Scarcity and the Problems of Just In Time Systems

[starshipcat]

Comments

[lindahoyland]

Wise thoughts. Some of my friends used to tease me for having a stock of toilet rolls, soap and tissues. Households and nations need reserves.

[starshipcat]

Thanks. We got caught by surprise one a couple of things right at the beginning of the crisis, when there was genuine panic buying. Now I'm trying to rebuild a stockpile, but with money being tight as a result of our business having no events to sell at, it's not easy.

[whswhs]

Some years ago, I asked Vernor Vinge about the catastrophic failures peculiar to advanced civilizations that he described in A Deepness in the Sky. What he described was relentless optimization leading to the entire economy being Just in Time. Then something got held up and it was "For want of a nail, the shoe was lost."

[starshipcat]

Interesting. I'm going to have to actually read that one -- skimmed it a little when we had it in stock, but never actually gave it a proper read.

[whswhs]

I think it's an excellent book, possibly his best. I particularly like the sustained comparison of two different styles of business management, and also the handling of "translation" (influenced by Tolkien's discussion of how The Lord of the Rings was "translated" from the Red Book).

[starshipcat]

The late great Gene Wolfe presented his Book of the New Sun as being translated from some unimaginably far-future language, as distant to modern-day English as it is to Proto-Indo-European, with some discussion of the obscure and antiquated words he used to represent the characters' words for objects that don't exist yet. (I managed to snag copies of the omnibus re-issues right before the library closed For The Duration, and I need to fit them in to re-read. I read them the first time before I really had the literary background to appreciate them).

And writing that makes me realize it's been a year since he passed away, and it hurts all over again.