alt.hn

5/21/2026 at 9:55:56 PM

The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

 https://davidoks.blog/p/ai-is-killing-the-cheap-smartphone

by d0ks

5/22/2026 at 12:12:32 AM

The headline here under-serves the article in my opinion: this is a fascinating, deep explanation of how the memory market works and why increased demand for HBM (used by big GPU racks) hurts the availability of wafers for DDR and LPDDR (used by laptops and phones).

by simonw

5/22/2026 at 7:58:19 AM

This also put a lot into perspective:

> these memory makers have learned a very particular lesson from the unforgiving history [deep drops in demand] of their industry: always leave demand unmet

I can't blame them for keeping some reserve demand ready so they keep having customers over the years.

by gblargg

5/22/2026 at 2:17:25 PM

I wonder if this is actually true in the long-term though. If they were to flood the market with lots of high capacity memory, then I think our programs would start using more memory too. As a result we might end up needing more memory faster compared to if they keep demand unmet.

Just consider that a chat application today takes more memory than a full 3D game with thousands of users (including chat) + the operating system used to ~20 years ago. If 128 GB of RAM were the norm then there's a chance we might expect to buy 128 GB of RAM too.

But I suppose it's really a question of how many dollars we expect to spend on memory rather than the specific amounts of memory.

by Aerroon

5/22/2026 at 4:41:08 PM

They are running fabs at 100% capacity. New fabs take many years to build, cost billions, and are out of date within a few process moves.

One cannot simply "flood the market" or the Chinese would have done it ages ago.

by FuriouslyAdrift

5/22/2026 at 5:42:43 PM

The Chinese memory makers have been sabotaged by USA, otherwise they would have already "flooded the market" and reduced the prices.

Even so, the production of cheaper Chinese DDR5 memory is increasing despite not being able to import all the tools and materials that are needed, so eventually they will benefit from this memory shortage that allows them to gain market share that they would not have gained otherwise.

by adrian_b

5/22/2026 at 8:45:21 PM

I'd like to learn more about how they've been sabotaged. What happened?

by ijidak

5/22/2026 at 9:07:37 PM

Google US semiconductor sanctions on China. Basically US (and allies pressed by US) aren't allowed to export their most cutting edge semiconductor tools and materials to China, so China can only make chips using older-gen tools on older process nodes than western-aligned competitors.

The other part of the sabotage is that western companies then have restrictions on what chips they're allowed to buy from China. IDK if RAM chips are also on that list.

by joe_mamba

5/23/2026 at 4:48:14 AM

Is any of that relevant to RAM? Half the DRAM is non-EUV and pretty much all DRAM has been stuck on 10nm for the last decade

by NavinF

5/24/2026 at 3:40:53 PM

That isn't "sabotage". Those are export restrictions.

China also runs adverse competitive industrial policies (e.g., industrial spying, flooding markets). Not making value judgment here.

You have quite the post history BTW.

by HFguy

5/23/2026 at 3:26:57 AM

I dont know if trade sanctions counts as "sabotage" but point taken.

by spunker540

5/26/2026 at 12:23:07 AM

Well it kinda counts as self-sabotage now, at least in effect. We shot ourselves in the foot so China couldn't compete as easily.

by FireBeyond

5/22/2026 at 8:13:21 PM

> and are out of date within a few process moves.

The fabs themselves (especially for memory) are being retooled for process moves. At least that's what micron has been doing.

But otherwise I agree. Micron has a new fab being built that was started around 2020. It's nowhere near finished.

by cogman10

5/22/2026 at 3:59:51 PM

For older hacker news readers who have lived through multiple RAM price spikes - it has held true for decades so far. Making memory is one of the most vicious tech markets to compete in.

by giobox

5/22/2026 at 9:24:05 PM

SSDs have spiked too. The 5tb backup spinning rust drive I bought for CAD$150 in September 2024 now retails for CAD$260.

by Scoundreller

5/22/2026 at 5:54:40 PM

The last one I remember was after the 2011 tsunami. I think things are worse these days because memory isn’t just a chip that you toss on a board anymore, it’s now frequently delivered in the same package as the CPU.

by jnovek

5/22/2026 at 8:24:51 PM

There was the 2007 spike following the Windows Vista release when a huge chunk of the corporate market had to buy new machines, there was also the Hynix fire in 2013, to pick a few recent ones. The 2007 spike was pretty rapidly killed by the famous global financial crisis that followed.

by giobox

5/22/2026 at 2:40:30 PM

I think that Slack's memory usage is "not bad" at ~300MB just because Discord exists, and somehow that seems to get into the gigabytes before even looking at a message.

by xnorswap

5/22/2026 at 3:58:48 PM

Too much of IRC has been lost to Discord :(

by Scoundreller

5/22/2026 at 6:09:49 PM

LiberaChat FTW!

by tracker1

5/22/2026 at 9:06:57 PM

Yeah everything is a browser app now gotta ship a whole browser engine even for a simple messaging app.

by daymanstep

5/22/2026 at 3:51:39 PM

"I wonder if this is actually true in the long-term though. If they were to flood the market with lots of high capacity memory, then I think our programs would start using more memory too. As a result we might end up needing more memory faster compared to if they keep demand unmet."

It's a gambler's ruin problem. Future profits are worth zero if you go out of business first.

by pjdesno

5/22/2026 at 3:12:03 PM

Lots of people have bought baseline 32/64 GB ram in their laptops for a long time (the last few laptops).

Applications can be lazy and grow to the amount of resources using, but the real need for maximum ram is using it for these new purposes.

by j45

5/23/2026 at 3:35:16 AM

We already had that. Memory prices got really low for a while. If there are too many companies with too much capacity they’re forced to race to the bottom until one of them collapses and reduces supply.

by Aurornis

5/23/2026 at 10:21:10 AM

Yup, see my previous boom-and-bust comment. In particular vendors will remember the price crash in 2022/23, the industry only recovered once the AI mania set in. There'd been another boom around 2020/21 when supply-chain panics meant hyperscalers bought up huge inventories, and just before that another low around 2019. So the current situation is standard pre-bust behaviour.

by pseudohadamard

5/22/2026 at 2:39:32 PM

[dead]

by picsao

5/22/2026 at 10:33:36 AM

I'm no expert analyst on this topic, but I'm worried this time might be different for them. China finally has the technological capability to challenge this time around and they will gobble up the unmet demand, allowing them to get more experience and more money to catch up.

by Ilaurens

5/22/2026 at 2:31:27 PM

> always leave demand unmet

And then allow small low cost manufacturers to get the rest of the market... like China has been doing this whole time.

by nashashmi

5/23/2026 at 12:00:13 PM

How does that work in practice though? There’s a central “RAM Oversight Council” that checks that no one sells too much?

by illiac786

5/23/2026 at 5:47:54 PM

There are only 3 memory manufacturers. They just quietly follow the same strategy. They learned not to talk about it from the last time they were fined for antitrust price fixing in the 2000s.

by zargon

5/23/2026 at 5:50:07 PM

ouch. That’s indeed a problem.

by illiac786

5/23/2026 at 10:15:14 AM

It's more than that though. Memory is a series of boom-and-bust cycles. Also, it costs around $15 billion and takes 2-3 years to build a fab. So if you were to start now, you'd have a pretty good chance of hitting the next bust right after spending $15 billion. It's not necessarily some sinister conspiracy, it's because execs are reluctant to be the ones to take the blame for setting fire to $15 billion. Looks kinda bad on your CV.

by pseudohadamard

5/22/2026 at 12:28:24 AM

This author has outstanding articles regularly

by cm2012

5/22/2026 at 6:42:02 PM

Agentic workflows and computer use. You still need regular servers for the agents to use.

by nullpoint420

5/22/2026 at 12:40:32 AM 

  The MacBook Pro on which I’m writing this piece needs memory that can keep up with a powerful processor running many programs at once: so it uses a standard called DDR, “double data rate,” which runs at a reasonably high voltage and offers high bandwidth. The processor on my iPhone is less powerful, so it needs less data at any given moment; but voltage matters enormously, since every milliwatt allocated to memory is drained from the battery. So smartphones use LPDDR, “low-power double data rate,” a variant of DDR engineered to operate at lower voltages.
The last MacBook Pro to use DDR was in 2019. All Apple Silicon Macs use LPDDR.

by aurareturn

5/22/2026 at 1:41:37 AM

Apple has been using LPDDR in the MacBooks since at least 2015. I remember it was one of the complaint of the 2016-2017 MacBook Pros. They were still using LPDDR3 because LPDDR4 wasn't ready for production yet (despite regular DDR4 being available). The 2018 MacBook Pro's finally switched to LPDDR4.

by windowsrookie

5/22/2026 at 1:38:27 AM

Maybe author is writing this from an Intel Mac!

by cherioo

5/22/2026 at 1:40:18 AM

Quite possible. He did say his “powerful” MacBook Pro CPU is faster than his iPhone.

I’m pretty sure even an iPhone 11 chip is more powerful than a 2019 MacBook Pro CPU in ST. An iPhone 15 is more powerful than the fastest 2019 MacBook Pro Intel CPU in MT.

I suppose he can be using a 2019 MacBook Pro or older and an iPhone 14 or older and compares only MT speeds.

by aurareturn

5/22/2026 at 7:08:34 PM

Powerfulness is measured in watts, it's why I keep my almost 400W 980ti around. :)

by NathanielK

5/22/2026 at 5:04:19 PM

The early 2005 PowerBook G4 was the last pro notebook with DDR surely, as the MacBook Pro your referring to seems to use DDR4.

by fredoralive

5/22/2026 at 12:57:56 AM

What was most surprising about all this to me was this line:

> So modern DRAM manufacturing is an extraordinarily complex and expensive process. Building a single state-of-the-art DRAM fabrication facility, a “fab,” will cost you about $15 to $20 billion; acquiring all the necessary equipment, like lithography tools and etching machines, will cost you another few billion; and then it’ll take you a few years of producing substandard and defective memory chips before your yields start to look competitive.

Extraordinarily complex and expensive! And yet I look at all the money being shuffled around between Nvidia and Google and Microsoft and Amazon and Apple and can't help but think that this is a tiny amount in comparison to what they're moving around on the stock market buying shares in each other.

Apple in particular has $20B in its couch cushions and is very vertically integrated and hardware-focused. Apple silicon is currently made by TSMC, but it seems they'd be a prime candidate to spin up their own memory fab.

I suppose the biggest problem to current executives at each company is the "few years" until that investment yields results, in the short term it's better to pay through the nose and buy GPUs with HBM at any price.

by LeifCarrotson

5/22/2026 at 1:53:50 AM

> it seems they'd be a prime candidate to spin up their own memory fab.

While Apple et al certainly have the money to tilt up their own fab, they're savvy enough to understand the memory market's long history of constant boom/bust cycles. I still remember the huge DRAM shortage in late 80s forcing my startup at the time to delay launching our new product for a year.

People assume Apple cares about vertically integrating cost but they're actually focused on integrating margin. Apple has billions in cash on hand and when they think about what to do with it, a key metric is Return on Capital, especially the margin that capital will generate. Since a core metric public companies are judged on is blended margin, they are looking for ways their bags o' cash can be put to work generating revenue at margins that will pull their current average margin up vs down.

Averaged over time, mainstream memory devices are historically one of the worst margin areas of the semi market. It's super expensive to tilt up a fab on a new node but once you do, turning the crank faster to make a lot more chips isn't too hard because mainstream DRAM tends to be quite uniform. So when a fab on a new node and/or RAM generation first opens, the margins tend to be pretty great. But as the node matures and/or the RAM generation goes from 'new' to 'commodity', competition heats up as everyone gets better at making more faster. Then they're tempted to maximize revenue by cutting prices until their mature fab is at 101% utilization. And that eventually drives margins down until someone's selling near cost to sustain their low-price-enabling volume - with occasional dips below cost when they get stuck holding excess inventory. That's why cash-rich companies with high margins like Apple are delighted to buy DRAM built with Other People's Money. As long as the DRAM market is under competitive pressure, Apple gets to shop their huge orders around to get the absolute lowest price on RAM that was built with other investor's low margin dollars.

by mrandish

5/22/2026 at 9:19:41 AM

> I still remember the huge DRAM shortage in late 80s forcing my startup at the time to delay launching our new product for a year.

That one was caused by manipulation by politicians, not market forces. Micron started a price war with Japanese memory manufacturers, the Japanese cut prices to compete, Micron sued them for "dumping". The saga ended with the 1986 U.S.–Japan Semiconductor Agreement, which, among other things, created production controls that limited the total dram supply. The level was set based on then current demand, and due to the rapid growth of demand at the time it almost instantly caused a massive global supply deficit.

The agreement also caused the rise of the South Korean memory industry, because the Japanese companies offloaded their now surplus equipment for cheap.

by Tuna-Fish

5/23/2026 at 4:00:12 AM

I worked in DRAM salvage from 1987-88. It became niche profitable to harvest 4116s from years-old boards (4164s if you could get them) and put them right back into 256K memory expansion boards for PC ATs.

256K bytes of RAM that way made us $128 in sales. I earned $3.35 an hour. Any inventory I accumulated went out the door next morning.

It was a brief moment, but it makes me wonder if we'll see refurbished memory in fashion next year.

BTW the company, OEM Parts, was one of the last great surplus shops, surviving until just recently. Probably there were still cardboard bins with my handwriting for all the TTL chips that weren't in demand.

by FarmerPotato

5/23/2026 at 11:19:15 PM

No joke, at my startup we had to inventory all our unused prototype hardware to see how much memory we could reclaim. Last month.

We are not launching our product this year. We can scrape together enough memory for shareholder and show floor demo units, but we have tens of thousands of people on the waiting list and we simply can't get that much memory at any price. What we can get would mean a $400 price bump.

What the hell do you even do?

by vitally3643

5/22/2026 at 1:36:42 PM

> That one was caused by manipulation by politicians, not market forces.

Funny how you then go on to explain it was market _actors_ that drove the politicians to act, but that this is nevertheless totally not an example of market _forces_.

by SiempreViernes

5/22/2026 at 1:48:35 PM

Market forces are usually meant in the spherical cow sense, not that the cow has politicians on their pockets.

Here it's useful to point out that free markets can't exist without an external force keeping them in check.

by actionfromafar

5/22/2026 at 8:35:56 AM

This has become like opec's best years. Only there's no cartel at least not openly.

But there's another key bottleneck. Even with all the money in the world, getting those machines that etch the RAM could be a multi year ration shop queue. And they're not making those companies every day!

by kopirgan

5/22/2026 at 9:16:10 AM

> This has become like opec's best years

Yes, except no DRAM maker is taking this as a signal to go deep into debt to double or triple capacity. It takes a minimum of 3+ years to dramatically increase capacity and no one expects this inflated demand bubble to last that long. Because they've seen this cycle before, they'll bump next gen capacity up a bit more than planned, maybe 15-25% because the current windfall profits are enough to build a buffer to absorb the hit if that excess capacity comes online in the next DRAM demand crash.

In the meantime, they'll just apologize to everyone for the "market conditions beyond our control" while banking as much of these crazy profits as they possibly can while it lasts. But deep down they remember they were starving just yesterday and know they'll be starving again tomorrow.

I understand why everyone's pissed at the "evil DRAM makers" but I also remember boasting about how I scored some crazy cheap RAM sticks not so long ago. None of us were shedding tears when they were selling at a loss just to survive.

by mrandish

5/22/2026 at 9:40:35 AM

> Yes, except no DRAM maker is taking this as a signal to go deep...

Incorrect. CXMT is taking this as a signal to open new fabs, create new products, develop new silicon manufacturing techniques, and enter the consumer market worldwide (except USA).

by officialchicken

5/22/2026 at 1:31:04 PM

CXMT is a company with heavy state backing and control that started its current trajectory years and years ago. It has infinity money and isn’t allowed to go bankrupt. CXMT is reading political signals (Beijing wants indigenous AI up and down the vertical) as much as market.

by landl0rd

5/22/2026 at 7:12:11 PM

> CXMT is a company with heavy state backing and control that started its current trajectory years and years ago. It has infinity money and isn’t allowed to go bankrupt.

This also describes the U.S.A. steel industry. "Heavy state backing" and "not allowed to go bankrupt" often result in particularly terribly-performing industries. If anything, it's notable that China seems to buck that particular trend.

by nerdsniper

5/22/2026 at 6:21:53 PM

Not sure "only the Chinese model can solve the normies pain" is a great look.

Lately consumers are told capitalism is cheap TVs, phones, and computers while housing, healthcare, education, energy, and food climbed further out of reach. The "bread" part of bread and circuses has shrunk dramatically, "but at least you're getting cheaper circuses" is what they've been saying.

Now you're saying only a heavily state-directed Chinese model is still willing to aggressively finance new fabs and meet demand to provide that? "Capitalism demands we don't expand capacity and don't meet demand' is kinda a tough sell after capitalism has been sold as expanding access. "Consolidation, maximal extraction, shareholder preservation, and AI" isn't going to be a winner. I get it makes business sense and wouldn't be a big deal in the past, but the rapidly changing dynamics hitting nearly every part of daily life across the entire economy feels destabilizing.

We're down to wearing dystopian sci-fi level cheap clothes, can't afford chips/sodas, candy/sweet treats have been enshitified to no longer be fulfilling, we can't afford to call an ambulance. Media is polarizing instead of mass media calming. Heck thrift stores are becoming unaffordable to the low end as the middle now resorts to them.

"You don't have the foods you are used to, decent clothing, shelter, health, or social cohesion but you have a sweet 6 year old phone and flock cameras keeping you safe". Jesus it feels... not good. Even cyberpunk dystopia understood you needed to at least jack people into something.

by _DeadFred_

5/23/2026 at 2:28:19 AM

> Lately consumers are told capitalism is cheap TVs, phones, and computers while housing, healthcare, education, energy, and food climbed further out of reach.

Who says this? The latter are heavily regulated and not exposed to market forces, which is why they didn’t get cheaper, unlike TVs etc.

by MrBuddyCasino

5/23/2026 at 7:40:41 PM

The libertarians?

Cato https://www.cato.org/publications/trade-buys-goods-services-...

Cato “One of the big reasons Americans’ inflation-adjusted wages have climbed in recent decades is that the exorbitant prices of things such as housing, health care, and education have been offset by significant declines for tradable goods such as toys, clothing, and consumer electronics.” https://www.cato.org/commentary/cheap-talk-cheap-stuff

The Adam Smith types: https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/economics/economic-nonsense-2... "Many consumer goods follow the same trajectory; most recently smartphones have done so. Far from being left behind, the poor are pulled along by the progress that initially caters for the rich."

by _DeadFred_

5/23/2026 at 10:00:28 AM

The result of equivalent deregulation would be slums and shantytowns. But hey, cheap rent! I don't think this is s desirable outcome either.

Also, from the article:

> In other words: you can buy a computer thousands of times more powerful than the best consumer device from 40 years ago, for something like 0.3 percent of the price. No other good in history has experienced a decline in cost on that scale: poor people can now carry around in their pockets computers many orders of magnitude more powerful than what the richest slice of the world’s population could afford a few decades ago.

That extreme level of efficiency increase is something very specific to computers and not something translatable to other areas of the economy.

by xg15

5/22/2026 at 6:28:59 PM

> Incorrect.

Okay, you got me. I was reflecting the prudent way long-term players generally interpret the market. But from time to time external macro-economic and/or geopolitical factors may shift. Those changes may persist over time or eventually swing back like tides. Other times someone thinks they've got a new angle or a new technology (the RDRAM format was a notable attempt). Occasionally, the people who always say "But this time it's different" are lucky enough to actually say it one of the rare times it IS different.

Time will tell if CXMT's gambit will pay off. Even if it doesn't maybe their state sponsors will absorb the losses for other strategic reasons.

by mrandish

5/22/2026 at 10:55:57 AM

Isn’t that the point?

Everyone knows the commodity market (outside HBM) is going to be margin crushed within a few years… by CXMT, demand swings, and so on.

So nobody cares to fully meet the demand today. They are perfectly happy telling customers (those not willing to sign a 10 year contract paying up front at least) to go pound sand.

They don’t even need an OPEC like arrangement. They are effectively perfectly coordinated already in dismissing customers.

by MichaelZuo

5/22/2026 at 3:18:55 PM

Yes, there are a bunch of bizarre comments in here. "Why aren't they rushing to make more fabs? Don't they know China is using this moment to the enter the market in a big way?" Yes, they do! And building more fabs would make that worse. The last thing you want to do before a state-backed player enters the market in a boom cycle is load up on debt to produce more capacity just before the bust.

by Analemma_

5/22/2026 at 3:56:22 PM

It's a bit surprising many here are referencing the memory supply cycles without mentioning this revolutionary new application for memory people call AI. It'd be like talking about weather cycles and climate without mentioning global warming. Just like the planet is not going to get colder on average than it was for the foreseeable future, we're not going to need less memory for the foreseeable future.

China is trying to be vertically integrated, completely independent of outside influences and own the future supply/means of production. Memory and chips are piece of their larger plan. In any event, whatever China brings online will be absorbed - imagine a future where people's home computer has 100 to 1000GB of RAM in one variety or another. Folks are going to want better chips and more memory for years to come, supply will be absorbed.

by state_less

5/22/2026 at 6:53:44 PM

> this revolutionary new application for memory people call AI.

Most analysts think LLMs will elevate the long-term base RAM demand level. I mentioned 15-25% above prior projections without AI, which I think everyone agrees is highly likely. That's actually a lot because it's an overall market number and RAM goes lots of places other than PCs, servers and high-end mobile (depending on how you segment, 25% overall could be in the neighborhood of doubling PC, server, high-end mobile demand).

Above that range analyst estimates diverge. Some are more bullish, and a few are much more bullish. But everyone's error bars get much wider when the numbers go over 30% overall. It's hard to tease out exactly how much of the current demand bubble will persist in the long-run. Clearly, the current market is distorted by short-term dynamics but which part is base demand and which distortion?

How much consumer AI compute will be on-device vs aggregated in load-balanced clouds? How much RAM will that kind of compute require? Will the market find it's more efficient to consolidate around two or three mega-datacenters or will each frontier lab (and geopolitical block) continue drag racing each other to tie-up future RAM (as much to keep it away from competitors as for their own needs). I don't know. I've been watching this game as an interested bystander for several decades and I wouldn't bet too much of my own money on the most bullish estimates.

by mrandish

5/23/2026 at 1:13:54 AM

I think there will continue to be latent demand from PC, server and laptop users who have put off purchases as hyperscalers skip to the front of the wafer line with large outlays of spending for chips and RAM. This would likely extend out beyond the datacenter demand which analyst are pretty confident will be in place for the next 2 to 3 years, looking at Nvidia estimates alone.

I'm concerned that the regular Joe/Jane won't be getting a GPU or a system upgrade for some time. And then you have people in Africa and elsewhere who can't afford new phones.

There probably is some distortion in that the top spenders aren't terribly against cornering the RAM market and forcing everyone to pay more for local AI due to higher RAM, GPU and CPU costs while squeezing people through their APIs to access AI services, but that's an expensive gambit that depends on local models not getting good enough and frontier models to continue to get better while requiring large swaths of memory and compute, keeping consumers demanding the latest models from the APIs. But if the supply increases and people have more access to RAM, GPUs and CPUs, we'll likely see more local model usage and people doing all sorts of creative work, even training their own models.

I'm bullish, not so much of an overzealousness as having witnessed so many of these computing explosions to not doubt it much anymore. We'll collectively find all sorts of creative uses for these wafers and tech. If I were to bet on it, I'd simply buy a basket of stocks and hold, riding out the noise - nothing too surprising there.

by state_less

5/22/2026 at 5:02:52 PM

If this future is so certain… where are the customers (non HBM) willing to sign a 10 year contract paying up front?

Even taking bank loans at a 10% rate to pay (maybe even 15%) upfront would still make sense.

by MichaelZuo

5/22/2026 at 7:54:28 AM

To reframe your great comment:

Is it fair to conclude that DRAM is basically a commodity that can be specified well enough by a set of parameters?

If so it won’t allow you to get any competitive advantage in your products and thus wouldn’t be a business you want to be in as Apple.

by baxtr

5/22/2026 at 8:39:22 AM

Yes, that's what I meant by "Mainstream DRAM". The basic parameters are specified by standards like JEDEC, so the most common types can be used in many systems thus reach high volumes. This can be less true for specialized RAM like HBM or the highest performance grades.

by mrandish

5/22/2026 at 8:46:08 AM

The competitive advantage is having access to it.

by RealityVoid

5/22/2026 at 10:29:37 AM

The only reason I can see Apple do this is if it enables them to sell entry level devices with vastly more ram than the competition can afford. Say entry level MacBook Pro with 256GiB ram to facilitate running frontier level local models. If that is an edge they want to have.

by spockz

5/22/2026 at 10:50:30 AM

In what world would 256GB of RAM be “entry level”?

by sokoloff

5/22/2026 at 1:35:01 PM

In the same world 8GB used to be unfathomably huge not that long ago?

Hell, an 8GB hard drive was unfathomable when I was a kid in the 90s. I remember getting a 30 megabyte drive for our Mac LC.

by ceejayoz

5/22/2026 at 3:23:15 PM

The first computer I ever used had 512K, which was a great deal back then, and by the time I was old enough to learn to type it had 10MB disk too.

My childhood best friend and neighbour had the same kind of computer except they only had something like 384K of memory and I tried to convince them their computer was broken when it didn't count up all the way.

by trollbridge

5/22/2026 at 6:09:22 PM

> The first computer I ever used had 512K

Mine had 4K of RAM and an 800 KHz CPU - and I was living in the future, man. No way I could use that much memory. After all I had to type in whatever program I wanted to run every time I turned it on. Then I got a manual audio cassette recorder and thought "Woah, I don't think it gets better than this!"

by mrandish

5/23/2026 at 5:12:43 AM

My first (vic20) had 3.5KB of ram. When I added a whopping 8KB memory expansion cartridge, I genuinely wondered if I could possibly get any of my BASIC programs to use it all.

And when I upgraded from tapes to the 1541 floppy drive (5.25" floppies), it was like "thats it - I have INFINITE possibilities now"

Simpler times :)

by isr

5/23/2026 at 7:49:27 AM

> the 1541 floppy drive

Ah, the legendary 1541. We used to joke it was the only floppy drive on any 8-bit micro that was actually slower than some dial-up modems. It wasn't actually slower, but it was really slow compared to most other 8-bit computer's drives (unless you added after-market accelerators).

by mrandish

5/23/2026 at 11:59:43 PM

Crazy fact: I found out recently that the 1541 had the same 6502 CPU as the Vic20, but was clocked at a HIGHER speed.

Who knew :)

by isr

5/23/2026 at 12:20:48 PM

> Then I got a manual audio cassette recorder and thought "Woah, I don't think it gets better than this!"

That's not how I remember it. By the time we got data cassettes, we knew very well that floppies were the future.

by jech

5/22/2026 at 2:12:33 PM

And that Mac LC only had a max of 10MB of ram.

by mmmlinux

5/22/2026 at 3:20:45 PM

The same world where a MacBook Pro G4 12" came base level with 256MB of RAM.

The same world where a classic Mac came with 128KB of RAM.

We might someday live in a world where entry-level is 256TB of RAM.

by trollbridge

5/22/2026 at 1:06:50 PM

That is the timeline I want to live in. Probably.

by giwook

5/22/2026 at 10:57:48 AM

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.

by m4x

5/22/2026 at 1:50:16 PM

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 microwaves, cars, etc.

One of the reasons Intel fell behind is that they couldn't give access to their competitors for business reasons, and therefore could never scale as high as TSMC could.

There are many other reasons, but accounting is a huge one. Unless there is a huge ROI or something else we don't otherwise know, I don't see Apple adding such expensive deprecating assets onto their books as chip fabs.

by hylaride

5/26/2026 at 3:44:11 PM

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".

by FarmerPotato

5/22/2026 at 7:09:52 PM

The point of my GP post was that due to being one of the world's biggest and longest-term buyers, Apple is already paying very close to actual manufacturing costs + amortized capex because RAM is an undifferentiated commodity. Owning the factory themselves doesn't reduce the actual manufacturing cost + amortized capex that Apple would have to pay their own factory. Apple is already buying RAM at the lowest possible margins. It's similar math to deciding whether to spend your own cash or get a loan. If the loan's interest rate is low enough, it's better take the loan and put your cash to work where it can return a higher margin. And at the incredibly low margins Apple pays for RAM, keeping that cash in long-term investments will actually earn more money than putting it into building RAM factories.

If Apple could go back in time 3.5 years and decide to build their own factory, that would put them in a great position today. But deciding to do it now won't increase their supply 3.5 years from now more than just increasing their long-term orders with existing suppliers. Those suppliers will start building new factories based on Apple's increased orders and they'll do it faster and cheaper than Apple can because they don't have to build some factories in the U.S. for political reasons or worry as much about environmental regulation, permitting and ensuring Apple employees in Penang get benefits similar to employees in Cupertino.

by mrandish

5/22/2026 at 8:01:44 PM

Isn't one of the points of the article that memory manufacturers leave demand unmet for their own financial safety? In which case, nobody (including Apple) is paying close to manufacturing costs. There isn't enough memory to go around and prices are extremely inflated.

You're talking about the "best" things Apple could do with their money, in terms of investment returns, but I think that misses the point that Apple literally can't buy enough memory at any price.

by m4x

5/22/2026 at 9:59:53 PM

> that misses the point that Apple literally can't buy enough memory at any price.

They can't buy enough today. I think I already explained this as well as I can in my second paragraph above. You seem to not be appreciating that every decision in this business has a 3.5+ year latency. And 3.5 years ago when Apple made the decisions they're living with now, Micron was selling their furniture (euphemistically speaking). Sinking billions into building RAM fabs would not only have gotten you laughed out of the boardroom, Apple shareholders would have rioted (for all the logical reasons I laid out in my prior two posts). The only scenario where the prudently balanced decision Apple made to not vertically integrate RAM manufacturing looks bad is the very unlikely scenario that actually happened this one time - but that 'bad look' is only temporary because the situation will probably look different 12 months from now (which is less than a third-of-a-fab-decision away)).

Back when I first became a strategist for a public F500 tech company whose products you probably use often, a very wise man took me to dinner and counseled me to never post mortem my decisions on the outcomes, but only on the decision process. In other words, knowing what I knew when I made the decision, did I choose the option most statistically likely to get the desired result - regardless if it worked or failed that time? In highly uncertain games, some bets don't pay off. In my work, if 60% of my decisions came out positively, I'd have been the greatest of all time (they weren't that quite that high). If strategists don't think this way we end up leading our companies to doom by "chasing black swans" (aka unlikely outlier outcomes).

> memory manufacturers leave demand unmet

That's not their plan or desire - it's just the inevitable result of trying to predict both future demand and future capacities of unbuilt fabs on new nodes (every new node is an adventure). Both are rough estimates with bell-curve probabilities and wide error bars. You might imagine the Chief RAM Strategist drags the center of the bell curve so the big bump in the middle is right over their best guess of what the fab yields and market demand will actually be three years from now - perfectly slicing the odds in the probabilistic middle. But they don't. Instead, being a smart, experienced strategist, they slide the bell curve a little bit to the low-side - because very profitably selling everything you can possibly make and regretting the 5 or 10% of demand you left unmet is a far, FAR better (and more survivable) problem to have than sitting on 5 or 10% unsold excess capacity from expensive fab space you paid to build but can't monetize. That extra capacity will often force you to take lower margins on ALL your capacity to ensure you sell through the extra 10%. This is how you speed run becoming an ex-strategist, sometimes of an ex-company.

In short, being wrong on the low side is the best kind of wrong you can be. But being wrong on the high side is the worst kind of wrong, and it's not linear. Every extra percent you go over costs significantly more than the last. If they do their job perfectly, it looks to consumers like "manufacturers leave demand unmet." If they do their job less than perfectly but pretty well, it looks like "RAM's too damn expensive and the idiots created a shortage - what were those morons thinking?" If they do their job catastrophically it looks to consumers like "Woohoo, RAMs dirt cheap. Look at me! I've got so many sticks I'm bathing in them like Scrooge McDuck!"

by mrandish

5/22/2026 at 10:49:49 PM

I'm not sure what you think I'm saying, but in case it needs clarifying, it is not that Apple should have built fabs 3.5 years ago, or today, or at any other point in time.

What I did say is that in a hypothetical world where Apple did invest in their own fabs, they'd have much better access to memory and could be selling machines with vastly more memory than their competitors today. Should they be doing this? I'm making no statement either way.

> a very wise man took me to dinner and counseled me to never post mortem my decisions on the outcomes, but only on the decision process

I appreciate this wisdom on one hand, but on the other it's comically misguided. You have no way to evaluate the decision process if the outcomes are not considered. Don't post mortem your decisions in a way that leads to self-blame or paralysis, but certainly post mortem them to see whether the process was suboptimal.

In this case, any board laughing at the idea of investment in memory 3.5 years ago should instead have been looking more closely at likely memory needs over the then-near-future, given the quite obvious upcoming demand for GPU memory. There's no magic bullet and they wouldn't have been able to make perfect decisions regardless, but clearly the process they followed at that time was suboptimal.

by m4x

5/23/2026 at 7:59:51 PM

> What I did say is that in a hypothetical world where Apple did invest in their own fabs, they'd have much better access to memory and could be selling machines with vastly more memory than their competitors today.

Okay, I understand your point. I've always taken it as given that vertically integrating DRAM fabs was one of many options available to any very large manufacturer with sufficient cash flow. However, I think your point was inaccurate. If Apple invested in their own fabs, they would not have better access to memory today, unless they ALSO did something quite irrational and overbuilt their fab's capacity by a factor of 2X or more. In terms of greater capacity, at Apple's massive scale of consuming more than a "one fab" amount of output, owning their own fabs vs ordering from fabs owned by others still requires pre-ordering their expected RAM needs ~3.5 years in advance. Regardless who owns the fab, no fab can make significantly more chips without that long lead time. The difference in lead time, total capacity and margin between a self-owned fab you started building 3.5 years ago and "pre-buying most of a fab's output 3.5 years in advance" is minimal enough to be virtually immaterial. This entire area of strategic analysis is broadly called "Build vs Buy", but it has more to do with financial and tax metrics around cash on hand, capex, amortization and return on capital. The problem we're focused on here is lead-time or supply elasticity (eg how quickly can we get a lot more DRAM than we thought we'd need and at what cost delta). And, at this scale, those dynamics aren't fundamentally changed whether you Build or Buy.

> Should they be doing this? I'm making no statement either way.

Given the dynamics, I assumed you weren't just stating that acting irrationally is always an option, but that doing so was a rational option strategically. But it's not. Even in your scenario it wouldn't have changed anything UNLESS you imagine Apple of 3.5 yrs ago was psychic and built two fabs for every one they actually expected to need - but that would have been insane. And if they were that insane, they could have accomplished very nearly the same thing by pre-buying 2X their expected RAM needs from their 3rd party suppliers. At Apple's scale, 3rd party suppliers are what we call 'virtually captive'. You're such a large customer, you're practically funding the supplier's capex. This is a serious strategic problem for such suppliers (but great for Apple).

> I appreciate this wisdom on one hand, but on the other it's comically misguided. You have no way to evaluate the decision process if the outcomes are not considered.

Yes, of course you consider the outcome as one data point. But I said you don't assess by the outcome, meaning we don't judge the decision process's ultimate validity only (or even mostly) by the outcome. It's just one element. The reason is that for highly uncertain decision spaces with unknowable key externals, you can have NOT just: 1. Optimal decision-making / successful outcome, and 2. Sub-optimal decision-making / failed outcome but ALSO: 3. Optimal decision-making / failed outcome, and 4. Sub-optimal decision-making / successful outcome. Understanding the ramifications of this matrix is crucial - especially the last two.

A key example, is the hypothetical where a crazy strategist consults an astrologer, pre-commits to 2X the projected need for fab output (whether by building/owning fabs directly or just indirectly by pre-buying one or more fab's entire output in advance). If the astrologer says "build 2X what you think you'll need" and there's an unforeseeable confluence of events 3 years later that causes a worldwide shortage of RAM, then if you overweight the outcome in assessing if your strategic planning process is optimal, you'd always just do what the astrologer says. In short, in high-risk domains, sometimes a sub-optimal decision-making process can randomly result in a successful outcome - but that's a spurious signal.

If I'm the Apple VP responsible for DRAM supply chain strategy, the question I might ask my demand-side forecasting team is to run a post mortem study of whether any data sources might have existed at the time we locked in our DRAM capacity commit which could have predicted the DRAM bubble with sufficient certainty that we would have made a different decision back then. However, I'm virtually certain the answer is "No". At Apple's scale and longevity, their teams on this are already very good. If the answer was "Yes", they'd already have done it. I understand you think "this AI thing was knowable 3.5 years ago" but hindsight is always 20/20. If you haven't done such rigorous forecasting and post mortem analysis in complex, high-risk domains with thousands of variables, not just 'known unknowns' but many 'unknown unknowns', with billions of dollars at stake - it's difficult to appreciate the full scope of the challenge. The trick is the question is not just a true/false binary of "AI will cause a run on DRAM." The real question is multiple choice and the choices are numbered 1 through 5,000 (at least). And "AI will cause a run on DRAM" is just 'possible future scenario' #3,462.

by mrandish

5/22/2026 at 11:16:55 AM

Why would they sell a device with 256GB of RAM as the lowest-spec device rather than making 8 32GB or 16 16GB machines as their entry-level?

Apple’s not exactly famous for their low pricing on spec upgrades nor competing based on being the price leader…

by sokoloff

5/22/2026 at 12:52:28 PM

If 256GB of RAM enables them to run on-device AI models that (for reasons) are a key feature differentiator?

Personally, I think there's no way memory heavy inference moves on-device (vs cloud) due to the economics, but it's not impossible technology + platforms go that way for currently unforeseeable reasons.

by ethbr1

5/22/2026 at 2:58:38 PM

I think there’s a realistic chance consumer inference moves on-device. I think it really depends on marketing.

My non-tech friends and family would probably be served perfectly fine by local models today, if they had a working web search tool. Their queries are often “soft” and don’t have an exact answer. My mom and aunt used it to pick a hairstyle, my mom used it to get an image of what a room would look like with particular drapes in it, etc. Stuff I think mid-sized local models like Gemma or smaller Qwens could do without issue. They just don’t have a device that will run them.

Businesses won’t move. They need a huge context so they can stuff a bunch of Confluence pages in it and 300 tools and it needs to read an entire codebase and yada yada. The hardware depreciation and electricity will probably make it a net zero or even cost more than paying for API access.

by everforward

5/22/2026 at 3:05:32 PM

The economic argument in favor of cloud inference: higher utilization is always going to have a ROI for inference hardware.

But maybe that hardware becomes so commoditized that it's not difficult to obtain / stuff in a box.

by ethbr1

5/22/2026 at 5:30:45 PM

My argument is predicated on the assumption that mainstream hardware manufacturers will copy the way Apple and Framework have made system memory usable for inference.

In that world, a) we are already at or close to having enough memory in local devices to do inference locally, and b) that memory isn't inference-specific and can be utilized for other things. Most devices come with enough memory to do some level of inference, and some come with plenty (eg a gaming desktop probably has 32GB+ of RAM in it).

You aren't going to run Kimi on it, but I think the reality for a lot of consumer inference is that it doesn't need to be. It's going to be a lot of things that are soft, and easily answered by a search API, so the LLM really just needs to be able to skim and summarize. Going a step further, we may even see some kind of hybrid approach where a local OpenRouter kind of thing decides whether the task is soft enough to do locally with models that fit in RAM or if it needs to be farmed out to a PaaS provider.

by everforward

5/22/2026 at 1:08:00 PM

Right. I’m not arguing that Apple wouldn’t offer a 256GB model if they could make money doing it; I’m puzzled as to why they wouldn’t offer several lower-spec models as the entry-level into and then progressive upgrades within that line, since only some people need that 256GB feature differentiator of running frontier-level models on their MacBook Pro.

by sokoloff

5/22/2026 at 3:04:02 PM

And I'm saying, if 256GB of memory is a requirement for running customer-expected local models (and local models are preferred for some reason).

by ethbr1

5/22/2026 at 3:24:19 PM

Think past on-device inference... imagine what on-device training could do. And that would need a lot of RAM.

by trollbridge

5/22/2026 at 11:46:26 AM

And yet, Apple had to drop base configs from their lineup. They weren't selling $599 Minis at cost. They could take someone over and inflict damage on competition.

by stasomatic

5/22/2026 at 1:11:38 AM

And what happens if the market settles back down or the leading memory tech pivots away from what you invested all this capital and time chasing?

You'd need a very strong, very particular forecast to make such a costly bet. And conversely, it may say something about their internal forecasts that they're not making the bet.

by swatcoder

5/22/2026 at 1:30:34 AM

> And conversely, it may say something about their internal forecasts that they're not making the bet.

Idk if you can read into it that way.

All these companies have cafeterias but you don't see them investing into farmland so they can get their bananas a few cents cheaper.

But also why bother spending 20B on a fab when you can invest 20B into TSMC and let them build the fab?

by lesuorac

5/22/2026 at 6:28:40 AM

Because having every major company in America’s eggs in one basket is as insane as it gets, especially with China bearing down on Taiwan.

by dyauspitr

5/22/2026 at 6:37:16 AM

That’s an entirely different framework, one that doesn’t concern investment decisions of Apple or Google.

I do agree that USA and EU could foot the bill and subsidize a couple billions in such industrial infrastructure, perhaps taking back a cut of the profit rather than privatizing all of it.

But they’re not doing it, or are making pitiful efforts at that

by eecc

5/22/2026 at 9:10:52 AM

It's just an insane amount of money to invest with the long-term effect of you oversaturating the chip market.

Throwing 20B into a chip fab in the EU would be politically a very unpopular move, if it's done as a public company or worse directly state owned, you'll royally piss of Taiwan, South Korea and China and it's likely they'd retaliate by e.g. subsidising their auto industry more in order to give the death blow to the EU auto industry.

by Maxion

5/22/2026 at 10:15:15 AM

They'd more likely split themselves laughing.

The solution to threats to global economic integration is to address the threats to global economic integration. It's not to cannibalise our own full-employment high value economies, by diverting enormous capital and labour into duplicating vast swathes of lower value jobs we don't actually have the work force for anyway, just so we can pay unaffordable prices for the resulting goods.

We probably both agree it's an absurd fantasy, and the people trying to make stuff like this happen are implementing policies that ensure that it won't, such as putting tariffs on the inputs they need to build out this domestic manufacturing capacity in the first place.

by simonh

5/22/2026 at 11:26:43 AM

> The solution to threats to global economic integration is to address the threats to global economic integration.

So permanent world peace. That sounds much easier.

by sarchertech

5/22/2026 at 1:41:41 PM

Amd it isn't only geopolitical threats we have to worry about. The world's hard disk supply disappeared with a tsunami in Thailand. Taiwan is vulnerable to those and earthquakes. Efficiency and robustness are at odds and we are leaning too far towards efficiency. Even if China hadn't been so large it could absorb the costs of capturing the world's entire manufacturing base with subsidies, centralizing that much has risks completely apart from politics.

by galangalalgol

5/22/2026 at 3:05:15 PM

Thailand was flooding, not tsunamis.

by lmz

5/22/2026 at 2:40:25 PM

It’s one thing when toys, pots, furniture etc. is made somewhere else. It’s a completely different thing when your high tech is manufactured there.

by dyauspitr

5/22/2026 at 10:59:12 AM

The issue with national investment in the EU is that it might be attacked as state sponsored activity where one can complain that public money are used for market moves or if it is EU wide initiative, then the governments will squabble whose economy will get the money. The framework is not mature enough to allow for delegating to someone to solve the problem for everyone and to balance the beneficiaries in the long term.

by gostsamo

5/22/2026 at 2:28:47 PM

It shouldn't be a politically unpopular move. Other countries can get pissed off, but those other countries also cannot guarantee that Europe will get chips when times are tough. If you want to build modern drones and missiles you need access to a large amount of computer chips. In a crisis will those still be available to Europe?

by Aerroon

5/22/2026 at 9:14:59 AM

Probably for strategic reasons.

Mainland China is one concern.

Another is AI being the commodity compliment to semiconductors.

by dnnddidiej

5/22/2026 at 6:27:32 AM

Meta spent more on the Metaverse, it’s all the most certainly something they can afford to take a hit on and they won’t because memory and CPU usage is only going to go up from this point on.

by dyauspitr

5/22/2026 at 11:58:39 AM

> And conversely, it may say something about their internal forecasts that they're not making the bet.

It says they are no longer worried about being punished for monopolistic behavior and have bet a “ballroom donation” will exempt them from another round of punishment.

I feel like folks around here have already forgotten about the last time the memory suppliers quietly agreed to keep raising prices and stop competing with each other.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal

by tw04

5/22/2026 at 10:34:16 PM

I’m of the (possibly unpopular) opinion that ~80% of these new data centers are never going to see the light of day.

None of the economics or supply needs of these things make any sense. The water is generally not there, electric transformers are next to impossible to acquire. I just read about one in Utah that’s supposed to be 2.5x the size of Manhattan?? https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/933687/u...

I could be wrong, but I think a lot of this was planned by software guys who are used to brute-forcing their way through “impossible” problems. But those were software problems, where the limits are mostly theoretical. In the world of atoms, limitations are real.

by Eric_WVGG

5/23/2026 at 3:22:42 AM

Neither transformers or water are the limiting factor, cash is. Right now the big 3 are taking all their profits and building data centers. If there's not an ROO they'll stop.

Transformers aren't so complex that production can't increase. Most water is used for agriculture and right now the data centers can pay more for it.

by throwaway85825

5/22/2026 at 1:27:58 AM

Why should society care about people making profits? Society would greatly benefit from cheap abundant ram than FAANG shares going up. I'm kinda sick about only caring that some billionaire makes more money and would rather you know... actually improve conditions to better society.

This is why China is eating the West. Quite easy to start an electronics company when you have such an abundance of suppliers, compare this to America where there is maybe one or two players in the entire nation.

Quite pathetic, but we live in a pathetic world so it tracks.

by shimman

5/22/2026 at 1:47:51 AM

You think Chinese businesses aren’t in it for the profits?

by hcurtiss

5/22/2026 at 2:04:15 AM

While these private companies exist and are in it for the profits, they don't control the government, meaning any potential price gouging is strictly regulated. The Chinese government actively prevents private companies from becoming too powerful or dominating an industry in the public eye. Instead, they foster competition by promoting and building up alternative companies.

A great example of this is how they handled digital payments. While Visa and Mastercard maintain a monopoly in the West, China faced a similar situation when private mobile payment systems began dominating the market. In response, the government stepped in and forced the ecosystem to open up to competitors.

by xbmcuser

5/22/2026 at 7:39:40 AM

I wouldn't characterize it as forcing to "open up". It's true they put an end to some of the most egregious anti-competitive practices, but the Chinese tech ecosyatem, including payments, is still notoriously non-interoperable. For example, there's no way to transfer money between WeChat Pay and Alipay.

The relationship between Tencent/Bytedance/Alibaba is what happens when there are no monopoly laws or they are ineffective: every company fighting tooth and nail to corner every market with a single "super-app". No specialization at all and many races to the bottom, like the recent war between Alibaba, JD and Meituan over instant delivery that made every company involved lose a lot of money.

by chbbbbbbbbj

5/22/2026 at 2:57:31 PM

I don’t get the example, any payment in China is basically a duopoly between WeChat and Alipay, meanwhile in US there are visa, mastercard, American Express and discover counting credit card payment only.

by handle584

5/23/2026 at 3:42:10 AM

In the US, Visa and Mastercard control the backend infrastructure, giving them the power to decide who can use their services. This is why we see them blocking legal platforms or creators simply because a corporate board disagrees with what they are selling.

In China, this kind of corporate driven censorship doesn't happen. Tech corporations like WeChat and Alipay don't control the payment routing that is run by the state's central network. A merchant just needs a bank account and a QR code, and any customer can use it to pay them. The private apps cannot arbitrarily decide to block a legal merchant based on corporate politics or moral stances.

by xbmcuser

5/23/2026 at 3:35:36 PM

Exactly as the other comment pointed out, in China you would not run such a business to begin with, let alone to be blocked later by payment processors.

By legal platforms or creators I suppose you mean the dispute between card processors and platforms like steam, pixiv, dslite, etc about nsfw contents like anime child porn? Those stuff are already banned in China long time ago.

To give a real example of how China bans stuff, take ByteDance as an example. It used to run a joke sharing app roughly translates into Subtle Jokes that is on par with TikTok in terms of popularity. Then one day CCP decided it did not like it, then poof it's gone overnight. The founder issued a public apology and promised to almost double their censorship department in the future. Comparing to the TikTok case in the US, we got what? The funny-yet-pathetic legal tic-tac-toeing of Singaporean-not-Chinese nonsense. There is just fundamental difference in the scale and efficiency of censorship.

by handle584

5/23/2026 at 4:17:04 AM

Instead, the government does it themselves based on regular politics and moral stances.

by f33d5173

5/22/2026 at 7:05:56 AM

But not open up to competitors like Visa.

by sroussey

5/22/2026 at 10:43:01 AM

Credit card processors are, as a natural aspect of their purpose, a deeply useful surveillance network.

by ceejayoz

5/22/2026 at 3:01:33 PM

In the opposite direction unionpay works at major US retailers directly or at least through a partnership with discover, even Alipay is available at CVS, while us processors presence in China is next to zero.

by handle584

5/22/2026 at 4:41:40 PM

Alipay is available only through Discover. Chinese processors have no presence in the US. In the same way in China you can use Visa and Mastercard through WeChat.

by slaw

5/23/2026 at 4:45:56 AM

Source about alipay/discover partnership? I could not find any and it is hard to imagine how a card-based network can support a qrcode-based system. The acceptance of Alipay at CVS/Walgreens is native, meaning you pay by qrcodes, exactly what you do in China.

Major merchants in the US do support UnionPay, even USPS(!) displays its logo. The problem used to be small/local merchants, but with the advent of modern PoS like square/clover it is getting better.

In what same way? Even registering a Wechat account is no trivial task, just look at all those ppl asking help scanning their signup codes. Suppose you did KYC and seasoned the acct enough to get it finally working, it is still limited to business codes (think of bigbox stores), not personal codes (think of farmers market, local mom-and-pop place, etc). The latter actually dominates the daily life in China.

IMO using V/M through wechat/alipay is like in the world you described and I was arguing UnionPay works in the US because ppl can buy gift cards at PO then use them at merchants, which is actually smoother comparing to this w/a business, but at the same time quite ridiculous.

by handle584

5/22/2026 at 9:48:34 AM

Correct. A level playing field for all companies regardless of other factors is explicitly a non-goal.

by cwillu

5/22/2026 at 3:02:18 AM

They are but the difference is that China doesn't want to encourage monopolies and have zero qualms in jailing or executing bad business leaders.

by shimman

5/22/2026 at 3:09:53 AM

There absolutely are monopolies. There are, in fact, many state run enterprises. Where do you get these ideas?

by hcurtiss

5/22/2026 at 4:27:47 AM

My understanding is that the Chinese government prefers to have multiple successful companies in each field and they don't like it when one company becomes too powerful.

by wmf

5/22/2026 at 6:19:09 AM

They pivoted away from that quite a while ago now they just disappear people for a week or two and randomly completely crush a business here and there to make sure they understand their place.

by tick_tock_tick

5/22/2026 at 8:21:51 AM

[flagged]

by coldtea

5/22/2026 at 10:23:26 AM

If you have no practical experience living in a totalitarian country, don't wish that upon yourself and your family.

That momentary feeling of triumphing over your enemies won't compensate for what you'd lose. This is a mistake that was made by numerous intellectuals in history.

by inglor_cz

5/22/2026 at 11:11:25 AM

Everyone thinks they’re getting the cushy office job working for the party, until they’re handed a shovel by someone with a gun.

by transcriptase

5/22/2026 at 12:43:37 PM

In the worst case, knowing that they are about to dig their own graves.

by inglor_cz

5/22/2026 at 11:46:39 AM

1920's: Hard times create strong men.

1950's: Strong men create good times.

1980's: Good times create weak men.

2010's: Weak men create hard times. There you are, wishing for hard times. May I suggest finding yourself the socialist paradise where they do as you wish and move there? You should be happier and we will be as well as long as your wishes don't come true.

by hagbard_c

5/22/2026 at 12:56:28 PM

>May I suggest finding yourself the socialist paradise where they do as you wish and move there?

If you promise not to sanction and bomb it and fund and arm far-right wing dictator thugs there, I'm game!

But you got it backwards: it's your "strongmen" and your "elite human capital" that has created hard times, destroyed strong working and middle class men's livelihood, pivoted the economy to financial betting games, outsourcing, and rent-seeking, and enshittified everything.

by coldtea

5/22/2026 at 8:38:09 PM

So also does the US. Trump had prominent cases against Google and Meta. Biden against Apple and Amazon. Prominent efforts on airlines and grocery stores. Honestly, I'm pretty sure the US and Chinese antitrust laws are pretty similar (theirs largely crafted after ours).

by hcurtiss

5/22/2026 at 8:21:02 AM

State run is better than a private for profit monopoly or few-o-poly which is what we get.

People all over the world have often revolted to get some enterprises state run (nationalizing) and were often punished or even bombed for it.

by coldtea

5/22/2026 at 8:32:43 AM

State run (or heavily regulated) services around here in Eastern Europe: health care, education and housing. All incredibly bad and expensive, I pay huge chunks of my monthly salary for them and I try to avoid them at all costs. They get worse and more expensive with time too.

All the other services and products I use in my life, from the car I drive to the clothes on my back, the food I eat and the device I write this on are provided by private enterprise and they have become much better and cheaper in my life time.

by nickpp

5/22/2026 at 9:32:44 AM

Health care, education and housing have been getting worse and more expensive in the US over the decade also. Must be all that nationalization.

by yuriks

5/22/2026 at 10:20:03 AM

I can buy "more expensive", but as far as "worse", can you provide the relevant metrics?

I don't think that your chance of survival of a heart attack or lymphoma got worse since 2016.

by inglor_cz

5/22/2026 at 10:38:13 AM

If you can afford less (lesser treatment, drugs, procedures, quality of doctors and hospitals you can pay for), then your chances of survival also got WAY worse.

Doesn't matter if the 1% has now access to better versions.

by coldtea

5/22/2026 at 11:01:58 AM

Sure, if actual availability of healthcare to an average American has grown worse, that would be a bad result. But that is something you should demonstrate with data instead of just asserting it.

by inglor_cz

5/22/2026 at 3:28:13 PM

I mean one can go look at the health outcomes of the average american vs other developed nations, and see that we do not get much for the amount of money we spend. I won't bother to argue this with you. If you're genuinely operating in good faith, you're just as capable of finding the studies as I am, and if not, there's really no point

by wing-_-nuts

5/22/2026 at 7:39:20 PM

When comparing average Americans and their health to average, say, Spaniards, we should not ignore the 400 lb gorilla in the room named "obesity".

Even Europeans are getting bigger, but America is way, way worse. Seeing those extreme landwhale-type people who cannot even walk around the mall and navigate it using a motorized cart, throwing bulk packages of horrible shitty ultraprocessed food and drinks into said cart, always makes me wonder how the hell is your healthcare system even capable of keeping them alive.

That is nothing short of a miracle, and should be taken into account in all international comparisons.

by inglor_cz

5/22/2026 at 8:34:18 PM

Uhuh, That's why we're #1 in the world in conditions uncorrelated with obesity like infant mortality right?

by wing-_-nuts

5/22/2026 at 9:06:07 PM

Does this concern an average American, or mostly the poorest quintile of the population?

We're not discussing whether your healthcare system is friendly to the poor; everyone knows that the US is not particularly kind to its poor, in any aspect.

The original topic was if its overall quality declined in the last decade for the average American, who is not poor.

by inglor_cz

5/22/2026 at 10:14:22 PM

If it's bad enough 'for the poor' that it's pulling down the average for everyone that's a pretty damning indictment of the system overall is it not?

I'll be honest. I really tire of the mental gymnastics people put themselves through to make excuses for the American system. I don't think we have anything more to discuss here.

by wing-_-nuts

5/22/2026 at 10:59:34 AM

I don't have concrete metrics/sources to give right now, but my general perception from reading the news is that there's been staffing issues pushing healthcare systems in the US towards increasing workloads in individual providers, leading to less time/attention given to individual patients, lower availability of appointment slots, and offloading of patients onto alternative app-based telehealth platforms, which have been trending up alongside aquisition/consolidation of independent private practices.

by yuriks

5/22/2026 at 11:03:23 AM

Staffing problems are absolutely everywhere, regardless of the particular healthcare system or even political system. Czechia, the UK, China, Japan. It seems to be a global trend, much like falling birthrates.

by inglor_cz

5/22/2026 at 11:26:14 AM

I mean, yeah, that was the point of my original reply: health care, education and housing have been getting less accessible in general, not just that poster's country. (Or wherever they're from. I checked the comment history and it seems to be 90% talking back to people criticizing capitalism/markets. Wouldn't be my preferred hobby of choice, personally.)

by yuriks

5/22/2026 at 2:25:19 PM

Not a hobby, but a duty. I lived under both systems and I do not wish the horrors I’ve seen in my youth onto my children. Although at this point, it’s probably unavoidable. It seems that some lessons can only be learned by experiencing them, no warning is ever enough: Russia, communism.

by nickpp

5/22/2026 at 3:26:04 PM

Yes, now ask someone from a nordic country about how best to balance capitalism with regulation and social safety nets. I think you'd get a very different answer.

by wing-_-nuts

5/22/2026 at 6:01:58 PM

Step 1: start with a vast reservoir of oil revenue and a culturally-homogeneous population

by CamperBob2

5/23/2026 at 2:00:15 AM

You mean the country that immediately asked for help from a country with vast oil reserves and a famously heterogeneous population (Iraq)?

by selimthegrim

5/22/2026 at 6:37:58 PM

I must have missed the fact that sweden, denmark, and finland had vast oil reserves. Also Sweden's population is now ~ 20% immigrants.

by wing-_-nuts

5/22/2026 at 1:50:06 PM

> Must be all that nationalization.

No, it’s the regulations. In less regulated, freer markets like vision correction eye surgery the costs went down and quality up. Even in health care.

by nickpp

5/24/2026 at 9:08:28 PM

You mean in places where every random without a degree can perform eye surgery, and doesn't matter if one in 5 customers go blind from it? Yes, that sure drops the prices.

But they're way cheaper than the US in heavily and properly regulated health markets too.

by coldtea

5/22/2026 at 3:24:18 PM

You'll forgive me if perhaps I want something as important as eye surgery to be well regulated. Have a look at health outcomes for literally any industry where regulation is lax, like Brazilian plastic surgery. It's not great.

by wing-_-nuts

5/22/2026 at 3:30:55 PM

Sure, I totally get you. Then higher costs, lower availability and crappier services (all due to less competition and more bureaucratic hoops) is a price you should be happily willing to pay.

by nickpp

5/22/2026 at 3:48:33 PM

Contrasting the American Healthcare system vs one of pretty much any other developed economy proves this to be false.

by wing-_-nuts

5/22/2026 at 10:37:40 AM

State-run all those things used to be way cheaper and better here than after privatization. So much more, it's not even funny.

by coldtea

5/22/2026 at 6:39:00 AM

But those are mostly companies who provide a public service, or am I wrong?

by ma2kx

5/22/2026 at 9:36:28 AM

In China the desire for profits serves the society. In the US the society serves the desire for profits.

by mjanx123

5/22/2026 at 11:12:25 PM

Oh sure, Chinese investors and business people share their profits with everyone out of the goodness of their heart. Nice fairy tale.

by strangegecko

5/22/2026 at 2:05:02 AM

> This is why China is eating the West.

Nothing to do with cheap labour.

by mr_toad

5/22/2026 at 2:59:56 AM

Labor has very little to do with it and more about a political class that has to increase the material needs of a nation if they still want to stay in power.

What has the US government done for American's lately outside of forcing people to buy healthcare and providing monetary support for families for a small window during covid? All we have is a political class that wants to fuck Americans raw until they pump every cent out of us.

Also the US has one of the most weakened labor classes in the world, come the fuck on. Corporations convinced our governments to sell out labor at every opportunity. You're acting as if it was the 1930s where there was a national strike every month until the Wagner Act.

by shimman

5/22/2026 at 12:32:06 PM

Why are you stating China competitiveness isn't related to labor, and then pivot to US labor?

Before you go there, you should answer: what has the Chinese government done for the Chinese lately? Is everything well in their society, labor and economy wise?

by libertine

5/22/2026 at 8:18:09 AM

No, nothing to do with that. Even Steve Jobs said so back 20+ years ago, about why Apple can't just get out of China manufacturing.

He said the labour cost is neghigible and not qualitatively different to the US. It's the availability of every part and tech you need in nearby supply centers and factories, the huge supply of appropriate resources, including the ability to have tens of thousands of expert workers on command for a fast new production run.

by coldtea

5/22/2026 at 3:30:58 PM

Of course you do not talk about cheap labor when you are exploiting it, from which all the speed, all the availability-at-any-time come from. The closest quote I can find is

The story is told of when Apple did a last minute design change on the Iphone. As soon as the parts came in, 8000 Chinese workers were immediately called in at midnight to start a 12 hour shift. An Apple executive is quoted as saying that the “speed and flexibility are breathtaking.”

Currently the reality on Chinese assembly lines is those expert workers are working 12 hour shifts for 1 day off every 14 days, and earns about $800-$1,000 a month.

It's a huge problem in China actually, those 996-esque working schedule is everywhere now, normal 955 or even 965 schedule is almost non-existent among domestic private employers. The sad thing is that sometimes some Act (like EU supply chain law) forces factories to 955 schedule but those line workers are not happy, because that means they don't get overtime and are making minimum wages like $300 a month, not even enough to live a life. Chinese got five day work week because of WTO, yet now many have lost it.

by handle584

5/22/2026 at 12:24:22 PM

I'd buy that if you're talking about developing new products/new production lines, it's cheaper to have suppliers and know how hand - and it's great for margin optimization, because they have other production lines.

But that margin isn't funneled to pay wages and improve living standards.

To say wages don't play a role it's more of a corporate narrative to wash those decisions.

If wages aren't a factor, why don't they raise wages and living standards for those workers?

by libertine

5/22/2026 at 2:14:48 AM

We're also eagerly taking advantage of their cheap labour and we're taking advantage of plenty of people here at home, sometimes to the point of literal slavery (it's okay when they're prisoners or immigrants)

by autoexec

5/22/2026 at 2:15:41 PM

No, we’re past the cheap labor. They’ve already taken the lead on 3-D printing, drones, robotics, are very close to making their own CPUs and GPUs, their lead on EV cars is pretty much unassailable, they’re in the process of building an electrostate with 100% redundancy and dirt cheap electricity, their bullet trains are on par with Japan’s, they are supplying the entire world with everything solar. I could go on and on. China has arrived and all our geriatric government cares about is creating a white ethnostate and propping up oil and gas companies.

by dyauspitr

5/22/2026 at 6:17:33 AM

Chinese labour isn't very cheap anymore.

by suddenlybananas

5/22/2026 at 6:24:02 AM

I own FAANG stock because I own the S&P 500 in my retirement accounts, and so do managed pension funds. There's a lot more than billionaires who benefit from FAANG shares going up in value.

by JuniperMesos

5/22/2026 at 8:27:10 AM

It's true that the current pension provision depends on this. But if pensions are mainly funded by companies which extract monopoly rent, then it would actually be more efficient and be less distortionary to the competitive market to fund them directly out of taxation - one big, simple rent instead of 100,000 different ones clogging everything up.

by ajb

5/22/2026 at 10:49:18 AM

Are US retirement accounts largely growing on the back of “companies which extract monopoly rent”?

That seems outlandish. My iPhone isn’t “rent”, neither is an Nvidia GPU, or an Instagram ad.

by twoodfin

5/22/2026 at 5:16:44 PM

The argument works at the margin as well, though. Suppose companies deliver value X and also extract rent Y, and defend Y on the basis that it would threaten the value of pensions to prevent it - this is rebutted in the same way.

by ajb

5/22/2026 at 5:21:38 PM

I don’t get the point you’re trying to make.

What if X >> Y? Why should we think otherwise?

by twoodfin

5/22/2026 at 7:07:07 AM

I agree, the sentiment that billionaires are the only beneficiaries of share value increases is misinformed, but the mentality of profit chasing is a long term security risk not just to the nation, but to the continued rise in value of said shares. Once China has enough of a grip on their domestic attempts at semiconductor fabrication, these company's supply chains will be completely compromised, allowing China to practically swap out any of these FAANG companies for Chinese counterparts over time. As long as the US, UK, EU and FAANG continue to do next to nothing to develop domestic chip fabs and supply chains, it is only a matter of time.

by technoloch

5/22/2026 at 7:34:50 PM

This is a general argument in favor of protectionist tariffs and against free trade.

by JuniperMesos

5/22/2026 at 2:21:20 PM

Aren't you worried about the circle-funding these companies indulge in when your pnsion depends on it? For example Nvidias's dubious deals with Huangs charity? If something goes sideways there, $5T are at stake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUbJDrL6ZfM

by frm88

5/23/2026 at 1:01:56 AM

Congrats, what about the other 80% of Americans that can barely afford rent and pay for healthcare? Fuck them right? As long as your shares go up, people must die.

What a great economic system with great morals that create moral societies.

by shimman

5/23/2026 at 5:50:34 AM

Increasing FAANG stock prices actually make it harder for me, personally, to afford housing - because I live in the bay area where all the FAANG companies have major offices and when people with lots of FAANG stock get richer, one of the things they spend it on is buying housing in the bay area, bidding up the price of that limited resource for everyone else. Building more housing in the bay area would help with this, but there's a lot of local political pressure not to do that; and this is a bay-area-specific problem because of the physical locations of (most of) the FAANG companies.

Anyway a lot more than 20% of Americans are beneficiaries of some kind of pension or 401k or other source of income that is ultimately funded by the US stock market. And shares of the US stock market going up do not kill people who aren't having part of their income funded primarily by the stock market. People who think this is true and that society is therefore immoral badly misunderstand what the actual problems with producing goods and services for people are, which is the thing that actually matters for human health and flourishing.

by JuniperMesos

5/22/2026 at 1:59:19 AM

Society should care about people making profits because otherwise those people do something else instead of providing goods and services. What happened in Communism is instructive on this point. Now if you want to argue that the pursuit of maximum profit as an end is a problem, there's a case to be made. The US had something like a marginal tax rate of 90% around the 1940s/1950s, if I recall correctly, and it obviously didn't hurt innovation, but people got paid in perks and corner offices and status instead of just money.

I think people are misled by Marx and derivatives, and misdiagnose the problem. I don't think people are upset by the CEO making lots of money as much as they are by the HBS management style of using people as a tool, or even as interchangeable "resources". However, the philosophical materialism of Marx & Co. pretty much makes this inevitable. (The secular view is also materialism, so you get it on both sides.)

by prewett

5/22/2026 at 4:02:52 PM

> I don't think people are upset by the CEO making lots of money as much as they are by the HBS management style of using people as a tool, or even as interchangeable "resources".

How about both? Both are pretty terrible for society IMHO. Some shithead's making 6000x of what average worker at their company because they're on top and they're treating everyone under them as interchangable tools with zero compassion. If they were limited to only making like 3x then they'd be on a much more equitable place with their underlings and might even be more likely to see them as fellow humans instead of disposable work units.

by egypturnash

5/22/2026 at 7:19:02 AM

Perhaps it’s not capitalism that’s the problem but the unboundedness of the greed of a few, with respect to the other needs of humanity.

Also Adam Smith implied that unbounded avarice is irrational and disruptive to society.

The assumption is that morality survives grotesque wealth accumulation, we see many examples proving otherwise

by eecc

5/22/2026 at 10:26:01 AM

"unboundedness of the greed of a few"

Lots of people claim "greed", but the stereotypical Tech billionaire doesn't simply roll around in gold like Scrooge McDuck, doing nothing and demanding more. They invest and reinvest it into new enterprises.

Of all the ways of dealing with massive wealth, this is probably the second least disruptive one. (The first one would be just giving it to honorable causes.)

by inglor_cz

5/22/2026 at 1:28:34 PM

They claim greed because they always choose the path that makes them more money even if it has clear, evidence-based proof of societal harm.

Ya know, just like the Sacklers and pushing oxycontin.

by fireflash38

5/22/2026 at 1:58:54 PM

You don't know in advance what is going to make you money. Investments are risky.

In 2026, we know that SpaceX is a huge success. In 2002, it was just one of very many space startups, the vast majority of which ended up bankrupt, and before the last Falcon 1 flight, it was already on the brink of bankruptcy. They were incredibly lucky that the last rocket they had money for actually reached orbit.

During the same time, John Carmack invested into Armadillo Aerospace, and lost money.

Was he less "greedy" than Musk only because in retrospect we know that one didn't pan out and the other did? Or were they both simply risk takers in an uncertain field, motivated by a mix of incentives?

by inglor_cz

5/23/2026 at 1:41:54 AM

That is a complete distraction from Meta in particular selling social media hard to kids even knowing that their work explicitly caused mental harm.

This is not a I own stock am I culpable issue, it is a company knowing their product is dangerous and ignoring the issues because it doesn't make them more money.

Same shit as the tobacco industry. People do banally evil shit for money.

by fireflash38

5/22/2026 at 9:07:01 AM

"Capitalism is the problem" by itself is like saying "unix operating systems are a problem". There are so many flavours, so many parameters (laws, tax, etc.) that I do not see value in generalizations.

I think morality is quite hard to define and any system should take into account unboundedness of some human attributes (being greed, stupidy or other) in some humans.

by vladms

5/22/2026 at 8:27:43 AM

Capitalism is the only known system that aligns natural, normal individual greed with the benefit and advancement of the society.

by nickpp

5/22/2026 at 2:57:40 AM

Call me crazy but society should care about giving people meaning, providing healthcare, and an education. You know the three things that lead to productive humans.

Notice in my comment I mention nothing about taxes? Maybe people are mislead about neoliberalism? All it has done was sell out American jobs, get civilians addicted to drugs, and manufactured a political class that cares about donations over material needs.

This is an economic system that isn't even 50 years old and you're already going with the Marx scare quotes as if US branded capitalism hasn't already killed 10s of millions of Americans in the pursuit of profit.

Let's not even peel back the founding of this nation, a colonial white slaver state with minority protections baked into the constitution to impede people's chances of progress with every life.

by shimman

5/22/2026 at 10:34:40 AM

>Call me crazy but society should care about giving people meaning, providing healthcare, and an education. You know the three things that lead to productive humans.

Things that are paid for by economic surpluses. No profits, no investment, no taxes.

It's very much a matter of balance, you're not wrong that those services you mention are vital as are many others generally provided by governments. However it's all funded by a dynamic efficient economy.

The question of private wealth is the hardest, but private wealth by itself isn't a problem. The question there is, who should own and run productive economic activity. If it's not the state, it's private individuals. The wealth of billionaire industrialists doesn't consist of one big pile of money they wallow in, like Scrooge McDuck. It consists of their ownership and control of companies that do things in the economy.

Taking away that wealth means taking away those companies, and doing what with them? if you sell them to other private individuals, now they own and run those companies. If you can just take companies away from people like that, why would anyone build or buy them? If you take the companies into public ownership, now they're run by civil servants and politicians, but you'd have to pay for the companies, right? If you just seize assets, nobody is going to invest in anything that can be seized.

I do think inequality is a growing problem, but there are no easy answers.

by simonh

5/22/2026 at 2:40:16 PM

You don't understand the point of capitalism. It's not about making rich people richer. Capitalism is about producing stuff. To create a large variety of (useful) products for society.

You need capital to make pretty much anything. Somebody has to come up with a large amount of resources (money) put upfront into the venture. Capitalism creates the incentive for that - if the gamble pays off, then the investors get more value back. If it doesn't work out, then investors lose money. Most businesses fail early and do not provide a return for the investment.

The point of capitalism is to keep this system running. As a result of it we have made an ungodly amount of technological and quality of life improvements. Some people have become filthy rich from this, but typically they also provided the world with goods or services that people like and use. Tesla made Elon filthy rich, but it also made electric vehicles popular.

by Aerroon

5/22/2026 at 3:51:22 PM

> You don't understand the point of capitalism. It's not about making rich people richer.

Making the rich richer isn't necessarily the point, but it is an unavoidable consequence.

> Capitalism is about producing stuff.

Humans have been producing stuff well before the concept of ownership was invented, and certainly well before the massive wealth accumulation that is the hallmark of capitalism.

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 6:08:41 PM

And almost for the entirety of that period, humans lived in abject poverty. The rise of capitalism perfectly correlates with the most spectacular increase in human flourishing and prosperity in the history of our species. Even in the last fifty years, liberalizing economies, private ownership, and contract law have lifted tens of millions out of poverty, mostly in SE Asia.

by hcurtiss

5/22/2026 at 6:59:26 PM

And yet many in capitalist society lived and still live in abject poverty, despite the fact that there are enough resources so that no one should be left wanting. Nevertheless, you've somehow convinced yourself that those people either (a) don't matter, (b) deserve it, or (c) can't be helped.

If the goal is to reduce poverty, I fail to see how the existence of billionaires is a positive outcome, either now, in the form of Musk and his ilk; in the form of the robber barons of the late 18th century; or in the form of the noble lords of the feudal period to owned a lot but contributed nothing.

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 8:29:49 PM

It's not, but if the existence of billionaires correlates strongly with an increase in the median standard of living, I'm all for it. My politics are not driven by envy -- only what consistently produces the best outcome for the most.

Regarding the idea that we can design a system where "no one should be left wanting," that sounds nice. So does big rock candy mountain. There is no such system.

by hcurtiss

5/22/2026 at 8:45:11 PM

> It's not, but if the existence of billionaires correlates strongly with an increase in the median standard of living, I'm all for it.

Great, but it doesn't. The gap between the poor and the wealthy has only grown in the US, especially since Reagan's "trickle down" economics.

https://www.statista.com/chart/35953/inequality-wealth-gap-u...

The accusations against the working poor of "envy" are a barbaric slur. People just want to get valued fairly.

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 9:50:39 PM

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 expenditures have too, all while poverty rates have substantially declined. It is exceedingly difficult to argue by any objective metric that rising income inequality has handicapped median standard of living.

We see similar trends around the world. In fact, the countries that have struggled the most with stagnating standards of living are precisely those that have most aggressively imposed redistributionist policies.

Income inequality with rising standards of living for the median is only bad if your politics are driven by envy.

by hcurtiss

5/23/2026 at 12:44:18 AM

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 and any benefit for the rest of society. last time that happened in the US, the robber barons and Wall Street class nearly brought down the world economy.

by hackyhacky

5/26/2026 at 7:07:48 PM

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.

by hcurtiss

5/27/2026 at 11:53:08 AM

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.

by hackyhacky

5/27/2026 at 8:26:10 PM

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

by hcurtiss

5/29/2026 at 4:14:12 PM

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?

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 8:30:10 PM

But not all "capitalist" societies have the same percentage in "abject poverty". So that makes me think that capitalism by itself is not the only major determinant of some of the bad things that we see, but rather the lack of interest and of focus to fix actual issues. Many societies can learn from others and improve their situation. Note: and many, if not most actually do, check : https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/the-share-and-number-of-p...

If the goal is to reduce poverty, the number of billionaire is actually irelevant. How you fund reducing poverty might influence the number of billionaires, but, for me it is more important what each society does for the poor, rather than counting how many are billionaires today.

by vladms

5/23/2026 at 12:46:21 AM

> If the goal is to reduce poverty, the number of billionaire is actually irelevant. How you fund reducing poverty might influence the number of billionaires, but, for me it is more important what each society does for the poor, rather than counting how many are billionaires today.

You're so close. The only missing connection is the realization that billionaires exercise outsize influence, and will affect government policy to help themselves, not the poor. The only way for the poor to not have their voice silenced by the rich is to reduce the rich.

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 1:13:43 PM

Society shouldn't. But it's not society making that decision, it's the corporations and people with lots of wealth that want to get even more wealth.

by duskdozer

5/22/2026 at 7:16:38 AM

> Why should society care about people making profits?

The people making profits are the ones providing food, shelter, and phones to you.

by WalterBright

5/22/2026 at 8:27:54 AM

Well I am still waiting for my google home and my meta steaks.

Reality is, those companies don't give anything back, just siphone all profits into tax havens so owners can take as much cash out of it as possible, in one form or another.

Their goal is to provide nothing back as much as they could. Look at their actions, not some empty PR statements.

by kakacik

5/22/2026 at 7:17:39 PM

> Reality is, those companies don't give anything back

California, Washington, and New York are about to find out what happens when they drive the wealthy businesses out of the state.

Massachusetts found out a few years ago. They decided they were going to heavily tax yachts that were built by the yacht industry in the state. What happened is the wealthy bought their yachts elsewhere, and the local yacht industry collapsed, and many thousands of skilled craftsmen lost their jobs.

The tax was rescinded.

by WalterBright

5/22/2026 at 8:19:05 AM

No, the real people providing the food, shelter and electronics are the generally the lowest paid in society.

by csomar

5/22/2026 at 9:45:18 AM

But they are making a profit. Otherwise they'd have to stop providing stuff, because they'd be broke.

by roenxi

5/22/2026 at 1:45:16 PM

> The people making profits are the ones providing food, shelter, and phones to you.

I'm not worried about the guy making my sandwich at the corner deli. He's entitled to my money because he provides a valuable service.

I am worried about the owner of FoodCo, who plays golf all day while his employees run the company. He provides literally no service to anyone at all, but makes more money than any employee. He then uses his profits to buy homes in the area, so his employees can pay back half of their paycheck to him in the form of rent.

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 2:46:19 PM

Why doesn't a small village have a supermarket? If it's small enough then it won't have any store at all. Why? Because the business doesn't make enough money to justify it and the consequence of this is that none of the inhabitants of that village can "just go to the store to buy some milk". They either need to plan weeks or months worth of shopping in advance or have access to transport that can take them to a town that has a store.

The owner of FoodCo put in a lot of their money upfront to make the company happen in the first place. Your deli guy wouldn't have a job if the FoodCo guy hadn't done what he did.

I know that it's hard for people from rich (and high population) countries to understand, but the high variety of goods and services that exist are a consequence of people investing into businesses. Without them many of these businesses wouldn't exist, because most people are not rich enough to be able to fund a business on their own.

by Aerroon

5/22/2026 at 3:10:54 PM

> The owner of FoodCo put in a lot of their money upfront to make the company happen in the first place. Your deli guy wouldn't have a job if the FoodCo guy hadn't done what he did.

This is blatantly untrue in the face of even a cursory thought. If the deli didn’t exist, that worker would have done any number of other jobs. Subsistence farming, doing deli stuff out of his house, maybe even community funding a coop grocery store.

That was how things worked at many points in human history. Instead of “private citizen makes $thing and collects rent” it was some variety of “municipality funds $thing for the community”. That just doesn’t extrapolate to a global economy well, for better or worse.

by everforward

5/22/2026 at 2:54:22 PM

Your argument amounts to billionaire apologism and has nothing to do with my comment.

If a supermarket cannot be profitable in a small village, an investor isn't going to change that. The investor will invest in businesses that can be profitable.

> Your deli guy wouldn't have a job if the FoodCo guy hadn't done what he did.

People have had jobs since before civilization, and certainly before massive accumulation of wealth became the norm.

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 7:10:42 PM

In capitalist countries, accumulation of wealth comes alongside the prosperity of the rest of the country.

by WalterBright

5/22/2026 at 7:21:12 PM

Ah yes, the famous "trickle down" economy of Reaganomics. If only we had more billionaires, then I'm sure I'd be able to afford to get my car fixed.

Unfortunately, this economic model has been proven to be wrong. If it were true, then we would have seen a decreasing gap between the rich and the poor. We didn't.

https://www.statista.com/chart/35953/inequality-wealth-gap-u...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/09/why-is...

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 8:55:36 PM

> Unfortunately, this economic model has been proven to be wrong.

As I've mentioned several times now, the growth of the wealthy in the 19th century corresponded with the movement of the poor into the middle class.

> If it were true, then we would have seen a decreasing gap between the rich and the poor.

What matters is the state of the poor, not the gap between rich and poor. Musk's wealth, for example, has no effect on my standard of living. Or yours.

by WalterBright

5/23/2026 at 12:50:16 AM

> As I've mentioned several times now, the growth of the wealthy in the 19th century corresponded with the movement of the poor into the middle class.

Yes you keep on mentioning that, but I don't know why. Correlation is not causation. You haven't even proposed a mechanism of causality.

> What matters is the state of the poor, not the gap between rich and poor.

You keep on repeating that, and you keep on being wrong. You are parroting billionaire propaganda in the hopes of making people ignore injustice. In reality, in the US, living standards are falling for most people, while Elon Musk has no rational reason for possessing so much wealth.

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 7:09:11 PM

Name one CEO of a large company who fits your profile.

by WalterBright

5/22/2026 at 7:18:38 PM

Elon Musk is a great example. These days, he mostly writes racist tweets, pretends to play video games, consolidates his own businesses to increase his own apparent net worth, and undermines the federal government.

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 8:57:27 PM

May I remind you of your post I was replying to:

> He provides literally no service to anyone at all, but makes more money than any employee. He then uses his profits to buy homes in the area, so his employees can pay back half of their paycheck to him in the form of rent.

by WalterBright

5/23/2026 at 12:51:11 AM

Thanks for the reminder. Are you implying that EM does not invest in real estate or are you just being contrary?

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 8:14:47 AM

Nope. They're the ones making those more expensive, via collusion, rent-seeking, monopoly capture, and lots of other ways.

by coldtea

5/22/2026 at 8:18:05 AM

It's a cycle. The zeitgeist moves from communism to capitalism and vice-versa every 30 years or so.

by csomar

5/22/2026 at 10:55:51 AM

The zeitgeist yes, but in terms of actual politics socialism nowadays is really a vague aspiration rather than any actual policies. Certainly here in the UK our Labour governments since the 90s have confined themselves to just tweaking the settings on the economy Maggie built in the 80s. I'm just about old enough to remember what actual socialist economic policies looked like.

by simonh

5/22/2026 at 11:42:44 PM

Corbyn tried to make Labour do something different but we saw how we got treated all because he wasn't willing to kowtow towards Israel.

by Der_Einzige

5/22/2026 at 1:37:17 AM

Part of this is a lie high prices for equipment has a lot to do with monopolies in the whole supply chain and one of the major reason I am rooting for China to get parity on node as that would mean it would have been able to break all the monopolies and we get competition on the whole production from uv machines, wafer, on equipment for storing etc. Renewables are rapidly taking the world to very cheap or free energy but it would be bad if the way to best use the energy for production is controlled by a few corporations

by xbmcuser

5/22/2026 at 9:53:51 AM

China becoming self sufficient in chip fab could be the trigger point for WW3 so lets not root too hard

by s08148692

5/22/2026 at 5:07:21 PM

no we already are going to a world war with the pedophile president and parliament (for some reason people like to pretend he is the only one in the epstein files) being controlled by a mass child murdering prime minister of a racist apartheid country they will attack Iran again and start the world war.

by xbmcuser

5/22/2026 at 2:53:29 AM

While I think Apple is a prime candidate to do something like this financially, I’ve never had the impression that they ever want to get involved in something “just” for vertical efficiency. There’s always a long-term vision where they can leverage it to gain a competitive edge that their competitors can’t match (the PA Semi acquisition being a perfect example of this).

RAM doesn’t seem like something where simply owning the manufacturing could lead to a disproportionate competitive edge. It would just be a vertical efficiency gamble that may or may not pay off. Of course that could simply be a failure of my imagination.

by stouset

5/22/2026 at 9:50:44 AM

Tesla is building their own fab

Huge gamble - If they pull it off I wouldn't be surprised if other companies follow

by s08148692

5/22/2026 at 10:03:47 AM

And then everyone will scream unfair when the Chinese roll up the market from the bottom.

by gmerc

5/22/2026 at 11:52:15 AM

$20B a single Fab. And you don't just have one Fab. You need multiple. And again I have to state this every time, the most expensive Fab is empty Fab. You need to fill it, and you need to fill constant and consistently for years.

>but it seems they'd be a prime candidate to spin up their own memory fab.

They will be the prime candidate to work with memory makers for additional capacity. Not to start their own one. Here is a $20B cheque and 5 years guarantee of orders. Go and make me some memory for his price.

I mean this is the same story for iPod and NAND. It seems we are repeating what we should have learned.

by ksec

5/22/2026 at 11:55:33 AM

You needed to fill it constantly in the “old times” when memory was ubiquitous and cheap to justify the finance payments on the debt you incurred to build it.

When you’re Apple and can build it with cash, and ram is currently so insane it saves you a decade of memory price gouging in a single year, the math changes quickly.

by tw04

5/23/2026 at 5:37:53 PM

>and ram is currently so insane it saves you a decade of memory price gouging in a single year, the math changes quickly.

Apple is not paying the same insane price most people / other players are paying.

by ksec

5/22/2026 at 1:13:48 AM

Literally the most overwhelming thought, reading this, is "man, capitalism is a mistake"

The amounts of money circulating whilst some of us struggle to make rent ...

Nothing fair, or just, about this world we live in

by richforrester

5/22/2026 at 9:38:40 AM

> The amounts of money circulating whilst some of us struggle to make rent ...

It may be expressed in terms of money, but these are assets and capital. You wouldn't find a fab a very comfortable or satisfying place to live.

The reason the numbers get so big is the gargantuan accumulated savings that are prepared to fund the similarly gargantuan ventures. The large numbers are supported by maintaining and sustaining the capitalized value by profitable investment and depreciation.

When you talk about rent, while it may be expressed in the same unit (money), the economic function played is very different. Here, it is consumption rather than saving/investment. If the dollar equivalent of all those assets went towards paying rent, while it would secure housing for some time, it would eventually become completely exhausted, and so too would housing security. Large pools of assets are simply not a way to get stable housing, it would only consume the large savings society has accumulated to be able to undergo those big ventures. It would be short-sighted and harm us in the future.

The cause and solution to rental instability is to be found in housing, building, and land policy that restricts the production of housing.

by sophrosyne42

5/22/2026 at 7:29:59 PM

That's right. Housing is not an asset to society or the economy, it's a drain that wastes money on preserving human life. Unlike valuable uses of capital like options trading and cryptocurrency.

by svachalek

5/24/2026 at 12:51:39 AM

Despite your reply obviously not being good faith, I will correct errors for others.

> Housing is not an asset to society or the economy, it's a drain that wastes money on preserving human life.

You are equivocating between asset in the sense of 'generally useful thing', and the sense I used above which is a capital good. Housing is obviously a useful thing and necessary, just as all other consumptive goods like food, clothing, etc. That makes it an 'asset' in the former sense to people (there is no such thing as useful to the economy, which is just an abstraction). But housing, food, and clothing are not assets in the latter sense. I.e., paying for housing is a consumptive act and not a productive act. There is nothing good or bad about either, the distinction is simply a distinction of economic function. Eating is important, but eating uses up resources; it is consumption. Cooking is important, but it is not eating, you don't get anything out of it until you eat; it is production. Both rely on each other, neither can be given up completely without harm.

Thus, a proper balance must be struck, because it would be foolish and self-destructive to only consume. If there was only consumption, then this would simply sacrifice your future and you would not be able to survive after you have used up what was produced before. The question is about whether you want a stable, regular, and lasting way to be able to have valuable things like housing, food, and clothing. To do that, you have to refrain from consuming your entire stock of assets, you have to refrain from using up all the resources you have. But that is what you would to if you took all the capital that companies have saved up and consumed it. The purpose of my original post was to point out that you can't look at production as if it were consumption, they have different roles and if you mistake production as an opportunity to consume, it is self-destructive.

Replying by ignoring this distinction and instead making a strawman will not prevent your perspective from being self destructive.

by sophrosyne42

5/22/2026 at 2:53:28 PM

No, capitalism isn't a mistake, unregulated capitalism is a mistake. The solution is simple, don't let companies merge/acquire after a certain size. Capitalism works when there is a healthy competitive market. It doesn't work when there are 1-3 big companies all fixing prices.

by tensor

5/22/2026 at 8:15:40 AM

> , is "man, capitalism is a mistake"

Man, we need a better term for this criticism.

The US right now is more harsh to live in than the US pre-Reagan, which was more harsh than many countries with a strong welfare state, but all of them are capitalistic.

by Linosaurus

5/22/2026 at 8:48:55 AM

Perhaps the term you are looking for is corporate feudalism.

by account42

5/22/2026 at 9:11:01 AM

Maybe, but you have very similar dynamics in China or other countries. At the root the problem is one of power dynamics, inequality, authoritarianism (whether legitimized by money or politics or both). Or said otherwise, an erosion of democratic and egalitarian ideals.

by strangegecko

5/22/2026 at 3:12:10 PM

“Late-stage capitalism” is the normal term for expressing a belief that capitalism tends to eat itself over a long enough time horizon.

by everforward

5/22/2026 at 7:34:41 AM

> Nothing fair, or just, about this world we live in

We all make different choices, and so have different consequences.

For example, I squandered the proceeds of a business deal on a new car. If I'd bought MSFT instead, I could have bought 100 new cars.

by WalterBright

5/22/2026 at 8:51:03 AM

So what you're saying is that we all just need to become better gamblers? That doesn't exactly scream functional society to me.

Besides, this can't work for everyone - if you get 100 cars without an equivalent amount of more work put in then someone else has to do that work without being properly compensated for it.

by account42

5/22/2026 at 11:04:16 AM

It shifts the gains away from the marginal investor in Microsoft who was only willing to pay a penny less for those shares (probably an eighth of a dollar when this anecdote happened). Instead of them getting the 100 cars, the buyer who was willing to hit the ask earlier gets them.

That profit comes from owning a piece of a productive company, productive companies often spring from early-stage losses that require investment money from somewhere, seed stage money comes from the high likelihood that later stage money will come in if the venture appears successful.

by sokoloff

5/22/2026 at 1:41:05 PM

Your comment does not address the (imho reasonable) criticism that the described system incentivizes gambling as the key to wealth, rather than labor.

There are many problems with a gambling based economy, not least among them that over a long enough time line, all the money ends in very few hands.

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 1:43:00 PM

I don’t view long-term investing in productive companies as anything close to gambling.

by sokoloff

5/22/2026 at 2:25:54 PM

Which is fine, except that one can't know in advance which companies will continue to be productive..that's why it's gambling.

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 2:40:37 PM

Feel free to avoid it if you think it’s gambling.

https://www.macrotrends.net/2324/sp-500-historical-chart-dat...

by sokoloff

5/22/2026 at 2:47:52 PM

This does nothing to support your point.

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 4:29:12 PM

Studying that chart might reveal a way to long-term invest in a way that isn't anything like gambling.

Or, I might be completely wrong and just been on an incredible white-hot-streak gambling for the last 30 years.

by sokoloff

5/22/2026 at 4:37:59 PM

"I can win" is not a refutation of the claim that investment is gambling in any way that matters. The more relevant question is: does investment reward productivity (i.e. skill, strength, labor) or does it reward ownership (i.e. those who have capital will continue to accumulate capital)? By your own statement, it seems the latter.

All of that money that you've "earned" with investment, where do you think it came from? What do you think you've done to deserve it? If investment is fundamentally risky, then it's an unsound basis for a stable society (i.e. it's gambling); if it's not risky, then you can't even argue that you deserve that money by having risked your own capital.

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 6:53:40 PM

> All of that money that you've "earned" with investment, where do you think it came from?

It was created by the company you invested in.

> What do you think you've done to deserve it?

I took the risk of providing capital for the company to use to create wealth.

Risk is an elemental characteristic of free markets.

by WalterBright

5/22/2026 at 7:12:24 PM

> It was created by the company you invested in.

That's right: the value was created by other people, but yet you are benefiting. That makes you a parasite.

> I took the risk of providing capital for the company to use to create wealth.

So what? I can take a risk by jumping into a shallow pool. That's not the same as labor and does not entitle me, ethically, to profit. The profit should go to the people who do the work.

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 8:36:14 PM

> That's right: the value was created by other people, but yet you are benefiting. That makes you a parasite.

This is classic Marxism.

The employees were compensated commensurate with the value they produced. The value the investors create is the result of taking the risk by providing the capital and organization needed for the company to operate.

If you don't believe that, you're free to organize with like-minded fellow travelers, set up a commune, and split the rewards equally. I would caution you, however, that 20,000 other communes have been set up in the US, and they all disappeared. In my estimation, the typical commune member leaves after about 2 years, because they were doing all the work and the others were lazing around getting their equal share.

Put another way, SpaceX would not exist without Musk.

by WalterBright

5/26/2026 at 11:49:18 AM

> This is classic Marxism.

Correct. Are you going to dispute it or is "this is Marxism" the extent of your argument?

> The employees were compensated commensurate with the value they produced.

If they were compensated commensurate with the value they produced, then there would be no profit for the company, and the CEO's compensation would not be 1000x that of a line worker.

> If you don't believe that, you're free to organize with like-minded fellow travelers, set up a commune, and split the rewards equally.

That is one approach supported by unions.

> Put another way, SpaceX would not exist without Musk.

Yes, and I would not exist without my parents. That does not mean that I give them 90% of my profit.

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 5:01:55 PM

“Never lost money over any 20 year period” is a good enough refutation of investing in the S&P being gambling in any way that matters to allow me to act.

Others might be more conservative and I hope they find and choose investments which match their style and risk-tolerance.

by sokoloff

5/22/2026 at 5:52:17 PM

> in any way that matters to allow me to act.

I don't care how you act. That capitalism benefits the rich is not the subject of debate. This isn't /r/wallstreetbets

What is at stake us that all value is created by labor; and that the capitalist class (of which you are a member) is allowed to profit despite not producing anything at all. That makes you a parasite. Isn't that what the rich say about the poor?

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 7:05:09 PM

> What is at stake us that all value is created by labor

That's the communist "Labor Theory of Value" which is nonsense.

For example, spend the day digging a hole in your backyard. Did you create any value? Nope.

by WalterBright

5/22/2026 at 7:16:01 PM

> That's the communist "Labor Theory of Value" which is nonsense.

Can you explain how it's nonsense? Can you think of a valuable product or service that you consume that is not produced by labor?

> For example, spend the day digging a hole in your backyard. Did you create any value? Nope.

I didn't say that all labor produces value; I said that all value is produced by labor. As a Smart Guy who Created His Own Software Company with No Capital At All, I'm sure you know enough about elementary logic to recognize the difference.

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 8:49:22 PM

I recommend you start a commune. Or a business. It's a free country, there are no laws against it.

> all value is produced by labor

But you deny that the labor of the CEO produces value.

Consider Microsoft. The company's stock was flat for 10 years. Then Nadella took over as CEO. The stock went up by a factor of 10. Same company, same employees, same intellectual property. The difference was Nadella. A similar story with Steve Jobs' second coming at Apple. And Steve Jobs at Pixar. There are innumerable such stories.

It's similar to military generals. An army's victory or defeat is pretty much entirely due to the general.

by WalterBright

5/26/2026 at 11:57:02 AM

> I recommend you start a commune. Or a business. It's a free country, there are no laws against it.

So in your view, there are only two options: (a) unlimited astronomical compensation for CEOs while line workers get minimum wage or (b) hippie commune? You really can't see any other option? Even 50 to 60 years ago, CEO salaries were not as distorted as they are today and yet the world did not grind to a stop.

> Then Nadella took over as CEO. The stock went up by a factor of 10

The stock is not a measure of productivity. It's a measure of expectation. The problem with you and many capitalists is that you view the stock as the company's product. It isn't. Is the current version of Windows ten times better than the previous version? No? Then why did the stock go up?

> It's similar to military generals.

Great analogy. A general (O-10) in the US army serving since 1986 makes $19,000/mo. A private (E-1) makes $2,407/mo. That's a difference of ~8x. Now explain to me again why a CEO makes >1000x what his employees make?

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 6:50:59 PM

> a long enough time line, all the money ends in very few hands.

You're assuming the economy is zero sum, which it obviously is not.

by WalterBright

5/22/2026 at 7:08:53 PM

> You're assuming the economy is zero sum, which it obviously is not.

That assumption does not follow from my statement.

What I do assume is that the easiest way to make money is to have money, which means that the rich and get richer and the poor get poorer. We've already seen that the rise of billionaires correlatives with an increase in wealth inequality and poverty.

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 8:25:30 PM

Gambling is zero sum, so it does follow from your statement.

> the rise of billionaires correlatives with an increase in wealth inequality and poverty

The rise of the wealthy in the 19th century corresponded with scores of millions of people rising out of poverty into the middle class and beyond.

> What I do assume is that the easiest way to make money is to have money, which means that the rich and get richer and the poor get poorer.

Creating value does not make the poor poorer.

Consider the wealth in America today. Compare it with the wealth in America in 1800. Where did all that wealth come from? Rich European immigrants?

Did you know that when Rockefeller built Standard Oil, the price of kerosene dropped 70%. Just who exactly was he "robbing"?

by WalterBright

5/26/2026 at 12:25:42 PM

> Gambling is zero sum, so it does follow from your statement.

My statement was "long enough time line, all the money ends in very few hands." That has nothing to do with zero-sum. Even if we assume that your premise of "rich billionaires make everyone else richer too", it does nothing to contradict my statement.

> The rise of the wealthy in the 19th century corresponded with scores of millions of people rising out of poverty into the middle class and beyond.

The decrease in poverty in that time period stems principally from industrialized farming techniques, increasing available food resources. There is nothing in that process that requires super-billionaires.

> Creating value does not make the poor poorer.

That depends. If all the created value is in the hands of rich, it gives the rich the power to buy more things, including things that the poor people need, e.g. housing. That drives up prices for the poor, and effectively decreases their buying power. That's how supply and demand work.

> Consider the wealth in America today. Compare it with the wealth in America in 1800.

Now consider the wealth distribution in America now versus the wealth distribution in America 60 years ago. At that time, the difference between the rich and the poor was much smaller. It was also a time of great economic expansion, opportunity, and innovation. So clearly super-billioniares cannot be necessary for economic productivity.

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 6:48:36 PM

Gambling: the ROI math means you lose money

Investing: the ROI math means you make money

> So what you're saying is that we all just need to become better gamblers?

It means take advantage of the free education you received. Make an assessment of what you enjoy and what you are good at. Select an opportunity in the intersection of those two endeavors.

People start businesses every day in America.

> Besides, this can't work for everyone

Wealth is not zero sum. If you create wealth, that does not mean someone else must be worse off.

by WalterBright

5/22/2026 at 8:29:15 AM

If I'd simply written the correct numbers on last week's lottery ticket, I could do that.

(hindsight stock picking is terrible!)

by pjc50

5/22/2026 at 2:01:03 AM

China going capitalist ( while remaining authoritarian ) has helped lift 800 million out of desperate poverty.

I hope that India too can emulate this in my lifetime. I was born in Kerala and would love to see Indians live in a country that is as wealthy per capita ( PPP adjusted ) as Singapore or failing that even as wealthy as the USA.

Capitalism has it's problems. But you struggling with rent is entirely your self-inflicted problem...

by KnuthIsGod

5/22/2026 at 2:18:48 AM

> But you struggling with rent is entirely your self-inflicted problem...

Yeah, that one guy and 70% of the country https://www.yahoo.com/news/videos/70-americans-struggle-pay-...

by autoexec

5/22/2026 at 4:05:15 AM

So why aren't those people lining up to try and emigrate to non-capitalistic countries for a allegedly better life?

Instead for the past century we have almost everyone in the world wanting or not minding moving to the hypercapitalist USA.

Ironically almost all the countries with emigration controls and exit visas in the past century were noncapitalistic countries trying to stop their people from fleeing to capitalistic countries.

by ivewonyoung

5/22/2026 at 4:56:05 AM

I don't know what you would define as "non-capitalistic" or why you'd limit your options to only those countries, but the idea that people can just pack up and go to live wherever they feel like is incredibly naive.

The reasons Americans don't just move to whatever country they think they'd enjoying living in the most are often the same reasons most people all over the world don't. They have a life here. Family, friends, jobs and other ties to their community that would be hard to leave behind.

Uncertainty and fear also keep people from moving their lives to new countries. Especially when they're going to a place where they don't have friends and family to help them with things like expenses and childcare.

Americans in particular are unlikely to speak anything other than English and while English is often understood to some extent many places overseas it can't be assumed to be avilable everywhere. Understanding the local language is often a requirement for getting citizenship in a country and not being fluent will be a hindrance even where it isn't explicitly required.

It's also very expensive to move. You'll need to have enough money to live somewhere and feed and clothe yourself the moment you step off the plane. You'll need to store all off your things someplace until housing can be secured and that can take a lot of time. Countries can require thousands in fees to apply for citizenship and people struggling with basics like food and housing aren't going to be able to afford that. About half the country doesn't even have a passport and the expense of getting one (along with the needed documentation) would be an additional burden.

Other countries don't necessarily want you. Immigrating is difficult. Unless you can demonstrate that you've already got someone willing to hire you (and effectively vouch that you won't be a financial burden) or you have some much needed skill or one that a native citizen cannot perform you may not be welcome. No nation is obligated to accept responsibility for you just because you want to live there.

It'd be great if everyone everywhere could just pack up and leave to start a life wherever they felt like it, but there are many reasons why that just isn't realistic. There are tens of millions of people America right now living in places without safe drinking water because of heavy metal contamination. Why do you think they don't just pack up and move to cities with drinkable water? What about the tens of millions of Americans who live within one mile of toxic waste sites that have been linked to infant deaths, cancers, and other serious long-term health issues? Why don't they just move? Forget about America, how about all those starving Africans just move to somewhere with lots of food? The world just doesn't work that way.

by autoexec

5/22/2026 at 7:43:36 AM

Some countries have walls to keep people in, some have walls to keep people out.

> the idea that people can just pack up and go to live wherever they feel like is incredibly naive.

That's how America was populated. In the last 5 years, millions of people walked from South America to the US. Walked!

The tax increases in New York, California and Washington have resulted in an exodus of wealthy people.

by WalterBright

5/22/2026 at 9:21:37 AM

America was populated by giving people land in exchange for doing the hard work of settling the country so that the government could expand farther west. The land wasn't empty before then, but it wasn't populated like it is now either. It was hard work and bodies were needed so immigration was strongly encouraged. The existence of illegal immigration today is another thing entirely.

I have absolutely no problem with wealthy people who refuse to pay their fair share of taxes leaving. Good riddance. If they want to act like parasites let them leech off the people some place else. Eventually those people will wise up and ask them to pay up or get out too. It's that or bow down and spend their lives in serfdom to their rich lords and masters. I prefer freedom over robber barons.

by autoexec

5/22/2026 at 6:07:13 PM

> Good riddance. If they want to act like parasites let them leech off the people some place else

That's a reactionary emotional reaction that many countries started with and failed and led to people fleeing and the govts banning people leaving. Examples include East Germany, North Korea, the eastern bloc etc.

History has shown again and again that chasing away high earners with super high taxes like doctors, tech workers, small business owners etc. leads to worse outcomes for everyone because they already pay a large share of total taxes. Also, they may quit and just collect the welfare off the high earners tax income. At the federal level the top 1% pay 40% of federal taxes, that's not even counting the jobs they create. Imagine a place trying to serve 99% of the people with only 60% of the tax revenue. They're either going to increase the taxes till there's no one left to overtax or reduce govt services which reduces govt employment leading to lower tax collection and even more welfare spending.

Taxes on things discourage the use of things, that's why high taxes on smoking and alcohol work. Supertaxing economic productivity and rewarding people sitting around not working will and has led to lower economic productivity.

https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c6521/c6521.pdf

I got a lot of downvotes making these comments and ran into posting limits. HN isn't a place for debates like this, you win, socialism is amazing, everyone upvote me now.

by ivewonyoung

5/22/2026 at 6:35:11 AM

Those factors apply to non Americans wanting to move to the US but it's apparent that there is heavy demand to the extent of millions taking dangerous trips and breaking laws just to get a foot into the USA. You cant find such latent demand to the same extent via surveys or visa applications in the other direction.

by ivewonyoung

5/22/2026 at 9:25:29 AM

Those factors apply to everyone. Even, as I pointed out, within America itself. There are Americans living in places that are literally killing them. They aren't happy about, but they also can't just leave either. Learn about them and their lives if you really want to understand why.

by autoexec

5/22/2026 at 6:28:09 AM

I would be curious to see those stats that show they are no longer in poverty, as poverty is relative, aka when rent goes up many still can't afford it. Just because they have more money coming in, it doesn't mean they aren't poor. Wealth per capita in the UK, US, Germany, and so on is good but there is still rampant poverty in each where people struggle to afford food, housing, and utilities. The wages don't match the outgoings.

by ktallett

5/22/2026 at 9:55:22 AM

> But you struggling with rent is entirely your self-inflicted problem...

The funny thing about this is that practically every single person in the US between the ages of 25-45 was an early adopter and a big fan for some (or all) of FAANG in the early days, and clearly saw the importance. The fact that they aren't filthy rich and far wealthier than older people tells a story. Not a story of lattes and avocados, but a story where housing and education costs guaranteed that as a group they couldn't save, never had a chance to invest, still can't invest. With certain adjustments the story isn't so different for much of the western world.. maybe education was cheap/free but their domestic labor market was weaker, whatever. They were and are still pretty much guaranteed to be on the outside. Luck, timing, and good connections are nice at any time, but the last few decades it's everything. In another timeline maybe wealthy youth is landlording it over the impoverished oldies, but in the best timeline we'd split the difference.

Even worse, it's a uniquely bad time to be smart and hardworking, because that's the type of attitude that could stick you with a lack of resilience at just the wrong time. People who've coasted may do much better than ones who are striving. Would you rather be a university grad with new debt right now, or be a certified HVAC tech for the last 5 years? If you were a mechanic, would you want to own the shop with loans to pay off in this economy and tariffs to deal with, or would you prefer to be a simple employee that can just bounce once the company goes under? I've met phd's who are delivering pizzas to make ends meet. Blue collar folks not only have better job security at the moment, but going back some years, if they got a mortgage at the right time and place with that stable job maybe they could do normal life stuff like kids, retirement one day.

What lessons do we think young people will take from all this? Nothing against anyone who is lucky, but a stubborn belief in mythical meritocracy or the legendary American dream is absolutely stone-cold crazy these days. There's just the insiders and the outsiders and there's not much rhyme or reason to any of it.

by ian_j_butler

5/22/2026 at 10:57:14 AM

> it's a uniquely bad time to be smart and hardworking

I think the next decade will be one of the single greatest times to be smart and hardworking. I think we’ll see AI-powered tools evolve to give hardworking humans significantly more leverage than they’ve been able to individually harness before and coupling that with smart (meaning high and good judgment on how to use them) will be an incredibly powerful combination.

by sokoloff

5/22/2026 at 2:06:37 AM

> But you struggling with rent is entirely your problem...

Who said anything about struggling with rent? Sounds like you a grasping for a straw man.

> I hope that India too can emulate this in my lifetime

I, too, hope the best things for the people of China and of India. But India, by any metric, is already a capitalist economy, where its wealth is concentrated in the hands of a very few.

To the extent that China has been successful is distributing its wealth among many people, I'd say it's the authoritarianism, rather than the capitalism, that has been instrumental. The state sets agendas, quotas, and salaries specifically to produce that outcome. Top-down government control is not a feature of unbridled capitalism.

So we have two large industrializing economies, both capitalist. One (the authoritarian one) has succeeded in drastically reducing poverty; the other has not. And yet you think that capitalism is the driver of equality?

Capitalism produces wealth. You need some other system to distribute that wealth fairly.

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 2:25:34 AM

> Who said anything about struggling with rent?

The person they replied to, in the very comment they replied to…?

> > > The amounts of money circulating whilst some of us struggle to make rent ...

by F3nd0

5/22/2026 at 3:25:12 PM

China also does massive amounts of investment in new technologies and local companies. One of the reasons capitalism concentrates wealth these days is that it’s cheaper to generate enormous capex to prevent paying for labor than to deal with the opex of labor. Ie the road to wealth requires either wealth or investment from the wealthy.

In capitalism, the wealthy provide the capex and reap the profit. In China, the government provides a lot of the capex and claims a lot of the profit (either directly or indirectly). They can then re-invest that, use it to set salaries free from market forces, etc.

The US could do more of that without getting into the contentious issue of raising personal taxes. Ie the government could control the flow of GPUs into the country, asserting that it had the right of first purchase, distribute them to a tightly controlled private company (think power or water company, with margins set by law), and probably make a profit on the cheaper hardware because they’d be a massive purchasing block. We won’t, though, because Google, Amazon, Oracle, etc are currently posed to make a _ton_ of money off doing basically the exact same thing.

by everforward

5/22/2026 at 1:49:31 PM

China wound not have a ton of billionaires that are living and fleeing China if they had their wealth distributed well

by throw3452

5/22/2026 at 7:45:48 AM

> capitalism is the driver of equality?

Nope. It is the driver of opportunity, though. It's up to individuals to take advantage of the opportunity, or not.

by WalterBright

5/22/2026 at 8:00:04 AM

>It's up to individuals to take advantage of the opportunity, or not.

The problem is that after decades monopolies consolidated and you have massive offshoring of labor to cheap countries and offshoring of profits to tax havens, there's not much opportunities the working class individuals can take, as all the opportunities are now geared towards the asset owning rent seeking class.

by joe_mamba

5/22/2026 at 8:01:24 AM

There are endless businesses you can start with little to no capital.

by WalterBright

5/22/2026 at 12:06:43 PM

> 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.

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 7:45:58 PM

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.

by WalterBright

5/26/2026 at 2:07:32 PM

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?

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 12:30:21 PM

If you count being a Doordash or Uber eats self employed sole proprietorship as "endless business opportunities", then yeah you could be right.

by joe_mamba

5/22/2026 at 7:50:06 PM

I had a paper route as a boy. It was definitely a business, as I contracted with the newspaper publisher for it. I bought the papers from the publisher, delivered them, and collected money from the customers. How much money I made was a function of how many customers I could sign up for delivery. I made enough to buy a car.

Real estate agents operate in much the same way.

by WalterBright

5/22/2026 at 8:25:56 PM

Have we already gotten to the part of the conversation where you just admit that your entire understanding of economics is based on a handful of personal anecdotes?

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 10:01:05 AM

Like what? Will they be profitable?

by tardedmeme

5/22/2026 at 6:43:26 PM

I started my own software business with no capital.

by WalterBright

5/22/2026 at 7:04:27 PM

That's very impressive. How did you write software without a computer?

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 8:06:55 PM

The school had one. When I wasn't at school, I wrote code in spiral notebooks.

Today you can buy a computer for $25. https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=raspberry+pi

You can pick up a keyboard at the thrift store for about $5, and a monitor for maybe $15.

by WalterBright

5/22/2026 at 8:27:31 PM

Okay so you admit that you did in fact have capital and you were lying before?

Did you ever compensate the school for their involuntary loan of that computer or are you now admitting that you are a thief?

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 9:58:15 AM

Capitalism incentivizes risk taking because the payoff is enormous - the most successful risk takers get to own the world 50 years later.

The problem: there's a second phase 50 years later, where the risk takers from 50 years ago own the world and do their best to prevent further rewards flowing to new risktakers. We are in that phase now.

The other problem: when the reward is so great, you do everything to get ahead, even illegal things, because the expectation value (winning*P(winning) + prison*P(caught)) is still positive.

by tardedmeme

5/22/2026 at 6:42:14 PM

> the most successful risk takers get to own the world 50 years later.

Musk creating wealth has taken nothing from me. How about you?

> there's a second phase 50 years later, where the risk takers from 50 years ago own the world and do their best to prevent further rewards flowing to new risktakers. We are in that phase now.

Did you know that Hackernews is run by wealthy people who fund startups?

What illegal things did Bezos do to get rich? Jobs? Gates? Musk?

by WalterBright

5/22/2026 at 7:03:49 PM

> Musk creating wealth has taken nothing from me. How about you?

That's exactly what he'd like you to believe. Where did that money come from? Did he just print it himself?

> Musk creating wealth has taken nothing from me. How about you?

Considering that billionaires are actively involved in writing the laws that ostensibly apply to them (see also: regulatory capture), I hardly think that legality should be highest bar that we hold them to. After all, the lords of medieval France acted "legally" when they executed their tenant farmers for failing to pay rent after a bad harvest.

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 7:42:23 PM

> Where did that money come from?

The value created by his company. That value can be turned into money by selling shares of it (stocks), or by borrowing against it (bonds).

Money is created by banks. When banks loan you money, that money is created by a notation in the bank's ledger. But they only loan money on collateral, which would be in this case the value of the company. The money gets destroyed (!) when the loan is paid off. But the value of the collateral remains.

by WalterBright

5/23/2026 at 9:29:44 PM

So you don't think when Musk took taxpayer money that he took anything from you. Are you not a taxpayer?

by tardedmeme

5/22/2026 at 8:21:27 PM

> The value created by his company.

A company is just a legal fiction. It doesn't do anything without people. The value was actually created by the people who work for Musk. In other words, those employees create a large value, and are paid a relatively low compensation. The difference goes to Musk, who contributed no value at all.

That's called theft.

> Money is created by banks.

Huh? No it plainly is not.

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 2:27:30 AM

"while remaining authoritarian" implies that Authoritarianism is an exclusive trait of Communism, which is the most absurd thing I've ever heard. Use any Capitalist country with an Authoritarian leader as an example.

by platevoltage

5/22/2026 at 7:47:10 AM

There have been 20,000 communes set up in the US. None were authoritarian. They all failed anyway.

by WalterBright

5/22/2026 at 7:17:35 PM

I don't know what this has to do with anything I said.

by platevoltage

5/22/2026 at 1:18:46 AM

Courtesy of TFA and capitalism:

"In 1985, if you were a reasonably affluent American, the best computer that you could afford was the IBM PC AT. The PC AT would cost you about $6,000—$19,400 in 2026 dollars—and thus represented about a quarter of the median American’s annual income; and it ran on an Intel 80286 processor, capable of something like 900,000 instructions per second. Today, if you find yourself in a market stall in Nairobi or Lagos, you’ll be able to find a cheap smartphone—like the Tecno Spark Go, manufactured by China’s Transsion—for somewhere between $30 and $120. That phone will run on a processor capable of billions of calculations per second."

by mhb

5/22/2026 at 1:28:44 AM

This quote has nothing to do with capitalism.

Please note that "commerce" and "capitalism" are not synonymous, and that the former does not imply the latter. Capitalism is in no way a prerequisite for technological development.

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 9:43:36 AM

"Capitalism" is an ever shifting ambiguity that exists to be a scapegoat to attack but is completely meaningless in its concrete usage by the attackers.

But "capitalism" in its historical and practical meaning means nothing other than commerce, i.e. the society based exchange, the system of production based on exchange. It was only through capitalist accounting methods that businesses were able to conduct commerce in such a way as to contrast costs and proceeds, and therefore create the optimizations that lead to mass computer production or, what is the same, cheap computers for the masses.

by sophrosyne42

5/22/2026 at 12:17:51 PM

> But "capitalism" in its historical and practical meaning means nothing other than commerce, i.e. the society based exchange, the system of production based on exchange

Completely wrong. Many of my comments here distinguish commerce from capitalism.

Commerce, ie the exchange of goods and services, has existed longer than civilization. Even some animals do it.

Capitalism is specifically the substitution of labor with ownership as a means of profiting. This produces an imbalanced market: some people compete for resources by selling their labor, while others compete simply by owning capital: the means of production. The problem is that the latter mode allows unlimited accumulation of wealth, while the former is limited by time and effort.

Imagine if Elon Musk was working a salaried job that paid $60000 per hour. How long would he have to work in order to earn his current fortune?

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 2:01:18 PM

Every socialist tries to make this distinction and falls to their own guillotine. You do realize that "substitute with" is merely a synonym for "exchange"?

The exchange of labor, to be sure, has existed nearly as long as civilization itself, perhaps longer, as all people cooperate by exchange through the division of labor right down to the family, and it is exchange whether the articles to be exchanged are money or physical things or even intangible, ephemeral things like love, pride, loyalty, or otherwise. Since human society is human cooperation by the division of labor, by your definition capitalism is nearly synonymous with human society itself. Fine by me.

by sophrosyne42

5/22/2026 at 2:15:58 PM

This argument does not make any sense.

I have no problem with the concept of money. Commerce always the exchange of good and services, including on a symbolic level: as you point out, affection, money, etc. "Money" is not the distinguishing factor between commerce and capitalism.

At the risk of repeating myself: the distinction is how wealth is acquired. Capitalism allows one to acquire wealth merely by possessing capital, which in turn engenders unlimited capacity to acquire more capital. Capital is unique among all those systems for that reason.

by hackyhacky

5/23/2026 at 12:49:25 AM

Then capitalism cannot exist and never has, because there is no such thing as something which produces wealth merely by possession. Mere ownership (as in a legal title) does not and cannot yield an income. To have a yield, something must be put to use. Without a use, there is no yield. Capital (in the sense of the monetary value of assets) is merely an index for the utility of assets in producing a yield. There is nothing special about the yield of capital; there is properly speaking no yield to capital at all, only a yield for the assets which the capital indexes. Entrepreneurs gain wealth by choosing which uses to put assets at their disposal. It is only when assets are put into production that they yield a profit or loss. And wealth accumulates only when there is sustainable profits. Mere posession would not involve exchange, let alone production, and therefore could not yield any profit. There is no "free" or "automatic" generation of income. It is the result of conscious activity on part of the owner, as is capital itself.

The distinction between capitalism and earlier forms of production is that money provides a means to index the yield of assets by capitalizing the value of those assets. The ability to quantitatively track the yield provides the ability to determine whether you are able to replace the asset or if you are consuming it. Accumulation can be planned by resolving to consume less than the yield of the asset. Capital and capital accounting, too, has existed nearly as long as civilization has existed. But the cause of the yield is in principle no different from the yield of resources in pre-history, which is refraining from consuming more than you produce. What is unique is the ability to determine the economic yield of things quantitatively, not procedure by which wealth accumulates.

by sophrosyne42

5/26/2026 at 12:00:24 PM

> Mere ownership (as in a legal title) does not and cannot yield an income. To have a yield, something must be put to use.

Money is used by loaning it out, which requires no effort and most importantly: the amount of money you can loan out (and make a profit from) is not limited by the number of hours in the day, and therefore owners can always out-compete laborers.

> The distinction between capitalism and earlier forms of production is that money provides a means to index the yield of assets by capitalizing the value of those assets.

Now you're getting it!

by hackyhacky

6/5/2026 at 4:30:42 AM

> Money is used by loaning it out, which requires no effort

Money is a medium of exchange. It is used by exchanging it for something else. A loan involves trading money in the present, which is more valuable, for money in the future. What produces value here is surrendering present goods indirectly through the intermediary of money. The creditor gives up consumption so that others can consume or produce earlier than they otherwise could have in absence of the loan. This is the value produced by loans in the eyes of the debtor.

> Now you're getting it!

Notice how any market automatically involves said accounting immediately when money is used. Your earlier insistence that markets and capitalism are distinct cannot be maintained.

by sophrosyne42

5/22/2026 at 6:21:23 AM

I mean we don't really have any counter examples even China didn't really start advancing in any meaningful way until they started moving towards capitalism.

by tick_tock_tick

5/22/2026 at 12:19:53 PM

We didn't have any examples of states without a divinely appointed absolute monarch until we did. Things can change.

And as a matter of fact, there are many examples of non capitalist societies.

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 1:32:36 AM

Capitalism is in no way a prerequisite for technological development.

Really? Who else builds stuff?

by CamperBob2

5/22/2026 at 1:39:29 AM

>Who else builds stuff?

The Chinese, famously?

by torben-friis

5/22/2026 at 3:20:45 AM

China is a great example of a counter point to the argument. They only started making things once they realized capitalism was better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_and_opening_up

> The reforms [starting in 1976] de-collectivized agriculture, abolished the people's communes, relaxed price controls, allowed foreign direct investment into China, and led to the creation of special economic zones, most prominently the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone and the Shanghai Pudong New Area. Private enterprises were allowed to grow, while many state-owned enterprises were scaled down or privatized. Shanghai Stock Exchange and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange were established in 1990, allowing a capital market system

by ivewonyoung

5/22/2026 at 3:48:05 AM

> They only started making things once they realized capitalism was better.

Free commerce is not the same as capitalism. A country where production, wages, and ownership are decided centrally can hardly be said to be unfettered capitalism.

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 3:58:09 AM

> A country where production, wages, and ownership are decided centrally can hardly be said to be unfettered capitalism.

The reforms in China I listed heavily cut down on that. Are you claiming that China is somehow less capitalistic now compared to 1976?

By your metric the US isn't capitalistic because NASA and various govt agencies and entitlements worth trillions of dollars a year of taxes exist.

by ivewonyoung

5/22/2026 at 4:27:45 AM

Please avoid straw man arguments. I didn't say that China didn't use capitalism: I said that it didn't use unfettered capitalism. Its capitalism is strongly tinged by its authoritarian rule with the explicit goal of reducing poverty.

The US, like China, continues to use a mixed approach to economic management in the form of regulated capitalism. The degree of regulation in the US has been declining since the 1950s, resulting in larger wealth inequalities and more poverty.

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 2:20:06 PM

On the subject of straw men, there is no such thing as "unfettered capitalism." That is something you invented to support your argument.

Put another way, capitalism, like communism, is one of those pure ideologies that has never really been given a fair shake. In fact, human nature rules out the possibility of a fair trial for any pure ideology. We are political creatures, not ideological ones. If you really are beyond your high-school years, as your account age suggests, this should be obvious.

Unsurprisingly, the most successful systems are those that have proven to be better at meeting human nature on its own terms. Hence the triumph of capitalism as it is practiced today, which for all its flaws has the advantage that you don't have threaten people at gunpoint to force them to engage in it.

by CamperBob2

5/22/2026 at 2:35:47 PM

For all of your rah-rah capitalist boosterism, you failed to address the actual content of my argument, which is that the reason during the last 50 years that the China has had decreasing poverty, while the US has had increasing poverty, has nothing to do with capitalism, and everything to do with restrictions on capitalism (or their absence).

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 3:02:29 PM

As others have pointed out, that's a naïve and frankly incorrect reading of Chinese history, but it's also not something that can be addressed here.

by CamperBob2

5/22/2026 at 3:55:46 PM

It evidently can be addressed here, as you yourself mentioned. No one has yet pointed out to me why my reading is "naive and frankly incorrect," so feel free to be the first.

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 7:03:28 PM

I listed the reforms upthread that you ignored.

All the reforms fit a capitalistic model, not just a free commerce model.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48231586

And of course, Mao's communism was very anti-capitalistic.

by ivewonyoung

5/22/2026 at 8:30:42 PM

All well and good but you still haven't addressed my point which is that China's reduction of poverty is due to its central control of wages, construction, and capital.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48236489

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 9:11:47 PM

An assertion made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

by CamperBob2

5/24/2026 at 5:09:37 PM

Here is evidence. https://www.worldfinance.com/strategy/china-the-land-of-less...

by hackyhacky

5/25/2026 at 7:33:44 PM

State owned enterprises != private companies. Even in the US, govt salaries for higher ups are asymptotically low compared to private companies.

by ivewonyoung

5/26/2026 at 12:01:22 PM

> As of 2013, two-thirds of Chinese graduates set their sights on a government position or a role at a major state-owned firm,

by hackyhacky

5/23/2026 at 1:24:46 AM

They had "central control of wages, construction, and capital" to a much higher degree before they started becoming capitalistic in 1976 and the poverty levels were much much worse and not going down. They only started going down once they embraced capitalism and started allowing private companies.

by ivewonyoung

5/24/2026 at 5:08:46 PM

That is consistent with my earlier statement: capitalism creates wealth, but you need another system to distribute it fairly. It's crazy to think that capitalism alone will "raise all boats" when this has been shown to be untrue.

by hackyhacky

5/25/2026 at 7:41:28 PM

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 all that.

If you keep increasing taxes and reward people that don't work by giving them free and easy wealth, the tax revenue will actually go down at some point instead of going up, leaving less to redistribute. It's like killing the goose that lays the golden egg.

https://fee.org/articles/the-laffer-curve-its-time-to-stop-l...

by ivewonyoung

5/26/2026 at 12:03:22 PM

> 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 increasingly provided for free if one doesn't work. The Laffer curve and all that.

So in the US in the 1950s and 1960s, when the highest marginal tax rate was around 90%, did people suddenly stop working? Or did the US enter its highest period of productivity and income equality?

by hackyhacky

5/31/2026 at 1:34:51 AM

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

by ivewonyoung

5/31/2026 at 11:57:17 AM

This chart looks at the top 1%. This is intentionally deceptive. "The total national income share earned by the top 1% and top 0.1% in that era was far lower than it is now, and consequently, the income thresholds required for entry into the ranks of the top 1% or the top 0.1% were lower. By today’s standards, there were many fewer rich households in the 1950s than there are now—in fact, almost none. The rich people from the 1950s that Greenberg is comparing to the rich of today were what we would now call the upper middle class—thus, not an apples-to-apples comparison. Had there been any 2017-style rich people in those days, they would likely have faced an effective tax rate near that confiscatory statutory rate of 91%.... It’s not a coincidence that the rich are so much richer now than they were in the 50s: it’s precisely because effective tax rates on the rich have gone down so much that it’s worthwhile to become rich in the first place." [1]

Why is your article making claims that, while true, give a distorted view of 1950s tax policy? It's certainly possible that an organization called the "Tax Institute" has an agenda they are trying to push.

[1] https://rooseveltinstitute.org/blog/effective-progressive-ta...

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 7:52:07 AM

[flagged]

by WalterBright

5/22/2026 at 1:34:48 AM

> Really? Who else builds stuff?

Said the Christian in pre-Englightenment Europe: "Well, of course Christianity is the one true religion. After all, the whole civilized world is Christian."

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 1:35:19 AM

That doesn't answer my question.

by CamperBob2

5/22/2026 at 1:39:17 AM

That's because your question is silly. I'll spell it out for you: Just because all modern states are capitalist does not mean that all states must be capitalist, as evidenced by the many erstwhile states that were not capitalist. Your failure to see beyond your immediate surroundings and ignoring the first sentence of my previous comment is perhaps the reason for your silly question.

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 3:18:43 AM

> Just because all modern states are capitalist does not mean that all states must be capitalist, as evidenced by the many erstwhile states that were not capitalist

However, I doubt anyone else would instead want to live in current day North Korea or pre-1990 eastern bloc countries, or in East vs West Germany.

by ivewonyoung

5/22/2026 at 3:45:19 AM

> However, I doubt anyone else would instead want to live in current day North Korea or pre-1990 eastern bloc countries, or in East vs West Germany.

An astute observation, if your knowledge of history begins and ends with the 20th century.

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 4:03:54 AM

So not a single country out of ~200, not one, emulated the alleged great successes and utopias of historic non-capitalist economies for a century plus. Which is why you're unable to name one in the 20th century. Hmm I wonder why.

Maybe we can look at societies where the modern era hasn't touched, like some places in Africa. Why is the quality of life so great there that everyone wants to move from hypercapitalistic societies like the US to Africa instead of the other way around?

by ivewonyoung

5/22/2026 at 4:23:56 AM

Wow, talk about moving the goal posts. I was pointing out that capitalism has not always been the universal economic system, and now you're trying to make me explain why years of exploitative colonialism and corrupt authoritarianism haven't yielded a better alternative. Well, isn't it obvious?

300 hundred years ago, every country in the world was ruled by an absolute monarch, and that fact alone was considered persuasive explanation of divine will: the world must always be thus. Since then, the philosophy of rulers has changed, but small-minded apologists for the status quo have not evolved in their thinking. "If our current approach isn't the best option," say the small-minded apologists, "why isn't anyone doing anything different?" The answer to that question, in case it wasn't obvious, is the same as it was 300 years ago: entrenched interests.

Are you seriously arguing that it is impossible to allocate today's abundance of resources in a more fair and productive way than our current system does?

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 6:57:51 AM

The problem is that your proposed approach has been tried again and again and has failed every single time with disastrous consequences for several generations.

Once people are given all the resources they want they are not motivated to work. The productive people get tired of the product of their hard work being forcibly taken away and stop working since they would be given resources anyway. That's how the system collapses since there aren't enough resources for everyone to sit and consume. Thats exactly what happened in the eastern bloc. https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/When...

How many times should we run the same failed experiment and ruin millions more lives?

https://www.africadatahub.org/blog/what-usaid-funding-of-afr...

https://www.ft.com/content/c10e4f2f-5564-42a4-8aa7-66c78ca1c...

https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/articles/kathy-hoch...

by ivewonyoung

5/22/2026 at 12:24:04 PM

> Once people are given all the resources they want they are not motivated to work

You are again straw manning an argument. I said nothing about giving people all resources with no work. In fact, I explicitly said the opposite: I want a society where people compete to provide labor in order to gain material advantage.

My argument against capitalism is that that competition should be fair: people should compete for resources with labor, and not against those who contribute no labor.

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 7:15:52 PM

That makes no sense because labor needs capital to take risks so they get salaries. For example new drug discoveries cost a lot of money and a huge percentage fail with big losses that go to paying labor but not eventually benefiting from it. Banning that model where capital is risked by passive investors would've meant far fewer life saving drugs being invented, literally making mankind worse off.

If someone wants to passively invest $3M into a new coffee shop and pay labor to work in it, banning it like you want to do will kill the economy and disadvantage the little guy.

by ivewonyoung

5/22/2026 at 8:32:06 PM

> 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.

by hackyhacky

5/25/2026 at 7:54:24 PM

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.

by ivewonyoung

5/26/2026 at 2:02:37 PM

> 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.

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 1:55:49 AM

You don't have to demonstrate this kind of ignorance of human history on main. Aren't you embarrassed? Do you value knowledge even a little bit?

When did capitalism begin? How was 'stuff' created and distributed prior to that? How do other, distinct and contemporaneous modes of production create 'stuff'?

by lkey

5/22/2026 at 7:55:13 AM

Capitalism began when Thag, who was a good hunter, brought home two dinosaur steaks. His buddy Grog was a lousy hunter, but was good at making spears. Thag traded a dinosaur steak for a new spear.

by WalterBright

5/24/2026 at 2:02:06 AM

Really Walter? You know better than this.

First, pedantically, we did not share time with 'dinosaurs' in the sense you imply.

Secondly, pedantically, that kind of hunting was not the main source of calories for hunter-gatherers. It's more apt to imagine them as gatherers first and primarily.

Thirdly, and also pedantically, you are not describing the system of capitalism that I, and most educated people talk about when they use the word. That system has only been with us in the main for, generously, 250 years.

Critically, Thag and Grog both own the means of production for their spears and 'steaks' respectively. The necessary abstractions for capital accumulation, debt, and private ownership simply do not exist.

by lkey

5/22/2026 at 12:25:51 PM

That's commerce, not capitalism.

Capitalism began when Thag declared that he owns all the dinosaurs, and anyone who hunts a dinosaur must pay him 10 percent of the meat as a tribute, or else he will stab them with his spear.

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 6:35:55 PM

Um, Grog had the spear.

by WalterBright

5/22/2026 at 7:23:38 PM

[flagged]

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 7:48:50 AM

> Capitalism is in no way a prerequisite for technological development.

Communist countries copied technology, their inventions are very few. Capitalist countries routinely exhibit rapid technological development.

by WalterBright

5/22/2026 at 6:39:41 PM

I was just watching "Shock and Awe", a documentary on Amazon, about the development of electrical theory and products.

It was driven largely by people who wanted to make money off of their inventions. None of the progress came from communist countries.

Did you know that Gutenberg invented the printing press in order to make money?

Did you know the Wright Bros invented the airplane in order to make money?

And so on and so forth.

by WalterBright

5/22/2026 at 7:07:11 PM

> It was driven largely by people who wanted to make money off of their inventions.

I am getting a little tired of repeating myself, but you're evidently confused so I'll indulge you.

The opposition to capitalist as a monetary system does not imply the opposition to the profit motive. As I've said several times, and which you continue to ignore, the exchange of goods and services in the form of commerce requires the profit motive. Conflating my position with communism is a straw man.

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 7:24:04 PM

Well, you do repeat Marxist tenets, like the class struggle and the labor theory of value.

by WalterBright

5/22/2026 at 7:32:49 PM

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

by hackyhacky

5/23/2026 at 5:11:10 AM

> 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.

by WalterBright

5/26/2026 at 2:06:21 PM

> 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...

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 1:30:44 AM

That has little to do with what I said.

A third of the world lives in poverty. That's the fault of capitalism.

by richforrester

5/22/2026 at 7:58:08 AM

About 90% of the world lived in poverty before capitalism.

Besides, America's poor have a higher standard of living than medieval kings.

by WalterBright

5/22/2026 at 10:06:23 AM

The fact that some countries (mostly the political west) developed a wealthy middle class post WW2 was not due to capitalism but due to social democracy.

Capitalism by itself does not produce egalitarian wealthy society. The system divides the populace into "capital owners" and "workers" who are in direct conflict.

There are plenty of capitalistic countries where most people are poor. In fact many of the as said Western countries has also high levels of poverty while running capitalism in the 1800 etc until post WW2 social democratic movements.

Once you dismantle those social democratic constructs such as labor unions and start shifting more power to the capital holders you'll see how the society splits apart to rich and poor. The rich use their wealth and power to rig the system to benefit themselves even more and become richer at the expense of everyone else. Ultimately they will remove democracy because functional real democracy is a threat to their wealth.

by samiv

5/22/2026 at 6:34:07 PM

The middle class emerged in colonial America. During the 1800s, scores of millions of people came to the US with little more than a suitcase. They went into the middle class, and some into the wealthy. We know this because:

1. Average height increased throughout the 1800s

2. Life expectancy increased throughout the 1800s

3. Plenty of photos and paintings of towns that consist of middle class housing

> The system divides the populace into "capital owners" and "workers" who are in direct conflict.

That's what Marx claimed. I've had many jobs. In none of them was I ever in conflict. It was a negotiated relationship, where I provided labor and expertise in exchange for money. I've also been a boss, and if you ever have been you'd know you had no power over your employees. They only work for you because they want to. When they stopped wanting to, they simply disappear, and there's not a thing I could do about it.

In the US, every worker has the power to walk away and start their own business. The wealthy in America did not come from wealthy immigrants, they came from poor immigrants.

by WalterBright

5/22/2026 at 8:47:37 PM

Most employees have absolutely Zero leverage. Ask any Amazon warehouse worker how much liberties they have and how much in practice they can negotiate. Just because some employees have had some leverage doesn't change the underlying power dynamics between employers and employees. In fact we're now seeing this play out in software as well with the AI hype train and I expect a reality check to hit many people previously in their cushy office jobs.

by samiv

5/22/2026 at 11:12:17 PM

> Most employees have absolutely Zero leverage.

They can walk away at any moment and there's absolutely nothing Amazon can do about it.

Amazon pays significantly above minimum wage. Why don't they pay minimum wage?

Amazon benefits to warehouse workers include heavily subsidized health care (starting at $5 per week), up to 20 weeks of paid parental leave, prepaid college tuition, and a 401(k) company match.

That's the leverage workers have.

by WalterBright

5/23/2026 at 6:51:07 AM

Walk away and do what?

Most proletariats don't have that option since they need their incomes.

When an employee has exactly the options of taking it or leaving it is not leverage.

by samiv

5/23/2026 at 6:36:55 PM

> Walk away and do what?

There are more than 1.1 to 1.3 million businesses in the US with over 30 employees. But somehow, a person is only employable by one of them?

16.6 million Americans are self-employed.

by WalterBright

5/22/2026 at 11:06:30 AM

People living with room mates working 80 hours a week have a higher standard of living than kings?

Do you even listen to yourself?

by imtringued

5/22/2026 at 6:23:32 PM

Let's enumerate a few things:

1. Today's poor are as tall as rich people, meaning they get plenty of nutritious food. They're taller than medieval kings.

2. Fresh vegetables and fruit from all over the world 365 days a year.

3. Flush toilets.

4. Air conditioning

5. Central heating

6. Infinitely better medical care

7. Endless amazing entertainment at the push of a button

8. Can communicate with anyone in the world, for free

9. Anything you want to know, at the push of a button

10. Far better clothing

11. Cars you can drive anywhere

12. Fly at 30,000 feet in complete luxury across the country

13. Free education, in any field you want

14. Hot and cold running water

15. Hot showers

16. Microwave ovens

I can go on if you like.

by WalterBright

5/22/2026 at 9:20:13 AM

> Besides, America's poor have a higher standard of living than medieval kings.

Only if you define the standard of living in a consumerist way.

by account42

5/22/2026 at 11:06:44 AM

Would you willingly swap your life (or the life of your child) for that of a medieval king?

I sure wouldn’t.

by sokoloff

5/22/2026 at 6:15:25 PM

Neither would I.

by WalterBright

5/22/2026 at 1:36:21 AM

> A third of the world lives in poverty. That's the fault of capitalism.

So what you're saying is that capitalism lifted about two thirds of the world out of poverty.

Thanks to capitalism, I don't have to toil in the fields.

by rationalist

5/22/2026 at 1:43:08 AM

> Thanks to capitalism, I don't have to toil in the fields.

No, that's thanks to commerce not to capitalism. Capitalism benefits those those who hold capital, which is not me.

The fact that there are more than enough resources for no one to live in poverty should suggest to you that something is wrong with the distribution system.

"It's true, Mr/Ms Rationalist, that our patented Miracle Medical Snakeoil caused a third of your leg to become necrotic and fall off, but be glad for the two thirds that did not fall off!"

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 1:48:43 AM

> > Thanks to capitalism, I don't have to toil in the fields.

> No, that's thanks to commerce not to capitalism. Capitalism benefits those those who hold capital, which is not me.

Are you toiling in the fields? It seems to me like your attitude is that "If I can't be rich, then no one should be rich."

> The fact that there are more than enough resources for no one to live in poverty should suggest to you that something is wrong with the distribution system.

So instead of two thirds of the world not living in poverty, everyone should live in poverty equally?

by rationalist

5/22/2026 at 1:56:12 AM

> It seems to me like your attitude is that "If I can't be rich, then no one should be rich."

The problem with capitalism is not that some people get rich and some people don't. The problem is that of an unfair playing field.

Everyone has a body and a mind, and commerce allows us to rent out those features in exchange for pay. People who are smarter or stronger or work harder or work more will be able to benefit more. That's how I got rich. But there's a limit to how rich I can get, because I have only one body and one mind and there are a finite number of hours in the day.

The other way to get rich is to own things. If you own a factory or real estate or bonds you get to charge other people and make a profit even though you are expending no effort. And in this case there is no limit on your profit, because you can use your profit to buy more capital and make more profit from that. The result is eventually a winner-take-all economy, where the winners own an increasing amount of society and everyone else pays them to use it. If that sounds familiar, it should, because it's feudelism, and is the eventual end state of capitalism.

You should really read a bit about the philosophy that you're arguing so vehemently for, apparently without knowing anything about it.

> So instead of two thirds of the world not living in poverty, everyone should live in poverty equally?

No, that's ridiculous.

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 7:00:29 AM

> The other way to get rich is to own things. If you own a factory or real estate or bonds you get to charge other people and make a profit even though you are expending no effort. And in this case there is no limit on your profit, because you can use your profit to buy more capital and make more profit from that.

Risk : Reward, that's obvious, isn't it? I have known many relatives who bankrupted themselves trying to "own" stuff. I also know some who succeeded and are rich. Starting a business is very hard, try it.

by eklavya

5/22/2026 at 12:10:57 PM

> Risk : Reward, that's obvious, isn't it? I have known many relatives who bankrupted themselves trying to "own" stuff. I also know some who succeeded and are rich. Starting a business is very hard, try it

In order to risk one's own capital, one must first own capital. Today's working poor, just like the serfs of times gone by, have nothing to invest but their own labor. It's hard to build a business when you're fully occupied in working to buy food.

You've inadvertently pointed out the fundamental inequality of capitalism: in order to get the (potential) benefits of capital, you must first belong to the capitalist class.

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 12:35:13 PM

It's interesting how when you talk to people who are vocally in favor of capitalism, they always turn out to be in favor of an imaginary version of capitalism where everybody is a small business owner, rather than in favor of how the system works in practice and the outcomes that it necessarily creates.

by ndiddy

5/22/2026 at 2:07:45 AM

> You should really read a bit about the philosophy that you're arguing so vehemently for, apparently without knowing anything about it.

You had a good comment until you wrote that. Don't lower your standards with stupid personal attacks.

> The problem with capitalism is not that some people get rich and some people don't. The problem is that of an unfair playing field.

I would love for things to be fair, but I grew up in the real world and learned that things weren't fair back when I was a kid in primary school.

Instead of lamenting about something that I can't control, I decided to focus my efforts on what I can control. Instead of tearing other people down, I built myself up.

Unless you can change the human characteristic of greed, the world will always be unfair. You can spit into the wind, or you can set a sail.

by rationalist

5/22/2026 at 2:18:06 AM

> You had a good comment until you wrote that. Don't lower your standards with stupid personal attacks.

I apoligize for judging you based on the things that you write.

> Unless you can change the human characteristic of greed, the world will always be unfair.

There is nothing wrong with greed or unfairness, to a degree. As I said in my previous comment, some personal characteristics will naturally lead to inequality of outcome. That's fine, because everyone is deriving profit from the (variable quality) work that they are personally able to produce. I would say that greed and unfairness are essential to any system of commerce, which I support.

Capitalism, on the other hand, allows inequality on a grand scale that necessarily results in a society that no longer rewards hard work: the lords own all property, everyone else works for them, and there is no way to achieve wealth competitive with that of a lord simply by labor. The laborers work to surive, and the owner class consumes all the benefits. This is the system that we spent a century of war fighting to end. It seems silly to go back to feudalism just to appease the modern-day lords.

> Instead of tearing other people down, I built myself up.

Who, do you suppose, am I tearing down? I want a society that rewards hard work. A system with no social mobility is not that system. I want people to improve themselves in order to make more money. What I don't want is a society where the owner class are able to be parasites on everyone else, producing no labor (physically or intellectually) but showing giant profit. The modern day US is increasingly distant from its much more socially mobile past, and it's only going to get worse.

I'm not saying that the current crop of billionaires haven't worked hard to get where they are. I am saying that their work is not proportional to their benefit, and at a certain point they are able to continue benefitting despite producing noting of value.

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 2:25:33 AM

> I apoligize for judging you based on the things that you write.

I apologize for thinking you were willing to have a decent conversation. I won't waste any more of your time.

by rationalist

5/22/2026 at 3:45:31 AM

> I won't waste any more of your time.

Thanks!

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 3:54:02 AM

> Thanks!

You're welcome!

by rationalist

5/22/2026 at 9:44:27 AM

The third of the worls that lives in poverty obstinantly refuses to adopt capitalist methods.

by sophrosyne42

5/22/2026 at 1:33:44 AM

Really? What other systems are better at lifting people out of poverty (without killing a few tens of millions in the process?)

There are so many other places where this sort of low-effort high-school edgelording fits in better than here.

by CamperBob2

5/22/2026 at 1:44:00 AM

> There are so many other places where this sort of low-effort high-school edgelording fits in better than here.

A good sign of low-effort edgelording is championing an obviously broken system by using a straw man to disparage the alternatives.

by hackyhacky

5/22/2026 at 2:14:02 PM

[dead]

by CamperBob2

5/22/2026 at 8:14:33 AM

They are not just shuffling money around though.

Nvidia sells all the stock, prices for GPUs moved up not down.

Companies like Apple don't want to be in every industry. Its risk, its cost, its expertise you need.

And sure you can throw money at it but you need people. Alone hiring all the experts is probalby not that easy. Who knows how to setup a DRam Factory?

It takes years to build this up

by Curosinono

5/22/2026 at 6:58:49 PM

For a commodity part, Apple has a history of buying a manufacturing partner a dedicated manufacturing line in exchange for locking down a guaranteed supply at a lower overall price.

It's one of the early moves Tim Cook made after joining Apple to lock down enough flash memory supply to move iPods from hard drives to flash.

by GeekyBear

5/22/2026 at 1:42:09 AM

> Apple in particular has $20B in its couch cushions

I wonder how long it REALLY took them to move from intel to apple silicon, which they don't even make.

It might be easy, like a consumer deciding to generate their own electricity (pv on the roof)

or it might be slightly harder, like a consumer deciding to generate their own electricity by drilling for oil, refining it, etc...

by m463

5/22/2026 at 1:49:44 AM

Well, they acquired PA Semi in 2008, they used their first chip (the A4) in the iPad in 2010, and they progressively iterated using the chip in phones until they announced the switch from Intel in 2020 (concurrently, more or less, with the A14). So it took them 12 years and 10 different chips.

by prewett

5/22/2026 at 9:54:36 AM

> I wonder how long it REALLY took them to move from intel to apple silicon, which they don't even make.

Apple has much, much more control over their silicon than they ever had with Intel.

With Intel, they were stuck with whatever Intel could supply - and that, particularly regarding power management, wasn't much.

In contrast, for ARM, Apple has been one of their longest-ever partners [1], with Apple holding one of the very rare and probably very expensive "Architecture Licenses" that allow Apple to not just build CPUs out of pre-made IP blocks, but also design their own cores and, and that is the crucial thing, extend the ARM instruction set on their CPUs.

The latter is what made the ARM move feasible, there would have been no way of getting high-performance emulation of x86 without a few specific extensions.

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2023/09/06/apple-inks-new-deal-arm...

by mschuster91

5/22/2026 at 6:26:15 AM

Apple, Google Microsoft Amazon should all set up memory and CPU fabs. I don’t understand why they don’t do it. $400 million ASML machine is chump change and you can almost certainly find/train locals or provide incentives to immigrants to come here as workers to fill the roles there.

by dyauspitr

5/22/2026 at 10:47:39 AM

30 years ago that's how the industry was structured. IBM was the largest memory manufacturer. MBAs spent decades undoing the arrangement you're now suggesting.

by dboreham

5/22/2026 at 5:31:06 PM

fabs probably was low margin business compared to selling Ads before current AI boom.

by andriy_koval

5/22/2026 at 6:47:33 AM

Well, isn’t Musk doing something similar with his new solar panels fab?

Frankly it’s ridiculous how we (the West) dropped renewables like a hot potato because it became synonymous with subsidizing China’s dominance in the field.

by eecc

5/22/2026 at 6:31:18 PM

Now that I look into it, it looks like he is, which is a good thing. For some reason I thought Terafab was like a pie-in-the-sky idea where he was going to do compute in space on satellites or something, but it isn’t that. It’s actually a real fab in the United States and I fully support that even if Elon is a piece of shit.

by dyauspitr

5/22/2026 at 6:35:49 AM

It’s hilarious that they’ll spend a trillion renting GPUs instead of just making their own.

Even if you were nowhere near state of the art, being able to produce millions of your own cards every year at cost would save you a lot of money.

by MagicMoonlight

5/22/2026 at 9:46:07 AM

> And yet I look at all the money being shuffled around between Nvidia and Google and Microsoft and Amazon and Apple

A lot of that is “weird money” created by the act of passing it around between the entities or “Holywood accounting” style money that exists when convenient and will vanish the instant it might be taxed or need to be extracted from the cycle to pay for something tangible. Trying to use a large amount of that money for tangible long-term building projects risks piercing the vail.

by dspillett

5/23/2026 at 1:39:17 AM

The Big 3 memory producers are really super charging their Chinese competitors CXMT and YMTC. They will IPO this year and they will be able to get massive funding for their build outs.

If the Big 3 had been more prudent, they could have kept profits lower and avoided this, but now they've probably dug their own grave and will see massive decline in profits starting from 2027/2028 when Chinese capacity really comes online.

by try-working

5/23/2026 at 2:55:58 AM

The article has examples from history of overexpansion and crashes. Would rapidly expanding (or keeping profits lower(??)) be beneficial long term for the Big 3? I bet they think it's better to bank the surplus now. The Chinese will have to get their investment back somehow too after the expansion spend.

by lmz

5/23/2026 at 3:34:57 AM

Profit is not a concern for the Chinese

by georgeburdell

5/23/2026 at 4:28:46 AM

[dead]

by try-working

5/23/2026 at 3:00:39 AM

Well, they're about to lose massive market share to CXMT and YMTC.

by try-working

5/23/2026 at 11:09:28 AM

If they're screwed either way then the rational solution is to bank the extra cash. Then at least they would have cash at the end of it. If they are production constrained how would reducing profits help in any way?

by lmz

5/23/2026 at 5:55:45 PM

We wouldn't be switching to Chinese manufactured memory if Korean & US memory wasn't exorbitantly priced. They're forcing the switch.

by zargon

5/25/2026 at 11:08:46 AM

It's a capacity constraint. It's either consumers switch or the HBM buyers switch and I know which one I'd prioritize.

by lmz

5/23/2026 at 9:16:29 AM

while it looks like outlandish fantasy today, looking forward to their competitors dumping consumer memory in a couple year's time.

regardless, this industry goes through such cycles (which have killed weaker companies and made the situation worse). high time for the memory "OPEC" to disband.

by rldjbpin

5/22/2026 at 8:03:48 AM

I work in healthcare imaging. The DRAM crunch is translating into significant increases in costs - because reconstructing images from raw scans is a compute-itensive process; and that gradually translates into product price increases. And then, healthcare providers may well opt for cheaper, lower-tier medical scanners, since they can't afford the better ones; and then finally you get less accurate scans if you're suspected to have cancer or whatever.

So, that's another way we are financing the LLM machine and the trillion-dollar valuations of those corporate behemoths.

by einpoklum

5/22/2026 at 1:39:43 AM

It's impressive that somehow, as if by coincidence, we're seeing the biggest inflationary drivers for decades, perhaps for centuries, all happening simultaneously.

The Iran war is spiking the price of oil and will likely cause shortages of pretty much everything if it isn't ended.

The Ukraine war is helping with that by destroying Russian refining capacity.

The memory shortage is set to do the same to consumer electronics, which are absolutely essential to the modern economy.

Meanwhile the AI fad is seeing huge layoffs. At the same time as the AI Big Cos are beginning to show signs of ending the subsidised free lunch phase and moving to a utility model, which will raise prices for every company that is hooked on AI.

Also tariffs. Although I'm not sure if anyone knows what's happening there.

And farms are failing. Climate change will accelerate that, so there will be food shortages within a few years.

If it's not cynical and deliberate, it's an astounding confluence of (literally) catastrophic mismanagement.

by TheOtherHobbes

5/22/2026 at 1:55:17 AM

> Meanwhile the AI fad is seeing huge layoffs.

This is really the only point I disagree with. Layoffs are being blamed on AI, but they are really a hangover of the covid hiring boom, and subsequent bust.

All the tech money is going into building data centres (and the gas turbines that power data centres), and it turns out that programmers don’t have the relevant skills to build gas turbines.

by mr_toad

5/22/2026 at 10:42:45 AM

> Layoffs are being blamed on AI, but they are really a hangover of the covid hiring boom.

The world's most convenient virus.

by wartywhoa23

5/22/2026 at 2:57:16 AM

A few months ago I’d have been right there with you; however recently there have been a number of high profile multi-thousand-head layoffs attributed to budget pressure of deploying AI - and so technically it’s more of an indirect rather than “a robot stole my job” replacement, but still causal. Those tokens will be “doing” labor, rather than the human.

by threecheese

5/22/2026 at 11:46:42 AM

Workers at many of these companies are being required to use AI each day, not because AI is such vaporware that it has to be pushed, but because making employees use it creates trainable datasets to further improve it, further automate work, further put pressure on headcount. A very worrying cycle on top of the already rapidly improving real capabilities of AI.

by Schlagbohrer

5/22/2026 at 9:00:12 PM

Most companies are showing high revenue and profit and still laying off huge segments of their workforce. Largely due to the stock market - a lot of non-AI players are facing lowering stock price.

by array_key_first

5/23/2026 at 10:18:03 AM

High revenue and profit are not relevant - employees cost money, so if company feels it could do without them, the layoffs happen. Low revenue and loss would be another reason for layoffs too, of course.

by bornfreddy

5/22/2026 at 2:15:36 AM

And building gas turbines (or even designing them) are probably not jobs that pay salaries developers got accustomed to, especially in Sillicon Valley, over the last 10-20 years.

Jobs at GE in Schenectady may not be what those developers are looking for even if they were qualified.

by ghaff

5/22/2026 at 3:13:32 AM

No, but it's a fun line for any automotive or other old-industry workers to throw at programmers, as they were the ones promised re-training in industries they would have to start from the bottom in.

by xethos

5/22/2026 at 2:10:44 AM

There are a bunch of factors that are intertwining. And unfortunately, some specific demographics are mostly those being most caught in the crosshairs.

by ghaff

5/22/2026 at 5:38:30 AM

> And farms are failing. Climate change will accelerate that, so there will be food shortages within a few years.

This is the key one to watch out for. Prior food-based conflicts have sparked revolutions and civil wars. People can tolerate not having electricity, people can tolerate not having internet, people can tolerate not having gas.

But a lack of food, due to a wheat shortage which in turn was sparked by Siberian wildfires destroying a whole year's wheat crop in Russia, precipitated the Arab Spring and the subsequent civil wars, as well as the ascendancy of ISIS.

by fakedang

5/22/2026 at 11:51:16 AM

Coffee crops have already been failing the last few years due to global warming, and now with the fertilizer crisis that is hitting major coffee producers hard this year (Kenya, Ethiopia, Indonesia, all famous for coffee and all dependent on Gulf fertilizer).

by Schlagbohrer

5/22/2026 at 11:00:19 PM

So where are all these rich bunkers and storage caches again? Isn't there like a map of these things, to help them preserve their thousands of lbs of food for their future generations of course. No need to have backup feed for the starving masses.

by mannanj

5/22/2026 at 11:01:46 PM

[dead]

by cindyllm

5/22/2026 at 7:36:52 AM

> Climate change will accelerate that

The climate is changing in a positive direction for farming. Farming is easier now than ever before. There's literally no chance of food shortages. Unless, of course, there's another attempt at building socialism.

by Ray20

5/22/2026 at 12:28:28 PM

And also the sky is red rather than blue.

by gilrain

5/22/2026 at 10:58:47 PM

You cannot state a contrary opinion like that here without kicking off the tribalism mentality. Yes, hacker news internet nerds have that. You can observe it in the wild above by the incessant down votes.

by mannanj

5/22/2026 at 11:44:34 AM

William Gibson coined the term "The Jackpot" to describe an apocalypse made up of many different disasters all happening near in time, overwhelming civilization. Pandemic, war, mismanagement, corruption, resource scarcity, climate breakdown, ...

by Schlagbohrer

5/22/2026 at 3:28:33 PM

The book "1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed" essentially argues that as being the root cause of the Bronze Age Collapse. The eastern Mediterranean and middle east were sophisticated, highly integrated cultures with a large amount of trade. There was a series of droughts, earth quakes, fires, etc. that re-occurred over a period of time, causing agricultural output to drop, leading to rebellions, leading to wars, leading the trade routes to collapse, and everything collapsing roughly at the same time.

by ecshafer

5/22/2026 at 8:45:48 PM

The more academic term is polycrisis.

by shimman

5/22/2026 at 5:42:03 AM

It would be a great scapegoat for further monetary expansion related inflation.

Step 1) Instigate price increases for temporary reasons, leading to noticeable price increases.

Step 2) As temporary reasons go away, increase money supply. Prices stay the same, you get to blame the causes from step (1) while not mentioning that the prices could have gone down when the problem went away, or blaming greedy companies for not lowering the prices.

by pfannkuchen

5/23/2026 at 12:30:21 AM

Presumably food shortages will first be felt by livestock, so expect meat to get much more affordable (as animals are slaughtered to avoid the need to feed them) for a while, then expensive (when there are fewer head). Animal feed represents over 50% of acreage.

by WillAdams

5/23/2026 at 1:43:41 AM

we can generate full protein mixtures with hydrogenotrophs, fed green hydrogen from solar, the photosynthesis -> protein is 10x more efficient than plants.

90% of acreage could be slashed this way, either for rewilding or for development.

Soylent Green, but veritable, not old people

by DoctorOetker

5/22/2026 at 1:46:50 AM

US tariffs are mostly dead. Ruled illegal and being refunded. Second attempt at tariffs has also been stopped. And inflation over the past 5 years is still milder than the late 70s and definitely milder than what has been seen in Turkey or Argentina or Zimbabwe.

by tootie

5/22/2026 at 3:12:03 AM

refunded to whom? the businesses? great! where’s my refund as a consumer who paid those higher costs (passed along to me)?

by lurking_swe

5/22/2026 at 10:05:18 AM

If you imported yourself, then all major carriers (Fedex, UPS, DHL) have announced that they will refund the cost.

The imported stuff you bought retail unfortunately won't be refunded (unless one of the current ongoing class action lawsuit will win).

by gpt5

5/22/2026 at 1:57:20 AM

Not to mention that some of the effects that OP cited are either deflationary (like layoffs and automation), or clearly cyclic (like the memory boom bust stages, experienced just a few years ago post COVID).

by gpt5

5/22/2026 at 2:59:56 AM

Ah, the ole’ “were doing better than Germany ca 1937” argument. /s

by threecheese

5/22/2026 at 1:53:54 PM

I didn't say "doing better". I was responding to someone very wrongly stating that we're at a historic level of inflation.

by tootie

5/22/2026 at 3:00:59 PM

And AI causing electricity infrastructure price rises for domestic consumers - aka forced indirect investment in AI companies.

Oops, sorry, wrongthink, I mean "due to the war in the Middle East", even though a large majority of gas in the UK comes from elsewhere (gas and electricity prices in the UK are supposedly very tightly coupled ?)

by gib444

5/22/2026 at 5:08:31 PM

If Malaysia can't obtain 30% of its fuel because of the Hormuz closure, they don't just reduce their consumption of fuel by 30%, but make up for most of the deficit by buying it for a higher price somewhere else. But the fuel they buy to make up for the deficit simply means there's less fuel for other folks buying in that market to purchase, which drives up prices. This process repeats until prices stabilize worldwide, which ultimately results in higher prices for fuel in the UK.

by mjh2539

5/22/2026 at 10:07:28 PM

What's fuel (petrol/diesel) got to do with it? (By gas I meant natural gas, not petrol)

by gib444

5/22/2026 at 11:24:44 AM

Destruction of russian refineries should increase proposition of crude oil on the market and drive price down a bit.

by ponector

5/22/2026 at 1:45:54 AM

Farms are failing where? More than usual?

by 7thpower

5/22/2026 at 2:08:41 AM

New Jersey just declared a state of emergency after an unprecedented cold snap wiped out crops across the state, up to 90+% for some farms.

by crooked-v

5/22/2026 at 5:18:39 AM

[dead]

by jauntywundrkind

5/22/2026 at 1:47:39 AM

they are not failing, our Socialist President provides billions in handouts for Farmers so they gonna be just fine

by bdangubic

5/22/2026 at 2:11:11 AM

We're losing a lot of workers. Some might consider that a good thing if they hate the idea of a large exploited underclass (or just people of a certain skin color), but it could be a problem for farms if there aren't enough hands to harvest in time.

by autoexec

5/22/2026 at 7:37:25 AM

Let us hope this results in farms offering Americans better wages for working on farms. Only 1% of the retail cost of produce is due to labour. Farms could double wages to workers and it would barely move the needle on inflation.

by Gareth321

5/22/2026 at 9:31:06 AM

I agree, but the farmers aren't pulling in massive amounts of cash either. There are record profits being siphoned from the wages of the workers, and from the profits of the farmers, and from the pockets of the consumer at the register. We'd all be better off if we tracked the money down and took it back.

by autoexec

5/22/2026 at 11:50:19 AM

Put Wall Street out of work and have the bankers work the farms out there in rural Conneticut and NJ and NY. It'll be good for them, put some hair on their chest and give them Real World Experience (tm)

by Schlagbohrer

5/22/2026 at 1:03:29 PM

Farmers don't see your retail cost in their gains either. That's captured by huge middlemen corporations.

Unless of course the farmers are themselves working for a huge vertically-integrated corpo.

by fakedang

5/22/2026 at 2:30:12 AM

Handout for American farmers or Argentine ones?

by pibaker

5/22/2026 at 1:53:31 AM

if they are large corporation owned farms as many small family owned farms are going to go bankrupt in the next 2 years because of the price of fertilizer and diesel and higher interest rate.

by xbmcuser

5/22/2026 at 2:15:00 AM

Oh come on. What they are trying to do is turn farm owners into corporate farm employees. The handouts are just to keep their votes.

by platevoltage

5/22/2026 at 2:02:21 AM

He destroys trade relations so the farmers can’t sell their produce, then bails them out by taking on more government debt so farmers can dump soybeans in a ditch.

It’s all such a clown show.

by Gigachad

5/22/2026 at 2:15:30 AM

Don't forget the threat of Ebola, hantavirus, Taiwan war

by mgh2

5/22/2026 at 2:34:53 AM

The Taiwan war that the world is sleepwalking into is going to wipe out so much chip capacity that the current inflation will look like a blip.

by jurgenburgen

5/22/2026 at 3:09:17 AM

While it's a possibility, do you believe it is likely enough in the very near future to the point where you are betting on it? Perhaps shorting TSMC?

If I did so when I first thought about it, I would be broke by now.

by rationalist

5/23/2026 at 1:27:37 AM

Not shorting TSMC, I’ve lost too much money shorting and it’s just too easy to lose because of timing even if you eventually are correct.

I’ve overweighted EU weapons manufacturers because a Taiwan war will be coupled with an expansion of the war in Europe. With the US busy trying to fight China, Russia will for sure make a bigger move in Europe. European defense budgets will 10x.

by jurgenburgen

5/23/2026 at 9:53:23 AM

Big picture, I think you're right that there will be continued and increased EU spending on weapons. But... Russia is basically at full capacity just standing still (or losing slowly) in Ukraine. Do they even have the ability (people, weapons, fuel, money, logistics) to significantly expand the war further?

by mft_

5/26/2026 at 6:07:12 AM

I hope they don’t but also worry that China is willing to fight to the last Russian just to keep Europe busy.

by jurgenburgen

5/22/2026 at 6:39:47 AM

The point to short will be when the Chinese army forms up.

With Ukraine we saw it. It was incredibly obvious. Hilariously the Ukrainians themselves saw the huge army on their border and told everyone it wasn’t going to happen and refused to build any defences. Taiwan will be the same. But the satellites will give everyone enough warning.

by MagicMoonlight

5/22/2026 at 11:16:30 AM

To be fair my understanding at the time was that Ukraine was well aware the invasion was coming and the government was publicly making claims that helped avoid panic and allowed them to move military assets around more easily.

by _heimdall

5/22/2026 at 8:37:29 AM

> the Ukrainians themselves saw the huge army on their border and told everyone it wasn’t going to happen and refused to build any defences

You're going to have to cite that, because Ukraine was already in the low-intensity Donbass conflict when the most recent invasion happened.

But yes, you can't hide an invasion fleet. The Chinese navy only has three aircraft carriers. They've recently had high level purges in the PLA. Invading now would be a disaster for them. But you never know when a disaster is going to get ordered for political reasons.

by pjc50

5/23/2026 at 1:19:47 AM

At the time it did seem like mobilization came very late, after the invasion already began. But like the other commenters pointed out they did prepare for it and a few more days of mobilization wouldn’t have changed the outcome.

by jurgenburgen

5/22/2026 at 12:35:46 PM

The Chinese also have at least a few landing ships that they've been practicing with. I'm not sure how many aircraft carriers they need for Taiwan.

by rationalist

5/22/2026 at 7:46:49 AM

> Hilariously the Ukrainians themselves saw the huge army on their border and told everyone it wasn’t going to happen and refused to build any defences.

In terms of gaining political support, being a victim in the modern world is very advantageous. The more of your civilians die unjustly, the more the media will portray you as a great and brave leader. There is nothing hilarious about this, only cynicism of the leaders of the country.

by Ray20

5/22/2026 at 12:46:19 PM

>Hilariously the Ukrainians themselves saw the huge army on their border and told everyone it wasn’t going to happen and refused to build any defences.

Not the full truth. Leadership said publicly that there was nothing to worry about, but the AFU dispersed assets, distributed suppiles and ammunition, and took a defensive stance before the invasion happened.

by tokai

5/22/2026 at 9:03:27 PM

I'm sure leadership in Ukraine was aware of an impeding war, but naturally that's not the type of thing you're gonna tell your citizens. It doesn't help anything; it would only cause panic, migration, and resource hoarding.

by array_key_first

5/22/2026 at 9:26:17 AM

Ukraine expected treaties to mean something. The world now knows better.

by account42

5/22/2026 at 7:20:56 AM

[dead]

by theshackleford

5/22/2026 at 11:15:02 AM

Are you expecting that China invades Taiwan and destroys chip production? Or cuts the world off and keeps the supply for itself?

by _heimdall

5/22/2026 at 3:48:38 PM

If China were to invade successfully, Taiwan chip production will self-destruct just to prevent it from falling into Chinese hands.

by kccqzy

5/23/2026 at 2:16:25 AM

Keep going…

by deadbabe

5/22/2026 at 6:45:08 AM

I heard that one company buying all the product or a majority of the product is called a monopoly practice.

  If a dominant buyer locks up most of the supply chain through exclusive contracts, it prevents rival companies from getting the materials they need to survive, which violates laws like Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

by p0w3n3d

5/22/2026 at 6:50:06 AM

It's called a monopsony[1], regardless, antitrust regulation is famously dead under the current US administration.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony

by supriyo-biswas

5/22/2026 at 7:03:59 AM

Regulation is dead under this current US administration (unless you pay a bribe). It's so weird this is where we are right now and most of the tech leadership has to play along even though it's technically illegal?

by gbriel

5/22/2026 at 6:08:04 PM

> most of the tech leadership has to play along

Many of them orchestrated the situation.

by wmeredith

5/22/2026 at 3:34:20 PM

very cool word, but I think the etymology stated in Wikipedia is wrong.

the second part of the word just means purchase (in a weird ancient Greek tense). there's no relation to fish whatsoever.

(I'm Greek)

by _kidlike

5/22/2026 at 12:18:21 PM

Antitrust has been dead for decades. It spans administrations and parties.

by nathanaldensr

5/22/2026 at 1:36:17 PM

Under Biden they at least tried

by fireflash38

5/23/2026 at 4:25:31 AM

sometimes i wonder if thats big tech pivoted to team red...

by andrekandre

5/22/2026 at 1:19:00 AM

This is the biggest memory repricing cycle I've ever seen in my life; some degree of high price/limited availability and "free RAM with purchase of Doritos" cycle is always expected, but this has been the worst one yet.

As other commenters have pointed out but I might have missed in the article, compute maturation is amplifying memory constraints right now and making it worse. Device upgrade cycles are getting longer because most compute-based products have matured, with CPUs not seeing substantial gains and memory usage really only expanding at the absolute top end of workloads pre-LLMs (3D and HPC in particular). An iPhone 14 still has almost all the features of the iPhone 17, because the compute capabilities are remarkably similar; Geekbench shows a performance delta of ~25-30% between the 14 and 17 Pro Max models, which is pretty paltry considering the devices are separated by four years of manufacturing improvements. This extends into desktops, laptops, tablets, STBs, and more, with only VR devices and larger ARM/RISC-based kit seeing more substantial uplifts as general designs improve.

So with compute stagnating and memory constrained, my money is on vendors taking this as an opportunity to gradually shift away from a yearly release cadence and slow down to a biennial cycle that alternates between budget and flagship launches every other year. Even if LLMs fail spectacularly and all that memory capacity becomes available, HBM memory likely isn't to find its way into many consumer devices (just ask AMD how it worked out for them on consumer GCN GPUs).

The name of the game, especially for consumers, is efficiency - "potato builds", as I've been calling them. Software and services optimized for lower power, smaller-specced devices of increasing age instead of pandering to flagship devices with poorly optimized code or engines for the sake of new shinies (like Raytracing). Between the memory shortage, shifting geopolitics, rising costs, and stagnant wages, consumer purchasing power is going to be squeezed like a vice for the foreseeable future, and businesses will need to adapt around that reality.

by stego-tech

5/22/2026 at 1:53:20 AM 

  So with compute stagnating and memory constrained, my money is on vendors taking this as an opportunity to gradually shift away from a yearly release cadence and slow down to a biennial cycle that alternates between budget and flagship launches every other year.
My bet is that vendors will simply discontinue their low margin phones, which are usually the budget phones.

For example, Apple might make fewer iPhone 18 and let it sell out frequently. They’ll use their RAM supplies mostly for the Pro phones.

I don’t think Apple will stop releasing new iPhone Pros every year. The business is too big.

by aurareturn

5/22/2026 at 6:38:55 AM

> For example, Apple might make fewer iPhone 18 and let it sell out frequently. They’ll use their RAM supplies mostly for the Pro phones.

Apple has a second option that may not be open to most other vendors - as they've just demonstrated with the MacBook Neo, they could cut the RAM in half on the budget models. One good cycle of optimising the hell out of their (almost entirely native) software stack, and iOS would once again sing on a 4GB SKU.

by swiftcoder

5/22/2026 at 8:19:33 AM

I doubt they'd consider that because it's a downgrade. If things get truly desperate, then maybe.

by aurareturn

5/22/2026 at 10:53:05 AM

The Neo is a downgrade versus the current MacBook Air too. Which is ok since it is also dramatically cheaper.

I don't necessarily expect them to cut memory on the existing models, but I could well see a 4GB iPhone e/mini showing up to shore up the bottom of the lineup, as the pro models get price increases.

by swiftcoder

5/22/2026 at 2:19:20 AM

I mean, that's the correct short-term read, but if LLMs in hyperscalers remain commercially viable to the point of tying up memory for several years, and if that necessitates an expansion of memory fabrication to satiate unmet demand, and if that demand ends up getting hoovered up by AI companies again due to their unmet or delayed demand from technological adoption, then Apple et al may not have much of a choice but to adopt such a profound strategy change.

There's a lot of 'ifs' there to be sure, but they'd be fools not to at least discuss the possibility internally and understand their options.

by stego-tech

5/22/2026 at 2:08:02 AM

> Even if LLMs fail spectacularly

Haven't they already proven to be extremely useful? In some areas they are definitely here to stay, coding/software and search (retrieve and summarize information). There's a bunch of places where they are surely shoehorned in, overhyped, and don't belong, but there's also equally many places where they might still be transformative but aren't used yet.

But overall I think the technology is well proven.

by skiing_crawling

5/22/2026 at 2:16:48 AM

I always leave room open for failure, and that approach has generally served me well personally and professionally. I have never been punished for having an exit strategy.

Besides, the marketplace is still in its infancy for LLMs, with a lot of unanswered questions. A lot of those questions surround the commercial viability of frontier models on bespoke hyperscaler data centers with limited usage outside of LLMs specifically should those economics be non-viable. Since that's where the memory is being tied up into, that means it's a critical question to answer in order to determine long-term investment needs into further memory fabrication.

by stego-tech

5/22/2026 at 9:35:50 AM

> Haven't they already proven to be extremely useful?

Most certainly not. The accuracy issues mean that they can't really be used effectively for coding or search, the two things you mentioned.

by bigstrat2003

5/22/2026 at 12:05:01 PM

They work well functionally, but financially anything can still happen.

by yxhuvud

5/22/2026 at 8:15:46 AM

So the availability of cheap phones is going down because of the cost of RAM.

What about the RAM consumption trend of the last 10 years? I think it is very feasible to produce phones with the same amount of RAM as was the norm 10 years ago. The only compromise would be using older algorithms and features that consume less of it, and to take a bit of effort on keeping an eye on memory consumption in the development phase. There's a lot of opportunity. We can even leverage AI these days to optimize existing software for RAM usage.

by nuancebydefault

5/22/2026 at 11:21:58 AM

Unless you can use apps created 10 years ago the is no sense to produce phones with old specs.

Think of desktop, browser and electron applications. No way one can comfortable run modern software on 2015 machine. Maybe Linux could help, but anyway

by ponector

5/22/2026 at 3:53:03 PM

> No way one can comfortable run modern software on 2015 machine

My personal laptop is a ULV 6th gen i5 with 8GB of RAM. Gets the job done, slowly but usably. That's about 9 years old. It runs Ubuntu. A dozen or so Firefox tabs, Kicad, VS Code, Slack. Computer things.

I'm of the opinion that application developers should be given middle-tier consumer systems as work machines. The whole notion of "dogfooding" is "dog-something else" if your devs experience the product using different hardware from the customer.

by ryukoposting

5/22/2026 at 3:21:20 PM

My initial reaction was that old compute levels are probably good enough for modern applications, but after thinking through all of the common use cases you’re probably right.

I think it’s AV that makes the difference. The modern smartphone does a ton of processing on the image sensor, and the modern laptop is expected to output multiple 4k video signals (zoom camera + desktop sharing) while accepting multiple video signals, without dropping below 120hz.

by bitmasher9

5/22/2026 at 1:54:48 PM

I think the reasoning is incomplete.

RAM isn't the only reason to upgrade. CPU's are more efficient, screens are significantly better and support variable-refresh-rates (and high refresh rates), battery technology has not stood still: even if they didn't degrade over 10 years.

There's plenty of reasons to upgrade to a new system even if it has the same memory capacity on paper. The memory will probably be faster and lower voltage too.

by dijit

5/22/2026 at 8:36:55 AM

RAM usage doesn't just depend on the software that comes with the phone but also (or even more so) on the apps the user installs and on the content - so this is something that would need an ecosystem-wide adaption not just a single vendor.

by account42

5/22/2026 at 8:11:21 AM

So, if you were wondering how come LLM services are cheap or gratis - now you know another group of people bearing the costs: The poorer half of humanity, who will now not be able to afford a smartphone, i.e. not having access to a computer. Sure, that doesn't kill you, but it is quite significant personally and socially.

by einpoklum

5/22/2026 at 8:26:52 AM

That's the worst critique of AI I've ever heard, and I've heard a lot of it.

by azan_

5/22/2026 at 10:08:53 AM

Care to share your constructive rebuttal with us?

by Hackbraten

5/22/2026 at 12:56:39 PM

Increased demand will result in more money for new hardware investments and will in the end decrease prices and provide better technology for everyone. Like it always has.

by azan_

5/22/2026 at 4:25:18 PM

I'm sure you tell homeless people on the street that their demand for housing will in the end increase availability for everyone, like it always does, so everything is fine.

by einpoklum

5/22/2026 at 6:08:16 PM

> I'm sure you tell homeless people on the street that their demand for housing will in the end increase availability for everyone

Whatever you say mate.

by azan_

5/22/2026 at 1:16:57 AM

Maybe if we're lucky we get more memory efficient software. ehh who am I kidding.

by amazingamazing

5/22/2026 at 1:57:16 AM

Last week I spent some extra time on a ticket in order to write a slight refactor that saves some RAM. If I had asked my boss for an extra day to implement this I would have been chastised for not delivering faster.

Thankfully my colleagues saw the value in what I was doing. I smuggled the optimization into my PR with their approval. Anecdotal, but there are still people who care about efficiency out there.

That being said, unless your manager is John Carmack, or you work in embedded systems, time spent on reducing memory footprints is seen as wasteful by the business.

by BuyMyBitcoins

5/22/2026 at 6:58:20 AM

> time spent on reducing memory footprints is seen as wasteful by the business

I think that there is a way to change that.

If an application runs significantly better on lower end hardware while delivering the same results, the customers should prefer it. It is just a matter of promoting it that way.

by pbasista

5/22/2026 at 1:45:41 AM

Yeah, modern software towers of libraries literally eat memory.

MS Teams uses around 1000MB of RAM to do exactly the same things that Microsoft Messenger could do in 8MB.

by RachelF

5/22/2026 at 11:17:26 AM

Also 12 processes right now on my mac for some reason.

It's haaard to do state machines.

by nottorp

5/22/2026 at 9:36:04 PM

Can you shed more light on this? You are saying that more processes help avoid figuring out correct state logic? Howso?

by CrimsonCape

5/25/2026 at 10:49:43 AM

This is not HPC, they don't need to 100% use all cores.

If they knew how to do a state machine, a glorified chat app needs how many threads? Maybe 4: UI, network, audio, video. And the last 2 are only needed during calls.

They have 12 just because they don't know to do better.

Btw with teams (the application) off there's a com.microsoft.teams2.agent there anyway. What's it for, spyware?

by nottorp

5/22/2026 at 1:45:19 AM

Might get some ingenious creations from poorer countries, like how in China they mod RTX GPUs to have more RAM because of export controls. Maybe some souped up Xiaomi devices with insane amounts of memory from old donor parts? Custom ROMs/postmarketOS for ultra low end devices that wouldn't normally get them but needed because they're going to need to last a few more years?

by hnthrowaway6323

5/22/2026 at 10:19:40 AM

Amused by all the comments about optimisation. If anything the vibe coding era will lead to the opposite

by Havoc

5/22/2026 at 11:05:31 AM

I have a friend who is VP at a major telecom company. He has no technical experience but has been using Claude to create data analysis apps. He was complaining that it took three hours to process certain datasets, so I took a look.

He had Claude essentially create a 300MB json file and was doing all of the data processing on that data directly.

It never occurred to him, or Claude, that there were other ways to operate on that data. It took me less than 10 minutes to get that processing time down to under a minute.

These are the type of issues that worry me about vibe coding.

by LatencyKills

5/22/2026 at 11:13:09 AM

What would have happened five years ago? I suspect this VP would have gone entirely without analysis tools for these datasets or would have a department of people slowly grinding away at his long list of tickets, tickets that were poorly specified and hard to get clarity on because by the time they were worked on, he’d lost some of the context of his original request.

Now, he makes small apps that scratch his own itches, while everything is fresh in his mind and he can clarify or learn “hmm, that’s not actually what I want” and the cost is some tokens and the occasional job that runs in 3 hours instead of not existing at all.

by sokoloff

5/22/2026 at 11:27:06 AM

He didn't even know that there was a solution to the performance issues. He simply assumed that processing data took that long.

I think it is great that he now has this capability, but a total ignorance of software engineering is going to continually bite this type of user. Instead of questioning Claude's solution, my friend thought he just needed a faster computer.

He was also using very sketchy Python imports when much safer, more mature options are available. Not knowing that you shouldn't use just any random Python package is a ticking time bomb... especially when his machine is connected directly to his corporate intranet.

by LatencyKills

5/22/2026 at 11:56:22 AM

Finding out that one's boss cannot estimate work time is a blessing if an engineer is wise enough to use that. "Yes boss, this task will take me all of June to do" (finish it in two days, enjoy a relaxing June)

by Schlagbohrer

5/22/2026 at 11:59:49 AM

> Not knowing that you shouldn't use just any random Python package is a ticking time bomb... especially when his machine is connected directly to his corporate intranet.

Don't worry, I'm sure IT would never give this manager priveleged access to systems permissions.

by Schlagbohrer

5/22/2026 at 11:41:33 AM

> my friend thought he just needed a faster computer.

Another contributing factor to rising consumer electronics prices due to vibed up coding is just what we needed.

by noisy_boy

5/23/2026 at 12:41:34 AM

People have done this long before vibe coding was a thing. I've seen this everywhere. Not every business employs devs or can afford to. So people hack things together with powershell or python. It has always been this way.

by esikich

5/22/2026 at 11:31:07 AM

> It took me less than 10 minutes to get that processing time down to under a minute.

You could have done it with Claude in 1 minute :) It probably never occurred to the VP to ask Claude for performance optimizations

by WithinReason

5/22/2026 at 12:11:49 PM

LLMs are quite good at optimization. Here is a simple prompt - rewrite this crap from electron to rust + whatever time tested ui framework. And now we have 80% less ram usage.

by ReptileMan

5/22/2026 at 3:34:41 PM

To be fair electron to rust would probably work even with LLM ram overhead

by Havoc

5/22/2026 at 11:52:18 AM

Dude I will just include a skills.md for optimisation, and include a line in my prompt saying "also make the code really well optimized". Problem Solved sunglasses emoji

by Schlagbohrer

5/22/2026 at 3:49:30 PM

Jatin Malek on Twitter had perhaps the best explanation of the DRAM crunch:

"The reason why RAM has become four times more expensive is that a huge amount of RAM that has not yet been produced was purchased with non-existent money to be installed in GPUs that also have not yet been produced, in order to place them in data centers that have not yet been built, powered by infrastructure that may never appear, to satisfy demand that does not actually exist and to obtain profit that is mathematically impossible."

by pjdesno

5/22/2026 at 4:04:48 PM

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 are actually underestimating demand, and there is going to be tons of profit. Nobody knows for sure, but profit is very, very, very possible.

by crazygringo

5/22/2026 at 6:44:13 PM

> 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?

Couldn't possibly happen with railroads!

https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2016/02/crisis...

by Kim_Bruning

5/22/2026 at 9:30:01 PM

My point is, railroads turned into a real thing. The demand was real and the general large-scale investment was justified.

Just because some companies made bad decisions doesn't mean the railroad industry as a whole was some kind of mirage or mistake. Laying down tracks for trains and passengers that didn't exist yet is still necessary.

by crazygringo

5/22/2026 at 9:06:03 PM

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.

by array_key_first

5/27/2026 at 8:33:40 PM

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

by adampunk

5/22/2026 at 4:13:00 PM

>Except the "profit that is mathematically impossible" part. That's just made up and false. It's entirely possible that we are actually underestimating demand, and there is going to be tons of profit.

JP Morgan says $650 billion in annual revenue required to deliver mere 10% return on AI buildout is equivalent to $35 payment from every iPhone user, or $180 from every Netflix subscriber 'in perpetuity.'

Very, very, very unlikely it makes profit, which why AI keeps getting overhyped by CEOs.

by d3rockk

5/22/2026 at 5:30:18 PM

Altman said months ago that they are expecting around $65/user/month from ad-supported ChatGPT. A strong hint about where they see account prices in the future.

When you run the numbers, $65/mo turns AI investment into a a 5-7 ROI, which is totally within normal bounds.

Considering there are over a billion unique weekly active users for the major labs, and demand has been relentless, it's a pretty easy sell to get investors on board.

"You pay internet, you pay phone, you pay AI".

by WarmWash

5/22/2026 at 7:12:29 PM

Those numbers sound... unrealistic to me. Just doing some napkin math: 65 $/user/month / 0.01 $/ad ~= 6500 ads/user/month, which is about an ad per minute if you assume someone is using the chat interface 4 hours a day including weekends. Maybe you see that behavior from "my GF/BF is AI" types but I'm also already assuming 0.01 $/ad which is super high to my understanding (if you work in adtech please correct me if I'm wrong). I don't forsee over 50% of your workday or leisure time spent in ChatGPT as likely, especially if the ad rate is well beyond YouTube's nigh-unusable amount it is now.

by kartoffelsaft

5/22/2026 at 7:12:02 PM

There's never going to be 65$/user/month, they already struggle to move past 5% of paying users with the current pricing.

by realusername

5/22/2026 at 4:27:00 PM

Did they consider that profits on the build out won't be uniform, i. e. there will be some companies that go under but the rest of them will capture the profit?

by strangegecko

5/22/2026 at 5:11:27 PM

Some companies going under doesn't change anything about the market as a whole.

If the demand is real and the company just sucked, their users and infrastructure will end up at a competitor: the value for that one company is bigger, but the overall per-user bill remains about the same.

If the demand is fake the infrastructure will be sold off at a big loss, allowing new companies to enter the market with far smaller investment costs, allowing them to undercut the competition, driving down the price users expect to pay for compute, resulting in a race to the bottom between the remaining AI companies in an attempt to attract enough users that their hardware won't sit idle - which in turn makes it far less likely that they'll be able to hit those revenue figures. And a bunch of investors just lost a few billion dollars, of course.

by crote

5/22/2026 at 5:16:50 PM

And the rest still bought RAM, GPU and datacenters.

What a giant waste of resources that are missing elsewhere

by croes

5/22/2026 at 9:33:07 PM

Consider that a large majority of the revenue will come from businesses.

Even $100 per month per employee will likely turn out to be quite reasonable, if it can make employees more productive by several hundred dollars per month.

by crazygringo

5/22/2026 at 4:30:55 PM

AI labs selling a billion subscriptions for $1000/yr is absolutely on the table.

by HDThoreaun

5/22/2026 at 4:33:38 PM

it could replace a bunch of $100k+/year workers.

by Jyaif

5/22/2026 at 7:13:57 PM

Well, even these AI companies cannot manage to replace these workers themselves.

by realusername

5/22/2026 at 4:49:56 PM

the big question is: who would pay for those services then?

I mean I love simplicity, and if economy could be simplified to a big money printer machine directly printing the money to a burner, then it would be so simple, that even a short context window could comprehend the economic cycle finally!

by fodkodrasz

5/22/2026 at 4:15:38 PM

[dead]

by anthonypasq

5/22/2026 at 5:15:04 PM

Where does the money for that profit come from?

Who buys anything made by AI if he could do it by AI themselves?

Who can afford AI if their customers do with AI what they do?

Who creates the next man made code needed as training data to prevent model collapse?

by croes

5/22/2026 at 5:12:54 PM

Uh... The history of railroads is littered with folks losing their investments for exactly this reason.

Was your point that owning the steel companies is the path to riches even when most of the railroads fail?

by Shog9

5/25/2026 at 9:56:20 AM

Can you link to this?

by bob_theslob646

5/22/2026 at 11:27:12 AM

God of war 2 ran on 32MB of ram. There is enough ram in the devices for any reasonable workload. Just the developers on all levels of the stack weren't bothered to give rat's ass for optimization.

The current crunch and constrain in compute is great time to show once again some ingenuity. The lowest level of smartphones from couple of years ago have more computing power than XBOX 360. That should be enough to run Whatsapp smoothly.

by ReptileMan

5/22/2026 at 11:21:39 AM

We always knew the limits to Moore‘s Law are first and foremost economic. Given an industry used over decades to predictable lowering of price per compute function and thus swallowed any advance for new user functions and overhead when the limits are reached there is going to be a squeeze. AI scaled up at the time the production capacity became more inelastic.

Maybe it is time not just shrink transistors but also software bundles. I can see decades of possible progress hiding in plain sight behind a browser screen.

by heisenbit

5/22/2026 at 11:33:34 AM

AI data centers are eating like 80% of memory.

Making user space applications more memory efficient is not even going to be a rounding error on memory demand.

I am with you that it needs to happen, but it's not going to solve a memory shortage.

by onlyrealcuzzo

5/22/2026 at 11:57:15 AM

It would make memory-poor phones more viable. Like why can't we have a 512MB, or even 256MB RAM phone. Although I doubt that the software effort would be cheaper than just buying the extra RAM. It's definitely much more uncertain.

by H8crilA

5/22/2026 at 1:13:29 PM

Those exist, they're just feature phones. Smartphones have to run general purpose apps and that takes RAM.

by zozbot234

5/22/2026 at 3:38:08 PM

That was my point, make it so that apps can run on that RAM budget. At least some apps.

by H8crilA

5/22/2026 at 1:08:02 PM

That's newly fabbed memory vs. an existing stock. The stock is quite massive, so optimizing existing use and enabling it to be repurposed can be meaningful.

by zozbot234

5/22/2026 at 1:52:25 PM

Not really...

If the new memory is needed for AI data centers, it doesn't matter if your existing MacBook doesn't need as much memory anymore.

by onlyrealcuzzo

5/22/2026 at 2:27:56 PM

If the existing MacBook needs less memory, it can use its current memory spec for higher-level uses that formerly required a MacBook Pro. That meaningfully affects the market.

by zozbot234

5/22/2026 at 2:35:58 PM

You don't seem to understand supply and demand.

That does not help the demand side for AI data centers - which is the vast majority of the market...

by onlyrealcuzzo

5/22/2026 at 3:03:40 PM

If your point is purely about supply and demand for datacenter HBM and LPDDR, you're probably right. Local model inference (using the existing memory stock) can make a dent in current use, but not in projected future uses that will plausibly involve much larger models.

by zozbot234

5/22/2026 at 11:34:32 AM

This is great news, maybe people are going to start caring about their electronic gadgets more and not treat them as disposable? Maybe longevity is going to become a criteria again?

by fguerraz

5/22/2026 at 11:42:09 AM

The blokes in Agbogbloshie will hopefully make more money from recycled e-waste.

It has been a disturbing trend on TikTok to see all the livestreamers in the united states showing how to recover gold and metals from e-waste... it used to be an exceptionally dirty and low margin business only done by the world's poorest. Now it has become valuable enough, and the economic situation in the usa has deteriorated enough, that americans are doing it in their homes and backyards.

by Schlagbohrer

5/22/2026 at 1:49:07 AM

I've been buying a "new" used iphone for $100-150 now, every few years, for over a decade. My "new" used Dell laptop I bought a few months ago for $40 which became a linux system in just an hour. All good here.

by DaveZale

5/22/2026 at 12:05:10 PM

Like Taleb says: "I've never seen a shortage not followed by a glut." Just wondering when this time is and got how long end consumers should wait for prices to fall again strongly.

by fittingopposite

5/22/2026 at 8:12:17 PM

Did he ever check housing market in certain developed areas?

by andriy_koval

5/24/2026 at 8:35:33 PM

Then China needs to ramp up DRAM production, because the big three won't in a significant enough fashion to bring the glut

by shdh

5/25/2026 at 3:02:05 AM

No it's not about interesting supply. The logic is that the demand will just plummet when the general economic situation turns because we have over provisioned the datacenters

by fittingopposite

5/22/2026 at 3:29:50 PM

I'll wait forever, if necessary.

by Ylpertnodi

5/22/2026 at 2:33:09 AM

I appreciated the detailed breakdown of the memory crunch and how it will affect parts of the industry and consumers. Very good article.

I'm not one of those people who chases all the new great things. I wait until things wear out or become completely obsolete before upgrading. I just get comfortable doing things the same way every day and see no reason to waste money on SaaS shit or anything else wastes my time or money.

I think the memory shortage will present opportunities for those willing to take advantage of the situation. A lot of DRAM is going into GPUs for data centers in AI work. Those units have a limited lifetime online and they will be rotated out and replaced with new units as performance degrades. I think this will be a lot like Li-ion batteries in that many of these GPUs will be perfectly fine for home pcs or small business workstations or for other less intensive use cases and the RAM will be performant enough that a viable recycling industry should arise from this AI buildout.

Funny enough, one day the local AI noise-making, power-wasting, water-wasting data centers will be the best places to score high-tech components and many of us will have one right down the road. That should set a lot of people up as recyclers redistributing reconditioned components to those who build their own systems.

by doodlebugging

5/22/2026 at 12:43:25 AM

This article expanded my understanding of the memory industry dramatically.

For anyone who doesn’t follow the market closely, this is about a good a primer as you could hope for.

by jimbokun

5/23/2026 at 8:42:26 AM

Two predictions.

The people responsible for throwing the consumer segment under the bus will see no repercussions for this - nobody is going to jail, consumers get screwed.

The memory prices will never return to the pre-shortage prices. They’ll use this as an excuse to subtly increase the base prices and the orgs that sell the devices will also do a similar increase, also past what the BOM changed by.

by KronisLV

5/22/2026 at 6:28:17 PM

This is such a detailed article and lesson in manufacturing complex parts and their fixed costs vs variable costs accounting lesson, and a lesson in how a product we use daily goes through the manufacturing chain and its' price, availability etc.. is influenced by a complex chain of factors.. I agree with the top poster, the title is an undersell of the full article..

by nashsimulator

5/22/2026 at 8:31:27 AM

Very well written sub.

Any prediction on when it'll end? Can Chinese companies scale up to scare the big 3 into increasing capacity or lose price control?

by kopirgan

5/22/2026 at 9:25:59 AM

It will end slowly, and then very suddenly.

The demand for AI simply doesn't exist at the real prices. It barely exists at the current subsidized rates - Microsoft, Google, Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI are spending hundreds of billions to make mere billions.

And then these data centers will be worthless, future ones won't get built, memory demand will evaporate on the spot.

by automatic6131

5/22/2026 at 12:11:56 PM

Very interesting and thoughtful comment. I agree. When demand from hyperscalars drops rapidly after the tide goes out and everyone realizes that they can't continue building out the data centers, then fabs will be left with overcapacity that will flood the market. Wondering what this will mean for local LLMs when good RAM is available for cheap?

by fittingopposite

5/22/2026 at 9:39:26 AM

I have the same opinion, these AI companies can't even work financially with the cheap ram prices, they certainly won't with high prices.

And ram producers are betting on it, they will just milk the AI companies until they collapse.

by realusername

5/22/2026 at 10:35:57 AM

I'm yet to see any convincing argument that inference is subsidised in any substantial way. Training and speculative expansion are where the spend is from what I can see.

by andybak

5/22/2026 at 10:47:51 AM

A few days ago Gemini redid their rate limits, making images/audio/video generation much more expensive, shrunk limits across the board (including a new weekly limit) and added more expensive tiers.

At the moment you can pay $20/month to do thousands of expensive queries a month (involving file uploads, the Pro model, extended thinking), and evidence suggests that heavy users are not profitable.

by rjh29

5/22/2026 at 5:27:30 PM

I agree that heavy users are probably not profitable but that's the way the economics of subscription services tends to work across the board.

I'm arguing that even if inference isn't profitable right now it's not orders of magnitude off. Whatever pricing emerges for models equivalent to current frontier models won't be significantly higher than the current API pricing.

There are already enough small companies without tons of VC money to burn that are serving up nearly-frontier llms at prices lower than the big players are charging. They can't all be subsidising? These are companies without any moat or any IP.

by andybak

5/22/2026 at 8:26:11 PM

[dead]

by rjh29

5/22/2026 at 10:47:47 AM

If inference was profitable - they'd tell us. Msft, goog, public companies. They'd break out the numbers and show us, if they were good.

But instead, all we get is known liars going on podcasts and repeating "stylized facts" that aren't literally true about their supposed profitability on inference, from companies losing billions per year in a situation where they don't have to tell the truth.

That is VERY far from a convincing argument that they are profitable. So I can & will safely conclude that the opposite is true.

by automatic6131

5/22/2026 at 10:56:11 AM

The Chinese memory makers can scale up but the amount of capacity they currently have is negligible. They're in the same boat as everyone else, it's just that nobody expects them to curtail production on purpose to raise prices even higher, whereas that's expected behavior (according to the article) from the established memory makers.

by zozbot234

5/22/2026 at 7:38:07 AM

If electronics become too expensive for consumers, wouldn't the demand for AI also go down because consumers cant access it?

by bit1993

5/22/2026 at 7:39:25 AM

I don’t think AI demand is driven by consumers.

by larsnystrom

5/22/2026 at 7:44:27 AM

Users will have even have more dump devices and will be forced to use remote and cloud services.

by s17tnet

5/22/2026 at 1:16:53 AM

At Xiaomi's latest smartphone launch event, Xiaomi founder Lei Jun said that memory prices are likely to keep rising over the next two years, which could drive smartphone prices up as well. His conclusion was pretty direct: everyone should just replace their phones now. Kind of a depressing story.

by Viacol

5/22/2026 at 1:31:04 AM

He could be right, or he could just be a phone company CEO trying to get you to buy a new phone, or he could be both.

by nyc_data_geek1

5/22/2026 at 1:20:56 AM

Wanted to get Steam Frame VR headset and probably it will be delayed due to this. Sad

by cryptoegorophy

5/22/2026 at 5:35:53 PM

Luckily innovation in smartphones has also stagnated. I just bought a 6 year old phone (Poco X3 NFC) secondhand for 60 euro. That's barely a downgrade from my Poco X7 from last year.

Poco X3 has excellent support for Ubuntu Touch, PostmarmetOS and LineageOS etc.

by Levitating

5/22/2026 at 1:13:48 AM

I’m really wishing I had overbuilt my NAS last year. As it stands I feel lucky to have even built it at all given I bought all the parts in the last week of September.

My 4090 and 12900k are gonna have to last till 2029 at this rate won’t they…

by ls612

5/22/2026 at 1:31:34 AM

Won't processors come down in price because people are buying less of them because people are buying less computers because of higher RAM prices?

I've heard that is happening for motherboards.

by rationalist

5/22/2026 at 2:32:26 AM

Processors are currently becoming the next bottleneck on the server component side of things. If consumer SKUs start seeing even less volume than they are today, manufacturers will simply produce more for the datacenter.

Certain popular AMD SKUS are already 120 days lead time and growing. If a vendor will talk to you at all.

I expect motherboards to get cheap until they get to be really expensive niche products should the current situation last a few more years. At least as we know them today as PC enthusiasts and/or prosumers. I could very much see that market evaporating entirely and moving towards large integrators instead. Gamers and such were already a rather small niche to begin with.

Right now the saving grace is a server board doesn’t look a whole lot different than a consumer board. But that may change significantly faster than anyone predicts should current trends with SoCs and the like continue. You may be in a place soon where you get to choose your CPU/RAM/storage at purchase time like you do with a MacBook today.

by phil21

5/22/2026 at 1:44:36 AM

I’m not gonna build new until I can get a GPU and RAM as well lol. That’s gonna be a few years for sure.

by ls612

5/22/2026 at 4:07:05 PM

Surely some significant fraction of the billions and billions are being spent on intensive R&D to for example increase scale of MRAM modules or radical new paradigms like nitrides-based ferroelectric compute-in-memory?

I think there's a reason that University of Michigan researcher jumped after that ferroelectric breakthrough.

I am hopeful that some of this massive pressure is going to push us into the next paradigm, which is likely some kind of "true" compute-in-memory system. That may increase performance and efficiency for AI by up to 100 X.

by ilaksh

5/22/2026 at 12:46:18 AM

But aren't there plenty of used expensive phones from the last 5-7 years that are more or less equivalent replacements for new cheap phones? Apple alone sells 250 million phones a year.

by blehn

5/22/2026 at 12:49:53 AM

The article takes a while to get there, but it is focusing on a set of companies I hadn't heard of ("Transsion, Oppo, Vivo, and Lava") that buy components from last gen smartphones to make cheap devices to sell in the African and South(/east) Asian markets.

Presumably the supply of 5+ year old used phones that fully work is not enough to meet that demand, which is why these frankenstein Android companies exist.

by _--__--__

5/24/2026 at 12:55:27 AM

did I understand the article correctly?

"Because of all the peripheral circuits and all the vertical channels, a single gigabyte of HBM consumes more than three times the wafer capacity that a gigabyte of DDR or LPDDR does. Every gigabyte of HBM produced is, in effect, three gigabytes of commodity memory not produced."

Is this true or conflating wafer area with process steps?

If the bottleneck isn't process steps but wafer area, you'd expect the semiconductor boule growers to rake in all the profit, not the memory makers themselves (although they would see more revenue). I'm not hearing about Umicore or other semiconductor corps raking in big under a wafer shortage.

Thats why I ask the question if this is actually correct.

If correct, it really makes one wonder what would be more productive for machine learning community X PB of HBM vs 3X PB of conventional (LP)DDR RAM, or somewhere in between. By giving a couple of big players carte blanche financially, has allowed the decision to divide in 3 global memory capacity (in units of terrabytes manufactured per day say)? The singularity that slows itself down?

by DoctorOetker

5/22/2026 at 12:16:20 PM

>One of the most remarkable things about the last few decades is how cheap computers have gotten.

>In 1985, if you were a reasonably affluent American, the best computer that you could afford was the IBM PC AT. The PC AT would cost you about $6,000—$19,400 in 2026 dollars—and thus represented about a quarter of the median American’s annual income;

In early 1980s a PC AT was SOTA. I guess that if you buy a SOTA computer today it might cost you close to $19,400.

by DeathArrow

5/22/2026 at 12:22:32 AM

I can't say I've noticed specifically. I have two tracfone accounts and a Cricket account so used to use the Android phone with Cricket after two months - a free phone. But tracfone was bought by Verizon and they being them immediately changed the unlock period from two months to a year. So that to me kills my use case of free smartphones as I don't want to spend any money on phones.

by sys_64738

5/22/2026 at 10:24:04 AM

I find this deeply ironic, the revolutionary product is eating the devices the consumer who where supposed to use it on. Saturn is hungry!

by 21asdffdsa12

5/22/2026 at 10:28:03 AM

I feel like this has just accelerated what was the ideal scenario all along: high hardware prices push more people to rent

by ngcazz

5/22/2026 at 2:02:35 PM

From an outside view OpenAI buying all that raw RAM certainly looked like they were buying it mostly to prevent anyone else from using it more than that they had an immediate need. I recall a Microsoft exec complaining that many of the GPUs they purchased were just sitting in a warehouse as they didn't have the power supply to actually do anything with them.

by deltoidmaximus

5/22/2026 at 12:08:22 PM

It will result in more people having to "rent" their computer from a corporate cloud. An extension of what already exists for poor gamers who stream their own games from a cloud renderer.

by Schlagbohrer

5/22/2026 at 7:23:01 AM

Who else thinks that this constraint will force new creative solutions. We got compression algorithms due to limitations.

my 2 cents

by agumonkey

5/22/2026 at 11:40:34 AM

"and then it’ll take you a few years of producing substandard and defective memory chips before your yields start to look competitive."

As a complete know nothing about the fab industry, I am always puzzled by this. Do the fabs need to be seasoned like an iron cast skillet or something?

by stasomatic

5/22/2026 at 11:57:02 AM

Kind of.

There's a mysterious fab entity known as "the Recipe" - the product of long iterative dialing in of the fab's operating parameters. Of which there are a great many. A modern fab performs hundreds of manufacturing steps, with thousands of tweakable parameters, and they may interact in non-obvious ways to affect the outcomes. This is what's discovered and adjusted as the fab runs.

The difference between having the Recipe and not having the Recipe is the difference between 96% yield and 12% yield.

Changing the process (i.e. 4nm to 2nm) is the most sure way to lose the Recipe. The fab knowledge you spent months and years of engineering work discovering will no longer apply. But you can also lose the Recipe by replacing fab hardware, by changing the suppliers, by an act of god, and more.

by ACCount37

5/22/2026 at 12:13:25 PM

Can a recipe be acquired and reproduced to perform correctly from the start? Say one line is performing well, can its parameters be copied over to a new one and start producing?

My head annoyingly refuses to accept the non-deterministic outcomes when applied to electronics. In other disciplines, let's say bow or musical instrument making, you need to harvest the wood, age it, dry it, pray to a deity, work with its natural im/perfections etc, but this is "just" bits.

by stasomatic

5/22/2026 at 12:32:20 PM

What we see as "just bits" is a product of thousands of men, smarter and more skilled than both of us could ever hope to be - all working together to keep those bits of ours delightfully simple.

The unfortunate truth is, "bits" sit on a vast foundation of chemistry and physics pushed to their limits. It's a (mostly) deterministic subspace, carved carefully into the non-deterministic world with sheer effort and skill. This is why those fabs are so expensive and complex. Nature defied, reproducibly and at scale. Keeping the Crawling Chaos away one wafer at a time.

If one line is performing well, you can copy its parameters to another, as a starting point. It'll get you some of the way there. How far? Have fun with that. Those two lines, you see, are not the same exact line copied twice. The equipment is the same, but our "the same" is a short for "merely very similar". There are subtle differences. There always are. And some of them matter.

by ACCount37

5/22/2026 at 1:28:50 PM

[dead]

by cindyllm

5/22/2026 at 11:46:45 AM

I can imagine that the process of fabrication relies on tweaking a tremendous amount of parameters. In a sense seasoning a skillet and perfecting it to the max

by JrProgrammer

5/22/2026 at 9:56:16 AM

The optimist in me hopes this means developers will pay more attention to memory usage in their apps.

by cbdevidal

5/22/2026 at 10:23:45 AM

Well, not if you believe that all future software will be slop.

by Zopieux

5/22/2026 at 12:21:16 PM

I don’t. Also from my optimist side :-)

by cbdevidal

5/22/2026 at 1:44:34 AM

Maybe it's time to go back to the time where computers and entertainment were niche and develop efficient resource-constrained devices....

I hate it that we had decades of progress to have computers become a very expensive hobby because some dudes high on fentanyl think some text prediction model that destroys the planet is worth a trillion dollars.

by xinayder

5/22/2026 at 12:23:22 PM

>All of which is to say: things are going to get a lot worse before they get better.

I have a 14900KS, a CPU from 2 years ago and is still amongst the strongest in benchmarks like Cinebench. And 128 GB DDR4 RAM. I feel like I can wait a few more years to upgrade.

by DeathArrow

5/24/2026 at 8:40:54 PM

Same, I have 128GB of DDR, a 3090, and 5950x

I was about to upgrade earlier 2025 but then held off, guess I shoulda just pulled the trigger

by shdh

5/22/2026 at 11:39:07 AM

HBM is what makes this bifurcated. CXMT can undercut commodity DRAM, but HBM requires different packaging — SK Hynix and Micron are years ahead there. ASP gap is roughly 5x

by clearstack

5/22/2026 at 12:30:08 AM

The deep dive on memory market dynamics and the LLM bubble distortion is great. But another cause of declining smart phone sales is simply that the devices have matured and aren't improving at nearly the same rate.

From 2008 to around 2015, upgrading every two years could make a meaningful difference. From ~2015 to ~2020 upgrading every three years might be worth considering. I just upgraded my top of the line flagship after nearly six years. And I actually looked for compelling reasons to buy a new phone every year since 2023. There just weren't any.

Frankly, this latest flagship phone is pretty underwhelming. It's slightly faster at a few things. The battery lasts a little longer. The screen can get a little brighter. The camera is supposed to a little better. But those are just the claimed improvements. I haven't actually noticed any of them in daily use because they weren't issues with my 2020 flagship phone either. Otherwise, the new phone is almost exactly the same size, same weight, same resolution, same look and same capabilities. I only upgraded because I was long out of contract and it was a only a couple hundred bucks for a $1400 MSRP phone with a new contract and a trade-in of the old phone.

by mrandish

5/22/2026 at 1:17:16 AM

Yeah I'm still using an iPhone 12 from late 2020 and it's honestly still fine in terms of its processing power, cameras, features etc. for anything I use it for. It does need a new battery but even that has degraded way slower than earlier phones I've had.

I was using an iPad Pro from late 2018 (mostly just for casual web browsing, reading documents and watching video on, I still do all my real work on laptop/desktops) as well until this year, and would have kept using it if I hadn't accidentally dropped it in water. I don't really notice much difference at all between my old one (when it worked) and the new iPad Air I replaced it with, except for the battery being a little better and having a bit more ram being nice (websites in background tabs are less likely to be purged from memory when I come back to them).

by stephen_g

5/22/2026 at 12:41:47 AM

Ever since I started working from home I barely use my phone, I just buy a mid range phone, and it seems just as capable as high range phone in most every practical way. The only real thing that seems a bit better is the camera, but I don't actually use it that often. The only thing I've really been a bit tempted by is Lidar on Apple, but more for dev fun that normal practical purposes.

by keithnz

5/22/2026 at 1:06:44 AM

> The only thing I've really been a bit tempted by is Lidar on Apple

Maybe in that vein, one thing I wish phones would do to differentiate themselves is just add more sensors. I want my phone to be the tricorder from star trek. iPhones should have first party support for generating point clouds and measuring distances using lidar. Their microphones are probably already calibrated, why not expose that as a decibel meter. Same for light sensors. Phones used to have IR emitters, why not add those back in?

Also the iPhone still only has 240fps slow motion, I've found samsung's 960fps really useful in capturing transient phenomenon or even measuring mundane things like LED flicker.

Conversely the Pixel seems to be the only one shipping with an IR thermometer, and they'll probably remove it given most people don't seem to care. That's something I would've found useful in ad-hoc situations where I've had to make do with the back of my hand.

Air quality detection (especially pm2.5, CO2, and CO levels) would be great but I don't know if those sensors can be miniaturized enough to fit.

by krackers

5/22/2026 at 1:15:03 AM

They're out there. Caterpillar makes a smartphone with a FLIR camera.

by fragmede

5/22/2026 at 1:28:47 AM

I so wanted one of those, but then when I heard about their poor to non-existent software/OS updates, I stayed away. I'll stick with my USB-C FLIR dongle.

That's the problem with non-Google and non-Apple phones.

by rationalist

5/22/2026 at 6:41:07 AM

Yeah, I mostly upgraded to get the magnetic charger on the back of my iPhone. Weren't a lot of other compelling reasons - the already pretty great cameras improved a bit, the screen is a bit nicer, but otherwise its much the same slab of glass.

by swiftcoder

5/22/2026 at 12:40:21 AM

First, the iPhone 17 Pro is a huge improvement.

Second, the article doesn’t focus on phones we buy. There won’t be a shortage of those.

by trvz

5/22/2026 at 12:48:29 AM

What does it improve, in practice? For myself, I need my phone to make phone calls, take photos/videos, occasionally run apps, and to be a wifi hotspot. My iPhone 6S did all of these well enough that I only upgraded it recently because I dropped it and bent the power button. My new phone has a slightly nicer camera and better battery life, that’s about it.

by taneq

5/22/2026 at 1:23:29 AM

I actually also do not find new phones that much of an improvement, but just to be a devil' advocate:

1. High-resolution screen, finally approaching paper (600dpi) 2. High-refresh rate screen, up to 240 fps. Once you see 60 fps, you are already hooked, and 240 is just mind-blowing. 3. High-resolution camera, 50 Mpx means that the camera actually starts to match paper (600dpi) 4. Slo-mo camera (240 fps) to match the screen. 5. Decent memory sizes. On my recent 24 Gb size memory I can actually run multiple apps in parallel, and they are not getting killed. You see, using all available memory is a competitive strategy for app developers -- when they use all the memory, their competitors are evicted from RAM and the user is less likely to receive notifications. 6. Decent sdcard size (1Tb). Same reason for the storage. App manufacturers are trying to use all available space, so that you would delete the competitor's apps in order to keep using theirs. 7. HDMI over USB -- finally you can connect a keyboard and a monitor, and get rid of your laptop, just use one device for everything.

by aboardRat4

5/22/2026 at 7:19:02 AM

> Once you see 60 fps, you are already hooked, and 240 is just mind-blowing.

I'm a sample size of one, but I'd rather have 20% better battery life (this would extend the life of a three year battery to roughly four years) than eye candy. Extremely aggressively glued-in batteries turning into hazardous gas packages are the only reason I replace portable computers these days.

And -given the history of such things- lack of care in system design means at year two or three, you'd find that your phone very, very inconsistently delivers 240fps. I think it's pretty widely known that once you get to somewhere around 15 or 30 FPS sudden variation in frame rate is far, far more noticeable and unpleasant than rock-solid "low" frame rate. [0]

[0] That is, a 240 FPS system that janks down to 30 FPS every few seconds is gonna be considered much less pleasant to use than one that always runs at 30 FPS.

by simoncion

5/22/2026 at 12:44:53 AM

Improvement in what way and over what previous phone? The parent mentioned a number of metrics.

by georgebcrawford

5/22/2026 at 2:05:06 AM

Near the end of the article it says:

> We’re already at the point where marginal buyers in the poor world are getting priced out of the smartphone market. We’re rapidly approaching the point where buyers in the rich world feel the same thing.

So it predicts that phones we buy are next.

by Brybry

5/22/2026 at 11:11:07 AM

Add to this if China keeps adding pressure to Taiwan, escalating in a soft blockade, we might see something worse than what’s happening in Hormuz.

by softwaredoug

5/22/2026 at 10:29:50 AM

I wonder if aggressive swapping could help a bit. Higher performing SSDs with endurance. Unless flash memory is also being squeezed...

by HPsquared

5/22/2026 at 10:49:28 AM

Yes, it would be viable. Intel Optane/XPoint is wearout-resistant and has DDR3-like performance for 10% of current DRAM prices (and that's on the secondary market, since it's not being manufactured new). But it's far more power-intensive per bit read/write than even SSDs, let alone DRAM.

by zozbot234

5/22/2026 at 11:17:29 AM

AI is choking the tech industry and the economy at large. This already has negative effects on the supply chain and profits.

by emsign

5/22/2026 at 7:07:26 AM

This is another place where modern capitalism struggles in an area that requires large capital investment producing payoff after years of startup costs, and the buy side is volatile. We've seen this recently with rare earths, copper, and some other minerals. DRAM is almost in the same category.

China has an advantage here, once domestic DRAM production finally gets going. DRAM policy can be set strategically. China's economic planners may choose to provide DRAM to domestic manufacturers rather than export parts, even if exporting parts would be more profitable in the near term. That's already being done in raw materials. Conversely, if external suppliers have lower prices, there may be a policy decision to buy domestically to keep the domestic manufacturers going. Done with the goal of leveling production, this can work. Done stupidly, it becomes a money drain, of course.

Probably China controls the DRAM market around 2030 or so.

by Animats

5/22/2026 at 10:55:57 AM

what share of the DRAM market does China control today?

by ahepp

5/22/2026 at 7:19:50 PM

About 7.6%.[1] That's Changxin Memory Technologies. That makes them #4 in DRAM, after Samsung, Hynix, and Micron. They're still only a third the size of Micron, the last US manufacturer. They have a lot of scaling up to do, but they can make current-generation DRAM.

Changxin just became very profitable, due to high DRAM prices. They're planning an IPO. And, of course, building more fabs. Yangtze Memory Technologies isn't as far along, but they're building a new fab and planning an IPO.

Both of these companies were created in 2016 as part of a national effort to become a force in the DRAM industry. It took a while to get the technology working. Now it works, and they can scale up.

[1] https://chinabizinsider.com/how-the-economics-of-the-global-...

by Animats

5/22/2026 at 7:17:21 PM

That's why it is very important for these AI companies to go bust for the collective good.

by wg0

5/22/2026 at 7:23:38 PM

It'll definitely happen. After all, the collective hate for the oil barons 100 years ago put them out of business in a jiffy. /s

by gbgarbeb

5/22/2026 at 7:30:24 PM

Oil companies were profitable.

Oil always burned provided there's oxygen.

Price of oil was crystal clear how much you'll get for what you're paying.

And nothing else was affected with supply of oil.

No harm in keeping comparisons inline with the subject matter at hand.

by wg0

5/22/2026 at 9:01:23 PM

So does this mean all of the ram I've got piled up in a box is not worthless anymore?

by ecommerceguy

5/23/2026 at 1:18:00 AM

It's bad when even Samsung is not even able to negotiate an agreement with Samsung.

by arikrahman

5/23/2026 at 5:49:34 AM

I feel confident in predicting there will be a glut in 5 years.

by anigbrowl

5/22/2026 at 10:39:54 AM

TIL: price rise (eng.) = repricing (newspeak).

by wartywhoa23

5/22/2026 at 8:27:53 AM

Use ZRAM, seriously.

by anthk

5/22/2026 at 7:45:11 PM

>So it will be hard to avoid a great repricing of consumer electronics in the coming years

I would have thought in the coming years they'll build more chip plants or the AI bubble will crash or some such. If there's an effect it should be greatest now.

by tim333

5/22/2026 at 8:08:58 PM

since any given day here there will be a majority unconcerned or actually defending code bloat, well now, this uniinteresting topic is just chickens-coming-home-to-roost. All the benefits of Moore's law are not gone, today's prices reflect a very large N of an exponential decline of cost per bit; these price increases are linear, not even a 2nd order polynomial, so why all the angst? go to your room and clean up your code.

by fsckboy

5/23/2026 at 6:21:31 AM

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by norikaoda

5/22/2026 at 1:08:08 AM

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by Ayushkumar1808

5/22/2026 at 4:26:29 PM

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by emmanuelsemugga

5/23/2026 at 3:00:53 PM

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by noborutakahashi

5/22/2026 at 8:19:53 AM

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by mstralman

5/22/2026 at 12:59:30 AM

I'm a newborn shill for Ulefone. They come unlocked and the manufacturer supports rooting. The devices are rugged, heavy on features and are (still) reasonably priced.

Pics:https://duckduckgo.com/?ia=images&origin=funnel_home_website...

Two other underappreciated handset brands are Doogee and Blackview. Gorgeous devices and solidly built. From what I recall they're friendly to root.

by WarOnPrivacy