Apply the Willie Sutton principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Sutton)?
"Because that's where the money is" frequently works, even if the quote is apocryphal.
594 karma · joined November 9, 2019
"Because that's where the money is" frequently works, even if the quote is apocryphal.
In sort of the same domain, see how poor the response was to "pig Ebloa" (African swine fever) which was certain to hit the PRC once it broke out in the Caucuses and was not contained there. See the 2021-22 winter thermal fuel situation which started with pique which ended Australian coal imports (which are also cheaper than the PRC's own production on the mainland).
Other stuff he inherited, like the one child policy and I'm pretty sure the residential real estate bubble, so judging the quality of his response to them in the context of all their inertia is hard. That said, puncturing economic bubbles is not thing that should be delayed, although here again it would have needed to be replaced by _something_ or the PRC would have to end its financial repression (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_repression), something you also see most of the rest of the world continuing.
But the PRC and Vietnam are taking hits I interpret due to the world economy slowing down. And Xi's Zero COVID policy is perhaps becoming unsustainable. It's kinda necessary since it's prevented the population from getting natural immunity and their own vaccines aren't good and aren't trusted, and there's a lot of history behind that. If the CCP just let COVID rip, even less nasty Omicron, it would get very ugly for a while.
But it keeps shutting down huge cities and metro areas and has turned the PRC into an unreliable supplier. See the mess Apple is now in, I read something like 6 million and counting fewer iPhone Pros made at that Foxconn plant that's undergoing so much chaos and lost so many of their more experienced workers (or so I assume about the last point).
The US is in a cold war with the PRC, and that's in the process of shutting down its semiconductor industry, or maybe just the most advanced nodes depending on how the new embargo gets administered. But Apple spent quite some time qualifying what's evidently good enough flash from one of their marque companies and that's now dead since it's advanced enough to be targeted.
Overall, this embargo is a moderate sized dagger aimed at "the workshop of the world" so it's going to have effects, especially when the one year delay foreign companies have in getting licenses ends (then again they'll have plenty of time to get those licenses, or not).
Xi is moving back to not quite doctrine Marxism and the economy, especially the private-ish part of it is taking hits, especially in web/apps stuff, see Jack Ma now living in Japan. That may have been justified on the merits, but it was done because he got a little too big for his britches as the CCP saw it.
In particular I'd look at the residential property market, that's a HUGE bubble that appears to be bursting now. Too many details to go into, just there's reasons it is/was so much of the economy, and not good ones.
And finally Xi is not very smart, had his education brutally ended in middle school by the Cultural Revolution, and is just not a very good helmsman. And is now the single most powerful figure in the PRC since Mao. This is not encouraging.
Avon is indeed amazing. And it's no accident Terry Nation, the creator of Blake's Seven, was the author of what made Dr. Who a smash hit with his script for the second serial titled "The Daleks."
Just squeezing into the "1970s" in 1970 was ITC/ITV's UFO which was also great SF, I watched it a few years after in weekly syndication in the US. Didn't get a chance to watch the previously mentioned BBC shows until the 1980s.
They've generally taken over running universities from the faculty, and as I recall they're where the vast bulk of increased expenditures have gone, not counting buildings which are often built with earmarked funds since alumni have steadily fewer reasons to trust these administrators.
And if the EU plus U.K. deindustralizes and can't afford fertilizer for their farms that "importing more goods" from them is likely to reverse. They could even become even less reliable than the PRC.
According to the fine article there's more going on, Vietnamese exports are also suffering, a likely big factor is demand destruction from much of the world going into recession. Going back to my energy theme and this is also hitting the US, households paying a lot more for energy have less money for goods made in East Asia.
The other interesting data point is:
"Germany’s exports to the U.S. were almost 50% higher in September year over year. Germany’s mechanical engineering sector has boosted its exports to the U.S. by almost 20% in a year over year comparison of the first nine months of 2022, according to Project 44."
Today they don't want to destroy a big customer and part of their supply chain, but that price could be deemed low enough in all sorts of circumstances. The very high likelihood they'd get destroyed in return by our nuclear triad including manned bombers make the price including to the leaders much, much higher.
And that's one reason manned bombers are a very important part of the nuclear triad, they can be launched "on warning" and sent the codes to arm their bombs and missiles later.
That another part of the problem with bombcar's concept from the viewpoint of the railroad companies, they'd need a lot more people than you might think so a spare could be close enough to "XXX" to get there without throwing off the Orwellian "Precision Scheduling" of this PSR concept.
The train goes when it's built up to an arbitrary number of cars like 150, not at any set time. Since the system is not even designed for trains that long, it would probably generally back up in any give location if a train was too long delayed in leaving. The companies obviously also wouldn't want to pay for "jets and helicopters" to get a spare to XXX really quickly.
And since no one can predict when a substitute might be needed, it would take many more spare engineers and conductors to cover for those out on a sick day. This has to be why the railroads are fighting so hard against this apparently trivial benefit, despite the bad optics etc.
The question is why did Team Pelosi not first try a bill with both measures, that's how you get something "hard" passed, bundling it with something "essential."
You're correct, but that still doesn't address the quality control issue for things like metal bending, unless you add intense $$$ inspection to the process. You still have X amount of inventory of items you haven't yet assembled into cars or whatever for the final test of quality.
OK, for some of the upstream problems you could spend extra money to statistically pick individual items out of a designated stockpile/buffer and assemble them.
But stockpiles work better for stuff that can be tested, like piles of ores and elements or at the complete opposite end chips and electronics that can be tested , and nowadays we have the transistor budgets for self-testing.
As you say, they have their reasons for keeping it.
This situation does not lend itself to pat answers, including why Team Pelosi didn't first try a bill with both provisions combined. This trainwreck (sorry) could be seen coming for weeks, there was plenty of time to try to do the right thing. Except of course for both parties' establishments hating this segment of the population.
Your claim would be more useful if you pointed out the vote was 52-43; with no great effort six Republicans voted for it, five Democrats are AWOL and Manchin for some reason I can't imagine voted against it.
The Senate also voted 26-69 against 60 more days of negotiations.
Compare to knowledge workers like programmers needing to know the code base.
Nobody sane will believe them; while I believe the start of this was when the New Left captured "Team Blue" in the 1970s and blue collar workers famously became part of the Reagan coalition (and worked with him against the Soviet Union, particularly in Poland), the GOP establishment hates this part of its base.
Repeating part of another comment which in general is a repeat of all of this:
A great deal of Trump's otherwise inexplicable popularity is that he's a 1970s NYC Democrat just like Reagan in the 1980s was a self-described FDR Democrat and he doesn't hate these people. Doesn't care or do much for them, but this is a palpable difference from the GOPe.
Another difference perhaps is that the SOP treatment, US, U.K., don't know where else is to give anyone bad off enough to require supplemental oxygen a steroid to suppress the innate immune system.
A great deal of Trump's otherwise inexplicable popularity is that he's a 1970s NYC Democrat just like Reagan in the 1980s was a self-described FDR Democrat and he doesn't hate these people. Doesn't care or do much for them, but this is a palpable difference from the GOPe.
One thing people don't generally know is that as developed in Japan it's a quality control system. If a jig at a supplier gets out of alignment and parts made with it are out of spec and not noticed until assembly, you're better off with a feedback loop measured in hours instead of months.
COVID and the silicon shortage ... I'm not even sure JIT has any relevance, one of the biggest problems in the US was car makers canceling orders when as you could easily predict from historical plague patterns the demand for cars would go up as people left cities. Demand for a whole bunch of things changed due to the secular changes in the economy like work from home, JIT's shorter feedback loop might even help with that.
But chips are indeed one thing that shouldn't be done in JIT style. They inherently take a long time to make and are relatively easy to test. Toyoda was said to have changed their inventory strategy for them after the disruptions of the earthquake and tsunami.
And then there are disruptions like a fire taking out a fab line, I remember this happening in Japan for embedded type chips. Unlikely any relevant inventory policy would save you from that especially if there's an increase in demand where stockpiling won't save you.
The industry can't even in theory surge old nodes for which the equipment is no longer manufactured. We hear a not uncommon pattern is that they'll just suddenly stop making chips forever because they can no longer fix a critical machine.
Some time before then it was realized we had a "software crisis" as outsiders put it, and IBM realized they were spending too much money supporting many different designs, some evolutionary with minor changes?
Many ideas behind systems like Linux go back to the 1960s as well, see Multics, the primary inspiration for UNIX but ultimately a closed source dead end.
For the original question we have to realize how very small many old computers were. UNIX started on small DEC minicomputers, it would have made almost no sense at all back then to allocate more than 32 bits when your maximum data address space was 56KiB and your CPU was 16 bit (the PDP-11 family where UNIX became big following an incompatible DEC predecessor).