🆕 Never Post! News Post: On the Impending Silicon Goods Shortage

Listeners! Ho! A New Never Post! Today Mike chats with Jeffrey Parkin of Rogue and Rory Carroll of Alloy about the impending chip shortage caused by the construction boom in AI Data centers. How did this happen, why is there no easy way out, and how should you – as a consumer – be thinking about this these things?

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News Links

• New Mexico's Internet Affordability Program
• https://acpdashboard.com/
• Affordable Connectivity Program
• TikTok's usership steadies post-sale
• TechCrunch on TikTok's usership steadying
• Temu’s global rise runs into a regulatory wall
• The political effects of X’s feed algorithm
• Pope says beware of the internet
• Exclusive: Goldman Sachs launches AI-free index
• Substack, Polymarket announce partnership
• Looming Taiwan chip disaster
• U.S. aim to curb China's chipmaking access
• Will Intel deliver leading-edge chips?
• Taiwan won't move chip production to U.S.
• Why Taiwan Fears ‘America First’ Risks Eroding Its ‘Silicon Shield’

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Chip Chat

• Rogue.site
• Alloymag.com

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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.

so we commissioned a document
about sustenance and the city’s pores
metaphors of food and skin
for when the water rises

wired the desirable apartments
caves in units, strange hotels
possible domesiticities
before the water rises

commissioned a report detailing
repose and densities for stones
from a point of view superior
to where the anger rises

excerpt of RISK MANAGEMENT SONG by Lindsay Turner

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure and is distributed by Radiotopia

Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host Mike Rugnetta. This intro was written on Tuesday, 02/24/2026 at 03:04PM eastern, and we have a just in time show for you this week. In this episode, I chat with Jeffrey Parkin of rogue.site and Rory Carroll of alloymag.com about how the chip shortage caused by the construction boom in AI data centers will come not just for the PC market, but also video games, automobiles, and countless other consumer industries. How did this happen?

Why is there no easy way out? And how should you as a consumer be thinking about these things? But first, we're gonna take a quick break. You're gonna listen to some ads unless you're on the member feed. And when we return, we're gonna talk about a few of the things that have happened since the last time you heard from us.

Baby, can't you see? I'm calling. A guy like you should wear a warning. It's dangerous. I'm falling for six stories this week.

New Mexico has passed the first statewide Internet affordability law in The United States. This month, governor Grisham signed into law legislation that will allow the state to provide up to $30 a month to households to subsidize an Internet connection with a statewide cap of $45,000,000 annually. On 01/01/2022, the Federal Communications Commission launched their affordable connectivity program or ACP, which according to its own dashboard, set aside a total of $14,200,000,000 and spent 715,000,000 per month to help American households pay their Internet bills. That program was discontinued on 06/01/2024 after funding rollout and adoption issues. No federal assistance program is planned to take its place, so New Mexico is the first state to take the issue up itself.

TikTok is doing just fine. The platform's US operations were recently taken up by a new conglomerate of owners. You can see our previous news episode for details on that. And following that transition, its user base remains at around 95% of what it was beforehand, reports Censor Tower. CNBC writes quote, early narratives of a mass user exodus prompted by service outages and censorship concerns now appear overstated.

And they continue later, the average daily time spent by American users on the platform has since returned to around eighty minutes after dipping to an average of seventy seven minutes during the week of the reported disruptions, end quote. TechCrunch reports that, quote, competing video apps like Upscrolled and Skylight Social saw rapid user adoption as some looked for TikTok alternatives, end quote. But according to widely shared usage data, many people who left appear to have returned within days. Hey. Hey.

Whatever happened to Tmall? The international shoddy goods retailer had a meteoric rise alongside competitors like the TikTok shop, but has faced recent challenges as regulators in Turkey, the EU, and Poland have set their sights on the site according to rest of world magazine. The retailer is being investigated for misleading advertising, undisclosed subsidies from the government of China, and monopolistic practices amongst other charges. Since 2024, Tmall's parent company, PPD Holdings, has posted a $45,000,000,000 revenue loss down from around 60 to 15,000,000,000. In the coming year, the expiration of several de minimis duty exemptions around the world threatens their bottom line even further.

The content algorithm on x has real world political impacts. A new study in the journal Nature found that people subjected to an algorithmic feed on Elon Musk's social network were more likely to adopt conservative political positions quote, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump, and views on the war in Ukraine, end quote. People would follow algorithmically promoted, quote, conservative activist accounts and would continue following them even after algorithmic service was discontinued. People involved in the study, however, did not exhibit shifts in self reported effective polarization, which is measured via questions about, quote, life satisfaction, partisanship, and fueling thermometers for Democrats and Republicans. Meaning, though their attitudes may have shifted, they were themselves unaware of the shift.

You got more?

No. Goldman Sachs has just launched an AI free index fund. SPXX AI lets you quote invest in the S and P 500 benchmark index minus all things AI, reports Axios. This as discussion of the so called AI bubble reaches increasingly many corners of financial speculation and well, the economy. Funds like SPXx AI allow investors the security of a highly diversified index while isolating their exposure to what they may feel is the risky bet of robots that generate pictures of monkeys in bikinis.

Goldman refers to the stocks which make up the fund as quote, old economy stocks. Polymarket has partnered with Substack, getting a start on what is quickly shaping up to be the nightmare blunt rotation of platforms. The partnership will allow, quote, Substack users to integrate Polymarket's prediction data directly into their content, end quote. According to a thehill.com story that reads a bit like a press release, if I'm being honest. Substack claims a fair number of their top newsletters are already making use of the prediction market platform's data to write about current events, with Polymarket going so far as to say journalism is better when it's backed by live markets.

For those not in the know, Polymarket and other related platforms like Kalshi allow people to place money on the outcome of everyday events, most regularly sports related, But in practice, the quote markets range from wagers on the likelihood of Jesus' return to The US striking Iran. Polymarket and its adherents claim these quote markets provide insight into newsworthy events and the unfolding of culturally moments thanks to the wisdom of crowds. Something anyone who has spent even ten minutes online will know is complete bullshit outside the walls of Wikipedia and maybe, let's say, 60% of Reddit on a good day.

My lady.

And finally, artificial intelligence needs Taiwan. The single biggest threat to the world economy, US treasury secretary Scott Besson said at Davos last month. The single biggest point of single failure is that 97% of the high end chips are made in Taiwan, end quote, and everyone wants them. No industry more so than tech who has made a run on the world's supply of various semiconductor products from processors to RAM to storage in their haste to build AI data centers. And this is the case most notably in The US and China, two countries currently locked in a heated rivalry.

The soothsayers for the American economy, which is now not much more than a pile of consumer goods balanced atop a few AI data center toothpicks, have grown increasingly wary of China's technological advances, going so far as to consider it a matter of national security to quote, implement countrywide controls on key choke point semiconductor manufacturing equipment and subcomponents, end quote, so that they cannot make their way into the country. They are also aware that China could, at any moment, blockade Taiwan and cut off the world's supply of advanced semiconductor technology. As such, The US has been attempting to broker a trade deal with Taiwan. One aspect of which would involve the country assisting in opening facilities in The United States with US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick claiming the country would move 40% of its capacity stateside. Taiwan's vice premier Chen Lichen, however, described this outcome as simply not possible.

Not only because, in her words, it's impossible to allocate based on production capacity, but also because The US doesn't currently have the labor pool to support the industry and TSMC, Taiwan's largest and most accomplished chip manufacturer who contracts with Apple and Nvidia among others is one of the island nation's biggest deterrents against China who relies on their output for its own tech sector. Global reliance on Taiwan's manufacturing has been called its silicon shield against Chinese aggression. The upshot here is any capacity to build chips in The US is years and maybe decades away, but there is a looming a chip shortage now. One that's about to touch upon nearly every major industry, a broad swath of consumer goods ranging from video games to cars. How did we get to this point?

What can we expect from the next couple years, and how should we, as mere consumers prepare? After a short break, me, Jeffrey Parkin, and Rory Caroll discuss. Joining me are Jeffrey Parkin, co owner and founder at the independent video game news and criticism site rogue.site. Jeffrey, thanks for being here.

Thank you.

And Rory Carroll, co founder, publisher and editorial director at the independent car culture site alloymag.com. Rory, appreciate it.

Hey, thanks for having me.

So here on Neverpost and your respective sites, we've covered a lot of these headlines. Demand for memory and storage space has skyrocketed caused by the construction boom in AI data centers. And this means that those things are gonna be harder and harder to get a hold of for consumers, which means that their prices are gonna skyrocket. And this is something that folks, if they want to have direct experience of this right now, they can go to newegg.com or their computer retailer of choice, search for, let's say, RAM sticks or an SSD and, you know, brace themselves. In some scenarios, there are prices that are four to five times higher than they were as recently as about a year ago.

But the thing that I think has gone a little bit underreported in a lot of this is that this is also the case for entire industries, two of which, we're gonna discuss with you guys, experts in them respectively, right now, video games and automobiles. So my first question for the both of you is just, when manufacturing and distribution of these things is working as expected, like, on a normal Thursday, like, what should this process look like for video games and for cars? Like, who is supplying the components for what purpose and, like, how do they get to where they need to go?

I'm actually gonna jump in first because video games, especially consoles, work on a really weird cadence. The PS five and the newest Xbox, the series x, came out in 2020. So there's this huge boom in manufacturing and releasing them, and then it dies off over the next roughly eight years or so. Ideally, like we saw with the Switch two, there's all of the purchasing of these semiconductors and microchips and RAM and everything else that go into the consoles that you buy, and then they just maintain their stock as necessary. And the reason that this has come up for us recently, it's about time to be talking about the next generation of video game consoles, like the PS six and whatever bizarre amalgamation of letters Microsoft comes up with.

The news with all of the AI data centers buying up everything is that those big companies, Sony and Microsoft, are probably going to have to push out their next launch.

And so are they buying huge supplies of these components for launches and then, like, smaller amounts as demand dwindles.

That is my understanding of it.

Yeah. Got it.

I know, like, cars come out every year. So I imagine that the process is a lot different.

Well, it's actually not super different. I think, like, cars do come out and there's a new model year over year, but really cars are on a five or ten year cycle. So what you'll usually get is the introduction of a new model, which is like, generally speaking, a whole new architecture, a whole new, you know, from the wheels up new car, then you'll get four or five years later, you'll get a refresh, which is like, okay, maybe with new headlights, new exterior design, some new technology inside, and then you'll push that another five years before you kind of get to a new model. Sometimes it lasts longer than that. Sometimes it's a little bit shorter than that depending on how things are selling.

But that's generally the the schedule. So, you know, the auto auto industry is not super different from any other industry in that this stuff gets planned, you know, ten and fifteen years out. And, like, historically, you know, back back in the old old days, you used to you'd build cars in this similar cycle. You'd stock up on all the parts that you're going to need for the entire production run of the car or or you'd you'd have them being built kind of simultaneously. And just like every other industry kind of in the last twenty, thirty years, everybody has gone to this, like, just in time where it's like stuff should ideally be being produced and shipped to you exactly the moment you need it.

So you should not have any stock. You should not because all this all the obviously, like, stock and warehousing stuff cost money. That's all additional costs. So, like, ideally, with anything else, you're getting stuff as it is needed the second it is needed on the assembly line. So that's kind of like the ideal situation.

Obviously, the car companies, they've had this happen before. This exact thing happened for different reasons in 2021, and it was a huge catastrophe for everybody. And they've spent the last, you know, five years or so figuring out how to prevent this from happening again. Everyone took this very seriously, and everybody has taken a lot of kind of affirmative steps to prevent it from happening. There are some real difficulties in solving this problem.

I

and that you know, Rory, you said something that gets to the next question that I wanna ask, which is, like, this is a lesson that I have learned maybe a few times since the pandemic began, which is, all of this comes from one place or, like, a relatively small number of places, and there's no plan b? Like, it's just so shocking to me that consumer electronics, AI data centers, video games, and automobiles are all being supplied by the same relatively small number of manufacturers.

No. Yeah. There are big names that supply everybody, and it's really specific manufacturing. Like, even a company as big as Samsung says that it'll take two years before they can get another plant up and running.

Well,

yeah. There there are big structural issues with spinning this stuff up. And I think too, I I mean, I think this is this is something that's kind of plaguing the auto industry generally in The States. You know, if you ask a car executive if you have asked a car executive anytime in the last twenty years what they want from the government, they will tell you it's stability. It's like, they don't care what the standards are.

They don't care what the emission standards are, any of that stuff. Mean, they do. But, like, the big thing that they want is to be able to on this ten or twenty year cycle predict what's going to happen. And I think the answer to a problem like this in the sixties and seventies would have been, we will just build our own semiconductor facility. We will just build our own.

And that may take us a few years, but we're confident that coming out of the other end of it, it'll be a good investment and we'll have control over our own supply chain and yada yada. That's obviously not the response you're getting now. I think a lot of that is this instability where it's like you're gonna face these kind of transient issues for a period of time. The world is going to change change very drastically. You don't wanna be stuck with the factory that's at lower capacity or working at low capacity.

And it's like you can't trust the state or you can't trust the the government to to be asking you to do the same things from administration to administration, which is like a very strange I mean, it's to me, like, as a as a watcher of the car business, watching the government act in kind of defiance of the car business, like, very strange. Like, that's a that's never happened to me before. I've never seen that happen in my lifetime. Or it's happened, like, Clean Air Act. You know what I mean?

Like, big momentous. But but this is, day to day, hey. We understand that's what you need to be competitive globally, but we're not giving it to you. Like, that's never happened before. It's difficult to imagine any other response for an automaker but to just hoard whatever they can get from their suppliers today.

What else would you do except buy as many chips as you can, which is the same response that every other manufacturer is having.

I actually wanna step back for a second because as somebody who knows how to turn on a car and not much else, my first reaction in seeing that, like, the PS six is running up against car manufacturing was kinda confusion. Yeah. And I have since come to realize, like, it's not just the in dashboard displays that this is affecting. Can you, Rory, talk about where these chips are even going and what they're used in?

Oh, yeah. I think that, you know, the the most new cars these days will have more than a thousand of these chips. Some of them have way more than that. But I think what we're looking at in a a modern car, I think people are, like, very, very apt to say, like, a car is a computer on wheels these days. And it's I think, like, that actually undersells it quite a bit because the amount that you're asking a car to do, a modern car, just to move down the road as far as, like, computing demand is crazy.

I mean, the the easy stuff, like, okay, who's you know, how are you controlling the infotainment screen in a a car in the eighties? Your HVAC, so heat and cold and all that stuff would be controlled by a series of cables. That's all digitally controlled now. How do you open your gas cap door? There's that that kind of stuff, but there's also the actual behavior of the car is is very heavily controlled by computers.

So I think, like, as cars have gotten larger, the cars have in turn gotten heavier. Batteries, especially like modern cars with with hybrid batteries or EV batteries, got very heavy. And in order to keep the car, like, moving down the road safely, that requires a ton of computing power. So you have sensors that are reading your wheel speed. You have sensors that are reading brake temperature.

You have sensors that are reading comparing all that stuff together and then making the actual suspension or brakes in the car behave a certain way to either maintain your comfort or to maintain traction on the road. So it's like I mean, there's there's this is like a longer discussion, but I I had this super long discussion with Porsche a few months ago. Their their cars have gotten, as all cars have, have gotten heavier and heavier and heavier. Over the last ten years, as they know this, they they recognize the cars are getting heavier. So they have now three separate suspension technologies that are designed to mask the weight of the car for the driver.

So the car in real time is sensing where it is in the road and then in some cases, like it's being suspended from a helicopter adjusting the pitch Woah. And the dive of the car to erase the sensation that you would have of a very heavy car diving under braking. There are all these knock on effects that make these cars infinitely more complicated and heavier and technically better. Like they are faster, they're more efficient, they're, you know, they're yada yada yada. Like they do all this other stuff.

The cars are being asked to defy physics. They're being asked to deliver performance and efficiency that, like, should not be possible. And, like, that's how you end up with 3,000 sensors in the car. It's like or 3,000 chips. Like, that's how it happens.

The car is not a not necessarily a computer on wheels, but a data center on wheels, and therefore, the the competition there is maybe makes a little bit more sense. I'm curious. I would love to ask you to a question that I don't you might not know the answer to, but I'm curious if you've come across a justification in the reporting that you've done so far, which is like, is there a business case for chip manufacturers to supply data centers almost exclusively? Because it seems like there's so much of a downside, you know, just maybe societally or, you know, with in their relationship with other industries. Like, are they being paid more per chip by Sam Altman and crew?

The answer is and I'm gonna try to avoid, like, angry phrases like short termism here,

but Sure.

Data center hyperscalers like Meta, Google, Amazon are buying 70% of the supply of these semiconductors at this point, there's absolutely no reason not to sell to them.

Mhmm.

If they're building half $1,000,000,000,000 worth of data centers this year, why wouldn't you get in on that? Yeah. And that's exactly what we saw with Micron just a few months ago. Micron, shut down their consumer RAM supply to focus exclusively on high bandwidth memory for data center.

I think this whole thing is a really interesting I think, like, this is one of the fun things about cars generally, but it's like you get all these great illustrations of kinda like what the limits of the system are. You know, you have all of these companies acting in their own short short term self interest because they're all responsible to their shareholders on a quarter by quarter basis, and they're all so well optimized. They all know exactly what kind of a shortage they can survive and what kind of where they can get extra supply when they need to. Like, this they they know so much, but there's so little incentive for anyone to make a long term investment in anything. Even if they know down the road, it would it would help them or whatever.

The risk or the the fear of of being kind of hung out on a big investment is it keeps people from making those long term decisions. And I think, like, you run up against these, and I think, like, all of manufacturing in The United States and all these kind of big companies in United States are running up against these, like, very hard limits to what this economic system will do. Yeah. Which is really, really fascinating. I mean, it's it's it'd be fun to watch if it wasn't like

Us.

Your four zero one k. Yeah.

It makes me think of, you know, like, I see in reporting, you know, Apple is able to say that they are gonna be able to continue manufacturing phones and laptops and, you know, a bunch of their a bunch of their goods without having to increase prices or not having to increase them too much because they were able to secure these long term supply deals with all of these manufacturers. And I'm assuming it's just the case that, like, they are able to do that, and they're able to do that with confidence and at the scale that they can because they are Apple. And that as big as the video game industry and the automobile industry are, they just aren't Apple, and so they aren't doing long term deals. You know, they're they're doing the sort of just in time production like you described, Rory. Is that that's the case?

Yeah. It's a buying power

thing. Yeah.

A good year selling cars in The United States is, like, 15,000,000 cars.

Yeah. And that's that's slightly less than the Switch two is sold Yeah. Since last July, I think.

So it's just orders of magnitude of difference.

A really good comparison that I had to look up because I just didn't know. NVIDIA's Next AI card, like the entire card that you plug into a server rack, has about 30 times as much RAM in it as a standard computer or or a PS five for that matter. So Yeah. A single card that goes into those giant server racks at a data center of which there are hundreds of server racks. So suddenly, it's these numbers are incomprehensibly huge.

Yeah. And there there is a really interesting I mean, again, another interesting kind of case study. You know, the the CHIPS Act under the Biden administration was one of these kind of, like, efforts by the federal government to kind of address this issue. And they they ended up passing a bill and getting a bunch of money appropriated. The kind of intervening whatever it's been four or five years since getting these facilities up and running has been massively difficult and complicated.

And I think, like, the Biden administration towards the end was kind of scrambling to get this money spent and ended up giving up on a bunch of, like, labor and environmental protections that they had promised to get this stuff through. Getting them built is one thing. It's very expensive compared to places elsewhere in the world where you'd build them. The United States does not have the labor force for this, like people who aren't accustomed to doing this. And then also their supply chain getting these materials delivered.

Like, this is a very mature industry elsewhere in the world, in China specifically, and like it is very, very difficult without a moonshot level kind of investment and kind of some very strong handed public policy

Yeah.

To imagine, like, moving something like that to The United States.

I'm curious if there is you know, the story of artificial intelligence over the last couple years has been it's being taken up by increasingly many industries, released the upper level management and the c suite of various actors within those industries insisting that it be implemented or used at certain points. And I'm curious if you have a sense of if there is now, like, inter industry drama, for lack of a better phrase. Like, is the automobile industry looking at the tech sector? Is video games looking at tech and being like, dog, like, what the fuck? You know, like, we I thought we were in this together, and now, like, like, this makes everything so much harder.

Like you said, it's the c suite. Like, everybody up top is talking about how AI is gonna change everything, and the people who are actually doing it don't care. Like, don't use it, don't want it. We focus a lot on indie games just because there are more of them and they're more interesting to talk about sometimes. But you're starting to see, like, made by a human in in game descriptions, and, like, no AI was used.

At the same time, you're starting to see pushes for disclosures because there are, Steam Next Fest starts today. There's a bunch of demos of people promoting their games, and even Steam is starting to push for, not require, a disclosure for how AI was used. And I saw my first one today that was AI was used in the coding of this game.

You know, the car industry has been really funny, especially over the last, like, twenty, thirty years because the people now who are like in charge of car companies are like in their fifties and sixties. And they all have like this kind of scar tissue from from the Internet and then from social media and like where it's like they felt like they got left behind. And so the result of that has been over this last, say, ten, twenty years of kind of like the technology flim flam era of like building and selling technologies that don't really have a use case. They've been very eager to get wallet inspected by the Silicon Valley set. And to to their credit, I mean, I think, like, everybody watched Tesla's stock valuation go to $400 or $600 or whatever it was.

And GM who made $12,000,000,000 in a profit last year is, like, at 60. And I think a lot of their board members are saying like, hey. Why isn't it not like that for us? And the answer to to that for a lot of these companies has been to get very heavily invested in the next bleeding edge tech around, like, design and around manufacturing, but also around, like, autonomous cars and ride sharing and and all this other stuff. I think, like, right now, we're seeing most of those companies feeling like they've been burned by that.

I don't think there's, a like you said, I don't I don't think there's, like, a rivalry thing happening. I don't think the auto industry is under any illusions about, like, being on the same team as any other industry.

Yeah. Sure.

But I I do think that this this has felt a little bit more cautious. I mean, like, I watched companies dump tens of millions of dollars into having a virtual storefront in the metaverse, like, three years ago or whatever or, like, do NFT stuff a few years ago. They seem to be a little bit closer to hedging, I think, on this thing than they have, which is good. Like, that's Yeah. That's smart.

That's a that's like an indication of having learned a lesson. Yeah. As someone who is screaming when car companies were opening up metaverse dealerships, this is like a welcome development.

It has always felt like I grew up when computers were in a computer room, and that's the place where you went. But it's always felt like there's this disconnect between real world, like, your car in the driveway stuff and entertainment and electronic stuff is over here. And in writing about this and living in 2026, that disconnect between the computer room and the driveway just doesn't exist anymore. Yeah. There's what, three, four companies that make this stuff

Yeah.

At a at a handful of factories in the world.

There are a few of these companies making the the chips, but it's like there's one supplier for the machine that actually writes the thing. It's like, that's nuts. Like, that's crazy. Fifty years ago, you would build excess capacity. In the current situation, it's like everything is running on this kind of bare minimum up and down the board, not just cars and not just chips, not just like, everything across the board is running on this bare minimum, like, the all of global electrical infrastructure or at least like North American electrical infrastructure, which is like, okay, what's the minimum amount of money we can invest and still make a return on this?

I mean, how ironic is it? Right? That it's like you look at how you might ameliorate some of these problems and you start to think about the resources that would go into doing that. And it's not like they don't exist. It's just they're all tied up in the bank accounts of tech billionaires who are investing in, you know, AI data centers and and the like.

That money could be working in the economy, the broader economy.

I mean, it's funny to think about what's going into making AI data centers and, you know, did they just skip a step? Should they have first sat down and been like, well, first, we need some factories. Let's get some factories first and then Yeah.

I mean, there's there's no money in doing that. You're not gonna get to euro.

Nope.

But again, it's like a that's a just a weird expression of the the system now. It's just like, wow. That's these contradictions are getting heightened.

Yeah. Surely, that's not a bad sign. I'm curious, like, for you guys, like, what is there stuff that people should, like, look out for? Like, what's gonna happen next? What is the attitude a consumer should have at the moment?

A good question. I mean, the the price shift will be slower in cars than it will be anywhere else because sales are so sensitive to price. I think, like, you know, you'll see massive swings in profitability based on a $2,500 or $1,500 cash incentive on the hood of a car the hood of a $50,000 car. Like and the margins on them are very, very small. So I think, like, you know, now if you're a consumer, it's not a time to freak out.

If you can stomach the super high interest rates that you'll pay for a new car right now, it's fine to still do. And I would also say, like, twenty years ago, the response to a situation like this or the response to 2021 would be go buy a used car. Used car prices have come down a little bit since the early twenty twenties, but they're still very strong. I mean, the idea or the the time when you go buy a good car for $2 or $2,500 and have it last you a while is that's increasingly difficult to do. I mean, I think, like, table stakes now is, $10 and up.

So there's not a there's not a hack to work your way around it. It's kind of like, unfortunately, if you need a car to get around and live your life, they kind of have you. So it's it's gonna be a minute before this starts impacting new car prices and and affordability, which is, like, also, know, there are no cars available in The United States. New cars under $20,000. The average sale price is over $50,000.

So there's a whole separate affordability conversation to be had. So, yeah, you're kinda screwed, I guess, is the is my positive answer to that.

Yeah. I I actually kinda have the same reaction of you're kinda screwed because what started this entire conversation was in October, I built myself a gaming computer, like, from scratch just to prove I could that would compete with a modern console, and I did it for just over $800, and I was really proud of it. It it works great. This is this is great. I checked my shopping list just a couple of days ago, and it's over $1,400.

So it's gone up by 75% in four months. Electronics, consumer electronics, gaming is all about the latest and greatest, but, like, I think the answer really is, if you've got something that's good enough, keep using it. Yeah. You don't need the latest and greatest, because it's it's going to be a a huge disconnect through this year and probably well into next year

Yeah.

Before anything gets sorted out. It's just not the time to upgrade. Yeah. Which is a larger conversation about planned obsolescence and the disposability of all our electronics, but kinda time to hold off on upgrades, I think.

Yeah. If you can hang on to your car, keep driving. I mean, even if this chip thing wasn't happening, just the interest rate thing is, like, reason enough to just keep driving whatever piece of shit you're driving. That that's my advice.

K. Don't freak out. You're kinda screwed, but hang on to your piece of shit as long as you can.

That's my advice for life is hang on to your piece of shit.

Jeffrey, Rory, thank you so much for joining us to chat about this stuff. This has been fascinating.

Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Yeah. Thanks for having us.

Jeffrey, where can people find you on the Internet?

I write at rogue.site. Several other coworkers and I from one of the big name places started it as our independent site. It's about video games and kind of everything around it, and it's kinda where I write angry news pieces lately.

Hard to write anything else at this

point. Yeah. Yes.

Rory, what about you?

Alloymag.com. It's a new car site, new approach. I think if you go check it out, it's it's unlike anything that's being done in in cars anywhere else. And then we're on blue sky at alloy underscore mag. I am personally on blue sky at rory_carol.

And I think, yeah, that's those are all good places to find me. If you need to find more than that, then text me or something. Text me.

What's wrong with you? What else do you need? And we'll put links to all those things in the show notes. Thanks again, fellas. Really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Thank you.

That is the show we have for you this week. We are gonna be back here on the main feed next week on or around Thursday, March 5. For $4 from craigslist.org in the Brooklyn area, you can currently purchase. Okay, let's see, a rapid mac cooker, world's fastest and easiest way to cook mac and cheese, A glass teapot warmer that you put a candle in the middle of, it looks like, and you put the teapot on top of it. This looks dangerous.

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So we commissioned a document about sustenance in the city's pores, metaphors of food and skin for when the water rises. Wired the desirable apartments, caves in units, strange hotels, possible domesticities before the water rises. Commissioned a report detailing repose densities for stones from a point of view superior to where the anger rises. Excerpt of risk management song by Lindsay Turner. Never Post is a production of Charts and Leisure, and it's distributed by Radiotopia.