Japan to fund firms to shift production out of China

Re:Japan to fund firms to shift production out of China by xamuel on Thursday April 09, 2020 @12:42PM (#22824392)

How would it work if we got globalism "right"? What if instead of a virus, it was an asteroid which instantly destroyed all the factories in Country X, so there's no way for Country X to send supplies overseas even if they wanted to? If we want to be safe from events like that, we better not outsource any critical production to Country X. But if we don't outsource any critical production to any foreign countries, what's even left of globalism then?

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Re:Japan to fund firms to shift production out of China by TeMPOraL on Thursday April 09, 2020 @12:49PM (#22824485)

I think doing globalism right would require everyone to mandate some amount of redundancies be left in the supply chains. Some amount of fat left uncut. All in order to derisk the economy in case a random piece of it gets shut down by force majeure.

I mean, imagine if all of AWS was just a single data centre labeled us-west-1. Imagine something happened to it. This is comparable to how Wuhan shutting down impacted the global supply chains.

(I lack a good web comparison for what happened afterwards - the EU, and recently the US, shutting down, hitting the global supply chains again, this time on the demand side.)

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Re:Japan to fund firms to shift production out of China by xamuel on Thursday April 09, 2020 @01:16PM (#22824838)

Since you mention web comparisons, imagine your lead dev announces that to improve redundancy, the project shall use both React and Angular for the same application. "This way, if one of the dependencies shuts down, we'll already be partly using the other dependency! What could possibly go wrong?"

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Re:Japan to fund firms to shift production out of China by TeMPOraL on Thursday April 09, 2020 @02:36PM (#22825742)

This makes no sense, because the only reason React would suddenly fail on you is if your project is so very badly engineered that you don't pin dependencies and cache them locally. And even then, your deployed instances would remain unaffected.

A dependency is something you own (a checked-out copy of). A better comparison is with services. So you may be using a payment gateway in your product, and maybe you need just a single one - but at the very minimum, you should have a plan in place to switch to a different one at a moment's notice. That's reasonable redundancy.

I think I've come up with an analogy for demand-side supply chain issues though. Imagine you have a web service that's constantly under 90% load during normal operations, and that eats almost exactly as much money in the infrastructure costs as it earns. Imagine that service gets mentioned on Hacker News. It almost immediately fails due to increased demand, you can't provision new instances because you don't have enough money in the bank, and then when suddenly the demand drops, you can't afford to keep it on at all.

Only a series of very bad decision would cause the above scenario to happen, and yet it's almost exactly like how supply chains operate in physical space.

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Re:Japan to fund firms to shift production out of China by xamuel on Thursday April 09, 2020 @02:48PM (#22825861)

We could easily imagine that suddenly it is revealed that React contains some super-well-hidden malware that phones home to Facebook, and that's been built into React since early versions. As doubtful as that sounds, it's actually not unlike recent scares about China embedding secret transmitters deep inside of circuitboards, etc.

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Re:Japan to fund firms to shift production out of China by TeMPOraL on Thursday April 09, 2020 @02:54PM (#22825917)

Again, you own your code dependencies[0]. A patch would be quickly released by software security experts, which every half-competent developer could apply to their product on their own. That's the benefit of ownership - you get to fix things. With software, you don't even need spare parts.

Depending on services is where the fragility starts. They're single points of failure, unless you have a plan to quickly switch to an equivalent competitor.

[0] - Unless they have a time-limited commercial license. Then they're essentially a service.

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Re:Japan to fund firms to shift production out of China by int_19h on Thursday April 09, 2020 @08:28PM (#22828705)

Doing globalism "right" requires that there are no borders at all, so it would be solved in exactly the same manner as if the factories and the supplies were in two different corners of Country X.

We are also not getting there anytime soon.

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