Most active commenters

    ←back to thread

    Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

    (www.buysellram.com)
    160 points redohmy | 11 comments | 15 Nov 25 02:45 UTC | HN request time: 0.921s | source | bottom
    Show context
    mrsilencedogood ◴[21 Nov 25 21:22 UTC] No.46009135[source]▶
    All I can say is,

    - the insane frothing hype behind AI is showing me a new kind of market failure - where resources can be massively misallocated just because some small class of individuals THINK or HOPE it will result in massive returns. Even if it squeezes out every single other sector that happens to want to use SDRAM to do things OTHER than buffer memory before it's fed into a PCIE lane for a GPU.

    - I'm really REALLY glad i decided to buy brand new gaming laptops for my wife and I just a couple months ago, after not having upgraded our gaming laptops for 7 and 9 years respectively. It seems like gamers are going to have this the worst - GPUs have been f'd for a long time due to crypto and AI, and now even DRAM isn't safe. Plus SSD prices are going up too. And unlike many other DRAM users where it's a business thing and they can to some degree just hike prices to cover - gamers are obviously not running businesses. It's just making the hobby more expensive.

    replies(20): >>46009293 #>>46009325 #>>46009327 #>>46009366 #>>46009534 #>>46009576 #>>46009665 #>>46009724 #>>46009733 #>>46010134 #>>46010139 #>>46010163 #>>46010207 #>>46010410 #>>46011013 #>>46011039 #>>46011204 #>>46011260 #>>46011299 #>>46011459 #
    epistasis ◴[21 Nov 25 21:43 UTC] No.46009325[source]▶
    It is a weird form of centralized planning. Except there's no election to get on to the central committee, it's like in the Soviet era where you had to run in the right circles and have sway in them.

    There's too much group-think in the executive class. Too much forced adoption of AI, too much bandwagon hopping.

    The return-to-office fad is similar, a bunch of executives following the mandates of their board, all because there's a few CEOs who were REALLY worked up about it and there was a decision that workers had it too easy. Watching the executive class sacrifice profits for power is pretty fascinating.

    Edit: A good way to decentralize the power and have better decision making would be to have less centralized rewards in the capital markets. Right now are living through a new gilded age with a few barons running things, because we have made the rewards too extreme and too narrowly distributed. Most market economics assumes that there's somewhat equal decision making power amongst the econs. We are quickly trending away from that.

    replies(9): >>46009378 #>>46009390 #>>46009619 #>>46009692 #>>46010462 #>>46010983 #>>46011182 #>>46011371 #>>46011474 #
    automatic6131 ◴[21 Nov 25 22:14 UTC] No.46009619[source]▶
    We need better antitrust and anti-monopoly enforcement. Break up the biggest companies, and then they'll have to actually participate in markets.
    replies(3): >>46009668 #>>46009804 #>>46011128 #
    1. fpoling ◴[21 Nov 25 22:31 UTC] No.46009804[source]▶
    I think a better solution is exponential tax on a company size. I.e. once a company starts to earn above, say, 1 billion, it will be taxed by income by ever increasing amount. Or put it another way, use taxes to break the power law and winner takes effect all into a Gaussian distribution of company sizes.
    replies(4): >>46009970 #>>46010153 #>>46010492 #>>46011370 #
    2. logancbrown ◴[21 Nov 25 22:49 UTC] No.46009970[source]▶
    Ah yes, the same tax mentality that is working great for EU innovation.
    replies(1): >>46010839 #
    3. Terr_ ◴[21 Nov 25 23:08 UTC] No.46010153[source]▶
    Is that revenue, or profit? If revenue, it'll slam certain kinds of high-volume low-profit businesses, and if it's profit then the company will just arrange to have big compensation "expenses" for executives.

    The latter would have to be backstopped by taxes on individual income.

    replies(2): >>46010686 #>>46011045 #
    4. philipkglass ◴[21 Nov 25 23:47 UTC] No.46010492[source]▶
    This would permanently increase DRAM prices. Memory fabricators either earn billions of dollars in income each year or they can't keep going. There are no little Mom and Pop businesses that can do photolithography on leading process nodes.
    replies(1): >>46010660 #
    5. octoberfranklin ◴[22 Nov 25 00:10 UTC] No.46010660[source]▶
    Nonsense, it would force vertical de-integration.

    Chip fabs used to be like book publishers; you don't have to own a printing press to be an author. Carver Mead even described his vision of the industry that way.

    Nowadays you have to get your cell libraries and a large chunk of your toolchain from the fab. Of course it's laundered through cadence+synopsys, but it's still coming from the fab. You have to buy your masks from the fab (heck they aren't even allowed to leave the fab so do you really own them?). And on and on.

    For the record I don't agree with the "exponential" part, but otherwise this is an underappreciated and powerful technique.

    replies(1): >>46010727 #
    6. octoberfranklin ◴[22 Nov 25 00:13 UTC] No.46010686[source]▶
    The sane version of this proposal omits the "exponential" part, applies to profits (net income), and makes the tax rate industry-specific (just like Washington State's revenue tax).
    7. philipkglass ◴[22 Nov 25 00:19 UTC] No.46010727{3}[source]▶
    In another comment you proposed a sane version of the parent proposal. I wouldn't have commented if fpoling had originally floated that scheme. I was mainly objecting to drastically increasing taxes "once a company starts to earn above, say, 1 billion" without regard for the minimum viable scale of different businesses.
    8. wqaatwt ◴[22 Nov 25 00:35 UTC] No.46010839[source]▶
    Corporate taxes specifically were quite high by European standards until 2027 and are not relatively that low today either
    9. Hikikomori ◴[22 Nov 25 01:02 UTC] No.46011045[source]▶
    Set limits so the top cant earn more than x times the lowest paid in the company then.
    replies(1): >>46011526 #
    10. AnthonyMouse ◴[22 Nov 25 01:58 UTC] No.46011370[source]▶
    > I think a better solution is exponential tax on a company size. I.e. once a company starts to earn above, say, 1 billion, it will be taxed by income by ever increasing amount.

    This is in the right spirit but you want two things to be different about it.

    The first is that the threshold for a given industry doesn't make sense as a dollar amount, it makes sense as a market share percentage. Having more than 15% market share should be a thing companies don't want, regardless of whether it's a $100 trillion industry or a $100 million one.

    And the second is that taxes create a perverse incentive for the government. You absolutely do not want the government to have even more of a financial incentive to sustain and create more of the companies of that size. What you want is to have fewer of them.

    So, what you want is a rule that if a company has more than 15% market share, the entire general public is allowed to sue them into bankruptcy for the offense of market consolidation. Which also removes the problem where they buy off the government prosecutors, because if they commit the offense then anybody can sue them.

    11. steve_b ◴[22 Nov 25 02:29 UTC] No.46011526{3}[source]▶
    Companies would then outsource their low-paying jobs to other companies.