That's the weird part. The argument seems to be that any temporal failure of a system means we need to change the system wholesale. There is no argument for why a different system would be better, merely the belief that the current system has flaws, therefore...

This part confused me:

> bad public policy coupled with decades of corporate greed.

The article mentions a cascading set of changes that move from minor inconvenience (bicycle parts) to minor but more serious inconvenience (french fries being, however tangentially, "food"). Even then, there is no claim that the "have no potatoes" was for all ingredients, and no one went hungry did they? Unless I'm mistaken, no one in the west has yet starved as a result of all this. Happy to be corrected.

A restaurant I go to has variously been out of Lamb, Chicken and Sweet potatoes. I mean, the horror of being forced to eat normal potato wedges over sweet potato wedges was too much for me, but AFAICT I'm still alive.

So it seems like, as you point out, the system has failed to produce the outcome people claim not to want - huge choice variety and abundance - but has instead produced slightly less than huge choice variety at some moments in time. I'm not sold that's a disaster.

> but has instead produced slightly less than huge choice variety at some moments in time. I'm not sold that's a disaster.

Yeah, the ship has a hole which visibly widens, but we are not underwater yet, so that's not a disaster.

That's a metaphor that could be applied to literally anything.

What point about reality is it making?

Are people standing in line for toilet paper or bread?

Of course those problems can be fixed and are not too bad YET, but saying that you don't need to worry about this is wrong.

What widening? Throughput at ports is within a few percent of where it has been.

The first derivative of food supply disruption is clearly positive. The exact value of the second is debatable, but I feel confident saying it is at least not clearly substantially negative. Slightly negative at best and I can't give a lot of evidence for that.

The sum total of that disruption has not yet burned through our buffer, though it has caused a noticeable rise in prices. However, it is not wise to wait for our buffer to be entirely gone before being willing to identify the problem.

> The first derivative of food supply disruption is clearly positive.

It might be more than it was a month ago, but it seems to me that we had worse disruption earlier in the pandemic than we have right now.

The world if you have something and then take it away is not equivalent to the one in which said thing never existed to begin with.

Before globalized trade each country had more local manufacturing.