Global Supply Chain Crisis 2021: Megathread - A cozy thread for watching the supply chain fall apart just in time for the holidays

[Male Idiot]

Ok Joseph, so how come the supermarket has zero broccoli in stock for the first time in my life? What, is the Jolly Green Giant on unemployment insurance too?

Broccoli is the one item we can do without. It tastes foul.

Keeping a small stack of food you replace over time as you consume it costs you 150 dollars and can last you 2 months on a lean diet if shit hits the fan.

 

[Manimal House]

Broccoli is the one item we can do without. It tastes foul.

Keeping a small stack of food you replace over time as you consume it costs you 150 dollars and can last you 2 months on a lean diet if shit hits the fan.

You're missing the point. That Biden speech was giving the notion that the supply shortage was affecting frugal Christmas present type of stuff that no one really needs, and that its normal for it to be like this during the holidays. Yet I'm seeing first hand that grocery stores suddenly aren't able to get certain foods that have always been readily available. Unless there's a recall, I've never seen a store run out of something they usually overstock on like broccoli.
Different example: for the last year or so, I've seen onions in grocery stores look like total shit. I've had to be really picky with what I grab because a lot of them are either spoiled or look like they're about to, and before the lockdown happened that's never been a problem where I live. From what I've gathered, the pandemic shut down a lot of restaurants so there was no orders going through to supply the restaurants, so the distributors had all these extra onions that they kept for too long until grocery stores bought them when they were on the verge of being thrown out. Combine that with the labor shortage that has gotten worse and worse each month that fucked with production, and that just made the problem worse. Even ignoring onions, when restaurants opened back up, they were all ordering products in high quantity all at once and distributors couldn't keep up with the demand. For a while where I lived, it was hard to find a place that had chicken wings. Simply put, the pandemic lockdown completely screwed up the flow of distribution for food.
Also, there's a huge problem with trucking transportation right now, since the ports on the west coast are all bottlenecked with supplies that can't be unloaded, partly because the amount of truckers available aren't enough to get things unloaded smoothly, let alone drive the stuff to the destination. That's a whole other can of worms that involve labor shortages, bad working conditions and an old business model that's been fucked sideways by regulations. Apparently a lot of truckers just dipped because they refused to put up with it.
It's a whole mountain of issues put in a dumpster fire that the lockdown poured gasoline on, but Biden's making it out to be a nothingburger.

 

[Hippopatumus]

I’m very much an abstractionist. A prepper is fundamentally someone who invests significant, life-altering capital to prepare for scenarios whose probability of happening within a lifetime are too low to economically justify the investment in the first place. Therefore preppers always lose by definition, because if some apocalyptic scenario does happen, then a person isn’t prepping in the scope of that event because it falls outside of the definition of a prepper (in hindsight). Determining if someone is a prepper in real-time is thus an estimate, as one cannot definitively know if someone is a prepper until he dies.

You can buy six months worth of calories for one person for like $150.

 

[Billy Beer]

Still have people bitching about there being no PS5s available

I'm more concerned about why there are no PS5s available

PS5 is a bad example, because it's selling more than the Wii, which suffered shortages even in normal times.

The thing is a friggin beast and pissing on GPU's that cost north of £1000.

 

[BradCarter]

Preppers don't give a shit about the stock market. All they care about is buying 3-6 decades worth of MREs (shelf life: 3 years) and hoarding hundreds of guns.

The 3 years is a "best by:" date. There are C rations that are still edible from Vietnam. They gradually taste worse and worse but if properly packaged, sealed, and stored there's no way for bacteria to get into them and won't make you sick if you can palette the taste.

Power level edit: When you prep you don't buy enough food to have 4 course meals 3 times a day. You get enough food that will keep you walking for however months you want in hopes you can scavenge/hunt/trade for supplemental supplies. So like a can of beans per day. The human body can survive like 2 weeks without food. We don't need nearly as much to survive as our modern diets would lead you to believe.

 

[Sped Xing]

The 3 years is a "best by:" date. There are C rations that are still edible from Vietnam. They gradually taste worse and worse but if properly packaged, sealed, and stored there's no way for bacteria to get into them and won't make you sick if you can palette the taste.

Say that to all the mouldy MREs I've been given.

The advantage of the MRE is it's light and doesn't have hard edges. It's not immortal.

 

[BradCarter]

Say that to all the mouldy MREs I've been given.

The advantage of the MRE is it's light and doesn't have hard edges. It's not immortal.

Right that's why the properly stored part is important. Guys not giving a fuck throwing them in and out of trucks and planes over and over again tends to have negative effects on packaging. And each item is individually sealed so even if one pouch pops the chances are decent the others survive

 

[Sped Xing]

Right that's why the properly stored part is important. Guys not giving a fuck throwing them in and out of trucks and planes over and over again tends to have negative effects on packaging. And each item is individually sealed so even if one pouch pops the chances are decent the others survive

Sure, but if you're going to go through the trouble of a controlled climate storage facility, mylar bags, oxygen scavengers, and sundries othet things you can do to preserve food, MREs are not a good choice of things to carefully store.

MREs are

1) Very bulky. Anyone with any sense doesn't carry fully pouched MREs in his pack when he can toss out a bunch of cardboard, extra spoons, salt packets, and other nonsense and compact them down to easily a third their volume.

2) Not appropriate nutrition for sedentary people. Really you could probably get by on the calories from just one, as they're salty and packed with sugar. This is reasonable for people expected to be fighting, patrolling, or doing lots of manual labor, but it's pretty unhealthy for a preppie sitting around in his khakis and polos eating and peeking out the blinds forever.

3) They're bleeding expensive.

The whole "I'll make a multi year stockpile of food" idea doesn't make much sense, anyway. Perhaps if you plan to become a vault dweller, but even then it's smarter to come up with a way of replenishing your supplies without getting radiation poisoning. If you're prepping for an economic disaster, it's just plain silly. I guess if you plan to become a self-sufficient subsistence farmer, having a granary to store a year's or more worth of foodstuffs, as a buffer against drought or crop failure, could be worthwhile, but if you plan to live somewhere people know you exist, you're better off being able to trade for goods and defend what you have.

The true prepper focuses on good social skills, physical fitness and health, and having a wide scope of practical abilities and knowledge. Note that these will all serve you well no matter what happens, while having ten times as many assault rifles as you have hands and forty year's worth of carefully preserved nixtamalized maize flour will only make you either poor in status quo or robbed in a disaster.

None of this is to say anything against having a reasonable stockpile to get you through lean times, but what are going to do, hide in a bunker and eat canned peaches for the next fifty years? If the world is such a wasteland that you can't farm, forage, hunt, steal, or trade for what you need, why bother?

 

[Male Idiot]

Sure, but if you're going to go through the trouble of a controlled climate storage facility, mylar bags, oxygen scavengers, and sundries othet things you can do to preserve food, MREs are not a good choice of things to carefully store.

MREs are

1) Very bulky. Anyone with any sense doesn't carry fully pouched MREs in his pack when he can toss out a bunch of cardboard, extra spoons, salt packets, and other nonsense and compact them down to easily a third their volume.

2) Not appropriate nutrition for sedentary people. Really you could probably get by on the calories from just one, as they're salty and packed with sugar. This is reasonable for people expected to be fighting, patrolling, or doing lots of manual labor, but it's pretty unhealthy for a preppie sitting around in his khakis and polos eating and peeking out the blinds forever.

3) They're bleeding expensive.

The whole "I'll make a multi year stockpile of food" idea doesn't make much sense, anyway. Perhaps if you plan to become a vault dweller, but even then it's smarter to come up with a way of replenishing your supplies without getting radiation poisoning. If you're prepping for an economic disaster, it's just plain silly. I guess if you plan to become a self-sufficient subsistence farmer, having a granary to store a year's or more worth of foodstuffs, as a buffer against drought or crop failure, could be worthwhile, but if you plan to live somewhere people know you exist, you're better off being able to trade for goods and defend what you have.

The true prepper focuses on good social skills, physical fitness and health, and having a wide scope of practical abilities and knowledge. Note that these will all serve you well no matter what happens, while having ten times as many assault rifles as you have hands and forty year's worth of carefully preserved nixtamalized maize flour will only make you either poor in status quo or robbed in a disaster.

None of this is to say anything against having a reasonable stockpile to get you through lean times, but what are going to do, hide in a bunker and eat canned peaches for the next fifty years? If the world is such a wasteland that you can't farm, forage, hunt, steal, or trade for what you need, why bother?

I agree with most of what you say, but I am sure most preppers imagine patrolling their own little turf on the Rad Wastes thus wouldn't really be sedentary.

 

[AnaphylacticShock]

Grocery store cashier told me today to start stocking up because they won't be able to fill the shelves soon. Thanks to this place, I've already been prepared.

 

[BradCarter]

Sure, but if you're going to go through the trouble of a controlled climate storage facility, mylar bags, oxygen scavengers, and sundries othet things you can do to preserve food, MREs are not a good choice of things to carefully store.

MREs are

1) Very bulky. Anyone with any sense doesn't carry fully pouched MREs in his pack when he can toss out a bunch of cardboard, extra spoons, salt packets, and other nonsense and compact them down to easily a third their volume.

2) Not appropriate nutrition for sedentary people. Really you could probably get by on the calories from just one, as they're salty and packed with sugar. This is reasonable for people expected to be fighting, patrolling, or doing lots of manual labor, but it's pretty unhealthy for a preppie sitting around in his khakis and polos eating and peeking out the blinds forever.

3) They're bleeding expensive.

The whole "I'll make a multi year stockpile of food" idea doesn't make much sense, anyway. Perhaps if you plan to become a vault dweller, but even then it's smarter to come up with a way of replenishing your supplies without getting radiation poisoning. If you're prepping for an economic disaster, it's just plain silly. I guess if you plan to become a self-sufficient subsistence farmer, having a granary to store a year's or more worth of foodstuffs, as a buffer against drought or crop failure, could be worthwhile, but if you plan to live somewhere people know you exist, you're better off being able to trade for goods and defend what you have.

The true prepper focuses on good social skills, physical fitness and health, and having a wide scope of practical abilities and knowledge. Note that these will all serve you well no matter what happens, while having ten times as many assault rifles as you have hands and forty year's worth of carefully preserved nixtamalized maize flour will only make you either poor in status quo or robbed in a disaster.

None of this is to say anything against having a reasonable stockpile to get you through lean times, but what are going to do, hide in a bunker and eat canned peaches for the next fifty years? If the world is such a wasteland that you can't farm, forage, hunt, steal, or trade for what you need, why bother?

I agree, having a literal metric ton of them makes no sense. But having a few boxes even past the expiration date makes enough sense. They are good for trading, all of them have coffee, matches and seasonings. And personally I have them because they would be a nice luxury having a debatably full, hot meal after eating canned corn and worms for a few months

 

[Meat Target]

Sure, but if you're going to go through the trouble of a controlled climate storage facility, mylar bags, oxygen scavengers, and sundries othet things you can do to preserve food, MREs are not a good choice of things to carefully store.

MREs are

1) Very bulky. Anyone with any sense doesn't carry fully pouched MREs in his pack when he can toss out a bunch of cardboard, extra spoons, salt packets, and other nonsense and compact them down to easily a third their volume.

2) Not appropriate nutrition for sedentary people. Really you could probably get by on the calories from just one, as they're salty and packed with sugar. This is reasonable for people expected to be fighting, patrolling, or doing lots of manual labor, but it's pretty unhealthy for a preppie sitting around in his khakis and polos eating and peeking out the blinds forever.

3) They're bleeding expensive.

The whole "I'll make a multi year stockpile of food" idea doesn't make much sense, anyway. Perhaps if you plan to become a vault dweller, but even then it's smarter to come up with a way of replenishing your supplies without getting radiation poisoning. If you're prepping for an economic disaster, it's just plain silly. I guess if you plan to become a self-sufficient subsistence farmer, having a granary to store a year's or more worth of foodstuffs, as a buffer against drought or crop failure, could be worthwhile, but if you plan to live somewhere people know you exist, you're better off being able to trade for goods and defend what you have.

The true prepper focuses on good social skills, physical fitness and health, and having a wide scope of practical abilities and knowledge. Note that these will all serve you well no matter what happens, while having ten times as many assault rifles as you have hands and forty year's worth of carefully preserved nixtamalized maize flour will only make you either poor in status quo or robbed in a disaster.

None of this is to say anything against having a reasonable stockpile to get you through lean times, but what are going to do, hide in a bunker and eat canned peaches for the next fifty years? If the world is such a wasteland that you can't farm, forage, hunt, steal, or trade for what you need, why bother?

I agree, having a literal metric ton of them makes no sense. But having a few boxes even past the expiration date makes enough sense. They are good for trading, all of them have coffee, matches and seasonings. And personally I have them because they would be a nice luxury having a debatably full, hot meal after eating canned corn and worms for a few months

I try to rotate out my canned/non-perishable food periodically. If it's not expired or rotten, I'll either eat it or give it to the church food pantry collection, then buy fresh non-perishables.

 

[BradCarter]

I try to rotate out my canned/non-perishable food periodically. If it's not expired or rotten, I'll either eat it or give it to the church food pantry collection, then buy fresh non-perishables.

Yes I do the same. Only 2 months with so 60 something cans. It still takes up space and raises questions when someone sees my pantry. The goal really isn't to survive off of it. It's just your emergency supply because you cant go foraging if you are too weak to walk. Non-perishables really live up to their names. Save for botulism canned goods can last quite a bit longer than their printed date too.

 

[Aqua Panda]

Dog food shortages finally hit my area. Had to order it online and sign up for Amazon Prime to get it in time.

My doggo is fine, but any with special diets might be in for trouble if it gets hard to source the speciality stuff. (Stuff like sensitive stomachs, diabetic, and pancreas formulated food.)

As for stuff like ps5's or 30xx video cards, I just gave up and accepted it'll be years before I can get an upgrade. Just hoping now my current setup won't have anything break. (And honestly, not much is coming out anytime soon that actually looks fun to play.)

Even Microcenter is now scalping 3080ti's for $2000+. Even old 1050ti's are going for $300 in their stores. I'm wondering if we will ever see MSRP again.

 

[Sped Xing]

I've been working my way towards being a self-sufficient peasant for years, but my motives are pure autism. I just think farming is neat.

Other people carefully provision their households in order to save money in the best case and survive in the worst case. This is commendable and wise.

It's the people who uproot their lives and live as they otherwise would prefer not to, because THIS IS IT FOR SURE THIS TIME that I make fun of. When you couple this sort of panic-buying with dunning-kruger and a need to tell the world about it, you've got the makings of a fun lolcow. Fiberglass is not good alpaca forage.

EDIT: I feel ya on compooters. I don't know shit about computers, but I do like me some map-staring games. I promised myself I'd get a new gaymer PC when it had been ten years since I bought the last one. Well, I got there but oh no, oops.

 

[BradCarter]

I've been working my way towards being a self-sufficient peasant for years, but my motives are pure autism. I just think farming is neat.

Other people carefully provision their households in order to save money in the best case and survive in the worst case. This is commendable and wise.

It's the people who uproot their lives and live as they otherwise would prefer not to, because THIS IS IT FOR SURE THIS TIME that I make fun of. When you couple this sort of panic-buying with dunning-kruger and a need to tell the world about it, you've got the makings of a fun lolcow. Fiberglass is not good alpaca forage.

Well my stockpile of firearms (that I tragically lost in a boating accident yesterday) isn't for the apocalypse. I'm just a gun autist and I think boomsticks are cool.

 

[Puff]

That's literally prepping.

That's literally normal for everyone I know. Being in the country doesn't make you a prepper.

 

[Hippopatumus]

I’m very much an abstractionist. A prepper is fundamentally someone who invests significant, life-altering capital to prepare for scenarios whose probability of happening within a lifetime are too low to economically justify the investment in the first place. Therefore preppers always lose by definition, because if some apocalyptic scenario does happen, then a person isn’t prepping in the scope of that event because it falls outside of the definition of a prepper (in hindsight). Determining if someone is a prepper in real-time is thus an estimate, as one cannot definitively know if someone is a prepper until he dies.

This is some tortured logic.

A prepper is someone who desires to be prepared for seen and unforeseen events and they have evaluated threat models relevant to them and applied that to their planning in a thoughtful way.

A person deploying life-altering amounts of capital to prepare for low-probability scenarios is a hoarder, OCD or is suffering from paranoid delusions--in other words struggling with mental health issues.

Both call themselves preppers.

BTW I have around a year of household food and supplies and I deployed roughly 1% of my yearly household income to arrive at that level--however because I utilize only deep pantry techniques I'm not actually spending any more money I'm just paying forward purchases, which in an inflationary scenario ends up being a cost-saving measure.

 

[feral cat #6385]

After I stockpiled 90 days' worth of cat food. My cat has decided he doesn't like that type of food anymore and wants *different* food.

If the shit hits the fan, I'm thinking of eating the cat.

 

[George Lucas]

This is some tortured logic.

A prepper is someone who desires to be prepared for seen and unforeseen events and they have evaluated threat models relevant to them and applied that to their planning in a thoughtful way.

A person deploying life-altering amounts of capital to prepare for low-probability scenarios is a hoarder, OCD or is suffering from paranoid delusions--in other words struggling with mental health issues.

Both call themselves preppers.

BTW I have around a year of household food and supplies and I deployed roughly 1% of my yearly household income to arrive at that level--however because I utilize only deep pantry techniques I'm not actually spending any more money I'm just paying forward purchases, which in an inflationary scenario ends up being a cost-saving measure.

It was meant to be a shitpost and I'm sad nobody got it (or did and didn't say anything).

But I still generally don't like preppers either online or irl. Actually, I tolerate them better online.