Fine-tuning the future

"America faces supply chain disruption and shortages." "From zippers to glass, shortages of basic goods hobble the U.S. economy." "America Is Running Out of Everything." Over the last few weeks, you could have read any number of news stories like this. If you read these news stories, you find that shoppers are wandering from store to store, looking for basic household supplies and goods. On e-commerce sites, many goods that used to be available with one-day shipping now have waiting periods of a week or more. For those of us of a certain age, it all sounds quite familiar - the way things used to be in India in the 1970s. Of course, there are shortages all over the world, most notably of semiconductors but nothing like the 360° ones being suffered by what was supposed to be the most ruthlessly efficient e