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archildress

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I really can't make clear enough how good Kagi is. I've tried all the competing emerging search engines as they've had their 5 minutes of fame. They don't compare to kagi. it's the first google rip and replace I've ever tried. Pony up the $10 a month and put your money where your mouth is on "let's pay for products instead of being sold to advertisers."

Just-in-time will cost you far more than it will save you. The problem is that when it fails, you judge those failures as "backwards looking one offs" as opposed to a cost that is part and parcel to being JIT.

Factory downtime is the single biggest cost a manufacturing shop can incur. No amount of working capital savings from carrying fewer screws, widgets, and bolts can offset the costs of taking 14 plants down due to penny wise, pound foolish math.

I've thought about this many times, and my answer is: when there is a massive, at-scale leak of seriously disruptive personal information. Think Google search history, medical files, or databases of credit card transactions. When it takes enough peoples' lives off the normal track, people will finally be fed up.

All planning really is based on assumptions, like safety stock levels. In organizations you typically have someone who decides "hey, this is the right level of inventory to keep, based on our demand right now." That's not a bad approach, but the problem is a lot of supply chain planning is top-down and dictates "we only want to keep $x tied up in inventory" and as you can imagine that number is driven by management as low as possible. When COVID happened last year, levels were slashed so low and now the supply chains can't recover.

Basically my view is that it's this over reactiveness and obsession with free cash flow has swung so far so as to create a too-painful jam.

I would agree that over consumption is a problem, albeit a separate one to the conversation at hand.

Cheers.

Thank you Toyota and practitioners of "lean" / "Six Sigma" that told us all about the wonders of just-in-time, to only carry exactly as much inventory was needed for demand. After all, we'd rather have that cash in a bank account than tied up in inventory.

While well intentioned, the problem is that it all relies on assumptions, largely tied to demand. And when demand goes through a wild whipsaw, and everyone takes diverging viewpoints of the shape of that whipsaw curve, the highly interdependent chain snaps.

Labor is an issue for sure. But make no mistake, the "restart from COVID" supply chain conundrum owes a lot of its pain to optimizing everything to the hilt, then reacting slowly as the world around us changed.

I'm sorry but your analogy just doesn't work.

If you're de-platformed from YouTube, Facebook, etc, you can still publish your content and share it. You have a distribution issue, you don't have an "ability to perform" issue.

If you're locked out of the banking system, your business is done. You lack transactional alternatives.

In reply to your first point, the original article discusses credit score, which does not use income in any way. You're talking about applying for loans, which use a credit score and other factors to determine credit worthiness. My points are relevant to the credit score only.

Consider the fact that conflating credit score to credit worthiness (respectfully, as your reply does) as the biggest indicator of the brokenness.

Credit scores are so fundamentally broken anyway.

In financial analysis of a company, the number one item you tend to look at is "free cash flow" - the "cash available for the company to repay creditors or pay dividends and interest to investors." [1]

Why then do we not take income into account in credit worthiness? Why do I not periodically upload my W2 or tax return to the credit bureaus in order to show that yes, I'm credit-worthy because my income makes it possible to service my debt?

The entire idea of a credit score based on having had credit and paying past loans off is asinine. To start throwing nonsensical parameters like browsing history into the equation is second derivative asinine.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/freecashflow.asp

These types of agreement are relatively common in some manufacturing environments, and are often called "take or pay." In essence you're reserving capacity.

What's interesting to me about this one is that I fundamentally believe that both:

- Cloud computing will be increasingly commoditized, with lower cost providers emerging in the next 3-5 years

- More companies of scale will go back to building their own infrastructure as a cost savings project.

For Amazon, I think the incentive is as much about locking in revenue as it is locking in "demand" - helps with their demand planning of how much more to build out.