> if RAM prices weren't artificially inflated by the fever dream of private equity.
RAM prices are a result of skyrocketing demand. That's hardly a fever dream.
You can hardly blame RAM suppliers for taking the money of people who are coming to them begging to pay more than the person before them in line. It's not like they are squeezing the market in some cartel price-fixing racket.It's the customers who are willing trying to pay more for better access.
The innovations and the price of RAM are so non-sequitur at this point; I can't understand what point you're making. Sure, if RAM were as easy to get as the circuit boards they're being put on, innovation would be the same (or accelerated!) but that doesn't have anything to do with the fact that RAM is incredibly supply constrained and ramping production to meet the demand of a seemingly insatiable market takes a long time for a product this complicated and specialized.
If any of the manufacturing companies could have seen this coming, they'd have started ramping production to insane levels 5 years ago, and they'd be taking in just as much money as Nvidia is.
Companies (CRWV, etc) are borrowing at 10%+ interest rates to buy NVidia GPUs that NVidia makes 75% gross margin on. I repeat, companies are selling junk bonds to buy GPUs at a 300% markup. Cocaine dealers probably don’t even make 75% gross margins.
Other companies (OpenAI, etc) are also borrowing at 10%+ interest to rent the GPUs to train LLMs.
All of these GPUs need a ton of RAM. There is a fixed supply of RAM. There is insane demand for RAM.
What in the world does a 20-year-old scheme and prosecution have to do with it?
Besides, when demand outstrips supply you don't have to fix prices. Why would you? They cannot deliver all of the RAM people want. Think about it for a minute: how would price fixing even work?
(and don't get me started on the ridiculous "they're switching from DDR3 to HBM" part of that wikipedia article...)
> What in the world does a 20-year-old scheme and prosecution have to do with it?
My point is that we don’t know for sure. DRAM manufacturers have admitted to price fixing previously, and it’s the exact same companies that produce RAM today.
If you search for “price fixing cases in hardware”, you will find plenty of guilty pleads from other/unrelated HW companies that are more recent. Price fixing happens and sometimes they even get caught doing it ;)
> Think about it for a minute: how would price fixing even work?
In the past, it worked by manufacturers collectively agreeing on price quotes and margins IIUC.
I’m not claiming any foul play. I’m saying we can’t know for sure and it’s happened before.
That too, although more higher-end OLEDs are equivalent. The problem is that you can't buy the commercial displays: I recently wanted to replace an old LG and tried to get the Sony FW-65BZ40L (which has amazing specs), but I couldn't find a reseller willing to sell it to me. I called a couple of them, but they were not interested in dealing with a private individual, only with companies.
Nihilism is free, you are welcome to it. They haven't even been seated yet (takes place on January 3rd, 2027), we should give it a chance, I think. The nihilism remains available if we are disappointed by giving new folks a chance. Hope is not a strategy, but we must keep some, as a treat, imho.
> the self-described 'left' is not going to convince me that corporate IP & knowledge restriction is actually a good thing
It just goes to show how fluid people's beliefs can be when they have identified a "bad guy". Everything they do is wrong, even when it aligns with their ethos.
Are there situation where you don't want high quality results?
It's taken until very recently for me to trust AI to actually do what I want it to do for hobby projects. I still have to scrupulously code review everything that isn't greenfield or an http rest endpoint.
I also figure the open models I can run on this same hardware will only improve.
I’m not really struggling against poor quality results, I’m struggling against free tiers that don’t give me enough usage plus my unwillingness to pay a continual subscription fee.
> There are millions of Americans like me who will never step foot in one because of their association with Elon Musk.
You guys have to realize at some point that you're not a significant part of the market. There are a lot of people who don't particularly like musk but the amount that would never use a cybercab isn't a significant part of a 300m person market.
Yeah, sure. That's why Tesla sales have fallen for two consecutive years ever since he exposed himself as a fascist. You keep telling yourself that, buddy.
And to add to this, for also properly dealing with the 2008 financial crisis. Just as a reminder to those out there, the strategy of recent administrations for crises like this was to cut federal spending in order reduce deficits, and many of the politicians at the time were calling for cutting spending. Obama listened to his economic advisors who told him to stimulate the economy and get money into the hands of the people. There were some rough edges to their stimulus spending but it seems to have worked and our recovery was the envy of most of the world. In recessions, stimulus seems to have now become the norm.
Ah, maybe "recent" isn't the right word, maybe should have just said "administrations of the past 45 years." Because, was mainly referring to Reagan and his deregulation of the US economy with Reagonomics, and how this type of thinking became the norm afterwards, not just for politicians but for the American people. This is of course my opinion, but think the way a lot of politicians in 2008 reacted to stimulus when it was proposed backs this up at least somewhat.
...and I don't have anything against cutting spending. In fact, actually think Reagan did the right thing in using this tool as well as deregulation to end stagflation. But it seems like cutting & spending should be based on the situation and for 2008, spending seemed the right course of action.
I would argue that the Affordable Care Act was nothing more then a common sense consumer protection legislation for a consumer market that should not exist in the first place.
The fact that it was this big and this hard to get and with this many compromises against consumer interest, speaks more of the disfunction of the USA government at the time then it does about the value of that legislation.
This is a deep misunderstanding. Socialized healthcare has been a fight for almost 100 years. What you find "common sense" has been an intense, almost existential fight, up there with slavery, universal suffrage, civil rights, prohibition, and abortion.
This fight not about the dysfunction of the USA government at the time, it's about a fight over the structure of the USA as it was founded. There have always been strong political forces trying to dismantle all "common sense" features of the welfare state, who have convinced the masses to vote against their own interests out of the American Dream of rugged individualism.
This is in contrast to the unique decentralized communitarian history of America with community activism, charities, NGOs and nonprofits filling the social holes between the government and private enterprise. The current healthcare system evolved out of this, and gradually received more patchwork of private and government involvement (Medicare/medicaid, and the ACA) which why it's an expensive mess. Most European countries post WW2 had a chance to design something more efficient and didn't centralized insurance as a threat to liberty.
I am aware that describing the ACA as consumer protection legislation is a hot take, and I understand that many people will take issue with it, and correctly so (it is more complected than that).
But in essence the most revolutionary part of the ACA was regulating how health insurance companies sell insurance to their costumers, i.e. consumer protection. There were other aspects of the ACA, like subsidies to low income families etc. which weren’t consumer protection, but the regulations about how insurance is priced and sold most definitely were. And these regulations were very basic and common sense kind for any consumer products, stuff like don’t abuse your customer’s health situation with personalized premiums etc.
I say that this should not be a consumer market because private health insurance are inherently consumer hostile, and cannot be sold on the consumer markets without hurting the customers with unfair charges, etc.
Maybe a bit of both sides in my opinion. It shows the dysfunction of the government and our healthcare system, but it was also practical and helpful to the those left out of the healthcare system.
You mean other than Obamacare, Dodd Frank, GFC stimulus, Auto industry support, repeal of DADT?
Yeah, you're right. Much better to have Trump who just passed tax cuts for billionaires and corporations, imposed tariffs on Penguins and pardoned a bunch of people, some of whom he said he didn't even know.
> The world would've been very different with say, Bernie Sanders as president in 2016.
Undoubtedly, US and probably the world would likely have been a better place if that had happened.
Unfortunately, at present in the United States, the choices om offer(at least at a national level) are either neo liberalism with a woke 1.0 add on, or full on MAGA. The latter part is likely going to swing back to neocon territory by 2028 though.
The whole character and his role in pop culture I find very frustrating.
The guy is the antagonist in the movie so you're not supposed to like him and he's written that way. He's a strawman and his whole speech is how the real version of him would sound filtered through the ears of someone who disagreed with him.
So you end up with people holding him up as an example that disagree and agree with him but the both of those groups are choosing the sides of a caricature that doesn't understand the point he's trying to make. It's weird.
It's the problem with most Oliver Stone movies, Scorsese movies, and many other directors: the premise of the film requires a charismatic antihero, and therefore the "bad guy" becomes cool and popular.
The directors always try to avoid this criticism by saying, "Well he goes to jail in the end," but I think it's a bit of a cop out.
I tend to agree with the idea that art should try to embody some moral values, which goes against a lot of contemporary thoughts on aesthetics. But I think it’s a basic fact that people look toward fictional characters as role models, directly or indirectly. Avoiding that responsibility is not good.
> I think it’s a basic fact that people look toward fictional characters as role models
I think it's closer to "monkey see, monkey do".
After the Fast and The Furious movies, young men would street race home from the movie.
After watching the movie The Program, young men laid down in the street at night hoping not to get hit by traffic (copying the risky stunt the characters in the movie did).
The art simply shows what is, not what should be.
The Sopranos was interesting because it showed a mob boss doing the typical mob boss things (dodging FBI surveillance, dealing with rival crime families and street thugs, organizing new business ventures, burying evidence deep in the woods / dumping in the river). But it also showed a man with momma issues, with panic attacks, processing (well mostly rejecting) therapy, a wife who spends too much, a son as dumb as a box of rocks, etc. It wasn't the broad morality of western societies, but it was approachable because the character was eminently human.
Similarly, Dexter was a serial murderer, but he had "a code" (to only murder other serial murderers). His code doesn't necessarily match up with the morals of you or I, but like any fiction, it allows you to suspect your disbelief and inhabit the moral choices / predicaments of the character for a few minutes / hours.
> The directors always try to avoid this criticism by saying, "Well he goes to jail in the end," but I think it's a bit of a cop out
I don’t know which directors you’re referring to, but I doubt you receieved such a simplistic response from Scorcese. Worth reading him in his own words on this, below is what he said regarding Jordan Belfort’s character in The Wolf of Wall Street,
“That's something that I've always been attracted to and is interesting to me. Someone like Jordan or Jake Lamotta or Tommy, Joe Pesci’s character in Goodfellas, and people say well that type of person that sort but… I guess what that means is that they try to distance themselves from them. It's someone else it's not me but in actuality I feel it's not someone else, it's us. It's you and me and maybe if we'd been born under different circumstances, maybe we would have wound up making the same, exactly the same mistakes and choices and doing exactly the same things. I really think … when people say “that kind,” it’s not a matter of equalizing everyone and saying we're all responsible, I think it's a matter of facing and recognizing and acknowledging that part of us which is a part of our common humanity. And we have to deal with it.”
“He [Jordan Belfort] thought that he could bypass morality or surpass morality with a combination of money and drugs. I don't know maybe he still does, I really don't know. There's another way of answering the question; he was different from Madoff and Skilling in that they weren't crashing helicopters or throwing little people (or maybe they were but if they did they kept it pretty quiet) but in that sense Jordan's experiences are more entertaining and that brings you closer to him because you look at these guys and think this seems to be a lot of fun. Well, it doesn't just look that way they really did have a lot of fun. In fact that's really all they could do is have fun and more fun and more on top of that, until it wasn't so much fun anymore. But what they couldn't do was just be. They just couldn't face that. So the challenge is to show that honestly without tipping the scales into judgment and taking you outside of the world these characters and the particular ways that they live their lives which was to obliterate all obstacles, all troubles, all difficulties, by taking more drugs, more money.”
> Well, it doesn't just look that way they really did have a lot of fun. In fact that's really all they could do is have fun and more fun and more on top of that, until it wasn't so much fun anymore. But what they couldn't do was just be. They just couldn't face that.
Blaise Pascal in his Pensées (Thoughts):
> When I have occasionally set myself to consider the different distractions of men, the pains and perils to which they expose themselves at court or in war, whence arise so many quarrels, passions, bold and often bad ventures, etc., I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber. A man who has enough to live on, if he knew how to stay with pleasure at home, would not leave it to go to sea or to besiege a town. A commission in the army would not be bought so dearly, but that it is found insufferable not to budge from the town; and men only seek conversation and entering games, because they cannot remain with pleasure at home. […]
> Whatever condition we picture to ourselves, if we muster all the good things which it is possible to possess, royalty is the finest position in the world. Yet, when we imagine a king attended with every pleasure he can feel, if he be without diversion, and be left to consider and reflect on what he is, this feeble happiness will not sustain him; he will necessarily fall into forebodings of dangers, of revolutions which may happen, and, finally, of death and inevitable disease; so that if he be without what is called diversion, he is unhappy, and more unhappy than the least of his subjects who plays and diverts himself. […]
> To endure oneself may be the hardest task in the universe. You cannot hire a wise man or any other intellect to solve it for you. There's no writ of inquest or calling of witness to provide answers. No servant or disciple can dress the wound. You dress it yourself or continue bleeding for all to see.
Over the last 10 minutes of Wall Street, the main character gets arrested, breaks down crying, gets punched in the face, and then goes to jail. The last scene has his father (driving the MC to jail) turn almost literally to the camera and tell the viewer which precise moral value he's being punished for not upholding. I don't know how much more embodied in the art the values could be.
The problem is that you have to include people's self-justifications to tell a meaningful story. If Gordon Gekko were an uncharismatic sleazeball who tells everyone "I'm greedy because the misery of others pleases me, haha!", the film wouldn't work as a criticism of Wall Street, because real Wall Street tycoons are usually charismatic and don't say such things in public.
>his father (driving the MC to jail) turn almost literally to the camera and tell the viewer which precise moral value he's being punished for not upholding.
Yes, and there's the scene with Hal Holbrook, I think he lectures Bud Fox just before or after he's arrested? Holbrook made a career of playing moral authority figures.
I think the seductive appeal of Gordon Gekko is meant to illustrate something fundamental about the human condition. We are all susceptible to temptation, whether it involves pleasure, money, status, or power. Success doesn't necessarily satisfy desire, if anything, it intensifies it. Can you eat just one potato chip? Would you return a found wallet full of cash? If you made a million dollars, would that be enough? Gekko is an example of an ordinary human predicament: the difficulty of knowing when we have enough, and the ease with which we rationalize getting more.
---
On another note, it's too late to edit my earlier post in this topic.
"delivered in 1986 at The speaker? Ivan Boesky"
should be
"delivered in 1986 at what is now the Haas School of Business of the University
of California at Berkeley. The speaker? Ivan Boesky"
The erroneous question mark is in the PDF, but I inadvertently omitted the location clause. Carelessness is another aspect of the human condition.
> I think the seductive appeal of Gordon Gekko is meant to illustrate something fundamental about the human condition. We are all susceptible to temptation, whether it involves pleasure, money, status, or power.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago:
> The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.
I don't think it's exactly "bad guy looks cool and popular." Some people simply identify with villains in fiction. They see nothing wrong with what normal people see as villainous behavior. Without society's law and order, and/or with wealth/power of their own, they would themselves behave just as villainous.
I'm convinced that a lot of people--probably even some of my own neighbors--wear a mask of civility only because we live in a society and have rules that are enforced. If the opportunity ever arrived and we entered some kind of Mad Max lawlessness, they would instantly start to murder and plunder just like barbarians out of fiction.
>I'm convinced that a lot of people--probably even some of my own neighbors--wear a mask of civility only because we live in a society and have rules that are enforced. If the opportunity ever arrived and we entered some kind of Mad Max lawlessness, they would instantly start to murder and plunder just like barbarians out of fiction.
This is mostly a prepper fantasy that justifies things like buying a bunch of guns and canned beans instead of investing in more difficult things like community building. From the (IMO, naive) POV that human behavior is strictly selfish, it would rarely occurs that this kind of behavior would be beneficial to an individual's self-interest. Even in the worst-case, entirely imaginary SHTF complete destruction of society scenario, sociable behavior is more beneficial than any kind of anti-social Wasteland Raider behavior.
Maybe some aberrant individuals, but they would quickly fail without community support.
I suspect a lot of this has to do with context (both geographically and culturally). E.g. There's a big difference between there's been a short term local collapse, e.g. after a natural disaster and civilisation will return to normal afterwards (so there's some incentive to behave because bad behaviour might get punished at some point) and the whole society has collapsed (it's going to be a free for all for long enough bad behaviour is unlikely to be punished).
Even if there's plenty of evidence that people will band together in times of crisis, despite what popular culture might tell us. See Lord of the Flies vs actual kids marooned on an island. In a hyperpolarised society with ready access to guns I suspect that would be different as the counterpunch article suggests.
I suspect the smart thing to do is hedge your bets and be prepared for both eventualities (be a villager AND an anti-pillager) as they'll no doubt be a bunch of people out there that are hungry and don't have the skills/temperament to be a villager.
That preppers and the "tough on crime" set overlap is really curious to me, since in the first you have an acknowledgment that circumstances shape behavior utterly, and in the second you have people really, really eager to punish or deter on an individual level, rather than shape behavior by changing systems.
Both preppers and the "tough on crime" set engage in violent fantasy. The enjoyment is in imagining they get to violently mistreat somebody.
Tough on crime is not about tough and fair punishment for crimes. These people are actually perfectly fine by crimes committed by cops and agencies for example. They will excuse crimes made people people they find sympathetic or crimes against people they distain. They also don't care much about finding the correct perpetrator.
Lack of punishment is in itself an enviromental factor. I'm sure those people would love to hand out punishment themselves in non apocalyptic scenarios, but the law doesn't let them.
> If the opportunity ever arrived and we entered some kind of Mad Max lawlessness, they would instantly start to murder and plunder just like barbarians out of fiction.
In the aftermath of various disasters, history has shown that people tend to help each other out:
It's okay for art to explore immoral topics, but it's generally not okay for creators and commentators to go, "Come to your own conclusions, wink wink." Have the respect for your viewers, and for your society, to be upfront about how your art is fraught; to say that you don't like the message or implications even if you felt compelled to explore some dark aspect of reality or society or psychology. Or, have the courage to say that you don't think it is fraught. But it's definitely irresponsible to unleash something transgressive on society and then try to wash your hands of it.
> it's generally not okay for creators and commentators to go, "Come to your own conclusions, wink wink."
This viewpoint seem completely crazy to me. If audiences cannot be trusted to think for themselves, why should artists be trusted with telling them how to think?
why is acknowledging that Hollywood knows how to tap into our "bad guy" parts (and many of us have them) unpopular on HN?
it's the same reason so many very intelligent people completely reject time-tested traditions like Christianity. we have the luxury of having morals instilled very widely. this is the legacy of religion; it's part of the state via law (one of the earliest was in the Torah, a text that is considered "religious"). yet so many of us take it for granted and then say things like "i don't need religion because i'm a good person." that's bullshit. most of us are good because we have to be.
this is exactly how a story with a moral (eg, Scarface, Wolf of Wall Street, etc.) can actually encourage bad behavior. there are MANY guys out there that have a little demon inside them that wants to be the guy before the climax of the film. but unfortunately, the expression (and arguments) of that spirit is very uncommon on HN.
i'll say it again. Hollywood and the hip hop industry are well aware that they encourage young men to indulge their somewhat anti-social instincts. In fact, it's well known that Interscope owns prisons. They make songs that encourage crime, then they make money when people go to prison.
He’s just a much more interesting character than Charlie Sheen’s. Sheen is playing a kind of boring up-and-comer type character who doesn’t have much more to say apart from “gee I don’t know this insider trading and corruption stuff might be wrong”. Gordon Gekko is a charismatic and successful villain who has an ideology and set of values that he created himself, like the Neitzschean Ubermensch - the audience doesn’t agree with these values but he articulates them well, which makes him more intriguing.
Do you remember the context of that speech? He was presenting a takeover offer to the shareholders of a poorly run company with a bunch of useless execs with no skin in the game. He may be the villain of the movie, but not of that scene. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHnZi87272U
He's still the villain. He sounds perfectly reasonable. His criticisms of Teldar paper are plausible. He makes a compelling case for greed, but by definition, greed is excessive, it cannot be good.
His apparent reasonableness obscures the fact that he's appealing to the rapacious or covetous nature of the shareholders. He wants to override any moral objection to the fact that he's buying the company, in part, to strip the overfunded employee pensions, and by accepting his offer, shareholders get a cut. (IIRC, it's been decades since I saw the movie.)
What is the moral argument against this? What is the "rapacious and covetous" nature of the shareholders? Pensions are not 401Ks. If there is money left after benefits are paid out, that is the property of the company.
The fact that you see pension savings as the property of the company seems "greedy" to me. I'm not criticizing you. It's technically true in at least some companies. Similarly, the Social Security Trust Fund is the property of the US Government, not the future beneficiaries.
The moral failure is treating a retirement fund, and the people whose livelihoods depend on it, primarily as an opportunity for personal enrichment. Pension assets do not belong to the company in the ordinary sense. They are held in trust for the benefit of employees and retirees. The employer generally cannot withdraw funds while the plan is operating.
Wall Street was released in 1987, and the law regarding pensions has changed since then, in part to address employers reverting pension assets. As I understand it, there is a now a 50% excise tax on reversions, which are only allowed in specific circumstances. I imagine this tax is intended to discourage reversions.
Personally, I don't understand why any of the money I put away for retirement belongs to anyone but me. Usually such funds are managed by finance companies, not the employer, and the finance companies are already getting their cut, any lucky excess should come to me.
(The substance of the issue with overfunded pensions is itself a complicated separate topic, which I don't mean to oversimplify.)
It's crazy how this conversation is a microcosm of the contemporary economy.
Can I add another wrinkle? Wealthy Gekko is obviously the villain, trying to raid pensions to expand his own coffers. Now, what if the pension raid is the cratering of index funds (and the financial contagion that follows)? What if the beneficiary isn't a rich financier, but a generation of workers who finally see asset prices plummet enough to allow them to afford homes, cars, etc.?
Seeing the parallels to our current (or coming) moment, I wonder how others read it.
Not sure why you think a market crash will help housing affordability, much less cars and "etc", and do so enough to overtake the proportionate squeeze on jobs, income, and credit availability. The "pension raid" is decried because a small rich cabal is seen as using it to cash out on inflated valuations before the subsequent correction, and basically everyone whose retirement plan isn't "an early grave" pays into it equally.
The overfunding isn't separate. It's central to the entire thing. If a company owes $5000 a month to its employees, but it has enough to pay them $6000 a month, that money does not go to the employee. It is called a "defined benefit" for a reason. Also the money is not put there by the employees. It is put away by the company. Pensions are not 401Ks.
And yet, those useless execs are better for the company and for employees then him. Much better.
Villans usually see themselves as heroes and everyone else as either stupid or sucker. That does not mean I have to adopt villans framing just because he looks charizmatic.
There's a disturbing number of people who watch movies like RoboCop and Starship Troopers and don't realize they are satire.
I have a running joke with my closest friends that we are in a post-satire world because real news today is frequently indistinguishable from satire from 10-20 years ago. Sometimes The Onion headlines just bleed into the monotony of the news cycle, but it's not because they are any less satirical.
1) Michael Douglas is extremely attractive and charismatic, so people like him even if they're not supposed to. Gekko seduces the viewer to the dark side like he seduced Bud Fox.
2) The movie never shows Gekko in jail, so you never see the true consequences.
The fiber cut was to the Philadelphia TRACON facility, which is run by the FAA. Also, the FAA runs the towers at airports, unless it's a contract facility. No idea how the infra is handled at contract facilities, but I'd be shocked if it didn't follow FAA guidelines, such that the FAA is dictating the levels of redundancy available.
Also, there's a big difference between a small towered airport in a more rural area, and a major international airport with 10x or more the commercial traffic. So there's probably some difference of buildout depending on the facility usage.
Quick edit: looks like there were two fiber cut incidents recently, one at an airport last month, and the TRACON issue that happened 1.5 months ago!
RAM prices are a result of skyrocketing demand. That's hardly a fever dream.
You can hardly blame RAM suppliers for taking the money of people who are coming to them begging to pay more than the person before them in line. It's not like they are squeezing the market in some cartel price-fixing racket.It's the customers who are willing trying to pay more for better access. The innovations and the price of RAM are so non-sequitur at this point; I can't understand what point you're making. Sure, if RAM were as easy to get as the circuit boards they're being put on, innovation would be the same (or accelerated!) but that doesn't have anything to do with the fact that RAM is incredibly supply constrained and ramping production to meet the demand of a seemingly insatiable market takes a long time for a product this complicated and specialized.
If any of the manufacturing companies could have seen this coming, they'd have started ramping production to insane levels 5 years ago, and they'd be taking in just as much money as Nvidia is.
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