Everything is supply chains in movies but I would have gone with Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome as the example because I haven't seen the listed movies either.
When I saw this at the other place, my first thought was that I shouldn't wait to replace my personal computer.
It's a weird article, mainly because I'm not sure who the intended audience is. Software engineers, I imagine. It certainly isn't me. His two main metaphors don't actually illuminate anything for me, if anything they were obfuscatory. I was also struck by the claim that China's refusal of waste was ignored, which is very much not my experience. It may not have dominated headlines as much as the current situation, but it was widely reported and commented on, including here. I'm also not sure what to make of his observation that macro models don't account for the micro factors that actually drive things in practice on a moment to moment basis. Well, yes, that's the nature of modelling.
Even if you did include a dummy variable for asshat forgets to raise anchor, you can't estimate it.
Bad movie settings : anywhere there are no consistent characters. Like a bus stop maybe? Or anywhere where there are no obstacles to stop characters getting what they want. (A Culture Orbital.)
I guess that's why Forrest Gump sucked.
Also, his point about the Suez Canal authority suing the Ever Given's owners - it's perfectly possible to model that, it's the Coase theorem. Party A is asking for compensation from Party B. And if you're interested in either stock-flow consistent macro modelling or else beer distribution game MIT systems dynamics it's irrelevant - neither cares who paid who to move the ship, just that the ship was moved.
I'm also struck by the fact he just seems shocked and astonished and even offended that things are made out of matter and require conscious effort. The insight that as well as market activity between organizations there's an enormous amount of planned economic activity inside them is far from new - Herbert Simon wrote this in 1991:
"Suppose that ["a mythical visitor from Mars"] approaches the Earth from space, equipped with a telescope that revels social structures. The firms reveal themselves, say, as solid green areas with faint interior contours marking out divisions and departments. Market transactions show as red lines connecting firms, forming a network in the spaces between them. Within firms (and perhaps even between them) the approaching visitor also sees pale blue lines, the lines of authority connecting bosses with various levels of workers. As our visitors looked more carefully at the scene beneath, it might see one of the green masses divide, as a firm divested itself of one of its divisions. Or it might see one green object gobble up another. At this distance, the departing golden parachutes would probably not be visible.
No matter whether our visitor approached the United States or the Soviet Union, urban China or the European Community, the greater part of the space below it would be within green areas, for almost all of the inhabitants would be employees, hence inside the firm boundaries. Organizations would be the dominant feature of the landscape. A message sent back home, describing the scene, would speak of "large green areas interconnected by red lines." It would not likely speak of "a network of red lines connecting green spots.""
It's supposed to be "Herbert Simon, who worked in Squirrel Hill." The local angle matters.
Yeah, this reads like someone applying his own professional lenses to something he doesn't work on practically, with more humility than most who do that, but still little practical takeaway besides "shit is complicated".
"How on earth could anyone model the impacts of Chinese New Year?" I don't know, but I imagine they struggle through somehow.
I mean, there's a lot wrong with macro-economic models, but they can handle seasonality.
The inside of a restaurant is a bad setting for a movie, but Louis Malle made it work anyway.
Soundstages are pretty limiting, they can work well if sufficiently theatrical, but for instance, that's why Seinfeld is such a bad show.
You should watch Chinatown. Not because it's the greatest movie ever made, but because it's not bad, and is a good example of the kind of nuance that the suits decided not to make, preferring instead Star Wars simplicity, superheroes, and CGI spectaculars. And my god that Huston character. And of course, you can/should deplore the director's off-screen conduct throughout.
Global supply chain is like a Heist movie. Gotta have all the specialized players to pull off the caper.
Bus stops have recurring characters.
16: Star Wars had nuance before they edited it to make Han not shoot first.
For supply chain movies (even with a link to Star Wars), l would mention Sorcerer , released the same month as SW and so completely forgotten . Friedkin, who directed the Exorcist and Cruising.
California thread convergences here, but I'm suddenly intensely curious to poll everyone: which did you like better, "Chinatown" or "There Will Be Blood"?
I liked "Chinatown" a whole lot and just loathed TWBB (despite the score), and it strikes me that one of my problems with the latter was that it managed to make the story of the oil industry in California seem boring and stupid, which is a Herculean accomplishment, whereas "Chinatown" was a good movie about natural resource exploitation. Somehow. I haven't seen it in a while.
You can download the software the US uses to seasonally adjust data (the effect of the Christmas shopping season is incredibly gigantic). It's called X13-ARIMA-SEATS, which I think was the name of the killer police robots in Robocop.
I don't like Chinatown at all. I don't understand why they had to give the villain an additional familial flaw. It is completely unnecessary stupidness in a movie that up 'til that point is about interesting things.
Sorcerer is fantastic, a real nail biter. As is the film it's based on, Clouzot's Le Salaire de la peur.
This guy doesn't seem to understand that risk is something can be modeled. How do you model whether a pipeline might break in the port of Los Angeles? Look at all of the pipelines that have operated for decades, count how many have have ruptured . . . The insurance industry has been modeling this kind of thing for centuries. Insurers had even modeled the risk of pandemic, and had offered pandemic insurance, although hardly anyone thought it was worth the cost.
The real reason for supply chain disruptions is very simple: Americans changed consumption patterns from services to goods for the past year and a half. People who couldn't get haircuts or go out to movies bought furniture instead. Furniture requires a physical supply chain in a way that a year of haircuts does not. Oddball bottlenecks are a consequence of the entire system being closer to capacity than it usually is.
We bought zero furniture this year.
Except for one couch and two office chairs. I guess my point is I'm frugal because I have not replaced my recliner.
23: Wages of Fear is maybe the tensest and most harrowing movie I've ever seen. (I'm also a big fan of Le Corbeau, about a French village destroyed by anonymous letters, which Clouzot got in enormous trouble for making during the French occupation.)
Mad Max, definitely, actually all of the Road Warrior movies. Wasn't the most recent one about disruption with a hijacked fuel truck?
How about another classic? They Drive by Night about the new, high tech trucking industry, complete with Ida Lupino, yay, and a high tech murder.
Was the French Connection a supply chain movie? Just asking.
I've always found supply chains fascinating. If you are a city kid, odds are everything either comes from elsewhere or is made from stuff that comes from elsewhere. There were no iron mines or dairy cows in my neighborhood, but we had lots of stuff made of iron and plenty of milk to drink.
I think there was a consulting interview question about how many truckloads of bananas go to NYC every day and it was something like 7.
27. Agreed. I didn't sleep for a couple of days after seeing Wages of Fear. Not sure I'd be equal to Le Corbeau.
28. In my teens I spent one summer as a volunteer supervisor on a playground (read undeveloped bomb site) in the East End of London. Most of the apprentice criminals who played there had no idea that milk came from cows. Of course they had never seen a cow. The neighbourhood was later levelled and turned into some of the most expensive offices in the UK.
27. Agreed. I didn't sleep for a couple of days after seeing Wages of Fear. Not sure I'd be equal to Le Corbeau.
28. In my teens I spent one summer as a volunteer supervisor on a playground (read undeveloped bomb site) in the East End of London. Most of the apprentice criminals who played there had no idea that milk came from cows. Of course they had never seen a cow. The neighbourhood was later levelled and turned into some of the most expensive offices in the UK.
At $10 per banana, that's a lot of money.
I grew up in a county with more cows than people and a classmate whose family had a dairy herd.
My grandfather pretended that he'd grown up on a farm, milking cows, and then as an adult he ended up in Lawrence, Kansas, where there really were a lot of cows, and when it came up in conversation, he'd say, "I've milked enough cows to last a lifetime."
And it is true, because 0 is a legitimate number to last a lifetime.
I've never touched a non-human nipple intentionally.
I worked with Herb Simon. Great story about him. From him. He bought the first house the real estate agent showed him in Squirrel Hill. When asked why he didn't try to bargain down the price he said he assumed markets were efficient. He liked the house and was willing to pay the asked price. Who says economists aren't fun?
All the cool people have houses in Squirrel Hill.
Do you try to knock the price of housing down in the US? Here you start at the advertised price and bid up. We put our house on at 400 and got 425. We didn't think that was very good. If we hadn't been in a hurry we'd have held out for 450 and got it.
Simon buying in Squirrel Hill was a very long time ago. The transaction price then was always below asking.
I'm old.
In boom markets, offering over asking price is a thing, but I've never seen it. Around here it's normal to offer a bit under the asking (or a lot because setting a comically high asking price happens) and if a buyer does offer the asking, the owner would be seen as unreasonable for not agreeing (assuming they didn't have a higher offer).
I think we did offer to pay the asking price when we got ours. We'd lost two or three bids before that. This was in the days before the great recession. I am also old.
36: Tell us more about why you refuse to give dogs tummy rubs.
43, 44: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLopdpRY_zo
We need more movies about eclectic webzines.
We need more movies about eclectic webzines.
We need more movies about eclectic webzines.
I'll say it again, we need more movies about eclectic webzines.
I left reading Adam Smith's _Wealth of Nations_ until far too late. In my 30s, I learned that:
1. the price of gold & silver was pretty much the same, worldwide
2. the price of leather and tanned goods wasn't much-varying, but still it did vary, worldwide
3. and the price of meat was very varying, worldwide
From this Smith concluded that the more durable the good, the less variable the price was worldwide, once the good was sufficiently valuable to put on a boat. So what really mattered, was the price of boat transportation. Elsewhere, I learned that by the 20th century, once you put something on a boat, it really didn't matter very much how far you sent it: that's how cheap ocean transport is. And then I learned about "capesize carriers", that carry coal, ore, grain, etc. Literally, they can carry ore, which then has to be smelted to produce metal and (usually copious) byproduct tailings. That's how cheap ocean transport is.
I guess people don't understand just how pervasive globalization is, even though they should.
50: I got a sense of that from the factoid that fish gets shipped from Scotland to China for processing, then back to Scotland for consumption.
"He that commands the seas, commands the trade of the world; and who commands the trade of the world is lord of the wealth of the world." Sir Walter Raleigh, IIRC.
Minivet: Oh ha! Two nuggets:
1. I remember a little bit before The 2016 Apocalypse, learning that the USDA had authorized chickens to be sent to China for processing, and then returned to the US, and then not marked specially to distinguish from chicken that had been processed in the US. Boy was I reassured!
2. For decades, Trader Joe's naan has been made in Bombay (or ... well, in India -- I don't check every time I buy it, and haven't bought it in months and months, b/c pandemic). The idea that it's cheaper to bake flatbread in India, freeze it, and ship it frozen to the US .... well, that was a little bit of a surprise.
53.1 is funny given what the general opinion is over here of the safety of US chicken.
Ajay: heh indeed. But, uh, y'know, there's chlorinated chicken, and then there's melamine. I buy only organic chicken, and often only air-chilled, to your point.
Anyway, you ship the ore because the alternative is to ship the fuel and charcoal gets the ship really dirty.
The Unmitigated Pedantry guy has a gig piece explaining just how much forest you need to make the metal bits for a legion.
Settler Montana, as opposed to Indigenous Montana, has been about the global supply chain from day 1. The fur trade, mining, logging, sheep ranching, wheat farming, you name it.
I was just reading about our no-longer-operative aluminum industry. The timeline: https://flatheadbeacon.com/2016/09/14/rise-fall-columbia-falls-aluminum-plant/ Do you know what ingredient of aluminum we have here?
This one is more in depth. What's notable here, I'd say, is the extent of government involvement in getting the thing off the ground, see e.g. pp 12-13, and that Anaconda didn't know shit about aluminum id 13-15.
(The answer is electricity. Bauxite from Jamaica was smelted into alumina in Corpus Christi and then shipped by rail to northwester Montana to be reduced to aluminum.)
"I thought you only got melamine in milk."
Yeah IIRC they dumped it in there to make it look like the milk had higher protein content
More of the history of aluminum here, including the exciting British process combining shale and human urine. https://montana-aluminum.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/AL-book-Chapter-1.pdf page 7.
Maybe that's why the British pronounce it different
The extra 'i' is because I peed in it.
The answer is electricity
Hungry Horse, come for the electricity, stay for the glory hole.
https://www.usbr.gov/pn/hungryhorse/history/5.html
CharleyCarp: Oh yeah, that was another interesting example from Adam Smith's book: he described how the fashion tastes of Parisian society ladies was intimately tied-up with the business of rough, rugged, independent, [insert adjectives for he-man] fur-trappers in deepest Canada. Without those society ladies, those trappers wouldn't have been there.
The link is 63 explains how the Brits ended up saying it wrong.
55: Chet, if you think buying organic chicken is safer in the US, I think you're misinformed. Food safety in this context is about proper slaughterhouse practice, not about toxins. "Organic" won't save you.
Bell and Evans chicken is labeled "Air Chilled," which I think is what you are getting at. It's what we buy, though we do eat lots of chicken we don't cook for ourselves.
Many of the fancier local restaurants do specify that they use the same chicken.
You can't step into the same chicken twice.
Anyway, some people splurge on cars, some on jewelry or watches. I splurge on chicken.
Supply chain relevant -- the most remote places I know in Lapland are mines for gold and lead as well as iron. Both of which are are useful up there only for what you can buy with the money you sell them for, and wholly useless to the Sami. Similarly, one of my favourite hamlets, which was only connected by road to the rest of Sweden in the late Thirties, used to sent ptarmigan and butter over the mountains to Norway before then; from the Norwegian coast they were shipped to high end restaurants in Oslo and even Britain.
(not all three minerals from the same mines. Sprinkle commas to taste)
All we get is chicken and margarine.
So much covid. I wonder if this will re-scare the old-people Republicans?
McConnell is only five years younger and has to be exposed to way more people than Powell.
McConnell is the one Republican who has shown any seriousness about covid protections.
Right, because why ruin the world if you don't have a few years to enjoy watching everyone suffer.
Its the difference between being evil and stupid and just being evil.
Bastard was fully vaccinated and then went and died while having covid. Gift to the loonies.
Powell was being treated for multiple myeloma which destroys your immune response. I know the crazies won't care but it's actually a great example of why we need healthy people vaccinated to protect at-risk individuals.
83 with blood cancer, which I wish people were reporting along with fully vaccinated.
Wow someone's actually taking the time to nuke the spam!
Its warmer that way. Nobody likes cold spam.
Someone crashed into my retaining wall again. I'm starting to think of straight trucks as a form of erosion.
87. Yes, that's why I said "while having", not "of". But you're right that the crazies won't care. We all know what the myth will be.
91-93: It's a conspiracy to stretch out guest posts so that they pay off better for me. I had posted before seeing Ogged's post.
You should check with him before you post because he's up to a post every 21 months now.
94: Someone crashed into my retaining wall again.
Late Saturday night (actually early Sunday morning) someone lost control coming around the bend below my house, clipped my neighbor's mailbox, destroyed mine and the lower three steps of my walk (losing a wheel in the process) and continued on to whack a tree at the other end of my yard which turned the car on its side in the road (my yard slopes down to the street). My wife and I heard nothing; I only was awakened by the flashing lights of the emergency crews. The driver apparently climbed out and fled before the police got there.
A little surprising as he was coming up a rather steep hill at the time. Not a reoccurring problem, but I had just replaced the mailbox ~6 months ago when someone backed out of the neighbor's driveway across the street and hit it.