You know how when there's a congestion in a road, the traffic moves backwards slowly? Example: https://i.imgur.com/7p43YV7.gifv
Will this happen with the supply chain problems that we've had this year? For how long?
Will this happen with the supply chain problems that we've had this year? For how long?
Both commonly happen after supply chain disruptions. Bullwhip effect happens over the entire chain, while group velocity happens on a single stage of it.
The high density region of cars is moving backwards.
Shipping things 5000 miles should not be cheaper than making them closer to home. Although shipping is astonishingly efficient, a retroactive carbon tax (not just for the current emission, but one that doubles it for back-charges) should be instituted on shipping worldwide in bulk. That will incentivize local sourcing.
It's not just for long-term global warming. We are a medium-scale disaster (small asteroid stike, supervolcano explosion, megatsunami) from worldwide starvation due to supply chain disruption.
I'm really glad alternative energy is so competitive, because it is local generation, and not just in the local powerplant sense. Poor places actually are a lot more resilient to disruption because everyone has a cow in the backyard and a garden.
Similarly home solar and storage are so much more disaster resilient.
Perverse economic incentives aren't just on the liberal side. "Free market" economics with its unfunded externalities is another kind of perverse incentive that has led to these ridiculous rube goldberg supply chains.
We grow a seasonal garden, much larger than most people I know, about 3 acres and we don't keep tedious records or really optimize it but it seems like it would fall far short of being enough food to live off of.
The hardest part is growing enough protein, which is why livestock is sort of a necessity for subsistence living unless you live someplace with accessible and abundant fish or game. One past solution was collectively owned and worked acreage devoted to beans, milk or similar, though I suppose it could be argued that leads us back here, eventually, once someone gets the idea to sell the surplus of that. (It did once, already)
TL;DR Check out "Four-season Gardening" by Elliot Coleman for interesting ideas on expanding your growing season without adding electricity
https://www.waldeneffect.org/blog/Calories_per_acre_for_vari...
https://www.quora.com/What-crop-including-tree-crops-produce...
Most peoples' gardens aren't exclusively growing staple crops, so some land would need to be set aside for nutritional completeness. Calories/acre isn't a complete picture; root vegetables require less processing than grains. In a "collapse of supply chains" situation, that needs to be included.
If you're using them to supplement sunlight, the electricity required depends on your local climate, efficiency of your lights, etc. I've found that the most readily available data on that is from marijuana enthusiasts, amusingly.
The word "should" is used to contrast with reality. Crafting policy around something other than reality is not a good start.
Surely there are some costs hidden somewhere, and that distorts things. But if water transport is not the right way to do things, then there must be a huge worldwide conspiracy that's lasted for millenia.
Also why efficient mass transport (eg new bullet train lines) are too costly to build in USA.
Invest the earnings from a carbon tax in carbon-negative projects (such as renewable energy), and you've got a win-win situation.
It wouldn't result in a silicon wafer fab near your house so you can have a locally-sourced smartphone. Even crops would come by sea for a large number of people.
Sure, a different tax or cost structure will shift the equilibrium. But the concept that stuff from 5000 miles away "should" be more expensive, and that we should make policy based on that assumption, is just ridiculous.
EDIT: if oil was more expensive, it would probably shift to more sea transport and fewer people living inland. If anything, land transport is the thing which has been given an unfair market advantage by externalizing costs.
Great! Nuclear and wind are both carbon-neutral. I would be very satisfied with that.
> But the concept that stuff from 5000 miles away "should" be more expensive, and that we should make policy based on that assumption, is just ridiculous.
No, that's not the argument I'm making. The argument I'm making is that stuff that has caused more carbon emissions 'should' be more expensive, and conversely, stuff that caused less carbon emissions 'should' be (relatively) less expensive.
How many miles that stuff happened to travel is only material to the discussion insofar as transport tends to cause carbon emissions.
It's not clear that such policies would reduce shipping stuff from 5000 miles away -- except by reducing the total amount of stuff made -- so I don't see a direct connection to the topic of this thread.
Everything from sustainability of companies and economies, fossil fuel subsidies and regulatory capture, pollution and climate costs, and far more make shipping things 5000 miles APPEAR to be cheaper in the current time frame.
That does not mean that it really is cheaper.
It is like the problem of buying boots - do you get the $40 pair that might last you a year, or the $160 pair that will last you a decade, and perform better on every parameter the entire time? Which is really cheaper?
It can't be fossil fuels externalities, because water transport has been used over long distances well before oil and coal were used as fuels. And it can't be due to a government policy because water transport has been used by pretty much anyone that has a coast or riverbank.
Some realities are just to big and obvious to wave away with generalities.
If we were talking about economies where all the manufacturing and all the consumption was from communities that lived on connected bodies of water, that would be fine.
But the reality is that everyone does not produce and put their work directly on a boat, and does not purchase goods right off the boat. And even if they did, the current boats are massive carbon polluters, externalizing those costs to the rest of the world.
The reality is that global shipment involves far more than just boats - it is an entire exosystem of multi-modal transport, none of which works without the others — as we are seeing right now with the failures.
Moreover, there are also massive societal costs to offshoring manufacturing that are fobbed off onto future generations. These have zero to do with the efficiency of water transport.
So, I'm speaking of the entire system of offshoring manufacturing and transport of finished goods appears to be more efficient than local manufacture, but is in fact full of highly externalized costs that make the "efficiency" in fact a fallacy.
Globalization is efficient. Any claim to the contrary is an extraordinary one, and requires extraordinary evidence.
It can't be explained away with fossil fuel externalities, because it's been going on since before fossil fuels.
Fair enough
I think where we disagree is on the definition of "efficiency" and globalization.
I agree that there is definite value and efficiency in globalization. It is certainly more efficient to obtain materials only on the other side of the planet rather than go without. And this kind of global trade has certainly been happening for millenia, at some level.
But global trade is not globalization. Globalization is more exporting work to arbitrage labor rates for things that could perfectly well be built at locally, and that kind of globalization has only been happening for a few decades.
For efficiency, if you externalize enough problems and tail risk, anything can be "efficient".
Arbitrage of labor rates is superficially efficient, but it is mostly externalizing costs. These costs begin with hollowing out local economies and increasing local poverty and costs to society as a whole, but arguably more important in the long term is losing key skills, know-how, intellectual property, and industrial capabilities. Perhaps most critical is the loss of knowledge and control of manufacturing key military/defense goods, and creating a potential strategic failure.
Transfer of economic power and capability to benefit the current quarterly statements is efficient today, but can cost superpowers their position. While the US thinks it is exploiting China's cheap labor, China is exploiting the West's current profits myopia to gain strategic economic and military advantage, and they are succeeding.
Burn massive amounts of artificially cheap and subsidized fossil fuels on ships, rail, trucks, airplanes, etc. to transport everything half way around the globe, and the costs do not accrue for decades, but are coming due now. That's not efficient, it's externalization.
Build global just-in-time supply chains with 100 links, and the whole economy becomes subject to weakest link failure. Of course, while it doesn't fail, you have become "more efficient" by not incurring costs of building locally and storing inventory.
All of these things are appear more efficient when longer term considerations and tail risk are ignored.
It is like the economy pre-2008, it seemed very efficient to package all the mortgage loans into AAA-rated mortgage-backed-securities... it worked for years ... until the risk came to the surface and we came within literal hours of a global monetary system crash and did endure a global recession.
So, it is all very efficient at a narrow enough point of view. But, it is not antifragile, it is brittle - when any of it fails, the geopolitical situation, the supply chain, the climate, etc., you're thoroughly forked.
Add in the costs of entire continents or even the globe of becoming totally forked, and repairing that, then I'm not sure the conclusion is that massive globalization is most efficient.
However, in China, they are specifically working to steal technology from the west, by both requiring local "partnerships" for any business, and requiring exposure of IP, and training of workers. So, they are trying to leverage the low-cost labor abritrage into their own capabilities.
They are big enough that if they can keep the arbitrage going long enough, a generation or two, the original local industries in other countries are hollowed out and no one knows how to build it anymore. This has already happened.
This is also supported by keeping their own labor & environmental laws skirting abusive levels, so even if the wages increase, the overall costs are still lower than the other country.
If we are very lucky and diligent, we may be able to overcome that by leapfrogging them with automation, but we still need to become a bit protectionist to overcome the differences in labor and environmental protections to bootstrap a higher-skilled and much more automation-leveraged labor force.
also, we need to financially encourage non-Just-In-Time inventory management to reduce risk. The problem is again the short-term profits are increased by JIT management, but the tail risk of being screwed by supply chain issues is also largely increased. E.g., I just saw a headline on HN that BMW is eliminating touchscreens on several lines of cars because of chip supply issues. Higher costs, lower profits, and less-satisfied customers, but hey, they delayed the expense for those chips and didn't pay for warehouses to store them!
And that is an example of "brittleness" — too many single points of failure, that do not have a redundant backup system. Avoiding this is why it is smarter to have multiple sources for every item, maintain inventory, power your factory (or especially data center) with feeds from two grids, etc..
It's much more perverse than just hidden and externalized costs.
These disasters are extracting billions in additional profits from workers to the 0.1%.
Why wasn't the Texas grid more resilient to cold weather? Because it was more profitable not to weatherproof the system, and then the inevitable grid failure was extraordinarily profitable to the tune of billions of dollars for the owners of energy corporations, at the expense of rate payers and tax payers.
Logistics companies are raking in billions of excess profits due to the shortages of essential products that they themselves caused by not investing in a more resilient supply chain.
Did Texas energy companies intentionally keep the grid vulnerable so they could profit? Did logistics companies intentionally break supply chains to benefit themselves?
It doesn't have to be intentional, it's the natural mechanics of an oligopolistic market system.
When we allow market participants to profit more by running at 100% of capacity than by building in resiliency, and then allow them to profit spectacularly when that lack of resiliency inevitably cascades into catastrophe, then that's exactly what they're going to do.
Why not?
Sea freight is massively efficient per unit/distance. So it is no wonder it is cheap.
Right now a lot of companies are aware of supply chain issues and counter acting them for instance by greater stockpiling which in turn worsens the situation for others.
Bring back inventory.
That's a really good way of putting it.
Rapidly increasing your stockpile size as a response to shortages is what worsens things.
So it's actually a lot more analogous than you'd think.
- Safety margins requires distance to increase with velocity. i.e. if the light turns green and everyone accelerates together, then you end up with a bunch of cars going at high speeds bumper-to-bumper. This would be clearly undesirable even if everyone could press the gas pedal at the same time. Meaning you'd still want to insert a delay between cars regardless of people's ability to press the gas pedal at the same time. Heck, even with self-driving cars, you'd still want comparable safety margins in case something goes wrong; it's not like self-driving cars result in a perfectly predictable world.
- "Stay the same distance apart from the car behind you and in front of you" ignores the fact that the car behind you might be quite far behind you (if there at all). In reality you probably want to maintain a minimum distance both in front of and behind you, not an identical distance.
- It also fails to show that decongesting a traffic jam by deliberately slowing down (which is what you'd have to do to increase your distance from the car in front of you) will actually result in you getting to your destination more quickly. It's certainly not intuitive for that to be the case.
While I'm not claiming the conclusions would be necessarily wrong if you take these into account, for a viewer that hasn't already done research in this area, it sure doesn't convince them that the conclusions are correct once these are accounted for either.
Many behaviors considered positive for society are encouraged by appealing to self interest. Various tax credits (EV tax rebates come to mind), appeals to health and cost reduction (bicycling, walking, car pooling/public transport, etc.) and many other areas where a change in behavior is considered a "public good" are encouraged by benefits (or punishment -- tickets for not wearing a seat belt, drunk driving, etc.) that appeal to an individual's selfish interests.
As such, why does it matter if societally net-positive things are being done for selfish or altruistic reasons, as long as people do them?
You are responding in the context of a thread without considering the reason the thread developed: someone stated that the effect worsens because selfish behaviour.
Your point is well taken. However, GP questioned whether folks were doing net-positive things due to altruism or selfishness.
Assuming that the result is net-positive (which might be an incorrect assumption, but I'm going with it), it's irrelevant as to the 'why'.
If results are net-negative or zero impact, it might be worthwhile to ask the 'why' of the motivation behind the behavior.
I'd add that while the initial post may have asserted that (paraphrasing) "selfish behaviors make things worse," GP's comment didn't address that at all and every other response to GP interpreted it the same way I did.
Is it a requirement that I respond not only to the comment to which I respond, but every comment prior to that one? If so, how far does that requirement to apply prior context apply? Do I need to address the psychological make up of selfish vs. altruistic behavior? The science underlying climate change and greenhouse gases? The basis for chemistry in our physical world?
And yes, there seems something got lost there.
Assuming that the result is net-positive (which might be an incorrect assumption, but I'm going with it), it's irrelevant as to the 'why'.
Hmmm... no. the_mitshuhiko stated that intentions were an important reason as to why things were worse. Then the discussions drifted to other situations where intentions were the same and the results were not.
That could invalidate the_mitshuhiko point since selfish intentions not always lead to worse results.
Then Retric suggested that in fact the_mitshuhiko might be right because along with selfish motivation there could be also selfless motivation.
gruez's comment is where I started feeling a diconnection, because hey, the point seems to be that you can do selfless things for selfish reasons. I really got lost there. If your motivation is selfish, you're not being selfless, like, not at all. Yeah, your actions could lead to good results to society, but that doesn't make them selfless, just useful.
When you respond to gruez, you don't say that. You say that it doesn't matter what's the motivations. I actually kinda agree, but it does matter in the context of this thread.
I consistently get frustrated when a thread goes too deep and people starts responding just to my last comment, maybe I'm being extra sensitive here.
I get you. And my comment wasn't intended to slight anyone, and certainly not to frustrate you. If that was a result of my comment, I'm sorry about that
You hit exactly upon my point with:
>You say that it doesn't matter what's the motivations. I actually kinda agree, but it does matter in the context of this thread.
Again, I take your point, but mine wasn't an observation of the larger issue, just that in the grand scheme of things, if someone does the right thing, it usually doesn't matter whether or not they're done for the right reasons. As long as it gets done.
Totally agree.
Unfortunately the reverse is also true: if someone does the wrong thing it usually doesn't matter wether or not they're done for the right reasons (or wrong reasons?) but it also happens all the time.
Sometimes it's very difficult to know if a reason is good, wrong or evil. Driving children to school? Not sure about the USA, but when I used to drive in Madrid, school holidays were patently obvious.
Apologies for the delay in responding.
As the old saying goes, "actions speak louder than words."
I'd say that also applied to the reasons people do things.
While there certainly is merit in consciously choosing to do the right thing (whatever that might be, in context), even if one doesn't have a conscious or stated reason for doing something, the action taken is what will impact the world around us, not the thought (or lack of) process behind that action.
And while acting selfishly may have negative consequences (as you point out WRT driving in Madrid on school holidays), understanding the dynamics of self interest can prompt societally positive behaviors for selfish reasons.
Examples and counterexamples of this are numerous, and we've covered a bunch of them.
I think we're mostly in agreement about the principle behind this, if not always specific examples.
Is it so hard to believe that there are people who try to do the best thing for the greater good over their own self interest? Some folks, like me, choose a less comfortable experience because we believe in public transit.