nice to see companies having behaviour as stupid, short-sighted and damaging as the people hoarding toilet paper
For toilet paper, the cost of that disadvantage is having to wash your backside with the shower head and the benefit is the warm fuzzies of doing the right thing. For a business with no chips, it could be an existential threat. Warm fuzzies don't pay salaries.
The only way to avoid it is to have every company in the world to agree to not hoard, and harshly punish "defectors" somehow. Or have the supplier strictly ration supply, which doesn't work if the supply is coming from existing stock in the hands of distributors unless they also cooperate (or collude, depending on how you look at it).
None of that is remotely possible in the global industrial system. JIT is often blamed, but to avoid it, trillions of dollars worth of material would need to be hoarded constantly, which is its own problem: storage costs money, logistics and space, and its a substantial risk if you end up not needing it or the goods expire or become obsolete on a shelf and overproduction is a waste of resources. Going bust because you hoarded 5 million components that you never actually needed and couldn't offload is still going bust.
If the semiconductor shortage continues to worsen, I think we'll start to see calls for this type of intervention. One step that could be taken immediately is to prohibit sales from the distribution channel to overseas brokers, which are currently resulting in stupidity like $800 FPGAs that used to cost $20. But it's also true that this sort of market manipulation has downsides of its own.
I honestly don't know what the right thing to do here is. But I do know the industry had best unfuck itself, and that right soon, or this situation is going to have major consequences in everyday life.
is going to ? Already has.
Used car prices start climbing Jul '20.
That's got a huge ripple effect across the market, as best as I can tell, because it pushes people to buy older/lower cost cars across the board. Either that or they continue driving their old/potentially unsafe car even longer.
I prefer the bidet, and seeing normal reams of toliet paper cost now $30 for the "mega" value pack, I'm amused at the production of something, the trucking of something, the retailing of something that is ultimately discarded . The whole thinking and execution of it is backwards.
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It is remotely possible, the governments can set immediate import/export restrictions and also guide manufacturing as they did during Covid for incubators and such. While it won't be effective, it can either help the stock/supply rebound, or throw into more fear...
At least in America, my Grandmother's generation (great depression) grew up with outhouses. When homes were renovated to add an indoor bathroom, they were done on the cheap.
Heck pre-pandemic the idea of a bidet was crazy, I had to work hard to find one that was reliable and at a good price. Now they are super available and advertised all over the place, but when I went to get one installed 10 years ago it was not easy just finding a reliable, cold water, model! Warm water models were obscenely priced in the US.
It was likely a chicken/egg thing. Consumers didn't know about them, so no one made them for the US market, which meant the few that did exist cost an arm and a leg, so no one bothered to buy them so no one bothered to mass produce them.
On top of that, when I inquired about getting an outlet installed behind my toilet for an electric bidet, my plumber and electrician thought I was crazy!
Same question in 2021, "sure we do that all the time".
Pretty sure mine didn't make them much money since they didn't include a pair of stainless steel mounting brackets, and they FedExed them to me. From Korea. In a box 100 times the necessary volume.
Bidets have gone mainstream in the US!
Basically even during the worst of the panic it only ran out for the duration it takes for a truck to be driven to the manufacturers warehouse, load it, drive to the shop and unload it.
With semiconductors we are actually running out of stock/capacity at the very beginning of the chain instead of last mile delivery.
I got all my electronic parts on time for my private development and first small manufacturing run. It is indeed no brainer.
This doesn't mean they should go out and build their own gas peaker plant.
We live in a society, and no man is an island. You can't control everything you depend on. Sure, you can control some things you depend on, but that's a long, and expensive rabbit hole. Hoarding twenty years of canned food and seventy thousand rounds of ammuniton is all well and good, unless doing so puts you in a situation where you can't pay rent.
That is because it's a utility that source power from several producers. The risk of no power what so ever for a prolonged time is not something to even be considered. Should that happen, society as we know it is probably at risk and my job is no longer important at all. Oh, and someone actually do plan for intermittent power delivery failure including having two different outside sources for power, a battery backup and diesel generators, data centers come to mind.
And if they intend to feed the generator in perpetuity, I'll happily shift the goalposts to some other critical supplier not providing their services.