Shipping: “‘Just Get Me a Box’: Inside the Brutal Realities of Supply Chain Hell” [Bloomberg]. “The system underpinning globalization—production on one side of the planet, connected to consumers on the other by trucks, ships, planes, cranes, and forklifts—is too rigid to absorb today’s rolling tremors from Covid-19, or to recover quickly from the jolts to consumer demand or the labor force. It’s avoided a complete collapse only through a combination of human ingenuity, painfully long hours, and, as [logistics manager RoxAnne Thomas] describes a recent success, strategy, mixed with a stroke of luck…. [S]upply uncertainties, disruptions, and inflationary forces are here for the foreseeable future, perhaps into 2023. But how things play out this month, one of two peak seasons each year for goods, will be crucial in determining how long these shortages last and which companies are able to adapt…. With summer winding down, the big test of the global trading system’s resilience might still be ahead. Every October a weeklong national holiday in China marks the unofficial deadline to get shipments out of the world’s second-largest economy in time to reach the U.S. and Europe for the holiday shopping season. With lines of ships outside ports at their longest since the pandemic began, the pressure to meet that cutoff is stronger than ever.” •