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

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.

I wonder, is there any way to avoid this kind of market failure? Even a planned economy could succumb to hype - promises that improved societal efficiency are just around the corner.

> Is there any way to avoid this kind of market failure?

There are potentially undesirable tradeoffs and a whole new game of cheats and corruption, but you could frustrate rapid, concentrated growth with things like an increasing tax on raised funds.

Right now, we basically let people and companies concentrate as much capital as they want, as rapidly as they want, with almost no friction, presumably because it helped us economically outcompete the adversary during the Cold War. Broadly, we're now afraid of having any kind of brake or dampener on investments and we are more afraid of inefficiency and corruption if the government were to intervene than we are of speculation or exploitation if it doesn't.

In democratically regulated capitalism, there are levers to pull that could slow down this kind of freight train before it were to get out of control, but the arguments against pulling them remain more thoroughly developed and more closely held than those in favor of them.