Hacker News Reader

Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

There's nothing in this article that I haven't read elsewhere. But it still only gets things half right. Sure, outsourcing and offshoring to China caused supply shocks for things from Asia, but...potatoes? cooking oil? These things are not shipped from China. There's more going on than international problems. America has plenty internal supply chain problems, too. The causes might be similar, smaller scale, intra-national rather than international, but it's the elephant in the room is that things aren't functioning here.

View on HN

I think the problem stems from that reducing redundancy and squeezing your labor is the easiest way to reduce costs. Then, when things 'blow up' you get to jack up prices and pocket the money for fixing the problem you created.

With the amount of consolidation we currently have, you can't switch to a vendor that does not do this as the easiest way to rise to senior management is to do this.

Probably the most comprehensive way to fix this is to tie a significant portion of managements compensation to how well the company does over 20 years. You would also have to make it so if you have a significant stake in a company, you can only exit that stake over a 20 year period to keep shareholders/VCs from forcing the company to have a few amazing paper quarters so they can exit big before the company implodes.

I don't see this happening though, and it would be hard to keep existing players from adding loopholes (eg: 'loaning' their holdings out) that remove their accountability.

I think "stems from" is complicated in this instance by how much changed and how fast. Systems can take only so much change in a set period of time, and we've had a hell of a lot of change in under 2 years.

Populations movements (COVID), combined with personal spending habit changes (things over experiences), combined with who spends money (office -> work from home contributed to the toilet paper shortages), combined with labour market changes, combined with immigration changes (hospitality in Sydney is weird without foreign students and backpackers), combined with a lack of slack in the system (JIT etc), combined with probably hundreds of small law changes played a part in what is happening. That all these happened at once only makes it all the worse.

The article The World's Most Profitable Traffic Jam [0] is linked somewhere in this article and explains very clear why America has internal supply chain problems. IHMO a better read. It was submitted 3 times here on HN since dec 21 last year but never got much traction.

[0] https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-worlds-most-profitabl...

Could you recommend a more in depth reading list?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com