Well…damn, just crashed the bike but that’s for the next one…right now, I want to talk about the right’s latest bogeyman, JIT. As you know, there have been some pretty big supply disruptions with lots of container ships stuck outside of the major ports here in the US…and warnings that you should be shopping for christmas now so you will be able to get presents…and, of course, the right wing media is blaming the whole thing on Biden for reasons that make absolutely no sense….but that doesn’t matter to them. What everyone has to understand is that the bottlenecks are caused by a little thing in the supply chains called JIT…or just in time production. Back about 30 years or so, people started to notice that there was lots and lots of inventory and work in progress in their warehouses and factories that was costing them tons of cash to just store….and the production and other processes worked to estimates of what would be needed since that was the only information they had and most businesses and warehouses had months of production and stock just sitting there…but then new ideas started to form about making processes more efficient and only making goods that you have orders for…the idea of just in time started to be adopted across the world to squeeze every penny out of the supply chain. As it became more and more efficient, it also became more and more susceptible to disruption as the chain balanced on a knife edge with no tolerance for problems in any part of it. When the pandemic hit and closed factories accross Asia and everywhere else, and shut down ports and other transport systems necessary to move goods, the finely balanced house of cards fell apart since there were no warehouses full of goods to cushion the shocks, and the result was bare shelves across the country. But what Biden has to do with it, I don’t know…these are private, capitalistic systems that have been built to profit the owners and no one else…so tell me the actions he has taken that disrupted this house of cards? No…yeah, didn’t think there were any….is Biden hiding shipping containers at the WH? Is he telling truck drivers to quit since they are being paid less now than they were 40 years ago? Did he offshore all of American manufacturing so good have to be shipped from Asia? I think the repubs really are too stupid to understand the pitfalls of JIT…as an ME, I built many of these systems at the furniture manufacturer I worked for and lived the chaos when they crashed…this is just on a much bigger scale…geez…