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Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%

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Re: Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%

#581

Post by a9h74j »

Jtsummers wrote: post #284
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should go without saying that there are nuances in implementation. What I'm describing here is a fundamental tradeoff of JIT systems. If you get the wrong thing delivered it throws a bigger wrench into things because you don't have the buffer. Can you make this rare enough that the amortized cost is low enough to make JIT overall cheaper? Of course, that's why everyone does JIT.

> If you get the wrong thing delivered it throws a bigger wrench into things because you don't have the buffer. JIT, in Lean, does not mean no buffer, it means as little of a buffer as you can get away with. If you have issues with delivery like this on a regular basis, then you'd increase the buffer size (at least temporarily) and also take your suppliers to task for sending the wrong thing over and over. The buffer…

I wonder if Toyota was a little slower at starting to expedite, for having had a large buffer stock already in hand.

Re: Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%

#582

Post by Causality1 »

bumby wrote: post #309
Causality1 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nightmarish results of agricultural subsidies in the US is an excellent reason to not involve the government in the chip shortage.

Can you elaborate on your point? While I agree there are definitively some downsides to ag subsidies, I think the real question is if the interventionist downsides are worse than the non-subsidized downsides. As bad as they are, I'm not sure that incentivizing unhealthy food is actual worse than famine.

Cratering agricultural prices so margins are so thin small farmers are driven out of business in favor of huge conglomerates, mind-boggling levels of food wastage on the order of billions of pounds sitting in warehouses until they rot.

https://reason.com/2019/03/02/thanks-to-decades-of-governmen...

Re: Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%

#583

Post by zsmi »

xyzelement wrote: post #414
fartcannon wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever helps you sleep at night :D My parents bought a detatched home at 20 with minimum wage jobs. I bought a townhouse at 40 with a high paying career. My kid is going to be 60 by the time he can afford a home. It's fucked. Buy now.

> It's fucked. Buy now. Ok you certainly should go for it, but I'll give you one analysis that I have. We bought in a NYC suburb (for a bunch of reasons) and here's what I think constitutes price risk for me. At the end of the day, a house is worth what someone can and is willing to pay for it. Right now, there's reasons the demand is high for near-NYC housing because (a) people aren't sure they need to be near NYC l…

> All of these are demand factors that can change.

Don't forget: Cities actually allowing housing stock to increase. Very unlikely but hopefully not impossible...

Re: Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%

#584

Post by a9h74j »

robotresearcher wrote: post #447
throwawaygh wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also confused by the confusion here... probably naive pattern matching? Reminds me of TAing undergrad courses where you could get more than half the class to confuse "positive feedback" and "negative feedback" on a midterm by just giving examples where stability = bad :)

Grandparent gives the choices of ‘positive exponent growing against time’ or ‘negative exponent damping out against time’. Here we have a positive exponent damping (reducing) the output over time, because it’s value is less than one, resulting in a negative loop gain. The Wikipedia article linked up thread defines positive feedback as having positive loop gain, and negative feedback negative loop gain.

IIRC, generally a positive loop gain greater than one will lead to diverging behavior aka instability, whereas even a positive-sign to feedback, if loop gain is "less than one" will not. I might be brain-farting here, but I cannot be precise anyway, which IIRC gets into plotting poles in a complex plane. (Cue joke my applied math professor would tell, about why all the Polish people were asked to sit in the right-hand aisle of an aircraft.)

Re: Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%

#585

Post by a9h74j »

zsmi wrote: post #526
robotresearcher wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t positive feedback require a positive loop gain? Right now, not enough chips are available to make new chips. So the loop gain is less than zero, damping the output recursively.

The problem is, if the feedback signal is too slow in getting back to the thing which measure error (i.e. too much phase lag), then negative feedback can turn into positive feedback and this leads to an instability. One of the most complex pieces of the semiconductor fab is the building itself. Even with plans and permits in hand, it takes years to make one that can output at reason throughput and yield. This report…

Yes, and same situation in every mining-related commodity market. Multiple time delays of order several years. Large up-front investments. Large uncertainties in payoff. Look at the multi-year price behaviors in those markets and see too if there is much stability.

Re: Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%

#586

Post by jcranberry »

5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #256
eldaisfish wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider for a moment the people outside the developed world whose lives are greatly improved by cars. Scarcity drives prices up putting things out of their reach.

Have you even been to the developing world? We mostly drive old junkers that were discarded by Americans and Europeans after 15 years of use for breaking and polluting too much.

Need to keep that supply of junkers coming though!

Re: Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%

#587

Post by solatic »

duncanawoods wrote: post #322
mathattack wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just the opposite. Need to let people raise prices to encourage slack in the system. Let’s prices settle where chip makers can produce new chips. There are market failures where the government needs to step in, but this isn’t one. Even with climate change (where they should step in) the government can’t get to the point of saying it’s ok for gas prices to be high. We don’t want the government to pick winners and lose…

It's a puzzle to me why companies like nvidia didn't just raise prices and instead left both customers and profit to the dirty world of scalpers. I guess it's "brand damage" but I feel there would be something more fair and honest if in times of tight supply they ran their own ebay-like store and auctioned them off. It wouldn't feel like a price hike and prices could automatically settle as supply/demand reaches pari…

To over simplify, let's say that you have 100 people in the market: 90 people who can afford $100 per card and 10 people who can afford $200 per card. In typical times, you charge $100 per card and sell 100 cards, earning $10,000 in revenue.

Now you have a chip shortage, and you can only produce 50 cards. If you charge $200/card, you only sell 10 cards, earning $2,000 in revenue. If you charge $100/card, you'll sell all 50 cards, and earn $5,000 in revenue. So it can still make sense to keep the price lower if it makes you more revenue overall.

Re: Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%

#588

Post by fartcannon »

xyzelement wrote: post #414
fartcannon wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever helps you sleep at night :D My parents bought a detatched home at 20 with minimum wage jobs. I bought a townhouse at 40 with a high paying career. My kid is going to be 60 by the time he can afford a home. It's fucked. Buy now.

> It's fucked. Buy now. Ok you certainly should go for it, but I'll give you one analysis that I have. We bought in a NYC suburb (for a bunch of reasons) and here's what I think constitutes price risk for me. At the end of the day, a house is worth what someone can and is willing to pay for it. Right now, there's reasons the demand is high for near-NYC housing because (a) people aren't sure they need to be near NYC l…

Agreed. Same with stocks. It's all gambling.

Re: Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%

#589

Post by onepointsixC »

dylan604 wrote: post #551
onepointsixC wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So, apparently the best opening salvo is to take out USA comms satellites and that essentially cripples American offensive capabilities. Modern tomahawks are heavily reliant on comms networks to hit long-range ground targets. No they aren't. They were designed with the assumption that GPS wouldn't be available and instead will rely on terrain tracking. >Plus, any destroyer launching these at targets deep in Chinese…

I can't decide if some of these scaremongering stories are from the military industrial complex to convince more funding into new things, or just anti-propaganda to give pause to rushing into new conflicts.

It's neither. The US is in an incredibly bad position right now because of three decades of under investment. After closing too many public yards after the cold war now the USN is barely able to keep up with regular maintenance during peace time of it's vessel's, let alone during a war. The average age of most American vessels is greater than that of their sailors. All while they're asked to face down the PLAN which now outnumbers them and is newer.

Re: Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%

#590

Post by starfallg »

Scoundreller wrote: post #529
starfallg wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the same reason why food security is so high up on domestic priorities also. If a country is dependant on other nations for food, then in case of war you just need to target their logistics chain to starve them into submission. All those subsidies make sense, if you view the nation-state as primarily concerned with its own survival.

This is Canada. We ain’t going to run out of food. The funny thing about a centrally-planned dairy system is that it takes very little disruption to destabilize it.

As a fellow Canadian (living in the UK currently), we may like to think of ourselves as an independent and sovereign nation, but we are very much tied to the hip with the US in terms of defence. Our food security strategy hence is also aligned as such.
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