> The incentive for one of the big players to undercut the other on cost even just a little bit to pick up market share is extremely lucrative.
I would argue that the DRAM price fixing scandal actually demonstrates that the industry operates like a cartel. During times of low demand and high supply, they will coordinate to protect prices, and then during spikes in demand (or alleged spikes in demand) they coordinate to keep the price from dropping.
> then during spikes in demand (or alleged spikes in demand) they coordinate to keep the price from dropping.
Why would they need to coordinate to keep the price from dropping during a spike in demand? a spike in demand will obviously not be expected to lower prices regardless of collusion
Yes, the industry is capacity limited so if there's a true spike in demand, prices will be high even absent any collusion. Especially if previous investment in expanding capacity has been lacking for many years.
If the industry is at capacity (which it plausibly is, especially since HBM memory is made in the same facilities) then no one can physically "undercut" anyone else. Collusion works by artificially restraining supply of some valuable good; if there was genuine collusion at play, we'd probably be seeing companies make less of the expensive HBM (to push its price even higher; note that patent and other IPR restrictions can in fact have this effect, to some extent) and more of the comparatively cheap DRAM!
>Why would they need to coordinate to keep the price from dropping during a spike in demand?
They wouldn't you're right.
But I would expect for them to follow the sorts of behavior we've observed in other markets - egg prices, gasoline prices. When a spike occurs, even if as brief as a lightning strike, they will only very slowly drop prices, when in a purely capitalistic world the price drop ought to be equally fast - suggestive that the slow drop is a mutual agreed upon collusion. After all, it's in all sellers best interest to game that "consumers temporarily agreeable to scalping prices" as hard as possible, Nash equilibrium or whatever amongst sellers. Many such cases and more vicious and brutal punishments for such behavior would serve to benefit the common man, the final point and benefit of capitalism
Of course. Price drops only really come through in response to competition.
Long term high prices invite further investment. Investment arrives and wants a quick return. Fastest way to return is to sell above cost but below market. Established players respond. Yada yada. I once met a former projector salesman who was unbelievably angry that someone, I think Acer, came along and destroyed the ~2000 AUD hard price floor that projectors once commanded, which dropped the whole market and his commissions along with it.
Even when collusion is government endorsed instead of outlawed, the same rules apply. See the bromkonvention. You need the new player willing to take the 10% margin to hurt the bottom line of the guy taking 150%.
>when in a purely capitalistic world the price drop ought to be equally fast
No the price can only drop as fast as supply and competition can catch up. For an industry with high input capex costs, thats extremely slowly. I would think some banks would be keen to take a risk on a new RAM fab based on the demands coming from AI, but also I would personally not take the bet that AI will be in this state in 5 years time. So assuming Banks and other lenders are as skeptical as I am, they wouldn't lend, or would request a bigger entity guarantee the loan.
>brutal punishments for such behavior
Brutal punishments for failing to ramp up production? Or for not lowering prices for no reason? I really dont understand
> when in a purely capitalistic world the price drop ought to be equally fast
That is not obvious. When demand is higher than supply, it is clearly good move to raise prices. But when demand is lower than supply it us not clear than lowering prices would raise volumes to compensate for lower margins.
> Following the plea agreement he was sentenced to 8 months in prison and fined US$250,000.[6] Lee was subsequently promoted to President of Samsung Germany in 2009, and then President of Samsung Europe in 2014.
Was in the room working for a hardware company during the offshoring phase of high tech manufacturing
Offshoring was 100% because of antitrust concerns. Copyright landlords and hardware manufacturers were concerned with Americans and their morals also having the skills to create endless competition.
American workers compensation prize was endless hustle jobs to distract them from political revolution.
The olds don't care if the kids end up unskilled knowledge serfs, fuzzy VHS tapes of outdated academics. The olds will be dead.
The problem with citing cartels and greed is...when prices are low, is it because the industry is momentarily altruistic? Did the industry wake up in late 2025 and think "holy shit, I've been being nice, but it's time to turn over a new leaf and start gouging people?"
I mean, don't get me wrong, they are greedy. But that's been true for years. What's changed is the market.
Agreed, this was an example of a similar phenomenon as to why you can’t trust self-id economic situation surveys. FWIW, we see similar effects in food security surveys with six-figure households being classified as food insecure.
I can definitely see a situation where a renting single-earner six-figure household in a place like SF may require assistance. It's all about the relative cost of living and financial situation, you can't really make ground pronouncements like this without ignoring the data.
> Single-person households making under $105,000 a year are classified as “low income” in three Bay Area counties by California’s Department of Housing and Community Development.
Are you saying that based on the semantics of "poor" vs "may require assistance"
vs "low income", or...? My comment has a link that's backed up by a government website.
If we look at $105k in San Francisco, minus federal, state, and local taxes, you're looking at roughly $6,400/month take home pay. If you make a budget out of that, you get $3,000 for rent, $800 for groceries, $250 for transit, $250 for medical, $150 for Internet, $600 for entertainment, $900 to retirement, and then finally $400 towards an emergency fund. If you do not have all those things in your monthly, you are poor. Now, there are certainly people who have less than that, and we could argue the semantics of being destitute, vs simply poor as colloquially defined terms, but the brackets that California’s Department of Housing and Community Development has are: acutely low, extremely low, very low, low, and moderate income.
We can use https://saul.pw/mag/wealth/ and say that even with a $105k/yr salary in SF, you're sitting at ↑3 or ↑4 or so, instead of using the emotionally loaded term poor if it would contribute to having a more thoughtful and substantive discussion.
don't they choose to live in SF because that's where they got the job? if they would move they would lose the job, because you generally can't take your job with you. (remote work being the exception)
if life in a place is expensive, and jobs in the same area do not pay enough to cover those expenses, then a person with that job in that area is poor.
I don't know whether you've been to San Francisco, but most (about all?) people who can get a 100k job in SF has quite a bit of mobility w.r.t. where they could live or who they work for.
I would love to see a sample of a handful of cases of these 100k earners who we should consider poor and in need of assistance to make ends meet.
how long would the commute be though. if you have to spend more than two hours commuting each day in order to afford living with the money you earn in SF then i'd see that as a problem.
Do you really believe there are a million destitute starving wet and unclothed children wandering around outside in the UK? Obviously there is some gross exaggeration going on, like most of those million are "cold" because they have worn out hand-me-down jackets and maybe go without dinner sometimes, mostly because their parents are junky pieces of shit who can't be bothered to open a box of slop for the kid even though they're on government programs to pay for the food.
That's funny. Because I lived in Peckham for a decade, and it's obvious to me that money is fucking fucking tight for a lot of working families.
It's obvious to me that zero-hour contracts have massively reduced labour power.
It's obvious to me that energy bills are crippling.
It's obvious to me that there has been galloping inflation over the last decade.
It's obvious to me that all food has become more expensive since Brexit, notably including fresh fruit and veg.
It's obvious to me that rent is increasing faster than wages, and that it's well over 50% of income for millions of households.
It's obvious to me that benefits can be speciously cut at any moment, by policy of "climate of hostility", leaving a recipient unable to cover bills for a month while they take time off work and chid care to bang their heads on the bureaucracy.
When I say "obvious", I mean it literally: these things are in plain sight. When you say it, what I understand you to mean is that you have strong preconceptions making your blind. Could you kindly not Marie Antoinette in my country, thanks ever so.
So? One million kids going without food, shelter or warmth is scandalous. It's scandalous if it's because welfare payments are too low. It's scandalous if it's because we're failing to identify neglect. Scandalous either way.
Why would a story about parental neglect be framed with discussion about Britain being one of the wealthiest countries, if not to deflect blame from neglectful parents onto society as a whole by insinuating that not enough money is spent?
I mean I agree that that's not the perceived thrust of the article. However, parental neglect is largely a product of the environment. Parents rarely just naturally don't care for their children. There's usually other factors; stress, debt, addiction, mental health issues etc... . These are things that a state can provide support with. It's very challenging to access good quality talking therapy, for example. And a well-funded welfare system could do more to identify children in neglected situations, and to work with the families to bring them out of it.
You'd have to sue them to enforce it. Good luck bringing a case against Qualcomm, perhaps one of the worst companies known for its intellectual property management
Why do I need to sue them, when it's me, who does things I think are granted in their licenses, that they try to forbid? Isn't that the other way around?
> At the end of 2023, Justin Garrison left AWS and roasted them on his way out the door. He stated that AWS had seen an increase in Large Scale Events (or LSEs), and predicted significant outages in 2024. It would seem that he discounted the power of inertia
Your comment is relying on that referenced inertia. Things will continue to function for a period of time, but there exists an inflection point at which they no longer function as previously.
The year or so after Musk took over was brutal. The influx of far-right pests, troll farms and porn bots was one thing, but the reliability went down the drain.
Musk effectively left his newest plaything a few months after the takeover and some events like him going in in a datacenter and disconnecting servers, that was when Twitter (I'll call it X when he acknowledges his daughter) started to stabilize again.
All that he seems to be doing these days at Twitter is messing around with the recommendation algorithm, override the decisions of what's left of moderation for his far-right friends and that's it. Oh and of course Grok/xAI or however it's called these days, but IIRC that's a separate corporate entity that just got shoehorned onto Twitter.
I haven't looked at the source too deeply yet to investigate how you implement the fork, but you state that it's a fork of Firefox, how do you plan to integrate fixes from Firefox (security, etc)?
It's implemented as a set of patches + new files for net new files I add myself, then to build it, the firefox source is downloaded and patched automatically - so bumping the underlying firefox version is generally very easy.
I'm currently actually tracking the firefox beta channel because the frequent small updates are so easy to do.
So, if a person is a traditionalist/conservative Orthodox Jew, who holds traditional “non-affirming” views on LGBT issues-do those views count as “eliminationist rhetoric”?
If a project decides it won’t welcome people who believe what almost all conservative/traditionalist Orthodox Jews believe (even if they keep those beliefs to themselves in project forums), it is essentially deciding that Jews (of that kind) aren’t welcome-isn’t that antisemitic, and in itself a species of eliminationism? (not with respect to Jews in general, rather with respect to Jews of that kind)
And the same point holds for “Sunni” or “Shi’a” or “Catholic” or “Protestant” or “Eastern Orthodox”
There's a clear difference between respecting people and hate speech; no project should welcome someone who contributes inappropriate insults and off-topic rants.
If that stereotypical Orthodox Jew wants to be a valuable community member, they can keep their hostile opinions to themselves, and nobody will consider them troublemakers.
Obviously they won't feel welcome because they realize that the majority would despise them as bigots if they expressed intolerable opinions, but hopefully it can become a reason to question their ideology.
I think the distinction is whether they express their views in project settings or in unrelated settings. If they express them in project settings, then I can’t see how that could possibly be on-topic, which makes it disruptive behaviour. But if they express them in unrelated settings, and then someone else brings that to the attention of the project-well, then it has nothing to do with the project, so the project should refuse to get involved
I would argue that the DRAM price fixing scandal actually demonstrates that the industry operates like a cartel. During times of low demand and high supply, they will coordinate to protect prices, and then during spikes in demand (or alleged spikes in demand) they coordinate to keep the price from dropping.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
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