Christopher Columbus reached the Americas in 1492. He traded colourful beads and small mirrors. In return he got gold. Both the indigenous people and the Spaniards thought of each other as fools.
Value does not arise out of usage or cash flow or how something is classified or even its history. Value arises out of perception. Its all a narrative. It always has been.
People thinking crypto is useless is a narrative. People thinking money will always lose value due to inflation is a narrative. Both are true based on your point of perception.
You've got to do less but do better. Thinking that you need to do more is the culprit.
Marie Kondo teaches how to declutter your home by using joy as measurement. You've got to do the same thing to declutter first. Make a list of everything you do. And then measure them on 3 points:
1. Does it give you joy?
2. Does it earn you compliments?
3. Does it captivate you and keep you interested?
If the answer is no for any of the 3 questions, cut it out. (Question 2 should only be used for money making activities.)
There is a point to gossip (which is what most news is.) Gossip connects people. Helps with bonding. When two music lovers meet, they don't each talk about their fav musician. Because that would quickly make the conversation competitive. So instead, they talk about the most famous current musician.
Don't disconnect yourself so much that it makes interaction with others difficult. Find one or two good sources of headlines. And don't go deeper than the headlines or the first paragraph. 2 minutes a day is enough news.
I said I gained "more confidence", not that I am confident. After all, like I said, I put about 15 seconds of thought into it, which was how long I knew that Ryan Holiday as a person even existed.
But I think I get it. I'll make another assumption, still in about 15 seconds, this time about you: You like Ryan Holiday. You subscribe to his mailing lists, have read his writings, and may have a couple of his books on your shelf. Your views on the world are aligned with his. So you're offended that I made a negative assumption about him because he's "your guy".
I think it's very easy to make assumptions and it's good to have heuristics to make life easier. But it's not wise to double down on them.
(You're half wrong again. I dont think stoicism that Ryan Holiday talks about is the greatest philosophy. I have read a couple of his books but dont subscribe to him. Anyways I would love to buy you a copy of his work if you want to read and judge for yourself.)
I've not played Factorio but love your argument. Very thought provoking.
What happens if something in the middle breaks and you don't have a buffer? What happens if there is no iron shortage but the steel furnace blows up? Aren't buffers important in such situations?
> What happens if something in the middle breaks and you don't have a buffer? What happens if there is no iron shortage but the steel furnace blows up? Aren't buffers important in such situations?
Okay, lets have two factories that convert 5-iron into 1-steel (Factorio ratio):
* "Buffer Factory": requiring 7000 steel to buffer up / 35000 iron before working at full capacity.
* "JIT Factory" : requires 200 steel to buffer / 1000 iron before working at full capacity.
The JIT-factory can sustain for 5-seconds without any inputs. (Belts in the game pull 40-items per second). The Buffer-factory can sustain for 175 seconds. You're seeing this as a good thing. It is not.
When you hook up a new source of iron to the JIT-factory, it only needs 5-seconds (assuming 5-belts of iron: 200 iron/second) before it starts up to full capacity.
When you hook up a new source of iron to the Buffer-factory, it needs 175 seconds before it goes back into full capacity. (The 175 seconds of buffering "need to be paid" at some point. In the case of Buffer-factories, that payment is done _before_ your end product is even finished).
JIT-factory is more useful. You shutdown when you run out of material (aka: using less electricity. Using fewer resources. Using fewer items).
The Buffer-factory needs 175-seconds to shutdown after running out of material. It also needs 175-seconds of "booting up" once you hook up new sources of material to it. That's electricity you're spending, resources you're using on BUFFERING that's completely a waste.
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Yeah, it sucks to be a worker in the JIT-factory, because your managers want to fire you during these low periods. But you can't deny the underlying efficiency of the strategy. Of course workers want the 175-seconds of buffering periods (aka: to be paid even when the factory is unproductive). But that's short-sighted.
I'm not saying that workers "Deserve" to get screwed here. But fundamentally speaking, the JIT-factory is clearly more efficient. What we need to discuss politically is how to protect the livelihoods of the workers during these periods when supplies run out.
But building systems where you have long periods of "boot up" and "shut down" just so that workers have something to do? That's not useful at all. And anyone who has played Factorio will see this instantly when thinking about buffers.
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Now I don't know the "ratios" of chips to cars. But lets say 100 chips create 1 car for simplicity.
Lets say Ford gets a shipment of 100,000 chips next month. Should Ford build 1000 vehicles? Or should Ford build 500 vehicles (and buffer up 50,000 chips) ??
Think about what the buffer actually means. Obviously, building 1000 vehicles is the answer. The sooner the vehicles are done, the better. The buffer only wastes time and energy.
Your initial example is not making an argument against buffers in the supply chain, but against large production runs requiring large inputs. In the context of logistics, I think of a buffer as a system that slowly fills up due to excess capacity greater than demand, which can be drawn down in times when demand exceeds production. You seem to be referring to a buffer as a process which requires large inputs to get start producing. Ironically, a buffer as I use the term would decrease the 175s startup time for your "buffered" factory.
In real life, factories/farms/hospitals are not designed to agilely shut down and start up again while awaiting inputs, or when there is no demand for the output. Upon a drop in inputs the company goes bankrupt, the crop doesn't get planted, or the patient dies. Upon a drop in demand the company goes bankrupt, the crop gets thrown out, or the travel nurses go elsewhere. Where flexibility in supplies is not an option, the solution is to have a buffer of money (or credit), seed, or medical supplies to smooth out anticipated supply shocks, and we buffer against demand shocks with money/credit, features markets, storage facilities, and some hospital inefficiency.
> You seem to be referring to a buffer as a process which requires large inputs to get start producing.
No.
> I think of a buffer as a system that slowly fills up due to excess capacity greater than demand, which can be drawn down in times when demand exceeds production.
Yes. That's what I mean.
The steel furnaces __use iron__. This means that during the buffering process, the steel furnaces are "saving up iron", and preventing the rest of your factory from using iron.
That is to say: the 35,000 iron you put into the steel furnace __COULD HAVE BEEN USED__ in the yellow-belt portion of your factory, and could have instead made 23333 yellow belts.
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Its not worthwhile to save up 7000 steel (aka: 35,000 effective iron) when that iron could have been used to make _OTHER_ parts of your factory do important things.
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It doesn't matter if you "buffer up" that 35,000 iron slowly, quickly, all at once or over anything. Any such buffering means your "steel portion" has arbitrarily decided that the iron should be saved here, in a box unused. While shortages propagate outward to all the other parts of your Factorio where you __COULD__ have been using the iron instead.
Ok. So the problem is that your furnaces are too greedy. They are buffering up in the absence of oversupply. There are many in-game solutions to that, but in reality we use price signals. When price signals are not available, we shame people for being greedy and hoarding.
Well, what if some of us think that the cryptominers are being too greedy, and maybe they should cut back on their chip orders so that car companies get more chips?
This chip shortage thing was foreseen in March: 7 months ago. That was more than enough time for a new batch of chips to be made or for production runs to be reallocated.
EDIT: Taiwan seems to think some hoarding is going on: https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4306366. We know that all chip-manufacturers are using more wafers and creating more chips than ever before. Yes, even this year (even as Texas got that cold-snap and frozen power plants). So why do we have a chip shortage?
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