[hedora]

There was a lot written about this in the 1990s during the rise of globalization and just in time supply chains.

Basically, you build a big warehouse and keep it full when prices are below projection.

This is equivalent to investing capital at a negative interest rate, so it’s not done anymore. Instead, the system is designed to pass supply shocks on to the consumer when possible.

I’ve noticed the local grocery stores have started replacing shelf price tags with little computers so they can reprice food in real time. (And hire fewer stock people),

Anyway, the keyword you want is “just in time supply chain”.

[znnajdla]

> This is equivalent to investing capital at a negative interest rate, so it’s not done anymore.

Stupidity of financializing everything. There’s no amount of money in the world that can quantify the safety of having critical items like food in supply. You can’t eat money. If everyone builds “just in time” supply chains the world collapses after a single shock.

[pas]

but there's finite resources. cost-benefit analysis still makes sense. there are things that consumers can easily substitute.

for example meat is a high-quality but luxury source of protein, as in it's expensive, but people like it a lot so they pay a lot for it, see beef prices, but except specific allergies everyone can switch to poultry, fish, or plant-based protein sources easily, as in anyone people who prepare food at home can easily prepare a different one, restaurants can switch too, etc.

but there are products with very fragile supply-chains, like baby formula (breast milk is not always available/possible), but there are not a lot of domestic producers, and there's some typical political meddling with it (since it's critical there's a lot of subsidy for it, and since it's quality controlled it's not easy to enter the market, since it's FDA controlled you can't just import it), yet there's no mandatory stockpiling. it would push up the price. how much? who knows. depending on how perishable the product, how much would it cost to warehouse it. should this be done with public money? should this be one more regulatory burden? yet more cost-benefit questions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_infant_form...

[znnajdla]

Nope, this is bullshit. Some things you simply cannot put a price on, and therefore are not amenable to cost benefit analysis. What’s the cost of a human life? The cost of sovereignty and freedom and independence? The cost of wanting to live the lifestyle we want, such as eating meat even when there are alternatives? The cost of beauty and love? Financializers simply ignore all of the things they cannot put a price on and lose all of the above.

[pas]

Trade offs are still real even if you decide to run away from them.

Finance is a service that facilitates a form of this. The questions you ask all require context.

For example we have a rough estimate of how much the Iranian regime spent on chasing the dream of nuclear deterrence. About 2 trillion dollars. This is the trade off they went with. This is the money that they did not put into desalination plants, for example. And similarly, just to again see how important context is. They decided to make themselves more sanction-proof, which means growing a lot of food in a very arid region, which requires a lot of water. Again, even though a bushel of wheat on the global market is cheaper than growing their own, they decided the risk of getting cut off was not worth it.

Also I'm not saying "sell 'em all; let the market sort it out", quite the opposite. But without even having a way to put prices on things we can't even talk about what and how much to tax, and what we are collectively then spending that public money on, and then see how much sense that makes.

[znnajdla]

No. I'm not willing to put a cost on: freedom, sovereignty, or life, and I'm not willing to consider "tradeoffs" to these things. These are simply things I'd rather die than live without, no matter the cost. And encouraging people to think about the cost of these things is actively harmful. Spreadsheets are the tools used by financiers to enslave people.

[klysm]

Yes but think of the shareholders! And that doesn’t show up nicely on a spreadsheet does it?

[genxy]

I can and can't believe that for the whole thread, your comment is the only one with the phrase "just in time".

If you want hydraulic shock, you replace your warehouse with fedex.