Email or username:

Password:

Forgot your password?
T Chu 朱's posts Post Back to profile
Top-level
Luis Villa

@chu Even lots of technically very sophisticated people have not put 2+2 together on our deliberately-fragile JIT supply chains, and how badly they will hold up in the face of sustained climate disruptions.

30 Sep 2023 at 17:31 | Wall-to-wall | Open on social.coop
20 comments
DELETED

@luis_in_brief @chu in the late 1990s I worked at a factory that was transitioning to just in time materials. I was working in shipping and receiving and helped set up the Kanban system of materials supply. It originated in Japan and was all the rage. The fragility of such a system requires an extremely stable commercial network. That stable world that the #CorporateOligarchy relied upon has now succumbed to the inherent nature of #Capitalism.

30 Sep 2023 at 18:52 | Open on mastodon.online
Wen

@Alienated53 @luis_in_brief @chu

Any highly optimised system is inherently sensitive to disruption. Be that a ship getting stuck in a canal or a small increase in flu infections.

You can have two of three, low cost, robustness to change or rapid delivery in most systems. All three are difficult to achieve.

30 Sep 2023 at 19:53 | Open on mastodon.scot
epicdemiologist

@Wen @Alienated53 @luis_in_brief @chu Or as my engineer brother-in-law says, "Cheap, fast and good: Pick any two."

30 Sep 2023 at 21:30 | Open on wandering.shop
chasmodeus

@Wen @Alienated53 @luis_in_brief @chu

And capitalism will always chose the cheapest two of the three with no regard to the long term sustainability of them.

30 Sep 2023 at 22:55 | Open on mastodon.social
Wen

@chasmodeus @Alienated53 @luis_in_brief @chu@climatejustice

Capitalism will not necessarily do this. Unfettered, unregulated capitalism will. But an argument for a space with more words 🤪

30 Sep 2023 at 23:02 | Open on mastodon.scot
greenleaf

@chasmodeus @Wen @Alienated53 @luis_in_brief @chu That's a bingo! I mean the whole concept of capitalism at it's core, is designed around that particular idea. It's a dumb system really.

30 Sep 2023 at 23:03 | Open on climatejustice.social
ティージェーグレェ

@Wen Yeah, the sub-field of system & network administration more colloquially referred to as "DR" (Disaster Recovery) is pretty deeply tied into such "mitigating strategies" but they are far from fool proof.

My first employer after I graduated from University circa 1999-2001, we had a 10kW backup generator that we would routinely wheel out & test as part of outage preparations, because the building's (which was a bank which also had an old got.net data center in it) 600kW back up diesel generator wasn't automatic & there was enough lag we might have to use the 10kW generator as a stop gap.

My employer circa 2002-2006, bought their HQ building for a song from a failed start up that was planning to do hardware fabrication before the dot-bomb era wiped them out.

The entire building: was on battery back up (with a room full of batteries, which were tested & maintained semiannually), it also had a 600kW diesel generator, which would automatically power on within 10 seconds of an outage & would self-test every week. It was also: on a hospital (our neighbor) "grid". In the event of power failures: emergency services such as hospitals are the last to be powered down & the first to be powered up.

However, that employer had 20+ branches spread across 5 counties. One of the locations: the largest granite quarry West of the Mississippi, with the world's largest wheeled excavator. It got power *directly* from the Moss Landing station, so if Moss Landing ever did maintenance, Aromas was offline, because they were direct fed, no grid resiliency. ;-/

Circa 2007-2014, with @bifrosty2k's network wizardry, my employer survived a fiber cut which wiped out AT&T in SF & other transit providers such as Global Crossing, while we were still up & online & passing traffic without a hiccup.

But: not many ever get to those levels of disaster recovery planning. It costs real money & requires a lot of lessons learned the hard way, not taught in schools.

@Alienated53 @luis_in_brief @chu

@Wen Yeah, the sub-field of system & network administration more colloquially referred to as "DR" (Disaster Recovery) is pretty deeply tied into such "mitigating strategies" but they are far from fool proof.

My first employer after I graduated from University circa 1999-2001, we had a 10kW backup generator that we would routinely wheel out & test as part of outage preparations, because the building's (which was a bank which also had an old got.net data center in it) 600kW back up diesel generator...

1 Oct 2023 at 2:31 | Open on rap.social
Mike D

@teajaygrey @Wen @bifrosty2k @Alienated53 @luis_in_brief @chu
No background is in IT so I'm familiar with DR. Doing it properly requires commitments of time and money from the people up top.

1 Oct 2023 at 2:39 | Open on sfba.social
ティージェーグレェ

@Wen @bifrosty2k @Alienated53 @luis_in_brief @chu

Similarly, for those doing hardware design, supply chain issues can be a real problem. JIT paradigms, break down entirely.

For example, anyone who pays attention to @bunnie's Precursor project, will have observed: this was done in the same time frame as the pandemic.

I preordered 2 Precursors. Both arrived, when expected, no issues.

In the same time frame, I also preordered a HiFive SiFive Unmatched. I never received it. Crowd Supply did not even issue me a refund, until last year.

Also in the same time frame, Planet Computers announced their "Astro Slide 5G" via IndieGoGo. Last time I received an update from that project (which was months ago) they had maybe only shipped units to about half the people who backed it, and were at odds with their ODM.

I mean, it doesn't surprise me that bunnie mitigated around the failures of the industry with which he is intimately familiar. His blog updates, even before the Precursor project, reflect how astute he is. His 2019 BlueHat talk on Supply Chain Security, is one of the only public presentations of its kind: youtube.com/watch?v=RqQhWitJ1A

His book, The Hardware Hacker, speaks to the realities and economics of supply chain pitfalls. Few other people even seem to be paying attention to such challenges, let alone sharing their knowledge publicly instead, treating them as "trade secrets".

Albeit I'm biased. I took a class in hardware hacking from bunnie at ToorCon in 2006. One thing that stood out when another student asked him: "what if someone clones your design and undercuts you?"

His response (paraphrasing): "If someone can do what I do, and bring it to market for less than what I can? I will use them as my supplier!"

Flawless logic there, most would be too tied to their ego & "ownership" to sit well with that type of adversarial economic fabricator. He clearly cares about security beyond price points into tractable methodologies which end users can verify themselves.

@Wen @bifrosty2k @Alienated53 @luis_in_brief @chu

Similarly, for those doing hardware design, supply chain issues can be a real problem. JIT paradigms, break down entirely.

For example, anyone who pays attention to @bunnie's Precursor project, will have observed: this was done in the same time frame as the pandemic.

1 Oct 2023 at 2:44 | Open on rap.social
Hal Pomeranz

@teajaygrey @Wen @bifrosty2k @Alienated53 @luis_in_brief @chu And even all of your contingencies fail if you can’t get more diesel to refill your generator’s tank. And that’s what’s going to happen if the rest of the world is suffering a sustained interruption. Oh, and how are you feeding your staff if the grocery stores are out of food and/or the water supply is interrupted?

Also you’re out of luck if people with guns decide to come take your nice digs away from you. That’s what full societal collapse looks like.

@teajaygrey @Wen @bifrosty2k @Alienated53 @luis_in_brief @chu And even all of your contingencies fail if you can’t get more diesel to refill your generator’s tank. And that’s what’s going to happen if the rest of the world is suffering a sustained interruption. Oh, and how are you feeding your staff if the grocery stores are out of food and/or the water supply is interrupted?

1 Oct 2023 at 4:15 | Open on infosec.exchange
ティージェーグレェ

@hal_pomeranz Yeah, one of the things that upsets me is the false promise of biodiesel.

In theory: hey, you can grow your own fuel supply!

In practice, I have never found a biodiesel vendor which does such things.

The promises of "your fuel won't come from an unethical war waged overseas" doesn't bear fruit when the "local" biodiesel vendors continue to charge a premium, even HIGHER than petro-diesel. So, as petro-diesel rates go up, biodiesel rates go up EVEN HIGHER, because greed and profiteering even for the "hippies" I guess?

It's exasperating.

I guess it's still local; there are still wins for sure, but a lot of warfare is economic in nature, not just environmental.

@Wen @bifrosty2k @Alienated53 @luis_in_brief @chu

@hal_pomeranz Yeah, one of the things that upsets me is the false promise of biodiesel.

In theory: hey, you can grow your own fuel supply!

In practice, I have never found a biodiesel vendor which does such things.

The promises of "your fuel won't come from an unethical war waged overseas" doesn't bear fruit when the "local" biodiesel vendors continue to charge a premium, even HIGHER than petro-diesel. So, as petro-diesel rates go up, biodiesel rates go up EVEN HIGHER, because greed and profiteering...

1 Oct 2023 at 4:58 | Open on rap.social
Estarriol, Cat owned Dragon

@Alienated53 @luis_in_brief @chu JIT works brilliantly where it starts at one end of an industrial complex and finished exits the other, like the Japanese ones. HP tried with plants in california and new england and wondered why it struggled......

30 Sep 2023 at 19:58 | Open on mastodon.scot
Peter_Panther

@Alienated53
Interestingly Kanban was invented in the 1940 to deal with disrupted supply chains due to war and scarcity after the war. Kanban is an optimiser. Not more not less, and it will work no matter what the environment is.
@luis_in_brief @chu

1 Oct 2023 at 7:11 | Open on mastodon.social
Bill the Galactic Hero

@luis_in_brief @chu It’s amazing after the Toilet Paper Shock of 2020, that people don’t see how quickly the supply chain will break

30 Sep 2023 at 19:22 | Open on mindly.social
Dahie

@GalacticHero This example also showed - how in the face of supply chain interruptions - everything is done to keep supply infrastructure rolling (speaking for central EU). Yes, in the scope of the pandemic it was tougher to get noodles and flower, but not impossible to switch to alternatives. Scope of the climate crisis is a different story.

30 Sep 2023 at 21:50 | Open on chaos.social
Infinite Cyclist

@GalacticHero I wonder how many households still have toilet paper stored since 2020.

1 Oct 2023 at 0:33 | Open on newsie.social
Matt Ferrel

@luis_in_brief @chu you would think the toilet paper shortage during the pandemic would have taught them something

30 Sep 2023 at 21:12 | Open on mastodon.sdf.org
Nils Skirnir

@luis_in_brief @chu So-called supply chains are really supply matrices and are truly 4 dimensional. They are very fragile

30 Sep 2023 at 22:53 | Open on kolektiva.social
@bike

@luis_in_brief @chu "deliberately-fragile JIT supply chains"

in which the shelves are missing more than toilet paper.

30 Sep 2023 at 23:39 | Open on toot.bike
Go Up