71–80 of 84 posts
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> 800 […] That's a very small amount of money, often less than a single month's insurance premium. Jesus fucking christ, what the fuck ?! How much does health insurance cost in the US ?
Is this really the first time on the internet that you've encountered a discussion about US healthcare costs?
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I've commented on this before on HN. I have sleep apnea and a ResMed CPAP. A very US-centric response: Insurance also seems to have access to this data in one way or another (not sure if direct with ResMed or via your doctor). If you don't hit your "compliance target" for treatment, insurance will cease paying 'their share' of the cost. So I found myself in a downward spiral of 0. Struggling to sleep with sleep apnea…
As someone who couldn't hit compliance either, any other sleep apnea solutions that have worked for you (or others?) (apologies about derailing into subthread)
Starlink provides a router with their ISP package. For the last year the router comes without an ethernet port. Wireless only. They've never said why but I assume it's because of a chip shortage. (There is an add-on for ethernet you can order for a modest price.) ResMed started selling a version of their popular AirSense 10 AutoSet sleep apnea machine without a cellular modem. Normally the product uploads treatment d…
there is no shortage of 1000BaseT PHY and ethernet chips or you would see absolute chaos in the market of $50 to $150 home/small office routers and ethernet switches. The sort of all-in-one CPU/RAM/ethernet chip that's built into a small router like the starlink one already implements ethernet it just needs the PHY to do it If mikrotik and ubiquiti can still source the chips to build $50 routers, which is the case, t…
So many smartphones are thrown away in the trash each year. How many chips can be scavenged from them? Perhaps chip shortage will finally put an end to the planned obsolesce of the smartphone industry, and bring some kind of stability to the whole thing.
What we really need is advanced work on local asymmetrical interconnected systems.
I follow news from the boutique modular synthesizer space, and it has been a BLOODBATH lately. The legendary OP-1 was recently discontinued. Prices are going through the roof. Multiple popular modular synth companies have closed up shop recently due to the chip shortage. What can I say, it sucks!
The OP-1 is a bad example. It was discontinued because they replaced it with the OP-1 field - essentially the same thing but with a few feature tweaks. But the bloodbath is real. Companies are shutting down (WMD, synthesizers.com), delaying or killing products (bastl, dirtywave, behringer), and raising prices (moog). For the sake of the little guys who can't weather the storm much longer, I really hope this lets up a…
I can't fault the brokers for doing what they do, but one MCU I tried to source the other week had a 40x markup from normal. Yes, 4000%.
I know of certain STM32F7 SKUs being sourced for $600/piece instead of $8/piece via shady backstreet Shenzhen suppliers. The whole electronics scene really needs a transparent futures market.
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there is no shortage of 1000BaseT PHY and ethernet chips or you would see absolute chaos in the market of $50 to $150 home/small office routers and ethernet switches. The sort of all-in-one CPU/RAM/ethernet chip that's built into a small router like the starlink one already implements ethernet it just needs the PHY to do it If mikrotik and ubiquiti can still source the chips to build $50 routers, which is the case, t…
Well there is shortage of PHY chips. Decent TI chips go for 50$ a piece over broker. Minimum order quantity 200 pieces. We took ancient Realtek parts for 7$ from broker. Normally it’s <4$. These are sad news from last 2 months. Regular distribution channels have zero stock with funny lead times of 1,5 years.
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> the futures market should never determine if a factory is operating But what about washing machine futures ? Or more realistically, how much is shutting down the factory going to cost the washing machine manufacturer in terms of employee compensation, lost employees (more hiring and training), washing machine brand losses in the market, failure to deliver on existing contracts, and similar? They can't claim force m…
True... but that has to be compared with those same set of losses the car factory up the street will suffer if they don't get the chips... If there is only enough chips for one factory to run, someone has to shutdown and take those losses. And the shutdown factory should be the one with less to lose, not the one who didn't buy futures in time.
That sounds highly communist. The factory with the most to lose should have been looking out for themselves. They did not, so they suffer economically, and hopefully learn a lesson (or their bankruptcy stands as a lesson for others) for the future.
Because of their decisions, one of the factories can claim force majeure to protect them from some of the consequences of shutting down, while the other cannot, so the other shutting down and reselling their chips is probably not an option.
Salvaging chips out of washing machines might be the best possible option for everyone to fulfill their contractual obligations.
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> 800 […] That's a very small amount of money, often less than a single month's insurance premium. Jesus fucking christ, what the fuck ?! How much does health insurance cost in the US ?
I pay ~$500/month for "pretty good" health insurance, and my employer pays roughly the same (a "benefit" that the employer pays 'half'! /s ) And then you have to pay small fees when you go visit a doctor ($25-ish each time), pay for medications (expensive). Emergency room swipes your credit card before a doctor even sees you ($150 co-pay for my plan). Pay thousands for an MRI (that the insurance company has graciousl…
MDSave.
I got a brain MRI for ~$450.
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This is a whole industry in China. There are buildings in Shenzhen with hundreds of vendors selling scavenged storage and memory chips, because those are highly standardized. And discontinued chips from the 80s and 90s are salvaged and sold on ebay and AliExpress so people can repair their old electronics. I've even seen broken laptops get their CPUs desoldered and turned into desktops with custom adapter boards. The…
Fun fact: this industry also has a habit of fraudulently remarking harvested chips (which are usually fine anyway) to look like brand-new ones. It caused a bit of a minor scandal in the retrocomputing community when this was found out.
