Let me tell you about the great Neon shortage of 2022. Who's got two thumbs and makes 50% of the world's Neon supply. Ukraine.
They can recycle neon in chip making, but it would involve shutting down the FABs to reengineer. Though my understanding is TSMC already does or has some sort of stockpile. But a lot of other chip makers do not.
This is absolutely valid and not a point that is irrelevant or that should be ignored.
I would just like to be certain that in everyones mind they are also aware that complaining about supply chain disruption and future scarcity of consoles etc is less important than the fact that, for example, Ukrainian maternity wards are as we speak being deliberately targeted by Russian shells and missiles.
I'd like to think everyone's aware of that.
Supply chain disruption is about more than just "I can't get my PS5." You get scenarios like: Russian military action causes economic sanctions against Russia, which causes shortages of Russian-supplied raw materials, which causes production shutdowns at a fab in Taiwan, which causes those fab workers to be laid off, which causes a fair proportion of a city's workforce to miss rent, which causes a real-estate company to report a loss, which causes the pension funds that own the real-estate company to revise their projections, which causes a factory in Illinois to either increase its workers pension contributions or cut their benefits, which means some of them can't afford to replace old cars now, which means a 2007 F-150 stays on the road instead of being replaced by an EV, which means climate change is accelerated slightly and an EV plant retooling that's supposed to create 1000 jobs gets delayed....
At some point fairly early in that chain, direct causal effects become difficult or impossible to prove. But you can run thousands and thousands of such cascading-effects scenarios. And you always end up at more or less the same conclusion: For every person who gets shot or bombed in a war, you have several more people who lose some aspect of their livelihood, and for each of them, you have negative impacts on several more people, and so on. Almost everybody loses in some way.
Well, except maybe the ammunition factories and arms dealers, but we'll leave them for another day.....
