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.
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.
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.
> need to discuss why major news outlets were parroting government propaganda that shortages and inflation were transitory
Because announcing there will be shortages is guaranteed to produce shortages.
I used to buy a sum total of six rolls of TP in 2019 (I use a bidet, so this is mainly for guests).
Right now I have a box of 24 in the house with two used all through 2020 + 2021 (no guests, that's why).
So that's 22+ rolls which I have taken off the market without utility, which is because the week I went looking for TP it wasn't there and you could order in bulk instead.
They pulled the lever on the trolley problem, therefore it is their fault, but not pulling is also a choice with damage.
What in the article makes you think that the shortages are not transitory? Maybe the shortage period will be longer than originally expected, but that doesn't mean they were wrong.
And WTF is this "new economics" bit? I never heard anything about that, either from government or non-fringe media sources. Links, please.
I don't remember anyone talking about "new economics", I remember people speculating inflation was due to supply chain disruptions due to the pandemic, and that would be short lived.
I still disagree with that theory, clearly giving everyone more money is going to raise prices, but it's not quite as ridiculous as you make it sound.
Well, in many cases they were transitory. You may remember, for example, big stories about a lumber shortage from earlier in the year, until the shortage spontaneously resolved itself in July.
> 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.
Because the inflation being referred to being transitory was from the central bank's monetary policy, but the inflation we're seeing for many things is from supply-side constraints. The why of a thing happening can be just as important, if not more so, than the what happened.
People were expecting demand-pull inflation ("too much" economic activity), but we we're probably seeing is the cost-push variety:
The same thing can have multiple causes, some of which many be more easily predicted and/or modelled.
Also, this begs the question for what is considered "transitory": 3 months? 6? 12? Other?
The fact of the matter was that inflation was expected because of the spending surge, but that 'transitory' meant that it would be 12-18 months, some using the spending of the Korean War (as compared to the Vietnam War spending):
> The Korean War started when North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950 and ended with an armistice in mid-1953. As displayed in the following figure, US inflation soared in late 1950 but returned to around 2 percent in 1952 and 1 percent in 1953.[3]
>parroting government propaganda that shortages and inflation were transitory
Are you claiming these shortages are permanent? I see no evidence of that, since already things which were scarce or costly have returned (wood, toilet paper, etc.).
It's still more likely these shortages will subside as workers return (a decent amount of the shortages are Delta shutting down production lines).
Let me "parrot" other commenters and say that I've never even heard of this "new economics" you're talking about, and I check mainstream news pretty regularly, so I'm not sure what you are talking about.
Also, let's be fair, most of the "critical reporting" under Trump was not "The administration forecasts x% economic growth, but experts disagree" variety, it was more like "Wait, did the president just tell people to drink bleach, or was it supposed to be a joke, in which case which part was a joke and which wasn't?" variety.
> This is a far cry from the critical reporting of the 2016-2020 years.
You almost answer your own question, but mistake cause & effect.
They weren't reporting critically, it just happened that their preferred (leftwing) political option was out of power. They were lying against Trump / for Democrats, just like they're now lying for Biden. The only difference is, who's in power.
>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.
Because that's what they do. They define reality.
When it comes time to convince people that the shortages and inflation are normal and will always be there (and were always there in a "we've always been at war with Eurasia") way, they'll do just that.
>This is a far cry from the critical reporting of the 2016-2020 years.
2016-2020 didn't have critical reporting either. It had hysterical partisan crap, with a big bias against Trump with ridiculous stories proped up to inifinity because it made good bucks (and because Trump was championed by middle/working class/flyover state people - basically everything esteemed and hip journalists, academics, and pundits on the upper middle class - or aspiring to be there - despise).
The same partisan bias proped up Biden (a long-time lame "professional politician", forever an insignificant mediocrity, and now barely functional due to age, that was touted as some kind of political messiah by the media).
Populism is a political ideology which pits working class and low income common folks against the ultra wealthy and ultra powerful.
The people who own these news networks are literally the people that populists position themselves against.
The campaigns against populists (Ron Paul, Bernie Sanders) are usually successful. In the case of Trump, they weren’t. I think what we are seeing now, where the news has basically just given up and semblance of even trying to be an indicator of true things which are happening in the world, is that elites are trying to course correct.
Like it or not 2019 was the best year that the working class and low income have had in the US for a very long time. Real wage growth was record high, unemployment was record low. It was an incredible time (if you don’t see this: please try to diversify your fried groups. The people in the country who usually get forgotten about we’re happy and hopeful in a way they haven’t been in a long time).
So why are the news people lying? Because they want people to forget that, and they really need to be right about their idea that electing an elderly, senile, corrupt, career politician is the solution. So they just lie about it.
Edit: when you guys downvote this can you please just give at least some kind of explanation? I really wish some of you could have seen the level of hope that the poor and working class had for the first time in a LONG time, and what this lying and gaslighting has done to them. It’s horrible.
Theory: most of the Facebook Hate in the media right now is largely due to it being one of the main critical outlets against said media and those who align with its preferred point of view. It is the everyman’s antidote against them.
If the dominant viewpoint on FB was the opposite viewpoint a la every other social media outlet, we most likely wouldn’t be having these discussions about FB right now, or at least not anywhere near this degree.
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!
Seriously though, I'm glad I don't need a car, computer, or home repair. Friends in tech are telling me 50-100 week lead times on parts. (Like the Intel NIC article on HN last week.)
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.
Wes of Watch Wes Work[0] constantly complains about multi-month lead times on previously common car parts.
I've noticed plenty of products that I used to order on-demand now having multi-month lead times - like my contacts. My doctor gave me ten lenses, but said I might not see my annual order of lenses arrive for six to eight weeks. I guess I'll get used to readers :)
I like the Factorio comparison. It's great to show the complexity of manufacturing simple products and how transport delays in one area can affect the whole economy.
It's way too complex to make any blanket statements, but it stands to reason that at least some 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
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?
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.
May I suggest that tech companies are so heavily valued because it seems reasonably possible for a single company to win the market on a global scale. We all know the absurd amount of money required to put out a mature service. Losing tons of money but getting there first is a winning strategy and practically delivers a monopoly.
Hopefully the market will correct by funneling money into distributed manufacturing. This will happen because money loves buying things, dislikes making things, but actively hates it when there's nothing to buy, nowhere to go, nothing to do.
I actually think repair and remanufacture is a great place for growth in this area. It's a lot easier to enter than full-blown factory production, AND it will help a stuff-rich society get some real utility out of all that crap sitting around in storage units, closets, and landfills.
Maybe I'm just in a good mood but I'm actually kind of excited for this.
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.
Welcome to issues large swathes of the world have been obliged to deal with all along. We’ll live.
> 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.
> The best solution to the Everything Shortage is to have a policy to make more of just about everything.
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!!!!
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.
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.
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'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.
I think it heavily depends on what type of goods you are buying. I've not seen issues for basic consumer goods, but in my professional role laptops and other goods that require chips are experiencing some significant delays. Steel roofing for the gazebo I'm building doubled in price, steel tubing for welding has gone way up and orders are delayed. My argon tanks for welding cost 25% more to fill today than pre-covid. Hard to say how much of this is shortage vs price gouging though.
Get a 3D printer? So far as I can tell, printer prices haven’t changed; filament prices haven’t gone up.
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.
Yes, how could I ever make a hook without three failed print attempts thrown in the trash first which will last millennia. If only there was some endlessly-recyclable material like steel or biodegradable material like wood which could be used.
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.
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).
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 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.
[+] [-] conjecTech|4 years ago|reply
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.
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.
[+] [-] sorokod|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coolso|4 years ago|reply
Perhaps it’s time for the US to finally stop doing that.
[+] [-] agumonkey|4 years ago|reply
news report of 10 days for tankers to unload cargo in california too
[+] [-] iammisc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gopalv|4 years ago|reply
Because announcing there will be shortages is guaranteed to produce shortages.
I used to buy a sum total of six rolls of TP in 2019 (I use a bidet, so this is mainly for guests).
Right now I have a box of 24 in the house with two used all through 2020 + 2021 (no guests, that's why).
So that's 22+ rolls which I have taken off the market without utility, which is because the week I went looking for TP it wasn't there and you could order in bulk instead.
They pulled the lever on the trolley problem, therefore it is their fault, but not pulling is also a choice with damage.
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|4 years ago|reply
And WTF is this "new economics" bit? I never heard anything about that, either from government or non-fringe media sources. Links, please.
[+] [-] creato|4 years ago|reply
I still disagree with that theory, clearly giving everyone more money is going to raise prices, but it's not quite as ridiculous as you make it sound.
[+] [-] SpicyLemonZest|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw0101a|4 years ago|reply
Because the inflation being referred to being transitory was from the central bank's monetary policy, but the inflation we're seeing for many things is from supply-side constraints. The why of a thing happening can be just as important, if not more so, than the what happened.
People were expecting demand-pull inflation ("too much" economic activity), but we we're probably seeing is the cost-push variety:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation#Keynesian_view
See for example Shipping being >4 times higher than the base line of January 2019:
* https://www.oecd.org/economic-outlook#GDP-growth-projections...
The same thing can have multiple causes, some of which many be more easily predicted and/or modelled.
Also, this begs the question for what is considered "transitory": 3 months? 6? 12? Other?
The fact of the matter was that inflation was expected because of the spending surge, but that 'transitory' meant that it would be 12-18 months, some using the spending of the Korean War (as compared to the Vietnam War spending):
> The Korean War started when North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950 and ended with an armistice in mid-1953. As displayed in the following figure, US inflation soared in late 1950 but returned to around 2 percent in 1952 and 1 percent in 1953.[3]
* https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economic-issues-watch/in...
* https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/07/opinion/covid-biden-econo...
[+] [-] ChrisLomont|4 years ago|reply
Are you claiming these shortages are permanent? I see no evidence of that, since already things which were scarce or costly have returned (wood, toilet paper, etc.).
It's still more likely these shortages will subside as workers return (a decent amount of the shortages are Delta shutting down production lines).
[+] [-] knightofmars|4 years ago|reply
If this was obviously the case then why didn't you make a ridiculous amount of money speculating in the stock market or other markets?
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] newaccount2021|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yongjik|4 years ago|reply
Also, let's be fair, most of the "critical reporting" under Trump was not "The administration forecasts x% economic growth, but experts disagree" variety, it was more like "Wait, did the president just tell people to drink bleach, or was it supposed to be a joke, in which case which part was a joke and which wasn't?" variety.
[+] [-] tomp|4 years ago|reply
You almost answer your own question, but mistake cause & effect.
They weren't reporting critically, it just happened that their preferred (leftwing) political option was out of power. They were lying against Trump / for Democrats, just like they're now lying for Biden. The only difference is, who's in power.
[+] [-] coldtea|4 years ago|reply
Because that's what they do. They define reality.
When it comes time to convince people that the shortages and inflation are normal and will always be there (and were always there in a "we've always been at war with Eurasia") way, they'll do just that.
>This is a far cry from the critical reporting of the 2016-2020 years.
2016-2020 didn't have critical reporting either. It had hysterical partisan crap, with a big bias against Trump with ridiculous stories proped up to inifinity because it made good bucks (and because Trump was championed by middle/working class/flyover state people - basically everything esteemed and hip journalists, academics, and pundits on the upper middle class - or aspiring to be there - despise).
The same partisan bias proped up Biden (a long-time lame "professional politician", forever an insignificant mediocrity, and now barely functional due to age, that was touted as some kind of political messiah by the media).
[+] [-] devwastaken|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thepasswordis|4 years ago|reply
The people who own these news networks are literally the people that populists position themselves against.
The campaigns against populists (Ron Paul, Bernie Sanders) are usually successful. In the case of Trump, they weren’t. I think what we are seeing now, where the news has basically just given up and semblance of even trying to be an indicator of true things which are happening in the world, is that elites are trying to course correct.
Like it or not 2019 was the best year that the working class and low income have had in the US for a very long time. Real wage growth was record high, unemployment was record low. It was an incredible time (if you don’t see this: please try to diversify your fried groups. The people in the country who usually get forgotten about we’re happy and hopeful in a way they haven’t been in a long time).
So why are the news people lying? Because they want people to forget that, and they really need to be right about their idea that electing an elderly, senile, corrupt, career politician is the solution. So they just lie about it.
Edit: when you guys downvote this can you please just give at least some kind of explanation? I really wish some of you could have seen the level of hope that the poor and working class had for the first time in a LONG time, and what this lying and gaslighting has done to them. It’s horrible.
[+] [-] coolso|4 years ago|reply
If the dominant viewpoint on FB was the opposite viewpoint a la every other social media outlet, we most likely wouldn’t be having these discussions about FB right now, or at least not anywhere near this degree.
[+] [-] post_break|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SavantIdiot|4 years ago|reply
Seriously though, I'm glad I don't need a car, computer, or home repair. Friends in tech are telling me 50-100 week lead times on parts. (Like the Intel NIC article on HN last week.)
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.
[+] [-] RyJones|4 years ago|reply
I've noticed plenty of products that I used to order on-demand now having multi-month lead times - like my contacts. My doctor gave me ten lenses, but said I might not see my annual order of lenses arrive for six to eight weeks. I guess I'll get used to readers :)
0: https://www.youtube.com/c/WatchWesWork
[+] [-] dx034|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tunesmith|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pirate787|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sharikous|4 years ago|reply
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?
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.
[+] [-] goalieca|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] javajosh|4 years ago|reply
I actually think repair and remanufacture is a great place for growth in this area. It's a lot easier to enter than full-blown factory production, AND it will help a stuff-rich society get some real utility out of all that crap sitting around in storage units, closets, and landfills.
Maybe I'm just in a good mood but I'm actually kind of excited for this.
[+] [-] cbdumas|4 years ago|reply
[0] https://am.jpmorgan.com/us/en/asset-management/institutional...
[+] [-] emodendroket|4 years ago|reply
> 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.
> The best solution to the Everything Shortage is to have a policy to make more of just about everything.
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.
[+] [-] rhacker|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dylan604|4 years ago|reply
Edit: What's wrong with asking a simple question?
[+] [-] yellottyellott|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] irrational|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zwieback|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] greenail|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] usrusr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darsoli|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 83|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lsiunsuex|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] coryrc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nullwarp|4 years ago|reply
It's been really good for printing brackets and things and simple replacement parts
[+] [-] Loughla|4 years ago|reply
Also, last year, I wasn't able to get filament for about 3 months due to the pandemic.
[+] [-] xyst|4 years ago|reply
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).
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.
[+] [-] baggy_trough|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awinter-py|4 years ago|reply
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/us/abbott-covid-tests.htm...
not really a global supply chain issue is it
[+] [-] spoonjim|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshsyn|4 years ago|reply