• So then… why weren’t they selling them for dirt cheap?

    Oh yeah because “supply and demand” isn’t a science like they want you to believe, it’s just a tool they use to rationalize their exploitation of working class consumers and a compass to guide their market manipulation.

    • Supply and demand is a science, and it’s that predictability that enables entities with large capital access to artificially limit supply to enforce market conditions preferential to them. (De beers).

      The free market is an idealised model which requires physically impossible assumptions to function. Regulation and approximations are what are required to ensure that the free market will tend towards balanced supply and demand instead of over-sized entities (monopolies and oligopolies) to exercise outsized market control. A slightly imperfect free market is still great, a grossly imperfect one is barely different from feudalism.

      In other words, we have anti-monopoly regulations for a reason. The problem arises when those with the power to control the entities with outsized influence are instead bought by them.

      (I am absolutely not pro free market btw, but it is a valid model for human behaviour when its assumptions are close enough to be approximated)

      • You have some good points, but I disagree that supply and demand is a science. I think the evidence is abundant that it’s merely a social construct and only behaves somewhat according to its own theory because enough people believe in its reality for it to be self-perpetuating. A sufficient change in paradigm could reveal a very different dynamic.

        As for free-markets, I believe a large part of the issues we’re seeing today can be traced back to the confusion/conflation of “free markets” with “capitalism.”

        Free markets have existed for as long as humans have been bartering. They existed in the ancient Greek agoras, along the Silk road, and pretty much anywhere archeologists have discovered some form of currency or trade.

        Capitalism is an early-modern invention based on the ownership and transfer of capital; i.e. trading of stocks or shares in the ownership of a company, which then hires executives, administrators, managers, etc., all delegated to perform their functions within a daisy chain of middlemen, all with the purpose of extracting as much profit as possible from the resources of the environment and the laborers who actually produce the value.

        It’s completely different from free market. Capitalism can (and does currently) exist without a free market. Free markets likewise can exist (and have existed) without capitalism.

        You can have free markets in a socialistic economy. The only difference is the workers own the means of production, which can take the form of employee-owned co-ops governed by democratic labor unions. That and the purpose of the economy isn’t to extract profit for the benefit of capital, but rather to provide for the needs of society.

        Food, water, utilities, housing, clothes, safety, healthcare, education, etc., these are all necessary things in society that take some participation of its members to provide. But there’s no reason why any of that needs to be provided for the sole purpose of extracting profits. That’s just the current economic system we live in.

        Comfort items, leisure activity equipment, recreational and creative endeavors, etc., aren’t exactly necessities as particulars (i.e., nobody needs a set of golf clubs), but as a category, these things are a social need, as society needs to provide the option of exploring such things if it wants to be considered a free, fair, just, equitable, and thriving/flourishing society.

        And a free market is a decent system for providing those options, because (for example) if there’s demand for art supplies, somebody will make a livelihood providing those things. But as soon as it becomes about producing profit for shareholders (i.e. capital) then it becomes soulless, toxic, and destructive.

  • Kissaki ( Kissaki@beehaw.org ) 
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    2 hours ago

    Nvidia has reportedly contacted TSMC to wind down their chip orders.

    We can hope that soon prices will come down.

    Let’s hope nobody else continues the sabotage operation. Unfortunately, we see in different places how some people continue to chase doomed paths. Lying and deception are all part of these shitty, destructive operations.

    I don’t quite remember, too few chip producers was one problem, but low number of big buyers another. Was Nvidia a big enough part of buyers? Will the other big buyers simply eat up what Nvidia frees now?

  • eleijeep ( eleijeep@piefed.social ) 
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    5 hours ago

    Imagining that all these wafers have to end up on the market and the price of GPUs and RAM becomes affordable again is a nice fantasy but unfortunately I think they will bury these chips in the ground before they let the price go down again.

  • Maybe a 500 billion fine could boost the american economy. Also a long jail visit for the CEO, as an example. To show that we don’t like it when they risk causing an economic depression.

  • I’ll tell you what he’s not facing: an avalanche of inquiries on the collusion of Nvidia with the various fascist states (Chinese and American), corruption, market manipulation and financial misconduct on a grand scale. All this wife-cheating and James Bond spy business is just a diversion.