Re:Millions of credit-card customers can’t pay their bills
by TeMPOraL on Saturday April 25, 2020 @06:15PM
(#22982056)
> Make sure the truly essential workers (the ones needed to keep us fed, clothed, healthy, and with the lights on)
Can you enumerate these people/jobs, and the stuff they need?
I feel I'm slowly coming around to be against lockdowns. I used to think things similar to what you wrote, but I've also been following supply chain news over the past two months. And I keep seeing things like:
- There's a shortage of yeast and flour in stores not because there's a shortage of actual yeasts and flour, but because there's a shortage of store-sized packaging for them. If you want to buy 50 kilos of flour in one bag, there's plenty of that on the market.
- At one point the UK was worried that delivering food into stores will slow down because the UK was running out of cardboard, as people order more while garbage collection for recycling halted. I haven't seen anything on that topic for a while, so maybe it was resolved.
- Recently, it was said that US food production may face problems because of shortage of carbon dioxide. The path here is that shenanigans with oil prices and closing down of various industries caused the plants producing, among other things, carbon dioxide, to shut down.
I'm just waiting for the first stories along the line of "critical sector X is rapidly losing manufacturing capacity as they run out of spare parts for some doodad Y, which are unavailable because they're manufactured by Z, which was deemed non-critical business".
For better or worse, we ended up with complex and deeply interconnected supply chains that nobody seems to have traced properly, so critical industries keep experiencing unexpected and non-obvious issues. This situation doesn't lend itself to shutting down arbitrary pieces of economy.
Can you enumerate these people/jobs, and the stuff they need?
I feel I'm slowly coming around to be against lockdowns. I used to think things similar to what you wrote, but I've also been following supply chain news over the past two months. And I keep seeing things like:
- There's a shortage of yeast and flour in stores not because there's a shortage of actual yeasts and flour, but because there's a shortage of store-sized packaging for them. If you want to buy 50 kilos of flour in one bag, there's plenty of that on the market.
- At one point the UK was worried that delivering food into stores will slow down because the UK was running out of cardboard, as people order more while garbage collection for recycling halted. I haven't seen anything on that topic for a while, so maybe it was resolved.
- Recently, it was said that US food production may face problems because of shortage of carbon dioxide. The path here is that shenanigans with oil prices and closing down of various industries caused the plants producing, among other things, carbon dioxide, to shut down.
I'm just waiting for the first stories along the line of "critical sector X is rapidly losing manufacturing capacity as they run out of spare parts for some doodad Y, which are unavailable because they're manufactured by Z, which was deemed non-critical business".
For better or worse, we ended up with complex and deeply interconnected supply chains that nobody seems to have traced properly, so critical industries keep experiencing unexpected and non-obvious issues. This situation doesn't lend itself to shutting down arbitrary pieces of economy.