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Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

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Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#201

Post by sophrosyne42 »

zarzavat wrote: post #181
sophrosyne42 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing suspicious or abnormal about this behavior. It is called competition. Ironically, trying to prevent this kind of behavior prevents competitiob, and is a key factor for causing monopolization

It depends... if OpenAI bought the DRAM in order to use it, then fair play to them. If they bought the DRAM in order to stop their competitors from using it because they are falling behind, that's anticompetitive in spirit, though I'm not sure if it actually breaks any laws.

I don't see what's less competitive about that, although I do see how it might make zero financial sense.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#202

Post by pbhjpbhj »

loeg wrote: post #45
jakebasile wrote: post #27

I hate this. PC gaming is my hobby, the only one that’s lasted my whole life. It’s always been there. It’s how I met my wife. It’s how I relax after a long day. It’s how I’ve participated in so many stories that stick with me and given me so many memories. All of it is being murdered by the AI bros. Before them it was the crypto bros. It’s one thing after the other and I hate it so much.

Just live with the PC you have for two more years. It's probably not a big deal? A moderately capable machine from 5 years ago is still marginally capable.

Yh, my moderately capable machine is from 8 years ago and had already waited for an upgrade. Was going to be this Black Friday. Crabcakes.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#203

Post by Tepix »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #159
throwthrow_ wrote: post #148

I asked ChatGPT if it can generate a bunch of RAM for me. He says this is some kind of famous joke or something. (I’m sorry I couldn’t resist)

"Downloading RAM" is more feasible than people think. The seek time of a consumer-grade hard disk is said to be on the order of 10 ms. That's roughly the latency of a very high quality FTTH connection. Meaning that if you run a HDD rather than an SSD, a swap file in the cloud could potentially be faster than a local one (especially when you consider multiple reads/writes that could be done in parallel). It's not exac…

Yeah, not exactly just 1 million times slower.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#205

Post by pbhjpbhj »

loeg wrote: post #135
jakebasile wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully this blows over in a few years and you’re right and I’m just catastrophizing.

One way or another. Either the AI stuff cools off, or the RAM people spin up more fabs.

Well there's like 4 RAM manufacturers, so probably they will spin up new fabs but continue to collude to keep prices high.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#206

Post by sophrosyne42 »

vegabook wrote: post #182
sophrosyne42 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing suspicious or abnormal about this behavior. It is called competition. Ironically, trying to prevent this kind of behavior prevents competitiob, and is a key factor for causing monopolization

Knowingly attempting to buy or sell in quantities likely to move markets, for direct profit, is called manipulation and is most definitely illegal. this is true in physical markets commodity markets and financial markets. Not saying that this is what openAI is doing but it definitely merits an investigation.

All quantities bought or sold on the margin will move the market. Whether it moves the market is not up to the buyer or seller; it is up to other buyers and sellers who react to that transaction and adjust their expectations. This is normal market dynamics, dynamics we should want to happen because markets adjusting to movements of big players performs a social function; you and I need to know how large movenents of resources affects our livelihoods, and this is how that can happen.

There is no reason to pathologize or find suspicious these normal economic facts. Especially when it is not within the power of a big player to choose how other people react to their actions, which is all "moving markets" is. If something is suspicious and illegal about that, then it is equally suspicious that you and I seem to go along with this "market movement" by these big players and pay the new prices. Are we colluding with them? We could do with less conspiracy-minded interpretations of these things.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#207

Post by kortilla »

franga2000 wrote: post #177
sophrosyne42 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The high prices ("price gouging") perform a social function because some cannot afford it; they prioritize what matters to them more, and ram is left available to those who absolutely require it. Trying to get around that by forcing prices below the market price simple encourages scalping behaviors. If prices are below the market price, but at the market price you would prefer the cash in your pocket over the ram sti…

I'm definitely not saying it's a binary can/can't afford situation. The point is that people don't "afford" things equally. I might some need RAM so badly that I'm prepared to take a huge risk and spend half of my paycheck on it. But that doesn't matter because someone else has 3x my paycheck, savings, and investment portfolio and a good credit score. How much money someone can spend on somethong is no indicator of h…

>since scarcity is more a function of demand than supply

This is incorrect. Anything that is bound by something like TSMC production is only made scarce when nvidia realizes they could sell out the entire run at $1000/card or whatever.

They were supply limited for years during the crypto boom. The way you know it was a supply problem is that you couldn’t even buy new cards because they were so frequently sold out.

Nvidia cards became really valuable overnight in the same way as any other asset. You trying to scream at “rich bastard” buyers will not change the fact that there is a shortage of cards so the price is going to go up across all sellers until the supply and demand curves intersect.

This is basic econ in action and history is fraught with attempts to try to fix supply shortages by capping the price.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#209

Post by franga2000 »

kortilla wrote: post #199
franga2000 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it better? As with all price gouging, better for those who can afford it, sure, but not for those who can't. The proper way to combat scalping is to implement fair allocation methods (for a start purchase quantity limits) and punish people for scalping. Look at how most places handled war-time gasoline shortages. Rationing coupons, purchase limits, demand leveling (like the odd-even system), price or profit contro…

During the pandemic there wasn’t gouging? I just remember complete shortages of inventory like toilet paper, basic microchips, etc. It would have been better if people did raise prices during the pandemic for those things to prevent hoarding so I could actually wipe my ass at 2 cents a wipe instead of 1. But alas, the “price gouging” cry babies would have come out and lambasted them for “being greedy”. Nope, governme…

Read again. My whole point was that governments used to know how to handle a shortage, but they don't anymore, as evidenced by the pandemic. They let the market figure it out and you got a mix of both price gouging and scalpers.

And no, doubling prices wouldn't have done anything. Hoarders would just hoard more because not only was supply low, but prices were increasing, so they better buy it now rather than later.

If governments actually governed, this wouldn't have been a problem. "You guys are being unreasonable, we have plenty of toilet paper for everyone. Each person gets two rolls per week unless you can prove you need more until you calm the fuck down. We're also putting the toilet paper factory into overdrive to compensate for this stupidity."

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#210

Post by kortilla »

franga2000 wrote: post #146
zozbot234 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to be "fair" for a necessity such as gasoline, you can have tradable rationing coupons. That way you are rewarded if you buy and use less gasoline, but the excess windfall due to the shortage is still transfered to you and away from the supplier. But even this assumes that gasoline is in fixed supply and there is no way of increasing its total production by paying more, which is not a very good assumption…

In a time of shortage, throwing more money at the problem usually won't increase supply. A shortage necessarily means that if you make more of something, you're guaranteed to sell it basically instantly, so there's already an incentive to increase production. And it's not like the higher prices mean more money goes to the producers so they can invest in more production capacity. The price increase is spread out betwe…

>A shortage necessarily means that if you make more of something, you're guaranteed to sell it basically instantly, so there's already an incentive to increase production.

This is patently false. Every oil reserve around the world has a cost per barrel of extraction. At $60/barrel many of them are shut down.

If you fix the price at $60 and demand goes up, you’ll end up with shortages and producers won’t be able to fill the gap.

It is very rare to have a market of physical goods where the cost of production is fixed and supply is effectively limited. For every other market, the price needs to go up to entice investing in making more supply.

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