4 ms·

nice to see companies having behaviour as stupid, short-sighted and damaging as the people hoarding toilet paper

lnsru 5y ago
While you could use newspaper as a substitute for toilet a paper some company has nothing as as a replacement. New part means costly re-certification of the whole product. No parts means one is out of business. So buying everything that is available on the market looks like very good decision from business perspective.
- hvidgaard 5y ago
  If you're that dependent on components that there is no replacement for, then perhaps buy enough stock to last you through a redesign and recertification is in order. Having a contingency plan for such scenarios seems like a no brainer.
  - lnsru 5y ago
    There are sooo many no brainers, that bureaucratic monstrosities also known as Big Corps just can’t get right. I work for one and more than half of the daily problems are home made and were simple no brainers elsewhere. I got all my electronic parts on time for my private development and first small manufacturing run. It is indeed no brainer.
    - hvidgaard 5y ago
      It's because they value short term gain over long term gain and stability. I see it all the time in software development too.
  - vkou 5y ago
    I'm pretty sure that whatever business you work for has no planned replacement for their local power company ceasing to provide electricity. This doesn't mean they should go out and build their own gas peaker plant. We live in a society, and no man is an island. You can't control everything you depend on. Sure, you can control some things you depend on, but that's a long, and expensive rabbit hole. Hoarding twenty years of canned food and seventy thousand rounds of ammuniton is all well and good, unless doing so puts you in a situation where you can't pay rent.
    - erik_seaberg 5y ago
      I don’t know that massive datacenters are truly a good investment for my employer, but at least we have several zones in two regions in case of power/network/natural disaster issues.
    - hvidgaard 5y ago
      Nice straw man. But I'll go with it for no other reason that I hope no one believes in that absurdity as an argument against planning for component supply issues. Issues that businesses have experienced time and time again since we began mass producing transistors. That is because it's a utility that source power from several producers. The risk of no power what so ever for a prolonged time is not something to even be considered. Should that happen, society as we know it is probably at risk and my job is no longer important at all. Oh, and someone actually do plan for intermittent power delivery failure including having two different outside sources for power, a battery backup and diesel generators, data centers come to mind.
    - FeepingCreature 5y ago
      Don't big businesses often have Diesel generators to keep power to essential devices going through outages?
      - vkou 5y ago
        I don't mean a two-day power interruption, I mean a two-year power interruption. And if they intend to feed the generator in perpetuity, I'll happily shift the goalposts to some other critical supplier not providing their services.
    - selimthegrim 5y ago
      You’d better tell the city of New Orleans that.
rvense 5y ago
FTR I'm just a hobbyist, and I've been hoarding chips and boards too (though probably not in quantities that affect anything)
adhesive_wombat 5y ago
Just like toilet paper, hoarding is just game theory in action. If you don't take part in the madness, you're at a disadvantage as the "sucker". For toilet paper, the cost of that disadvantage is having to wash your backside with the shower head and the benefit is the warm fuzzies of doing the right thing. For a business with no chips, it could be an existential threat. Warm fuzzies don't pay salaries. The only way to avoid it is to have every company in the world to agree to not hoard, and harshly punish "defectors" somehow. Or have the supplier strictly ration supply, which doesn't work if the supply is coming from existing stock in the hands of distributors unless they also cooperate (or collude, depending on how you look at it). None of that is remotely possible in the global industrial system. JIT is often blamed, but to avoid it, trillions of dollars worth of material would need to be hoarded constantly, which is its own problem: storage costs money, logistics and space, and its a substantial risk if you end up not needing it or the goods expire or become obsolete on a shelf and overproduction is a waste of resources. Going bust because you hoarded 5 million components that you never actually needed and couldn't offload is still going bust.
- bluGill 5y ago
  What is really needed is expose the JIT pipeline to upstream. We are buying 10,000 parts but need 100 per week, figure out what works with your production pipeline to deliver at that rate or above.
  - rocqua 5y ago
    Issue is that people will skew the numbers reported upstream. This way they can affect what their 'fair share' would be. This tends to devolve into everyone mis-reporting numbers in the same direction, causing the reported numbers to be useless upstream.
- CamperBob2 5y ago
  The other way to avoid it is to have the government step in and impose rationing, as done in times of war... at least, back when war meant the common American citizen was actually expected to sacrifice for the greater effort. If the semiconductor shortage continues to worsen, I think we'll start to see calls for this type of intervention. One step that could be taken immediately is to prohibit sales from the distribution channel to overseas brokers, which are currently resulting in stupidity like $800 FPGAs that used to cost $20. But it's also true that this sort of market manipulation has downsides of its own. I honestly don't know what the right thing to do here is. But I do know the industry had best unfuck itself, and that right soon, or this situation is going to have major consequences in everyday life.
erik_seaberg 5y ago
The best case would be somebody keeping a big stockpile and selling from it at a premium. “Anti-gouging” laws prevent that for toilet paper, so each of us has to hoard it instead.
doikor 5y ago
The thing with toiler paper is that we never actually ran out of it. Only the last part of the chain did (the shops). Toilet paper just takes a lot of space and sells for relatively little so shops in general do not want to stock much of it. Basically even during the worst of the panic it only ran out for the duration it takes for a truck to be driven to the manufacturers warehouse, load it, drive to the shop and unload it. With semiconductors we are actually running out of stock/capacity at the very beginning of the chain instead of last mile delivery.
more_corn 5y ago
Hoarding is just client side caching. Once the initial shock wears off it’s actually a benefit and prevents future shocks. Keeping a stock of critical components on hand keeps business from needing to place emergency orders.

While you could use newspaper as a substitute for toilet a paper some company has nothing as as a replacement. New part means costly re-certification of the whole product. No parts means one is out of business. So buying everything that is available on the market looks like very good decision from business perspective.

hvidgaard 5y ago
If you're that dependent on components that there is no replacement for, then perhaps buy enough stock to last you through a redesign and recertification is in order. Having a contingency plan for such scenarios seems like a no brainer.
- lnsru 5y ago
  There are sooo many no brainers, that bureaucratic monstrosities also known as Big Corps just can’t get right. I work for one and more than half of the daily problems are home made and were simple no brainers elsewhere. I got all my electronic parts on time for my private development and first small manufacturing run. It is indeed no brainer.
  - hvidgaard 5y ago
    It's because they value short term gain over long term gain and stability. I see it all the time in software development too.
- vkou 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure that whatever business you work for has no planned replacement for their local power company ceasing to provide electricity. This doesn't mean they should go out and build their own gas peaker plant. We live in a society, and no man is an island. You can't control everything you depend on. Sure, you can control some things you depend on, but that's a long, and expensive rabbit hole. Hoarding twenty years of canned food and seventy thousand rounds of ammuniton is all well and good, unless doing so puts you in a situation where you can't pay rent.
  - erik_seaberg 5y ago
    I don’t know that massive datacenters are truly a good investment for my employer, but at least we have several zones in two regions in case of power/network/natural disaster issues.
  - hvidgaard 5y ago
    Nice straw man. But I'll go with it for no other reason that I hope no one believes in that absurdity as an argument against planning for component supply issues. Issues that businesses have experienced time and time again since we began mass producing transistors. That is because it's a utility that source power from several producers. The risk of no power what so ever for a prolonged time is not something to even be considered. Should that happen, society as we know it is probably at risk and my job is no longer important at all. Oh, and someone actually do plan for intermittent power delivery failure including having two different outside sources for power, a battery backup and diesel generators, data centers come to mind.
  - FeepingCreature 5y ago
    Don't big businesses often have Diesel generators to keep power to essential devices going through outages?
    - vkou 5y ago
      I don't mean a two-day power interruption, I mean a two-year power interruption. And if they intend to feed the generator in perpetuity, I'll happily shift the goalposts to some other critical supplier not providing their services.
  - selimthegrim 5y ago
    You’d better tell the city of New Orleans that.

rvense 5y ago

FTR I'm just a hobbyist, and I've been hoarding chips and boards too (though probably not in quantities that affect anything)

adhesive_wombat 5y ago

Just like toilet paper, hoarding is just game theory in action. If you don't take part in the madness, you're at a disadvantage as the "sucker". For toilet paper, the cost of that disadvantage is having to wash your backside with the shower head and the benefit is the warm fuzzies of doing the right thing. For a business with no chips, it could be an existential threat. Warm fuzzies don't pay salaries. The only way to avoid it is to have every company in the world to agree to not hoard, and harshly punish "defectors" somehow. Or have the supplier strictly ration supply, which doesn't work if the supply is coming from existing stock in the hands of distributors unless they also cooperate (or collude, depending on how you look at it). None of that is remotely possible in the global industrial system. JIT is often blamed, but to avoid it, trillions of dollars worth of material would need to be hoarded constantly, which is its own problem: storage costs money, logistics and space, and its a substantial risk if you end up not needing it or the goods expire or become obsolete on a shelf and overproduction is a waste of resources. Going bust because you hoarded 5 million components that you never actually needed and couldn't offload is still going bust.

bluGill 5y ago
What is really needed is expose the JIT pipeline to upstream. We are buying 10,000 parts but need 100 per week, figure out what works with your production pipeline to deliver at that rate or above.
- rocqua 5y ago
  Issue is that people will skew the numbers reported upstream. This way they can affect what their 'fair share' would be. This tends to devolve into everyone mis-reporting numbers in the same direction, causing the reported numbers to be useless upstream.
CamperBob2 5y ago
The other way to avoid it is to have the government step in and impose rationing, as done in times of war... at least, back when war meant the common American citizen was actually expected to sacrifice for the greater effort. If the semiconductor shortage continues to worsen, I think we'll start to see calls for this type of intervention. One step that could be taken immediately is to prohibit sales from the distribution channel to overseas brokers, which are currently resulting in stupidity like $800 FPGAs that used to cost $20. But it's also true that this sort of market manipulation has downsides of its own. I honestly don't know what the right thing to do here is. But I do know the industry had best unfuck itself, and that right soon, or this situation is going to have major consequences in everyday life.

erik_seaberg 5y ago

The best case would be somebody keeping a big stockpile and selling from it at a premium. “Anti-gouging” laws prevent that for toilet paper, so each of us has to hoard it instead.

doikor 5y ago

The thing with toiler paper is that we never actually ran out of it. Only the last part of the chain did (the shops). Toilet paper just takes a lot of space and sells for relatively little so shops in general do not want to stock much of it. Basically even during the worst of the panic it only ran out for the duration it takes for a truck to be driven to the manufacturers warehouse, load it, drive to the shop and unload it. With semiconductors we are actually running out of stock/capacity at the very beginning of the chain instead of last mile delivery.

more_corn 5y ago

Hoarding is just client side caching. Once the initial shock wears off it’s actually a benefit and prevents future shocks. Keeping a stock of critical components on hand keeps business from needing to place emergency orders.