sounds scary

With all that cash printed worldwide to fight the pandemic this is no surprise. Not that there have been many better options, I heard someone say on TV or whatever "you first fight the war then you pay for it".

I ordered a refrigerator last August. Still waiting on it. Thinking about canceling that order and going with something that is in stock. With the price of materials going up I just wonder if I am better off just waiting and hopeing the refrigerator I have does not quit on me. I only put the refrigerator on order because the old one is about 15 years old and the wife wanted a certain kind and we though we would get one instead of haveing to settle on one in an emergency if the old one poops out.

The US FED has been holding down interest rates for years pre-pandemic, pushing savings into the stock market and allowing government to borrow without limit. They dare not change course now; they are riding on the tiger's back.

The Dow is up 48% this year. That money isn't real.

The downside here could be epic. WILL be epic.

There were much better options.

Perhaps there were, but I don't think I am informed enough to be able to judge that. On the one hand it is obvious that our civilization as we know it is in danger, perhaps grave danger. OTOH ageing people tend to think/say that...

Yup. Simon has been doing jazz ensuring supply for a 300-unit rollout of some multispectral sensors for fire and spark detection in cotton harvesters. Luckily he managed to score the last 400 pieces of LPC845 MCUs in 32-pin DFN, or we'd have been up the creek till late fall.

There are also not a lot of THS4631 op amps around ATM.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

We're having trouble with fiber-connectorized 850 nm VCSEL lasers. Nobody has any and price quotes have doubled.

We'd buy 1000 now if we could find good ones. One box that we make has

16 per.

Everybody else feels the same way, which is part of the problem. Maybe they're trading in some of those stockpiles of TP and hand sanitizer. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

That's because it's not money. It is wealth, it can be exchanged for money, but it's not money. Don't confuse the two.

I find it funny that anyone puts so much credence into a financial report of the economy. Commodities are up as a group. So? Copper has always been an up and down thing. Fixed supply rate and variable demand. Look at milk prices sometime.

I remember a TTL buying panic. Same dynamics as TP, but a roll of TP takes more space to store than an SN7474N.

We really need 1000 lasers.

One of my stranger neighbors bought a quantity of super-filtered full-face gas masks from Hungary or somewhere, to keep out the viruses. He's offering them to everyone on the block for free now.

But 1970s TP would potentially still be useful today. ;)

Is that the guy just down the hill who built the Borg house?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Yeah, and guess who holds some of that resposnibility.

Some shops have been canceling orders so they can take advantage of higher prices. eg. good video cards.

Yes. We are seeing very long lead times on parts that are normally readily available.

Especially micros.

Also price of copper has risien sharply so things like bus bars have skyrocketed.

"The chip shortage is affecting virtually all product manufacturing:

The global chip shortage hobbled auto makers world-wide. Now, other industries are feeling the squeeze.

It has hit makers of home appliances, heavy-equipment, servers and sex toys. It is confounding multinationals to startups. Even companies that don’t use chips as their core business, such as freight operators and retailers, find themselves affected. The scarcity means higher price tags for consumers, longer waits for goods, empty store shelves and swaths of the business world racing to secure whatever supply they can.

The chip famine first hit auto makers late last year after they underestimated demand during the pandemic. But as car makers ramped up orders, other industries saw the components queue lengthen and increased their own purchasing. Demand for consumer electronics stayed hot. Now chip makers can’t keep pace, driving up prices for parts, thinning out supply and spurring panic buying.

The tight supply for many chips is likely to persist through this year, companies say. The shortfalls are creating missed business opportunities, just as the global economic recovery is gaining momentum after a pandemic-led slowdown.

They have also contributed to escalations in the cost of raw materials for electronic goods in recent months. An index measuring the price of inputs for electronics companies in March soared to the highest level recorded in more than two decades of tracking, according to IHS Markit, a market researcher."

We had panic shortages of pasta, TP, Kleenex, flour, and horseradish.

No, just up the block. He also bought a lot of big traffic cones to put out in the (narrow) street to slow down traffic. Enormous pain. People are slowly losing interest in them too.

The neighborhood is zoned for single-family only. So the financial incentive becomes to buy a small house, tear it down, and put up a

4000 square foot monster that paves over the entire lot and sells for $4e6 or so.

This is paradoxical, since people are leaving California and the big coder mills are going remote.

Experts who think they can understand and manage an economy.

And billions of poor people who want the stuff that we have.

John Doe snipped-for-privacy@message.header wrote in news:s6keks$90r$4 @dont-email.me:

If I was a Chinese agent, you would be dead already, putz boy.

Nice try though, retarded punk.

snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Try the retarded conduct of Donald John Trump, and the stupid f*ck's "trade war" with China, which he was advised against.

Dumbfucks like you have no clue about repercussions.

Donald Trump didn't manage the Covid-19 epidemic in the US as well as he might have done. That has made the effects of the epidemic on the economy even worse than they might have been.

Or an epidemic. There are loads of armchair experts who think they can do a better job than the experts who were trained for the job. John Larkin is clearly one of them.

You've got to know that it exists before you can want it, and there's not a lot of point in wanting a car if you haven't got roads and a fuel distribution network.

Lenin's utopian plan for the Soviet Union was rural electrification, and his successors more or less managed to deliver it - it was set up in 1920, Lenin died in 1924, and it got to the initially planned 8.8 billion kWh in one year by 1931, not far behind schedule.

Once you've got electric power you can want quite a bit more stuff. If you've got a centrally planned economy, it doesn't get delivered all that reliably. Electricity is relatively easy. A satisfactory electric kettle is a bit harder. My wife's choice when we moved back some ten years ago was cheap and plastic, and the plastic decided to fall apart recently - we had to go to two shops before we found a replacement that looked as if it wouldn't crumble, and I ended up paying a lot more for what we bought than she'd paid for the last one, or what we'd have paid for a unit that looked like the one that had crumbled. You can't easily tell if a plastic shell is made with plasticised material, which will crumble when the plasticiser evaporates. Metal and glass are safer choices.