What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

Even if spending stays shifted supply will be able to catch up eventually. Once people believe there's a predictable level of demand they will be able to plan output for it - or else someone else will capture that new market share.

So while the demand is waking up there are still a lot of places with large numbers of people sick and/or dying because they don't have wealthy governments who can afford mass vaccination.

The other big factor in this speaks to your point. We are importing far more than exporting. Containers have gone up 10x in price over the last year and we need to get all these empties back to Asia, etc.

If you put a vase on top of your car and drive away, it's irrelevant which bump in the road causes the vase to fall off; it was bound to fall off eventually. The global supply chain was optimized for efficiency, to the point of fragility, and whether it was a pandemic or a war or something else, a shock was coming eventually. With climate change, we can expect more frequent weather-induced changes in the future. A supply chain which cannot handle frequent, large changes is too fragile, and that's what's wrong with JIT.

Considering almost every article I read about the causes cites the shift from services to goods (to the point of feeling like it's filler at this point), I wonder how we are reading such different sources. I'm thinking about sources like the NYT.

With that understanding, there's only one rational course of action: to secure your supply before they do, and your competitor realized all this.

The only real decision to make is whether to risk the more aggressive move of also locking up your competitor's supply.

Chip manufacturing has a clear start/end date for the product lifetime. This is necessary when you are incorporating a product into a design and product lifetime. Sometimes they will 'oops' you and send it out of print early. Generally, they have a 'b' product that "meets" your needs or product engineering just scrambles and tries to guess how many we need for a final run for our EOL. Much like the guy above me, the former requestor and probably his boss... I pad my estimates. Thank the baby Jesus I don't deal with the complicated world of sales and cocaine.

I want to put a big asterisk on "meets" because one man's performance metric is another man's failure. In discrete circuits this can be harmonics and in more complicated topology this could be tuned for an entirely different (but potentially acceptable) set of characteristics.

Enter the hardware qualification rounds where people like me make people cry and deadlines slip.

Supply lines work in months of advancement and trust me when I say this they have been fighting with chip shortages for months.

The people who care about costs have been playing a weird game of rubiks cube and the people who don't have been buying everything for year+ production. Guess who won that game of planning competition...

Taiwan going complete Orwellian and shutting down for months screwed the market in so many ways. Short sightedness on bean counters screwed themselves in many other ways and automobile manufacturers had the brilliant idea to just 'buy it all out' and give the manufacturers a big payday.

Seriously, chip manufacturers are like shoe string manufacturing. The latter counts wartime boot string orders as a big payday and that is something a lot of us look at as a bad year in a paycheck. (well the ones with skill anyway).

Lines are created with a product if the current line cannot manufacture that product. There are cases where they have to shutdown and completely retool. This isn't remotely the case regarding components today. The line simply stopped and/or went to minimal production. It wasn't news or a surprise because this is garbage we have been fighting with for months. Taiwan simply stopped producing at the level they were because they have some severe lockdown strategy.

If you are a bakery that sells very close to 100 loafs a day, you would want to make about 100 per day. Some event happens randomly and you have demand for 400. You could call it a supply chain failure or you could call it a success to turn away 300 customers once a year vs throwing out 300 loafs every other day.

At the end of the period, all of this redundancy spend gets binned so you gained nothing from it. Some essential services like healthcare could make sense to spend extra on redundancy since turning away 300 "customers" is a lot more serious than not getting your loaf or gaming pc.

Governments need to be built up to handle 100 year floods. Businesses standard life time don't last long enough to spend a ton of resources on betting towards those kinds of time scales.

Cash on the balance sheet is not inventory. Cash won't make the bill of materials magically appear; if a weather event knocked out 5nm production at TSMC, I'm not sure any amount would be able to address their supply chain woes. There just aren't enough ASML machines in the world, let alone everything else in a state of the art fab.

I wouldn't rule out their ability to build a fab in some sort of incredible Manhattan Project-esque feat with their outstanding funds, but at that point you'd have to ask "at what cost?" Then again, maybe that's a more efficient way they could use their cash than sitting on it.

At 1% chance each year, it would actually be 'sixtynine year floods'.

With that said, citing averages on companies can be pretty misleading. For example, family-owned businesses tend to last longer, with 1/3 reaching 60 years [0]. That naively suggests a mortality rate of ~1.8% per year, not that far from the risk of a 100y storm. There may be other categories of private firm that are more optimized for longevity, or it may be possible to structure them in order to make better infrastructure actors.

[0] https://hbr.org/2021/07/do-most-family-businesses-really-fai...

I duck-duck-go'd for a source and happened upon this article from 2015 :)

https://www.flexport.com/blog/does-apple-ship-iphones-by-air...

How the market speculation on the value of a company can affect its resiliency ? If tomorrow everyone sold Apple stock for 1 cent, why would Apple the company care ? Same revenue, same costs. Give me a break with the importance of the stock casino.

Given how many Fortune 500 companies have died even in prosperous times since the list started, I’m gonna file this away as “manufacturing consent to maintain the status quo.”

Corporations are not literal machines or organisms. They’re a social acquiescence given the reality of biological need at scale. The logistics are necessary; the behavior is necessary; the ownership angle is propaganda.

That said, this does read like someone with a personal axe to grind, leading to motivated reasoning.

But it's critical to note that the proposal has different rules for privately held stock & real estate. So the tweet author's buried argument doesn't hold water.

I believe those assets would mostly be treated the same as they currently are, e.g. sold or death.

For the 700 or so people who are targeted it basically creates a tax on the collateralized loans they get to avoid selling stock/cap gains in the first place. While not doing that directly, that's the effect of it.

And they get 5 years to pay the initial bill. 23.8% / 5 = 4.7% growth a year to be even (well something like 6 or 7 adding the new annual 23%). Most of these guys will likely generate more on paper profit than and they get deductions for any losses if they don't

It's what pisses me off most about the proposed Purdue Sackler settlement. Giving billionaires such long lead times to pay off fines and taxes allows them make more money than they owe.

The last graph on the WSJ article though says “Smart investment bankers and asset managers are already thinking about how to financially engineer products that will emulate existing stocks but be hard to value”

Check out the 2nd link for Pandora Paper reporting showing one egregious example of how they take advantage of this.

The owner of Nike puts millions of nike stock into a GRAT, which is privately held, and then the government gives that grat a 15% discount before it's passed along to his children.

Shouldn't get tax benefits for something that you claim is harder to sell (privately held stock) when in actuality the assets are 100% publicly traded nike stock.

The Wyden tax bill is a 100 pages long so maybe it goes after some of that crud, but there will always a scheme to lower your taxes.

https://archive.md/W2074 https://archive.md/yN7M7

All of this funny stuff is mostly people trying everything they can to get capital gains instead of income so they can pay a 25% tax rate instead of a 39% tax rate. When you're talking about billions of dollars - 14% is a lot of money.

From the perspective of the average person - the tax code probably makes sense. If you already pay 39% tax on your income, and THEN you have to pay 39% on your capital gains and half of your capital gains are actually just inflation - it's like you're getting taxed on your tax! True inflation has likely been ~4% since 2008. The S&P average is ~7.25% per year. So half of the "capital gains" the ordinary index fund investor would pay are just inflation.

But the .1% are different. You don't make it into the .1% with a ~7.25% return and a laborer's salary. You need to be making ~30%+ returns for decades. Or, ~10,000% for a few years (a lot of the successful VC-funded entrepreneurs).

Half of their capital gains aren't inflation. Barely any of it are. Effectively, there tax rate is ridiculous low compared to the average Joe.

And what's worst - the Fed is causing so much of that inflation. Would Tesla be a $1.1T company today if the Fed wasn't pumping up asset prices, lowering interest rates, and making future cash-flows absurdly and artificially valuable? No. And yet, Elon Musk gets to make $100Bn on paper - and he can take loans against those gains with <3% interest and never pay ANY taxes.

It really seems like this is a completely separate world - and it's >30% of US wealth - and it should be dealt with separately.

It's greed. I'm not religious or spiritual, but I am really talking about a serious psychological/spiritual disease that has infected our society. It's not just about getting enough to survive, or even enough to thrive, but there are so many actors out there out to get as much as possible that they simply cannot be satisfied anymore. Their stomachs are bottomless pits.

How else can you possibly explain multiple individuals being worth more than $200 billion (Sixty. Thousand. Lifetimes. Of Wealth), and yet it is not enough for them. They must command huge empires, the boards of which must "motivate" them with more money. These people have serious psychological problems. Like, please, just disappear to your islands and enjoy the rest of your short lives, please!

The entire world economy has been just one massive casino, one huge get-rich-quick scheme. And TV too. Fame and fortune without working for it, getting famous with no talent or skills. Think of how many millions and billions of people worldwide have been programmed to think they can and should be millionaires and that it can happen at the drop of a hat?

And now, a CEO has 1000x the pay of a median worker. They're all mini warlords, their plunder is bullshit bonuses and hollowing out business after business. A huge pump-and-dump scheme.

Just a couple decades ago, people dreamed of simpler lives. Plumbers, electricians, doctors, lawyers, engineers, small business owners. People dreamed of a kitchen renovation and saved up money for years to afford a new garage or that nice car at retirement. They couldn't imagine becoming YouTube starts or overnight millionaires because of some reality TV show or viral video.

Everything is fucked and it's because everyone thinks they are getting rich tomorrow. It's a mad dash to grab as much as possible, and people don't even enjoy the stuff they do have!

Society is sick and decades of neglect are coming due; the blighted pillars are crumbling.

I had hoped that by now things would have eased up, but if anything it is worse than the start of the year.

Many electronics components are majorly supply constrained right now, is isn't just silicon components, passives also have shortages everywhere.

Daily necessities are doing fine and most products aren't completely unavailable, but prices & lead times are increasing. There's a finite amount of time that can continue though... if companies can't get new delivery trucks or locomotive engines then eventually that will have a significant impact.

FWIW some companies have managed things much better. Our new Tesla Model Y was delivered in a bit under three months. Compared to what some auto makers are doing that's a miracle.

A certain type of adapter (3/4 inch to 1/2 inch) used to attach modern washing machines to older water lines is completely sold out in every store on a 50km range from my house, no-one knows when it'll restock. All other sizes are fine.

Back then we had second-source agreements. What happened to that concept?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28970983

There are 4 parts: primer, powder, bullet and casing. The casing is the most resilient because I can pick them up and reuse them. The bullet is probably the second most resilient, because in a pinch, I can get molds and pick up and melt down lead and make them. The powder is also pretty resilient because there are multiple manufacturers and all kinds of powder per manufacturer that would work, I would just have to adjust the drop (amount) for the new powder. Primers are the least resilient, because it's hard to replace and also competing manufacturers who make pre-assembled cartridges also need them, so I would certainly make sure I had plenty of those.

Of course, even with all that, there's no way of knowing how long the shortage will last. We're going on a year plus now, and who would have anticipated that?

This climbing equipment company's stated values are an appealing target to me right now. https://www.totemmt.com/about-us/

Buffers won't solve a long term shortage, but they can prevent a short term shortage from cascading. When the entire global economy is running with minimal buffers, then the effects of supply disruptions can last years, and that problem can't just go away by throwing money at it.

That's not really what he's saying. It's not about a single company, it's about the whole economy. When every company is running JIT, a small temporary supply disruption anywhere can bubble and propagate through the whole chain, becoming a huge disaster. It's like a traffic jam; when a highway is running right at capacity it only takes one person hitting the brakes to turn the whole thing into a parking lot. Except it's worse than a linear highway because the economy has many backlinks where companies early in the chain rely on companies later in the chain, causing feedback loops. Whereas if there was slack in the system then the relatively small initial shock wouldn't propagate.

I mean, the problem is not that we lack transparency, but that we have run out of options to fight the bottlenecks. Having some stockpiles as buffers would be one options to fight the problem.

This has the advantage that you already have industries that have capacity that can scale up. You have people trained who can train others. You already have equipment and facilities to which you can add to to break a bottleneck.

Basically, vertical integration at the country level.

Of course, this is the CEO of a shipping startup so that solution isn't on his plate of possibilities.

Also, low-volume items like aircraft carriers are probably a bad example. Aircraft carriers are ordered and built in small, specific quantities; I think it makes more sense to account for building a single aircraft carrier as a construction project rather than as a unit of mass production. Almost like you were building a small airport, thousands of units of housing, and a nuclear power plant.

For example, almost every successful company is valued at some multiple of book equity, because book equity doesn't (and shouldn't, and can't) incorporate any notion of growth. Tesla's book value per share is something like $27/share, which reflects the cars it has sold and the ones in process. It trades at $1077, which reflects hopes for cars that it will sell.

LIFO and FIFO are just book accounting methods for tracking costs of production. They tell financial statement readers how management puts the cost of unit production into inventory values on the balance sheet, and how inventory values are translated into Cost Of Goods Sold on the income statement. They really aren't the right basis for business decisions like pricing or production.

I don't know what he means by "companies now use FIFO or LIFO accounting" as if this is some innovation. These have been the _only_ choices under GAAP for . . . a century? Longer? Letting companies use Next In First Out for financial statements would be inviting management to manipulate its balance sheet and earnings through its cost assumptions. Of course a company will use up-to-date cost information for pricing decisions, but they've always done that.

Accounting is really a language of its own. It provides a lot of useful information, but you have to know how to use it and what to use it for.

Why would we expect there to be a perfect equilibrium immediately?

There's no reason to think this is over yet. We might just be getting started.

The price increase in graphics cards isn't related to this.

GMs trouble selling cars because they don't have enough chips to finish off the cars is a problem related to the pandemic and planning like the posts on Twitter note. The lack of new cars available has driven up prices on used cars. This is all supply chain driven.

> how unprecedented the issue is.

How unprecedented is it? In the last 130 years there have been two world wars and two global pandemics.

The US has now outsourced most of the production of goods to places in other countries. So, if something changes there (like the mask issues we had early in the pandemic) we have limitations here. And then there is the changes in posture of China where many of our things are manufactured. It wouldn't be unheard of, historically speaking, for that to impact businesses in the future.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/pandemic-could-mean-260-mi...

* There some things that are people simply need for survival. At a certain point, having no spare capacity and cascading failures means people die. Lack of masks last arguably killed people last year.

* It's quite possible to excess capacity and be good to the environment while present production is often terrible despite the lack of excess capacity.

* Sure, a complete lack of excess capacity is economical. Which is the OP's point in different words. Robustness to failure has been traded for immediate returns.

Covid was essentially "Sars II". If Sars1 had had the qualities needed to be a world wide epidemic, we'd be looking 10-100x the casualties. Sars1 happened a decade ago. Calling this a "hundred year crisis" seems wholly disingenuous. This event was forecast by quite a few people, the world was terribly unprepared and there's every reason to think the same factors that created this virus will create others much sooner than a hundred years from now.

On the other hand, people enter positions they believe will benefit them.

I would love to see the corporate equivalent of a pandemic, let the weak die off and the strong continue on. Sadly that isnt what happens. The weak become zombies, propped up by government money out of fear of the weak being killed off.

It's not just the port mind you - the whole logistics system is straining.

Broadly, too few workers to move too many things and a heavy reliance on "just in time" manufacturing techniques.

Like the ports are just one component of the issue, so are labor shortages at domestic manufacturers, overseas manufacturers, disruptions from COVID, and all of these things interplaying with one another.

We went from a self optimizing system, that had some risk of someone having too much of something, to a highly optimized system where there was no slack in the system - largely in the name of saving money - if there is less inventory on the shelf, there is less sitting on the balance book, and less that needs financing. Furthermore moving the kind of manufacturing overseas that we have, has increased fragility, both because because it adds obvious choke points - and because it's components that we've moved, so now the ports break down, and it takes 4 months to get a new car.

I'd say that business schools have been for the past few decades teaching that management has to be outright militantly hostile towards any employee, going through great lengths to work them to death and drop them at the drop of a hat.

Thus, these people have been leading by example on how everything and everyone is replaceable, even creating and validating the temp agency industry as a legitimate employer, and once the lessons on how everyone and everything is replaceable are applied by employees towards employers... We have a crisis?

Except the COVID pandemic is probably not a 1 in 100 year event, the last SARS epidemic was less than 20 years ago (and fortunately was not as disruptive as the current one). I wouldn't be surprised if the next one is within a decade. And we've done little to prepare for it.

A shortage in real life causes critical issues for real people. A shortage in Factorio does not.

Factorio often has implicit buffers through its belts (or bot network). If you build an inserter-only factory you'll become painfully aware how important they are to to the smooth operation of the factory. Otherwise it's very easy to get rolling waves of cascading backpressure, where the entire factory is only able to produce at good efficiency as long as you have fully saturated input as well as complete consumption of every product you produce.

In factorio, setting up some cable, chest readers and an alarm - but Factorio unmodded can't alert on rate of chest depletion IIRC.

That's what happened here - lockdowns led to a single change in customer demand for a wide variety of goods both on the personal side(more people at home -> snacks, food, toiletpaper that would have been used up at work started being needed at home), and on the commercial side (no people in the office: no ongoing bulk papertowels/toiletpaper/vending machines/office supplies).

[0] https://www.shmula.com/the-bullwhip-effect/310/

If you want to be rational about this, judge the plan (and this one too) on its own merits rather than on the fact you're being manipulated. You're being manipulated - you are always being manipulated, every time someone communicates with you, and you can't escape that. It's good to understand how, but then your job is to tease out the rhetoric and understand the underlying proposal enough to judge it on its own merits.

Following the exact same playbook. A bunch of easily agreeable "Rah, Rah bad Wall st. Short term over long term bad" to get everyone nodding, then an incredible leap to push his actual argument.

This guy is falling very quickly from "interesting how he got that thread picked up everywhere", to "somethings fishy here".

The logic presented is "The cause for the port slowdown is a future policy proposal I want people to oppose."

Obviously he isn't literally saying that, but that's the logic path he walks the reader down.

Yep, we simplify. Yes, we tell stories. We don't lie. (No, teaching Newtonian mechanics without mentioning Relativity isn't a lie, and neither is simplifying the container explanations until even bureaucrats can understand it ;-)

That said, having

1. seen the email that circulated with my customers ten years ago about how container ships transport goods from Asia to US and American air back

2. and having recently listened to "The Goal" by Eliyahu M. Goldratt

I do wonder if this is really the best solution.

I'm not saying he's right about everything, but trusting his integrity and industry knowledge is a very safe first step.

I figure the supply chain is like that. Under certain conditions, JIT is fine. Given sufficient disruptions, the system descends into chaos. Note that we have humans in the loop, too, so expect non-linearities.

I could be wrong. Corrections are welcome.

[1] https://youtu.be/Lx8gMBJBlP8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullwhip_effect

Basically - complex systems behave in complex ways. When you have a small shift in consumer demand, it gets amplified up the supply chain, such that you need potentially big shifts in the production of intermediate components. We had a big shift in consumer demand. The supply chain basically can't cope, and so we get chaotic behavior until consumer demand normalizes and revised sales forecasts get propagated up the supply chain.

It also didn't help that everyone was expecting an economic slowdown, and then the government gave trillions of dollars to corporations to juice the stonk market. The resulting price signals induced a ton of aggregate demand for production capacity that simply wasn't there.

[0] Capacity destruction: "Nobody's buying our stuff, we can't afford to keep this one ship/plant/facility/machine running anymore or we'll go out of business." But since every other player in their industry who might've bought it is in the same boat, maybe they're forced to sell to a scrapper, who promptly disassembles the ship/plant/facility/machine. I got my house this way. It was a rental property owned by a company that could no longer afford to keep it, so I bought it, took it off the rental market, and thereby slightly reduced rental capacity in this town. Compare this to an airline temporarily parking a slew of their planes in a densely-packed parking pattern at an un-busy airfield near a nice runway.

Odd, that.

In my household, we started making our own pizza, from scratch (save canned / bottled Pizza sauce). Flour keeps and is shelf-stable. Most toppings survive refrigeration. Those best served fresh are bought as available, menu rotated as needed.

If your supply chain can't guarantee delivery of complex sets of fresh time-sensitive product, drop constraints such that the product mix is less time-sensitive. Sourdough substituted for dry yeast, unavailable at any price.

(This works well at the household level. It works less well at industrial-scale production where flexibility is greatly reduced.)

Even before covid I used to read about consumer companies that have a shipping problem right before Christmas and go out of business. So I can believe that shipping problems on a scale this large will take time to fix. Thank you for your comment.

California ports suffered from AB5 and EPA rules more than other states, and with California controlling like 40% of the containers, they shot themselves.

Older trucks banned on roads and ports (CARB) and Owner Operator trucks (AB5) gig workers banned, they relocated their llc's outside california to keep their businesses running.

The CA EPA/DOL CARB rules also expanded fire seasons, as older logging companies closed down due to the state not renewing licenses on trucks. Mom/pop companies couldn't afford to buy very expensive trucks, new engines, or licenses. Less companies logging = more fuel.

CA just banned gas generators, as most construction sites use them power their tools. Work arounds will be people buying ford f150's with onboard generators as a quick work around, and most likely will raise costs even further.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Yes he would have. One, because there is a tax on capital gains, and he did; you probably mean an unrealized capital gains tax, but... Two, it is quite possible (and explicitly a motivation of the proposed law, so impossible for any honest critic to overlook) to borrow against public tradable assets, and if they are gaining value fast enough that a 20% tax on unrealized gains would significantly erode your holdings you can do so at interest rates far below the value growth, essentially without limit (that's how people fund lavish lifestyles without taxes on unrealized gains already), so he would be able to use that method to pay taxes without any dilution of ownership.

Rather, it seems like to me the reliance of having a few owners or a few institutions with consolidated power in the form of money or assets is a recipe for disaster. If anything, it's time to disperse the wealth and responsibility of production to as many firms as reasonably as possible. I'd rather have 20 smaller companies making the same thing than 3 big ones that supposedly make them cheaper due to scales of economy which imo is wrong and that most big firms are in diseconomy of said scales now (prices imo reflect this). Basically, we need to both economically and politically Switzerfy the economy (more dispersed institutions, less central control where reasonably possible).

Tech founders are a different breed.

People writing articles like this forget that it's not just Wall Street, but competitors who created the huge pressures for adopting JIT inventory systems. There's also the consumer. Are you willing to spend the additional money required to buy a car from a company who wastes tons of $ on excess inventory?

A lot of the JIT fashion came from Toyota, and yet Toyota doesn’t seem to suffer from these issues as much as others. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that most of the senior executives of Toyota have all been at Toyota for longer than many of us have been alive, and that the company president is the grandson of the company founder.

I will give him credit for cleverly spinning this logic all into a pitch to kill the unrealized cap gains tax proposal!

What? How did you get billionaire class and founders? He specifically says founder led companies and family owned businesses. Unless you reduce that group to the Waltons, how does family owned businesses equate to the billionaire class?

"Only founder led companies and family owned businesses can stand up to the immense pressure from the dogmas of modern finance."[1]

1: https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1453753942228160515

There was a book published a couple of years ago (before the pandemic) which was "demonstrating" (so to speak) that going back through history real financial/economic levelling at a reasonable scale only happened as a result of violent means (wars, revolutions etc).

I think what those violent means do (among other, more nasty things like people getting killed) is that (in some cases) they obliterate the societal/institutional structures on which a specific rent-seeking system is based, which gives the majority of the people a chance to "level up" until a new rent-seeking system takes shape.

Dear lord the amount of smug “wE aRe ThE mOSt EfFicIEnt wAY Of AllOCaTinG CaPitAl” arguments from very wealthy founders that would prefer to become more wealthy is frankly ridiculous. I get it, you went to Stanford and they taught you some fancy words to trick people into giving you money instead of investing in public infrastructure and services.

He didn't say they'd solve the problem. He said they're the only ones who can be resilient in hard times. OK I think he said the ARE resilient, I say "can be" because it's still a choice.

"I think economists call it rent-seeking." That's what the incumbents are after, and so are a lot of the startups - at least the startups seeking round after round of investment. If they're not seeking rent, they're trying to set up infrastructure (manufacturing or cloud this-or-that) and collecting returns (rent) on that investment. Nobody talks about profit on goods sold, they talk about return on capital (or RoE) and that seems a lot more like rent.

>I think economists call it rent-seeking.

Are you saying all "disruptive innovation" rent-seeking? Or only certain kinds? If a founder was able to "optimize the excess out of the system" by providing a better consumer-facing experience (eg. amazon), why shouldn't they be rewarded with profits? Is there any room for profits without being called a rent-seeker?

We're talking about founder owned companies owned by billionaires. So let's use an example of one: SpaceX. You're maligning "disruptive innovation" so let's expand out your claim with the specific example: an order of magnitude reduction in the cost of space flight and the introduction of competition in rural internet service.

So you're saying enabling access to other planets and the moon while providing people in isolated areas with internet service is an example of squeezing out profits and you're saying that you think it is rent seeking. Rent seeking is defined as an economic concept that occurs when an entity seeks to gain added wealth without any reciprocal contribution of productivity. Typically, it revolves around government-funded social services and social service programs. We already had programs to access space. They were an order of magnitude more expensive. We already had programs to provide internet. They didn't serve well the subset of people that are in remote areas. So in both cases it just isn't the case that the company is doing rent seeking.

In other words, you are completely wrong when we use a specific example.

This applies to more specific examples. Lets use the specific example of Flexport. It is owned by a founder and you're replying to things posted by them so it's even less of a reach than before.

They are introducing computers to an industry that has competitors from the 1400s era. These competitors sometimes have legacy processes built on physical paper and for some of them excel is an example of the use of cutting edge technology. You're saying that doing better than that for people using modern technology is an example of rent seeking.

So do workers, to be fair. The goal of workers in purchasing departments and HR isn't to make the business more efficient but to propagate a cushy lifestyle for themselves and their mates.

To an extent, that same misalignment exists in all classes of worker, including engineers.

SWEs are probably the worst at this; so many of the problems that we solve don't have anything to do with squeezing the most performance out of the hardware or reducing technical debt. Instead, a huge chunk of our time is spent on man-made bullshit that sysadmins don't solve properly because otherwise they'd be out of a job.

Plenty of people warned about the hazards of allowing these companies to outsource everything, government did nothing. Mostly because they are bought off by lobbyists. This could have pretty easily been prevented by putting tariffs on key industries to keep manufacturing here or at least in North America

Is this even still true in a super low interest rate environment?

Yeah in the 80s and 90s, tying your resources into inventory would have cost a lot in terms of missed opportunity to invest the money elsewhere. But with financing rates near zero or even sometimes negative in real term, wouldn't even the wall street guy be like: sure keep some inventory, cash is cheap right now.

This RoE argument seems very last century to me.

New companies aren't all trying to be rent-seekers, they also try to dodge existing regulation or actually innovate.

You can juice RoE in the short term by removing slack and shock absorbers, because increasing the brittleness of the supply chain probably won't show up in this quarter's returns.

The supply chain for fuel is brittle. There isn't sufficient inventory in tanks to buffer even short disruptions. A pipeline offline for a couple days is enough to make a crisis.

People catch wind of the crisis and start filling their tanks at three-quarters full instead of one-quarter full, and the brittle supply chain breaks with the accelerated demand.

Same thing we're seeing with the global supply chain which was already brittle, now individuals and companies are putting in bigger orders sooner to compensate, and it fails in the face of accelerated demand.

We thought that if we didn't do that we'd run a very real risk of the entire healthcare system collapsing. We were trying to "flatten the curve" so that hospitals could deal with an ongoing roar instead of being hit with a massive explosion.

We'll never know for sure, but I doubt that's the correct comparison. Even without government-mandated shutdowns, many areas--especially major urban cores--would still have experienced massive shocks as people voluntarily shifted to working from home, stopped going out to eat, etc. In other words, much of what the government did through law would likely have happened anyway out of fear and individuals exercising their common sense.

Sure, it wouldn't have been exactly the same, but I think the counterfactual is much less rosy than you assume. And then there are the benefits of the shutdown which helped to direct the drop in activity towards less essential parts of the economy and increased predictability, to say nothing of the benefits of reduced viral transmission.

The places which were closed were not producing things used in the supply chain.

How do you envision the time between march 2020 and the point where herd immunity through vaccines / infection would have been sufficient would have gone without a lockdown?

I'll take a lack of a few non-essential luxury goods for a year or two over a world where everywhere looked like that, any day of the week.