Comments by "looseycanon" (@looseycanon) on "Why There are Now So Many Shortages (It's Not COVID)" video.

  1. There is another problem specific to auto industry. Everything is on chips. Even things, like acoustic warning, that someone sitting in a seat is not strapped in, when this could could have been done with a single circuit. All you'd need, is a trigger, when car reaches certain speed, a weigh sensor in the seat (which could literally be spring based), contacts in the female side of the seat belt joint, a buzzer, some wiring and a pair of relays per seat (weight sensor triggers one relay, closed circuit through seat belt joint disengages the other)! Outdated? Sure. Does it get the job done and lower exposure to one particular component, which requires special resources? Yes. I for one believe, that Just In Time is BS, precisely, because shit happens. We are already at point, where transportation companies report hourly positions of their trucks and trains, because a manufacturing process doesn't have a day of materials on hand! Imagine, you have to change production, because the driver hit a deer. It's ridiculous! And it doesn't need to be of natural causes or coincidence, it could be man made by a speculation! Stockpiling doesn't solve that! The only thing, which does, is getting more involved in the supply chain. There's no way VolksWagen group didn't know, how reliant they are on particular commodities, yet they didn't build a FAB to cover some percentage of their demand, nor did they buy a copper mine and processing companies, which could provide them internally with necessary wiring (given the forced electrification)! Are you freaking kidding me?! There's no way, they didn't see situation like this coming. Maybe not due to natural reasons, but definitely because of political ones and they still did nothing! What I'd like to see, is approach, which eliminates strategic threats to manufacturing system. The most prevalent one these days, is that everything is done in China. Nothing against China (well, except basically everything they've done past decade), but the fact, that basically all manufacturing is done there at scale has become a bottleneck in the system, that is prone to clogging, due to political reasons. What I'd do, is I would find three locations on Earth with decent, all be it not perfect environment for manufacturing, preferably on different continents, and I'd build manufacturing hubs there. There wouldn't have been that big variety (at least within a model Octavia for European and Indian markets are on completely different base models), but there would be bigger interoperability. Say there were plants in the EU, mostly focused on European market and R&D, plants in Egypt, mostly exporting to Africa and plants in India handling local market and parts of Asia, China, if at the time there were a presence there, would be it's own system. All plants would buy from the nearest suppliers of required materials and run between 80 to 90% capacity. Why? Precisely because of shit like Covid or political meltdowns! This way, even if a entire continent went down, you'd have two thirds to a half of capacity secure and you could ramp up, if need presented itself, at cost of time spent on system optimization and short term reduction of maintenance at particular plants.
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