its criminal to underline non links in ur site come on
Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal
241–250 of 255 posts
Re: Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This was not the "free and global market" I thought we were supposed to have at this point. Perhaps you haven't noticed but the pendulum has been swinging the other way for a while already and has a lot of momentum behind it. It's mentioned off-hand because the ongoing return to a multi-polar global order is covered elsewhere already, across dozens of articles every day.
> has a lot of momentum behind it Does it? It's mostly the US pushing against globalism right now. Trump managed to unite almost the entire world.
In a world of international tensions, governments tend to favor their mega-corps and monopoly. It is a way of weakening your adversaries. It is commercial war.
Re: Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're not wrong, globalism and nationalism go hand in hand. All those Twitter bluechecks glazing Trump and trying to drum up the right-wing controversy of the day were exposed as people from third-world countries shitting up the American infosphere for cash. When British far-right nutters say "We can't import the third world", keep in mind that third-world dictators are saying the exact same shit about other parts o…
You can't get rid of migration barriers without getting rid of the welfare state. Do left-wingers want to get rid of the welfare state? Do they even want to get rid of the migration barriers that can be done away with freely, namely barriers to movement for highly skilled labor and services?
This wasn't what I was talking about, but for what it's worth I don't think welfare and migration are exclusive. If your concern is free-riding, then you can require a certain number of working years before a migrant is eligible for certain social services; or have a scheme in which free migration is required to be reciprocal and bundled with a minimum standard for welfare programs. I believe the EU does both.
The phrase "left-winger" is also kind of vague; lefties in America are very specifically left-libertarians and it was specifically that strain of leftism I was referring to. A lot of, say, European lefties are far less internationalist and far more authoritarian for my tastes. There's an argument in here that American lefties haven't ironed out the contradictions in their political ideologies yet. A lot of the support for free migration from American lefties and liberals only started because Trump took the opposite position and did so extremely. But I'd rather that than, say, mainstream American politics' obsession with endianness[0].
Additionally, the welfare state is currently being crushed under the weight of a bunch of retiring Baby Boomers. Which isn't a uniquely American problem. Every rich country with a welfare state has too many old people in the system. That's due to demographic collapse, which is itself a consequence of children being too expensive to raise in a world where effective birth control is easy to access. Immigration can actually make this less of a problem, by adding to the tax base. They don't even have to be highly-skilled immigrants, they just have to be generating taxable income that goes into the welfare system.
The Globalist Nationalist argument is that this is bad because Those People™ are criminal or uncivilized in some way. But that begs the question: where do we find more taxpayers to keep our welfare state solvent? The answer is to take away birth control and hope enough horny teenagers get pregnant to fix the shortfall eventually. Except this doesn't solve the affordability problem[1]. So all those kids are going to be in broken homes or no home at all. This creates a crime wave. In fact, this is exactly why Those People™ from Those Countries™ are so damned scary!
tl;dr The integrity of the welfare state is only tangentially related to the openness of its migration programs, because migrants can be both beneficiaries of and contributors to the system.
[0] In the original sense of endianness being a culture war over what side to break eggs on.
[1] The affordability problem is itself a cluster of related cost diseases endemic to urban centers. More people want to live in the city than there is housing available for them, so prices have to rise until somebody loses. And increasing the housing supply creates further demand for land, construction labor, and materials. That raises cost, meaning that housing has to get more expensive to make new units economic. And as housing gets more expensive, there's less children being born, which means less people working to build that housing, which makes the housing more expensive, so there's less children being born...
Re: Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal
#244> Budget brands normally buy older DRAM fabrication equipment from mega-producers like Samsung when Samsung upgrades their DRAM lines to the latest and greatest equipment. This allows the DRAM market to expand more than it would otherwise because it makes any upgrading of the fanciest production lines to still be additive change to the market. However, Korean memory firms have been terrified that reselling old equipm…
I'm not sure any realistic definition of free market would mean your actions are free from consequence. The global market is anarchy in the literal sense and no one is bound by a higher authority. Coercion and cartels are part of a free market. Economic efficiency actually requires a lot of rules and regulations to achieve the free market playground we like to imagine.
Cartels aren't part of a free market, wtf
Re: Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal
#245> Budget brands normally buy older DRAM fabrication equipment from mega-producers like Samsung when Samsung upgrades their DRAM lines to the latest and greatest equipment. This allows the DRAM market to expand more than it would otherwise because it makes any upgrading of the fanciest production lines to still be additive change to the market. However, Korean memory firms have been terrified that reselling old equipm…
> This seems to almost be mentioned off-hand, but isn't this a really bad and un-free market, and a much bigger issue? Korean companies are afraid of doing business with Chinese companies because of the US, because of retaliation? This was not the "free and global market" I thought we were supposed to have at this point.
The globalized free market wasn't all it was cracked up to be, so 90s-era understandings of how things are "supposed" to be will need to be revised.
Re: Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal
#246Moves like this should be illegal. It's becoming increasingly clear that OpenAI is going to get lapped by Google on technical merits. So this is the "code red" solution? Supply shenanigans? They are getting beat in the developer market by Anthropic. And getting beat on fundamental tech by Google. This is a company whose ostensible mission is to "benefit all of humanity" ...
Last time I used OpenAI computer-use agent (Atlas iirc), I asked it to go on vast.ai and configure an instance template for me. It gave me back control to input my username and password, but alas, since I had used my google account to sign in, I had to go through Google login portal, which put an end to my experiment since it deemed the agent's browser wasn't trustworthy.
Mmmh.
Re: Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
Atto 3 is $19.3k USD in Thailand. So it's really just tariffs and taxes making it that expensive elsewhere.
I read that's not really the case - there's a bunch of equipment on EU-spec (and some other market) BYDs that comes from EU vendors such as Bosch. It additionally has a completely different AC unit as the kind of refrigerant BYD uses in China is illegal in the EU. I'm not saying it justifies the price difference, but there are changes between the cars.
The BYDs exported to Europe are made in Thailand.
So no, they are the Euro spec car.
Re: Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't get rid of migration barriers without getting rid of the welfare state. Do left-wingers want to get rid of the welfare state? Do they even want to get rid of the migration barriers that can be done away with freely, namely barriers to movement for highly skilled labor and services?
This wasn't what I was talking about, but for what it's worth I don't think welfare and migration are exclusive. If your concern is free-riding, then you can require a certain number of working years before a migrant is eligible for certain social services; or have a scheme in which free migration is required to be reciprocal and bundled with a minimum standard for welfare programs. I believe the EU does both. The ph…
The solution to the affordability problem is trivial: go back to the land. Sure, it would be nice if we could also increase density in urban areas to Hong-Kong-like levels and leverage all the benefits in productivity that would be thereby unlocked, but that's a bit of a separate issue.
Re: Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal
#249I didn't keep up with the news lately and had to pay 650 bucks for two 32GB DRAM5 sticks for my new build. Yay.
Re: Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
What better way to hurt the designated enemy and make others bare the cost? Trump's America First in practice relies on a near-sided and overly simplistic understanding of the world (Win-lose, whatever is benefitting others must be a hinderance to the USA). Hence fighting the tariff wars against allies (Canada, Eu). Hence destroying Nato' credibility that was carefully built for 70 years. Hence ceasing to be Ukraine'…
« to bear the cost », not « to bare the cost »
Thank you. I was also wondering which one was correct, but I didn't have the opportunity to check it, so I went with my gut feeling. Thank you again for your help.