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The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

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Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#671

Post by hackyhacky »

ivewonyoung wrote: post #662
hackyhacky wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That makes no sense because labor needs capital to take risks so they get salaries. Total non sequitur. Labor (and salaries) predate the existence of money, as well as capital investment.

Before capital investment it was coercion, slavery or community building that made big projects possible. The first two were outlawed as they weren't needed under capitalism but were common in non capitalism like the gulags and Uyghur labor . Even under capitalism you can still volunteer, donate and create community orgs to build things, there's nothing stopping anyone.

> Before capital investment it was coercion,

Huh? You think that before investment, people didn't trade good and services of their own free will? You need to re-examine history. Commerce predates civilization.

If you think that slavery isn't needed under capitalism, how do you explain the extensive use of slavery under capitalism?

> Even under capitalism you can still volunteer, donate and create community orgs to build things

That's true, and is completely irrelevant to our conversation, because we're not discussing volunteering, we're talking about the distribution of profit. If there is no profit, there is nothing to distribute.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#672

Post by hackyhacky »

WalterBright wrote: post #617
hackyhacky wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because they are Marxist tenets doesn't mean they aren't true. Feel free to refute them if you feel otherwise.

> Just because they are Marxist tenets doesn't mean they aren't true. Since Marxism never works, there's something definitely wrong with the tenets.

> Since Marxism never works, there's something definitely wrong with the tenets.

Are you familiar with the idea of a thought-terminating cliche [1]?

You have given yourself permission to ignore everything associated with Marxism because you've been taught that it's "wrong." If you actually thought about your statement, you'd realize that you are quasi-intentionally dismissing ideas without consideration.

1. What does it mean for Marxism to have been "tried"? Do you consider the Soviet Union to be Marxist? I don't.

2. Even if Marxism had been "tried" and failed, so what? Do we dismiss capitalism because of failed capitalist states?

3. Even if Marxism in practice was futile, does that mean that very idea espoused by Marx is necessarily wrong? No, it does not. Newtonian physics is "wrong" in light of relativistics but there is still very much right about it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#673

Post by hackyhacky »

WalterBright wrote: post #529
hackyhacky wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are endless businesses you can start with little to no capital. Well, that's good news. I guess the cause of poverty must simply be laziness. That's convenient, because it allows me to demonize the lower economic classes without having to address the systemic inequality that rewards capital ownership over labor.

My dad told me I wasn't afraid at all of hard work. I had no problem lying down next to it and going to sleep. Value is created by some combination of 1) working 2) taking risks. Entertaining as it is, participating on HackerNews is not a path to making money.

I honestly cannot fathom the relevance of your comment. Can you please explain how any of that relates to a discussion of the value of capitalism?

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#674

Post by FarmerPotato »

hylaride wrote: post #364
m4x wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A world where Apple has invested in their own fabs, so they can sell devices with drastically more RAM than their competition at entry-level prices.

I'm no business expert and Apple is of course in a unique position, but owning your own fabs has rarely worked out long term. They require eye watering amounts of CAPEX that needs to be amortized over a timeframe that's longer than apple's products. Today's bleeding edge fabs become tomorrow's "cheap" fabs that pump out chips that don't need to be bleeding edge for the components that go into everyday products like m…

A more realistic scenario that surely must have been considered is this:

They make a strategic investment in the DRAM maker. It's the same idea as buying an equity stake or entering a JV with a flat-panel maker. Or deploying cash to provide the latest EUV tooling to TSMC.

Large famous-brand computer maker has no expertise in running a fab.

I could punch holes in this idea right away. But it seems better than "tilting up your own fab".

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#675

Post by hcurtiss »

hackyhacky wrote: post #585
hcurtiss wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, again, the gap between the poor and the wealthy is irrelevant. Income inequality doesn't describe what's best for the most. If more income inequality produces a better outcome for the majority, it becomes very difficult to argue income inequality is, itself, bad. While the GINI index has certainly increased over the last fifty years in the US, real median household income and real personal consumption expenditur…

It's not irrelevant. It wasn't irrelevant when the same arguments were made in favor of feudal lords. People want to fairly compensated: the premise of "a day's pay for a day's work" is based on it. If the idle rich are vacuuming up profits that properly belong to the working class, you're asking for a revolution. There is absolutely nothing to suggest a causal relationship between massive wealth in the upper classes…

I don't recall what arguments were made in favor of feudal lords. And one could hardly call that system "capitalism," which is the subject of this thread. I maintain that the relevant objective should be the best outcome for the most. There is abundant objective evidence that capitalism is the economic system best suited to that objective, even if it produces varying degrees -- and sometimes large amounts -- of income inequality.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#676

Post by hackyhacky »

hcurtiss wrote: post #675
hackyhacky wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not irrelevant. It wasn't irrelevant when the same arguments were made in favor of feudal lords. People want to fairly compensated: the premise of "a day's pay for a day's work" is based on it. If the idle rich are vacuuming up profits that properly belong to the working class, you're asking for a revolution. There is absolutely nothing to suggest a causal relationship between massive wealth in the upper classes…

I don't recall what arguments were made in favor of feudal lords. And one could hardly call that system "capitalism," which is the subject of this thread. I maintain that the relevant objective should be the best outcome for the most. There is abundant objective evidence that capitalism is the economic system best suited to that objective, even if it produces varying degrees -- and sometimes large amounts -- of incom…

Feudalism is the end-state of capitalism, as I've already commented: it is the consequence of all capital (typically, arable land) ending in the hands of a select few (lords), who then derive income by renting it out (tenant farmer system). As a result, the lords themselves never contribute labor and exist only as parasites on a system dependent on laborers who have no opportunity to acquire capital.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#677

Post by hcurtiss »

hackyhacky wrote: post #676
hcurtiss wrote: post #675

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't recall what arguments were made in favor of feudal lords. And one could hardly call that system "capitalism," which is the subject of this thread. I maintain that the relevant objective should be the best outcome for the most. There is abundant objective evidence that capitalism is the economic system best suited to that objective, even if it produces varying degrees -- and sometimes large amounts -- of incom…

Feudalism is the end-state of capitalism, as I've already commented: it is the consequence of all capital (typically, arable land) ending in the hands of a select few (lords), who then derive income by renting it out (tenant farmer system). As a result, the lords themselves never contribute labor and exist only as parasites on a system dependent on laborers who have no opportunity to acquire capital.

I can think of no capitalist society in the last thousand years that has produced feudalism.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#678

Post by adampunk »

array_key_first wrote: post #559
crazygringo wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just a snarky way to describe all business investment that requires purchasing things made in the future. It's entirely normal. You could literally rewrite the quote to be about iron and about building railroads for trains and passengers that don't exist yet. See how silly that would be? Except the "profit that is mathematically impossible" part. That's just made up and false. It's entirely possible that we ar…

Didn't that actually happen with railroads? Like, there was a railroad bubble and lots of people lost a lot of money? It happened with the Internet, too, and the Internet is pretty useful I think.

Most of the panics of the 19th century would have been stopped by a strong central bank, deposit insurance and fiat currency.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#679

Post by hackyhacky »

hcurtiss wrote: post #677
hackyhacky wrote: post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feudalism is the end-state of capitalism, as I've already commented: it is the consequence of all capital (typically, arable land) ending in the hands of a select few (lords), who then derive income by renting it out (tenant farmer system). As a result, the lords themselves never contribute labor and exist only as parasites on a system dependent on laborers who have no opportunity to acquire capital.

I can think of no capitalist society in the last thousand years that has produced feudalism.

Then you aren't trying very hard or (more likely) pretending to not know history.

Every feudalist society began with the accumulation of capital. That's what land ownership is. It happened in mainland Europe and Britain, it happened in Russia, it happened in Japan. Any society with land-owning "lords".

How do you think they got to be lords? Hard work?

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#680

Post by ivewonyoung »

hackyhacky wrote: post #669
ivewonyoung wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism creates wealth only when people are able to keep a decent amount of what they make. As a thought experiment, if you tax people at close to 100% under capitalism and "distribute" it to people that don't work, what do you think will happen? Surely there is a disincentive to working hard as taxes approach high levels while resources are increasingly provided for free if one doesn't work. The Laffer curve and…

> Capitalism creates wealth only when people are able to keep a decent amount of what they make. As a thought experiment, if you tax people at close to 100% under capitalism and "distribute" it to people that don't work, what do you think will happen? That's one approach, but not the only one, to eliminating capitalism. > Surely there is a disincentive to working hard as taxes approach high levels while resources are…

https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/taxes-on-the-rich...
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