[tonyedgecombe]

but this particular stuck boat is giving visibility to how fragile and interconnected everything is

Interconnected but not really fragile. One of the things about the pandemic that I was surprised by is how little effect it had. I kept buying food at the supermarket yet the naysayers were telling us we would be eating each other by now.

[kbelder]

Right. My biggest fear during the pandemic was a supply chain collapse, which would be FAR more damaging than the disease itself. Pleasantly, it hasn't yet materialized.

I think the chain was fragile, in that we immediately saw disruptions and shortages... but also adaptable, in that people responded and corrected them. Few problems can stand against a million competent businesses all working to fix things.

I want to see a detailed, process-oriented documentary about how the toilet paper manufacturers and distributors responded during the first few weeks of the pandemic. I bet there were damn near heroic efforts put out by some individuals, just to keep the supply flowing.

[randomsearch]

Same. I did notice however that prices went up across the board, and some generic products appeared that I hadn’t seen before.

The biggest difference (in the U.K.) is that almost all offers, discounts, disappeared. Effectively a temporary price hike.

So I concluded that probably my mistake was to underestimate the power of the market to regulate demand through higher prices. I can imagine people who stockpiled initially wouldn’t have been so keen to fill the trolley once the prices of some products doubled.

[kaesar14]

Right, I don't understand the claims that COVID proved how fragile the global supply chain/capitalism have made our civilization. Despite lockdowns, millions of people getting sick and dying, and widespread panic, the food and goods never stopped moving. The interconnectedness makes us stronger, as we're able to marshal the resources of a global civilization to compensate for issues as they arise.

[tharkun__]

Just imagine if the border closure between the US and Canada actually applied to truck drivers the same way it applies to regular travel (say to see your parents that live right across the border).

There are many more examples all around the world like that. It's just that we don't apply the same rules in order to keep the supply chain going, which is needed to keep civilization going and not going into a SHTF scenario. At least here in Canada, meat processing plants is another one of those examples. They had a real issue with that in the beginning where too many plants were shut down due to infections. It's the same in Germany for example. It's low paid labour. Usually done by people from Eastern Europe and they live crammed together while in Germany and they have a steady flow of people coming and going to flout rules about paying for proper social insurance and such, so you have a steady exchange of potential Covid-19 carriers between countries that have lived and worked in ideal conditions for large outbreaks. But you know, people gotta eat and eat cheap!

[tonyedgecombe]

>Just imagine if the border closure between the US and Canada actually applied to truck drivers the same way it applies to regular travel

We did briefly have that with the border between the UK and the EU. It soon got resolved.

[Nasrudith]

To be frank a lot of the vague ill defined claims aboht "capitalism/fragile" appeared to be ideological whataboutism from both communists and antiglobalists respectively. The previous defensively about their infamous shortages but that fails with a nanosecond of thought because to get the lasting shortages took /a fucking global pandemic/ instead of business as usual being empty shelves and occassionally massive overclocking of one thing.

It strikes me as cognitive dissonance and rigid thinking that capitalism equals always bad ior global connections equals always bad and spitefully trying to find something to justify their dogma.