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We were quoted $40 for a $4 STM32 microcontroller, by a component broker. Due to our desperate need, we caved in and paid for the 10x price and our only hope at
by laydn 5y ago
We were quoted $40 for a $4 STM32 microcontroller, by a component broker. Due to our desperate need, we caved in and paid for the 10x price and our only hope at this point is that the parts will be genuine. Sigh.
- pc86 5y agoIt sounds like it's actually a $40 microcontroller, then.
- zsmi 5y agoWhich means, unfortunately, that you actually have a $100 coffee maker, and not a $30 coffee maker, then.
- kzrdude 5y agoDisregarding chip shortage, this sounds like a reasonable outcome after the pandemic anyway. Somewhere, all that money that was lost needs to be recuperated - partly in inflation.
- jtbayly 5y agoWhy does “lost money” need to be recuperated? That doesn’t sound necessary at all. What does sound reasonable is that supply and demand change the prices of things.
- kzrdude 5y agoSupply and demand example: governments have created a lot of money to pay for extraordinary expenses in 2020 and 2021. Supply of money is now greater and this leads to rising prices (i.e. inflation). What I mean by recuperation: We don't create more value just from creating money. So if there is more money to go around but the same amount of goods produced, that leads to inflation. We're talking about inflation to adjust for the money created to cover expenses.
- jtbayly 5y agoYes. Inflation happens. So you think everything should cost 10x what it cost last year? Doesn’t seems reasonable to me. Seems like some things are up that much because of supply and demand.
- imtringued 5y agoNo, that's not the type of inflation that benefits anyone. Stagflation is what happens when you have a supply shock (usually natural disaster, political instability, bans or outright wars). Prices go up but incomes do not because nobody is being hired. For example, when you ban recreational drugs, the cost of drugs goes up as the supply dries up. At some point you can't raise prices anymore and the dealers start cutting the drug with whatever they have available like fentanyl. What we need is an inflation cycle closer to this ideal: consumers start buying products -> productive companies start earning more -> companies start producing more products -> companies hire more workers -> companies raise wages -> new consumers enter the market that start buying products. Once you reach full employment you raise interest rates to calm the market down and then everything is perfectly fine. Restaurants are one of the few places where we see the "good" type of inflation because it is resulting in higher wages.
- kzrdude 5y agoAh, I didn't meant it as something I think we "need" or what I "like" -- just what I think is coming. Governments have used a lot of money to pay for things: the supply of money has been diluted heavily, and this together with other effects like decreased productivity, will lead to inflation.
- tgv 5y agoWhy not $66?
- zsmi 5y agoI didn't actually calculate anything, so there's no precise answer, but the high level answer is, all the middle men want their cut too.
- laydn 5y agoNo, the manufacturer still quotes $4, with a 52-week lead time :-)
- digikazi 5y agoYour experience sounds similar to ours. We're an engineering company in the UK; in better days we paid £3,000 for 1,000 chips. Today we paid £58,000 for the same amount.