Discussing RAM prices

 So.....RAM is expensive. Like, REALLY expensive. Like 3x the price it used to be expensive. The RAM I got part of my microcenter bundle a year ago generally costed around $100 then. Now it costs $330. It's insane. And now Micron, one of the only three western RAM manufacturers is shuttering its customer division to maximize milking that AI hype train, baby! People are saying that the peasants' money isn't good enough any more, and now the consumer market is shrinking because, well, these companies have decided they can only produce so much, and AI data centers pay better. Screw us I guess. 

...*sigh*

Did I ever tell you how much I hate AI? Again, I dont hate the technology itself. I mean, I think it's heavily overrated given it is just a glorified chinese room experiment, but I actually ain't opposed to it itself. I know a lot of lefties are. DEY TUK R JERBS! Yeah, that's why we should have a UBI, dumb###es. But "pure ideology" keeps getting in the way for those guys so they just act like luddites and crap on the tech instead. There, I said it.

But at the same time, I do hate what AI is doing to various industries. Again, jobs apocalypse? I mean, here's how I see it, it took the great depression to get the New Deal, so if it takes mass technological unemployment to get to a UBI and break people out of this insufferable jobist hugbox, so be it. I don't care any more. I welcome it, because as long as the system hobbles along just good enough that it works, people will just cling to the old paradigms, while crapping on my ideas. I wish we could get UBI without introducing such a chaotic element to the economy that screws over so many people employment wise, but again, in a sane world, we'd welcome our AI overlords doing the work for us (assuming they're weak AI), and what really sucks is our social systems that reinforce a paradigm of work an employment to the point we literally beg for more enslavement because the only thing worse than having a job is not having one. Again, my ideas would fix that, or at least attempt to. So again, I'm fine with that stuff.

But with, say, the computing industry? I'm REALLY tired of this AI bubble. Nvidia doesn't give a crap about gamers any more and now low end GPUs are $250-300, which used to be the reasonable midrange models. Now RAM and SSDs are going haywire and Micron is leaving the consumer market. And people are starting to suggest this is the death of affordable computing. All because a bunch of rich people with WAAAY too much money have so much market sway the rest of us don't matter. Why care about consumers buying more RAM when businesses will buy up literally the entire supply of it, and pay better? It's disgusting. 

Honestly, this is where I get into my unified theory of everything about why the economy sucks, but it's income inequality. Fordism was designed with the idea that if you pay your employees decently, they'll buy your products. And that consumerist model is what drove the middle class through the 20th century. but decades of trickle down, with the working and middle classes being hammered from both ends both by rising costs and stagnating wages, have led to a situation where that once central middle class doesn't matter. They're peasants. They don't have money any more. The rich people have the money. So the rich people are all selling everything to each other while more and more people are being shut out from the market. And that's what's happening here.

How do we solve this? Tax the everloving crap out of the rich. My UBI would raise the top marginal tax rate in effect on those guys from 47% (including state and federal taxes) to 67%, and then with other ways of hitting them like wealth taxes, financial transaction taxes, corporate taxes, we fricking invest in UBI and other social safety net programs. You spread the money out, and the profit seeking companies will have to pursue a strategy of not just appealing to the top, but everyone else too. That's how you have a healthy economy. Because this isn't it.

Some people have also been talking IP laws. Like, apparently there are other manufacturers in China but OMG WE CAN'T LET THEM IN THE MARKET BECAUSE THEY STEAL IP. I'm sick and tired of hearing this argument. This might be a controversial opinion, but I think it's popular, but screw IP laws. I ain't saying we shouldn't have some, but most of them are just written in favor of the corporations. And we always have this weird derangement syndrome with China because ERMAHGERD OUR IP LAWS. 

Remember the trans pacific partnership. "IF WE DONT MAKE THE RULES CHINA WILL MAKE THE RULES!" Okay, so what rules do we suggest? Basically taking the American DMCA and enshrining it as the copyright law for the entire pacific rim. That's it, that's what our stake was in this as Americans. How does this benefit us? Blah blah blah job creation when businesses do good we do good. Except we don't. And now AI is doing a lot of the work artists used to do, another reason why people hate AI. But yeah, the entire mentality is if we give all of this money to corporations, it'll trickle down and it never does. IT NEVER DOES. Even before AI. If anything, those laws are anti consumer. They're basically government granted monopolies over certain ideas, concepts, or technologies that stop competition from copying those ideas and competing against the original creators. The argument is that they exist to encourage innovation, and that's the one thing I'll agree with pro IP people on. SOME level of IP is needed to reward companies for innovating, but wasn't the original copyright law like, 7 years or something? Like, okay, here's an exclusive monopoly over this idea for a few years, go, make your money. And then it expires, and then it opens up to everyone. Except then businesses lobbied to expand the laws to like life + 75 years or some crap and now they have a guaranteed monopoly forever. I guess you could argue that if creativity or invention is one's work, it's good to have financial security, but again, I literally want a UBI which gives ironclad financial protection for everyone for life. So...yeah. Some level of legal monopoly, but not exceeding say, 20 years, and then crap should just go open source. And in technology, that can be a LONG time. Even 7 years is probably sufficient given that's the average lifespan of a rather high end computer these days. 

But yeah. We need more competition in this space. That's one of the problems. As Gamernexus pointed out, in the past the memory industry acts like a cartel, and I know from history a lot of the time, they like to keep the supply low to keep prices high. And because no companies can legally enter the market to compete with them because of IP laws, well, that means consumers get screwed. That's the real nature of IP, it's pro business, but really, REALLY anti consumer, and as someone pro consumer, I understand IP laws only exist to reward innovation, and shouldn't exist on such a long time scale as it just causes market stagnation and anti consumer practices. 

So yeah, basically, what I'm saying is that the industry could benefit from competition. AMD and Intel are legally the only two companies that can make X86 chips. Why can't others do it? Copyright law! It's stupid! We got 3 RAM manufacturers with one now refusing to sell to mainstream consumers now. Why? Copyright law! Why does Nvidia have 90%+ market share? Again, IP laws. It's all this stupid intellectual property nonsense. So I say we loosen the laws like A LOT. Again, I'm not entirely ANTI IP. Like, okay, we need SOME level of IP, but I think depending on the industry and the medium those laws should top out at like 20 years and in some cases be less than that. If you can't make your money in that time frame, then that's YOUR problem. The system should reward INNOVATION, not stagnation. Today's innovations are tomorrow's staples that people rely on. Eventually, stuff that is for profit should enter the commons, and it should happen a lot sooner than life+75 years. Otherwise you got these companies sitting on tons of IP, having legal monopolies, and screwing consumers. 

So yeah...imagine if we had more than 3 RAM companies. Maybe new companies could only do DDR4 or something. That's fine for now. Some older respectable systems (like zen 3, alder lake, etc.) can run on DDR4. And new consumers who need more RAM could invest in DDR4 as a stopgap. And if the IP laws are like 7 years, well, DDR5 has been in the consumer space for 4 years? 3 years from now it would be fair game, baby! I mean, it would give us something, you know? 

But yeah, that's how we fix the computing industry and make it less anti consumer. Tax the rich, redistribute the proceeds, and then loosen IP laws.  Problems should sort themselves out from there. Bottom 80% has more money to spend, the top 20% has less, and there's more competition because we don't give people dynasty length IP protections.