Mike Rugnetta: 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.
Jeffrey Parkin: You got more?
Mike Rugnetta: 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.
Rory Carroll: My lady.
Mike Rugnetta: 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.
Jeffrey Parkin: Thank you.
Mike Rugnetta: And Rory Carroll, co founder, publisher and
editorial director at the independent car culture site
alloymag.com. Rory, appreciate it.
Rory Carroll: Hey, thanks for having me.
Mike Rugnetta: 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?
Jeffrey Parkin: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: And so are they buying huge supplies of these
components for launches and then, like, smaller amounts as
demand dwindles.
Jeffrey Parkin: That is my understanding of it.
Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. Got it.
Jeffrey Parkin: I know, like, cars come out every year. So I
imagine that the process is a lot different.
Rory Carroll: 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
Mike Rugnetta: 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.
Jeffrey Parkin: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: Well,
Rory Carroll: 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.
Jeffrey Parkin: 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?
Rory Carroll: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: 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?
Jeffrey Parkin: The answer is and I'm gonna try to avoid,
like, angry phrases like short termism here,
Rory Carroll: but Sure.
Jeffrey Parkin: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: Mhmm.
Jeffrey Parkin: 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.
Rory Carroll: 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
Mike Rugnetta: Us.
Rory Carroll: Your four zero one k. Yeah.
Mike Rugnetta: 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?
Rory Carroll: Yeah. It's a buying power
Mike Rugnetta: thing. Yeah.
Rory Carroll: A good year selling cars in The United
States is, like, 15,000,000 cars.
Jeffrey Parkin: Yeah. And that's that's slightly less than the
Switch two is sold Yeah. Since last July, I think.
Mike Rugnetta: So it's just orders of magnitude of
difference.
Jeffrey Parkin: 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.
Rory Carroll: 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
Mike Rugnetta: Yeah.
Rory Carroll: To imagine, like, moving something like that to
The United States.
Mike Rugnetta: 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.
Jeffrey Parkin: 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.
Rory Carroll: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. Sure.
Rory Carroll: 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.
Jeffrey Parkin: 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
Rory Carroll: Yeah.
Jeffrey Parkin: At a at a handful of factories in the
world.
Rory Carroll: 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?
Mike Rugnetta: 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.
Rory Carroll: That money could be working in the economy, the
broader economy.
Mike Rugnetta: 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.
Rory Carroll: I mean, there's there's no money in doing that.
You're not gonna get to euro.
Mike Rugnetta: Nope.
Rory Carroll: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: 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?
Rory Carroll: 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.
Jeffrey Parkin: 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
Rory Carroll: Yeah.
Jeffrey Parkin: 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.
Rory Carroll: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: K. Don't freak out. You're kinda screwed, but
hang on to your piece of shit as long as you can.
Rory Carroll: That's my advice for life is hang on to your
piece of shit.
Mike Rugnetta: Jeffrey, Rory, thank you so much for joining us
to chat about this stuff. This has been fascinating.
Rory Carroll: Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
Jeffrey Parkin: Yeah. Thanks for having us.
Mike Rugnetta: Jeffrey, where can people find you on the
Internet?
Jeffrey Parkin: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: Hard to write anything else at this
Rory Carroll: point. Yeah. Yes.
Mike Rugnetta: Rory, what about you?
Rory Carroll: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: 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.
Rory Carroll: Thank you.
Jeffrey Parkin: Thank you.
Mike Rugnetta: 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
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So we commissioned a document about sustenance in the city's
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