Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40% • Hacker News Board

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

#601

Post by inglor_cz » Thu, Aug 19, 2021, 7:11 PM UTC

baybal2 wrote: post #568

starfallg wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that China needs energy and other natural resources to sustain production which the US and allies can effectively blockade. It always puzzles me why China is so antagonistic with its neighbours. Indochina is very difficult to invade, and the whole South China Seas situation means that China has no blue ocean access into the Pacific. In a global war, the only reliable lifeline into China is through Russia…

> It always puzzles me why China is so antagonistic with its neighbours. > The issue is that China needs energy and other natural resources to sustain production which the US and allies can effectively blockade. You just answered your own question. They are so hostile, and aggressive exactly because of that immense insecurity, and fear. It's the mental model you pickup growing in any red country: you never acknowledg…

Interestingly, fear of Western blockade and interruption of import of vital resources was what motivated the Japanese to go to war in 1941.

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

#602

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 19, 2021, 7:13 PM UTC

a9h74j wrote: post #584

robotresearcher wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-han…

[deleted]

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

#603

Post by throwawayboise » Thu, Aug 19, 2021, 7:14 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #562

twobitshifter wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a source for the best Taiwan engineers working for minimum wage?

Monthly salary for a TSMC fab engineer is about NTD$48,000/month [1]; I saw another source on the web that listed NTD$612K/year, which is consistent. The exchange rate is 1 USD ~= 28 NTD, so that about USD$1700/month or about USD$10.50/hour, which is pretty close to what McDonald's pays these days. Prices in many foreign countries are wonky though, because of different cultural & economic systems. You can have a good…

McDonald's is paying $15 where I am now, and begging for applications.

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

#604

Post by xyzelement » Thu, Aug 19, 2021, 7:18 PM UTC

lastofthemojito wrote: post #575

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.

Reminds me of what I've heard Porsche aficionados say: "You can't pay too much for a classic Porsche. You can only buy it too soon". They're not making any more of them, and demand and prices only go up (until maybe one day they don't, I don't know).

>They're not making any more of them, and demand and prices only go up (until maybe one day they don't, I don't know).

You can say that about anything - limited run beanie babies, bitcoin, whatever. It's all true until it's not.

In the case of classic Porsches, next time you hear someone say that, ask them (a) what's gonna happen once boomers die out. Do genX/Z/millenials give a shit about a classic Porsche the way a boomer would? (b) what happens if/when we replace ICEs with electric and the gas station infrastructure goes away (not saying it will happen but it's one likely future path.) In the world where you can't get gasoline, is a classic car still valuable?

I don't know the answers to these questions but unless the person who is giving you advice has modeled this out, their advice is of no value.

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

#605

Post by robotresearcher » Thu, Aug 19, 2021, 7:23 PM UTC

robotresearcher wrote: post #415

a9h74j wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does have negative external effects, as you observe, in the sense of a viscious circle. But even a viscious circle, mathematically, has positive feedback, resulting initially in a positive exponent growing against time, not a negative exponent damping out in time.

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.

Self-reply, too late to edit. Looks like I remembered the definition of loop gain incorrectly. This should say a loop gain less than 1, not negative

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

#606

Post by fragmede » Thu, Aug 19, 2021, 7:23 PM UTC

neither_color wrote: post #576

blueblisters wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building it is one thing. Making it operational without importing talent and running it profitably is another. Taiwan has some of the best fab engineers who work at US minimum wage salaries. Of course you can pull them away with higher pay like China is doing, but that means profitability will likely go for a toss.

We pay junior engineers who work at social media companies six figures so why cant we pay taiwanese fab engineers enough?

The risk model is different. The cost of setting up an gorgeous tech company office in pre-Covid San Francisco is trivial compared to setting up even poor-quality fab. Not that we (the US) should shy away from doing it - the Silicon Valley is called that because semiconductors are made out of silicon, but SV is also full of Superfund sites (for many reasons, but IC manufacturing isn't a light industrial process, and is ridiculously capital intensive. A few million dollars, and a few months, and that social media company will have an MVP and started proving traction in their chosen niche. (It'll take closer to a decade to actually get somewhere with it eg tiktok, but MVP can be demoed to investors far sooner.) A few years, and closer to a billion dollars, and you might have broken ground on the fab.

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

#607

Post by jollybean » Thu, Aug 19, 2021, 7:24 PM UTC

Scoundreller wrote: post #328

Many countries have a funny concept of strategic industries. In mine, dairy is a strategic industry that is coddled by government so that we can have a local source. But every country thinks that so there’s foes and allies that can supply us UHT or powder milk on a moment’s notice. And if our milk supply disappeared tomorrow, everyone over 1y could substitute with 10000000 different things for nutrition. Cars are ano…

It's definitely worth keeping a skeptical eye on non-market interventions, but there are a ton of good reasons for it.

For auto - companies do not exist in isolation. They're a huge pillar for other things, especially the local economy.

If you were the CEO of a 'region' that actually owned all of the businesses, this would show up in your balance sheet: it would be perfectly acceptable to lose money in your auto-making 'division' if it meant that the 'education division', 'healthcare division', 'civic division' were made profitable.

Japan also makes a ton of money exporting it's cars so it's valuable.

Finance, telecoms, farming and entertainment all have different reasons for being supported but the impetus in most cases is rational.

If anything we probably need more high end fabs and this whole 'single source with 24/7 operations' is maybe not worth it, we might just have to be paying a little more for our chips.

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

#608

Post by vkou » Thu, Aug 19, 2021, 7:26 PM UTC

baybal2 wrote: post #557

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explain how a war between nuclear superpowers ends with anyone winning?

You have 1 superpower, and 2 upcoming challengers. US has enough nuclear munitions to outright defeat 1 equal superpower in a first strike scenario.

> US has enough nuclear munitions to outright defeat 1 equal superpower in a first strike scenario.

I wouldn't call half the population of the US dying in 30 minutes, and most of the other half over the next 30 days to be much of a 'victory', and I don't want the DoD to even consider employing anyone who would.

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

#609

Post by lotsofpulp » Thu, Aug 19, 2021, 7:26 PM UTC

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #333

itsoktocry wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> share more or less 1:1 with Toyota, customers who who put very easy miles on vehicles Like all the Toyota trucks used in military operations around the world? Those kind of "easy miles"? Comparing these two companies, with vastly different scales of operation, is kind of silly.

The edge between manufacturers in any given measurable attribute of vehicle performance is far, far smaller than a bunch of screeching fanboys on the internet would have you believe. If it weren't you'd see far less diversity of vehicles on the road. The humvee is also used by militaries all around the world. It's not known for particularly great reliability. Militaries have a much difference set of objectives when i…

While there might be a slight effect of Toyotas being used less intensively because disproportionally higher income people buy them, I doubt it is a material effect. The people that are not going to put pavers in their car because they can afford not to and want to keep it nice are buying Denali Yukons or other more expensive, luxury vehicles.

Toyota did not start expensive, and even now it is not the most expensive ($/mile). They earned that reputation over many years, and while they may have raised prices, the resale market does not show any evidence of the quality slipping.

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

#610

Post by Johnny555 » Thu, Aug 19, 2021, 7:26 PM UTC

l33t2328 wrote: post #577

Johnny555 wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that the population can relate to building a semiconductor ecosystem in the USA -- when a state gives incentives to bring movie production there, people think "Well look at all of those jobs and movies give our state great exposure", but when the government wants to spend billions helping to build a next-gen fab plant here, then it's like "wait, I paid thousands of dollars for my phone and computer, why…

I’m pretty sure the average person knows computer chips are important. > wait, I paid thousands of dollars for my phone and computer, why are we paying them to build plants here, don't we pay them enough This line of reasoning isn’t generally extended to any other area of production, so I don’t see why it would apply here.

Yet there's plenty of people that speak out specifically against semiconductor subsidies:

https://foundersbroadsheet.com/does-the-semiconductor-indust...

Supply and demand shocks will work themselves out fairly quickly if just left to market forces without government involvement. But a large section of the US population is under the delusion that if there’s a problem, only government can fix it.

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/560338-government-...

One part of the legislation, the CHIPS Act, allocates $52 billion to subsidize the construction of new chip factories in the United States. Officials believe it could result in seven to 10 new U.S. factories. Although a national security case can be made for it, too much subsidy can do more harm than good.