Buried near the end: Nisshin Seifun Welna stopped printing cooking time on their spaghetti packaging tape. There's a Japanese consumer somewhere squinting at the package trying to remember if it was 8 mins or 10 mins.

This is what "globalized supply chain" looks like up close.

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pibaker 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What is the alternative to imported fossil fuel product for a country like Japan?

	▲	Arn_Thor 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If they (and the rest of us for that matter) weren't burning so much of it, there'd be more left over for other uses. (with the obvious caveat that less demand means less production, which would mean there wouldn't be a lot of surplus. But in a world where we don't burn so much oil, it probably wouldn't be worth either party closing the Strait anyway...)
	▲	ktallett an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Japan need to use far less of it. Their levels of waste in plastic and so on, is still ridiculously high in comparison with many places.

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Barrin92 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>This is what "globalized supply chain" looks like up close.

If that's the extent of it I'd say they're doing relatively fine. People have been taking these events like covid as some glaring warning of globalized supply chains but given that we've had like ten major supply chain shocks in half as many years I feel like the supply chains are good actually.

If you told me ten years ago that North Koreans are fighting in Europe, Russia's oil facilities are being hit by drones, Houthis are launching rockets into space and the largest trade route in the world is blocked I'd have guessed it's worse than 4% inflation and Japan's running out of printer ink