Maximum Profit Rather than Reliably Getting Things to People

February 4, 2022 12:44 PM

How We Broke the Supply Chain (David Dayen and Rakeen Mabud for The American Prospect) Rampant outsourcing, financialization, monopolization, deregulation, and just-in-time logistics are the culprits.

A special issue on the topic also includes 'How America's Supply Chains Got Railroaded,' about railroad deregulation, 'We Were Warned About the Ports,' 'Medical Emergency,' about medical devices, 'The Hidden Costs of Containerization,' 'Labor Fight Brews on the Docks,' and 'China: Epicenter of the Supply Chain Crisis.'

posted by box (67 comments total)

I just read 'The Hidden Costs of Containerization' and, I think I need to go not buy some things.

Is there a point at which the kind of rent seeking bullshit the shipping companies are pulling starts to swing the pendulum back to local manufacturing?
posted by jacquilynne at 1:23 PM on February 4, 2022 [3 favorites]

'The Hidden Costs of Containerization,'
posted by box

eponystorical?
posted by lalochezia at 1:38 PM on February 4, 2022 [52 favorites]

Nationalize the ports. Recognize interruption of imported goods are a national security risk.
posted by Nanukthedog at 1:40 PM on February 4, 2022 [9 favorites]

This is using the supply chain issue to sneakily talk about a whole range of failed neoliberal economic policies.

I approve.
posted by gwint at 1:40 PM on February 4, 2022 [54 favorites]

"Declining unionization, increasingly demanding and empowered shareholders, decreasing real minimum wages, reduced worker protections, and the increases in outsourcing domestically and abroad have disempowered workers with profound consequences for the labor market and the broader economy."

"What should be done? A traditional economic argument is that policy should let markets function competitively and then rely on progressive taxation and spending... But progressive institutionalists have long argued for pre-distribution alongside redistribution, strengthening worker power by changing the structure of labor market institutions. We believe both ingredients are required."

That's from Larry Summers, described in the article as one of the economists who supposedly "base their entire worldview on low prices trumping all other harms."
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 1:41 PM on February 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

The obligation of publicly traded corporations to “maximize shareholder value” needs to be burned to the ground.

At the stake.

By a mob.
posted by armoir from antproof case at 2:00 PM on February 4, 2022 [46 favorites]

By which i meant: the writers and maintainers of such regulations and practices are (or are paid by) the very shareholders who benefit, so, not sure what options there are for getting them changed. Happy to have my cynicism better informed or squashed by someone better informed on the topic
posted by armoir from antproof case at 2:06 PM on February 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

In 1970, Milton Friedman argued in The New York Times that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.”

He was then fired out of a cannon into a brick wall should be the next sentence.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 2:10 PM on February 4, 2022 [23 favorites]

I want to drive down to the port and hang a sign sez “The Milton Friedman Memorial Longstay Queuing Area For Maximized Inefficiency And Risk To The Homeland”
posted by armoir from antproof case at 2:17 PM on February 4, 2022 [17 favorites]

Ok, I'm sure there are some legitimate gripes about the US supply chain, but Kroger (listed in the article) has a 1.95% profit margin according to Google Finance, and over 2021, retail sales increased 19% vs 2021 and up more than 10% vs 2019.

So is the supply chain broken? Maybe, but it's also very possible that it's mostly fine, given the COVID considerations and the massive increase in retail spending. Also up 19% over the year means that people may be grumbling about inflation (of course) but not enough to actually behave normally.

That's from Larry Summers, described in the article as one of the economists who supposedly "base their entire worldview on low prices trumping all other harms."
Maybe, but Larry Summers never actually did any of that, and he instituted the Fed Policy of using recessions and layoffs to decrease worker power. The current members of the Fed are much better, and any policy recommendation he has, you should pretty much do the opposite.
posted by The_Vegetables at 2:54 PM on February 4, 2022 [6 favorites]

Currently there's a lack of formula across chunks of the Midwest. People are being directed to "consult their pediatricians for alternatives". I figure that's important to point out to anyone claiming this is just inflation.
posted by pan at 3:19 PM on February 4, 2022 [21 favorites]

Maximum Profit Rather than Reliably Getting Things to People

ThisIsMySurprisedFace.jpg
posted by Splunge at 4:12 PM on February 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

Wait, you mean the invisible hand of the market doesn't actually result in the best or most efficient processes, it just leads towards greed and money hoarding on the backs of exhausted working people? Who knew?
posted by JauntyFedora at 4:20 PM on February 4, 2022 [29 favorites]

I am deeply unsurprised at how this is playing out for two reasons:

First, as is commonly said, any measurement that becomes a target ceases to be useful as a measurement. But the profitability of a company is said to be a measure of how successful that company is at meeting needs, while we ruthlessly optimize for profit. Eventually, that increased profit must come at the expense of the outcomes it is meant to promote, and by “eventually” I mean “we missed that turn-off about sixty miles back.”

Second, as evolutionary biology teaches us, over-optimizing for one thing makes an organism increasingly brittle to decreasingly significant changes in its environment. If it wasn’t a pandemic that pulled out the wrong Jenga block, it was going to be something else sooner or later, because the tower just keeps getting taller and wobblier. Honestly, if not for COVID, I’d have just expected recessions to become ever more common for ever smaller reasons until one day everything just collapses and nobody really understands which seemingly trivial thing was the cause. COVID gave us the bang instead of the whimper, and people are still confused at the result.
posted by gelfin at 4:29 PM on February 4, 2022 [34 favorites]

Maybe, but it's also very possible that it's mostly fine

The problem is that "mostly fine" considered via a huge grocery chains' profits and an overall bump in retail sales is cold comfort and a useless bordering on insulting metric to industries, companies, and individuals who cannot get actual things in their hands because of supply chain problems.

I mean, yay Kroger's profits, sure, fine, whatever, but meanwhile our rep for Yamaha professional audio products is telling us, "We might have some products in the US in 6 months? Maybe?" And while that's a minor inconvenience for our little company there are definitely other companies and Yamaha themselves going "OHFUCK!!"

Sure, sure, don't miss the forest for the trees and all, but if every tree falls down one at a time eventually you don't have a forest.
posted by soundguy99 at 4:52 PM on February 4, 2022 [11 favorites]

People being unavailable due to isolation and sickness taught us they focused on the wrong kind of redundancy.
posted by k3ninho at 4:58 PM on February 4, 2022 [3 favorites]

Oh yeah, and Kroger's awesome profits? Yeeeaaahhh . . . they just had a big strike. So maybe not so much evidence of "ok supply chain" and more evidence of "underpaid workers."
posted by soundguy99 at 5:02 PM on February 4, 2022 [15 favorites]

Soundguy99 for the win.

America: Profit at Any Cost.
Even if it costs American lives!
posted by armoir from antproof case at 5:04 PM on February 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

Nationalize the ports. Recognize interruption of imported goods are a national security risk.

I can't even tell if this a joke.

The article is all kinds of bullshitty incoherence. I mean, who in their right mind doesn't think supply chains were designed for maximum profit rather than reliably getting things to people? Supply chains are overwhelmingly for profit. Because they're designed to get money from consumers in exchange for bringing the goods those consumers want. Duh. The idea that supply chains are broken because of something other than a global pandemic and its lingering effects is laughable.

Curiously enough (or maybe not ffs), because supply chains are designed for maximum profit, they've been remarkably durable and efficient for pretty much the lifetimes of everyone reading this thread. Having to go without because of supply chains has been remarkably rare in the west, and its occurrence is absolutely unsurprising now.

Oh yeah, and Kroger's awesome profits?

1.95% profit margin is awesome? I have no idea why Kroger's profit margins were brought up, presumably as proof of something. Weird proof of awesome, though. Maybe that's sustainable for Kroger, but that's barely hand to mouth for some businesses.
posted by 2N2222 at 5:11 PM on February 4, 2022 [4 favorites]

Pretty normal number for the supermarket segment, I think. It's historically very low margin. Not sure what it's suppose to prove in this thread, though.
posted by ryanrs at 5:41 PM on February 4, 2022 [6 favorites]

I heard today that there’s a shortage of crutches. Makes me wish I’d been able to donate all the old ones I threw away during my last move because I was running out of time.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 5:45 PM on February 4, 2022

If it wasn’t a pandemic that pulled out the wrong Jenga block, it was going to be something else sooner or later, because the tower just keeps getting taller and wobblier. Honestly, if not for COVID, I’d have just expected recessions to become ever more common for ever smaller reasons until one day everything just collapses and nobody really understands which seemingly trivial thing was the cause.

William Gibson calls it the Jackpot.
posted by valkane at 5:46 PM on February 4, 2022 [9 favorites]

Yeah AFAIK 1-2% is normal for groceries. The "awesome" was, well, sarcastic, because Kroger's profits were raised as some kind of example of the supply chains operating more or less normally, only they don't work as said example because "serious problems with supply chains" doesn't mean "nobody can buy anything anywhere" so Krogers or Fender or Dodge or whothehellever can have a record year while still having massive supply problems and other industries can crash and burn because of their own supply problems.
posted by soundguy99 at 5:52 PM on February 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

As an electronics hobbyist, the chip shortage has been a massive pain the ass. I'm already operating under certain restrictions on what chips I can use (for example, I can't solder the smallest surface mount chips). With the huge supply shortages, it is becoming quite difficult to find the chips for my projects.

For a recent power converter I designed, most of the controller chips I could have used were ruled out because they were unavailable to me even in quantity 5-10. I looked at so many devices before I found one I could actually buy and use.

Semiconductor manufacturing is a very slow process. I think for many of these anonymous little chips, the fabs only do one or two batches a year of each part number. So it will take a long time for distributor stocks to get back to where they should be.
posted by ryanrs at 6:06 PM on February 4, 2022 [5 favorites]

The global Just In Time system and this miraculous global supply chain - which has been temporarily disrupted by the first global pandemic in our lifetimes - also helped Walmart and other retailers provide an enormous range of increasingly inexpensive basics, including food, to working class families. There are tons of problems in the current system, but the OP conflates multiple issues.
posted by PhineasGage at 6:15 PM on February 4, 2022 [3 favorites]

Lots of headaches for hospitals trying to get IV meds and fluids right now. It was bad before covid, it’s worse now. Instead of a handful of products being on backorder, there’s a dozen or more. It’s a rotating assortment from week to week. We’ve been unable to get premade dextrose syringes for a while so we’ve been compounding them instead. Now it looks like we might run out of the syringes we use to compound them. The supply chain has little to no redundancy, and because manufacturing for parenteral products is so tightly regulated, it’s also slow moving and inflexible. There might only be one or two suppliers making a given product for the entire U.S. market. The article mentions the IV fluid shortages in 2017–that was due to Hurricane Maria taking out factories in Puerto Rico. There was no backup capacity that could be mobilized quickly. Getting a production line up and moving can take months, even when there’s not a pandemic going on, and for products with slim margins there’s little incentive to do so.
posted by dephlogisticated at 6:55 PM on February 4, 2022 [11 favorites]

As far as I've been able to tell, a lot of Just In Time practices revolving around stock and supply chain is based to an extent on things like The Toyota Way of outsourcing parts manufacture to small and mid-sized companies, and we're living through a moment in history where someone decided that a situation that appeared in a single location with very specific environmental conditions (post war scarcity, low capital base, lack of suitable parcels of land for large scale manufacturing plants) would work just as well everywhere else.

The thing is, the Toyota Way is, and always has been outsourcing tremendous burden onto people in such precarious situations that they are unable to say no. After an order is filled (for whatever part), the small manufacturer often has to let many of its workers go because there is no work for them to do. Toyota (and many other similar companies) saves money on all sorts of things by outsourcing all of the work that keeps the company able to make and sell cars, while leaving those making and fabricating parts incredibly vulnerable.

That's the underlying idea behind this: fuck the little guy, we'll use them when we need them, and abandon them when we don't. When we need them again, they'll come crawling back because what else are they going to do? Just In Time has its roots in this system, and it's entirely unsurprising that the system is set up in such a way that it grinds down everyone involved with any of the actual work that goes into making the system move.

Corona showed us what happens when this bullshit system breaks down. Workers, for a moment, were able to show their intrinsic value and demand more and better in exchange for their labor, as seen in the various unionization drives and strikes across the country. Capital, and in many cases, governments, have shown their cards by removing worker protections and cutting pandemic safety measures.

It's a fun little coincidence that I just finished a Zoom class with students, trying to explain to them, in their first little steps into persuasive writing, that for any proposal that calls for change, the biggest issue is the inertia that resists change. Needing to show that the benefits of change will outweigh the costs of making the change. The thing is, we've reached a point where the system is failing the workers (and now the consumers) and changes are necessary, but require the system abandoning it's primary goal of profit above all, and building into it an allowance for those not in control of the system to simply live. That requires convincing the owners of wealth and capital to share, to persuade governments to act on the behalf of the populace, rather than the wealthy, and, well, here we are.

And this brings us back to the line "I don't know how to explain to you that you should care about other people."
posted by Ghidorah at 7:51 PM on February 4, 2022 [33 favorites]

This article was great. I've already passed it along. I'll have to read it again tomorrow to see what I missed this time through.

Supply chain thing: I work in the aftermarket automotive glass replacement business. We supply automobile glass and associated tools and products to the people who install them. There's a specific windshield that is for a whole series of the most popular vehicles from 1995 until about 2001. We have not seen one in our warehouse for over a year.

Like, are cops aware of this situation and giving drivers they might ticket for a cracked windshield a pass because they simply don't exist for anyone anywhere right now? Will they ever reappear? Are any factories adding these to their production lines that didn't make them previously? There are no answers, just this void, that once they start to appear is going to wreak havoc on any warehouse that gets any real stock in them, as they all fly out the door 5 or 10 at a time.

Anyway, supply chains. They affect a lot of things you don't even think about.
posted by hippybear at 8:08 PM on February 4, 2022 [12 favorites]

Don't all auto manufacturers abuse their part vendors? I suppose that doesn't work so well when the part vendor is a giant chip company.
posted by ryanrs at 8:32 PM on February 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

I’ve started to think the real source of our problems is we treat these “economists” as having any wisdom to offer in these matters. It seems to me that the people with possible solutions are supply chain managers, logisticians, and others with specialized knowledge and years of experience.
posted by interogative mood at 8:52 PM on February 4, 2022 [4 favorites]

What makes you think economists have any input in the way supply chains are constructed? Economists merely describe. It's business managers and executives who have made all of this happen.
posted by PhineasGage at 9:16 PM on February 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

This example is bogus:

“An earthquake in Taiwan in 1999 cut off supplies of the world’s semiconductor chips, which were mostly produced in that country.”

Uh, no way. Taiwan’s semiconductor capacity lagged behind Japan for another decade. Even in 2016, Taiwan held less than a quarter of the integrated circuit export market.
posted by Wet Spot at 9:27 PM on February 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

Today I submitted a custom board design to a circuit board factory in China. This is for a personal project, not something I'm going to sell. The Chinese factory is just making the bare pc boards (green plastic with printed copper traces, no components). I will buy the chips and other components myself and solder them to my board by hand.

Here's the cost breakdown:
$10 for 10 custom pcbs ($1/ea)
$19 to air ship pcbs from China
$335 defensive chip purchases

Usually I assemble one or two boards before ordering all the chips, in case my circuit doesn't work the first time. But now I buy many key chips right when the pcb order is submitted because I don't want the chips going out of stock between now and when I get my boards (1-2 weeks).

Silver lining: the absurdity is kinda amusing.
posted by ryanrs at 10:01 PM on February 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

@Wet Spot: Concur. This NYTimes Article stated that Taiwan has only 5% of global market in 1999.

Taiwan, the world's No. 4 chip producer, has a 5 percent share of the world's chip market

posted by kschang at 10:22 PM on February 4, 2022

@Wet Spot, a different article pointed out a different figure, and a different concentration.

Manufacturers here (in Taiwan) make 10 percent of the world's chips and about 80 percent of the "motherboards" used to run personal computers.

posted by kschang at 10:29 PM on February 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

The article from 2007 by Barry C. Lynn linked in the main story is a nice read. The argument that the pandemic caused this 'temporary glitch' doesn't hold water when people were warning for years that the so-called miraculous just-in-time global supply chains are in fact fragile and will break down at the slightest hint of trouble. And here we are.
posted by UN at 11:20 PM on February 4, 2022 [3 favorites]

"What makes you think economists have any input in the way supply chains are constructed?"

Economists write analyses for politicians and lobbyists and litigants etc on the costs (and benefits maybe) of different policy approaches to things like maintaining a domestic industry, public investment in transport infrastructure, regulating domestic stocks of essential commodities, and so on. A cynic might think they are simply rhetoricians for hire justifying what their funders want to do anyway, but even that is an input whose quality might affect outcomes in the real world.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 11:22 PM on February 4, 2022 [13 favorites]

Meanwhile in Brexit Britain: Furious Lorry Drivers Stuck For 17 Hours In Dover Queues
posted by Lanark at 1:12 AM on February 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

>A cynic might think they are simply rhetoricians for hire justifying what their funders want to do anyway
...isolated from consequences by not being impacted by the choices, not implementing or measuring its impact or not losing reputation for being wrong.
posted by k3ninho at 3:11 AM on February 5, 2022 [3 favorites]

He was then fired out of a cannon into a brick wall should be the next sentence.

To be fair, in 1970 it was harder to turn a profit on applying massive blunt force trauma to monetarists than it would be in 2022; no Kickstarter, for one.
posted by flabdablet at 5:31 AM on February 5, 2022 [4 favorites]

I always find myself wondering what it is that the US ships to China that makes China ship all that stuff to the US.
posted by clawsoon at 5:49 AM on February 5, 2022

I always find myself wondering what it is that the US ships to China that makes China ship all that stuff to the US.

Coal, oil, wheat, hay (yes, hay)... I live in a part of the country where I regularly have 1-1.5 mile (yes, miles) long coal trains full heading west, and then even longer ones empty heading east. Ditto trains of oil cars. Ditto trains of grain.

I don't know if we're still shipping scrap metal (iron and such) to China. That might have ended a while ago or maybe Trump ended it. But yeah, we ship stuff there that fuels their ability to make shit for us.
posted by hippybear at 5:53 AM on February 5, 2022 [5 favorites]

Coal, oil, wheat, hay (yes, hay)...

"Hewers of wood and drawers of water," as we'd say up here in Canada.
posted by clawsoon at 6:17 AM on February 5, 2022

I always find myself wondering what it is that the US ships to China that makes China ship all that stuff to the US.

Shipping containers.
posted by flabdablet at 6:18 AM on February 5, 2022 [2 favorites]

Nationalize the ports.

Yes!

Recognize interruption of imported goods are a national security risk.

No. That’s how you get terrible anti-labor policies that say that people striking for eg. safe working conditions are somehow a national security threat. Just build supply chains with redundancy for things that are important for people’s lives and health, like medical devices and supplies.
posted by eviemath at 6:22 AM on February 5, 2022 [4 favorites]

Curiously enough (or maybe not ffs), because supply chains are designed for maximum profit, they've been remarkably durable and efficient for pretty much the lifetimes of everyone reading this thread.

For the lifetimes of everyone reading this thread, they've been removing redundancies and making them ever more brittle. They have been in danger of breaking for a long time. Matt Stoller touched on this in his book Goliath before the pandemic, and - shocker! - he was right. I strongly recommend reading his article in Wired from February 2020 and his write up Counterfeit Capitalism from last year.

There is a quote from his Wired article that haunts me now, looking at what is happening currently: "Eighty-eight years ago, “old order” politicians, as they were known, proved unwilling—even in the face of crisis—to have the government apply its power toward the broader public benefit." That issue still persists now.

The supply chain system has been tottering for a long time and if it wasn't the pandemic, something else would have exposed its fragile nature soon enough. It's a bit like our roads and bridges here in the US. We pulled all funding for maintenance, and everything looks like it's still working great, right up until a bridge collapses in the center of Pittsburgh. If you're not the person working daily on aspects of this stuff, you can't see that the system is on the brink of collapse until things start collapsing.
posted by rednikki at 6:24 AM on February 5, 2022 [13 favorites]

Shipping containers.

Interestingly, yes. And one of the things that went sideways with the supply chain early in the pandemic was during lockdown around the world, consumer demand went up everywhere and places that normally didn't get a lot shipped to them from Asia were getting shipments, delivered in containers. Only those countries didn't really have things to ship back and a lot of containers got stranded/orphaned at unfrequented ports in inconvenient places. So there was a shortage of containers for a while because they weren't being returned. I don't know how much of that has been straightened out at this point, to be honest.

The problem now is that containers are sitting full in ports awaiting transit away from there and into the next part of the chain. But there are issues with all the stuff that happens after a container comes off a ship, so they sit there, full, also not being shipped back to China.

I'd heard not too long ago that the price of using a container (renting it? I'm not entirely sure how that is managed) has increased by over 10x during this whole thing. Supply/demand, etc.
posted by hippybear at 6:26 AM on February 5, 2022 [2 favorites]

I think it's limiting to look at this solely from a US perspective. Most of the rest of the world imports stuff from China, too; these are truly global issues, not y'alls national issues.
posted by Too-Ticky at 6:26 AM on February 5, 2022 [3 favorites]

Intel's $20 bln Ohio factory could become world's largest chip plant

Is this a good thing?
posted by sammyo at 6:27 AM on February 5, 2022

Silly question, but aren’t most (all?) of the ports already publicly owned?
posted by schmod at 7:07 AM on February 5, 2022 [2 favorites]

Meanwhile in Brexit Britain: Furious Lorry Drivers Stuck For 17 Hours In Dover Queues

What's impressive is that many truck drivers and companies in the EU are avoiding the UK altogether. What would these queues look like if that wasn't the case? Unfortunately much of this trade and business is never returning, despite it being framed as temporary teething problems. It's a shame.
posted by UN at 7:13 AM on February 5, 2022

Well, a good 10% of the world's ports (including London, Chennai, Melbourne, Sydney, Rotterdam, Busan, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, Qingdao) are government owned. By the government of Dubai.
posted by ambrosen at 7:16 AM on February 5, 2022 [5 favorites]

Silly question, but aren’t most (all?) of the ports already publicly owned?

It varies in the US. The Port of Los Angeles is owned by the City of Los Angeles, but individual terminal facilities where loading and unloading happens are owned by private companies. I believe the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is a similar setup. That seems, on my very quick internet search, to be a relatively common situation, though some ports are entirely privately owned?
posted by eviemath at 7:28 AM on February 5, 2022 [2 favorites]

So let me see if I've got this right. The invention of the shipping container, and the development of an integrated global supply chain, has allowed goods to be manufactured in China and shipped all over the world, raising the Chinese economic standard of living faster than any country in recorded history, and in the countries they ship to this has yielded a wide range of inexpensive consumer goods for the working class and everyone else. And then a pandemic worse than any other in the past century caused some disruptions to this global system, from which we are already recovering. Not sure that's a slam-dunk indictment and conviction of modern economics and capitalism.
posted by PhineasGage at 8:14 AM on February 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

That last bit Phineas "we are already recovering" is not exactly the sop you're treating it as. We've got 5 to 10 years of bumper cars crashing into each other yet assuming Nothing Else goes wrong or breaks.
posted by pan at 10:27 AM on February 5, 2022 [3 favorites]

Nothing lasts forever. For 40 years supply chain advances and monetary policy worked in parallel to grow GDPs at modest inflation. Cracks developed over time (as they do) and a system shock (COVID in this case) resulted in ruptures - shortages and inflation. Now the ruptures are being fixed. Decades from now we will do it again.
posted by MattD at 10:54 AM on February 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

Absolutely true, pan. Things are a mess, with many risks ahead. My point was that we should not measure the current mess against some utopian, imaginary vision of a planned global economy. I come from a union family (and even worked for an AFL-CIO affiliate), and I strongly favor much better labor and environmental protections than we have, and developing a more resilient supply chain will require government, ahem, encouragement, at the very least.
posted by PhineasGage at 10:54 AM on February 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

I own/operate a factory in a (European) country that still manages to produce/export a lot of goods. Just-in-time is something we deal with to stay competitive. I don't think it's a good idea, it's just how things are done. It's a constant struggle especially in the last couple of years. It would be 'easier' to not employ anyone here and move things to Asia. It would also be the nail in the coffin for our business because why would we even need to exist when we could be replaced by any random import/export company? It's good that the PRC has been able to lift millions out of poverty, no question. But it doesn't have its downsides: think of all those well paying jobs in the US and elsewhere that have been replaced by low paid Walmart jobs.
posted by UN at 10:56 AM on February 5, 2022 [2 favorites]

@valkane: “William Gibson calls it the Jackpot.”

Added to my reading list. Haven’t read any new Gibson for a while, but it sounds like he’s ahead of a notion that’s been simmering in my brain for a while, which I’ve been internally calling the Boring Apocalypse.

So many people have pre-romanticized The End Of Life As We Know It for so many different reasons, whether the ultimate triumph of their own religion, a usually-misplaced belief they’ll be better equipped to survive or have a higher social standing, an excuse to use the unreasonable number of guns in their basement, or just that it seems exciting, a sort of liberation from the tedium of “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.”

My hunch is that those people will not only be deeply unsatisfied, but won’t even recognize when it’s happening around them. It will be a “boil-the-frog” affair, with a long train of emergent inconveniences, to which people will react with the assumption that things are going right back to normal any day now, plus fishing around for whom to blame for things having failed to go back to normal already. Meanwhile “normal” gets continuously redefined, not by overt acceptance, but because the next domino to fall leads us to forget about the previous one.

I would not absolutely guarantee we are living through a nascent Boring Apocalypse now, but I also would not guarantee that we are not.
posted by gelfin at 11:04 AM on February 5, 2022 [6 favorites]

the Boring Apocalypse.

That’s the thing, and same with Gibson’s idea of the Jackpot, it’s been ongoing, and we’ve become inured to each new collapse and degradation that we can’t even see how far things have declined.

Just as an example, over at Defector, Albert Burneko’s response to the Rudy Giuliani fiasco on the Masked Singer, I Don’t Like This At All just tries to lay out how far back you’d have to go to explain what’s happened in the last twenty years, and how much of that knowledge is necessary to parse any of the last five years. And that’s just dealing with the political landscape.

We have been through, and are going through massive changes in climate and severity of weather. The world doesn’t do the things it used to do even up to ten or twenty years ago, but for the most part (and with awareness that this doesn’t cover everyone) we have survived each of these new catastrophes. Having survived them, or, if we’re lucky enough, just seen them on tv or read about them online, we just sort of file each disaster away into the mental folder of “things that happen now.”

The contents of that folder, full of whole states (and Australia!) burning, of tornadoes that can travel across five states, pandemics and our pathetically fractured responses to them, it would terrify anyone from even thirty years ago. For us, though, we have become inured because these “things that happen” either haven’t happened to *us* yet, or because they have, and we lived through them, and if we didn’t die, how bad can it be?

And that’s how, in bits and bobs, through once a century storms and out of season typhoons, we’re just sort of getting used to the end of things as we know them.
posted by Ghidorah at 11:38 PM on February 5, 2022 [9 favorites]

Wow, Ghidorah, thanks for the explainer on the Toyota way. This is one of those things, where I had all the components, but it never "clicked". Are there any sources where I can read more about the "dark side" of the Toyota method and it's history in post war Japan?
posted by kmt at 4:30 AM on February 6, 2022

Not Toyota, but plenty has been written about Dell’s hyper implementation of lean manufacturing. This isn’t the best article on the topic, but Dell, at least back in the early 2000s, would have suppliers park trucks full of parts outside Dell’s factories. The parts remained in the suppliers’ inventories as long as they were in the trucks, and Dell would only take a part out of a truck right when it was needed to build a PC they had already sold. This meant that the onus and cost of financing Dell’s parts inventory fell squarely on Dell’s suppliers.

Dell liked to crow about maintaining zero inventory, but the only way they managed it was by externalizing inventory to their suppliers, which often made life difficult for those suppliers.

But there is a dark side to Dell time: The company is fast in part because it has shifted some of the inventory burden to its suppliers. “The yin and yang of being a major supplier to Dell is that you get a whole bunch of business,” says Mentzer, “but the price of being a supplier is that you carry the inventory. If there is a supply-chain disruption, the supplier is stuck with the inventory, not Dell.”

To get a slice of its lavish procurement pie, Dell’s legions of suppliers must do things its way. They must be flexible enough, cost-competitive enough — and above all, fast enough — to compete on Dell’s terms. “Those suppliers who are the most consistent over time get the lion’s share of our business,” says Marty Garvin, Dell’s procurement chief. “The ones that aren’t get less and less. And those who can’t scale over the long run, well, their business goes away.”

posted by syzygy at 2:30 PM on February 6, 2022 [3 favorites]

Just to add on @syzygy's Dell story, Dell has gone to proprietary parts in recent years to make sure their parts cannot be interchanged with other manufacturers. GamingNexus have several reviews of their recent PCs, and ratings were abysmal. The mainboards can ONLY fit their own cases, and regular mainboards don't fit in Dell cases anymore. Even power supplies are non-standard. Doing this may make Dell's assembly process easier and/or cust costs it also increased the burden on the supplier since nobody else can use these parts (i.e. sunk cost fallacy) and consumer gets a PC that is incompatible with majority of publicly available parts. The only one that wins is Dell.
posted by kschang at 3:14 PM on February 6, 2022 [2 favorites]

kmt, I'm sorry, I don't really have a link to share, this is just based on decades of various newspaper and magazine articles. It's one of those things that I've sort of noticed and that, whenever it pops up, it sort of pings my internal radar, if that makes any sense.

Part of it has to do with living in Japan and noticing that zoning is quite different here, and that (at least in older neighborhoods) it's not uncommon to have a small factory or lumberyard right in amongst the residential area. One apartment I looked at seemed fine until (over the agent's protest) I opened up the back windows to the balcony, which overlooked a concrete factory, which they assured me wouldn't be a problem, as it only operated 8 am to 6 pm, Monday through Saturday.

A lot of these factories are disappearing, especially as Japanese companies are sourcing more of their parts from overseas vendors. The system was pretty much always terrible, as you had a massive company that each small manufacturer was solely dependent on, and when there weren't any orders, well, it's not like Toyota or Honda or whoever had to deal with laying off workers (which would look bad), which was a good segment of the whole point.

It feels like the "lean" supply chain is one of those things that MBAs picked up on during the whole 80s/90s obsession with Japanese corporate style. Married to an absolute and total lack of the concept of corporate responsibility, and we get the American style, complete with legal compulsions to create the maximum return for investors above all else.

It's no longer really the case in Japan, but there used to be a sort of set understanding (not unique to Japan in any case, though maybe it held on here longer?) that companies needed to provide workers with a living wage and the benefits that would allow them to raise a family and be a stable member of the society that supported the company. Aside from the obvious effects on morale, there was the general idea that workers should be able to afford the things they make, and man, that ship has sailed, been abandoned, bought at auction, and rammed onto the shore of an impoverished country to be stripped for scrap.
posted by Ghidorah at 5:42 PM on February 6, 2022 [4 favorites]

@kschang: “consumer gets a PC that is incompatible with majority of publicly available parts”

Which is extra sad and dumb because the only reason the PC platform came to rule the world in the first place was doing specifically not that.
posted by gelfin at 7:47 PM on February 6, 2022 [4 favorites]

@gelfin -- to be fair, you can put in new video cards, if they fit into the PCI-E slots, and USB ports are still the same. But upgrading the HSF, power supply or replacing the mainboard is next to impossible. This contributes to the e-waste problem in the long-run.
posted by kschang at 11:38 PM on February 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

You can put in new video cards if they fit into the PCI-E slots **AND** if they don't draw any more power than the one you're replacing. Lots of times the power supplies they put in don't have any headroom for a "bigger" gpu.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 5:17 AM on February 7, 2022 [2 favorites]