Revi wrote:Have you read Gail Tverberg's latest post? It talks ... now it's all too complex to really work effectively.
I did. And at first she seemed to be talking about the high cost of energy rather than her latest hobby horse of cost too low to allow further development. But she settled on "complexity."
I think the whole increasing complexity / diminishing returns bit is overused, especially on this site where the average age is probably higher than typical. Definitely the world is different than when most of us were kids in our little "Mayberrys." But the problem with the "Mayberrys" of the world today certainly isn't complexity. Mayberry was in N Carolina so I'll guess it's economic base in the '50s was furniture and textile jobs and probably tobacco. All jobs except tobacco (maybe it too) were exported to lower wage countries leaving an empty economic space behind. Even Opie probably went to school and became a chip designer in the big city. That goes a long way to explain where we are at now.
Just as California cornered the almond market through comparative advantage and efficiency of scale, containerized shipping and energy really too cheap to meter have allowed further and further concentration of manufacturing of all sorts.
Our problem with cheap shipping isn't increased complexity so much as reduced resilience. Monopolistic production, labor arbitrage and JIT enabled by containerization and digital communication of real time data has created this fragility. It has left behind "job deserts" like Mayberry, which likely doesn't even have a market with fresh produce any more. But also it stranded a lot of potentially productive workers and assets that have long been lost.
The concentration of production to fewer and fewer locations and companies combined with the lack of warehousing makes the system increasingly fragile. For example, one company: TSMC, produces 50% of all computer chips in the entire world. Pretty well every other manufacturing business depends on those products. That isn't complexity, that is weak link dependence and rigidity, underwritten by a the final offshoring to cheap labor-land. Unless Bezos discovers cheaper labor on Mars.
We're all familiar with the EMP / CME complete grid failure catch-22 scenario known as a "black start" where the power required to start generating power is unavailable. An actual failure of the supply chain would be similar in that there is no ability—knowledge, skills, assets— to "bootstrap" chip manufacturing in 10,000 locations.
Or for that matter, no ability for Mayberry to start manufacturing chairs again.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/02/16/se ... mpetition/https://fortune.com/2020/08/10/us-china ... hipmakers/https://blog.bizvibe.com/blog/top-semic ... -companieshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_start
The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves -- in their separate, and individual capacities.
-- Abraham Lincoln, Fragment on Government (July 1, 1854)