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

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

#91

Post by xpe »

scotty79 wrote: post #32
epistasis wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 becau…

Every corporation is a (not so) little pocket of centrally planned economy. The only saving grace is that it can die and others will scoop up released resources. When country level planned economy dies, people die and resources get destroyed.

> Every corporation is a (not so) little pocket of centrally planned economy.

This is confused. Here is how classical economists would frame it: a firm chooses how much to produce based on its cost structure and market prices, expanding production until marginal cost equals marginal revenue. This is price guided production optimization, not central planning.

The dominant criticism of central planning is trying to set production quantities without prices. Firms (generally) don’t do this.

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

#92

Post by Aloisius »

automatic6131 wrote: post #26
epistasis wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 becau…

We need better antitrust and anti-monopoly enforcement. Break up the biggest companies, and then they'll have to actually participate in markets.

Samsung lost a large percentage of market share to their competitors in the last couple years, so I'm pretty sure they already have to participate in markets.

Well, assuming they haven't revived the cartel.

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

#94

Post by TacticalCoder »

hypeatei wrote: post #18

Well, patience as a consumer might pay off in the next year or so when the music stops and hyperscalers are forced to dump their inventories. There still isn't a clear path to profitability for any of these AI products and the capital expenditure has been enormous.

[dead]

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

#95

Post by gruez »

epistasis wrote: post #8
mrsilencedogood wrote: post #3

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 R…

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 becau…

>It is a weird form of centralized planning [...]

It's a form of "centralized planning", except it's not centralized at all.

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

#96

Post by xpe »

mrsilencedogood wrote: post #3

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 R…

> … 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.

Technically speaking, this is not a market failure. [1] Why? Per the comment above, it is the individuals that are acting irrationally, right? The market is acting correctly according to its design and inputs. The market’s price adjustment is rational in response. The response is not necessarily fair to all people, but traditional styles of neoclassical economic analysis deaccentuate common notions of fairness or equality; the main goal is economic efficiency.

I prefer to ask the question: to what degree is some particular market design serving the best interest of its stakeholders and society? In democracies, we have some degree of choice over what we want!

I say all of this as a person who views markets as mechanisms not moral foundations. This distinction is made clear when studying political economic (economics for policy analysis) though I think it sometimes gets overlooked in other settings.

If one wants to explore coordination mechanisms that can handle highly irrational demand spikes, you have to think hard. To some degree, one would have to give up a key aspect of most market systems — the notion of one price set by the idea of “willingness to pay”.

[1] Market failure is a technical term within economics meaning the mechanism itself malfunctions relative to its own efficiency criteria.

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

#100

Post by CamperBob2 »

epistasis wrote: post #30
automatic6131 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need better antitrust and anti-monopoly enforcement. Break up the biggest companies, and then they'll have to actually participate in markets.

This was Lina Khan's big thing, and I'd argue that our current administration is largely a result of Silicon Valkey no longer being able to get exits in the form or mergers and IPOs. Perhaps a better approach to anti-monopoly and anti-trust is possible, but I'm not sure anybody knows what that is. Khan was very well regarded and I don't know anybody who's better at it. Another approach would be a wealth and income ta…

Khan was largely ineffectual. The current administration, if it can be blamed on SV at all, is more likely to be the result of Harris's insanely ill-timed proposal to tax unrealized capital gains just as election season was kicking into high gear.
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