Biters aren't real and factory pollution is woke nonsense.
The military research is to ensure that you can liberate the resources of other players.
The reason you don't want buffers in Factorio is so you can instantly see what you're short on. In real life you use reports to do the same thing and buffers give you time to solve the problem before it starts affecting actual production. Hell you can do the same thing in Factorio with circuits if you want to, it's just more complicated.
Does factorio not have any way to warehouse things for later use, or account for inventory on hand?
You can store things for later in chests and have those things go back onto the line automatically when they're needed. This only requires a little finesse but is doable even for relative noobs. Accounting for inventory on-hand is simple for the player (there are integrated charts) but incredibly difficult to do anything with that sort of information automatically (you would need to manually make your own logic gates).
It's a lot simple to just figure out what you don't have enough of (or just want more of) and then back trace your production lines until you find the bottleneck. The conveyor belts in the game really help with this and make this very easy since you can immediately see if you're short on something because those conveyor belts would be getting fully emptied. I think this is a strength of the game since it replaces looking at charts and reports with running around the factory you built.
Edit: If you haven't played Factorio then you should know that there a few things you do want reserves of. Ammo is a big one, as well as stuff for expanding your factory; conveyor belts, inserters, assemblers, miners, walls, etc. Those aren't buffers though, those are finished products you need.
It's also slightly better, because mining productivity means you want to keep ores unmined for as long as possible. But it is mostly because it's a lot easier.
Anyone who isn't adding buffers to their Factorio factory is an idiot. Do you just pick up items off the belts like a savage when you need to handcraft a one-off item? And what do you do if you have an input shortage?
Do you just pick up items off the belts like a savage when you need to handcraft a one-off item?
:yes-sicko:
And what do you do if you have an input shortage?
Faster belts
Sure I do, because needing one-off items is rare. Everything I personally need a lot of is made in my mall and stored there. When I have an input shortage I increase the amount of input until I have plenty. Buffers actually increase your resource usage because of the mining productivity infinite research.
Just in Time inventory is...adequate...as far as inventory methods go, so long as literally everything in the supply chain can be accounted for. The only reason it is so overwhelmingly popular is because of the cost that is shaved off by not purchasing in bulk/not having excess inventory on hand to pay taxes on.
One rather significant downside is that if something like a pandemic happens, you're going to be fucked sideways through a wall.
It isn't just taxes, it is also cash flow since you typically pay on receipt. With many JIT systems someone else is holding the bag as far as expenditures & tax burden while you have a (theoretically) solid/guaranteed production stream.
Right, that's what I meant with the 'not purchasing in bulk' thing. I wonder if the pandemic actually caused any shift in inventory management? Probably not anything substantial
And even the leanest JIT operations have contingencies planned for according to likelihood of disruption and impact of disruption. Thinking that JIT is about having literally no stock means you have absolutely no contact with any logistics operations.
Yeah, it's about running lean to save on cost/overhead. It's not a bad system, it just becomes problematic when improbable disasters happen, and the lead times on certain inventory items go from a couple weeks to 8+ months
It's part and parcel of the "end of history" idea that everything will be neoliberal forever, so why would you account for anything like a war or major disaster disrupting critical infrastructure or crashing the economy because some vital sector was bottlenecked through a single point of failure?
Not needing warehouse and storage space and the logistics to move things in and out of warehouses is another big factor.
I wonder how much damage video games have done to society, like for example SimCity being based on bogus neoliberal city planning.
The original Sim City was always so mad at me for building light rail only with no roads.
Anyone who has played Victoria 3 knows that communism is superior to capitalism
Thats right commies, if you just learned basic economics you'd know that the most optimal way to organize production is to plan it to within a milimeter of leeway in a perfect vacuum, so there is no waste ever!
anyone who has played Tecmo Super Bowl knows that the Chicago Bears are the greatest team in the universe and Jim McMahon can literally throw a football 90 yards with the accuracy of a fucking laser beam.
Well duh in real life you pay people to keep track of that shit and report back. If you're a company providing coffee, you don't want to learn that you're out of coffee beans the second there's no more, you want to keep some in the back to last while you order some in. That's the entire point of warehouses existing, FFS.
His failure with buffering is because he's playing it stupidly and not keeping track of his supply chains or his saved assets until there's an issue. Wow, what a shocker that's a bad idea.
Anyone who has played modded Minecraft knows that "holding reserves" is far superior to actually producing just in time. If you don't put resources on passive you'll spend too much time hunting them down when you need them instead of building up a supply in the background, your production will have a harder time scaling to new demands, and you're acutely vulnerable to supply chain disruptions like a creeper blowing up your mob farm. People are saying "why didn't we produce just in time" ? Well, there we go. Play modded Minecraft. You'll see just how bad not having buffers is in a simulated factory
Same with Dwarf Fortress. Having significant reserves is essential to survival. There's so much weird shit that can happen to disrupt agriculture and industry. You might end up having to hide inside your fortress for years because some god awful super-monster is standing outside the gates yelling "come outside i just want to talk!" Or your miners breached a caver and now your mine is full of giant cave spiders so you have no more iron until you figure out how to deal with them.
Everything that's true in a simulated micro level remains true in reality at a macro level.
This is why, for instance, everyone intuitively knows how national budgets work and affect things, because we've all dealt with household budgets :very-smart:
if you buffer things up, you don't know where the problems in your production are
This is just stupid. If you're keeping an eye on things, of course you'll figure out which of your buffers are draining faster than they're filling - and the beauty of using buffers is that it gives you time to add more inputs or decrease outputs without ever having everything come to a screeching halt because you ran out of something important. In Factorio for example if you run out of whatever you're using for power generation, that can cause a cascading failure where everything suddenly breaks down.
In the real world JIT is used because warehouses cost money and capitalists want to reduce that cost. Any sane, planned system that didn't have this consideration would of course include buffers because they allow you to absorb supply shocks.
If problems don't appear, you won't know where the problems are! :galaxy-brain:
it's more efficient but less resiliant sometimes resiliancy is important in a system
