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

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192 points redohmy | 6 comments | 15 Nov 25 02:45 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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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.

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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.

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themafia ◴[22 Nov 25 01:58 UTC] No.46011371[source]▶
> There's too much group-think in the executive class.

I think this is actually the long tail of "too big to fail." It's not that they're all thinking the same way, it's that they're all no longer hedging their bets.

> we have made the rewards too extreme and too narrowly distributed

We give the military far too much money in the USA.

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makeitdouble ◴[22 Nov 25 02:12 UTC] No.46011428[source]▶
> We give the military far too much money in the USA.

~ themafia, 2025

(sorry)

On a more serious note the military is sure a money burning machine, but IMHO it's only government spending, when most of the money in the US is deliberately private.

The fintech sector could be a bigger representation of a money vacuuming system benefiting statistically nobody ?

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1. wat10000 ◴[22 Nov 25 02:29 UTC] No.46011525[source]▶
It's around 3.4% GDP. That puts us in the top 10% or so worldwide, but it's not ridiculously high. It's on a similar level as countries such as Morocco and Colombia, which aren't known for excessive military spending. It's still kind of high for a country with no nearby enemies, but for the most part, US military spending is large because the US economy is large.
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2. themafia ◴[22 Nov 25 02:58 UTC] No.46011668[source]▶
It's around 16% of the total federal budget. To be fair about 1/3 of "military spending" is actually Salaries, Medical, Housing and GI/Retirement costs.

It's also the case that none of the CIA, NSA or DHS budgets show up under the military, even though they're performing some of the same functions that would be handled by militaries in other countries.

We also have "black appropriations." So the total of the spending on surveillance and kinetic operations is often unknowable. Add to this the fact the Pentagon has never successfully performed an audit and I think people are right to be suspicious of the topline "fraction of GDP" number.

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3. nirav72 ◴[22 Nov 25 03:07 UTC] No.46011704[source]▶
Just want to point out that the NSA is part of the DoD. (Or DoW now)
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4. themafia ◴[22 Nov 25 03:18 UTC] No.46011766{3}[source]▶
This is true; however, their agency budget is not part of the DoD's budget and is not included in the reported "total" for DoD.

At least not in the data set I use:

https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/agency

5. Melatonic ◴[22 Nov 25 03:22 UTC] No.46011782[source]▶
I think the number is probably much higher than we think - there is probably a ton of not so obvious spending on research and development.
6. Projectiboga ◴[22 Nov 25 04:02 UTC] No.46011995[source]▶
Military spending is a type of wealfare for the wealthy it is one of the only forms of public or government spending that doesn't crowd out private investors, the way public housing or publicly funded hospitals do. The high military spending and the contractor class often vote more conservative than typical for their demographic and economic peers It's been high since WW2, with maybe a slight drop in the late 70s. The current stat of "3.4 times gdp" ignores the fact that a large part of our national debt is from the military and war budgets. I saw a statistic in the mid 1990s that if we had kept our military budget at inflation adjusted levels equal to 1976 our debt would have gone to zero as early as 1994.