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A big hurdle to fixing the chip shortage: substrates

wsj.com

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Re: A big hurdle to fixing the chip shortage: substrates

#81

Post by vkou »

MarkSweep wrote: post #45
joe_the_user wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say that all Banana growers were shut down for 8 months and during that time all existing supply was bought up that were sitting on store shelves. -- But chip manufacturers didn't shut down. That's even close to the immediate cause, which was that the anticipation of changed future demand on the part of other manufacturers lead to them decreasing and change future orders. If you're going to ELI5("explain this t…

Some fabs did shutdown this year. One in Japan due to a fire and some in Texas due to power loss. I think both are back up and running, but it did not help to lose production. https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/archives/2021/03/30/200... https://www.statesman.com/story/business/2021/04/30/austin-f...

I'd expect these shutdowns to be more-or-less randomly distributed across calendar years[1], and in aggregate, accounted for, on a macro level, in supply/demand projections.

[1] The examples you cited suffer from confirmation bias - a plant shutting down due to a fire when there isn't already a chip shortage, would not really make the news. And if it did, you wouldn't be actively looking for it!

Re: A big hurdle to fixing the chip shortage: substrates

#82

Post by scrollaway »

cptskippy wrote: post #74
trangus_1985 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't particularly agree with the parent comment, but you are being oddly aggressive over something that is a real problem - communicating things is hard and it's a useful topic to consider in a world that increasingly runs on text-based communication.

Insulting and making fun of people because they have a problem isn't helpful but ok, but responding "aggressively" to insults is bad?

I don't see any insults or "making fun of people" in the comments you're responding to. You're choosing to see that.

Apply the Principle of good faith and you'll see you're the one getting worked up over nothing...

Re: A big hurdle to fixing the chip shortage: substrates

#83

Post by hermitdev »

cptskippy wrote: post #35
usui wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might have missed that I already stated that it's an irrational thing to complain about because units in nature are arbitrary, but given that no one uses these units for the topic at hand, why use them at all? Just for relatability? > It may as well be in hectares or "multiples of some lake somewhere", it's a massive number. We're saying the same thing but arguing for the opposite. Like I said, no one in…

> why use them at all? Just for relatability? Yes. Was that hard? The WSJ didn't write this article for you, it isn't an industry rag. This is like complaining that their scientific articles try to dumb it down for a layman's depth. A football field or soccer field is a perfectly reasonable unit of measure when you're simply trying to convey "a lot" to someone.

Pedantically, at least a standard US football field is an exact size (120yds long, 53 1/3 yds wide).

Soccer pitches? Not so much ... FIFA states the field of play for international matches should be 100-110m long and 64-75m wide (tolerances are relaxed to 90-120m long by 45-90m wide - which oddly means you could have a square pitch). If one would like an example of a comically undersized pitch, look to NYFC playing at Yankee stadium - they had to get a special exemption from MLS, IIRC.

Still useful, though, and I think a reasonable person with familiarity with either soccer or football would get a rough idea.

Please don't take this as criticism ; it's not meant to be. The mention of football and soccer fields being used as a measure of size in the same sentence sparked recollection of some not-otherwise-useful knowledge stuck in my brain.

Re: A big hurdle to fixing the chip shortage: substrates

#84

Post by hermitdev »

andrewxdiamond wrote: post #54
lovich wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the article it says they are committing to buying the entire production lines output. Isn't that just committing to spending as much money as building the factories + the profit of the vendor, but with no control over the actual production ?

It’s very unlikely that the deal says “we will buy everything you sell us no matter what.” It’s probably a typical purchasing agreement with tolerances and QA, just paid in advance. Thus there is still a lot of risk being taken on by the fabs. The production could go sour, geopolitics could change, resources might be unavailable, etc. The purchasing companies are externalizing all of this risk by purchasing the produ…

The chip companies probably have forms of insurance in place to cover losses if their independent supply chain partners fail to deliver that they wouldn't be able to get if the partners were integrated.

Re: A big hurdle to fixing the chip shortage: substrates

#85

Post by perl4ever »

usui wrote: post #24

Lol every time I see the word "feet" I'm reminded that this article isn't targeted to anyone but Americans, even when talking about manufacturing lines in Asia. My East Asian bias is showing but in all my experience I absolutely have never had to use those units in a serious professional context. Any time I see a technically-sounding article use units like "feet" and "football fields" I subconsciously find it very di…

A meter seems to me linked to the human body just as much as the foot.

"The metre was originally defined in 1793 as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle"

That factor of ten is because we have ten fingers. There's no cosmic significance to ten or ten million. Or to the size of a line of longitude on our particular planet.

And a meter is almost exactly a yard, or three feet anyway.

Re: A big hurdle to fixing the chip shortage: substrates

#86

Post by mschuster91 »

vkou wrote: post #80
mschuster91 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also imagine that there are no truck drivers to drive the bananas from the plantations to your local stores, and no ships to bring fertilizer to the banana plantations. In the UK, the situation is even worse: because there is an acute shortage of truckers to truck pigs from farms to slaughterhouses and a lack of butchers, 100k pigs are set to be killed and burned - they simply grow each day, and butchers have limit…

> And companies can't pay better wages because customers are conditioned on cheap meat. Are customers conditioned to cheap meat, or no meat? These customers surely live in a market economy, and understand that no matter how much they may bitch on Facebook, prices... Fluctuate..? The reason nobody wants to raise wages during a labour shortage isn't because they are afraid of hiking prices. Prices hike up all the time.…

> Are customers conditioned to cheap meat, or no meat?

To cheap and always available meat. Throughout history, a rise in wealth has been closely correlated with a rise in meat consumption (as seen e.g. in China, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/may/30/food.chi...).

> These customers surely live in a market economy, and understand that no matter how much they may bitch on Facebook, prices... Fluctuate..?

And politicians are highly afraid of the public bitching on food prices. Revolutions have often begun with a public pissed off about food prices!

> It's because they are afraid of being stuck with high wages after the labour shortage ends.

The never ending history of "corporate whining": http://leftycartoons.com/2009/09/04/a-brief-history-of-corpo...

Re: A big hurdle to fixing the chip shortage: substrates

#87

Post by Akronymus »

burnte wrote: post #62
runawaybottle wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your description doesn’t sound too different (if at all) from the face mask/ventilator shortage at the start of the pandemic. We didn’t stock up, and everyone tried to JIT purchase the necessary equipment. Maybe we all have something to learn from Doomsday preppers.

> Maybe we all have something to learn from Doomsday preppers. A little, but really just implementing the Toyota Production System properly. You'll never be perfectly prepared for everything, but a lot of the mess over the past 18 months of supply chain problems could have been avoided. In my personal life, I am NOT a prepper, but the way I stock my house, I had no issues with toilet paper, meat, or other weird short…

Didn't toyota pioneer the JIT system of logistics?

But as with most such systems, others only implemented it partially and thus in a way that in the end creates problems.

Re: A big hurdle to fixing the chip shortage: substrates

#88

Post by imtringued »

cptskippy wrote: post #35
usui wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might have missed that I already stated that it's an irrational thing to complain about because units in nature are arbitrary, but given that no one uses these units for the topic at hand, why use them at all? Just for relatability? > It may as well be in hectares or "multiples of some lake somewhere", it's a massive number. We're saying the same thing but arguing for the opposite. Like I said, no one in…

> why use them at all? Just for relatability? Yes. Was that hard? The WSJ didn't write this article for you, it isn't an industry rag. This is like complaining that their scientific articles try to dumb it down for a layman's depth. A football field or soccer field is a perfectly reasonable unit of measure when you're simply trying to convey "a lot" to someone.

If everyone uses a different unit then it may not appear to be a lot at all. Nobody is measuring office space in football fields so how am I supposed to know how a football field sized manufacturing plant compares to an office building?

Re: A big hurdle to fixing the chip shortage: substrates

#89

Post by oblio »

perl4ever wrote: post #85
usui wrote: post #24

Lol every time I see the word "feet" I'm reminded that this article isn't targeted to anyone but Americans, even when talking about manufacturing lines in Asia. My East Asian bias is showing but in all my experience I absolutely have never had to use those units in a serious professional context. Any time I see a technically-sounding article use units like "feet" and "football fields" I subconsciously find it very di…

A meter seems to me linked to the human body just as much as the foot. "The metre was originally defined in 1793 as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle" That factor of ten is because we have ten fingers. There's no cosmic significance to ten or ten million. Or to the size of a line of longitude on our particular planet. And a meter is almost exactly a yard, or thr…

> There's no cosmic significance to ten or ten million.

Cosmic? No. But social? For sure. 99.99% of math the layman will encounter is in base 10.

Re: A big hurdle to fixing the chip shortage: substrates

#90

Post by imtringued »

jaywalk wrote: post #23
mschuster91 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also imagine that there are no truck drivers to drive the bananas from the plantations to your local stores, and no ships to bring fertilizer to the banana plantations. In the UK, the situation is even worse: because there is an acute shortage of truckers to truck pigs from farms to slaughterhouses and a lack of butchers, 100k pigs are set to be killed and burned - they simply grow each day, and butchers have limit…

> now innocent pigs have to suffer for society's failures. They were going to be killed no matter what. I don't think it matters much to the pig what happens after it's dead.

Although we are conducting a perverted form of nature, there is nothing wrong with eating animals. The problem is the poor treatment of the animals and eating too much meat in general.

When you abuse animals for nothing then you are basically killing for sport.

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