Would confirm you are actually able to get the new car you want near list price before getting too excited.
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Wondering if pvn would take my 2015 Accord for his mom’s house.
Looks like my dealers have plenty of lot available cars. Obviously if I want customs I would expect a wait.
I just bought a 2013 accord with 90k miles and paid $15k 
I don’t know about constantly, but probably several times a year. Sometimes they go with hand-written notes mailed or left on our doorstep.
We engaged with one a couple of years ago. She asked us to name a price, so we came back with something way above zillow. Never heard from her again.
We would not sell at that price today, although it’s still above the current Zillow estimate.
so, we were talking specifically about chip manufacturing. intel did open up whole campuses (not just manufacturing) in ireland, but i can only find them launching in china in 2010. however, the amazing thing is that while intel leads sales of most expensive cpus and total revenue, it pales in comparison with tsmc in terms of volume of chips. tsmc makes chips for a far broader set of devices, apple, amd, nvidia, and many more.
anyways TSMC is an interesting story in that it wasn’t an accident, but it also wasn’t led by US companies simply looking to switch to cheap labor. the costs of launching such an industry in taiwan were so prohibitive that only governments could pull it off. and they got the perfect executive to take the reigns because he was snubbed at Texas Instruments, and he ingeniously decided to “outsource” actual chip design to his customers.
pollution from semiconductors plants started pretty early, and since the island is pretty packed, they gradually tightened controls around it. in the US, environmental regulations take two steps back when republicans are in power.
Anyone have a good idea on what the spread is (in general) on what you can sell a car to a dealer for vs what they turn around and sell it for?
I’m sure they’re just trolling for morons who will take a lowball offer
Not just available inventory that matters, they’d have to be not turning them over at all for you to get them at list price. Common for models to have some kind of additional overcharge this year. May only be $1-2k but could be like $10k or more.
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Thanks for the heads up. Ill keep that in mind if we pull the trigger
Yea, my brother got a new Kia Telluride and I think he paid 6k over list price a few months ago. But he was just writing it off as a business expense or whatever so not that it mattered.
I think it started with this from @iron81:
Does anyone know if the semiconductor problem predated the pandemic?
That’s a more general question. It’s where the basic issues that have led to the current shortages lie.
If we’re limited to chip manufacture I have a problem right away: what’s a “chip”? An integrated circuit? What kind? I did a little looking and it’s not clear to me when people talk about shortages, say for automobile applications, exactly what they’re talking about. Estimates I see range from ~100 to approaching 3000 chips needed for a car. In the first case maybe they’re just counting controllers. In the second, they’re probably including things like sensors, buffers, amplifiers, multiplexers, ADCs, DACs, displays, logic, relays, and memory. Are we short of all those things or just a subset?
anyways TSMC is an interesting story in that it wasn’t an accident, but it also wasn’t led by US companies simply looking to switch to cheap labor.
I’m not trying to minimize Taiwanese accomplishments but TSMC succeeded in large part because of the same set of circumstances and incentives that led US semiconductor companies to choose to go overseas.
the costs of launching such an industry in taiwan were so prohibitive that only governments could pull it off. and they got the perfect executive to take the reigns because he was snubbed at Texas Instruments, and he ingeniously decided to “outsource” actual chip design to his customers.
That’s true in the US too. In all cases I know of, city and state governments have been heavily involved. You need basic infrastructure. You need land, electrical power, a lot of fresh water, and a tolerance for environment impact and risk. You should be willing to push out anyone who gets in the way.
You also need labor. I had several Taiwanese friends and colleagues in engineering school. I don’t think any of them would have wanted to work for TSMC or ever did because they didn’t want to get worked to the point of burnout. Fortunately, they had better choices.
Morris Chang succeeded. Good for him. But I’m not so sure all of this wouldn’t have happened anyway if he hadn’t been around. A racial prejudice similar to what he experienced being an Asian at TI may be a factor in the other direction now that TSMC is looking to expand in the US. I guess there’s a kind of justice in that.
pollution from semiconductors plants started pretty early
It’s not generally appreciated how dirty an industry it is.
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I think I paid $33k for my Audi A4 in 2009 and it looks like comparable cars are going for like $15-16k right now.
The DoD really, really wants a domestic foundry that they can keep their eye on so they don’t have to worry so much about malicious hardware getting into their toys. Unfortunately that’s about 0.1 of the total demand for chips.
I dunno, maybe Biden should pitch a foundry as a 21st century jobs creation project. Need like a Joe Manchin but for electronics instead of coal mining.
Did you spray paint your phone number on the house?
I get letters occasionally, but never a text or call. Your dipshits are very proactive go getters!
I gave my buddy my 2012 Civic last summer when apparently I should have sold it, invested the proceeds in a couple of ink dots, and then flipped those for some monkey gifs. I could have retired by now!
I forgot about the kimchi! I’m content again with my deal.
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Elvis biopic coming out later this year! Wonder if it will resonate?
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you are right, “chips” can mean a lot of things. you could count it as the output of cutting a single wafer during manufacturing, because more or less every piece you cut from a wafer does a thing, and normalizes some manufacturers that use differently sized wafers. but of course you would have to count up all such chips that go into every cpu core of every cellphone/computer, with each device having additional specialized ICs. TSMC is responsible for a big majority of chips in manufactures, compared to intel/avago/samsung, although arguably 95% of iphone’s functions are useless if the dozen or so chips doing the RF signal DAC aren’t working.
i’m also bulking TSMC as Taiwan, but it in fact has a large presence in China and US, so we are double counting a good portion.
setting up semiconductor manufacturing is a lot more involved than your normal permitting land/electrical/water for other industries, which of course every government does. it has special requirements like level of vibration of the plant foundation, not too close to railroads, highways, volcanoes, and firing ranges, manufacturing robots that work with instant battery-backup and non-volatile memory, not to mention the software that stops chemical processes gracefully if there’s an electrical outage.
i think you are missing a lot of nuance and historical perspective if you just discount TSMC success as the set of circumstances for cheap labor. yeah, most companies are always chasing lower costs, but that’s not what makes them successful. there was real risk and foresight when gov’t of Taiwan decided to invest an astronomical sum for a moonshot at an industry dominated by americans in the 80s.
i’m just saying, don’t write it off as a lesson of greedy capitalism. greedy capitalism missed TSMC, in many cases companies were on the ropes (NVidia, AMD) when they decided to just focus on design instead of manufacturing, and it repaid all their previous missteps.
GlobalFoundries is pure-play formerly-US semiconductor company, which is now either private or foreign-owned. not sure, but it was held back because every owner thought they needed to cut costs, until current owner just expanded its factories and waited for the world to accelerate buying chips.
Intel is basically turning itself into a foundry, which would make it top-10 almost instantly. TSMC and Samsung have US fabrication as well. So, that should add up to at least 10% of world chips made in the US physically. Since US is only 5% of world population, i am not sure if US not dominating the semi-conductor market is really the problem. It may have been invented here, but domination is long gone.