99.9% of What you Need Equals ZERO

 The preceding article was about the academic world, this one is about the industrial realm but the subject is the same: Social and economic breakdown on the ground. The author expects things to get better in 2023. Like Covid-19? Any time now!

 Or maybe they will. But in the current environment, what is the chance that "something", anything really will go wrong in-between?

Guest Post by NickelthroweR on the Burning Platform (Link Below)

 https://www.theburningplatform.com/2021/09/08/99-9-of-what-you-need-equals-zero/#more-248282

As of the last census, 444,000 Americans owned a small business that was involved with manufacturing. These small businesses employ about 3% of the total workforce. Of course, you’d have a much greater chance of running into a doctor (985,000), lawyer (1,300,000), or real estate agent (1,300,000) than someone the produces things. That means that just 0.0013% of our current US population finds themselves in the same position that I find myself – the owner of a small business that manufactures real-world items.

Manufacturing real-world items require real-world inputs. As for myself, I need steel for the housings, epoxy and dyes for the knobs, aluminum for the face plate, copper for the circuit boards and wire, plastics, diodes, resistors, capacitors, LED’s, relays and on and on and on and on right up to and including various semi-conductors.

Luckily for me, I invested a decade and put in place a system where everything from hand-wound transformers to the cable harnesses materializes within a few days of each other and then the precision tools that I designed can be assembled, tested, and shipped. To make sure this system works, no one that supplies me anything gets paid until the finished product ships and I have the tracking numbers because, well, that is when I get paid.

When working, this just-in-time way of doing business is a wonder to behold. Watching how quickly it all fell apart is also a wonder to behold. 99.9% of what you need is zero.

There is no elasticity in a circuit. Either 100% of the necessary parts are present and in good working order or the circuit simply doesn’t work. People completely ignorant of such things may believe that substitutions exist but that is not how circuit design works. If your Intel chipset fails on your PC, you can’t substitute an AMD or Motorola chipset in its place. It has to be the chipset that the design was built around. A change in any semi-conductor usually means a complete redesign from the ground up.

At the end of the day, my business is not at all unique in the semi-conductors that it uses. After all, it would be foolish to use semi-conductors that are obsolete, out of production, or rare. Frankly, the more I see a semi-conductor in use, the more I find that it will be cheaper and readily available for me to use. That is why I use the same semi-conductors that are used in the automotive production, medical equipment, heavy machinery, etc.

As I sit here and write this, my supply chain is in absolute tatters. It is not possible to produce some of my products even though I have customers that wish to buy. In an attempt to keep my workforce, I’ve employed “sniffers” to go out and search for military surplus electronics and to visit places where electronics are sometimes misplaced and forgotten. By doing this, I’ve been able to continue producing analog products but even that can’t go on for much longer because 99.9% of what you need is zero.

As I write this, I’m now one item away from being completely out of business.

I do not say any of this because I want sympathy, an apology, or a handout. I am saying this because I want you to apply this lesson to everything around you. Pick anything. Pick an outpatient surgical center.

Suppose you run an outpatient surgical center that serves a rural county. Suppose you’ve worked hard and you have the top of the line equipment and tools. Suppose you’ve got everything in place – all the surgeons, nurses, PA’s, HR, administrators, coders, janitors, landscaping, cafeteria, etc. Let’s further suppose that there isn’t so much as a single squeaky door at your fantastic outpatient surgical center. You run a tight ship!

Suppose that the State where this surgical outpatient center resides just issued a mandate that all workers in your outpatient surgical center must be vaccinated against Covid or be fired as New York State has mandated. Now, suppose your Anesthesiologist isn’t vaccinated and you must fire her. Now what? Your outpatient center is now 100% shut down. It doesn’t matter how many HR Karen’s you hire.

It doesn’t matter if you fly a BLM flag from every window. You can teach CRT from sunup to sundown and it won’t make a bit of difference – you are closed for business and closed forever. After all, it takes 14 years to produce an Anesthesiologist and if half of them are fired statewide then your rural outpatient center isn’t going to have one.

Because our leadership class has never had to produce anything of value, they do not understand how any of this works. They believe 99.9% of what you need is the definition of success. They simply do not understand how quickly the $30,000,000 aircraft becomes a lawn ornament when you fire your fuel handlers. Printed money doesn’t fuel your aircraft – a trained specialist does.

They do not understand that the loss of our workhorse semi-conductors (semi-conductors that I’ve been told will be unavailable to me until at least 2023) means that there can not be a Green New Deal because the machinery needed to construct these projects can not be made nor can our current equipment even be serviced. 99.9% of what you need is zero.

Most Americans can’t quite put this together because most are end consumers and not producers. I suspect that they can’t understand the problem because they think of the world in the same way they think about a grocery store. A grocery store that has 99.9% of what is normally stocked looks perfectly fine. To the end consumer, 95% of what they want is nothing more than a transitory inconvenience. It is nothing to worry about.

They are wrong.

Dead wrong.

Useless Ken and Karen politicians flicked the economy on and off like a light switch, paid our workforce to stay home, and are now ordering us to fire people that can take a decade or more to replace.  The only outcome that I can see from these disastrous decisions is a biblical famine.  Get ready to witness the Four Horsemen.