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Agriculture's dependence on pollinators, including both wild and domesticated bees, has increased fourfold since the 1960s. A recent study of these pollinators found that they provide up to $577 billion a year of crops, half of which comes from wild pollinators. These ratios underline the severity of their collapsing numbers. More than a third are facing extinction.
Gemma Cranston, head of the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership team that participated in the study, warned that "less than half the companies sampled know which of the raw materials they source depend on pollinators", adding that there needs to be more research to get the full picture.
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Plight of the bees hits unaware businesses
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Plight of the Bees Hits Unaware Businesses
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If the thunder don't get you, then the lightning will.
(Score: 3, Informative) by darkfeline on Tuesday April 17 2018, @07:42PM (2 children)
Supply chain signal propagation is notoriously slow. There's a common introductory business game (one example [1]), where everyone splits up into a bunch of teams to simulate the various parts of the supply chain (retailers, warehouse, manufacturer, etc), the teams pass around cards to send signals about supply/demand, and you play it for a few rounds. The supply chain responds very slowly to changes in supply/demand and screws everything up.
It's like global warming; by the time the signals have appeared, the horse has not only left the barn, but has been caught and sold into someone else's barn.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_distribution_game [wikipedia.org]
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(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @10:26PM (1 child)
When all you're doing is relaying information about supply and demand, then of course it will screw up; that's why socialism always devolves into dysfunctional breadlines.
However, people don't fuck around with money.
They will pass a burden on as quick as they get it, unless there is some strange, distorting force at play, and it's that change in the exchange of money (not information about supply and demand) which will cause an economy to re-organize itself.
Damn. This is another reason to be wary of MBAs.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Thursday April 19 2018, @06:44PM
That strange, distorting force is called latency, and even very simple systems, such as a robot using gyro sensor input to walk, can experience negative emergent effects from latency. The larger and more complex the system, the greater the effect, and the global economy is a pretty big and complex system.
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