supply chains

Peter Zeihan speaks at Iowa Swine Day 2022 on geopolitics, the end of globalization and agriculture. He argues that supply chains, energy and farm inputs are all about to be disrupted.

Andrew "bunnie" Huang examines how realistic hardware supply chain attacks are, from rogue insiders to nation states, in the wake of the Bloomberg Businessweek report. He explains how undocumented components could be hidden on boards and how hard they are to spot.

Wendover Productions explains the wave of supply shortages in 2021, arguing the causes go beyond COVID. It covers how just-in-time manufacturing was applied, container imbalances and the chip shortage.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day tries to manufacture a grill scrubber entirely in the United States. Along the way he runs into missing supply chains, tooling and institutional manufacturing knowledge.

A short film from the Competitive Enterprise Institute adapting Leonard Read's 1958 essay I, Pencil, showing how no one person knows how to make a pencil and how many people cooperate without central planning.

A three-minute excerpt from Milton Friedman's Free to Choose in which he uses a pencil to show that no single person knows how to make it. He argues that the free market coordinates countless strangers peacefully.

James Mickens of Harvard gives a funny lecture at HBS's Future Assembly arguing that blockchains are a very bad idea. He covers their trust, legal and practical shortcomings for real-world problems.

A 36C3 talk by Bunnie Huang arguing that open source is necessary but not sufficient for trustworthy hardware, because verifying hardware is destructive and so creates a time-of-check/time-of-use gap. It surveys supply chain security and classes of hardware attacks, and presents the Betrusted approach to narrowing that gap.

Big Clive takes apart an IKEA Koppla USB power supply to assess its safety, looking at isolation and transformer construction.

A Veritasium video on how a feud between Russian mathematicians led to Markov chains and the modern prediction algorithms built on them. It covers the history and the math behind them.

Designer Thomas Thwaites describes his attempt to build a toaster from scratch, from mining ore and deriving plastic from oil. It is a short TED talk on how much civilization a simple object depends on.

A two-minute clip in which Milton Friedman uses a humble pencil to show how thousands of strangers across many countries cooperate, without central direction, to make a simple product. It is a short visual version of the 'I, Pencil' essay's argument about free markets and dispersed knowledge.

Wendover Productions explains how overnight shipping works, covering the hub-and-spoke logistics of companies like FedEx and UPS and the use of cargo aircraft. It touches on the economics that make next-day delivery possible.

FortNine explains the economics of the dealership model, arguing that dealers absorb inventory risk and help manufacturers' finances. It looks at whether cars and motorcycles could be sold more cheaply without them.

Wendover Productions explains how the US military moves people and materiel worldwide, including prepositioned equipment, sealift and airlift. It shows the scale of the logistics system behind US force projection.

Tom Scott visits the US National Helium Reserve in Amarillo, Texas, and explains why headlines that the world is running out of helium are misleading. He covers the Federal Helium Program and its planned privatization.

A short BBC Earth clip from David Attenborough's Life of Birds showing a lyrebird imitating sounds, including a chainsaw and camera shutter, so accurately it is hard to tell from the real thing.

Electronics hobbyist bigclivedotcom tears down a cheap USB power supply with a manufacturing fault that carries full mains voltage to the USB ports, showing the risk of electric shock.

Sabine Hossenfelder weighs the arguments for and against nuclear power, covering waste, fuel supply and newer reactor designs. She is skeptical that fast breeders and thorium solve the problems.

Asianometry explains that the worst of the 2021-22 chip shortage sits in trailing-edge semiconductors, not the leading-edge chips usually covered. It covers why those older-node fabs are so hard to expand and fix.

A man spends six months and $1500 making a chicken sandwich entirely from scratch: growing vegetables, making salt from seawater, milking a cow for cheese, grinding wheat, collecting honey and killing a chicken.

Rory McCune's AppSec EU 2015 talk on security risks in modern software deployment. It covers weaknesses in package ecosystems like npm, RubyGems and PyPI, and repository compromise.

A Wendover Productions video on how dollar store chains expanded across America and why they displace grocery stores in small towns. It covers their business model and supplier leverage.

A 38C3 talk on how advanced chips are made, centered on EUV lithography and the global supply chain behind it. It covers technical challenges from raw materials to finished chips and the geopolitical weight of semiconductors.

An 86-minute Milton Friedman talk arguing that inflation is a monetary phenomenon caused by money supply growing faster than goods, and that the cure is less government spending and money printing.

Gary Bernhardt's Cascadia Ruby Conference 2011 talk on using the Unix shell for practical problem solving. He builds pipelines interactively by iterative refinement, using small tools as levers.

Jeff Geerling interviews Raspberry Pi co-founder Eben Upton about the Pi shortage, the RP2040, RISC-V, the Sony investment and the origin of the name.

A 35C3 talk presenting a proof-of-concept SPI bus hardware implant with capabilities like those alleged in the Bloomberg Supermicro story, plus countermeasures for detecting such modchips.

Veritasium tells the story of the XZ backdoor, how a patient attacker became maintainer and nearly compromised SSH on Linux systems. It also covers free software history and how encryption in SSH works.

A DEFCON 20 panel with NSA whistleblower William Binney, journalist James Bamford and ACLU lawyers on the NSA's mass collection of communications and its conflict with the Constitution.

Wendover Productions explains how airlines make money from different cabin classes and why premium seats matter so much to profits. It also touches on how this shaped decisions such as the decline of supersonic travel.

Wendover Productions explains why US passenger rail lags behind other countries. It covers freight companies owning most of the track, geography and population density, and the economics of competing with flying.

Wendover Productions explains why Boeing's efficient 787 beat Airbus's giant A380, contrasting hub-and-spoke with point-to-point routes. It covers the economics of long-haul flights.

Mark Rober visits Zipline and looks at its autonomous delivery drones, including medical and blood deliveries in Rwanda. He demonstrates how the drones' propeller design and cable-lowered delivery pod make them quiet and precise.

CGP Grey explains that postal codes are routing instructions for mail rather than geographic regions. He looks at the quirks and problems this causes.

Patrick Boyle's deadpan account of Saudi Arabia's Neom and The Line megaproject, a planned 170 km linear city that has been scaled back to a fraction of its size. He covers the feasibility problems and the financing.

FortNine explains how Harley-Davidson ended up in decline, from a narrow lifestyle niche and an aging customer base to the pandemic hitting a company already in trouble.

Wendover Productions explains why drone delivery has not become the future once promised. It covers no-fly zones, costs and the difficulty of the final drop-off.

A Wendover Productions explainer on why train tickets, especially Amtrak in the US, cost so much compared with flying. It breaks down staffing, speed and the cost components behind a ticket.

A 60 Minutes segment on Luxottica, the company that owns most major eyewear brands and retailers and dominates the market. It shows how consolidation of brands and manufacturing affects glasses prices.