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Chip shortage leads carmaker Opel to shut German plant until 2022

reuters.com

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Re: Chip shortage leads carmaker Opel to shut German plant until 2022

#331

Post by King-Aaron »

dapids wrote: post #301
yholio wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scalpers perform a social service by rationing demand and ensuring availability. They don't eat the whole consumer surplus, rather, they must compete amongst themselves and the price you pay is the amount that makes client N+1 walk away if total supply is N. Some of the buyers will find that close to their margin, but others, for which the product is essential in very valuable (thus socially useful) goods or services…

> "Scalpers perform a social service" Good luck finding anyone willing to recognize this absurd point. > "the problem is low competition" Tell that to the GPU market.

I've noticed a new wave of neo-capitalists who seem to be actively sympathising with (if not encouraging) scalping. "It's just the way the free market works!" "That's how retailers always worked!" "It levels out demand!".

Such grubby people.

In basically all my hobbies, scalping has become the norm now. Computers, Japanese cars, tabletop games, hell even kids toys. It does feel like there's been a massive increase in the number of people with enough capital to see a trend and basically buy the market out with the intention of making a profit.

Re: Chip shortage leads carmaker Opel to shut German plant until 2022

#332

Post by bsder »

hef19898 wrote: post #287
lenzm wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to know what the pandemic is specifically to plan for a global market shock. Knowing that you have a critical component with a long inelastic supply chain is enough.

And then what? Just stockpile a year of everything? At every company along the supply chain? It is the first time in my life, professional in SCM and otherwise, that something like Covid and a global trade disruption happened together with a global shortage of one class of products. No way you for see or prepare for something like that. Hindsight in 20/20, just imagine the automotive OEMs would have gotten rid of the…

> And then what? Just stockpile a year of everything?

Or run a fab. Fabless isn't a God-given right. Vertical integration is a thing.

Vertical integration got a bad reputation because financial engineering dipshits like Carl Icahn would come in and strip mine your company for the single super profitable division and destroy the rest (see: Mesta Machinery).

Re: Chip shortage leads carmaker Opel to shut German plant until 2022

#333

Post by wyager »

dapids wrote: post #301
yholio wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scalpers perform a social service by rationing demand and ensuring availability. They don't eat the whole consumer surplus, rather, they must compete amongst themselves and the price you pay is the amount that makes client N+1 walk away if total supply is N. Some of the buyers will find that close to their margin, but others, for which the product is essential in very valuable (thus socially useful) goods or services…

> "Scalpers perform a social service" Good luck finding anyone willing to recognize this absurd point. > "the problem is low competition" Tell that to the GPU market.

> Good luck finding anyone willing to recognize this

Indeed, most people are pathologically incapable of performing utilitarian reasoning and have a very hard time with this point. Very unfortunate, because that's what informs most economic policy.

Re: Chip shortage leads carmaker Opel to shut German plant until 2022

#334

Post by exporectomy »

dapids wrote: post #301
yholio wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scalpers perform a social service by rationing demand and ensuring availability. They don't eat the whole consumer surplus, rather, they must compete amongst themselves and the price you pay is the amount that makes client N+1 walk away if total supply is N. Some of the buyers will find that close to their margin, but others, for which the product is essential in very valuable (thus socially useful) goods or services…

> "Scalpers perform a social service" Good luck finding anyone willing to recognize this absurd point. > "the problem is low competition" Tell that to the GPU market.

You disagree but with no reasons. You should consider why you hold that belief.

Re: Chip shortage leads carmaker Opel to shut German plant until 2022

#335

Post by vdfs »

SilverRed wrote: post #328
thriftwy wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if nobody did ssh+nfc keys yet. At least I could trust it.

The security of key fobs is not a great concern when the windows can still be smashed.

Key fob allow you to start the car engine, it should be a concern

Re: Chip shortage leads carmaker Opel to shut German plant until 2022

#336

Post by pitaj »

spectramax wrote: post #326
Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a civilized society it is the governments burden and obligation to ensure scarce resources are shared responsibly. When this process is disrupted and not quickly remedied you will inevitably discover that people take matters into their hands to get what they need. They might commit white collar crimes or engage in destructive or violent robberies and protests. They might also roll out the guillotines and collect s…

Absolutely not. “Sharing resources” doesn’t work when there is not enough to share. A civilized society works when supply and demand intersection determines the price of goods and services. Governments should interfere for specific cases (life emergency, masks, etc) and there are laws prohibiting scalping for these commodities - rightfully so. Your idea of government intervention would assume that government is a rat…

Laws prohibiting "scalping" or "price gouging" in emergencies often makes problems worse by incentivizing hoarding and disincentivizing more suppliers from entering the market.

Re: Chip shortage leads carmaker Opel to shut German plant until 2022

#337

Post by mendigou »

lvl100 wrote: post #312
whiteboardr wrote: post #4

@kliment summarized the why pretty well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26931498 Curious if this is true for all manufacturers.

This is not true at all. How many chips do you think the car industry needs for car parts? How many cars do you think they sell in a year? It’s not hard to figure it out. People parroting this narrative have no idea what’s happening behind the scene.

Most of us affected think it's very true. There are 60-70 million cars sold worldwide each year and many chips of different kinds in each.

If you have some deeper insight it'd be great to share it.

Re: Chip shortage leads carmaker Opel to shut German plant until 2022

#338

Post by bricemo »

basilgohar wrote: post #314
abfan1127 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is false. the supply would be gone at those low prices. Now they can be had for those who want it badly enough.

Your statement is false. Demand would be met with an increase in supply, satisfying all needs for the product and without the "help" of scalpers who sidestep supply-and-demand by artificially creating scarcity to drive up demand for their own profit. This is no help to anyone but themselves. If there's a legitimate demand that will be used, then there's a good case for production to be increased to meet such demand,…

Except increase in supply in chips takes 3-5 years

Re: Chip shortage leads carmaker Opel to shut German plant until 2022

#340

Post by lmm »

drdeca wrote: post #313
TeMPOraL wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I see it, this makes sense in a hypothetical world of perfect theoretical models (you may recognize this world as being the one inhabited by frictionless, perfectly spherical cows). In this world, scalpers cause the market to price in "stickiness" - the more critical an item is to the buyer, the more they'll be willing to pay - so the supply ultimately gets allocated to the most desperate of buyers, for the p…

It seems to me like most of the (alleged) benefits of scalpers would be equally well achieved by selling (some fraction of) the items in auctions, instead of just picking a price. However, my impression is that consumers would view this in a negative light, and that the harms to the seller’s reputation would be enough to outweigh the initially increased income. This seems to be the source of the inefficiencies that s…

> This leads me to an idea which, I don’t believe is typically done, but which I don’t know why not: Why wouldn’t a company just, list a price that they are “going to sell it at”, and then “sell” a large proportion of them at that price to an entity which isn’t publicly connected to the company, and then that organization sells the items via auction (and returns a large proportion of the profits back to the company).

That's often how a lot of today's "scalping" is done - AIUI a lot of "secondary market" tickets on StubHub etc. are sold by an entity that's owned by TicketHub or whoever, so that the artists can sell their tickets at the price the market will bear but put a low face price on them for the sake of their reputation.

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