Why There are Now So Many Shortages (It's Not COVID)

@Bruce Grubb So according to you, the reason is Covid, directly, not indirectly, as they claimed, I mean because of automotive industry cancelling orders... ;)
Anyway, According to your explanation, everything should have increased in price, CPus, since those are in computers too, memories, etc. And also, not all graphic cards got expensive Only some.
But I suppose you did not read all my previous comments so I will repeat. Two decades I bought this bullshit. Some explosion at a resin factory, some flooding to other, disasters happens all the time. And sure some times may provoke disruptions. But in time I started to see that some things does not correlate. And I realized that these are tactics to scare people to buy over the real price. You know, buy know, later will get even more expensive. So, decades ago I fell for this. But in last decade I was not fooled anymore. I just waited, or chose a different solution.
The problem is a littler more complex, there is no room to explain it all here, but the purpose is simple. To squeeze as much money possible from customer. And the methodology is vast. From simply lying, at cheap products, like powerbanks for example, where you gat a quarter or less of the capacity advertised, to more complex things like spreading rumors like this. If you are able to get the big picture, you keep your cool and you avoid the trap. If you act like the majority, than you overpay.

@Daneel Olivaw Basic supply and demand explains everything. As you said there is a delay and what graphic chips were made were based on the old data. Trapped at home people turned to the one thing they could do at home other than watch TV - computers which logically included graphic cards.

@Anne Hedonia it's to stop people like me from thriving. Not just me but lots of people here. Evil is overwhelming here

of course you'd be watching things like this. big fan ^^

sounds exactly like boeing strategy, seeking only short term profit, and ending with the 737max failures and the 787 mishaps

PEACE
BONANZA
ABUNDANCE
FREE THINKING

@varana312 Agreed, this is highly dependent on where you live and overblown like crazy. The reality is that in MOST of America it is perfectly safe for kids to go to school on their own. I did, so did my kids - even in a large city for one of them.
A big part of why we don't realize that is this focus on a national level. Something like 2/3rds of murders occur in just 5-6 counties in the U.S.. To extrapolate that to the remaining 3100 or so is absurd, but that is what happens. I'm not going to call any of them out because people will try to derail it by trying to collectivist those counties. What matters for this topic is that you simply can not rationally extrapolate those 5 counties to the other 3100+. But lets get back to the dreaded kidnapping scenario posited above.
We see the same patterns for things like kidnap. Stranger kidnap, what is referenced here, is incredibly rare and a tiny fraction of kidnappings. By tiny fraction I mean one percent OF one percent of all missing/kidnapped kids were taken by complete strangers - yes one one-hundredth of one percent. Even non-stranger abductions are rare and a tiny portion of missing kid cases. Of all missing child reports, 90% are miscommunication, getting lost, being late, runaways, etc.. Only 9% are family/friend abduction and almost always as part of a custody dispute.
Annually in the U.S. only around 100 kids are abducted by a "stranger" - out of over seventy million under the age of 18. Technically for the data a stranger includes someone whom the child has known for less than six months, or more than six months but only see once a month or so, or someone the kid would recognize by face, but not recall the name. Out of the roughly 100 about 60-65% are complete strangers.
This helps make the next stat make more sense.
Of this type of abduction, 32% were taken from/at the kidnapper's home, 32% from the child's home, and the rest were somewhere else.
Compare that to the UK where they have almost 300 per year abducted by strangers - some 40% or so of UK child abductions are stranger abductions. I don't have location data in my memory or handy, nor do I have whether they count "acquaintance" similarly, thus the comparison stops there. But consider this: UK has less total people than the US has children but 2-3 times as many stranger abductions - even more if you go on total strangers.
Now Japan ... oi what a mess when it comes to child abduction. They do have a big problem there, just not the stranger abduction kind. Their parental rights system causes massive problems that kind of makes them a parental abductor's place to go. As is the case in the U.S. stranger abductions are a tiny fraction, and custody battles dominate (joint custody doesn't exist there, parental abduction isn't really considered a crime at first, etc.).
So despite cattysplat's nihilism, no there isn't someone lurking around every corner to snatch our kids - a least not here in America. It is correct that reality speaks for itself, but what the press tells, or sells, you is often not reality. Nor is what cattysplat selling reality.

@cattysplat Even in Western societies, children can go to school by themselves without getting kidnapped. And when they're brought by their parents, it's usually because of road safety, or weather, or public transport availability. Not for fear of crime.

@cattysplat my view of the state follows between how Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard used to see it.
I'm confient that, with enough time, humans won't succumb to states in the long future. It just feels natural.

Maybe I should run for Governor of Texas. I would constantly be looking at this kind of stuff, and promoting Texas.

It’s about 15000 miles from Hong Kong to Houston the long way around. Way less if you go through the Panama Canal

@Tyler Hendrix r

@Jacc Just-A-Concerned-Citizen You’re simply wrong, and that’s textbook hun.

@TheTechiemoses the root of all evil is within us humans ourselves

@TheTechiemoses There were a lot of people in my area that just took up local jobs with Walmart, Lowe's or Home Depot. The latter two even kicked up a $2/per hour increase to keep up with sales plus multiple Covid relief bonuses were given out at this time. Lumber hit a dry period around mid-summer last year and currently they are nowhere near that level as most of them have more supplies than they can manage right now in this department. Drive by one of the latter and see if you notice that they are flushed with supply yet the demand never changed, only the cost has. It is not the store and it is not the distributor.
You will own nothing, you will rent everything and you will be happy.

They still hold pretty strong on their years required, but they're one of the best trucking companies out there.

But short game obviously works. The real question is how can we use the long game to fuck over the greedy short gamers.

@Kyle Morgese the main reason shareholders aren’t willing to play the long game is for one reason, limited life. Unfortunately, that’s an unknown variable for all of us. The thinking is “I need to make as much money as I can so that I can enjoy it before I leave this planet”.

@FutbolPro101 Yeah that's part of the problem

Every corporation has quarterly profits statement.
If you don't show profit, you are fired.

In that that case, it's really too bad that corporations are required to chase short-term gains, lest their investors not get richer, faster, constantly. If they feel like they could be making more money faster - short-term or not - they can simply demand things be changed.
The way these companies run is beyond messed-up.

I worked for bestbuy for 4 years. They profited more in 2020 than previous years, halved the workforce. Made them work all hours and then laid off half of them at the end of the year offering part time (which at the time we had 2 part timers and they were getting one shift a week)

@Slender Man 186 and Amazon made record problems.

They never “desperately needed money,” That was the narrative the media portrayed, but Microsoft grew by 1/3, Super stores like Walmart grew because their smaller competitors weren’t deemed “essential” enough to stay open, and speaking of which small businesses got fucked over for absolutely no reason.

Retail is one thing, whoselase and distribution is another. I'm only making an average of 5% in the electrical trade and still constantly have to hear "home depot has it for x!" However, thanks to this bs, home depot doesnt actually have it

"Just in time" really means "too little too late." I worked for a home goods company who essentially blamed the entire workforce when their "just enough" prediction was wrong, leading to massive backorders and ultimately negative cashflow. If they didn't attempt to game the system so hard and just manufacture at a slow and steady pace, they 1. wouldn't need a bunch of analysts who are essentially gambling and 2. they'd never be "out" for months, items would just come in as they're made.

@Manikarnika Tambe The failures just becomes tax write offs for the Venture Fund Bros, so it's all good as far as mgmt is concerned.

@D C There is a local co offering a signing bonus well into five figures to drive for them and it's not even long haul.

@akshay kumar there's a lot of hyprocondriaks out there and loads off Government and civil servants that relish the lockdowns doesn't matter to them they still get paid

@Jordon Carlson There is a also a concept of Single Points of Failure. It has to work in conjunction with JIT. You have to be absolutely ready for risk and dealing with the worst case scenario.

As long as the people at the top making the decisions keep making more money nothing will change. They either need to have their incentive removed, or be given a new incentive to not do this, like life threats.

While having a semiconductor factory in every country would be nice, there is a problem. A single new sufficiently advanced semiconductor factory costs a billion dollars to build if you're lucky.

@Peter P are you kidding? Investing in real estate is never a bad idea, land is finite. Labor is easy when it's not asking for a pension for unskilled workers. And healthcare is a tax writeoff, who doesn't love those. I don't know where you get your info, but they're lying to you, hon.

TAXATION still awaits anyone wanting to build a business here. MINIMUM WAGE still awaits anyone wanting to build a successful business here. To stand on an assembly line doing unskilled labor.

Never ever buy a brand new model of and appliance. You always buy a older model because the newer model hasn't been around long enough for flaws to be found.

For what it's worth, it is difficult to repair a circuit board like that, but it is probably possible for a DIYer to make their own circuit board.
If it is a 15¢ capacitor like Ed Siler guesses, that's totally DIY-repairable. The tricky part is when it's one of the chips.

@py Head Right to repair is not exclusive to farm equipment anymore although that is where it started and is most needed.

Things are no longer built to last or to be repaired. They just want you to buy more.

My m-i-l had her stove go out last year. The repairman said he couldn't even fix it because they weren't even allowed to order the part anymore. She had to replace it.

@MrPLC999 Not sure where you live, but plenty of stores _(especially chain stores)_ in Pennsylvania still have a lot missing from shelves even now.

Shortages? What shortages?
I go to Home Depot and Walmart and Costco, and I get everything I need. No empty shelves. Everything is fine.
Who exactly benefits by whipping up this bullsheet hysteria about shortages?

@Mohnnad Mercedes The logical conclusion of big jackpots, short term gains. As long as they get their payout before the house of cards topples over, then it's all good.

@Editors Practice that's exactly what they're doing. They want obedient slaves, not competent employees.

@Itinerant_Chuck I know you are but what am I? That's you. That's what you sound like

PEACE
BONANZA
ABUNDANCE
FREE THINKING

You forgot to add "in America". ;-)

#JESUS FIRSTt Jesus Is Love And The Way And Truth And Life And The Only Way To Be Saved Through The Creator Of All Things To Jesus Be The Glory

I read an article about how Boring behaved after Philip Condit became CEO and it said he ran it under the mindset of RONA, return on net assets, which sounds about right when you think they were cool outsourcing work for the 737 max, good for short term profit but bit them in the butt (though not as much as it should have). Profit off the engineering expertise of Boeing while killing the engineering that made Boeing what it was

This also explains why soooo many US firms sold out and moved manufacturing to communist China.
They were all warned! They did it anyway....Then when China steals your IP you seem incredulous....

During the depression the US government banned stock buybacks -- with very good reason. Ronald Reagan repealed that law. This is the single biggest factor for the "short term" thinking you're talking about. Learn about it.

So happy to work for a company where that's actually the case. Our main priority is customer satisfaction and actually helping the customer, everything else is second. Result? A really solid customer base and rapid market share increase as the customer base increases. It's a world's difference from companies just chasing quarterly profits. But it really has to go through the whole company, top to bottom. It's also a world's difference between claiming to have a mindset and having a mindset, seen too much of the former.

I wonder why? 🤨almost as if the need to survive in the market put something of a pressure on employers to gamble and irresponsibly cut costs, even if it's not the smart thing to do

I'm 28 years old and I've lived through 2 once in 100 year economic downturns.

Texas was special. Texas is the only state who's power grid doesn't comply with federal stanard, which is why Newsome's comment of "Even though the people of texas don't seem to like me, If it were within my power to help you I would." (paraphrasing), because texas isn't on the Western power grid.
They aloud buisness to dictate what was needed and what wasn't, and when you do that you might as well print the medal for the winner of the race to the bottom. Some of the systems they use in Texas are the exact same systems used in Antarctica, but the code on how they're installed is completely different.
Texas was an example of people willfully giving themselves over to political propaganda, and being to ignorant or prideful to understand how they messed up to fix it.

@AL2VAR Taiwan does not have a water problem.
It is surrounded by water.
Taiwan has a salt problem.

Lmaooooo

still waiting for my Vax 5G to kick in

Karen may have a sharper point than Haji.

@George George that's silicone not silicon.

So again, the ship workers had Covid and off work for quarantine, AND silicon needed for vaccine vials. I think we can place some blame on COVID-19.

He can't even speak in a normal cadence and you expect him to stay on track? He's obsessed with Toyota apparently.

Keep telling yourself China being next door to Taiwan has nothing to do with this.

Touche!

Car companies are at fault

Loui Anderson has a comic style that does this....

@A Kayfabe Turn your life around with this simple rule: don't ask what the world can do for me. Ask what you can do for this world.

Don't live paycheck to paycheck. Have a reasonable savings account for cushion. A good rule of thumb is to NEVER have less than $5,000 in savings. Start saving early before you get married and have kids so you won't get the opportunity to say, "I don't have the money to save." You've already messed up. Never borrow money. Not only does it make you look like a deadbeat, but it puts you in more and more debt. Credit card is ok, just monitor it closely.

Story of my whole life. Never get ahead just keep getting more behind until there’s nothing left. Some of us have it never end and ended up homeless or stuck for years and have no one on Earth to help us. I’m fact then you, like I, lose hope and faith in humanity and that’s when you realize no one cares. And if you are like me, have no family at all and no security and no future, and no person on earth willing to give me a helping hand, unless someone steps into my life and cares, it will just be another 30 years of the same. That’s not living, that’s just existing on earth for no reason.
Too many people do this and too many others have everything and still don’t care. People really struggle and really suffer and really do give up because there’s no help.
You don’t catch up without a miracle, or someone saving you with generosity, or death. And that’s sad.

@iNuclearPickle Your bills reflect your consumption choices. They are not carved in stone. Too much rent? Find roommates or a cheaper location. Car payment unaffordable? Drive a used, older but reliable car to reduce the loan, insurance and maintenance costs. Think.

@Jaiiy Ouhz hahahaha how can we do that if our bills eat up an entire check and most people pay rent. Also for my household it’s $150-200 a week for food and that food is barely enough for the week

@z beeblebrox The better question looks to be; Who is Kristopher working for?

@Martin Parmer um...Martin, i never said you were fake...

@Purple Nonsense anyone who's lived in the production planning materials management world would easily recognize from my post I'm no fake and no liar. Jit has tons of benefits but when the break comes, it's painful and difficult to fix.

I worked on oil tankers, and we had a JIT system for spare parts. The system should have been called JTFL......

On avg it may be the most profitable

@timmonk47 from my understanding oakland is not being utilized, pre-pandemic they wanted to use it for coal export but the inviromentalist shut it down.

@M Maranta Oakland is comparatively small

@Ming Mongo mariners call LA "Pedro" while it says LAX on the schedule. Long Beach is LGB

@Ming Mongo the Port of Los Angeles is in San Pedro (and Wilmington) which are part of the City of Los Angeles, the Port of Long Beach is a separate port, directly adjacent in LA County, both ports are dependent on the same labor pool and regional infrastructure

Oakland has a port. I see cargo ships coming in the Golden Gate every day

@tomurko I certainly get that it is overly simplistic, but that's my point. The actual concept of lean in itself is not that complex. I'm not claiming to know everything there is to know about supply chain theory because I played Factorio. Understanding fundamental concepts is not really that difficult, and sometimes practitioners end up forgetting or not implementing the fundamentals for lots of various reasons. Your attempt at sarcasm is the only over-simplification here.

@FPK My job is literally Risk Management, and I'm a Director. When it comes to Factorio, the stock that I have for lines is lean in the sense that not every one has a buffer, only the ones at risk of a supply shortage for some reason. The buffer supply I have is kept low enough to provide in an emergency, but not so high that I'm not OK with the loss if I have to just dump it all or it never gets used.

'I played factorio once so now I understand supply chain theory'

It's not sad, it's reasonable/logical. When you play a video game, you are interested in your "enterprise" to be the most efficient and create the most value, of all competing enterprises, from the start of the game until someone launches a rocket. When you're the CEO of a real-life corporation, you don't plan on staying there forever, your driver is personal gain and shareholder satisfaction for the short period you'll stay at the helm of that company, not the well-being of the company. Most shareholders at most corporations are not sticking to their shares long term either, so they'll definitely like someone maximizing shareholder value short term more than someone thinking long term.

The real problem with supply buffers:
Yes, they do cost a bit, and this bit can make a world of difference in industries that sell with razor thin profit margins.
If your competitor says "nope, i won't build up buffers for the moment shit hits the supply fan", then you can either: see that competitor undercut your product, or cut your buffers and their costs too.
It's a rats race to the bottom, everyone wants to produce more for less.
If you aren't willing to join the race: you usually lose by default.

@Johanna Geisel Very good response.

@LupusAries You have to keep in mind that the Soviet Union was an extremely non-industrialized and agrarian state before their revolution, and I think China was too.
Eastern Germany was destroyed, so it also had very little infrastructure.
Those plans were made to build up or rebuild infrastructure and industry.
If we tried a planned economy in a country that already has a functioning infrastructure and industry, you wouldn't have to put that many ressources into building one.
One could concentrate on fullfilling the people's needs and wishes.
In the former attempts they basically always hat too little of everything. That's not a thing we have to worry about in a developed nation.
And yes, of course one would have to put in a certain kind of flexibility. If the carrot harvest is bad this year, everybody gets fewer carrots or you have to import.
I also think you should plan that economy under a maximum of democratic participation.
That's also something that the former attempts lacked.
With the Internet we can take in the wishes and needs of all the people and also have them give their OK for the plan. One could ask the populace where the ressources should be put.
Oh, and one may not have to plan everything. There are probably things that you can eyeball and leave to the small producers.

@Johanna Geisel They mainly didn't work due to the goals and their longterm nature, remember they had 4 year plans, five year plans and 10 year plans and they were completely inflexible.
The inflexibility is an issue that will still be a problem today.
And the downside if a connand economy us that they entail a loss of job freedom, you won't be able to choose a job, you will get assigned one.
Oh and university/college places will be assigned on a requirement basis, with probably a lot of courses being canned, because there are more effective ways of training workers for certain jobs than college courses.

@FUSTER CLUCK 🐔 Meh, if we can have rad-resistant CPUs in space, surely we can bury a few critical power/data lines to harden them! I'm not really worried about that kind of implementation detail, I'm more worried about the pushback being a socio-political one...

@Johanna Geisel I kinda live in a socialist country, and it #FeelsGoodMan, when you're getting laid off but get decent unemployment to pay your bills and support your family! So yes - I'm clearly not the one who will say "blah blah Communism" ; while I can _absolutely_ see why most western people (particularly in USA) would see it that way...
So yeah I guess we both agree :-) it would be better, but it can also be scary to a whole category of anti-commie people...

You wish. America is the land of consumerism. With current immigration policies there is no way producing in the US will have the same net cost as in Asia. This will not change. Next continent is Africa. Things will be produced there as Asia is getting more expensive.

Good idea to do that though we gotta open the border ti any immigrant who wants to come so we can increase are workforce and have a chance competing with China that has 3 billion people

Repent to Jesus Christ!
“Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed-not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence-continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling,”
‭‭Philippians‬ ‭2:12‬ ‭NIV

It’s a great thoght but it will never happen

@Joe Mama Can you tell me what stockx is? Is it like ebay?
In your case, that's fine since we're in a high price demand short supply situation. It's fine to buy a gpu as long as it has a warranty that works so someone doesn't spend over a thousand to be the unlucky .00001% outlier customer of a defective gpu.
At least for me, I hate to spend over 1k for a defective gpu that doesn't have a warranty. Like how no one is fine with a new $20k lemon car with no warranty.

@geforce now nah bro just get the gpu off stockx or something i paid 200 on top of retail for my 3080 but it could have been 1000 more and i still would have found it worthwhile. The amount of utility, gaming and things I can do with that 3080 far exceeds any marginal savings of a few hundred dollars to “wait until 2023l

@M corp Kind of ironic how some coins implemented ASIC resistant algorithms so people who already have GPUs could mine without getting blown away by much faster hardware for mining, given that people wanted those GPUs for all sorts of purposes. Nvidia did come out with dedicated versions of GPUs for mining, and even the 1070 Ti alleviated some of that because it used GDDR5, not the X version, so non-miner GPU users didn't go for it as much.
Making easy money off mining isn't really true for those with pricier electricity. On the other hand are students living on college campuses blasting their mining computations without footing any more dough for their electric consumption... some places would begin to charge them beyond set limits, though.
Inevitably, profitability of mining a coin doesn't last, either because exploding amounts of mining produce so much of the coin that its value plunges, or, like bitcoin, the total amount of units is capped so the same hardware effort produces progressively fewer and fewer units.

Yea they should have started making more chip factories long ago with so many new electronics coming out we didn't have like smart watches, everything for smart homes, cars.

It's not so much people quitting as people retiring and no one new wanting to do it.

Truck drivers deserve a decent livable wage, until the microchip shortage is over and the autonomous vehicles eliminate the profession.

@blue M&M what does that have to do with the topic at hand? Also most of the jobs that the "illegals" are taking are jobs none of us want to do anyway... Like working the farms picking fruits and nuts in the hot ass sun all day long, or working at a meat processing plant... Landscaping. I don't want to do that stuff so they can take those jobs, somebody's got to do it.

@blue M&M You know that most illegal immigration into the USA doesn't actually come through the southern border right? That you are just repeating nonsense that has long been debunked? Also that when the USA was at its strongest and paying decent wages the border was wide open and people crossed all the time. Its almost like you are aiming at the wrong enemy here.....

This is why you need a secure southern border.

Bruh be careful. Speak too much logic and you'll cause a problem.

@Noe Popkiewicz Oh look, the mind reader is back. I agree with you on one item however; I also cannot say this was a good talk (I prefer my interlocutors *not* re-frame my arguments disingenuously). Cheers to you.

@CapriciousBlackBox And you talk about being imprecise, oh the irony.
'Almost everything? Well then what about X?' - that's dishonest and you know it.
'Lockdowns in Asia were brief and only slowed down production? Are you saying there were no shortages?' is comical at best.
'Nobody was making stuff, or delivering anything, that's why ports are overfilled with endless containers still waiting for processing, and entire container ships waiting for weeks in lines to dock ports' in your view explains the situation, well - good luck.
I want to say good talk, but can't really say that.

@Noe Popkiewicz "Using it wrong?" That's weird.....I didn't know a person could ask a question "wrong." Who knew? As for the rest of your acknowledgement about the impact of lockdowns....unimpressively imprecise...("not really"). To attempt to minimize the impact of global interruptions as though there'd be anything even remotely similar to the widespread shortages across myriad different goods categories we are currently experiencing *sans the covid crisis* is laughable. That's not to say there aren't market weaknesses that contributed....nothing operates in a vacuum....but again; when nobody is making stuff.....there's no stuff. The same holds true for shipping; if nobody is delivering stuff.....stuff does not get delivered.

You're saying, that to educate youth for high paying jobs we don't need high cost educations.

@CapriciousBlackBox so you do understand what "almost" means, just using it wrong on purpose?
Did lockdowns had an impact? Yes, they played their role in it. Were X weeks of lockdowns the reason why there are shortages of everything for XX months? Not really.

You hit it right on the head. Principles, principles, principles! Details differ, but principles prevail.

@76MUTiger Nailed it. Beautifully said.

Awesome feedback! The workable system (JIT) is known and learnable. Many people know it. US manufacturing leaders who don't understand this should get their MBA tuition reimbursed and then they should get fired for failing to learn what was so imminently learnable. They exposed their organizations to devastating risk through their own negligence.

I worked at a Toyota plant too and did a lot of cross campus JIT deliveries. Their level of efficiency is just mind boggling. Hectic as hell for us assembly workers but darn impressive to witness from a business perspective.

Welcome to capitalism :D

ocfos88, 100000% accurate af 👌

Is that a NSFW inkling?

Sorry I couldn't hit thumbs up more than once