Chip shortage leads carmaker Opel to shut German plant until 2022 • Hacker News Board

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

#451

Post by rjzzleep » Fri, Oct 01, 2021, 3:33 PM UTC

blowski wrote: post #444

ckuehne wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, there is only "knowing that communist central planning always ends up in shortages". See here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19970544 for an example that illustrates the point nicely.

"Some central planning" does not mean "communism".

On top of that the US and Germany had the same ability, it just that they were extremely slow in their decision making.

When they finally made that step it did help. Incompetence caused scalpers to rise and profit while the rest suffered until the Government finally got their heads out of their asses.

Nothing about stalinism or communism in here. Just general incompetence.

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

#452

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Oct 01, 2021, 3:48 PM UTC

Hamuko wrote: post #138

paganel wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're already only a few months away from 2022, most (if not all) carmakers present on the EU market have included back-up cameras in their vehicles. I know that my brother's Dacia Logan built in 2019 already had one.

Backup cameras have been an optional extra for a long time sure, but I don't think I'm aware of any car that actually comes standard with one. Well, maybe a Mercedes-Benz S-Class. I do have a backup camera in my 10-year-old Benz, but I imagine that the original owner paid a four-digit amount of euros for it back in the day.

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

#453

Post by treeman79 » Fri, Oct 01, 2021, 4:00 PM UTC

NicoJuicy wrote: post #381

treeman79 wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government is often the cause of scarcity. If price sky rocket, investors will increases production until prices are lower. Government can mess with this by limit prices causing investors to stay away, meaning fewer chips get built, thus ensuing a temporary problem gets worse.

You can't increase production of semiconductors within 3-4 years. Those assembly lines are highly specialized and extremely efficient. After all this time, the best they can do is 1% extra efficiency per month.

And factories were big and owned by the evil rich, so Russia socialized them. Thus leading to decades long shortages for all but the very rich.

A short term (1-5) year problem is no reason to takes steps to ensure a generational problem.

Free market is brutal about improving efficiency and growing with demand.

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

#454

Post by roenxi » Fri, Oct 01, 2021, 4:00 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #450

roenxi wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, sure, but that is assuming that the market is exactly 85 people. If we hold the number of people fixed and it is impossible to sell all of the inventory then holding back inventory is much more effective - because we have assumed it is impossible to sell. The hypothetical in that article would make more money if they sold 80 seats at $495, 15 seats at 900 and then 5 at $1500 (that makes $60,600). There are stro…

No, the math works fine. Ignoring baggage fees and first class vs catch etc. If you have a flight with 300 identical seats and you could sell everyone single one of them for say 100$ and that’s your maximum possible revenue from a single price point. Now the question becomes how do you capture value from people willing to pay more than 100$? You can play some games with round trip tickets and minimum stays, but again…

You're running in to a pretty fundamental problem with the maths here - if we have Retric-Air and Roenxi-Air, Roenxi-Air is going to be making more money because my plan is to copy your plan then sell a couple of extra $100 cheap tickets to fill the plane up. Your strategy is completely dominated by a strategy that just does that and sells a few more tickets. You're segmenting the market, I'm segmenting the market and fully utilising my capital.

I can tell you why the airlines would be planning on having empty seats in practice - because there are sometimes literally not enough people interested in travelling to fill the aircraft, so they adopt a strategy of leaving empty seats because they have no other option. If you've ever flown some god-awful connecting flight at 2am you might have seen that in action yourself. But that isn't because the airline is choosing to reserve seats, they'd much rather have more passengers - that just isn't an option.

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

#455

Post by xyzzyz » Fri, Oct 01, 2021, 4:23 PM UTC

Lev1a wrote: post #437

xyzzyz wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly how concert ticket scalpers work. Bands/producers covertly but with full awareness sell most of the ticket to scalpers, which outsources the reputation hit.

My mother told me about some new anti-scalper scheme she encountered recently when she was looking at ordering concert tickets for herself and my father. It went something like this: - basket size limited to IIRC a maximum of five tickets for the same concert, - name of the buyer is linked to (idk, maybe even printed on) the tickets AND - the named buyer would have to be there with the group to enter the venue. I thi…

You don’t seem to have caught my point: it is the bands themselves that work with the scalpers. They sell a chunk (often majority) of tickets directly to the scalpers for a price above what they publicly claim to charge. Then, they introduce measures like you describe, to reduce competition from grassroots scalpers, to ensure stable business situation for the anointed scalpers.

This arrangement works great: the reputation hit is very successfully outsourced to what you call “bottom feeding scum”. The band benefits from higher profit than they would otherwise be able to get if they tried to sell all their tickets at the publicly advertised price, which quite apparently is below the market clearing price. Ticket availability is increased: instead of having to fight to book the tickets in 8 seconds after the registration is opened, everyone can buy tickets at their leisure, simply paying more for convenience when they buy from scalpers.

Let me ask you this: for the band you are talking about, despite all the measures you describe, you still could buy tickets on StubHub, no?

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

#456

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Oct 01, 2021, 4:40 PM UTC

raducu wrote: post #403

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 by rationing demand and ensuring availability. While the fundamental issue is indeed price discovery, even in the most abstract market -- stocks/fx/derivatives there are numerous regulations in place to limit the predatory behavior of certain speculators. It is astonishing we have no such regulation for real-life items. Scalpers are compounding a problem, by reselling something at…

[deleted]

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

#457

Post by newsclues » Fri, Oct 01, 2021, 4:48 PM UTC

ashtonkem wrote: post #286

Eduard wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So many smartphones with digitizers having dead zones after just four years....

Car screens are built to different tolerances than cell phones. In particular they must survive a much more harsh environment than most other consumer electronics. This is precisely why the first Tesla screens were so shocking in their size and so unreliable; when Elon Musk found out that he couldn’t get auto screens that large he demanded they use consumer screens, which yellowed and failed due to the heat cars are…

I’m not referring to the big screens but the replacement of buttons and knobs with multiple small ones.

Like putting touch screens on the steering wheel!

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

#458

Post by drdeca » Fri, Oct 01, 2021, 4:55 PM UTC

jhanschoo wrote: post #356

drdeca wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but like, would their overall reputation be higher if they were to directly put some proportion of their inventory up for auction (like, each item individually, not like one auction for a bundle of a very large number of GPUs) instead?

No, the prices will still be comparable to scalper prices, and the cost-conscious consumer market will remember the company's price gouging when they make their next-generation purchase

This response was initially confusing to me, but thinking about it, I think it led me to realize that complaints about things like this are, essentially, an attempt at coordination among consumers, in order to collectively get a better deal.

If there were only a single consumer, a monopsony, they would have a large degree of influence on the price.

Building a public consensus on what prices are reasonable and what prices are "too high" allows for exerting similar pressures on the price, as if there were an organization which represented a large portion of the consumers and which would make a single decision for all of that portion (like, a purchasing union thing).

I hadn't realized this.

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

#459

Post by CamperBob2 » Fri, Oct 01, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

mensetmanusman wrote: post #283

CamperBob2 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the point of buying a car without A/C? You might save $1000 now, but you'll lose several thousand at trade-in time because no one else will want your car.

For driving indoors.

I'm trying to think of a case where regular passenger cars are driven in climate-controlled indoor settings, and I'm not having much success. What do you have in mind?

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

#460

Post by jrockway » Fri, Oct 01, 2021, 5:32 PM UTC

hef19898 wrote: post #432

avianlyric wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like a lot of work, and a PR nightmare if the public ever found out. Nvidia is already a money printing machine, and their margins are growing. I doubt it’s worth the time investment and risk exposure to the crypto markets for Nvidia. Better off using that time a money inventing better money printers.

Why would you start digging for gold if you are already becoming rich producing and selling the shovels?

I guess it's easier to make a shovel than it is to make a GPU, and it's easier to do industrial-scale crypto mining for a company that already owns a datacenter than it is to build an industrial earth processing operation. If NVidia wanted to mine a lot of coins, they no doubt have a few employees that could get that started. But it doesn't seem like they want to, perhaps because it's not a sustainable business or perhaps because their customers are already mad at them and they don't want to make it worse. (Though it's not really their fault that customers are mad at them; they're actually mad that someone invented cryptocurrency, which is not NVidia's fault.)