261–270 of 274 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
2x48GB DDR5 for $285 last March. Turns out I got the wrong kit for that build and had to buy another. It was too late to return it.
If you still have that wrong kit, now it's the time to sell it to make a fortune.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know you are being sarcastic but the reason why we have to hate Chinese is simply because the standard of living of Americans depends on China not succeeding, simple as that.
Does it, though? If anything it seems like the opposite: China's success had directly enabled my standard of living as an American to be as high as it is. I suppose it'd be true that the standard of living of some Americans depends on China not succeeding — specifically, those Americans who own corporations competing with Chinese firms — but I think they'll survive just fine with only 10 yachts instead of 15.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The normal price is not the same as the market price. The normal price is what we had last year. The market price is higher than normal, due to a sudden demand spike and production shifting to HBM. More manufacturing capacity coming online to return the price to normal is not dumping, it's how markets are supposed to operate. Dumping would be e.g. if China used subsidies to sell DRAM at a price below what unsubsidise…
Normal price is a technical term I assume. Is it just a historical price, or is it knowable without market based price discovery?
So some common sense is required: yes under normal circumstances selling below the market price is dumping, but when the market price looks like a vertical line because of a sudden shock then you can't really take the market price too seriously. Mostly the price of DRAM is not set on the open market but is negotiated via contracts between the major players so there isn't really one price of DRAM at the moment. If you're a big customer like Apple you can get a price that is completely different from what you or I can get fighting for scraps on eBay.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you'll often get a few meetings and then they will go silent and then what you were trying to sell them will be offered by them as a new product about a year later This is how business works anywhere. there are no charities. whatever you say to investors or suppliers they can use so you better be careful have lawyers and set up correctly. (The caveat is of course when Chinese companies do this your lawyers can do n…
> “This is how business works anywhere. there are no charities.” England and Wales have 171,000 registered charities. The USA has 1.6 million charities. Not everyone is a business sociopath.
If you want to make money don't be surprised they also want to make money. If it is financially better to build it themselves they will, or they will tell their friends. Pro tip: don't tell them enough.
Just like in China if they can take your product and slap their own label and sell it at 50% discount they will.
Back in the 1990’s everyone had to have a unix workstation for unclear reasons (why not run Linux for There were crazy bubble economics schemes that meant doomed startups got unix boxes for free. When the bubble popped, the workstation vendors hit a triple whammy: Inferior $/perf, unlimited used inventory at low prices, and an economic downturn. The same exact thing is happening now, except the hardware is being jamm…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is wise for these Chinese fabs to eventually use a very aggressive dumping strategy to price well below cost push out other players forever, especially in DRAM. It's not dumping, it's the opposite. Sam Altman's stunt has created massive amounts of fictitious demand (OpenAI isn't using those wafers it's ordering) and triggered massive panic-buying from everyone else. Prices are arteficially high, this has turboch…
> utterly ruin I realize Intel has done some serious ball dropping over the past two decades but you do realize the US has on shore cutting edge fabs, right? It's only luxury consumer electronics and the highest end corporate gear that use cutting edge nodes to begin with. Disruption of the cutting edge would certainly wreak havoc on the pricing and specs of high end luxury electronics but that would hardly be the en…
We could squabble about the finer details of Intel's fab capabilities. They have advanced nodes, but it's irrelevant. They simply do not have the capacity to support the entire demand that is currently supplied by TSMC.
It is not just "high end luxury electronics" that have modern CPUs. It's every bloody server in the cloud. (Have a look at who makes and distributes the mainboards. Same story, substitute Intel for Supermicro.)
The economic impact on this field would be a disaster. Compute becomes much more expensive, SaaS prices will follow, and with that a massive drop in demand.
Not to mention you can kiss the entire AI industry goodbye if the price of GPUs spike.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is wise for these Chinese fabs to eventually use a very aggressive dumping strategy to price well below cost push out other players forever, especially in DRAM. It's not dumping, it's the opposite. Sam Altman's stunt has created massive amounts of fictitious demand (OpenAI isn't using those wafers it's ordering) and triggered massive panic-buying from everyone else. Prices are arteficially high, this has turboch…
Why would they bother to invade Taiwan when they’re winning economically and diplomatically? Public opinion in Taiwan is rapidly changing towards peaceful re-unification and no one anywhere on earth trust the US will help them with anything.
They are hedging their bets. If Taiwan refuses to accept re-unification, China wants to have the option of a military annexation.
They have been planning this for quite a bit longer than the current US administration. They're not going to bank on Donald Trump forever, he's not getting any younger and healthier, and November 2028 is sooner with every passing day. A military conflict is not off the table, and so it is considered and prepared for.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it’s at least valid to conclude that a nation-level commitment to taking over a specific industry can work. You can gut your competitors and then dominate. It’s the Uber strategy applied at the geopolitical level. If you could figure out how to get your country to dominate the world economy without also allowing your leaders to commit campaigns of mass-internment and extermination, then maybe you’d have a dec…
You can only "gut" the competition if you're genuinely able to supply at lowest cost in a sustainable way. Selling at a loss and trying to make it up in volume is not a very good strategy. The Uber strategy was betting on having robotaxis everywhere, and then raising prices when they found out that this wouldn't be a viable solution in the near term.
Selling at a modest loss and making the volume happen eventually means you're not selling at a loss anymore.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You don't actually "lose" capacity, you just move to higher-valued special niches within the overall industry That's not what people mean by "lose" capacity. Suppose DRAM companies expand capacity because prices are high, then demand levels off, the price crashes, and they all go out of business except for the one in China which gets a government bailout. That's fine, right? We're not interested in making DRAM, tha…
The way I see it, China has leverage once you arreive to that dependency situation. That leverages goes away the moment they restrict exports and every country scrambles to create local production once again. We are seeing that with some rare earths, even tho china is back into exporting them (except to japan, I think?) everyone is looking for alternatives already. They may have killed their industry 10 years down th…
The first problem is that it doesn't go away instantaneously, so even if you could recover in ten years, you still get screwed immediately.
The second problem is that it's leverage. They can threaten to do it if they don't get what they want, and if you then do what they want (which often gives them even more leverage) they don't have to do it. But then they keep their leverage and you have to keep doing what they want.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> utterly ruin I realize Intel has done some serious ball dropping over the past two decades but you do realize the US has on shore cutting edge fabs, right? It's only luxury consumer electronics and the highest end corporate gear that use cutting edge nodes to begin with. Disruption of the cutting edge would certainly wreak havoc on the pricing and specs of high end luxury electronics but that would hardly be the en…
> I realize Intel has done some serious ball dropping over the past two decades but you do realize the US has on shore cutting edge fabs, right? We could squabble about the finer details of Intel's fab capabilities. They have advanced nodes, but it's irrelevant. They simply do not have the capacity to support the entire demand that is currently supplied by TSMC. It is not just "high end luxury electronics" that have…
Case in point, this very comment section. The major suppliers have discontinued DDR4 production because it's "obsolete" meanwhile capacity for that exact same technology is coming online in China. What makes sense just depends on context.