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Comment by samfisher83 | Hacker News Reader

Its the whole JIT inventories stuff they preach in business school. Toyota actually stocked enough chips to handle something like this.

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It's funny because systems dynamics have been known in supply chain optimisation for like 4 decades and the research itself is from the 60S. JIT is an obvious case of overoptimising leading to fragility so the fact that its accepted as the ideal is ludicrous.

I'm starting to think historians will look back at our age and say "it was the MBAs who doomed them", much the same way that historians look at China's history and point to an excess of court eunechs as the reason this or that dynasty fell.

The eunechs being blamed was mostly a "polite" fiction as they had no descendants to offend, especially important if the same dynasty is in place. Badmouthing the current emperor's ancestors isn't good for your health.

A very fair point. It was my impression that the bloating of the court eunech population was considered a sign of imperial decline. If the empire wasn't expanding, advancement was mostly available through court intrigue, and drama was internal to the class that was jockeying for the emperor's favour.

In one sense, it's like the bloating of university administrations over the last couple decades in the U.S. as Pell grants unleashed a torrent of money at post-secondary education. The easiest way to soak up the excess was to bloat the bureaucracy trying to spend it.

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