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PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

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Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

#311

Post by array_key_first »

charcircuit wrote: post #250
phil21 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only meaningful if you have enough disposable income to invest that it eventually (and I don't mean in 50 years) makes a dent against your living expenses. If you make $4k/mo and rent is $3k, it's pretty silly to state that it's a meaningful thing for someone to scrimp and invest $100/mo into a brokerage account. They definitely should do this, but it's not going to have any meaningful impact on their life for d…

Rent should not be more than 1/3 of your income so moving to an appropriate place will let that person save an extra 2k a month. It would take a year instead of a decade to have invested 24k.

The lower COL areas are lower because they're less economically viable, and therefore less desirable. The job opportunities and income will, more or less, match the lower COL.

Theres some exceptions, like rural doctors can make more more than city doctors due to high demand. But the less "physical" your job is, the rarer these exceptions become.

For software devs, you can move out of silicon valley. Maybe to Texas. And now those 1.5 million dollar homes are only 700,000 dollars. But your salary will reflect that.

Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

#312

Post by Anamon »

nickpp wrote: post #287
muldvarp wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You thought that abundance would trickle down into the pockets of people that have to work for a living? AI will lead to abundance. For those that own stuff and no longer have to pay for other people to work for them.

> abundance. For those that own stuff and no longer have to pay for other people to work for them. Why are you saying that? Anybody working for a living (but saving money) can invest in AI stocks or ETFs and partake in that potential abundance. Robinhood accounts are free for all.

...which almost everybody agrees is a bubble, wondering not if, but when it will burst.

Investing in AI companies is just about the last piece of advice I'd give someone who's struggling financially.

The billionaires will largely be fine. They hedge their bets and have plenty of spare assets on the side. Little guy investors? Not so much. They'll go from worrying about their retirement plan to worrying about becoming homeless.

Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

#313

Post by Anamon »

EddieB wrote: post #19
pseudosavant wrote: post #6

Built my son's first gaming PC 2 months ago. Figured it would be cheaper around Black Friday, but the prices were reasonable enough that we didn't wait. Turned out to be a huge savings to buy that fast DDR5 in September.

Just went through this today for my daughter- struggled to find an i5 not on pre-order, and the RAM was crippling- ended up going Ryzen 7 for a first time and 2x8Gb DDR5 6000 @ £119 - looking forward to building it with her!

Ryzen is the better choice anyway :)

Props on building a PC with your kid, I have very fond memories of doing that with my dad. Have fun!

Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

#314

Post by genewitch »

golem14 wrote: post #220
moribvndvs wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's next? Electricity? Yes. My electricity prices jumped 50% in 3 years.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mikesimoncasey_our-team-at-re... ? How much is due to long overdue infrastructure upgrades and greed by providers, vs the cost of energy? Also, consumer prices _have_ risen (mine included), but it's not clear that this is only because AI. While EV charging is not at the scale of all data centers combined, it seems to grow even faster than the datacenter's consumption, and is expected to…

> How much is due to long overdue infrastructure upgrades and greed by providers, vs the cost of energy?

This only makes sense if you ignore profits. We've been paying the bills since before this was "overdue"; for instance i am still paying a storm recovery surcharge on my electric bill from before i ever moved to this state. At the point where a "temporary infrastructure surcharge for repairs" becomes a line item on their profit statement, that's where i start to get real annoyed.

Our electric company has 287,000 customers and has a market cap of >$800,000,000

what percentage of that eight tenths of a billion in market cap came from nickel and diming me?

* note: nickel and dime was established as "an insignificant amount of money" in the 1890s, where sirloin, 20% fat was $0.20 a pound. That's $13.50 now (local); chuck $0.10 and $19 now. So somewhere between 67 and 180 times less buying power from a nickel and dime, now. Also that means that, y'know, my surcharges being $15-$30 a month is historically "nickels and dimes"

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiug.30112019293742&s...

Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

#315

Post by genewitch »

neogodless wrote: post #303
phil21 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only meaningful if you have enough disposable income to invest that it eventually (and I don't mean in 50 years) makes a dent against your living expenses. If you make $4k/mo and rent is $3k, it's pretty silly to state that it's a meaningful thing for someone to scrimp and invest $100/mo into a brokerage account. They definitely should do this, but it's not going to have any meaningful impact on their life for d…

If you contribute $1k per month for 10 years earning 6% you would have $162k. 5% of that would be $8100. Is $48k / year a typical income?

where are you getting $1k/month? GP said "invest" $100 per month given a $48,000 income and rent of ~$36k/yr.

Yeah obviously if i can sock away $12,000 a year for 10 years i'll have money. Just be aware that i was in a bunch of funds from 2010-2020 and were it not for what happened at the end of that decade i wouldn't have made any additional money at all. In fact, i would have lost a decent chunk of money - not just in fees, but inflation.

Also, where are you guaranteed 6% for a decade? t-bills or something?

Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

#316

Post by [deleted] »

nickpp wrote: post #279
Refreeze5224 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ding ding ding. What a surprise that a system designed not for human flourishing but pure profit would actually deliver massive profit with no regard for human flourishing. Humanity will have to adopt new human-focused modes of living and organizing society, or else. And climate change is coming along to make sure the owning class can't ignore this fact any longer.

> a system designed not for human flourishing but pure profit But please, don't be coy: tell us about that other system that is designed for "human flourishing" - we're dying to learn about it. Because I grew up under communism and I lived its miserable failures: the non-profit system didn't even manage to feed, cloth or warm/cool us. > new human-focused modes of living and organizing society Oh, these sounds sooo pr…

[deleted]

Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

#317

Post by smallmancontrov »

neogodless wrote: post #303
phil21 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only meaningful if you have enough disposable income to invest that it eventually (and I don't mean in 50 years) makes a dent against your living expenses. If you make $4k/mo and rent is $3k, it's pretty silly to state that it's a meaningful thing for someone to scrimp and invest $100/mo into a brokerage account. They definitely should do this, but it's not going to have any meaningful impact on their life for d…

If you contribute $1k per month for 10 years earning 6% you would have $162k. 5% of that would be $8100. Is $48k / year a typical income?

The pauper who invests peanuts and receives peanuts isn't the problem. The professional who invests modest sums and boosts their retirement isn't the problem.

The centabillionaire who invests their fortune and receives $50M a day from the market and cares about nothing more than keeping the gravy train going is the problem. They head to Washington and splash their free money hose around in exchange for political support to keep that hose pumping at all costs. That's why politicians were so lock-step about how it was super important for the US to sell our industry to China and drop capital gains tax below income tax and open the Double Irish Sandwich and now they're getting rid of social programs and instituting 50 year mortgages and so on.

The fact that the guy with the firehose can pump the firehose by stepping on the guy investing $1k month is the core of the problem. Until you are at escape velocity -- your net worth is enough to cover your lifestyle from investment returns alone -- you lose by default.

Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

#318

Post by georgefrowny »

mlrtime wrote: post #290
saxenaabhi wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same does apply to gas contracts. So many a time LNG companies break contracts and pay hefty penalties if the spot rate is high enough.

>So many a time LNG companies break contracts and pay hefty penalties if the spot rate is high enough. What do you mean "Break contracts"? I thought the conversation was about Futures contracts, you don't break them. You sell your contract or you take/give delivery (or cash settle).

There's no specific mention of futures upthread of this comment.

Not all gas is sold by futures, you can have a contract for, say, delivery of 20 million cubic metres of gas a year and a penalty if that isn't met. Some people actually want the gas for gas-related purposes rather then as a financial phantom.

Same for DRAM - Dell actually wants the chips to put in computers, an economic abstraction doesn't help much when you need to ship real computers to get paid, and many customers aren't in the market for a laptop future (Framework pre-orders notwithstanding).

Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

#319

Post by georgefrowny »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #302
Tuna-Fish wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except silicon, power, and water (and a tiny amount of plastic/paper for packaging), what else does a fab need that only produces DRAM? If true, then power is far and away the most variable input cost. Borrowing costs can be wildly variable and are the main cost of making silicon. All the "inputs" over the lifecycle of a fab are so completely dwarfed by the initial capital costs that you can pretty much ignore them…

This theory sounds nice, but do you have any sources to share? For example, I assume a fab runs for about 20-30 years. The labor inputs must be very high over this period. Basically, there are no poorly paid people inside a fab. And wouldn't "wildly variable borrowing costs" also affect oil and gas who need to finance the research phase and construction of the plant?

Micron Fab 6 is about 2300 staff (including 1000 contractors).

Even if you pay them all 500k per year, that's "only" about a billion a year in payroll.

The New York fab plan costs something like 20 billion more or less now to build, with 100 billion over 20 years.

Also, maybe the calculus is different right now in the US, but it used to be the semiconductor workers were expected to have PhDs coming out of their ears but were not actually paid very well, with salaries in Taiwanese fabs being around the $50-60k mark, and lower paid workers being more like $20k or less. Presumably US fabs will be automated to an even greater extent due to labour costs.

So it's very possible that servicing debt on the capital outlay is substantially more expensive than the payroll.

Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

#320

Post by Cthulhu_ »

pmdr wrote: post #98

So, like, we were already pretty much priced out of higher-end graphic cards, and now it's happening to RAM. All this while jobs are disappearing, layoffs are ongoing and CEOs are touting AI's 'capabilities' left and right. Next is probably CPUs, even if AIs don't use them that much, manufactures will shift production to something more profitable, then gouge prices so that only enterprises will pay for them. What's n…

> What's next? Electricity?

That and water. Electricity: Google made a post about scaling k8s to 135.000 nodes yesterday, mentioning how each node has multiple GPUs taking up 2700 watts max.

Water, well this is a personal beef, but Microsoft built a datacenter which used potable / drinking water for backup cooling, using up millions of liters during a warm summer. They treat the water and dump it in the river again. This was in 2021, I can imagine it's only gotten worse again: https://www.aquatechtrade.com/news/industrial-water/microsof...

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