First it was baby formula, now there’s a tampon shortage. Tampon prices are up 10% due to the rising price of oil affecting the cost of plastic and higher cotton prices due to mask manufacturing and the war in Ukraine. A whole lot of fertilizer comes out of Ukraine and Russia. So does neon, which is used to make semiconductor chips. The chip shortage is shutting down car plants.
This is the thoroughly interconnected world celebrated in prose by journalists like Thomas Friedman, who marveled at how Big Data and globalization brought everything together.
“No two countries that both have a McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other,” Friedman once claimed. In his greatest paean to globalization, “The World Is Flat,” he argued that, “No two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain, like Dell’s, will ever fight a war against each other as long as they are both part of the same global supply chain.”
McDonald’s in Russia has closed and the ones in Ukraine might be blown up any time. Russia restricted its neon exports while Ukraine’s neon exports have fallen sharply. Dell CEO Michael Dell has warned that the global chip shortage could last for years.
So much for the Golden Arches and Dell theory of globalist conflict prevention.







