Materials to get lights on are getting scarce

I never thought I’d see the day when HN starts posting random conjecture from Reddit…

Not a terrible thing to have happen. From a consumer perspective, it’ll be another factor for those who choose to buy rooftop solar and batteries. From a nation state perspective, it’s signal to ramp domestic manufacturing capacity for critical infra. 80 week lead times for high end transformers isn’t a terrible deviation from the norm (usually a year), but with the electrification of everything, it’s no longer acceptable for these lead times to be the norm (or not have strategic stockpiles of backups).

So what is actually going on? Supply issues everywhere while at the same time a booming stock market?<p>Is quantitative easing and unemployment protection turning our economy inside out?<p>It seems like prime time to deploy capital to build manufacturing and raw material capacity, is it all getting sucked into markets too abstracted from reality?<p>I’m getting a gut feeling that we’re running towards an entirely new kind of crash, worse but much weirder than have been experienced so far.

The knowledge <i>currently</i> exists on how to manufacture all this from minerals to final output- probably a good idea to spend some of those trillions in infrastructure spending tempting some retirees to come and help us re-establish a full chain of manufacturing in critical areas.

Recently I installed a fan in my living room. While I was at it I expanded the gang box from 3 to 4 and decided to replace the toggle switches with rocker switches. I was shocked when I went to the electrical aisle of my local Home Depot. They were out of so many components. I ended up having to go to 3 different Home Depots, 2 different Lowes, and 1 Ace Hardware to find all the parts I was looking for. I asked various electrical section employees and they just said they can&#x27;t get anything in and have no idea if they will ever get replacements. If you have a project in mind for sometime in the future, you might want to scrounge up all the parts right now.

The trade war is going to be long and painful. Furnaces that can’t be replaced in the winter… brown outs that can’t be fixed for a year…

I think it’s been well known that an attack on the US electric grid that damaged substations was a big risk as the large transformers have a long lead time and there is only a limited number of spares available.<p>I also don’t expect a 24 year old payment processor for a utility company to have perfect access to information about the operations and capex side of the business so take with appropriate salt grains.<p>Bottom line is yes we should worry about securing the national infrastructure but not because of this Reddit post.

Who calls power supply maintenance &quot;get lights on&quot;? Wtf.<p>Also &#x2F;r&#x2F;PrepperIntel? This is pretty deep down the rabbit hole.