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Comment by lancebeet | Hacker News Reader

Toyota, who is widely recognized as the pioneer of JIT manufacturing, famously began stockpiling microchips after the Fukushima disaster disrupted their supply chains. It might not make sense to stockpile raw materials, but stockpiling things with comparatively low storage costs w.r.t. the item cost sometimes makes sense from a capitalist perspective. This assumes the company runs with a long-term perspective in mind, which often isn't the case in western companies that are publicly traded or owned/operated by investment firms. In fairness, governments also frequently fail at accounting for resiliency, even when that's their explicit goal, so perhaps the incapability to account for resiliency goes beyond the economic system.

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What a lot of people (and companies) missed is that Toyota doesn't optimize till there's no slack left, and instead properly run Kanban let's you establish a capacity and slack "reserve" in the system.

Some people seem to run companies towards absolutely no slack at all, and are baffled by the idea of keeping some.

> In fairness, governments also frequently fail at accounting for resiliency, even when that's their explicit goal, so perhaps the incapability to account for resiliency goes beyond the economic system.

That's because governments are run by the same braindead efficiency-first mindset these days.

It used to be easy to campaign on resiliency back when the USSR still existed - no matter what, all NATO countries had really large armies, months worth of stockpiles of everything from arms and munitions over medical supplies to food. Education was heavily invested in because the countries needed well educated adults to compete with the external threat. Companies kept stockpiles and had detailed disaster recovery plans and drills, not just for natural disasters but also for "how the fuck do we keep production running when the Red Army is marching towards the border" and "how the fuck do we transition from building cars and motorcycles to tanks and fighter planes when the Great War breaks out".

But once the USSR fell and the "end of history" was announced [1], all of that resiliency went down the drain - it was expensive after all and neoliberalism / "starve the beast" ideologues demanded that the "inefficiency" be cut to lower the tax burden on the corporations and the rich... and here we are, our education systems in shambles, companies got screwed left and right when covid hit and supply chains broke, and our societies in shambles as well as the people didn't have much reserves left after decades of wage stagnation and companies didn't either so they laid people off.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Las...

> the incapability to account for resiliency goes beyond the economic system

Reminds me of how bad pollution was in the GDR (communist Germany). You think capitalism is bad for the environment? Communism was worse.

You'll find similar levels of ecologic devastation in the GDR as you will find in the Silicon Valley - the greatest agglomeration of Superfund sites in the US, originating from all the silicon production before a lot of it moved to Japan, Taiwan and South Korea.

Also, for fucks sake, look at the Western German Ruhrpott and the Ewigkeitslasten there. Or the open pit brown-coal mines - both West and East Germany have these, and they're a menace no matter where. All resource extraction is incredibly devastating, no matter if under communism, capitalism or anything in-between.

In the 80s, the GDR had unfiltered or less well filtered coal power stations, more widespread use of toxic chemicals such as PCBs, less safe nuclear power stations, and the standard car type had a two-stroke engine. Did you see the blackened house facades in the East in the early 1990s? It really was worse than West Germany. Doesn't mean that everything was fine in West Germany.

Open-pit mining holes and other permanent problems from mining like the need to pump out water to prevent flooding aren't really preventable except by not mining. It's mostly HOW things were done in the East that was worse. They had fewer spare resources to do things "nicely" and the state controlled both industry and the media (even the population via Stasi), so problems could be swept under the rug more easily.

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