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Comment by choeger | Hacker News Reader

After reading this story I wonder if we are already into deep, deep trouble. So many things depend on timely production and delivery of complex goods and very often that production depends on a stack of badly written and badly used software operated by underpaid and demotivated staff. How long until we literally cannot improvise a solution anymore? When has the last "process optimization" by some MBA consultant put up so many layers between motivated human beings that a problem is unfixable?

Could civilization actually end like this? Not in a big bang but slowly grinding to a halt because no one knows how stuff works besides some nonfunctional web forms?

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Everything looks crazy when you look at the details but the fact that we could all stay home for months and the world largely kept chugging along with only minor pricing changes and delays should give you an indication of how resilient supply chains are. No food was missing, no essential goods, largely the world stopped and yet all the important goods kept flowing. It's incredible to me how food shortages didn't hit multiple countries for example, which would be an indication of problems.

> we could all stay home for months

Maybe Hacker News was able to stay home for months but none of my friends making minimum wage--sorry, essential workers--ever got a break. I think you're dramatically overestimating how many people actually got to stay home and for how long. And obviously there's big class divisions between who does and doesn't get to stay home as well

> No food was missing

Speak for yourself. A branch of my extended family all starved to death, together with lots of people in their town, and I was talking to them every day, but still couldn't get them food in time.

It likely wouldn't have happened without the pandemic. Staple food prices have gone up a lot (like more than double in some regions), and availability gone way down because the one guy with the truck decides to not deliver to the more remote regions cos he's making more money now doing more local deliveries.

That sounds really awful, condolences. It's bizarre to think that high tech services (assuming you spoke to them over the internet) were available while primary needs were not being met.

Do you have thoughts on what could have prevented this at a system level?

No... There will always be people living on the margins of survivability. Either too poor to afford food, and at risk of starvation... Or in a place too hot for humans... Or too dry for humans... If nobody lived in these places, then as population grows, people would be displaced to these places.

People at those margins then die when conditions change. I wish those people weren't family. But if it weren't them, it would have been someone else.

I'm so sorry that happened. Your story really highlights the huge disconnect between how the rich and the poor felt the effects of the pandemic and subsequent supply chain disasters.

May I ask which country this happened in?

Chad

> A branch of my extended family all starved to death, together with lots of people in their town

I'm sorry for your loss. I can't imagine a whole branch of the family tree dying.

Can you say where this happened?

Sorry but you are sorely mistaken. The disruption for well-off people in rich countries was fairly minimal, but in other parts of the world and even in the poor areas of rich countries people felt the effects. Food insecurity in some countries is higher than ever, not to mention effects like years.of education missed (e.g. Philippines had 18 months of home schooling).

People are suffering, but we were not close to the end of civilization.

i dont know what you mean by “we could all stay home”, most people never stopped working, amazon deliveries kept coming, butchers and meatpackers never slowed down, and transpacific cargo ships kept moving (long beach port snafu notwithstanding)

also, I did have to go without my preferred brands of couscous and fresh olives for some months, so as far as i’m concerned the end was nigh

People in factories, ships, trucks, farms etc didn’t stay home.

Many people in factories did stay home. When the pandemic started my office was in a factory and i was told I wasn't allowed in the office. To get some test equipment sitting on my desk I had to get permission a week ahead of time. Likewise a lot of factory managers didn't go to the factory.

The people working the line in the factory need to go to the factory. However my company was paranoid that something would happen to them. If enough people working the line get sick production stops and then all profit stops. By contrast if a lot of people not on the line are sick but production continues - over a year is balances out.

And yet many factories continue to operate.

Notice how we have a backlog of ships to unload and not empty ships? That’s because factories continued operations.

Exactly the point: factories operated, but the managers tried (to various level of trying, some not very good) to protect the factory.

> Could civilization actually end like this? Not in a big bang but slowly grinding to a halt because no one knows how stuff works besides some nonfunctional web forms?

You just summarized the Idiocracy plot.

But you do have a point... just look how much money companies are willing to shell out for IBM mainframes (new hardware that has cycle-accurate emulation of 70s-era hardware) or for pensioners who lived and breathed COBOL. So many large-scale IT projects in government or corporations fail because of the boatload of undocumented assumptions and edge cases that have been built up over many decades, or don't even get started because of the effort that a migration brings.

Could civilization actually end like this? Not in a big bang but slowly grinding to a halt because no one knows how stuff works besides some nonfunctional web forms?

No.

I'll give you a clear counter-example: my iPhone 13 mini.

Go read an iFixit teardown of any advanced product like that. Many state-of-the art chips, many suppliers, a huge logistics effort.

And yet Verizon managed to send me one of the damn things just a few days after I ordered, shortly after the phones were introduced.

Sure, some people trying to fund their product using kickstarter have problems, but the big boys can build and deliver hundreds of millions of "supercomputers" per year.

Absolutely. As things get more complex, the foundations become unstable and fewer and fewer people know how the underlying stack works.

You'll be interested in this talk, "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko

Thank you for this link. I had never heard of the ancient mechanical clock mechanisms. "The arc of progress" really is a fiction. Human knowledge needs to be passed down and nurtured. Same with culture.

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