Anticipating major industry collapse, the Carrier Alliances showed remarkable discipline in aligning supply with demand as early as February; removing trade capacity from the seas by halting vessels and shipments. By doing so, the erosion of ocean rates was kept to a minimum. Basing their reaction on potential worst case scenarios, shipping carriers artificially created under-capacity. This made available space come at a premium and therefore significantly raised the cost of container shipping, stabilizing revenues for carriers.
If I'm reading this right, container shipping is an oligopoly similar to OPEC and they all banded together to reduce supply enough to raise prices, while in a competitive environment prices would have gone down due to reduced demand?
I doubt it’s that simple. There are significant costs to operating ships, and there may be a need to “smooth” supply and demand so sudden shocks don’t kill businesses in the system (on both sides).
I don’t know for sure, but I have been in businesses where you can’t just spin up and spin down at a moments notice if spot prices start bouncing up and down.
Part of the issue is modern accounting practices discourage holding on to money for a 'rainy day', the end result being our current state where profits tend to be immediately reinvested in growth or paid out as executive bonuses.
It's not due to accounting per se, it's the corporate finance worldview. Money that's just sitting there is not making any returns. So let's put it somewhere (stock buybacks? "zero-risk" money market fund? some AAA++ rated synthetic CDO? dogecoin? well, the sky's the limit, just don't forget to risk-adjust the expected returns).
Businesses operate "lean", and if they need more money to weather the rainy days, they can issue bonds, or ask the shareholders to inject more capital.
And to make mattes even "leaner" basically market forces pushed risk management out to "specialists" too. Underwriting, counterparty risk, credit risk, traditional insurance, "default insurance" are all just financial products now, that can be built into standard language of shipping contracts.
The tax code is set up with the assumption that corporations are pass-throughs -- they either re-invest funds or pay them out. Funds paid out are taxed as capital income by the recipient (often called "double taxation"). Corporations that sock away cash for a rainy day are viewed as evading this double taxation and are penalized rather harshly. This is another reason (but not the primary reason) why if you want to keep cash for a rainy day you need to have it overseas somewhere where the IRS can't penalize you for holding it.
Earmarking money for "rainy day" is accepted by the IRS as "Specific, definite, and feasible plans for the use of the earnings accumulation" as far as I know.
Or course if that pile gets too big this won't fly.
So, what are all the shell/holding companies in the Panama Papers, carribean etc doing with that money? Is it being invested?
I recall an article a few years back saying Apple is the largest hedge fund in the world, run buy a small office in Reno NV - and they had a gigantic cash reserve sitting in the bank:
The real-real-real true genuine answer is: it doesn't matter. We are not capital constrained. The central banks of the world issue/print money to keep the economy growing at a steady rate of ~1 percent. (For example the official target for the US central bank [the Federal Reserve System, aka the Fed] is 2 percent year-on-year PCE [personal consumption expediture] growth. But (!) at the same time the Fed has a dual mandate, to ensure close to full employment. And recently the Fed started becoming even more aggressive in addressing that: https://www.stitcher.com/show/voxs-the-weeds/episode/fix-rec... )
So it doesn't matter if Apple has a trillion dollar in the bank just sitting. The central bank will conduct open market operations to lower the rates of credit so people/companies are incentivized to start new ventures, finally invest in upgrading their old shit, buy a house with a lower APR, etc. And similarly when Apple starts "dumping money into the economy" the Fed will promptly raise rates to keep inflation in check.
Technically for those particular shell companies, yes likely.
For the general offshore companies (like Apple's), a very big yes.
This is a very accessible and detailed paper about how FDI (foreign direct investment) through offshore companies work, and how the high-tax-regime countries benefit the most (eg. the US): https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...
I was referring to an article I read about this Reno office - and they specifically said that - that they were investing, but they ALSO had a crap ton of cash in the bank...
They closed that office and now I cant find that article.
It's not quite how it sounds. There are a number of Carrier Alliances worldwide - "2M", "THE Alliance" and "Ocean Alliance". And there are a number of container carriers that operate independently without an alliance.
Since around 2008 it has been very difficult for ocean carriers of all types (not just containers) to turn a profit and so they all embarked on different strategies to try to become more efficient and manage costs. Before the Alliances, large ocean carriers needed to have an active and full network worldwide to attract customers. It's kind of like the transit problem: you don't get customers until you have a large network, but you can't afford a large network until you have a lot of customers. So many carriers operated routes that were loss leaders hoping to profit significantly off their mainline trades (you see the same in air travel).
The Alliances were one strategy to try to help these businesses become more efficient while still offering customers door-to-door shipping services, so in THE Alliance, there are a number of carriers each with different primary focuses, which means that they can operate much more efficient routes and take cargo wherever it needs to go.
The price of shipping a container is highly commoditized, there's intense competition in the market, and the margins are razor-thin, so I'm fairly confident that price-fixing isn't a significant factor in this industry. As well, as a shipper, the lions share of your costs getting a container from A to B are not the ocean transportation but everything else. Container storage at the port. Transport to the port. Loading and discharging costs. A multitude of fees that easily double or triple the raw container shipment number. Carriers have invested a lot in this space over the past years to verticalise and able to offer more of these services to their customers, instead of just being a pure ocean carrier. That (freight forwarding) is where the real margins are, and customers appreciate it because they get one simple upfront price, vendor management is easy, etc.
TBF, thats how Onasis made his fortune - as consolidating and buying up as much as he could, so yeah, it is an oligopoly in the sense that it rife with fraud, big money and old-boy sort of networks.
The EVERGREEN issue is interesting - They announced today that it could take weeks to free the evergreen - forcing all other vessels around the cape - adding at least 12-days to deliveries..
I would love to see a list of the traffic stuck behind the evergreen. It will be interesting to see what impact it will have on the EU economy.
Freight is a low margin business with a history littered with bankruptcies. I think this was more for survival than an attempt to exploit a situation for profit.
Classic network balancing problem. Even in regular times this causes gross inefficiencies: A number of years ago I had heard that for large carriers (e.g. FedEx, UPS) ~20% of trailers you see on the road drive totally empty to balance their network. They didn't have a good solution to optimize this figure nor did they know what the minimum value of this percentage could be.
Well, perfect inefficiency would be 50%, right? Assuming standard routes / no repositioning. I.e. towing an empty back for every container you shipped full.
I have no idea what percent is needed to cover repositioning, but 20% sounds decent. Especially for a dynamic demand system (little ability to micro forecast flows).
20% sounds pretty good? I mean you’d expect empty trailers for delivery - the flow of goods to be predominantly one-way (e.g. Memphis sends way more volume to Chattanooga than the other way around).
> A number of years ago I had heard that for large carriers (e.g. FedEx, UPS) ~20 of trailers you see on the road drive totally empty to balance their network.
I heard that Europe->Asia container ships transported plastic garbages because of there are less utilization compared to Asia->Europe. So sometimes higher utilization isn't good.
>North America currently faces a 40% imbalance; which means that for every 100 containers that arrive only 40 are exported. 60 out of every 100 containers continue to accumulate, which is a staggering figure considering the China to USA trade route sustains on average 900,000 TEUs per month.
>The scrapping of containers now exceeds the building of new ones, causing inventories in factories to plummet. It will take months before more vessels and containers are built, meaning capacity likely won’t normalize until Q2 2021.
Interesting, try to buy one and they are charging and arm and leg. About 10-15 years ago you could pick up an old 40 FT container for about $500. Today you could go to a yard that has 10000 stacked and rusting containers and they want $2k plus to buy a beat up one.
Globalisation and cost cutting gave us this fragile system with no redundancies, no stockpiles and backups. When something esssential runs out, we are just stuffed.
Whats worse is diffusion of responsibility - someone could be on the critical path to essential suppliers for millions of people, but at the same time have no obligations to ensure their job is done, and perhaps not enough profit margin to plan for the shit time.
All it took was a sneeze and the whole thing falls apart.
> All it took was a sneeze and the whole thing falls apart.
But it didn’t fall apart. I’ve been able to get nearly everything I was getting before the pandemic. Prices of some stuff has increases and there are a few things that are harder to find, but the variety of goods available to me now is still way better than it was even just 20 years ago.
The system is stunningly resilient. Shortages of a few things doesn’t mean “the whole thing falls apart”. You’ll know if that happens because people will get really violent really fast when food or water stops.
Depends how you define "fall apart". Will society collapse? No, most likely not. But that doesn't mean people don't feel significant consequences compared to what they were used to.
Just as a little example, all my remaining orders on Amazon are delayed by months and it is impossible to get any info except what the original projected delivery date was. One product ordered last October has not arrived yet. As a consequence I basically stopped any online orders except a few via ebay and am now just waiting for the backlog to be processed. The complete lack of communication from Amazon does not help, neither does Amazon's slow transformation into a dropshipping AliExpress reseller, causing delivery times to behave as predictably as quantum states.
> all my remaining orders on Amazon are delayed by months and it is impossible to get any info except what the original projected delivery date was
It sounds like you're ordering items with long delivery times that indicate they're shipping direct from China, is that correct? I exclude any non-Prime items and haven't had any shipping issues in the past year aside from a day delay here or there.
Some anecdata: located in SF. I rarely order non-Prime items. But I did recently order a desk grommet mounted USB hub (not charger) that was only available from China. Originally predicted to take a month, it took slightly longer at five weeks.
That’s interesting. My Amazon shipments have been fine for months (though there was some delay and unpredictability at the beginning of the crisis). What sorts of things do you typically order?
Are you outside of a major metro area? I say this because I've had 0 issues with Amazon deliveries during all of this and the only thing I can think of is I live in a major population center. That said it really sucks if that's the case because I imagine Amazon etc are lifelines for people outside of larger living areas.
Yes, I'm not exactly living in Manhattan. That said I've never had such issues before, including during the pandemic - after all I started using Amazon for good reasons, though those advantages have been declining for a while now. Only around Christmas time the delivery times increased sharply and never went back to normal levels as they usually do.
For a few parts I just can't get in a shop I tried other platforms and that made a difference. They often have a hard time competing with shipping fees, but that is a tradeoff I'll gladly take.
Barely. I mean... just look at what is going on in the Suez Canal, which is at the moment blocked by a mega freighter which had crashed into the walls and run aground: millions of dollars of damage and delays risking cascade effects in the harbors. Or how car factories all over the world are having issues because TSMC can't keep up with chip demands (and the car manufacturers having slashed orders during 'rona).
What makes it worse is that there are a number of conflicts that could escalate into open wars: the whole situation with China's aggressive imperialism (not just Taiwan), the powder keg Iran/Turkey/Syria/Israel, many countries in South America slowly or openly collapsing... at least some of these can drag the entire world's economy with them, one way or the other.
Covid had nothing to do with the suez blocking, could easily have happened in 2019, and it's a very rare event
The Suez is being progressively widened and doubled. Previous blockages have been due to war, this type of blocking I think is the first since 1869. The powder keg of Israel is hardly new (indeed that's often been the cause of previous Suez blocking), collapsing south american countries isnt new either - Pinnochet? Peron?
Car factories may be in trouble, but consumers are not. There si plenty of new and old cars. Maybe not exactly the car you want, with your color of leather and level of trim.
Conflict was here long before globalisation, it has nothing to do with just in time delivery and smoothly running supply chain. Taiwan is a problem, because of chips. The world economy is stronger than some south american country. The "western world" is pretty much ok until someone decides to bomb us. Europe will switch from eating rice to more bread, and everybody is satiated. And the rest wasnt doing any better 50 years ago than is doing now. Except for obvious war zones, which pains me very much that in this age of abundance we have to deal with shitty psycho leaders and tribal mentality warriors.
What's interesting is that most people seem to expect that carrier to be on it's way within a day or two at best, my personal estimate is that this could take weeks to get resolved, if they decide to unload on the spot it might even take longer. This is not easy to fix at all.
Essentially they have one more shot at a quick fix: todays high tide. And if that doesn't do the trick they will have to come up with another solution but those will likely be much slower to put into effect, 224,000 tons (!) is a lot of mass to try to move, especially when stuck.
The chip shortage is completely normal supply and demand at work. Real markets are not magic faucets that supply an unlimited amount of things at a constant price.
We haven’t even hit government mandated rations for things and that was a matter of course several times throughout the 1900s.
The Suez Canal is a cost and time optimizer. There is an alternate path around South Africa that all of these mega ships are more than capable doing. Transport costs for some stuff and delays will go up, but that’s it. That won’t even impact people in the US in any meaningful way.
What do you mean? Are you suggesting that somehow modern people have lost the drive to violently compete for resources if they became critically scarce? That seems unlikely to me. I think the old phrase "There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy" is as true now as ever.
"
Let me tell you something about Hew-mons, Nephew. They're a wonderful, friendly people, as long as their bellies are full and their holosuites are working. But take away their creature comforts, deprive them of food, sleep, sonic showers, put their lives in jeopardy over an extended period of time and those same friendly, intelligent, wonderful people... will become as nasty and as violent as the most bloodthirsty Klingon. You don't believe me? Look at those faces. Look in their eyes.
"
I don't know about grandparent but I do think that we have become soft and accepting of circumstances our ancestors would not tolerate. How many people live pretty sad lives distracting themselves with toys, electronics, crappy content, and self-medicating with marijuana or even opiates.
There are even biological signs of this shift. Like dropping testosterone levels in men.
> How many people live pretty sad lives distracting themselves with toys, electronics, crappy content, and self-medicating with marijuana or even opiates.
And how many people lived pretty sad lives being nothing more than serfs or farmers, without even the comfort of a distraction?
Software engineer and a farmer here. distractions are overrated. i ditched mine and my life improved greatly. ive since learned that building and making things is much more fun than crappy electronics toys content or drugs. Passive entertainment is for the lazy and those that lack creativity. Try picking up a hobby like woodwork or blacksmithing. Having sampled all of those listed distractions extensively, i can say im qualified to make the assertion.
Ive got a warm shower, a warm meal, dental, a roof over my head. Out ancestors would kill for the privilege of not having their children die from dysentery, Thier parents dying because your unrefrigerated food spoiled.
Enjoy a short brutal life with all that extra testosterone.
Not exactly sure that's how it works. I don't think there's any established correlation between low testosterone levels in males and comfortable lifestyles in society. I hope not, but it's possible the inverse maybe true. High testosterone drives males to compete for status, the by-product of which in human society is much of the complexity we see around us. Nobody really knows what happens to society when testosterone plummets - your warm meals and the roof over your head could be casualties of that.
Things have not really fallen apart, though. You can even still get coffee.
I find it silly to claim this or that should have been stockpiled with hindsight. There are just too many different things to stockpile. And the same people demanding that are probably the ones taking to the street protesting against wasteful living.
Supply Chains are optimizing for these things every day. Inventory and long lead times mean a lot of bound capital and costs. Both things are to be reduced, everyday. Some do it better than others.
The last container shortage, which lasted quite a while, was in 2019. Because of paint used on containers. The old obe wasn't allowed anymore in the EU and, if memory serves well, the US. So whole fleets had to be repainted. In China, because it is cheaper. So once containers returned to Asia, they were removed from circulation for a while. We also had the Hanjin bankruptcy. This time is interesting, because COVID already screwed everything up in Q1 2020, these issues were still not really sorted out by now. European ports will be in for some funny times now, they will run try until the Suez is open again. And they will get swamped. It will be sorted out so, it might be worse than usual, but generally these things can also happen due to bad weather. This industry knows what to do. Still really interesting, I am kind of sad I missed the SCM operations on that.
Whats even better than planning for costly buffers that are unused most of the time is having a system that can adapt to unplanned changes in circumstances. So far I don't see that this isn't the case, but time will tell.
Containers have to become a lot more expensive to have that effect. Per unit costs are still a fraction of total costs, so I wouldn't worry to much about that.
Is it that easy? It seems, that only works if people can pay for the essentials. For example, look at the grain prices that sparked the protests of the arabian spring. People could everywhere not afford their bread anymore while Saudi Arabia bought the grain at ultra high prices.
Yes, it's that easy. And prices of commodity food staples only cause unrest in very poor nations where food inputs constitute a large % of their income.
Wheat costs about $200/ton and peaked around $450/ton during the arab spring period. A ton of wheat (with a few supplements) is enough to for 500g/day for 5 people for a year if half your calories come from wheat. Even at $500/ton, that's about $100/yr/person for the wheat itself. Wholesale raw foods are quite cheap from the perspective of someone in a rich nation. Can be quite expensive for the very poor. The solution is to help people in poor nations industrialize so that they are less poor.
Isn’t this a problem of efficiency and optimization? Running the system lean leads to lower costs, but with risk of occasional shortfalls due to exogenous effects. But to optimize for those relatively infrequent events would increase the cost of the frequent events (the everyday shipping).
Given the challenge of finding an optimum it seems like the world hasn’t done too badly.
And yet we as a society look down on preppers. It's quite sad to see people complain about shortages and do nothing themselves. These aren't even shortages due to economic reasons or poverty, but rather due to simply to disruptions.
I am an Eagle Scout, and the Scout motto is "Be Prepared". I try and make sure I've got supplies to last me at least a couple of weeks if things get crazy, and plans for what to do when my home becomes unlivable. When the winter storm hit and knocked out power in my area, we were ready while many people I knew were scrambling to find food and shelter. I guess growing up in hurricane territory also instills the idea that things can go bad for a while and you need to do what you can to be ready.
It always surprises friends of mine to see that the bottom shelf of my pantry contains a lot of shelf stable meals that only slowly get cycled through. They never understood why I'd bother keeping at least several days worth of food around, "just in case".
Things today really aren't that crazy compared to what they could be like. Things will probably trend more towards normalcy in the next few months. But I know if things go bad, my immediate friends and family will be a bit more comfortable for a while longer than many of those around me.
I think part of it is that people in US have historically faced only several major disruptions ( 1939 depression being one of them ). Most people here have very limited idea how things work, when things are not conveniently available and don't seem all that comfortable with all the new ways they are being fleeced ( bots buying popular items, algorithms tricking them into paying more ).
I would wager that the majority people, at least in liberal / urban centers, would look down even on “a few months of food and water” preppers, though that may have changed a bit in the past year.
My definition of "preppers" is a lot more specific than "people who stockpile some essential goods to see themselves through basic disasters or disruptions".
And mine used to be as well, but in retrospect I think it's clear that I wasn't being fair. Judging any movement by their extreme fringe is gonna make them look silly.
Part of it is being informed, paying attention and thinking critically. I recognized things were headed in the wrong direction back in early February of last year. That's when I went on an online shopping mission for a full week, buying provisions for at least a 90 day lockdown. I told friends, family and neighbors. I also told everyone to buy masks immediately, even if they were a bit more expensive than normal (you could buy real 3M N95 masks for $1 each, which was 5x normal price).
A few people laughed at me for suggesting things could get really ugly. Others took the advise and acted on some of it. The first group had to endure long lines and very unpleasant conditions at local markets to get even the basics. The second group did OK.
One of the things that was also not helping is that idiot politicians were going on TV to tell everyone everything was fine and were, quite literally, laughing at the Trump administration and calling them racist (and more) for travel bans, etc.
The most horrific example of this was New York. Politicians in NY, from the Governor to the Mayor as well as health officials were telling everyone that this was nothing and that they should continue using the subway, going to restaurants, gathering, etc. They, quite literally, were responsible for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of deaths (people from NY panicked when things got bad and exploded out of the state, taking the virus with them everywhere). You don't have to believe me, here they are in their own words (yes, I kept links because I though this would be important to remember):
Some of these videos disappeared from YouTube, I had to find them again.
Some of the highlights on this next one (note all the lies and misinformation):
• Just like the normal flu
• We should relax
• We don't think it's going to be as bad as it is in other places
• We have been ahead of this from day one
• Go about your lives
• Go about your business
• There has to be prolonged exposure
• Just wash your hands
• No need to do anything special
• We want New Yorkers to go about their daily lives
• Ride the subway, ride the bus, go see your neighbors
• We have the equipment
• It's not like we are dealing with something we haven't dealt with before
• We have the ability to address this
• We have the capacity to keep this contained
• Like the normal flu
Here's another gem from Dr. Oxiris Barbot, NY Health Commissioner (once again, deadly lies):
• The local risk is low
• Our preparedness is high
• Go about your lives
• No indication to be using masks
• We have measures
• We have screening
• No indication that going through the subway is a risk factor
• No indications to be using masks
• False sense of security
• The risk is low
Of course, the mainstream media went with these stories, smugly laughing at the Trump administration and gladly characterizing their actions as racially motivated.
For context, the travel ban from China was put into place on January 31, 2020. Had these politicians and the media taken this event seriously it is likely hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved.
When I heard that I ignored what media and politicians were saying (all is well, not to worry, just like the flu) did my research and got ready early February. My hypothesis was very simple: Such action (the travel ban) would not be taken unless they learned of something very serious potentially coming to our shores. It was, pick a number, five standard deviations away from the mean in international politics. That caught my attention.
We need to be honest about this. These politicians and officials were likely responsible for seeding the country with the virus and killing hundreds of thousands of people. Yet most people are uncomfortable with an honest evaluation of history, being biased is easier.
I really appreciate your remembering and recounting this history. It's clear to me that I believed the "like the normal flu" concept at the time ... I even posted here on HN about that.
I agree with your take that the impact on America could have been much smaller in all sorts of scenarios, including just taking it more seriously sooner (like during the time frame that you're recounting).
I'm not sure that the travel ban from China in particular would have significantly affected the course of the pandemic in the U.S. We now know that COVID is very often totally asymptomatic and that it had already spread to many countries (possibly including the U.S.) by January of last year. People arriving from countries other than China could easily have introduced it into the U.S., and very possibly did (and certainly have many times since then). The U.S. didn't have the testing or tracing or quarantine capabilities to control the transmission of the epidemic in the community.
This skepticism is not meant to take away from your other points, which all seem right to me. I think many other kinds of responses (or awareness or understanding on the part of the American public) could have had a big effect last January or February. The responses, awareness, and understanding we actually got were terrible.
I think the greater point is that we all watched nearly all of US government and all of US media take the opposite side to the Trump administration on this purely on a political basis.
At this time they were trying to eject him from office on the most ridiculous of basis. Nearly all of the media and all of government was focused on damaging him. Because of this they could not bring themselves to line up behind him and follow his lead.
Think about that for a moment. Love or hate Trump, in that moment, early next year, the right move for the nation --not for politicians and the media-- would have been to say: "Mr. President, what do you want us to do. We are 100% with you."
The media, in particular, could have been far more useful to the nation and the world. Instead of focusing on their usual nonsense and web of lies they could have engaged in real journalism and delivered actionable information.
Instead of NY and San Francisco politicians saying things like "everything is OK, it's just the flu, go to festivals, get in the subway, etc." they should have contacted the White house for actionable intelligence on why they were sounding the alarm as they did.
Remember that at the same time Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx where on TV telling us a tsunami was coming, New York officials (and our current President and VP) were saying this was racist, xenophobic and nothing to worry about.
Like I said, I hope historians paint the entire picture and do so with the truth.
"I think the greater point is that we all watched nearly all of US government and all of US media take the opposite side to the Trump administration on this purely on a political basis."
The Trump administration IS the US government; he staffed the CDC, he controlled the messaging, he denied repeatedly that COVID was serious. It's not his public manner or communication skills that did the damage, it's his outright lying and deception that he and his administration did on a daily basis. Just because he was right about imposing a travel ban doesn't make up for the complete failure of his administration.
I was trying to be kind and not say all of the Democratic party and all of the left media. Which is the truth.
How could it be a failure if millions of people per day are being vaccinated today because of what his administration did while the entire Democratic party and news media were focusing on trying to destroy the man, his family and his business. C'mon.
Biden is trying to take credit for this. He didn't do shit. Manufacturing and distributing a complex at this scale isn't something you turn on in a week or two months. It takes a VERY long time. Having done it in almost exactly a year is an absolutely incredible accomplishment and the only one who can take credit for it is Trump. We can be critical of what he did wrong --and there's a long list-- but we also have to be honest and truthful about everything else.
But your first part of the paragraph (that "nearly" applied to) was the US government. Yet you seem to think the fault lies with the media and the Democratic Party. Who had control of the Senate in 2020? Who was in the WH in 2020? Who ran the CDC, and the COVID efforts? All GOP, all Trump appointees. He gets no pass because the pharma companies had been looking at mRNA vaccines for quite a while. We are very fortunate.
I wish you would take the time to read what I actually write. You are distorting my message.
Aside from that, I always say that nothing in life is reduced to a single variable. People like to reduce causality to a single variable because it's convenient and far simpler to think about. Life is a complex multivariate problem and what we are talking about isn't an exception.
Everyone in our government performed poorly during this crisis.
Democrats chose to wage war during a pandemic rather than get things done.
The media helped them.
Trump was an absolute idiot in public and truly inspired projectile vomiting almost every time he spoke.
Prior administrations --going back decades-- compromised our ability to respond to such emergencies through a range of actions, again, dating back decades.
And, of course, there's the American people, who seem to love to stop thinking critically, take sides, refuse to recognize when the common good is more important than our own little selfish impulses, etc.
I could not possibly list the variables that went into getting us to where we are today. Nobody could. It would, however, be nice if we could stop the nonsense for long enough for an honest root cause analysis and attempt to take action to not ever do this again.
Here's something that's very clear to me: If we continue to behave this way we are ensuring China's supremacy in the world order for one hundred to two hundred years. And they know it. More power to them, they are kicking our ass and executing flawlessly. I don't agree with their politics, but you have to be in awe of what they've been able to accomplish in about fifty years. That takes focus, unity and dedication we do not have and will likely never regain until everyone is wondering why a bag of rice is $100 and we have 25% unemployment.
"I think the greater point is that we all watched nearly all of US government and all of US media take the opposite side to the Trump administration on this purely on a political basis."
That's what you wrote. I'm not distorting anything. You seem to want to limit Trump's responsibility to his communication skills. He owned COVID, it was his administration, his Cabinet, the GOP controlled Senate, his CDC where he installed a leader that had huge question marks even before the pandemic. It was assigning his son in-law to the COVID task force. It was his touting quack solutions because he lacked the critical thinking to actually listen to medical professionals.
"Prior administrations" had issued warnings about the potential for this type of pandemic. Warnings that were ignored. (Echoes of 9/11).
You can claim I'm distorting your message, but your message is incoherent and ignoring the facts.
Most news from whatever source seems to be more about pandering to the partisan loyalties of the majority of their readers to make them feel warm and fuzzy. Honest evaluation tends to be used as ammunition by the "side" not being evaluated. "They hate us but even they say their guys were terrible here!"
The NYT has gone down this path far further than I would have thought possible. The WSJ is now owned by Murdoch so its less surprising that their news reporting has also slipped. Those are the two best. By a margin.
There's a massive problem that isn't being talked about because "Them! They're evil! Just look at what they say about..."
edit: I did something similar stocking up based on the Guardian (yeah, not an ideal source) reporting that a woman from Wuhan crossed the country with no symptoms for Chinese New Year and gave the virus to her whole family. She never had symptoms. I thought at that point, this is on, there's a non-negligible chance this will not be contained, so get prepared.
The state of the "news" media is truly sad to behold. They lie, sensationalize and have become political activists for one side or the other. I do not believe the rights they are afforded in the US Constitution were intended to be used in this manner at all. In that sense I agree with the statement that they have become the enemy of the people. They don't provide information, they publish ideology and lies.
And, yes, we have to be fair and clearly state that Trump was a complete moron in the way he handled some aspects of this. As an example, I cannot understand why he had such a problem with masks.
I can't even imagine the reasons other than to look at it from my background in manufacturing. This is what I think could have happened: The administration quickly understood we don't even make the cloth necessary to make masks. The US and Europe could not manufacture ANY of the safety equipment we needed for this pandemic at scale back in January of last year. We didn't even make the machines that make the masks.
Telling the public to go get masks would have resulted in a mess and panic. I get that possibility. Here's what they should have done: Figure out how people could DIY some level of protection and widely publish this. Trump should have gone on TV and told people the truth: We can't make enough masks. They are important. This is what you have to do while we sort this out. Instead he engaged in stupid battles with the media. That was dumb, unnecessary, and, yes, it likely cost lives too.
All that said, we are vaccinating at a rate of over a million people per day today because of what the Trump administration set in motion a year ago. They pushed for and succeeded at having multiple vaccines developed in the span of eight months. Something never before done in the history of humanity. And yet he/they were vilified for the stupid shit he did in front of the cameras and, to some extent, rightly so in my opinion.
This was a year in which both our politicians and our news media failed us in monumental ways. Both of these groups lied to us. And the consequences were deadly. I hope historians get this one right.
> I do not believe the rights they are afforded in the US Constitution were intended to be used in this manner at all.
You might want to look at some of the late 18th century pamphlets and newspapers that were the "press" of which the American founders aimed to protect the freedom -- the American revolutionaries' cause spread partly through pamphlets, so they were very sympathetic to the medium. These publications were not only extremely partisan, but they often abounded in personal insults and rage far beyond anything one would see in a modern newspaper. No, the Founders were very comfortable with sensationalism and extreme polemic.
> All that said, we are vaccinating at a rate of over a million people per day today because of what the Trump administration set in motion a year ago. They pushed for and succeeded at having multiple vaccines developed in the span of eight months
Say what now? If i'm not mistaken, none of the first vaccines ( Sputnik V, Chinese one, Pfizer/Biontech, AstraZeneca/Oxford) have anything to do with the US. Moderna and J&J are the only ones developed with US funding. So saying that the plethora of vaccines we got was due to the Trump administration is... wrong. Any even remotely sane administration ( which i know isn't a given for the Trump one) would have financed vaccine development, and many did ( UK with Oxford, France with Sanofi and Institut Pasteur ( both failures, Russia with theirs, etc. etc.)
> Warp Speed tried to fund Pfizer, Pfizer declined. That's hardly the administrations fault.
Indeed, it's not their fault, but it's also wrong to say they have anything to do with it.
> Also not including Moderna in your list of first vaccines is pretty self-serving considering it was approved (fine, EUA'd) one week after Pfizer.
Indeed i fucked up, i wanted to say none of the initial ones bar Moderna, and then say only Moderna and the J&J one were funded by the US, but changed the structure to avoid repetition and it came out wrong.
> Even the claim that Pfizer wasn't funded by the US is disingenuous; the US placed an order for 100 million doses of it in July for almost $2 billion.
Ordering something with payment on delivery doesn't fund its development:
quote from the press release:
> The U.S. government will pay the companies $1.95 billion upon the receipt of the first 100 million doses, following FDA authorization or approval. The U.S. government also can acquire up to an additional 500 million doses.
First: "Please develop a vaccine for us. Go quickly. Invest massive amounts of money and resources. We might buy some from you. If someone else comes up with it first, we'll buy from them."
Second: "Here's an irrevocable order for two billion US dollars for a product we need you to develop immediately. Go! Go! Go!".
No business with risk it all under the first scenario. It would be suicidal.
The second scenario. One where you are given guaranteed payment for a result as well as everything else that goes with it (lowering regulatory barriers, fast-track FDA action, help in mass manufacturing and organizing mass distribution, etc.). Yeah, the second scenario is vastly different.
Put it in terms of a startup. Imagine going to a VC and saying "I have this idea but no clue if anyone will buy it", vs. "I have this idea and I have this irrevocable US government order for two billion dollars of my product and all the support I need to make it happen quickly". Which one of the two do you think will get funded in a microsecond?
Yes, because making a vaccine for which there are over 7 billion customers that need it is absolutely the same as selling whatever. Production capacity is so far below what is needed that any vaccine manufactured in the first year or two is guaranteed to be bought.
In any case, the question at hand was whether or not the US admin funded Pfizer, and it did not. It gave them assurances, but so did many other entities ( like the EU), so the US really cannot be hailed as some sort of visionaries that made the vaccines possible with their generous help ( which was what GP was claiming).
You've missed the real issues; they weren't the only one making a vaccine and their vaccine wasn't by any means guaranteed to be good much less the best.
Without that pre-order, they had no guarantee that they would get any money. What if their vaccine turned out to be 50% effective? 30%?
You said that the administration should have funded vaccine development. They offered funding and were declined. They also funded J&J and Moderna, and provided purchase guarantees for Pfizer when they weren't allowed to fund it. In other words, the plethora of vaccines that we have is in part thanks to the actions of the administration.
What, specifically, are you suggesting they should have done that they didn't with regard to funding?
Edit: there are innumerable things we can point to that the Trump administration did wrong during the pandemic that made things worse. We don't need to invent new ones that are easily disproved.
The travel ban was declared by the WHO as ineffective, since the virus was already across the world, with places like Italy already being hot spots for it, so banning travel from China directly was useless and was indeed racially motivated ( the China virus, we banned travel from there, the problem is "solved") on some idiotic level.
I don't know why you're signaling out NY politicians, who, as stupid as they were with the initial handling, at least changed course when they understood - many others across the US refused to do so well in the pandemic, when it was painfully obvious how contagious and deadly the virus is.
The WHO said many things...and didn't say enough...they too are responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths around the world.
I'm sorry, the conclusion that the travel ban was racially motivated is just laughable.
I am singling out NY politicians because they likely seeded the entire nation with this virus at a massive scale when they took political sides rather than come into alignment with what the Trump administration was saying.
You can literally search for and find videos from exactly the same dates going back to January, February and March to confirm this. The Trump Administration was sounding the alarm. Every time Trump or the team would go on TV politicians from New York, Pelosi and Schummer and others would get in front of a camera to oppose it and tell the public everything was fine.
I focus on NY officials because they are likely responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths across the nation. Someone would have to trace the path the virus took in the US. Based on the timeline I would not be surprised if almost every single outburst traces to New York and San Francisco, but mostly NY. That's certainly the case for adjoining states and, I believe, Florida.
> The WHO said many things...and didn't say enough...they too are responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths around the world.
WHO were slow in some regards ( e.g. masks, but it's not like it would have made any positive difference when there simply weren't enough masks available even for medical personnel, let alone the general public), and it's their job to fight pandemics, but they're not "responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths". It's a novel virus, vastly more contagious ( even when asymptomatic), and especially due to China's initial botched response information was slow to tricke, and even when the WHO said stuff, issued warnings, gave counsel many countries outright ignored them, with some like the US deciding to withhold funding to fuck with the WHO in the middle of a fucking pandemic instead of listening to them.
> You can literally search for and find videos from exactly the same dates going back to January, February and March to confirm this. The Trump Administration was sounding the alarm. Every time Trump or the team would go on TV politicians from New York, Pelosi and Schummer and others would get in front of a camera to oppose it and tell the public everything was fine.
Are you sure? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eB_xCk5ABw, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuVo4fnpLC8 and similar ( you might say those are biased sources, but they show actual footage of him talking nonsense with dates, so if they're wrong, it should be pretty easy to debunk), and my own memory, and everything i've ever seen on the subject was exactly the opposite - Trump desperately trying to sweep it under the rug and saying that everything is fine, everything is under control. He continued to do so well after NY was in pandemic response mode, with makeshift morgues(!) to handle all the dead. Do you recall Cuomo's big speech about how states are bidding against each other for PPE and ventilators, and Trump's and Kushner's response that the federal stockpile is theirs, and they don't buy it that states suddenly need more PPE and ventilators?
The problems this pandemic uncovered run far and wide. It uncovered issues going back fifty years. Some could even argue going back to the very foundational elements of this nation. It is fair to say that nobody in government acted optimally and they are all responsible for unnecessary deaths to varying degrees.
Trump, at least to me, revealed himself as being in a range between incompetent to a moron when it came to effective communication with the public. One of our (sadly) favorite daily events was "Let's see what stupid shit Trump is going to say today". This did not help. This was deadly.
this was made worse by a Democratic party and mass media that chose to be at war with him in the middle of a world-wide pandemic. They were literally trying to eject him from office. How could have have possibly been a good idea at all?
Instead of everyone aligning for the common good they divided further and further, to the detriment of all. I place that blame 100% on the hands of the Democratic party and 100% on the part of the leftist media who support them blindly. To behave this way in the middle of a pandemic was pure bullshit and people lost their lives because of it. Trump had no control over the war that was being waged against him. Democrats could have (and should have) chosen to stop with the nonsense and focus on what actually mattered. They wasted our time and resources with impeachment right as this thing was exploding. Love or hate Trump, the truth of the matter is that when you have missiles coming down on your cities your fucking unite, no matter what, or we all die.
The foundational issues exposed by this pandemic were many. At the core, I think, is the reality that the US system of government isn't centralized. The most significant impact of this is that the US President (regardless of who it might be) or the Federal Government cannot, by law tell the states what to do. In other words, the US President cannot mandate mask usage, or staying at home, etc. The United States of America is more like a bunch of divided countries, each agreeing to some common frameworks and each telling the other states and the federal government "fuck you, you can't tell me what to do". The pandemic brought that to the forefront full force. Again, to our detriment.
Vaccine distribution is another issue. The federal government cannot mandate how to distribute the vaccine. They can recommend and setup systems, but the states have full autonomy on this front and can't be forced into anything at all.
Yes, amendments can be passed, but they require 2/3 of the House, Senate and State Legislatures to agree. This is difficult during normal times. Given the political war these bodies were fighting at the time, this was impossible.
The structural problems with the US Constitution continue with such issues as an imperfect freedom of the press right that allows the press to lie at will and become political activists in a fight. If you don't agree with this, just imagine a scenario where 95% of the press is 100% aligned with the Right to get a sense of what this nightmare scenario looks like to anyone interested in the truth and balance. We should not allow that to every happen in this country, yet it is exactly what we have today, with the left in full control of a vast portion of the media. Not sure how we fix it. We have to find a way.
This is no different from the right to firearms. We need to fix this shit (speech and firearms), it's crazy.
We also need to purge political ranks with solid term limits. The level of ignorance in Congress is staggering. This is an environment where people who would not make it in the private domain can become millionaires and have decades-long careers by simply pandering for votes. It's sick and we are all paying for the consequences of this travesty. The only system that has proven to deliver results in the private domain ought to somehow be adapted to government: Meritocracy, performance, results, delivering on promises, etc.
We have a political system where, every election, politicians tell us how they are going to fix healthcare, education, gun laws, unemployment, immigration and inequality. They have been saying these things for, I don't know, at least fifty years. Republican, Democrat, it doesn't matter. They are all a bunch of pandering incompetent imbeciles who have somehow managed to stay in power while driving this nation backwards. We need term limits and we need a merit-based system that rewards actual performance, not lies and manipulation.
The pandemic was the perfect storm that exposed just how fucked we are. If people don't wake up and fix this by voting intelligently and applying political pressure nothing will change and it will only get better. I mean, look at where we are now. This is hardly evidence of long term competence.
If nothing else, this has showed movies to be far removed fron reality. I imagine in hollywood, the US government takes something like a virus of questionable origin quite seriously. Not just because it can kill you but because it might mutate and a deadly strain might surface and do the real damage.
The real response was hard to fathom for most of the world. How can the most powerful nation on earth struggle so badly? More so since we live in the digitally connected age where data is plenty. Does this mean if we had an alien invasion they'd dysfunction as bad as they did? Its outrageous really.
Being prepped and having the financial muscle to buy supplies for months in advance is well and good but most people arent in such good financial terms. Therefore prepping is a function of time and money where money is the determining factor.
Not a lot of people have a lot of money. As much as they'd like to get into the practice anti-fragility, the economics disagrees with them
I don't think that's a tangent. I think you are exactly right.
The virus uncovered political dysfunction in ways nothing else could have achieved.
It also showed the world the state of decimation of the industrial bases of the US, Europe and nearly every nation on the planet. The fact that the US and Europe could not make masks and protective equipment because we don't even make the cloth or the machinery required to manufacture these things at scale was a shocking revelation for anyone not in manufacturing.
I think this is one of the reasons for which I reacted so quickly. Aside from having the means, I have been manufacturing things for three decades and have see exactly how badly our supply chain and capabilities have eroded. I want to say that I instinctively knew that a pandemic would likely cause massive shortages due to our lack of mass manufacturing capacity. It also helps that I spent a good deal of my life in Latin America. I remember my parents buying huge sacks of flour, sugar and other things as the economy faltered around them.
"The fact that the US and Europe could not make masks and protective equipment because we don't even make the cloth or the machinery required to manufacture these things at scale was a shocking revelation for anyone not in manufacturing."
Which makes my point even stronger and these politicians almost criminally liable for what they did. Telling people to go on the subway? Go to festivals? Unbelievable.
It's funny how much memories change with time. I almost forgot that the surgeon general and Health Canada recommended against wearing masks, and that the motto was that the real danger was fear/hoarding/overreaction.
You have to remember that before COVID19, we had SARS, MERS, swine flu, bird flu. All of these were huge news panics, lots of people got scared and started prepping for the end of the world, but for people in the west it largely ended up a nothing-burger. In the early days it's hard to know how bad something really is. Especially with the early info out of China being so unreliable (e.g. all those videos of people randomly falling down in public)
But once it hit Italy bad, there were no more excuses.
Of course, next time there's a disease that turns out to be a nothing-burger, the early incentive for politicians is going to be to overreact rather than underreact. If emergency-fatigue seems bad now, I don't think we've seen anything yet.
I think, I hope, what we'll do is pay attention to people like Dr. Fauci and ignore politicians insisting that "it's just like the flu, we are ready for this, go about your lives as normal". That is, quite literally, the level of dysfunction we experienced; the federal government yelling "Danger Will Robinson" and the entirety of the media and one political party saying "Ignore them, they are just being racist". And here we are.
Of course. Yet, when the President of the US gets on TV and announces that the administration enacted a travel ban from all of China...well, politicians, regardless of their ideological alignment, should stop talking and consider why this "full tilt" move was necessary.
At the time this was going on they were trying to impeach Trump. This means that the entire Democratic party and nearly the entire media could not bring themselves into alignment with him at all. They were trying to kill the guy. How could they turn around and say: "Yes, sir. What do you need us to do?".
And so the nation paid the price.
This virus showed the US and the world just how dysfunctional our system of government has become. It has also demonstrated how dangerously partisan and politically-driven our mass media turns out to be. All to the detriment of the nation and the world.
Imagine what we could have accomplished if they actually worked together.
When the President of the United States goes on TV to effectively say: "Danger! Danger! We are Shutting down travel from China". Well, politicians ought to stop, think, call the White House, understand why such a drastic move was made and then fall in line and support the effort rather than fight it.
There is no doubt at all that telling people in NY to continue using the subways, go to festivals, etc. caused the virus to spread exponentially.
NY officials were on TV saying things like "we are ready for this", "we are prepared", "this is just like the flu", "we know how to treat this", etc. None of those things are true. They pulled that stuff out of their collective asses. The Trump administration went five standard deviations in the direction of caution and while the entire Democratic party (in particular NY) and the news media went five standard deviations in the direction of ignorant bullshit.
Look, it's clear that Trump made a mess of his public handling of this event which, rightly so, cost him the election. In public, he was a mess. Being under constant attack from his opponents and having to deal with a rabid media out for blood every second of every day sure didn't help.
Behind the scenes, it's hard to find anything they did wrong. In fact, the actual handling of this pandemic behind the scenes was an outstanding achievement and it should go down in history as such. That team gave us vaccines in eight months. They saved millions of lives around the world.
You don't seem to be familiar with the definition of "lie" or something, I don't understand it.
"Behind the scenes, it's hard to find anything they did wrong."
Off the top of my head: They botched the China travel ban, they delayed and then botched the European travel ban, bad initial CDC tests, poor-to-non-existant data collection, planning based on keeping the virus out instead of mitigation or suppression, bad internal modeling... I think you are being silly.
Let's be clear OWS vaccine development was amazing and good, but OxfordAZ was ready at the same time, China & Russian vaccines too.
I agree with the thrust of your comment in general. I thought that Trump’s China travel ban was a choice of common sense and the Democrats labeling it as xenophobic was counterproductive.
While it certainly was xenophobic in Trump’s hands, it was practically a decision that made him happy as a China hater, the motivation of the decision is independent of its utility.
Trump certainly made a mess of it after that.
All of the politicians got fooled by the relative stability and rareness of the pandemic. Most of the time telling people not to panic it won’t be as bad as you fear works OK as a strategy in a country like the US.
That said, on the point about Trump and his relationship with China. I simply don't see it as xenophobic. And, BTW, I have never supported Trump or vote for him. I am a strongly independent classical liberal, with the caveat that I actively seek the truth and will never align myself with any political party by default because that implies they are 100% correct 100% of the time, which is impossible.
And, BTW #2, I don't hate China at all. While I disagree with their social and political stances, on the business front, the job they have done during the last 50 years is nothing less than outstanding. I have experience manufacturing in China and can tell you from that first hand experience that the US almost has no hope of regaining most of the industrial base it lost. While we focus on growing a society with a victim-mentality and growing division they have been growing what might already be the most entrepreneurial society in history. It's hard to describe the difference other than: If you want to get shit done, you go to China, not the US, not Europe. Sorry.
Trump has been talking about China for decades. He has been watching the erosion of our industrial base for a long time. And he rightly points at Chinese practices and the idiocy of our own politicians as some (not all) of the root causes. The popular "corporate greed" cause is nonsense. Go try and manufacture almost anything at scale in the US or Europe and see how far you get. There's no greed involved, we can't even make N95 masks at scale.
The problem with the Trump/China relationship, in my opinion, has many facets.
One of them is that he turned out to be perhaps the worst communicator who has ever inhabited the White House. I mean, his lack of ability to deliver well constructed messages in front of a camera was just unbelievable. In politics and leadership you have to be able to communicate. Every single one of his press briefings and speeches was an absolute train wreck.
The second issue had to do with the all-out warfare the entire Left and the media engaged in for four years. You can't run a country when at least half of your government is engaged in a war against the other half. It's impossible. I don't care who you are.
A simple example of this is Trump's attempt to rescind the postal treaty, dating back to 1874 (yes!) that made it so the US taxpayers subsidize nearly every Chinese package travelling within the US. In other words, once certain class of packages lands on US soil delivery of Chinese goods within the US is FREE. The intention behind this treaty was good. It was meant to help developing nations have access to our markets. Well, it isn't 1874 and China is the second largest economy in the world.
What that treaty means is that, as a US-based business, it costs me more to ship a package to New York than it costs a Chinese competitor. Even if my product cost exactly the same to manufacture, I lose.
That treaty should have been rescinded decades ago. Trump was the only US President (or politician) to speak about this and point out just how badly we were getting screwed and how much damage we are causing our own businesses. And for that his attempt to rescind this ridiculous treaty was labelled as xenophobic and racially motivated. Again, the entire Democratic party and the media were at war with him and could not care less about the absolute fact that this treaty has been damaging our nation for decades. In their ideologically twisted world they could not bring themselves into alignment with him at all, even if that meant damaging every single business in the US.
How do we fix this? Don't know. Other than, perhaps, strong term limits. On the media side, we do not benefit at all from having 95% of the media in political alignment with an ideological side. Imagine if 95% of our media were aligned with the right. That would be horrible. Well, it isn't any different when the tables are turned. This isn't good for anyone.
It's not just the wrong recommendations that have contributed to deaths, they have also undermined trust in governmental advice heavily by changing the narrative so fast.
They should do well to remember people aren't goldfish and have memories beyond three seconds.
I know it sounds a bit dramatic, but I would really like it if people took at least "a bit" of the underlying meaning of a specific phrase used in the ancap community. "Tax Cattle". It's been a really good way for me to conceptually explain quite a few of the actions taken by governments around the world during this pandemic. It's a sort of weird hybrid relationship between "protector" and "farmer". More leaning to the latter judging by how willing officials are to take "calculated risks" with people's lives so as to maintain business, work and normal day to day functioning of the cities/countries. "Freedom" of the people only being an afterthought and something we still don't quite have back yet.
I ran into an interesting issue the other day and I am starting to wonder if the harbinger of things to come. My dog food was 100% more expensive online. Local store only had one 30 pound bag.
We are already stockpiling ramen and water and now I guess we will start adding dog food into the mix as well.
Things have not fallen apart, but they have clearly changed.
Where are you at that dog food has gotten 100% more expensive (or where are you checking?) It doesn't seem like it's gotten that much higher for me just checking Chewy.com.
Chewy sent me an email saying that my cat's prescription diet wold not be available going forward and that I should look at a different brand or another supplier. Two days later, it shipped as normal and there is nothing in my subscription portal to suggest any issues.
It may have been a glitch or we may have problems in the coming months.
Amazon. There were only 2 non-local sellers so it may have been a fluke. I didn't check Chewy since I tend to wait for them to send me coupons to try them again.
Also Chicagoland, but yeah we get ours through Chewy.
Probably just the standard 'it's out of stock, so some random seller will throw it up there for 2-3x the price and hope someone buys it' that just about every product has on Amazon. I see it happen all the time with board games.
I definitely think that's a case of throwing crappy over-priced offers onto the wall and seeing what sticks. Just like crappy blog-spam, you never know when some fluke of the search algorithm will redirect some poor unknowing fool to your page or product and they are desperate or uninformed enough to buy whatever it is you are selling.
100% the fault of Amazon or whatever marketplace this is. Right now we should be having a rich taxonomy and unique product database that links all versions of the same product together so that I can click: "Chewy Dog Food 5kg" and get all the sellers offering it. Then proceed to sort by price, filter out the suppliers that look dodgy, add said suppliers to a "fake chinese product spam list" personal black list, and proceed to buy the cheapest original version of the product.
The local store had one bag of dog food, or one bag of the brand and flavor you usually buy? Very specific things go out of stock all the time. The petco near me is stocked floor to ceiling as are all the grocery stores. I don't live anywhere special.
Good point. Sorry. It is not my intention to start a panic here. There are a lot of options available ( "stocked to the ceiling" ) if you don't care about a specific flavor/brand. In my case, my dog is a little more demanding in a sense that other kibble we tried results in him throwing up so, in a sense, we are locked-in. But it was never an issue over the last years until now.
interesting, I wonder if it's something specific with your dog's food. Any idea on what it is? I just checked mine against an order +1 year ago and it's the same price.
GSD Royal canine in my case. Nothing apparent comes to mind. It seems like a generic enough kibble. I don't like to change it since he has a surprisingly delicate stomach.
This is why more people (everyone!) should definitely read “Black Swan” by Nicholas Taleb. His book is an amazing read about how we get fooled by chance and how we deal with risk. Anti fragile systems are certainly possible.
There are too many things for a central planning committee to stockpile them all, sure. But if incentives are correct then private actors will spring up and stockpile them for you. What we have today is a supply chain that's been fine-tuned in large part by (de-)regulation for efficient, brittle, globalized JIT inventory but it wasn't always that way. One line of thinking goes, if the lion's share of the gains from the current framework will just go to a couple of globomegacorps anyway, why don't we shake things up.
Coffee may not be the best example since it's not a complex supply chain: just a dry whole coffee bean (a raw commodity). A pencil, on the other hand, may have dozens of suppliers involved in the chain before a complete product is ready. It would serve as a stronger test for the health of the trade and manufacturing that sustains everyday life.
If you read the article, it looks like shipments are currently delayed around 15 days. It seems unlikely to cause anything other than short term inconvenience.
Your comment in the best example i for how people are so busy drinking the cool aid they dont even know how things were done 50 years ago.
We had grain elevators and other stockpiles of essentials. A country would save grain from summer to feed it through winter, and have months spare. This does not result in some imaginary 'wastefull living'.
Obviously you don't stockpile coffee and selfie sticks
But one of the main reasons a floor on price is desired is to allow farmers to survive financially and therefore keep the country in control of its own food production.
I'm not saying that nothing should be stockpiled. A country should have dedicated emergency services, that should also plan for stuff they need in case of various emergencies. I don't think such a service would stock shipping containers, though.
Even with Covid we saw some of the hindsight comments. In the early days it was thought that ventilators were the bottleneck and they should have been stockpiled. But that seems to not have been an issue in the end. And if you were now to stockpile ventilators, perhaps the next pandemic would require something else.
Given how many people would go through withdrawal if caffeine were to be unavailable all of a sudden, maybe nowadays coffee would be something worth having a bit of a stockpile of.
Just keep a box of caffeine pills in your emergency rations. If coffee is unavailable, then use the pills to give up the habit, by reducing dosage every day. No headaches or other side effects (apart from missing the habit of making a coffee).
I bought caffeine pills when I went on a multi day hiking trip, because I was really worried about withdrawal :-) In the end I didn't need them, one cup of coffee I was able to get in the hut in the morning was enough.
Everything you just described happens today, even considering your bogeyman of globalism. Visit Iowa or Saskatchewan if you don’t believe me. The nice thing about grain elevators is they’re fairly easy to spot from a distance. Had globalism taken them from us, a few people would have noticed.
If you think any first world nation is entirely reliant on global trade for subsistence of its populace (yes, even UK) you’ve been playing far too much Civilization. Now if you want to talk about the impact of globalism on crop markets and by extension a small operator, you have something to discuss. But you’re not saying that.
Also, various grains are considered essential elements of national security and are stockpiled and protected like many other resources.
It’s ludicrous to think that just because there is more global trade all governments have given up on their own interests and are just subject to the wills of “globalism”.
What is ludicrous is ignoring the dangers of both approaches, globalism and antiglobalism, with hand wavy strawmen. There are real issues, and while gp might not have articulated them well, your dismissal reads as a cliche response and not a genuine point of discussion or call for debate.
Twice I’ve worked for a B2B company that was losing money on every sale and yet out main customer had built their whole strategy around our continued existence. Like they couldn’t see what was going on.
Couldn’t, or wouldn’t.
If there is no way a reasonable person could make the item at that price point then you are living on borrowed time.
Unless your company was advertising the fact they lost money on every sale(and if it was still private why would it) how are the downstream customers to know that it didn't really figure out a way to create the widget cheaper than all the competitors?
If they were the only source of the product at that price, and they couldn't pay more for it... Then it seems obvious to assume something will go wrong eventually, collapsing the whole house of cards.
If your margins are that tight, any delay in a shipment will decrease your profit too much and risk the whole thing.
They don't need to know there's a current problem, only that any problem will collapse everything.
If the government response didn't prevent people from taking at-home tests, and had more nuance than 'shut down all "non-essential" activity', JIT inventory would have kept working on the whole. "Non-essential" was extremely poorly defined.
It was poorly defined, in the sense that nearly every single economic activity was "Essential" under the definitions set out by governments across the world.
If you provided any kind of service or product that was consumed by an essential business, you were also essential. My wife works in a small company that sets up tech conferences. They are... Essential (Despite not having any work for the past year. If nobody wants to pay you to do any work, I don't think you are essential, but I'm not the guy in charge...)
We were still importing cases on airplanes after mandatory pre-boarding PCR tests to fly to Canada so the notion that lower specificity at-home test kits were the key to unlocking the pandemic needs a lot of evidence to be compelling.
Looking at the definition of "essential" most places in the West, it was nearly everyone!
You really think a non-globalized economy would be better? Some country had a drought, needs to import food but there is no one to do it because there has never been a need before?
Indeed, globalization amplifies issues with transportation, but local source can only be more fragile with less fault tolerance. Issues like this are kind like network clogging in data centers, but one can hardly argue standalone applications are better because of that. A distributed system is definitely going to have more problem than a singular server, yet that does not mean standalone computers are better.
> Whats worse is diffusion of responsibility - someone could be on the critical path to essential suppliers for millions of people, but at the same time have no obligations to ensure their job is done, and perhaps not enough profit margin to plan for the shit time.
There are interesting parallels to unpaid volunteers maintaining open source projects.
The mechanism described in the article is that Asian economies are business as usual, but European and American activity has slowed because of the pandemic, so there's lots of demand to ship from Asia, but nothing coming back.
This makes sense, but at a macro level it can't have too large an effect on shipping rates: at worst, you need to pay for a round trip to bring back the empty container, instead of a one way journey. A 100% increase, which is a lot in most contexts, but oil prices (the other main marginal cost in shipping) fluctuate by that much three years out of ten.
Container shipping is so cheap these days that I don't see this effect killing the margins of many businesses.
I am from Brazil and I can say... things are screwed hard.
1. Food prices are rising fast, I am literally spending double per month now of what I spent 8 months ago.
2. The shipping shortage led to a severe deficit of materials, my shop sell stuff to auto manufacturers, and one of them told me they will have to shut down the whole factory because they can't get their hands on a passenger seat shipment, and already have their yard full of incomplete cars.
3. The deficit even affected politics: we had elections recently, I talked to one mayor candidate in person, and the candidate complained they couldn't make certain forms of campaigning, for example handing out flags, because the flag manufacturer was struggling to get a shipment of plastic to make the flag handles!
4. Some cities there been utter chaos as trucks with produce pile up waiting for containers, this week in particular people almost came to blows because trucks started to fill up a city, and the mayor banned crowds from the farmer market because COVID, leading to farmers to start to unload produce in the middle of the street and grind the whole city economy to a halt.
5. My shop been trying to stock products because we can't rely on imports, this has been extremely crazy, we get shipments at random dates, demand spikes on random dates too, we ran out of physical space, manufacturers been raising prices to us out of the blue (sometimes two months in a row)´, and another manufacturer seemly just gave up, whenever we call them, they say there is no trucks available so they won't bother even trying to manufacture whatever we ordered.
Shipping is totally fubar right now. West coast ports like Long Beach were jammed up as ships carrying PPE were prioritized and longshoreman were sidelined by quarantine and infection.
Part of my business is a logistics operation... post-Christmas we were hobbled, I lost 30-40% of manhours any given week and the customers on the other side were the same way. I had to cut throughput 50-60% and overcommit staff to do what I needed to do. Inventory on hand is 10x what it should be.
So I would guess that a lot of the container issue is inventory stuck in the channel. Even companies like Walmart are struggling to keep shelves stocked, and they have a world class, vertically integrated operation.
> at worst, you need to pay for a round trip to bring back the empty container
That assumes the container is ready for you to bring back. It sounds like a big part of the problem is that North America is a bottleneck where it is taking containers in, but they aren't available to be sent back, empty or not.
There was a huge backlog at the Port of Los Angeles in 2020 due to COVID labour constraints, ships were waiting weeks to dock and containers were piling up at the railhead. Now they have workforce constraints and a trade imbalance.
Perhaps the freight industry has long term contract rates which assume bidirectional flow, and they can't operate economically without essentially doubling rates, so they constrain capacity.
That's what I took away. It seems like there were a lot of containers on ships that came into US and European ports in Q2 last year, when the economy was shutting down, and those containers haven't been turned around as empties yet.
Just counting the containers in the picture, it looks like there are 24 x 20 x 9 = 4320 containers. I guess below deck there could be another ~4000, but that still leaves another 4000? Can they stack them that much higher?
Just some anecdata from my partner’s business - before all this shipping a container of woks from China to the UK cost £1500 and last month it cost an astonishing £9000.
Now I know why I can't get towels for my hotel. None of the hotels can't get towels. My franchise changed supplier because there is a towel shortage since last December.
Let us recall the good ol' days, when hotel towels were tastefully branded and of course got swiped (marketing marketing marketing!). The modern counterpart is a passive-aggressive notice on the wall that says that if you care to swipe a towel they will gleefully add it to your credit card bill. No fun, no cheer, no margin, no marketing.
Hotel towels are white stains are visible. We remove it if it get stained, ripped or stolen.
It depends on the guest how often towel last. Construction crew, or people with makeup, hair dyes stain easily. Local guest (People from the town) also stains more towels.
I probably used more towels during covid compare to previous 2 years.
But... don't the ships have to get back to China somehow, if they are going to bring more cargo from China to north america? Why don't they take containers (even empty) when they do so, especially when they are so valuable.
If the ships aren't piling up in north america, how are the containers? Are ships leaving north america without picking up containers and if so why?
> Are ships leaving north america without picking up containers and if so why?
One reason is given in the article: it’s more profitable not to wait to load up the empty containers and instead to go back and quickly ship another full load out of China
I guess eventually the prices have to catch up
Edit: I misread this is not clearly stated but I think still somewhat implied since they are not waiting for cargo to ship back they probably aren’t waiting for empty containers either
(It looks significantly better than a month or two ago, though, when ships were anchored 30-40 miles offshore because there was no more space for them.)
That would mean idling your ships, and not in the expectation of picking up a lucrative cargo, either - and there is no guarantee that you will be the direct beneficiary of your benificent action. It's a variation of the 'tragedy of the commons', where the individual incentives are not aligned with the optimal outcome.
In fact, it is very like the incentives to send out your fishing fleet to scoop up another catch before all the fish are gone.
This isn't really a tragedy of the commons, the price of shipping containers will rise until it is profitable to return the containers to Asia. This is a classic example of markets working to allocate resources via pricing signals. The only quirk is that when there is a month-long ocean voyage involved there is some lag time before things change.
I would call it a market failure if someone wants to obtain a container, and cannot do so at any price.
There are ag producers on the west coast who cannot obtain containers regardless of cost. That article quoted a 2x increase - there are plenty of people who would gladly pay that and more, but containers cannot be sourced.
There is a time factor to markets too. I'd call it a market failure if someone wants to obtain a container and cannot do so at any price for the indefinite future, but if you're willing to pay more but need to wait for an ocean voyage, that's just reality.
Markets are not magic - they don't let you ignore physical reality. They're just an eventually-consistent system that aligns incentives to meet demand. It's like a transcontinental trip: you can spend maybe $150 in gas and get there in a week, or you can spend $700 and get there in 6 hours - but (at least until Boom starts flying) you're not going to get there in less than 5-6 hours no matter how much you're willing to spend.
Typical containers are all welded. They don't break down or fold. Keep in mind containers stack on top of each other, being able to tear them down or fold would compromise their strength.
I doubt it, they need to withstand rain, snow and seawater, possibly refrigeration for a good share (I’m thinking about Apple products which are not supposed to go beyond 35°C - How do we manage sun exposure between the tropics?).
Surely it's "35C" only when powered on? Which is still a weird figure which is probably wrong because how are those products going to work close to a human body which has a default temperature of 36C (when not excercising, when not in the sun, etc.etc.)?
Your core temperature is that hot, but your skin won't be (unless you're in a desert or something). So you'd never be able to transfer that temperature to a Mac.
The vast majority definitely cannot be folded or otherwise disassembled. They are welded together as simply and with the fewest number of parts as possible, while complying with international standards.
I don't think that's the case here, though - it has been reported that this may well be the first time it has happened in the canal's 150 year history.
> *containers that could be split up and shipped in parts then re-assembled...*
There are flat-pack containers, but they don't have the robustness or water-tightness of conventionally-built containers. People abuse container working limits something awful to squeeze pennies, so the flat-pack version will end up net costing more.
If the US Navy designed a nuclear-powered container ship class for rapid ultra-heavy-lift capacity, like enough to haul over an entire light (400,000) army group in one pass, then that's probably around 200, maybe 300 ships? The fastest sealift in US Navy inventory is 33 kts, so a nuclear-powered one with no fuel concerns could probably put on another 30% to that easily, so around 40 kts; much faster and they'll start outrunning most naval escorts.
Not every warfighting artifact fits in a container of course, but the military has the luxury to be able to define their own extensions to the ISO standard (and they have, with the bicon/tricon/etc. standards).
There are about 5,300 container ships in the world, so at the high end this would be about 5% of world capacity. Maersk operates a fleet of around 700, so it isn't too outrageous, if the US wants massive force projection. Such a fleet could step in to preserve national-security-critical supply chains. Coffee IMHO, is not national-security-critical, heretical as that may be.
For the record, I'm against the US projecting force around the world. It's not worth it IMHO, but like most people on the outside of the US looking in, I'm outvoted. On a strictly we-must-be-the-hyperpower-at-any-cost basis however, it makes sense for such a posture to invest heavily into that kind of ultra-fast, ultra-heavy-lift logistics capacity at that kind of scale. I'm just glad that the kind of leadership glamour disease that has befallen so many US corporations has seeped into its military, and they'll never believe in the benefits of unglamorous logistics and infrastructure until it is too late to fund.
Prediction: By mid-2022 there'll be a glut of containers. All the publicity around the present shortage will induce manufacturers to ramp up capacity. But that takes time. The short-term pinch will evaporate by the time production ramps.
I wonder if there's a good systemwide way to handle this problem.
Airlines use "irrops" -- irregular operations -- teams to handle big weather events, to get their airplanes to where their passengers are waiting. I suppose ocean shipping has similar irrops protocols. But the grounding of the Ever Given in the southern Suez Canal indicates that shipping irrops teams ignore actual weather events at their peril.
> Prediction: By mid-2022 there'll be a glut of containers. All the publicity around the present shortage will induce manufacturers to ramp up capacity.
From someone else quoting TFA:
>> Anticipating major industry collapse, the Carrier Alliances showed remarkable discipline in aligning supply with demand as early as February; removing trade capacity from the seas by halting vessels and shipments. By doing so, the erosion of ocean rates was kept to a minimum. Basing their reaction on potential worst case scenarios, shipping carriers artificially created under-capacity. This made available space come at a premium and therefore significantly raised the cost of container shipping, stabilizing revenues for carriers.
Most containers are made in China, so who knows, their economy is extremely distorted.
Mills were producing steel well below cost for a long time, but ore prices have gone up and some inefficient mills are being shut down, so supply side costs increasing. Mills also reduced capacity significantly in 2020, causing a production bubble.
I think that India bought that coal; China is now relying on Brazil, which is having its own problems.
Chinese sanctions on a broad range of Australian products were being supported by the Trump admin ("America First") but that is now changing. If conditions deteriorated and iron ore sanctions happened (by either China starting something in the South China Sea or some stupid Corona sanctions) then the Chinese economy would grind to a halt and metal prices globally would spike, and we'd be melting containers down for their scrap value.
Notably, steel blast furnaces go offline once every 10~20 years, and that's to replace the firebrick lining on the inside. They take months to ramp up, and at least weeks with no output.
Do people not understand how insulting it is to call people in poorer nations who work hard to build a better lives for themselves and their families by making the crap you buy "slaves" is? Am I the only one who gets annoyed by this?
The people who work at amazon warehouses are slaves too. Being a slave is about being abused in a working environment. It has nothing to do with racism.
They make the crap, make slave wages, amazon flys it over and makes all the $$$. You should get excited about that.
They’re rental slaves. Anyone living paycheque to paycheque is. If your employer didn’t pay you anything but provided you with everything you and your family needed, with nothing left over so you have nothing to support you if you quit, that would be slavery. This is the same thing. Does it make you feel better to pretend it’s not true?
They pay just enough to survive, but not enough to plan for the future, improve your position in life, or be finacially stable enough to be a thoughtcrime troublemaker.
NOx/SOx emissions specifically. People repeat that statistic a lot and mix it up between noxious particulate emissions and climate-changing CO2 emissions. To be clear, cars emit far more CO2 than the largest container ships.
Another great opportunity to question the global supply chain that is not sustainable anyway. I understand it disrupts critical industries, but the impact on consumer over consumption of crap is a blessing.
This global shortage is caused by lockdown. Its clear that lockdown created massive problem. Way more than the virus itself. We need to make sure that lockdowns don't happen again in the future.
Lockdowns are the only solution for stopping the spread of an infectious virus or bacteria. How you implement the lockdown and how long for depends on the infection rates and treatment requirements.
If everyone masked/maintained hygiene/social distanced, then lockdowns can be lessened, but the best way to stop infections is to stop providing the environment were infections can occur.
Unless there are both effective and scalable treatment options, then some form of isolation is the only alternative.
Lockdowns simply don't work. How do I know? Because Sweden, which for a long time refused to introduce any COVID restrictions at all, has less deaths per 1M people (1317) than France (1425), which introduced full lockdown.
Also, Texas recently lifted all the restrictions couple weeks ago, and number of cases and deaths is still falling.
For vast majority of people, covid is non issue. Most people will either have no symptoms or only have mild symptoms. So no, not everyone will get sick from covid.
Of course, like any other disease there will be some death, particularly for old people and people with underlying condition but nothing that could cause problem as greater than mass lockdown.
My statement is essentially, some disease is preferable than mass lockdown.
Wanting to eradicate disease is good and I support it but not with something that caused massive problem that is worse than the disease.
"As the pandemic spread out from its Asian epicentre, countries implemented lockdowns, halting economic movements and production. Many factories closed temporarily, causing large numbers of containers to be stopped at ports"
Not so much lockdown, as mobility issues. For example, many labor-dependent industries like fruit picking and construction normally depend on migrants or seasonal labor from overseas, and are having a very hard time coping without it.
I agree. Social distancing + vaccination is pretty much the only effective strategy so far. Lockdowns do enforce that, but they also create vast damage beyond what's needed.
If I'm reading this right, container shipping is an oligopoly similar to OPEC and they all banded together to reduce supply enough to raise prices, while in a competitive environment prices would have gone down due to reduced demand?