this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
144 points (99.3% liked)
Technology
59665 readers
3831 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You're not a "doomer", as I read it more like the opposite- your defense of global trade is optimistic. Trade and specialization doesn't work nearly that cleanly in practice.
Companies and governments saw the disruptions of the past few years and realized that there are unaccounted for costs (and benefits) to the global supply chain. COVID, shipping disruptions (strikes, Evergreen, prices), the chip shortage, etc. all have taught a lesson about the diversification of supply chain risk. Decentralization isn't less efficient when you include those costs. So it makes more sense now to make goods in America for America, and make goods in China for China. Not all goods, obviously, but the scales have shifted...and that's a good thing for the health of global supply.
To extend your point, the fruit analogy assumes shipping is completely frictionless. In reality there are all kinds of downsides to shipping everything 12,000 miles across the world, both social and environmental. If you ship out 12 bananas and the cargo ship, train, or truck gets delayed, suddenly you have 0 bananas. Not to mention all the extra CO2, which the companies get to conveniently ignore.