Supply Chain Quotes

He who controls the spice controls the universe.

Fortifying the company involves managing supply chain risks to ensure continuity of operations and avoid disruptions.

Fortifying the company may involve diversifying suppliers and establishing contingency plans to mitigate supply chain disruptions.

I don’t know. What I can say for certain is that I’m not yet ready to abandon the possibility of America—not just for the sake of future generations of Americans but for all of humankind. For I’m convinced that the pandemic we’re currently living through is both a manifestation of and a mere interruption in the relentless march toward an interconnected world, one in which peoples and cultures can’t help but collide. In that world—of global supply chains, instantaneous capital transfers, social media, transnational terrorist networks, climate change, mass migration, and ever-increasing complexity—we will learn to live together, cooperate with one another, and recognize the dignity of others, or we will perish. And so the world watches America—the only great power in history made up of people from every corner of the planet, comprising every race and faith and cultural practice—to see if our experiment in democracy can work. To see if we can do what no other nation has ever done. To see if we can actually live up to the meaning of our creed.

Global supply chains have many constituents and responsible parties. Everyone in the supply chain has a responsibility to act in a way that promotes effeciency in the supply chain.

At Mayflower-Plymouth, we are trying to mimic the intelligence of fungi and mycelium to add value in service to businesses.

If you'd like to gain a new understanding of supply chains, get into gardening.

In business, supply chains risks are not only correlated to the competition or to collaborators or to customers. Supply chain risk is also correlated to all of the companies and industries using the same imputs as your business.

Efficient supply chain management is essential for individual businesses, specific markets, and for the economy as a whole - especially when we're talking about Permaculture Economics. A global economy where products and services are moved from source to destination with maximum efficiency.... That's a win for everyone.

When we first talked about the touch-screen, the guys came back and said, ‘There’s nothing like that in the automotive supply chain,’” Musk said. “I said, ‘I know. That’s because it’s never been put in a fucking car before.

Closed supply chain loops are essential to Permaculture Economics.

Blockchain technology is critical to making supply chains more efficient.

Slime mold can teach us how to establish better supply chain networks.

Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, "The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning," is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that "productivity" and "earnings" keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable, and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which must sooner or later crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide . . . though he's amiable enough, keeps cracking jokes back through the loudspeaker . . .

When we look at supply chains and distribution in nature, we see that natural systems include an abundance of nodes in a network. Distribution is widely spread - enough to include the maximum nodes feasible yet not enough to add unnecessary time or cost to the path a thing takes from source to destination. This maximizes efficiency, and minimizes the risk of congestion and bottle-necks.

In terms of systems design; ovals, circles and hexagons are more efficient than rectangles, squares and straight lines — Thats something to consider when designing supply chain systems.

If you wanna learn about supply chains and distribution, go meditate in a forest.

By eliminating over-production and long transport routes from the supply chain distribution system, it allows for more responsiveness.

Our ports wouldn't have backlogs if our supply chains, distribution systems and transportation systems mimicked fungal networks.

In this modern era, Panama should be considering new ways to invest in and profit from global commerce, logistics and supply chains. It's not just about widening the canal, but widening the ways in which the nation can add value to and extract value from the movement of products and services globally.

Reshoring, backshoring, and onshoring are now replacing offshoring and outsourcing.

Making stuff - that's easy. Supply chain, now that is hard.

The best supply chain is one that has no beginning and no end.

Waste is one of the biggest threats to supply chain resilience. No system can be resilient and wasteful at the same time.

Profit enables businesses to innovate and develop sustainable solutions, such as environmentally friendly technologies, socially responsible products, and ethical supply chains.

If we want better global supply chains, there are lots of other things that have to be made better first. We need to be better with equitably including small businesses into global logistics. We need to be better with upcycling, and feedback loops. We need to be better with implementing Blockchain technology. We need to be better with material ecology and designing products for longevity. And so much more.

In this modern era, Panama should be considering new ways to invest in and profit from global commerce, logistics and supply chains. It's not just about widening the canal, but widening the ways in which the nation can add value to and extract value from the movement of products and services globally. I'm a citizen of Panama just like I am of The US and The Bahamas. So I'd like to see Panama's evolution with this.

Without good strategic thinking, one event could be the end for the company. One mistake could invite demise. One unexpected situation in global supply chains, and next thing you know the company is filing for bankruptcy. Before these things ever happen, board members in the boardroom ought to be discussing and planning for how the company would respond if it were to happen.

Going forward, Panama should expand on the canal business in new ways. That means not only widening the physical canal, but investing more broadly in global logistics and supply chains. So Panamanian leadership should ask, how can we extract more value from the canal by adding more value to it. Or how can we create or plug into new platforms which facilitate global trade. As a citizen of Panama, I'd like to see this happen.

Logistics management and supply chain management are just different ways of saying capital allocation.

The best supply chain is one that has no beginning and no end; and decentralized points of access and distribution.

Permaculture economics empowers local resilience, reducing dependence on distant supply chains.

By integrating ESG principles into the core business strategy, companies can foster innovation and build resilient supply chains that withstand market volatility.

Improving the material ecology of all products is one way to improve supply chains.

Eliminating waste from the supply chain is not a chore, it's a reinvestment opportunity. Whenever we eliminate waste, we extract an opportunity to introduce more productivity and profit into the system.

By combining supply chains, we maximize space utilized per vehicle, we streamline routes, we remove waste from the system, we do more in less time, and we provide superior value to the businesses in the network.

Everything in a permaculture ecosystem is expected to have continuous present utility.

A lot can be learned from the big companies of today. Companies like Amazon have revolutionized logistics, companies like Tesla have revolutionized sustainable systems, companies like Microsoft and Google have revolutionized data mining and data distribution, companies like Maersk have revolutionized Supply Chains, companies like Gardein and Beyond Meat have revolutionized food. Every company can serve as a case study of some kind with various lessons that can be learned.

Winter arrived with December, and the world continued to suffer the loss of the Internet and most forms of communication. Supply chains were disrupted. The only mass form of personal communication was the letter, and postal workers were having their worst year ever, as they were actually meeded. Food was becoming scarcer and more expensive, as was fuel for vehicles and heating. Major cities experienced riots on a regular basis, spurred on by religious fervor and want. Civilization was on the brink of collapse.

When we apply additive manufacturing at scale and fully integrate it into society from a systems perspective, it can revolutionize the flow of products in the supply chains. Logistically, we can get products to their destination instantly and with greater efficiency.

When production, consumption and capacity are not in alignment, the result is waste.

The data side of supply chains is really important.

The intricate networks of ecosystems teach us the importance of building strong supply chains and partnerships.

The journey of cost management...never ends. I have yet to see a company that sends a message to its supply chain saying, ‘We are making too much money, please stop managing cost’.

Supply chain management is all about the efficient utilization of capital.

In terms of systems design, shapes are important. Rectangles are not common in nature. That's probably because from a systems design perspective, rectangles often degrade efficiency instead of contributing to efficiency. Yet humans have designed an entire supply chain system based on rectangles, squares and straight lines. If we want to be more efficient, we should replace those rectangles, squares and straight lines with ovals, circles and hexagons. And maybe some other nature inspired geometries.

Supply chains have evolved into value webs. The emphasis is no longer only on supply and the perspective is no longer linear. Instead, emphasis is spread out among various interconnected parts and the perspective is holistic. In order to adapt, we have to ask ourselves more meaningful questions about everything.

Every problem in society is caused by or correlated to the inefficient utilization of capital. How do we solve the problems in supply chains? More efficient utilization of capital. How to we solve climate change problems? More efficient utilization of capital. How do we end poverty? The more efficient utilization of capital. How do we improve our education system? The more efficient utilization of capital. How do we transition from fossil fuels to sustainable energy sources? The efficient utilization of capital. Simply by striving to efficiently utilize all capital everywhere, we will by default solve a multitude of problems.

The Bahamas should be positioning itself as a key strategic link in the global supply chain and the global movement of resources. We have a variety of strategic advantages along these lines, that if leveraged will allow us to add value to global commerce in very unique ways and then profit from the value we add collectively as a people.

I think you ought to write, in bed, and make use of your unhappiness. I do it. Many do. One should cook and eat one's misery. Chain it like a dog. Harness like Niagara Falls to generate light and supply voltage for electric chairs.

On both sides, they've failed us...of course, we know about the industrialists. Their corn syrup and cheese product. Their factory farms ringed by rivers of blood and shit, blazing bonfires of disease barely contained by antibiotic blankets. These are among the most disgusting scenes in the history of this planet... But on the other side...the organic farms, the precious restaurants...these are toy supply chains. 'Farm to table,' they say. Well. When you go from farm to table, you leave a lot of people out...I think more poorly of these people than I do of the industrialists, because they know better. They know it's all broken, and what do they do? They plant vegetables in the backyard.

Data alone has no value—it’s just masses of numbers or words.

Don't underestimate him, Morgan. Many, especially men, see the rise of minorities as a threat to their cultural and economic dominance. White men are losing their jobs to women, minorities and people at the other end of the supply chain in third world countries. Beleaguered voters will support him in the hope that he will restore their vanished status." "People won't take him seriously. This is the man that said on national TV that a woman's place is in the kitchen." "That may indeed be his biggest strength.

Today’s rapidly changing world, marked by increased speed and dense interdependencies, means that organizations everywhere are now facing dizzying challenges, from global terrorism to health epidemics to supply chain disruption to game-changing technologies. These issues can be solved only by creating sustained organizational adaptability through the establishment of a team of teams.

He envisions the supply chain as an “intricate network of suppliers, distributors, and customers who share carefully managed information about demand, decisions, and performance, and who recognize that success for one part of the supply chain means success for all.

One of the solutions to increasing the resilience of the rural economy is the automation of the rural economy in a sustainable manner. The adoption of a sustainable and inclusive approach to automating the rural economy can enhance efficiency and speed at each stage of the supply chain.

Inventory is something you don't see in nature. Everything in nature has continuous present utility. Our factories and distribution centers need to be optimized such that everything in there has continuous present utility.

The scientific networks that produced EUV spanned the world, bringing together scientists from countries as diverse as America, Japan, Slovenia, and Greece. However, the manufacturing of EUV wasn’t globalized, it was monopolized. A single supply chain managed by a single company would control the future of lithography.

Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago. —Warren Buffett

Supply shortages are a business opportunity. If your business can efficiently fill the gap and match demand, there's money to earn there.

The factory should be so production capable and responsive that it is basically synchronized with demand instead of being dragged by demand.

In the United States, the more common way to initiate change has been to have consultants come in who “borrow your watch to tell you what time it is

Supply chain leaders manage complex systems with complex processes with increasing complexity. Leaders

Time is money. If we could take one day of transit time out of the supply chain, we could free up $1 billion in cash. Unfortunately, we cannot.

supply chain was and still is the silent enabler behind great companies, world economies, and successful communities. It

How efficient and successful supply chains are is determined by how well they are managed.

The term supply chain is not new. It is fundamental to military strategy. It was the difference between winning and losing in the Napoleonic wars and the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. The

The blockchain is all about bringing in transparency and efficiency into the existing systems which are running the upstream and downstream supply chains and making them more proactive and predictive.

Every product in every product ecosystem needs to have multi modal utility. The system should be such that few products can serve many purposes and products and components are maxiximally interchangeable.

Honesty, this is a matter of life.” The chain rattled and the door hesitated. “You’re s’posed to say ‘and death,’” he supplied. “I have started to not believe in the other one,” said Nona. “It’s stupid saying ‘and death’ when most of the people who die get up and walk around again. Maybe if I said ‘a matter of life and double death.

The Gospel shows people their wounds and bestows on them love. It shows them their bondage and supplies the hammer to knock away their chains. It shows them their nakedness and provides them the garments of purity. It shows them their poverty and pours into their lives the wealth of heaven. It shows them their sins and points them to the Savior.

It is tempting to point the finger at local actors as the agents of the carnage---be it corrupt politicians, exploitive cooperatives, unhinged soldiers, or extortionist bosses. The all played their roles, but they were also symptoms of a more malevolent disease: the global economy run amok in Africa. The depravity and indifference unleashed on the children working at Tilwezembe is a direct consequence of a global economic order that preys on the poverty, vulnerability, and devalued humanity of the people who toil at the bottom of global supply chains. Declarations by multinational corporations that the rights and dignity of every worker in their supply chains are protected and preserved seem more disingenuous than ever.

Everyone—including people who vehemently oppose any form of federal government—depend on a sprawling supply chain that can only function with federal oversight, and most of them pay roughly one-third of their income in taxes for the right to participate in this system.

Westinghouse was responsible for tremendous feats of manufacturing—extremely well-built devices made by a factory of hundreds, each one supplying a part. A chain of construction. Edison, on the other hand, had built himself a factory that did not produce machines, but rather ideas.

His life was absurd. He went all over the world accepting all kinds of bondage and escaping. He was roped to a chair. He escaped. He was chained to a ladder. He escaped. He was handcuffed, his legs were put in irons, he was tied up in a strait jacket and put in a locked cabinet. He escaped. He escaped from bank vaults, nailed-up barrels, sewn mailbags; he escaped from a zinc-lined Knabe piano case, a giant football, a galvanized iron boiler, a rolltop desk, a sausage skin. His escapes were mystifying because he never damaged or appeared to unlock what he escaped from. The screen was pulled away and there he stood disheveled but triumphant beside the inviolate container that was supposed to have contained him. He waved to the crowd. He escaped from a sealed milk can filled with water. He escaped from a Siberian exile van. From a Chinese torture crucifix. From a Hamburg penitentiary. From an English prison ship. From a Boston jail. He was chained to automobile tires, water wheels, cannon, and he escaped. He dove manacled from a bridge into the Mississippi, the Seine, the Mersey, and came up waving. He hung upside down and strait-jacketed from cranes, biplanes and the tops of buildings. He was dropped into the ocean padlocked in a diving suit fully weighted and not connected to an air supply, and he escaped. He was buried alive in a grave and could not escape, and had to be rescued. Hurriedly, they dug him out. The earth is too heavy, he said gasping. His nails bled. Soil fell from his eyes. He was drained of color and couldn't stand. His assistant threw up. Houdini wheezed and sputtered. He coughed blood. They cleaned him off and took him back to the hotel. Today, nearly fifty years since his death, the audience for escapes is even larger.

Cost of Quarantines—Deaths As Dr. Fauci’s policies took hold globally, 300 million humans fell into dire poverty, food insecurity, and starvation. “Globally, the impact of lockdowns on health programs, food production, and supply chains plunged millions of people into severe hunger and malnutrition,

Parts of rural China are seeing a burgeoning market for female corpses, the result of the reappearance of a strange custom called "ghost marriages." Chinese tradition demands that husbands and wives always share a grave. Sometimes, when a man died unmarried, his parents would procure the body of a woman, hold a "wedding," and bury the couple together... A black market has sprung up to supply corpse brides. Marriage brokers—usually respectable folk who find brides for village men—account for most of the middlemen. At the bottom of the supply chain come hospital mortuaries, funeral parlors, body snatchers—and now murderers. —"China's Corpse Brides: Wet Goods and Dry Goods" The Economist, July 26, 2007

Today, it is focused on not just building chains but also on the design of agile networks.

The companies in our examples started with a mutual recognition of the power of collaboration and strong commitment to make it work.

I don't like the term Stock Keeping Unit because it Implies that the priority is to keep products in stock. But keeping things in stock is inefficient and therefore should not be the priority. The ideal is for there to be minimal gap between production and sale; minimal gap between the time of production and time of consumption. The ideal is for things to be produced as needed, not to be stocked until needed.

From the perspective of society as a whole, there is no fixed or objective need aside from those broad categories required for survival. Rarely, if ever, is there a fixed quantity or definite quality demanded. This is why the needs of individuals are best met by other individuals according to supply, demand, and the price mechanism. And this is why most of the needs of individuals cannot be met only by central government.

The merc was more than a person: like a spaceship launch, her existence implied thousands of skilled people, generations of experts, wars, treaties, scholarship, and supply-chain management. Every one of them was all that.

It estimated that for every $1 million spent on controlling supply in “source countries” in Latin America, there would be a reduction of about 10 kilograms in the total amount of cocaine consumed in the United States. If $1 million were spent trying to intercept cocaine further down the supply chain, on its way to America, that would save more like 20 kilograms. Prevention programs in schools were a bit more effective, saving about 25 kilograms per $1 million.

the price signals of supply and demand provided the only means yet discovered of coordinating the desires and actions of millions of freely acting individuals, without government compulsion, in what Hayek called a “spontaneous order.

Look, I’m keeping the power on so they can do whatever it is they do up there, and I can’t get basic supplies. And even when I do, the quality is complete crap, probably because of unrealistic quotas, rushing the manufacturing chain—

It is a common practice of life to focus on the world immediately before us, the one we see and smell and touch every day. It grounds us where we are, with our communities and our known corners and concerns. But to see the full supply chains of Al requires looking for patterns in a global sweep, a sensitivity to the ways in which the histories and specific harms are different from place to place and yet are deeply interconnected by the multiple forces of extraction.

Only she can say if, in fact, she has managed to insert herself into this extremely long chain of words to modify my text, to purposely supply the missing links, to unhook others without letting it show, to say of me more than I want, more than I’m able to say.

Our case was straightforward: The deal prevented Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. The Iranians had to remove two-thirds of their centrifuges, couldn’t use their more advanced centrifuges, and had to get rid of 98 percent of their stockpile. They had to convert a heavy water reactor so it couldn’t produce plutonium. Inspectors would have 24/7 access to Iran’s nuclear facilities, and the ability to access Iran’s entire nuclear supply chain—from uranium mines and mills to centrifuge manufacturing and storage facilities. To cheat, Iran wouldn’t just need a nuclear facility like Natanz or Fordow—they’d have to run an entirely secret supply chain. If they cheated, sanctions would snap back into place. Then there were the consequences of not having the deal. Without it, Iran could quickly advance its nuclear program to the point of having enough material for a bomb. That would leave us with a choice between bombing their facilities and acquiescing to a nuclear-armed Iran. Holding out for a better deal was not going to work. It was diplomacy or war.

A sustainable firm provides employees and customers with an inspiring vision to make the world a better place; efficiently delivers value to its customers, consistent with the firm’s vision, thereby earning economic returns, over the long term, that at least equal the cost of capital; builds long-term, win–win relationships with all its stakeholders; and applies creative systems thinking to the design, manufacturing, delivery, and recycling of its products, including their supply chains, so as to reduce waste and harm to the environment. The

The fairest state of them all, this tranquil and beloved domain—what has it now become? A nursery for Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas. A monstrous breeding farm to supply the sinew to gratify the maw of Eli Whitney’s infernal machine, cursed be that blackguard’s name! In such a way is our human decency brought down, when we pander all that is in us noble and just to the false god which goes by the vile name of Capital! Oh, Virginia, woe betide thee! Woe, thrice woe, and ever damned in memory be the day when poor black men in chains first trod upon thy sacred strand!

It was in Cleveland that Magic Slim became the most successful pornographic film producer in America. His training center was a key link in a human trafficking supply chain stretching from the former Soviet Republics in Eastern Europe to the United States. Trafficking accounts for an estimated $32 billion in annual trade with sex slavery and pornographic film production accounting for the greatest percentage. The girls arrived at Slim’s building young and naive, they left older and wiser. This was a classic value chain with each link making a contribution.  Slim’s trainers were the best, and it showed in the final product. Each class of girls was judged on the merits. The fast learners went on to advanced training. They learned proper etiquette, social skills and party games. They learned how to dress, apply makeup and discuss world events.  Best in-class were advertised in international style magazines with code words. These codes were known only to select clients and certain intermediaries approved by Slim. This elaborate distribution system was part of Slim’s business model, his clients paid an annual subscription fee for the on-line dictionary. The code words and descriptions were revised monthly.  An interested client would pay an access fee for further information that included a set of professional  photographs, a video and voice recordings of the model addressing the client by name.  Should the client accept, a detailed travel itinerary was submitted calling for first class travel and accommodation.  Slim required a letter of understanding spelling out terms and conditions and a 50% deposit. He didn’t like contracts, his word was his bond, everyone along the chain knew that. Slim's business was booming.

If Paul does not mean that all who are called are justified, the only alternative would be that some who are called are justified. If we supply the word some instead of the word all here, then we must supply it throughout the Golden Chain. Then it would read like this: Some of those he foreknew, he also predestined. Some of those he predestined, he also called. Some of those he called, these he also justified. Some of those he justified, he also glorified.

At Booths, over one-quarter of the transport footprint comes from the very small amount of air freight in their supply chains—typically used for expensive items that perish quickly. Conversely, most of their food miles are by ship (partly because the U.K. is an island), but because ships can carry food around the world around 100 times more efficiently than planes, they account for less than 1 percent of Booths’ total footprint. The message here is that it is OK to eat apples, oranges, bananas, or whatever you like from anywhere in the world, as long as it has not been on a plane or thousands of miles by road. Road miles are roughly as carbon intensive as air miles, but in the U.K. the distances involved tend not to be too bad, whereas in North America they can be thousands of miles. Booths is a regional supermarket with just one warehouse, so their own distribution is not a big carbon deal, and they have been working hard on further improvements.

JIT is a technique used to eliminate the waste of excess inventory. Parts and materials are “pulled” through the production process only as needed, rather than “pushed” out onto the production floor in large quantities. Accountants justifiably see inventory as an asset because it represents an investment by the company. From a JIT perspective, however, it is an avoidable cost that must be minimized. Any costs that do not contribute to the value of the output are to be eliminated.

Not all of history is recorded in the books supplied to school children in Harlem or Birmingham. Yet this boy and this girl know something of the part of history which has been censored by the white writers and purchasers of board-of-education books. They know that Negroes were with George Washington at Valley Forge. They know that the first American to shed blood in the revolution which freed his country from British oppression was a black seaman named Crispus Attucks. The boy's Sunday-school teacher has told him that one of the team who designed the capital of their nation, Washington, D.C., was a Negro, Benjamin Banneker. Once the girl had heard a speaker, invited to her school during Negro History Week. This speaker told how, for two hundred years, without wages, black people, brought to this land in slave ships and in chains, had drained the swamps, built the homes, made cotton king and helped, on whip-lashed backs, to lift this nation from colonial obscurity to commanding influence in domestic commerce and world trade. Wherever there was hard work, dirty work, dangerous work—in the mines, on the docks, in the blistering foundries—Negroes had done more than their share.

Lucid Motors was started under the name Atieva (which stood for “advanced technologies in electric vehicle applications” and was pronounced “ah-tee-va”) in Mountain View in 2008 (or December 31, 2007, to be precise) by Bernard Tse, who was a vice president at Tesla before it launched the Roadster. Hong Kong–born Tse had studied engineering at the University of Illinois, where he met his wife, Grace. In the early 1980s, the couple had started a computer manufacturing company called Wyse, which at its peak in the early 1990s registered sales of more than $480 million a year. Tse joined Tesla’s board of directors in 2003 at the request of his close friend Martin Eberhard, the company’s original CEO, who sought Tse’s expertise in engineering, manufacturing, and supply chain. Tse would eventually step off the board to lead a division called the Tesla Energy Group. The group planned to make electric power trains for other manufacturers, who needed them for their electric car programs. Tse, who didn’t respond to my requests to be interviewed, left Tesla around the time of Eberhard’s departure and decided to start Atieva, his own electric car company. Atieva’s plan was to start by focusing on the power train, with the aim of eventually producing a car. The company pitched itself to investors as a power train supplier and won deals to power some city buses in China, through which it could further develop and improve its technology. Within a few years, the company had raised about $40 million, much of it from the Silicon Valley–based venture capital firm Venrock, and employed thirty people, mostly power train engineers, in the United States, as well as the same number of factory workers in Asia. By 2014, it was ready to start work on a sedan, which it planned to sell in the United States and China. That year, it raised about $200 million from Chinese investors, according to sources close to the company.

Fish at breakfast is sometimes himono (semi-dried fish, intensely flavored and chewy, the Japanese equivalent of a breakfast of kippered herring or smoked salmon) and sometimes a small fillet of rich, well-salted broiled fish. Japanese cooks are expert at cutting and preparing fish with nothing but salt and high heat to produce deep flavor and a variety of textures: a little crispy over here, melting and juicy there. Some of this is technique and some is the result of a turbo-charged supply chain that scoops small, flavorful fish out of the ocean and deposits them on breakfast tables with only the briefest pause at Tsukiji fish market and a salt cure in the kitchen. By now, I've finished my fish and am drinking miso soup. Where you find a bowl of rice, miso shiru is likely lurking somewhere nearby. It is most often just like the soup you've had at the beginning of a sushi meal in the West, with wakame seaweed and bits of tofu, but Iris and I were always excited when our soup bowls were filled with the shells of tiny shijimi clams. Clams and miso are one of those predestined culinary combos- what clams and chorizo are to Spain, clams and miso are to Japan. Shijimi clams are fingernail-sized, and they are eaten for the briny essence they release into the broth, not for what Mario Batali has called "the little bit of snot" in the shell. Miso-clam broth is among the most complex soup bases you'll ever taste, but it comes together in minutes, not the hours of simmering and skimming involved in making European stocks. As Tadashi Ono and Harris Salat explain in their book Japanese Hot Pots, this is because so many fermented Japanese ingredients are, in a sense, already "cooked" through beneficial bacterial and fungal actions. Japanese food has a reputation for crossing the line from subtlety into blandness, but a good miso-clam soup is an umami bomb that begins with dashi made from kombu (kelp) and katsuobushi (bonito flakes) or niboshi (a school of tiny dried sardines), adds rich miso pressed through a strainer for smoothness, and is then enriched with the salty clam essence.

Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, "The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning," is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that "productivity" and "earnings" keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable, and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which must sooner or later crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide . . . though he's amiable enough, keeps cracking jokes back through the loudspeaker . . . on you roll, across a countryside whose light is forever changing--castles, heaps of rock, moons of different shapes and colors come and go. There are stops at odd hours of teh mornings, for reasons that are not announced: you get out to stretch in lime-lit courtyards where the old men sit around the table under enormous eucalyptus trees you can smell in the night, shuffling the ancient decks oily and worn, throwing down swords and cups and trumps major in the tremor of light while behind them the bus is idling, waiting--"passengers will now reclaim their seats" and much as you'd like to stay, right here, learn the game, find your old age around this quiet table, it's no use: he is waiting beside the door of the bus in his pressed uniform, Lord of the Night he is checking your tickets, your ID and travel papers, and it's the wands of enterprise that dominate tonight...as he nods you by, you catch a glimpse of his face, his insane, committed eyes, and you remember then, for a terrible few heartbeats, that of course it will end for you all in blood, in shock, without dignity--but there is meanwhile this trip to be on ... over your own seat, where there ought to be an advertising plaque, is instead a quote from Rilke: "Once, only once..." One of Their favorite slogans. No return, no salvation, no Cycle--that's not what They, nor Their brilliant employee Kekule, have taken the Serpent to mean.

Drafting conscript workers was one thing. But unless they were adequately fed they were useless. There was no industry in the 1940s in which the correlation between labour productivity and calorific input was more direct than in mining.91 But after 1939 the food supply in Western Europe was no less constrained than the supply of coal.92 As was true of Germany, the high-intensity dairy farms of France, the Netherlands and Denmark were dependent on imported animal feed. Grain imports in the late 1930s had run at the rate of more than 7 million tons per annum mostly from Argentina and Canada. These sources of supply were closed off by the British blockade. In addition Western Europe had imported more than 700,000 tons of oil seed.93 Of course, France was a major producer of grain in its own right. But French grain yields depended, as they did in Germany, on large quantities of nitrogen-based fertilizer, which could be supplied only at the expense of the production of explosives. And like German agriculture, the farms of Western Europe depended on huge herds of draught animals and on the daily labour of millions of farm workers. The removal of horses, manpower, fertilizer and animal feed that followed the outbreak of war set off a disastrous chain reaction in the delicate ecology of European peasant farming. By the summer of 1940, Germany was facing a Europe-wide agricultural crisis.

THE IRIS OF THE EYE WAS TOO BIG TO HAVE BEEN FABRICATED AS A single rigid object. It had been built, beginning about nine hundred years ago, out of links that had been joined together into a chain; the two ends of the chain then connected to form a loop. The method would have seemed familiar to Rhys Aitken, who had used something like it to construct Izzy’s T3 torus. For him, or anyone else versed in the technological history of Old Earth, an equally useful metaphor would have been that it was a train, 157 kilometers long, made of 720 giant cars, with the nose of the locomotive joined to the tail of the caboose so that it formed a circular construct 50 kilometers in diameter. An even better analogy would have been to a roller coaster, since its purpose was to run loop-the-loops forever. The “track” on which the “train” ran was a circular groove in the iron frame of the Eye, lined with the sensors and magnets needed to supply electrodynamic suspension, so that the whole thing could spin without actually touching the Eye’s stationary frame. This was an essential design requirement given that the Great Chain had to move with a velocity of about five hundred meters per second in order to supply Earth-normal gravity to its inhabitants. Each of the links had approximately the footprint of a Manhattan city block on Old Earth. And their total number of 720 was loosely comparable to the number of such blocks that had once existed in the gridded part of Manhattan, depending on where you drew the boundaries—it was bigger than Midtown but smaller than Manhattan as a whole. Residents of the Great Chain were acutely aware of the comparison, to the point where they were mocked for having a “Manhattan complex” by residents of other habitats. They were forever freeze-framing Old Earth movies or zooming around in virtual-reality simulations of pre-Zero New York for clues as to how street and apartment living had worked in those days. They had taken as their patron saint Luisa, the eighth survivor on Cleft, a Manhattanite who had been too old to found her own race. Implicit in that was that the Great Chain—the GC, Chaintown, Chainhattan—was a place that people might move to when they wanted to separate themselves from the social environments of their home habitats, or indeed of their own races. Mixed-race people were more common there than anywhere else.