There was a real manufacturing shift that had to happen in the transition from commercial toilet paper to residential, which is made by totally different machines. The problem was real. It’s just that someone, seeing that real problem, triggered a panic buy that resulted in cleared shelves and a misallocation of the actual supply, making everything worse for everyone.

In the present case, OpenAI just took 40% of the world’s supply off the market. That is massive, and will have implications for RAM availability for many industries. As a result, every other company immediately bought up as much supply as they could.

Cars during Covid is probably the closer comparison, actually. A combined supply-drop followed by demand-shock resulting in skyrocketing prices and empty inventory.

It absolutely happened. I was there, I saw it happen. Maybe it didn't happen in your area, but others weren't so lucky.

Yes, it did.

> [...] because there is so much shit people can produce at a time and the demand never increased if you scaled it to a 2 weeks period. There was enough stock in warehouses that 3 days later every store had a full stock again and the prices never increased.

No, there wasn't in lots of places, and demand for the kind of toilet paper that fits on home dispensers did increase (and demand for the kind of big rolls used exclusively in institutional settings decreased, and shifting between those two for manufacturing is not quick), and there were extended supply issues in many places. (This was certainly true where I lived, but I would expect it had lots of regional variance, because supply chains are regional, the share of workers that were moved home because of either the practicality of remote work or workplaces being shutdown varied regionally because of both policy and industry differences, and because the share of workplaces that use industrial style TP vs TP compatible with home style dispensers probably also varies considerably.)

Though you're right that the prices didn't skyrocket, as that would have been considered price gouging during an emergency, which would have been PR suicide at a minimum if not actually illegal.

AI companies will continue to buy up all the RAM so you and I have to pay the cost for it.

They will also eat up all the energy so you and I have to pay more for energy.

They will also then try and put you and I out of a job.

And if they fail to do so, they will then get your and my tax dollars to bail them out.

There should be real AI research and technology development, but the way it’s being done right now is heads the AI hyperscalers win, tails, all of us lose.

It’s being run as a massive scam against the rest of us.

If you would have asked me 5 years ago this wouldn't even become a bubble. I'm still amazed it did. It really taught me how much of the modern economy is just grift.

Yes and no and yes.

AI is having a bad impact on electricity prices, but the actual graph of US electrical use was pretty flat for 20 years and is barely increasing even now. If the bubble keeps going strong we might see AI get up to 10% several years from now.

The RAM and GPU use is a whole different category of dominating.

We need the corporate death penalty aka forced dissolution for egregious cases of misbehavior, we need easier ways to pierce the corporate veil (and I'm more and more inclined to actually support the death penalty here as well, despite the potential for abuse), we need corporate fines to all be measured % of gross income, at least double the profit margin.

And we need all of that fast.

I highly doubt that. Memory chip production takes years to scale up, which is partially a reason why the memory market (both RAM and solid-storage) is so susceptible to "pig cycles" - high prices incentivize new players to join the market (although less likely than decades ago, given just how much capital one needs and how complex the technology has gotten) and for established players to scale up their production, and then prices collapse due to oversupply.

For GPUs, the situation is even worse. During the GPU crypto mining craze, at least that was consumer GPUs so there indeed was an influx of cheap second hand gear once that market collapsed due to ASICs - but this time? These chips don't even have the hardware for rendering videos any more, so even if GPU OEMs would now get a ton of left over GPU chips they couldn't make general-purpose GPUs out of them any more.

Additionally, this assumption assumes that the large web of AI actors collapses in the next 6 months, which is even more unlikely - there's just too much actual cash floating around in the market.

Of course I'm joking, there are LLMs to check these things now.

But it should happen earlier due what is happening with the RAM, as it sounds quite illegal, like anticompetitive hoarding, cornering the market, raising rivals' costs, consumer welfare harm, and so on.

Operation handbook now dictates that you should have 3-4 years of all the ICs you'll need for production so you don't end up like the car manufacturers.

Some days I think the devastating crash of the economy that will come if the bubble bursts is the least worst outcome. Do people not feel like the tensions around AI will not soon become internationally geopolitical?

(It's already nationally geopolitical in the USA: Trump is trying to assert federal control over the states' rights to set their own legislation)

Small thing, but this is not simple or realistic at all. How does someone in an apartment grow enough food for their family?

That's certainly not a universal Legal Standard. If I'm harmed, but you didn't "intend" to harm me, does that nullify my Claim?

Hardly.

Thus, they invest in retirement and pension funds, who in turn invest the money in businesses to earn a return. Since that return must increase constantly, and organic growth is no longer possible, you have to pull shenanigans as a businessman to meet the requirements of the shareholders, lest they kick you out of the plane with a golden parachute.

So we let them do those shenanigans and the politicians don't do anything about it.

This is the shitcoin-for-your-eyeball-scans guy; the guy who didn't tell the board of his own company that he controlled their startup fund through an alias.

In the USA, nobody need ever go to prison for market manipulation anymore; they simply have to be able to pay the price necessary for a pardon. No logical consistency applies to the process.

Maybe OpenAI's RAM monopoly is what kills Electron.

Water tomorrow

This is the natural consequence of letting individual psychos control more money than most world economies.

Companies that are essentially monopolies have greater income than most countries GDP, with government bailouts, with the Federal reserve printing money like crazy, the interest on government debt is greater than military spending.

This is monarchy wearing the skin of capitalism.

An illegal price fixing cartel could defeat the first pressure on prices (though is unlikely to). The second pressure would exist regardless.

GPU prices have primarily stayed so high because there's kept being new surprising sources of excess demand that the market didn't anticipate. I.e. it has yet to reach "eventually". Also to some extent Nvidia's government enforced monopoly on CUDA (via copyright) has meant they don't have any competitors with equivalent products. And software creates a so called "natural monopoly" because it has zero marginal cost while hardware generally doesn't.