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RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

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Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#401

Post by marcosdumay »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #393
silisili wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happened at a place where I worked years ago, but not as 'on purpose.' We were a large company where most pieces depended on other pieces, and everything was fine - until a new CEO came in who started holding the numbers of each BU under a microscope. This led to each department trying to bill other departments as an enterprise customer, who then retaliated, which then led to internal departments threatening to…

Why is that a bad thing? If an internal department that’s not core to their business is less efficient than an external company - use the external company. Anecdote: Even before Amazon officially killed Chime, everyone at least on the AWS side was moving to officially supported Slack.

As a rule, organizations are created to avoid the transaction costs on those detail tasks. If you externalize every single supporting task into a market, you will be slowed down to a drag, won't be able to use most competitive advantages, and will pay way more than doing them in house.

But removing the market competition is a breeding ground for inefficiency. So there's a balance there, and huge conglomerates tying their divisions together serves only to make the competitive ones die by the need to use the services of the inefficient ones.

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#402

Post by CamperBob2 »

jfindper wrote: post #244
CamperBob2 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classically, not all jobs are considered "living wage" jobs. That whole notion is something some people made up very recently. A teenager in his/her first job at McDonald's doesn't need a "living wage." As a result of forcing the issue, now the job doesn't exist at all in many instances... and if it does, the owner has a strong incentive to automate it away.

> A teenager in his/her first job at McDonald's doesn't need a "living wage." Wow, a completely bad-faith argument. Can you try again, but this time, try "steelman" instead of "strawman"?

Let's talk about steelmanning, shall we? Why should I show good faith when absolutely no one else in the conversation is?

Take it from the top. First reply: The majority of minimum wage workers are adults, not teenagers. This is also true for McDonald's employees. The idea that these jobs are staffed by children working summer jobs is simply not reality.

The steelman position would grant that in fact, it's traditional for teenagers working summer jobs to do just that, and proceed to explain why high minimum wages as a one-size-fits-all policy are still a net win for society. Instead, autoexec starts by attacking an unstated position -- that these are necessarily 40-hour/week full-time jobs -- and wraps up by plainly and literally denying reality.

Second reply: A teenager is presumably also going to school full time and works their job part time, not ~2000 hours per year. If we build a society where someone working a full time job is not able to afford to reasonably survive, we are setting ourselves up for a society of crime, poverty, and disease.

At least kube-system doesn't make the mistake of assuming that all jobs require 2000 hours of work per year, but they fail to acknowledge, much less address, my point that not all jobs are done for survival purposes. Not only is that not an example of steelmanning, it's followed up by an irrelevant bare assertion made without the faintest trace of historical grounding.

Moving on to array_key_first: Just the simple fact that mcdonalds is open during school hours is enough to demolish the "teenagers flipping burgers" type arguments.

Once again, the fact is that jobs such as burger-flipping have traditionally provided part-time and summer jobs for young people living at home who are looking to save up a bit of money and get some work experience. This reply doesn't care to acknowledge the basic facts of the matter, much less address the strongest possible interpretation of my argument.

Then there's this zinger from swiftcoder: Turns out our supply of underage workers is neither infinite, nor even sufficient to staff all fast food jobs in the nation. If you are looking for an example of a strawman argument in this thread, how about picking on an actual one before jumping on my case?

Come back with your "steelman" bullshit when you're willing to apply the same rules to all sides of the argument.

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#403

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

marcosdumay wrote: post #401
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that a bad thing? If an internal department that’s not core to their business is less efficient than an external company - use the external company. Anecdote: Even before Amazon officially killed Chime, everyone at least on the AWS side was moving to officially supported Slack.

As a rule, organizations are created to avoid the transaction costs on those detail tasks. If you externalize every single supporting task into a market, you will be slowed down to a drag, won't be able to use most competitive advantages, and will pay way more than doing them in house. But removing the market competition is a breeding ground for inefficiency. So there's a balance there, and huge conglomerates tying t…

My four years at AWS kind of indoctrinated me. As they said, everytime you decide to buy vs build, you have to ask yourself “does it make the beer taste better”?

Don’t spend energy on undifferentiated heavy lifting. If you are Dropbox it makes sense to move away from S3 for instance.

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#404

Post by mrits »

jfindper wrote: post #229
mrits wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The BBQ place across the street from me pays $19/hour to be a cashier in Austin. Or the sign says it does anyways

sweet! according to austintexas.gov, that's only $2.63 below the 2024 living wage. $5.55 below, if you use the MIT numbers for 2025. As long as you don't run into anything unforseen like medical expenses, car breakdowns, etc., you can almost afford a bare-bones, mediocre life with no retirement savings.

Yes, if your aspirations end at being a cashier you probably want to get a roommate.

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#405

Post by array_key_first »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #386
array_key_first wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Successfulness and morality are orthogonal. If you can't make money wherever you're operating your business, then you're not successful.

But in that case they are successful; they're just not paying very much relative to the cost of living as a result of someone else's imposition of artificial scarcity

Which thereby leads them to not have employees, which destroys their business, therefore they're not successful.

If your business relies on X, and you can't afford X, your business sucks.

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#406

Post by kube-system »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #402
jfindper wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A teenager in his/her first job at McDonald's doesn't need a "living wage." Wow, a completely bad-faith argument. Can you try again, but this time, try "steelman" instead of "strawman"?

Let's talk about steelmanning, shall we? Why should I show good faith when absolutely no one else in the conversation is? Take it from the top. First reply: The majority of minimum wage workers are adults, not teenagers. This is also true for McDonald's employees. The idea that these jobs are staffed by children working summer jobs is simply not reality. The steelman position would grant that in fact, it's traditiona…

> At least kube-system doesn't make the mistake of assuming that all jobs require 2000 hours of work per year, but they fail to acknowledge, much less address, my point that not all jobs are done for survival purposes.

I think we both can agree that there's a lot of nuance when it comes to wages and employment. How much time is someone spending at that job? What type of living situation do they have? What other sources of income do they have in their living situation? What are their expenses? etc.

You're right that not all jobs are done for survival purposes. But colloquially, when people use the term "living wage", they're talking specifically about people who work a wage in order to survive. Which is the reason that most people have jobs.

> Not only is that not an example of steelmanning, it's followed up by an irrelevant bare assertion made without the faintest trace of historical grounding.

Do you mean that in the past people did not survive on a single income? Social and family structures in the past definitely look different than they do today. But that doesn't really have any relevance to the people living in the present. Socioeconomics changes over time. Many of the living situations of the past are straight up illegal today. I know relatives who grew up without electricity or running water and grew their own food for survival. They didn't need the modern concept of a "living wage", but at the same time you can't reasonably expect someone from today's world to do the same thing they did.

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#407

Post by silisili »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #393
silisili wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happened at a place where I worked years ago, but not as 'on purpose.' We were a large company where most pieces depended on other pieces, and everything was fine - until a new CEO came in who started holding the numbers of each BU under a microscope. This led to each department trying to bill other departments as an enterprise customer, who then retaliated, which then led to internal departments threatening to…

Why is that a bad thing? If an internal department that’s not core to their business is less efficient than an external company - use the external company. Anecdote: Even before Amazon officially killed Chime, everyone at least on the AWS side was moving to officially supported Slack.

I guess it depends on circumstances, but it boils down to each department only cost others some marginal cost in practice.

Imagine a hosting company and a dns company, both with plenty of customers and capacity. The hosting company says... I'll host your DNS site, if you provide DNS to our hosting site. Drop in the bucket for each.

One year the DNS company decides it needs to show more revenue, so will begin charging the hosting company $1000/yr, and guess what the hosting company says the same. Instead, they each get mad and find $500/yr competitors. What was accomplished here?

Further, it just looks bad in many cases. Imagine if Amazon.com decided AWS was too expensive, and decided to move their stuff off to say, Azure only. That wouldn't be a great look for AWS and in turn hurts...Amazon.

I do get your point, but there are a lot of... intangibles about being in a company together.

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#408

Post by patrick451 »

reissbaker wrote: post #342
jfindper wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have several qualms with how the real median household income is calculated, specifically the consumer price index. But I agree that tackling housing alone would be significant.

I think everyone has quibbles about the CPI. Ultimately though, it would take a lot of cherry-picking to make it seem like overall cost of living has gone up 3x while wages have gone up less. As a counterexample, an NES game in 1990 cost $50 new (in 1990 dollars! Not adjusted for inflation). Battlefield 6 cost $70 new this year (in 2025 dollars), and there were widespread complaints about games getting "too expensive…

Housing, vehicles, groceries, and health insurance are all up massively. Who gives a shit how much a game costs if you can't afford groceries and rent?

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#409

Post by patrick451 »

reissbaker wrote: post #342
jfindper wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have several qualms with how the real median household income is calculated, specifically the consumer price index. But I agree that tackling housing alone would be significant.

I think everyone has quibbles about the CPI. Ultimately though, it would take a lot of cherry-picking to make it seem like overall cost of living has gone up 3x while wages have gone up less. As a counterexample, an NES game in 1990 cost $50 new (in 1990 dollars! Not adjusted for inflation). Battlefield 6 cost $70 new this year (in 2025 dollars), and there were widespread complaints about games getting "too expensive…

In 2010 I paid 3k for a 10 year old truck with 100k miles. That same truck today costs easily 15k. Same story for rent. Same story for groceries. Same story for health insurance.

Who gives a shit how much trinkets costs if you can't afford groceries and rent?

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#410

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

silisili wrote: post #407
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that a bad thing? If an internal department that’s not core to their business is less efficient than an external company - use the external company. Anecdote: Even before Amazon officially killed Chime, everyone at least on the AWS side was moving to officially supported Slack.

I guess it depends on circumstances, but it boils down to each department only cost others some marginal cost in practice. Imagine a hosting company and a dns company, both with plenty of customers and capacity. The hosting company says... I'll host your DNS site, if you provide DNS to our hosting site. Drop in the bucket for each. One year the DNS company decides it needs to show more revenue, so will begin charging…

There is more politics than you think within Amazon Retail about moving compute over to AWS. I’m not sure how much of Amazon Retail runs on AWS instead of its own infrastructure (CDO).

I know one project from Amazon got killed because their AWS bill was too high. Yeah AWS charges Amazon Retail for compute when they run on AWS hardware.

https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/the-aws-service-i-hate-th...

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