Planes, trains and automobiles

According to whoever it is who decides such things, I just snuck into Generation X, being born in the first year that designation covers.Under normal circumstances, I am not given to allowing myself to be labelled with vague and unsubstantiated generalities, but being a Gemini I am also inherently curious and open minded, and so I must say the label does seem to fit.We X'ers are sort of an in-between lot, the best, or perhaps the worst of all worlds. Unlike the baby boomers, we were not born of war, global calamity or the heady optimism that followed and so we are not especially tough nor doe eyed about our prospects. And unlike the generations that followed, our formative years were not intruded upon by the all-seeing eye of technology, and so we retain a certain naive innocence, redolent of a simpler time when we could make mistakes, safe in the knowledge they would not be recorded for all time on social media to come back to bite us on the bum later in life just as we get elected to parliament.And so we are somewhat sneered at - neither here nor there, neither this nor that, unable to claim we were forged in battle, missed out on all the free sex in the 60s, and yet struggle to make our IPhones work properly. But we are optimistic, and yet also reasonably pragmatic - having had to make our own fun as kids, we are resourceful, flexible and adapt well to odd circumstances. And having been the progeny of the wild 60s, we are not that great with authority. We are the muddle along generation.The mining industry is of course one that will always involve lots of big trucks, driven by men named Reg, but if one talks to investors or those who dabble in the metals space, it is disturbingly clear how few actually appreciate the logistical componentIt's been educational then, whilst stuck down under with, on one hand, the horse and cart generation of my mother who doesn't have a mobile phone and my father who can't shop online and still writes cheques; and on the other, my children in the UK, howling in outrage that the world is no longer responding instantly to their every demand. I can only imagine what the utility companies do when one of my father's cheques arrives in the post - they must have to go and find an old person to identify what on earth it is and what to do with it.There are many ways we can compare and contrast the generations but one that is most relevant today is patience. It is easy to fall into the trap - and I confess that I am as guilty of this as any youngin' - that the world is now by and large instantaneous, driven by data, knowledge and the means to access it. We demand and we receive, if not within milliseconds, then at least within a few minutes, and at most a day or two if Amazon is involved. We use whatsapp and expect the recipient to have the phone at the ready; we send an email and get irate when we haven't received a reply within five minutes; we post on social media and if no ‘likes" are recorded within moments we fear we have somehow been shunned by our tribe.But suddenly, things have slowed a bit, and while at first it was assumed the world was coming to an end, in time the dear little things have come to realise that while they may be able to order something instantly online, a man named Reg in a white van has to trudge through corona-infected snow to deliver it - and Reg may not currently be as enthusiastic as he once was about risking his life to deliver some cheap tat that might at best provide 20 minutes of diversion before being consigned to the bin.The unedifying sight of supermarket shelves being stripped bare by panic buying was both a sad indictment on the selfishness of much of the human race, and their utter stupidity in being so readily prepared to believe that the world might actually run out of toilet paper. Quite clearly, most of the world haven't the faintest notion of how the world really works and how it is that all those wonderful products just seem to appear as if by magic in the shop each morning.To be fair I suppose, most of the world's population are now rather urban and utterly divorced from having to be exposed to, let alone understand, the complex supply chains that fuel their spoon-fed existence. It's been quite a while since I have had to catch and strangle a chicken for dinner and so perhaps it's not unreasonable that stupid people might observe the lack of toilet paper and deduce that the world has run out of it, rather than actually using their brains and considering that it is simply an issue of a finely tuned supply chain having to be adjusted to cope with a sudden change in demand.The mining industry is of course one that will always involve lots of big trucks, driven by men named Reg, but if one talks to investors or those who dabble in the metals space, it is disturbingly clear how few actually appreciate the logistical component. There are those who seem to consider the sector much like the knowledge economy and deal only with the abstract of metal prices, supply and demand, and ignore the reality that for these markets to function billions of tonnes of material must be shipped around the world every year.The negative oil price recently, was of course purely a momentary aberration based on limited storage capacity on the day of settlement. It passed, but may come again this month.The gold price spiked a couple of weeks back, on the back of rumours of physical shortages in the US, getting all the bugs into a tizz about global conspiracies and the usual rubbish they go on about. But in fact there were actually physical shortages, albeit only briefly.Comex settlement in the US uses 1kg or 100oz bars, in contrast to the 400oz bars that are more common in London, and there were not enough of those laying about at the time. There was and is no actual shortage of gold, but rather a shortage of the right form of gold in the right place at the right time. It took a little bit of time for bars to be recast by various mints, and then with most of the world's aircraft parked up, a little more time for those bars to be transported to the US. All was resolved in orderly fashion, but not fast enough to satisfy the market's inane demands for an immediate response.The sector is facing all manner of such challenges - supplies and consumables are slow to arrive, great care must be taken with movement of staff, government flunkies are all hiding under their duvets and refusing to do their jobs.All of our systems and supply chains were designed to suit the environment in place at the time.But then that all changed in a way that no one predicted and so the industry must adjust on the fly, which as far as I can tell, it is doing quite well - but it takes time.But it seems no one is prepared to wait anymore. No one is prepared to examine the underlying logistical constraints of these difficult times, noting the response, noting that it may take a week or so, and then taking a chill pill and letting it happen.

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