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Comment by mfer | Hacker News Reader

> I don't know if a slight price increase in graphics cards is the key issue to worry about at this point.

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.

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> In the last 130 years there have been two world wars and two global pandemics.

One rationale behind the push for global integration after WW2 and later on with China and the former Soviet Bloc was the idea that such integration would create incentives against a resurgence of war between great powers. It is precisely because another world war would be so disruptive in light of global economic integration that global integration was promoted and pursued in the first place by many policy makers—in order to make such wars less likely to occur.

I suppose the thinking was that the obvious downside—that if a great-power war were to occur, the global economy would be in shambles—was irrelevant given that another world war would likely amount to Armageddon.

In other words, preparing for the contingency of a world war is worse than useless, because the only viable path (both from a utilitarian and from a moral perspective) is to do what is most effective to prevent the occurrence of such a war (which pursuant to this line of thinking includes, of course, making significant investments in defense).

(tangent)

> One rationale behind the push for global integration after WW2 and later on with China and the former Soviet Bloc was the idea that such integration would create incentives against a resurgence of war between great powers. It is precisely because another world war would be so disruptive in light of global economic integration that global integration was promoted and pursued in the first place by many policy makers—in order to make such wars less likely to occur.

That's a topic explored a bit in The Interdependency Series by John Scalzi. I found it am amusing read (and actually liked Wil Wheaton as a narrator for it... though not everyone agrees on that point).

The teaser for the first book of the series:

> Our universe is ruled by physics, and faster-than-light travel is not possible - until the discovery of The Flow, an extradimensional field we can access at certain points in space-time that transports us to other worlds, around other stars.

> Humanity flows away from Earth, into space, and in time forgets our home world and creates a new empire, the Interdependency, whose ethos requires that no one human outpost can survive without the others. It's a hedge against interstellar war - and a system of control for the rulers of the empire.

  > One rationale behind the push for global integration after WW2 and later on with China and the former Soviet Bloc was the idea that such integration would create incentives against a resurgence of war between great powers.

i wonder what the recent resurgence of nationalism and "us vs them" thinking plays into this...

is it possible that our global economic system, international relations etc are not yet evolved enough to keep such a system functioning stably (in geo-political terms)?

For such a system to function, there must be one superpower, rather than two.

The US has clearly emerged as the one superpower in the aftermath of the soviet dissolution. But China has now emerged as a potential competitor to the superpower status (they've basically replaced the soviets in this model). They haven't yet reached the same level, but will soon according to all modeling and prediction.

I do believe that it is the US's hope, in the clinton administration, to have china's market economy open up, and thus, allow western "democratic" culture seep in (ala, like japan and korea - but without having a war to start with). This certainly, and clearly has failed now. China do not want to be "subservient" to the US superpower like the other westernized asian nations.

> The US has now outsourced most of the production of goods to places in other countries.

I think that is the point (or one of the points): it's not just logistics and spare capacity - it's a much more complex set of issues.

This isn't something accounting practices or "less greed" would solve, as seems to be implied in the Twitter thread.

Would you have voted for a party that spent $1b annually on mask manufacturing subsidies for masks nobody even bought? Who could have foreseen that demand spike?

> This isn't something accounting practices or "less greed" would solve

Are you seriously trying to say that production being moved to China, et al. is not because of greed generally, and ROE specifically?

It might have something to do with drastically lower labor prices and environmental laws.

There is only so much discrepancy in prices that global markets will allow before buyers start rewarding the lower priced sellers for taking advantage of the arbitrage.

Plenty of people foresaw it. California spent ~$200m on building up a stockpile of PPE and other medical supplies back in 2006, before Brown cut funding for the program in 2011.

Being right too early leaves room for the people who come after you to be wrong in a way that makes it useless that you were right.

Would you have voted for a party that spent $1b annually on mask manufacturing subsidies for masks nobody even bought?

I would have voted for a party with a program of "bring the manufacture of strategically crucial items back to the US and make it robust". This seems like it would even be Republican "bread and butter" and I don't see why either party had an issue with it.

How you label or market a subsidy doesn't change it to not be a subsidy.

i think a lot of people would not want such a subsidy.

Use the stockpile to sell / provide such masks to the VA, Military, and other government organizations on a FIFO basis so the stock is never stale. For stock that can not be moved quickly enough donate it to other countries that may need it.

"mask manufacturing subsidies for masks nobody even bought? Who could have foreseen that demand spike?"

The entire industrial capacity of USA, country of 300 million people, could produce zero Meltblown, so it could make zero masks. Do you think it's acceptable?

People talk about conflict with China while we depent on them for toilet paper to wipe out butts, it's like a mentall ilness.

The US gets a neglible amount of toilet paper, if any, from China. And there was never a supply disruption: there was a demand disruption, a distribution disruption and a run.

> Would you have voted for a party that spent $1b annually on mask manufacturing subsidies for masks nobody even bought? Who could have foreseen that demand spike?

Many people did (only at the $450MM level/annually). It was considered standard practice to have the federal government purchase large quantities of N95 masks to have in case of an emergency. GWB started the program, and Obama distributed 100,000,000 masks during the H1N1 crisis from the stockpile. I will say that restocking the pile took a cut after 2010, Congress cut its funding and Obama's team didn't fight for it. And what funding they did get didn't seem to get prioritized into masks.

> In the last 130 years there have been two world wars and two global pandemics.

Delays on intercontinental shipping and lack of availability of a few durable goods is a perfectly fine price to pay on that frequency. Optimizing to surviving a global pandemics without any problem would be ridiculous expensive.

Yes, specifically on the subject of cars, the manufacturers seem to be accepting way more risk than what is sensible. But that's their decision to make. If they were just left to face the costs of their decisions, they would stop making bad ones quite quickly.

(By the way, there were 2 flu pandemics similar or worse than this one on the last 100 years. That's one more than you are counting.)

The 'lack of chips' has nothing to do with US preparedness, it's entirely an overseas issue.

China & Co. did a big over-correction during the start of the pandemic, and that put a lot of things into chaos.

You now have chip speculators entering the foray, jacking up prices, not very helpful in letting the market clear.

10% padding in US operations I don't think would have made up for anything, the problems exist in shipping and on key/acute issues from the suppliers in Asia really.

I don't think it's reasonable to imply 'We should build all the stuff here to avoid delays during 1 in 50 years pandemics'.

I'm not blaming so much as pointing out that's where the underlying issues are.

Of course exacerbated by other things.

I think working out solutions to transportation, buyers paying for things like guarantees, plant and supply chain risk analysis etc. will become a thing now.

CEOs will hire consultants and firms to measure the likelihood in supply chain failure and make ammends.

I actually think we'll get adapt past most of this.

There were many more global pandemics in last 130 years. There were multiple global flu pandemics that were within the same order of magnitude of severity as Covid-19, eg. the Hong Kong flu of 1968 killed more people than Covid-19 had on per-capita basis.

It is not deadly global pandemics that are unprecedented, it’s the lockdown response to them that is.

> In the last 130 years there have been two world wars and two global pandemics.

I count 13 global pandemics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics#Chronology

what's your methodology? The linked section includes stuff like the "2015–2016 Zika virus epidemic", which was "worldwide" but had a death toll of 53 people. Should that be considered a pandemic? If we go with the "Epidemics and pandemics with at least 1 million deaths" table, there's only 6 worldwide pandemics.

If you're counting pandemics since 1891, I think any number between 6 and 13 is more defensible than the number 2.

Let me count again, while leaving out relatively minor pandemics like Zika:

* Fifth cholera pandemic

* Third plague pandemic (multiple outbreaks are listed)

* Sixth cholera pandemic

* 1915 encephalitis lethargica pandemic

* Spanish flu

* 1957-58 "Asian flu"

* Seventh cholera pandemic

* 1968-70 "Hong Kong flu"

* 1977 Russian flu

* HIV/AIDS pandemic

* 2009-10 swine flu

* COVID-19

That's 12 and doesn't count stuff like Zika, SARS, or MERS. It also doesn't count any of the Ebola epidemics.

I don't know if cases or deaths are a good proxy for expected supply chain impact. SARS, for instance, had relatively few cases and deaths because it mostly broke out in well-functioning developed East Asian countries that were capable of responding to it effectively, but those same countries have outsized effects on global supply chains.

It seems obvious to me that covid-19 had a much greater impact than any of those previous pandemics, even more severe ones, because it’s the first one for which we even attempted to implement such disruptive mitigations. Working from home was not feasible for most people in 1968-1970 for example, and nobody would have seriously suggested a major economic shutdown to deal with it.

An epidemic is an unexpected rise in cases within a community or region, which could mean part of a country, an entire country, an ethnic group spread across multiple countries, or an entire landmass. And a pandemic is an epidemic that has exponential growth.

An epidemic usually starts within a particular country and if it becomes a pandemic it will grow rapidly and spread to other countries, but the WHO definitions are only based on the number of cases compared to normal and how fast the number of cases is rising.

The pandemic didn’t kick the machine, the lockdowns and other unprecedented interventions did.

So this was a once ever event.

But this was known, and why many people (such as myself) opposed lockdowns.

It's stunning how much knowledge and wisdom has been lost about simple things like how to deal with plagues. This is not a new thing facing humanity.

"So this was a once ever event"

Nuclear war is also a once-ever event, so wr shouldn't worry about it,right?

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