There never was a container shortage worldwide. There were a lot of containers in the wrong places. They were piling up in West Coast US ports and scarce in China. It was more cost-effective to take ships back empty than filling them with empty containers to go back. Some of this was corrected by applying port fees to shippers who didn't take enough containers back.
This reflects the US's lack of exports and China no longer wanting unsorted US recycling.
There are many states where Bottle Rockets are still legal; they are generally states that are not considered a Nanny state or do not have high risk of fires. Some states like Texas banned them because too many houses had wooden shingled roofs decades ago that tended to catch fire because of a bottle rocket landing on them. And laws are much harder to get rid of once they have been enacted so despite very few homes actually still having a wooden shingled roof the ban on bottle rockets still stands.
A lot of places(From the state level down to individual city level) use the annual Consumer Product Safety Commission report on Firework injuries to determine what needs to be banned for so called "public safety" reasons. Which is why you have places that have even banned Sparklers.
Glad you liked it. I think this 8 second clip of a guy saying 'I'm lost' is hysterical, never gets an upvote though. Maybe you have to be English to get it.
Interesting. What kind of patterns have you tried to look for?
One source of "randomness" in user voting on time-sensitive sites (as opposed to e.g. a forum where you could log in once per day and read up on everything) is that the oline audience changes troughout the day as different timezones are at work / asleep / etc. This is both a regional change as well as an occupational/age change.
I discovered letting Europe see it a few hours before the USA woke up was the best time of day. A post needed a few upvotes before the 'bury brigade' saw it.
The recycling but is interesting. I was not aware of this aspect but have heard from other nations that they no longer accept containers full of plastic rubbish.
Yeah, even in Europe this is happening at a massive scale. Romanian border checks often uncover dozens or even hundreds of tones of plastic, textile, rubber garbage and e-waste coming from countries like France, Germany and the UK, falsely marked as "recycling" or "raw materials" in the paperwork, which are definitely not recyclable or usable, but will end up in some Romanian landfill operated by some shady unscrupulous business owner who even burn the trash sometimes, causing masive air pollution. I heard the same is happening in other countries, such as Turkey.
It hit me that many rich countries get their so called "green-ness" by paying poorer, more corrupt countries, to offshore their environmental damage, while globally the impact is still the same, but as long as it's not in their back yard, it counts as being green.
> operated by some shady unscrupulous business owner who even burn the trash sometimes,
As a guy living in Bucharest I can confirm that unfortunately that stuff is really happening.
It's kind of crazy when you think about it, i.e. the externality of regularly intoxicating about 2 million people with smoke that has the smell of some chemical trash so that some people further West can check the "we've done our part! we've recycled!" checkbox. All this while literally putting money in the Italian Mafia's pockets, as articles like this one [1] can attest to (in Romanian, but Google Translate can help).
Yeah, a lot should be coordinated at EU level to stop this practice. For example, if one country finds illegal trash trying to be imported at its borders, then the country of origin should bare part of the environmental fine in order to encourage self policing and environmental responsibility at the source instead of putting all the burden of policing at the poorer target countries since as it stands right now, western EU countries "get greener" by pushing their trash to Romania, and then scold Romania at the European Commission for being too polluted lol.
However, here's a major issue I found in the link you shared (translated to English via DeepL):
"The landfill in Glina [Bucharest, Romania] is a health hazard for citizens and the European Commission recognized this a few years ago. According to the law, landfills must be at least 1000 meters away from people's homes, but the one in Glina is only 70 meters away. The National Environmental Guard has never thoroughly checked the entire area, and there is evidence that hazardous waste may also be hidden there. Underneath the mountains of rubbish that have risen up near Bucharest no one knows what is really hidden and how much damage is being done to the land in that area.
In 2017, environmentalists warned that there was even cyanide pollution at Glina that could reach Bucharest. Prosecutors also opened an investigation after it was discovered that a Romanian company was discharging cyanide waste at the Glina dump, but these cases never reached final decisions because the trials were far too long, bogged down in courtroom proceedings and the facts were time-barred."
The problems I see here are two fold:
One, the Romanian authorities can't be bothered to police what's happening meters away from the capital city, where all the government institutions and politicians are.
And two, it seems like whenever something foul gets uncovered, the Romanian justice system is so incompetent, that nothing happens in the end and the perpetrators get away scot free on technical failures of the system, which only serves to attract and encourage further criminal activity of this nature.
This is a systemic failure on the Romanian side of epic proportions and needs to be addressed ASAP.
It's not just the Romanian system that has these issues. We have similar issues in Bulgaria too. There was some social movement in the past to replace the chief prosecutor, but to no avail. Political parties in the parliament seem to be backed by some financial circles and voting doesn't seem to have any long term effect on the general state of matters (less than 40% voted at all at this year's elections). Non-compliant bottom up/grassroots political movements are dealt with using different tools, ranging from discreditation campaigns in media, to "embrace and extend" and finally brutal suppression using the government power structures.
Same in Poland. And the "landfills" are just random plots of land, often very near high-density areas. The gangsters dump the waste in there, collect the money from their Western clients and disappear before the waste is discovered and police gets involved. Quite often, it's real nasty stuff (very toxic chemicals) and cleanup of one such site costs tens of millions of euros.
> It hit me that many rich countries get their so called "green-ness" by paying poorer, more corrupt countries, to offshore their environmental damage, while globally the impact is still the same, but as long as it's not in their back yard, it counts as being green.
Shit rolls downhill, don't forget that a lot of stuff imported in Romania is produced in China, partially because their environmental rules are even less strict than places like Romania.
In the last decades around here (the Netherlands) they have started burning more an more trash in an effort to stop using landfills, produce energy and to lower the amount of these corrupt streams going through poorer countries. I think some Nordic country even had to massively import garbage as they didn't produce enough.
Yeah, China famously stopped accepting it iirc, or India? One of them anyways.
Call me a conspiracy thinker, but I'm confident it was part of an international scam; companies in western European countries claim to recycle things, encourage consumers to separate their waste. They process it, bundle it up, and get a checkmark for having recycled it.
But then it gets exported and put in landfills or just burned. It would've been better for the environment (largely speaking) it was just landfilled or burned in the country of origin. I don't think garbage exports / imports should be a thing.
There is a bit of a pattern where society at large struggles to reason about waste (and end of life care, probably for similar reasons - triggers fear and disgust responses). Completely unavoidable part of sustaining a modern society. But it seems to be intolerable to handle in the harm-minimising way and essential to handle in the harm-most-difficult-to-see way.
It can be very frustrating. We'd be better off if people just took a deep breath and put their emotions to one side when we know that emotional reasoning leads to bad outcomes.
Sweden burns trash for electricity. But they also recycle too well. They reached a point where they were scrambling to import enough trash to run their electric plants. I don’t disagree in principle, but this is a (very limited) counterpoint where trash exports are a positive thing.
We should be exporting trash from fragile environments to sturdy ones wherever possible, even when national boundaries need to be crossed.
Australian landfill waste should go to the outback rather than rainforests, Chinese waste should go to their western deserts and tropical Africa should export waste to Saharan Africa to reduce the impact on wildlife.
Broadly agree that we should be shipping waste to robust ecosystems, but I differ on where that is. Generally speaking deserts are more fragile than high moisture ecosystems, though. Cryptobiotic crusts can take hundreds of years to form, and even a small disruption can destroy them until they reform.
More robust ecosystems reform readily, like hardwood and softwood secondary growth forests in the US, for example. They can quite happily grow back in a few decades on top of a clay capped landfill.
The myth was deliberately created by the plastic industry to shift blame from the plastic producers to the end consumers.
Know who invented the recycling emblem?
Like is the idea that the recycling companies are getting so much for collection that they can afford to pay to ship the stuff to China and landfill it there?
In Europe it is also likely the plastic packaging industry that's mostly paying for it as its cheaper for them to make it seem like plastic packaging can be recycled, that it is to get regulated to not cause so much waste.
A more generous reading would be that the industry is being incentivized to make their product easier to recycle by making them pay for the recycling, but it depends a bit on how cynical you are :).
The result though is that at least in my area the recycles pay so much for plastic waste that the municipality could lower the garbage disposal taxes as they were making money like with paper.
US taxpayers and consumers, via the prices charged by waste removal companies.
Recycling plastic was always a feel good political measure to let people continue consuming more and more with no guilt of harming the environment. The solution was always to reduce consumption, but that does not sell as well to voters.
Once I learned about it, I have never since recycled and have encouraged others not to recycle. The whole thing now is basically a gimmick and a great example of the 90s style thinking that believes touches around the edges will solve climate change. If governments want to make an impact on trash pollution on the ecosystem reduce really is the only thing that should be pushed.
Aluminum recycling still makes complete sense both economicaly and environmentally. It's cheaper and less energy intensive to reprocess cans and car bodies than to process ore into metallic aluminum. We should be focusing on recycling of metals (including batteries) and try to ditch plastics for glass. Glass just becomes sand in a landfill, which is vastly preferable to plastics that will still be around in a million years.
I generally feel the same way that you do, especially about recycling metals. But glass is much heavier than plastic, which translates to more energy spent shipping products around. We need to be cautious about the effects of plastics, and especially microplastics, on the environment. We also need to recognize that plastics are part of the picture when it comes to reducing carbon emissions.
The weight issue with glass is a good point. At some level we may need a subtle cultural shift away from individually packaged items. The other day i saw individually packaged eyedrops. The packaging was more mass and volume than the product, and probably contained sketchy plasticisizers.
If we can shift to renewables and electric trucks for overland shipping, it would at least help.
But it is also extremely easy to filter out aluminium from the general waste stream, so no real need to separate them, especially as the average consumer is not very consistent.
Recycling is mostly a theatre, but PET plastic (mostly bottles) is recycled and (in our country) is recycled locally into PET bottles again. So while recycling will not save us, to not recycle is also wrong.
I still separate my trash because even though my plastic will probably end on the landfill, my municipality does process organic materials into compost, and plastic added to the mix burns CO2 on the separation plant. But yes, if it all ends up in a landfill anyway where you live sorting out the trash is a waste of effort
When I look at the contents of the organic waste bin of my apartment house people often put what they throw in there inside plastic bags, which is kind of understandable because just throwing it in there unprotected and open to the air will probably lead to a rot problem and some really bad smells right in front of the house. I don't think this is collected every day.
I read an article here in Germany years ago that this is a major problem and a leading cause of ever more plastic in agricultural soil.
This depends on the country though. Here in the Netherlands, it's extremely expensive to dispose of things in the "general trash" bin. Recycling on the other hand, is essentially free (at least in my village). Organic waste is not free (except during the holidays!), but it's an order of magnitude cheaper than the general waste.
They are more and more working on doing the separation at the garbage company though instead of at the source. Generally the reason for this that that consumers aren't very consistent in the separation and a few mistakes makes the whole stream worthless if they don't implement separation after collection.
Two examples of large municipalities going this route:
Yes but this just changes which bin the stuff is put into. The organic bin next to my apartment in Germany always has plenty of plastic in it. The stuff that actually gets put into the packaging bin vs the general waste bin seems to be completely random, to the extent that I can see it. (Glass and paper bins mostly contain glass and paper.)
Plastic has never been recyclable. We used to tell ourselves the myth (with gleeful assistance from plastic manufacturers) and ship it to China so it was out of sight. They played along for a while until they finally gained enough clout to stopped taking it. I believe they term it as a ban on importing garbage.
Taking multiple years to correct a critical shortage and then overcorrecting is not a good example of markets being efficient. Any kind of system that responds to usage can do this, the criteria is about speed of correction, lack of oscillation, and avoidance of side effects.
China has about 1.4 billion people - and all-time 5.226 COVID deaths. The US has 331 million people - about a quarter of China - and an all-time of 1.1 million people, about 200x of China.
As much as it pains me to write this, but China did the morally better thing here and actually cared about the lives of its citizens.
China lies about everything. All public stats are cooked. There is no free press to question these absurd numbers, no whistleblower laws respected.
Their leaders have never ever cared about the lives of individual citizens. Xu’s hero, Mao, boasted that he would sacrifice as many innocent lives as he saw fit to reach his goals. The 5,000 number is laughable and meant only to keep Xi from executing party members, which he would certainly do if they told him anything approximating fact.
Eventually you will learn that way more than 5,000 people, mostly senior citizens, died from starvation alone during the recent months-long lockdown in Shanghai.
Some people prefer death over slavery. Others think being alive is worth much more then anything else. So, I guess one can choose now: 996 and zero-covid, or a bit more freedom and a bit more risk... I know what I prefer.
Except the choice wasn't between 996 and COVID, it was between serious, targeted lockdowns that everyone hates... And COVID and ineffective, more limited, but also more broad restrictions that everyone also hates.
I think it is more accurate that the CCP cared about China as an entity. Their actions have been very heavy handed and haven’t shown much respect for individual liberties.
In the UK we have a fraction of the population of China, and we did half arsed lockdown and lost nearly quarter million lifes! Imagine the death count in China if they went Sweden mode! Their zero covid policy is an example of putting population ahead of economy and make every other nation jealous.
The goal of the lockdown is to contains spreads and reduce death, reduce the chance of giving the virus an open field to mutate and yield new variants. Of course it’s never going to be zero death, but their numbers fared better than even smaller nations https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/china/
> Except there's no such thing as a zero covid, anywhere. Eventually you get covid and if you're susceptible (mainly old), you die.
Had everyone followed the New Zealand model in the first year until vaccines were widespread and available, the virus would have gotten extinct just as Influenza Yamagata strain.
You mean everybody should just be an island with low and very dispersed population, with relatively high development levels at the start and high degrees of self sufficiency wrt basic needs? Why, why didn't they all just do that then!
>We need a PID controller running the markets. Only half joking.
See Gosplan ([1]). They kind of tried. It will work better with an implementation that has more silicon than humans, but it will still be miserable on the edges.
I’ve seen a lot of Gosplan computer center. We were borrowing “untouched” versions of software for Soviet bloc-produced IBM-compatible mainframes there. At the exit there was a KGB post, they were checking for a permission for every single bit of paper that was being carried out. But we were not carrying paper, we were carrying magnetic tapes, and our contact at GVC (“the main computing center of”) Gosplan was too lazy to go get a permission for them. So I tucked a magnetic tape behind my belt and buttoned up my coat. Not a single time I was stopped. GVC Gosplan had a full detailed data on the Soviet economy and I could have potentially carried any secret data away.
But we were not carrying any secret data, we were carrying OS/360 21.8 and later on - VM/370 (do not remember the exact version for that, sorry).
So, while Gosplan was planning and financing the production and distribution of the “adapted for socialism” version of OS/360 (re)named ОС ЕС - their own computing center (and everyone else who could have got it) were using the original OS/360. I wonder if any mathematical model can handle such a situation properly.
The problem goes a bit deeper than just competence vs incompetence of the planner. The planner is a person. A person looks at the mathematical recommendation - and sees that it is cruel: a project should be closed, a lot of people should be laid off. In capitalism, no cruel decision is yours completely: “market forced me to do it”. Brezhnev time Soviet leaders were probably less cruel than an ordinary American capitalist. So the effective economy was out of question.
Also, to be cruel is not enough. You should have a political power to implement an effective solution. Political power is based on relationships. Suppose mathematics says: person A’s project should be reduced, person B’s project should be funded more. But: person A is your guy, and person B is of your rival’s camp. Will you follow the math? It’s probably a theorem: in a planned economy a recommendation that reduces the political power of a person that has the political power to implement it - will never be implemented…
It's a fictionalised history of some Soviet economics. There's a chapter on Kantorovich (cf the sibling comment). It goes reasonably deep (not mathematically deep) and provides a lot of context. Great book from a great author. Don't be put off by the "Soviet" part -- it's very entertaining.
One of the best minds of that epoch that worked on the problem was Leonid Kantorovich ([1]). From wikipedia:
"He is regarded as the founder of linear programming. He was the winner of the Stalin Prize in 1949 and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1975."
In that respect, any book about linear programming is a good start. The problem with the approach used back in the time was a slow feedback loop (5-10 years) and inability to adjust to externalities, including technology changes. That should be possible to improve with our modern tech, but I am not aware of any good contemporary books about it - if someone knows one, I would appreciate a reference myself.
Edit: from the CIA file on Kantorovich ([2]):
"In addition to his mathematical research, Kantorovich has been directly involved in developing improved designs for high-speed digital computers, an activity apparently motivated by the Soviet Union's need for improved computers in solving large economic planning problems"
"
The Central Bank is about hooking up a few valves and then predicting how every other valve's flow will react as a result. The Soviet system was closer to hooking up every single valve.
One thing I noticed is that smoothing functions that reduce overshooting the response also add some delay to the time taken to first reach the command threshold. This is interesting, if not quite surprising.
It's one of the fundamental techniques to get PIDs to work properly IRL. I can't find it right now, but I remember having a cheat sheet with a lot of tricks to make PIDs work properly. As a control engineer you learn a lot of fancy techniques, of which you usually only use a few, but practical PID control is sadly not taught in most courses because it's basically a collection of hacks.
If you know a little bit more about the system's behavior you can usually precalculate the optimal inputs and use the PID only for course correction, that often yields much better responses than what you can achieve with a controller alone.
If your system is nonlinear, it might be useful to use gain scheduling to adapt the PID parameters to the setpoint region you're operating in.
Switching behaviors in the system can also mess up your responses.
Sometimes your system has a vibrating frequency that can lead to resonance in your control. You may need to filter that, too, maybe even with a sliding frequency window. E.g. when controlling a gearbox attached to a motor, you don't want to actuate at the motor's vibrating frequency.
>smoothing functions that reduce overshooting the response also add some delay to the time taken
It's not so surprising if you think about what a low pass filter does. By filtering out the high frequencies the response becomes more sluggish, meaning that your input to the PID is already delayed. This means your PID reacts more slowly.
heh, control theory as applied to economics... this is really what MIT's system dynamics is/was about IMHO. Forrester's world model was an attempt at that.
Is multiple years actually bad? We are talking about real economy and real tangible things here. With lead times involved. 2-3 years doesn't actually seem that long in that context.
Yes, it is bad. 2-3 years is a long time. It is possible to make real tangible at great speed, but also at great cost. It's likely this would have been better than stalling the economy.
> The alternative is forcing some slack in the supply chain but that comes at a significant cost to consumers.
I’m amused by this comment.
You think the squeeze and now the glut didn’t come at a significant cost to consumers and the economy as a whole?
It seems pretty clear after the massive failure at the start of the pandemic that just-in-time went too far and there is not enough slack in the supply chain at all level. Even from a purely systemic look, the wild oscillation we see right now should be proof enough that the system is significantly under-dampened.
Paying 10% more for a product in perpetuity costs a lot more than a 12 to 24 month period where prices double. And for non-essential goods, the option is for some customers to simple delay purchase.
And you’re forgetting it works in both directions. Consumers may see temporary high prices but they often see temporary low prices during supply chain recovery.
And again, how do you accurately predict the future? Demand can double pretty quickly. Having 10% slack (and the cost of it) would have dampened higher prices somewhat, but now you’re paying higher prices all the time and slightly less high prices when things go sideways. Doesn’t seem like a good deal at all.
I’d much prefer the free market approach where there are multiple actors each making different bets on future demand than some overarching rule about how future demand should be planned for (thats how we get famines).
The producers who bet on increased demand (or shrinking supply from competitors) get handsomely rewarded for the bet.
> Paying 10% more for a product in perpetuity costs a lot more than a 12 to 24 month period where prices double.
JIT manufacturing gains are far under 10%. It’s mostly advantageous from a capital flow point of view. At this point, considering the overall brittleness introduced, it’s not obvious to me there ever was gained at all if you consider both the up and the down.
It’s pretty obvious that at this point the purely free market approach is as successful for manufacturing as it was for banking. How can we even talk about free markets when the government just saves everyone each time a large crisis happens?
What government save happened for the supply chain? What brittleness?
People had to pay more for cars? The cost of airline tickets went up? Lumbar prices went up?
I mean, don’t see many consequences for that brittleness. Inconvenience sure.
And I mean, if you think it’s the wrong move then there is an opportunity for you to get very rich - either start a company selling for higher prices to account for slack or heavily invest in ones that do.
> I’d much prefer the free market approach where there are multiple actors each making different bets on future demand than some overarching rule about how future demand should be planned for (thats how we get famines).
Interestingly, food production is heavely planned through regulation, subsidies and incentives in most countries precisely because the free market cannot be trusted with such a sensitive matter. Famines cause riots and that's bad for buisness.
>You think the squeeze and now the glut didn’t come at a significant cost to consumers and the economy as a whole?
Ah, yes, this tired old "we should incur broad and hard to quantify bad things to avoid some small but easy to quantify bad thing" that is ever popular among people who should be smart enough to know better.
I agree that the system does seem somewhat under dampened but without a serious attempt at forecasting what the actual cost of damping it is I see no reason to change the status quo.
Toyota's tier-two suppliers surely know it pretty well. Their suppliers a little less well. And so on, down through the supply chain.
It isn't the case that Toyota has some magical vision (though they are clear-thinkers). The key difference is that Toyota is at the end of the supply chain for all their suppliers.
Think of pulling an elastic tether on a solid object, which pulls an elastic tether on a solid object, which pulls an elastic tether on a solid object. Friction accumulates and it doesn't disperse evenly.
So the Toyota model is great iff you are Toyota or similar OEM. With diminishing returns as you progress further down the supply chain.
The actionable advice here is if you're loading a trailer, you want weight / center of gravity as close to the front / cab as possible. If loading, y'know, 40,000 lbs for a tractor trailer and you're loading it with pallets, alternate the pallet rows as far to the left and right as possible, switching direction every row. This prevents tipping and also does a favor to the person who has to unload it at the destination as it prevents weird slippages of pallet orientation and crunching. Poorly loaded trailers can definitely kill the trucker and other drivers. The oscillation severity really depends on the spread between the greatest and least weight of the items going into the trailer.
Perhaps. It wasn't an analogy, but rather a vibrant reference to the concept of oscillation. Your original comment declares a simplistic version of "working" based around having reached one specific condition, while writing off the dynamic system behavior and other effects that occurred while getting to this point.
Now, do we have reasons to be believe that this oscillation between shortage and surplus will grow or diminish? Will the next half-cycle of the oscillation create negative qualitative effects, even if it is ultimately diminishing?
I'm not saying there are easy answers to those questions, but we're better off being able to ask them.
What does your construction industry do if not "construct" those things? Have they devolved to just being lego builders that glue together the work of others?
um, yes? Home building construction crews are not the ones making doors, or windows, or tubs/faucets/etc. They buy them as parts to be assembled into a whole. What did you think that the crews are pouring glass on site into windows, or firing up ceramic glazing ovens to cure the toilets and sinks?
What a strange comment on the Hacker News, where everyone uses IDEs, debuggers, toolchains, profilers and other higher-level instruments to build products. When have you written your own hardware driver?
How many programmers do the low-level work on the "doors and windows" stuff? A tiny minority.
For some reason, shipping containers are unlike every other market... sellers refuse to advertise their prices! Take a look on craigslist: nearly every ad either has a fake price ($1, $1000, $999,999) or else says "call for pricing". The only place I've seen with real prices is a printed-on-dead-trees farmer's newspaper.
That website is what is so hard to find: straightforward pricing updated regularly.
I need a shipping container at some point in the next year but I'm in no hurry. Now I can just check this site every week or so to get a feel for when prices have bottomed.
Anybody know why the container market has such weirdly opaque pricing? It's a nearly-ideal commodity...
This is textbook "bullwhip effect" stuff. Everyone was over-ordering because the leadtime was forever... now everyone's stuff is coming through and they're canceling because they don't need 5 years of supply delivered next week. Every layer of the supply chain (consumer products, product assembly, component procurement, shipping, component production, materials shipment, materials production, labor, etc) produces a stronger and stronger echo of its demand shocks on its suppliers, and then suddenly it stops and reverses and gluts just as strongly.
It has seemed like a definite possibility for a long time with the covid demand... let alone with the Fed actively trying to crush consumers until they can't afford to consume to produce a second-order effect of forcing corporations to halt their price-increase-spiral. Of course you can never predict the exact moment the flip will happen (and it happens progressively across the economy of course), it's the old "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent in a short position", but, yeah, I've been saying this for like a year now and I'm nobody particularly special in that respect.
Hopefully we will see microcontrollers/power+display ICs, Raspberry Pis, and [housing] building materials come down soon. Those have remained stubbornly short despite the glut in consumer-facing electronic products and leading-edge ICs.
Fab space is going to be another interesting one too, everyone was super hot on building their own fabs for those embedded things, and while I think there's a strategic interest in that continuing, there is going to be some tough times ahead for the commercial operators - especially TSMC, they are the one company where the margins have undeniably and conspicuously soared over the past few years.
You've already seen pullback in planned increases to DRAM and actual cuts to flash production... and I doubt there's any particular product that is going to surge and take up that capacity right now either.
> After analyzing 2023 supply and demand in the memory market, due to a conservative demand outlook, DRAM and NAND Flash look to be greatly oversupplied in each quarter and inventory pressure will continue to accelerate in 1H23. In the DRAM sector, after Micron led the way to announce a DRAM production reduction plan that will fall far below historical levels of supply-side bit growth, the 2023 DRAM Sufficiency Ratio will contract from the 11.6% previously forecast by TrendForce to less than 10%, helping to alleviate rapidly deteriorating inventory pressure. However, more suppliers must be relied on to join in the actual reduction of DRAM production in the future in order to reverse the supply and demand imbalance next year.
> Kioxia Corporation announced production adjustments at its Yokkaichi and Kitakami flash memory plants. The company will reduce its wafer start production volume by approximately 30 percent, starting from October this year. By adjusting production in line with current market conditions, Kioxia will better manage production and sales. The company will continue to review and adjust operations as needed.
I think that first graph shows the price to ship a container ("blended" over several routes), not the cost of the container itself. "Drewry’s composite World Container Index".
Note that right at the moment the cost to move a container across the ocean is almost exactly the same as the cost to buy the container (see the second graph at the same url), for several routes. So it's easy to mix them up.
I think those pictures illustrate several of the reasons you shouldn’t repurpose shipping containers into buildings.
The buildings are, quite frankly, ugly. And that useless diagonal bit is really stupid. The tower for looking out over the beautiful country–side is a nice touch, but its square, blocky shape limits you to looking in four directions, making it quite inelegant. The nicest part of this project is probably the outdoor seating, and all you did there was plonk down a picnic table on some gravel. I’ve seen worse picnic tables though, so you get a few points there. I would have arranged for the courtyard to have an unobstructed view on one side, looking down the hill towards the orchard, but at least some of the tables have a view.
Probably workable if you just want a shed tho. But yeah most things I've seen are just architectural wanks on trying to make hot steel box livable by applying what would it take to build small home
This reflects the US's lack of exports and China no longer wanting unsorted US recycling.