This is an issue with latency, not throughput. Our supply chain is actually running at considerably higher throughput than we ever have before. The ports provide numbers for activity on their websites - Long Beach and Oakland are both operating at 30% higher capacity than they were pre-pandemic.<p>What has changed is the queues and the pricing. The shortages we are feeling are the gaps that have surfaced between when retailers trigger reorders and when they are replenished. They grew accustomed to being able to do that just-in-time as forecasted inventory went to 0, but the added delays have made this much harder.<p>Additionally, the shipping prices have made many things simply uneconomic to ship. I saw an analysis on the difference in cost recently for a grill: prior to the pandemic, shipping from China to LA contributed $5 to its price, with shipping costs up 8x, that's now $40. Rather than fulfill orders at negative margins, many people are simply waiting for lower prices after the holidays. It's not that they're being held up in transit, these things aren't being shipped to begin with.
More importantly than this, we need to discuss why major news outlets were parroting government propaganda that shortages and inflation were transitory, when they were obviously not. Major news outlets claimed that 'new economics' would mean that the expected inflation and shortages would not come to pass. Instead of critically questioning government official's proclamations of a new economics, outlets gladly parroted this position. This is a far cry from the critical reporting of the 2016-2020 years.
This has lead to some lifestyle changes for me. Much less meat due to the rising cost. Installed a Bidet on a whim the moment the TP situation started last year, best investment of my life. I traded in my truck last month for almost as much as I paid brand new for a brand new car. Some things are harder to find, or the prices have gone up and so I've just either switched to cheaper options or just stopped buying them at all.
It's like real-life Factorio: one conveyor jams and every downstream machine on the pipeline needs to be manually un-fucked!<p>Seriously though, I'm glad I don't need a car, computer, or home repair. Friends in tech are telling me 50-100 <i>week</i> lead times on parts. (Like the Intel NIC article on HN last week.)<p>Anecdotally, since the early 2000's I have had trouble finding contractors to do small home improvement jobs (under 50k). For at least two decades, only big jobs get bid, the rest require handymen. Not that I have a problem with handymen, just that they often shouldn't handle jobs that really require a team. So it feels like the comment about construction has never really been alleviated in my experience. It's like airlines and baggage fees: they told it is was due to 9/11 and fuel costs, and were only temporary, yet they persist.
It's way too complex to make any blanket statements, but it stands to reason that at least <i>some</i> of these snarls and delays will resolve very quickly as capacity picks up again. It's a variation of the bank teller question discussed in another thread - if your bank teller can process 6 customers per hour, and 5.8 customers arrive per hour, the average wait time will be 5 hours. If you add a 2nd bank teller, the average wait time will be three minutes. So if some of these problems are similar to missing that second bank teller, those parts of the supply chain will speed up quickly when that's resolved.
Europe and the UK have the same problem. I wish they looked at this situation (inflation, stalled supply chains, energy price raises) from a global perspective instead of focusing on the US only<p>I have the impression a long awaited crisis is finally coming. Remember the stock market going up and up and the busloads of many invested in tech and ML?<p>At some point the bubble had to explode. The COVID-19 crisis was an unexpected black swan which is acting, belatedly, both as a retardant and as a trigger for the global, systemic, financial and economical crash that usually happens once a decade.
There has been endless coverage of the supply side of current economic weirdness affecting the world, but scant coverage of the demand side. Yet if this blog post[0] that was discussed here a couple of weeks ago is to be believed spending on goods in the US shot up by 20% this year. It seems to me that even if global supply chains were working flat out and in perfect order we would still see huge disruptions given a shock to demand of that magnitude. I would love to see more detailed reporting from a knowledgeable source on this.<p>[0] <a href="https://am.jpmorgan.com/us/en/asset-management/institutional/insights/market-insights/eye-on-the-market/dude-where-is-my-stuff/" rel="nofollow">https://am.jpmorgan.com/us/en/asset-management/institutional...</a>
Welcome to issues large swathes of the world have been obliged to deal with all along. We’ll live.<p>> One possibility is that Americans adopt a sustainable, ascetic, and homespun lifestyle that reduces our dependency on goods that activate the global supply chain. If you can seriously envision such a world, I envy your gift of imagination.<p>> The best solution to the Everything Shortage is to have a policy to make more of just about everything.<p>Well, is it? The pandemic will pass but the various environmental crises created by the “more of everything” policy probably will oblige reduced consumption in some form.
Here's an upside. I've been waiting for 2 3/8 inch x 8 foot structural pipe for 3 months from a ranch store I shop at. Before prices went crazy I paid $26. They FINALLY got some in yesterday and the price was $22 per pipe!!!!<p>I have no idea why and I didn't question it. They said they ordered 200 and they got 14 of them. I only needed 6.
>This is the economy now. One-hour errands are now multi-hour odysseys.<p>Yes. I needed some simple parts for a home repair job I'm doing. In the before times I would have been able to find them all at one Home Depot, in abundance. I had to go to three Home Depots, two Lowes, and one Ace Hardware to find everything I was looking for.
I liked this comment from the article:<p><i>Focusing on the redistribution of income and goods is natural for today’s progressives, who tend to emphasize the virtue of equality. One lesson of the Everything Shortage is: You cannot redistribute what isn’t created in the first place. The best equality agenda begins with an abundance agenda.</i>
I'm disappointed this is front page HN as it seems a purely political piece of little value. The author supplies an anecdotal example and claims we should make more stuff here. Where are the details? What should we make and why?
Lots of liquidity has been created, worldwide, in attempts to keep people and businesses (big and small) afloat in lockdowns and/or "natural" consequences of the pandemic (e.g. reduced travel and so on, lots of industries would have seen trouble lockdown or not). Production surely did not grow in lockstep. What else would anyone expect other than prices catching up with money supply?
Although I read about the supply chain bottlenecks, I don't feel like it's impacted me yet. In fact it feels like there are more "Same Day" options than ever before (Amazon specific, but ditto for in-person shopping elsewhere). I live in NYC so not sure if that makes a difference or not.
Get a 3D printer? So far as I can tell, printer prices haven’t changed; filament prices haven’t gone up.<p>Can’t print toilet paper or paper towels but random I need a hook to hang something, or a fitting for a pipe that’s not under load, tons of stuff on thingiverse.
Besides a few manufacturers (Toyota for example) changing their ways, as long as it's cheap to produce products and ship them half way across the world. The status quo will never change.<p>Most US industries will be given significant bail outs from Main Street, while Main Street itself is left to fend for themselves on meager public support pillars (if they even manage to get through to a person that is able to help them).<p>I think COVID-19 was a test of our global supply chain and we have failed. If a virus mutates and is even slightly worse than COVID-19, then we are truly fucked.
This is essentially another manifestation of inflation, except that instead of prices being fully adjusted upwards to balance supply and demand, we have shortages instead.
I mean the home covid tests in the first paragraph are potentially made in maine<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/us/abbott-covid-tests.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/us/abbott-covid-tests.htm...</a><p>not really a global supply chain issue is it
I saw this article and went and ordered a ton of nonperishable food, toilet paper, paper towels, soap, etc. from Costco. Likely making the problem worse.
This isn't really surprising to me, as this is what happens when you have lockdowns worldwide travel bans in place. The supply chain gets affected. It throws the market out of whack, imbalance in the prices, and most importantly people lives out of order. Years of work thrown down the tube by bunch of central planners. The economy consists of everyone working to support themselves and their families, not just the rich.
“That’s why Joe Biden's Build Back Better plan includes billions of dollars to reshore manufacturing, invest in basic research, and beef up domestic supply chains.” – everything has to be a political propaganda.
The first question I want to ask is why is HN filled with globalist agenda apologists?<p>There is no shortage of anything. True shortages are determined by nature, not by the economic manipulations of financiers and globalists, which means that most of the shortages are the consequences of policy decisions not natural events.<p>Take something such as the shipping shortage. During their Covid crisis a lot of shipping capacity was taken of the markets. Some companies actually destroyed some of their ships.<p>18 months later there is a shortage of shipping capacity, alleged. I don't think I am that bright, but if whole loads of shipping capacity are taken of the market in what is bound to be a temporary downturn, is it surprising that there will be shortages?<p>Lets take the truck driver shortage in the UK. The UK benefited from cheap labour from Eastern Europe as a result of Brexit, which led many qualified British drivers to give up the job because the pay was shit. To be honest even the cheaper labour from Eastern Europe considered it to be shit. Then you have Brexit followed by Covid, and many of the drivers from Eastern Europe have seen that the grass is not so green on the British side and don't see themselves coming back.<p>As for the truck drivers there about tens of thousands of fully qualified HGV drivers who simply not interested in the job. There is no shortage of HGV drivers, there is a shortage of employers who are willing to pay decent money not just in the short term, but in the long term to get the qualified drivers to commit. Funny how the media never mentions that. Truck drivers need to take a medical to get on the road, and even the NHS doctors who are supposed to be doing them are not doing them anymore. Funny how that never gets mentioned by the media.<p>In effect industry should stop blaming the govt for their own questionable pay policies. The country of zero hour contracts is feeling a labour shortage. Surprise!!<p>Then you have gas shortages. Remember Nordstream and Nordstream II, which the US government did its best to sabotage? Well Germany needs more gas and it isn't fully up yet. Are US gas companies ready to fill the gap?<p>Then of course you have this manufactured pandemic. Just because there is a new illness around doesn't make it a pandemic, a definition which was changed by WHO in order to serve a global agenda. The "developed" world adapted a "treatment" policy which involved taken painkillers and hoping that the disease would not develop enugh to warrant hospital admission. Even then they cooked the definitions to allow every positive test to labelled as actual disease even if there are no clinical symptoms, and use it as an excuse to warrant economic lockdowns.<p>Announcement of shortages isn't about real shortages. It is simply a way of priming consumers to expect higher prices in the future, as though demand has risen when it hasn't.<p>It is time the general public stopped being hoodwinked by mainstream media who are simply the mouthpieces of Big Finance which has not taken over Govt in the Western world.
The current gridlock in Congress is a blessing.<p>If they actually manage to pass either stimulus things are going to get <i>really</i> bad. There's not enough supply or labor for the bipartisan "bridges and roads" bill. There's not anywhere near enough labor for the partisan social bill.<p>If they actually pass it, given the way government runs, they'll overpay for everything to get supply, which costs extra, but worse it's going to take supply (both material and labor) away from regular businesses and people.