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Comment by IG_Semmelweiss | Hacker News Reader

Coffee is not very different than other commodities. Much of it is in trouble at the moment.

Supply chains continue to be disrupted due to myriad of reasons. Its not only missing containers, you can argue they are still somewhat misplaces but its not just that - changing rules (COVID), changing borders (UK) , unstable financing (try to get money from any factor or revolver that is not a bank, good luck now), changing market tastes , changes even related to humans (unemployed disruptions along the supply chain workflow).

There has been many unsung heroes from the pandemic but at least as far as USA is concerned, I am still amazed we can still buy stuff from amazon with 2 day delivery.

(To wit - amazon also is not helping by limiting FBA inbound capacity to sellers)

Spot prices are all over the place. It will be like this for a while.

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For anyone looking to read more on the container shortage problem, NYT recently published a great piece on it:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/06/business/global-shipping....

> I am still amazed we can still buy stuff from amazon with 2 day delivery.

Depends on what you are buying I suppose. I was burned by some purchases early on in the pandemic (most notably a printer, something that has been in short stock nearly everywhere) and haven't used amazon or any other online delivery service since.

At least with stores I know it is there in front of me, even if there are shortages.

This was highly regional. A year ago, Amazon's delivery broke down entirely where I was living. (Rural community about an hour outside Seattle.)

For several months, Amazon prime delivery was in the 7-10 days range. Seattle quickly recovered, but it wasn't until August or September 2020 that normal prime delivery times returned for us.

What carrier do they use for delivery out there?

Just taking a wild guess from "rural" that Amazon may be handing off the delivery (or at least the last mile) to USPS. The issues may have been more USPS-related than Amazon stock issues or anything.

Mostly UPS. Occasionally FedEx.

You also have to add the inherent instability and fragility of the JIT supply chain system.

Most JIT supply chains can't be deviated more than about 5%-10% variance of volume without becoming abruptly nonlinear. Normal JIT is dependent on being within a narrow range of linear operation. Add positive and negative feedback loops and you have a super fragile system that can be easily disrupted.

Certainly. I dont think any government has been forward thinking enough to build some slack resiliency into the supply chain.

You see some of this at the federal level with food (US) or temporary safeguards by states , to make healthcare delivery during covid simpler (several states abolishing certain licensing rules etc) but I'm not aware of anything meaningfully impacting resilience of supply chain by any actor.

You could argue that spot and forward pricea help, but when you pay x and your stuff ia sitting at port idle with no prospect of moving, then you wonder whats the point of prices anyway.

When i pay for an uber, i know im being picked up when the time estimate tells me, especially if im paying surge pricing. That relationship was broken for shipping, for a big part of 2020 ,well into golden week

`To wit` is more of an `id est` rather than an `albeit`, which is how it has incorrectly been used here.

(I'm writing this for the benefit of the ESL folks, not so much as an admonishment)

So "to wit" ="namely" = "viz" but "ie"(id est) is appropriate when giving a simple example (vs a primary example) or an alternative wording? Albeit= nevertheless=however=on the other hand?

Sorry, these shouldn't be equal signs— no words are truly equal.

"i.e." is for giving clarification, not examples

e.g. is for giving examples

there are plenty of resources on the Internet to further explain this

Generally you should be able to replace “i.e.” with “that is” and have your sentence make sense and follow grammar rules. Similarly you should be able to replace “e.g.” with “for example.”

It’s generally ok to write “namely” or “to wit” where you might write “that is [to say]” although “to wit” isn’t very common. For example:

> We use a primitive programming language, namely C++.

> We use a primitive programming language, that is to say C++.

> we mainly use a primitive programming language. C++, that is.

> we mainly use a primitive programming language, to wit C++

"i.e." abbreviates "id est", which transliterates from Latin to "that is"; "e.g.", "exempli gratia", "for (the sake of) example". Most other such abbreviations found in English originate and function similarly, such as "cf." ("conferatur", "compare"), "nb." ("nota bene", "note well"), "etc." ("et cetera", "and so on"), etc.

Most people don’t know enough Latin for such translations to help with writing sentences that conform to standard grammar.

True, but looking up abbreviations like these seems often to lead first to the Latin expansion, and figuring out what that means in English provides the necessary grammatical clue. Also, I'm enough of a linguistics nerd to like the way abbreviations like these work for their own sake, so I thought I'd share in case anyone else might be interested too.

TIL, thanks!

There's probably a lot of money to be made solving these problems.

And a lot to be lost if you time your solution wrong by even a couple of months?

I don't mean simply buying/selling, more that the profit opportunities are in the process of overcoming the new trade barriers: finding ways commerce can flow through, or around, the blockages.

That's just commodities futures. All the fat has been shaved off. Very little to get without highly specialized knowledge - like you're the guy about to block coffee shipments or something.

Also I think climate change will be a increasing player in events with global disruptions in food, commodities, and industrial goods. Global capitalism has relentlessly optimized for lowest cost, but with minimal to no margin for risks or resiliency.

Having a vast surplus is a very useful form of resiliency. For commodities surplus is equivalent to low prices.

How so? Low prices drive alternate suppliers out of business as well as cutting margin for players in the market from having buffers to deal with mitigations possibly needing capital cost investments to keep bringing commodities to market. e.g. if you have a temporary drought, does the farmer have enough profit such that they have savings or capital lines to buy temporary water supply to get your crop through the dry period, or money to access getting your customs setup for new markets that have had a shortage in the regular markets. Or access to buy or rent new containers in this case possibly.

Demand is price dependent, if the supply drops by say 10% the prices rise aka price X = Supply Y. But, the other way of looking at this if you’re lowering the price below X you need a supply larger than Y.

Sure, economies get used to lower prices. However the excess annual food supply is plenty should some country have a 50% drop in agricultural output you don’t end up with famine just noticeably higher prices. That’s the slack inherent in very low prices and it extends to everything from industrial steel to phosphorus.

At stable equilibriums maybe you can follow the curve up and down, but if the system has maximized profit then the equilibrium isn’t stable against variation - especially as climate change increases variations.

Farms are subsidized, they are supposed to overproduce and throw anything we don't need away. If that excess produce was used for afforestation it could even become positive sum.

What's the better alternative?

Well, a much better algorithm for actually considering risk chains in logistics (though I suspect there are many to choose from already). But also likely including financial regulation to formally add risks stemming from supply and climate to accounting sheets - akin goodwill (which has it's problems), but making it a much for formalized first class entry into public company accounting is probably the only way to make a shift meaningful.

Proper use of import/export tariffs to incentivize local production and use of commodities.

Also to account for negative externalities such as worker rights, pollution and carbon emissions. Why encourage capital to move production overseas to escape how the community wants its goods to be produced?

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