How is Chipageddon affecting you?

[rs20]

Some people believe the same thing happens when they shop for airline tickets, i.e. the prices go up when "they" know you are searching for that particular journey...   Could do with some scientific testing/debunking too!

But there IS dynamic pricing in air fares ! Maybe not in the simplistic way the conspiracy prone think. Airlines try to maximize load factor times ticket price right up to departure. A consumer visible method is with stand-by tickets but it goes way beyond that. In Canada there are 2 majors serving domestic travel; Air Canada and West Jet with West Jet being the Southwest Airlines model type of operation. Some years back there was a court case against a West Jet Manager who had obtained login credentials for the Air Canada reservations system and was skimming their system to optimize West Jet per ticket pricing dynamically on various competing routes.

In this thread we've recently been talking about prices going up or things ostensibly going out of stock merely in response to an individual searching for or adding an item to their cart. That's a much more specific and wild accusation than plain old dynamic pricing (which is response to public information like actual sales/seat availability/predicitions of the same based on previous years) or free market supply/demand matching, which I don't think I or SilverSolder or really anyone else here is claiming to deny happening in the real world.

[Bassman59]

Hey, be glad it isn't "gate array-gate" or some stupid scandal like that.

Tim

To be fair, I don't think our non-US friends here would understand what is meant by the "-gate" suffix. Nor do I think any Americans under, oh, age 40 would, either.

"I'm gonna set it straight, this Watergate ..."

[fourfathom]

DigiKey emailed today to tell me that about 1500 (qty) ATSAMD21G18A controllers were back in stock (they had been on a "52 week" availability).  I placed an order for fifty and got it confirmed.  A few hours later they now show over 3000 in stock.

[Bud]

Hey, be glad it isn't "gate array-gate" or some stupid scandal like that.

Tim

To be fair, I don't think our non-US friends here would understand what is meant by the "-gate" suffix. Nor do I think any Americans under, oh, age 40 would, either.

"I'm gonna set it straight, this Watergate ..."

iPhone antennagate and bendgate happened fairly recently and  give a sense of negativity thag the "-gate" suffix was bearing, though not many people would know the origin of it, true.

[T3sl4co1l]

Hey, be glad it isn't "gate array-gate" or some stupid scandal like that.

Tim

To be fair, I don't think our non-US friends here would understand what is meant by the "-gate" suffix. Nor do I think any Americans under, oh, age 40 would, either.

"I'm gonna set it straight, this Watergate ..."

Hey, some people's crystal ball just ain't so crystal clear.

But hey, it's an opportunity to teach one of the Ten Thousand about a [notorious] bit of our history.  (Especially relevant as it seems to have repeated in front of our eyes, the last couple of years...)

Tim

[rsjsouza]

Well, on Nov 24^th I put US$3.5k in parts on my cart at Mouser. As of today, none has vanished.

[Kasper]

I work full time and on the side, I do home renos and build protos of little electronics I might try to sell some day.  Shelved the latest proto for a year while I focused on home renos and just went back to it last night.  First I spent an evening improving the FW then I decided to check the stock of the MCU, ATMEGA328P.  Ugh, I should have been a carpenter.

While I was it, I checked stock of the RPi compute module for a work project.  I really should have been a carpenter.

[mikeselectricstuff]

  First I spent an evening improving the FW then I decided to check the stock of the MCU, ATMEGA328P.  Ugh, I should have been a carpenter.

Just shrink your code down a bit - plenty of ATMega168's out there!

[Kasper]

  First I spent an evening improving the FW then I decided to check the stock of the MCU, ATMEGA328P.  Ugh, I should have been a carpenter.

Just shrink your code down a bit - plenty of ATMega168's out there!

Thanks for the recommendation but I'm actually going the other direction if anything.  Could use more MHz.

[eti]

"Gate's"-a-geddon a bit tedious...

[glentek]

If the Watergate scandal happened tomorrow it would be call Watergate-gate.

[Psi]

Really small 1.8V drive p-fets (like SOT-723) are getting super hard to get.

Not sure if its just high demand and low supply or if maybe SOT-723 is not very popular any more, and all the fabs are focusing on other packages.

[madires]

I really should have been a carpenter.

Wouldn't help much. Construction wood became rather expensive over here, sometimes hard to get, because a lot is exported for a higher profit. The same for other construction material. In need of a new central heating system? No chips, no control unit, no furnace. People living in the region which was flooded this year have huge problems getting a new central heating, despite being the top priority on manufacturer's delivery lists.

[Siwastaja]

To be fair, I don't think our non-US friends here would understand what is meant by the "-gate" suffix. Nor do I think any Americans under, oh, age 40 would, either.

"I'm gonna set it straight, this Watergate ..."

At least here, everyone understands that kind of -gate, it's used extensively, even by older people who can't communicate in English at all. And it's going to be deliberately mispronounced.

It's not surprising; importing English words in non-English language means these words can be dedicated for their originally secondary meanings, because the primary meanings are not needed as those are offered by our national language already. Like using "boksi", "box", to describe certain small add-on electronic devices such as set-top boxes; this makes the language richer. Similarly, we add "-gate" to many Finnish words to describe whatever scandal of the day. The smaller the scandal, the better.

[IDEngineer]

My experience, while visiting many countries in every hemisphere (north/south, east/west), is pretty much every English speaking culture understands the suffix "-gate" when used in a socio-political context as long as the person is a teenager or older. This particular term has truly gone global and ageless.

[Kasper]

I really should have been a carpenter.

Wouldn't help much. Construction wood became rather expensive over here, sometimes hard to get, because a lot is exported for a higher profit. The same for other construction material. In need of a new central heating system? No chips, no control unit, no furnace. People living the region which was flooded this year have huge problems getting a new central heating, despite being the top priority on manufacturer's delivery lists.

In BC, Canada 2x4's trippled in price for a while but they're almost back to pre-covid prices now.

As long as house prices keep inflating more than construction costs, it'll be fine.

[SilverSolder]

[...]
As long as house prices keep inflating more than construction costs, it'll be fine.

Except that if wages don't keep up, there will be a squeeze on !housing products...

[Kasper]

[...]
As long as house prices keep inflating more than construction costs, it'll be fine.

Except that if wages don't keep up, there will be a squeeze on !housing products...

Do wages ever keep up with inflation?

[SilverSolder]

[...]
As long as house prices keep inflating more than construction costs, it'll be fine.

Except that if wages don't keep up, there will be a squeeze on !housing products...

Do wages ever keep up with inflation?

They must beat inflation in the long run, or our standard of living would be going backwards since the dawn of time...

[keef46]

I recently used Rebound Electronics in the UK to source some STM32 MCU's.... but paid 10 x the normal price. Still we have enough for a year now - what we do after that is in the lap of the god's.

One thing I learnt from a different supplier - don't go back and ask for a quote for a higher qty - they just put the price up more per chip!

[tszaboo]

[...]
As long as house prices keep inflating more than construction costs, it'll be fine.

Except that if wages don't keep up, there will be a squeeze on !housing products...

Do wages ever keep up with inflation?

They must beat inflation in the long run, or our standard of living would be going backwards since the dawn of time...

It's not since the dawn of time, just the 60s. Wages and purchasing power has been in a decline since then. At least in the USA, I don't know how EU28 would compare to that. Probably still huge differences between countries.

[VK3DRB]

I just ordered PCBWay to build a small qty of some engineering boards for me. They are charging 5 X the Digikey price for ESP32-C3's, even though LCSC has them at 3 X the price. None available in the West of course.
 

[Kasper]

[...]
As long as house prices keep inflating more than construction costs, it'll be fine.

Except that if wages don't keep up, there will be a squeeze on !housing products...

Do wages ever keep up with inflation?

They must beat inflation in the long run, or our standard of living would be going backwards since the dawn of time...

It's not since the dawn of time, just the 60s. Wages and purchasing power has been in a decline since then. At least in the USA, I don't know how EU28 would compare to that. Probably still huge differences between countries.

I think we go through periods of deflation driven by innovation but I think lately we are in the runaway phase of capitalism where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Back in the day, if someone bought all the supplies and then tried selling them for 10x more, I think they'd get lynched. Now they get bonuses.

3D printing of homes could cause some deflation. I don't think the space race will. 

[SilverSolder]

[...]
3D printing of homes could cause some deflation. I don't think the space race will.

A lot of a home's price is the price of the land it sits on...   3D print that!

[Bassman59]

[...]
3D printing of homes could cause some deflation. I don't think the space race will.

A lot of a home's price is the price of the land it sits on...   3D print that!

And that price is based on where that piece of land is located!

(Also we can "3D print" the walls, but the rest of the details that make a house cannot be manufactured like that. You know: plumbing, cabinets, doors, wiring, flooring, windows, all the little things.)