noahpinion.blog

Roundup #89: It isn’t X, it’s Y

The key here is that China doesn't mine most of these minerals — it refines them. Other countries dig up the ore and ship it to China, and China uses a bunch of chemical engineering to turn them into usable materials for industry. Most of the world shipped their metal refining to China, because it's a dirty, capital-intensive, low-margin industry. But now as a result, China controls a bunch of key industrial chokepoints.

wired.com

Why Food Keeps Making Everybody Sick This Summer

While Trump administration cuts have contributed to the epidemic of foodborne illnesses this summer, there are also deeper issues that make the American food supply chain susceptible to parasites and bacteria outbreaks.

whyisthisinteresting

The Wildberries Edition

When a Wildberries warehouse burns, thousands of sellers lose inventory and take to the internet to complain, while the company — debt-laden and with razor-thin margins — threatens to further collapse Russia's economy. This concentration of value is now a feature of modern commerce. It is also not a vulnerability unique to Russia.

wired.com

The FDA Says It Didn't Apologize to Supplier Linked to Diarrhea Outbreak, Actually

The agency stressed that the July 17 voluntary recall from Taylor Farms still stands. The supplier has been linked to the ongoing cyclospora outbreak.

wired.com

Foxconn Ransomware Attack Shows Nothing Is Safe Forever

Famous for helping build Apple's iPhones, Foxconn just suffered another cyberattack, highlighting the perils of warehousing some of the world's most valuable data.

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with Marc from Fabricateurialist

I love sharing it with people to illustrate just how fragile the global economy is — because we have eliminated every redundancy in favor of efficiency, and the consequences are hiding in plain sight.

readtrung.com

Spirit Airlines & The Airplane Boneyard

The global aviation industry would grind to a halt without them. All parts have to be certified and need a comprehensive maintenance history to retain value.

readtrung.com

Tim Cook's Apple

Industrial engineering is essentially the study of people and machines. [It's about] how the two working together can create things that they couldn't create on their own. I've always viewed the supply chain to be a bit of a piece of art when it was done correctly. Because it's a symphony of…1000s of different components and parts coming together to create something.

ai-supremacy.com

Mythos, BigAI, Datacenters and Bottlenecks

Helium is as far as the Iran War and the semiconductor supply chain goes: as close to a "fundamental physical constraint" as we can get.

3quarksdaily.com

War on Iran

The world has never seen an interruption on this scale to the supply of stuff. It easily surpasses the 1979 oil crisis, sparked by the Iranian revolution, in which crude oil production declined by 4 percent. Forty-seven years later, Hormuz is the passageway for one fifth of the world's crude oil and one fifth of its liquefied natural gas. It's also the transit point for a third of exported urea—a feedstock used for making fertilizer which grows the food for an estimated half of the world's population.