This time shall be different

please don’t say gold is almost guaranteed to go up…

I mean, in so far as inflation is almost guaranteed to occur in a productive economy, gold is almost guaranteed to go up over the long term.

A better question might be “Is an investment in gold going to outperform another asset class?”

I looked into it as well but in the end went with a Gov Bond ETF instead.

That’s been the gambit with gold for a while. Point to a short term up-cycle in price and insist that’s a long term ROI you can count on.

But when you look at the actual price history

there are long periods when the price is either flat or negative. Risk of holding gold relative to, say, the S&P or even basic Treasuries can get pretty high, unless you’re very confident we’re in one of those rare '04-'11 sustained price rises.

Even as a hedge against short term downturns, it kinda sucks. If you look at the big historical recessions - '81, '90, '01, '08, '20 - the price of gold had typically already jumped ('01 being a notable exception) and subsequent years were fairly flat. Spikes in gold prices aren’t a bad prediction of future recessions, but they rarely make for good shelter on the eve of the crash.

Fungible, portable, valuable.

It isn’t fungible. Anyone who has tried to trade physical gold at anything close to the market rate can tell you that. And no retailer is taking a dribbling of yellow sand as payment.

It isn’t portable. You can’t produce a finite denomination of it easily or transfer it electronically or even carry it in a wallet economically.

It isn’t intrinsically valuable. It produces nothing consumable in the way an oil well or corn field or machine shop can. It’s a speculative asset with the potential to be turned into something more useful. But it has no practical use or purpose in a raw state.

Gold isn’t a scam, as far as the concept of wealth and hierarchy isn’t a scam.

The means by which commodified gold is packaged and sold to gullible investors is very often scammy. And the sales pitch promising future returns on investment are inevitably larded up with rosy predictions unsupported by current data.

The socialized mythology around gold (especially relative to peer commodities like copper or oil) radically inflates its sales price in bubble economies. But there’s no reason you’re going to see better investment performance than a purchase of real estate or commercial equity. And there’s certainly no reason you would want to buy and hold gold long term if you had an opportunity to build or invest in an actual value-accruing business.

At best, a long gold play is a hedge against deflation and economic decline. At worst, its a fad that cycles in popularity relative to cryptocurrency or beanie babies.

Did you mean IUDs?

… yes.

Insurance is about compensation for loss, and that’s it.

That’s certainly not true of medical insurance. Preventative care is part of the whole package. In fact, certain preventative care is encouraged. Health insurance companies are more than happy to pay for UTIs, for instance, because they’re so much cheaper than pregnancies.

Apple’s willingness to offload all of their production there and basically revolutionize their Tech industry

Taiwan’s FoxConn building assembly plants in Shenzhen in 2005 does not explain why Huawei is releasing cutting edge phones in 2025.

Besides, if you want to get historical, Apple cribbed all their technology from Microsoft’s trash bin back in the 90s. And Microsoft plundered IBM and the early tech companies of the 1980s before that.

Chinese firms didn’t cheat by licensing the same technology every American firm was outright stealing through reverse engineering.

I mean, ymmv. The historical flood of cheap memory has changed developer practices. We used to code around keeping the bulk of our data on the hard drive and only use RAM for active calculations. We even used to lean on “virtual memory” on the disk, caching calculations and scrubbing them over and over again, in order to simulate more memory than we had on stick. SSDs changed that math considerably. We got a bunch of very high efficiency disk space at a significant mark up. But we used the same technology in our RAM. So there was a point at which one might have nearly as much RAM as ROM (had a friend with 1 GB of RAM on the same device that only had a 2 GB hard drive). The incentives were totally flipped.

I would argue that the low-cost, high-efficiency RAM induced the system bloat, as applications could run very quickly even on a fraction of available system memory. Meanwhile, applications that were RAM hogs appeared to run very quickly compared to applications that needed to constantly read off the disk.

Internet applications added to the incentive to bloat RAM, as you could cram an entire application onto a website and just let it live in memory until the user closed the browser. Cloud storage played the same trick. Developers were increasingly inclined to ignore the disk entirely. Why bother? Everything was hosted on a remote server, lots of the data was pre-processed on the business side, and then you were just serving the results to an HTML/Javascript GUI on the browser.

Now it seems like tech companies are trying to get the entire computer interface to be a dumb terminal to the remote data center. Our migration to phones and pads and away from laptops and desktops illustrates as much. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone finally makes consumer facing dumb-terminals a thing again - something we haven’t really experienced since the dawn of personal computers in the 1980s.

But TL; DR; I’d be more inclined to blame “bloat” on internet web browsers and low cost memory post '00s than on AI written-code.

If heroin was fully legalized, zero restrictions, we’d be much better off than the current situation we have right now with the war on drugs, fentanyl analogs, and xylazine. Full stop.

If we hadn’t invaded Afghanistan and started importing heroin in bulk through Ahmed Wali Karzai’s mafia connections, we wouldn’t have tons of cheap heroin to hook people to begin with. Also, we did have fully legalized (functionally) zero restrictions opioids, back under Bush Jr.

That’s what Oxycotin was.

If you want to describe the US as a criminal nacro-state, you can start at the Florida pill-mills that flooded the country with hundreds of billions of dollars in highly addictive prescription drugs and made the Sackler Family some of the wealthiest people on the planet.

Based on this I’m not gonna read the rest of the article

Pretty sure all ram manufacturers are Korean?

Micron is American, headquartered in Boise, Idaho. Western Digital is based in San Jose, California. Kioxia (formerly a department of Toshiba) is Japanese.

Only Samsung and SK Hynix are Korean.

So, I don’t see anyone investing 10 years into the future to make ddr6 ram where their business plan relies on current trends.

Even if you’re not up to DDR6, there’s money to be made in lower-tier memory for lower quality devices. Also, when the market is in a pinch, you’ll have the ability to scale up with investment dollars faster if you’re already in the business.

Black, White, and Red All Over

Been saying that about a lot of these rich, reactionary fucks.

DARE promised me that five years of crack would put anyone in the ground. Meanwhile, Mike fucking Lindell is currently running for governor in Minnesota, fully coked out of his gourde. Dude’s been rolling deep in that powder since the 90s.

I feel extremely lied-to.

Yeah, that image must be photoshopped.

It’s this guy.

My Polymarket Bet isn’t printing. We’re still waiting to hear if Milo Yannapolis was right about him just being in hiding and saying racist things under a rock all day.

The miracle of the Chinese Economy (and, really, all the BRICS countries) has been their willingness to educate and industrialize their population.

Yeah, it takes a ton of R&D, but when you’ve got 1.4B people you’re going to sift out a few who can get the job done. India’s Tata is already building their own semiconductor facilities. Brazil’s semiconductor sector has been struggling to break into the global market for… decades. Russia’s so sanctioned that they’ve got no choice but to go in-house. South Africa is finally building industrial facilities to match their role in the raw materials supply chain.

I would suspect this crunch in the global market is going to incentivize a ton of international investment in manufacturing entirely to meet domestic demand. And heaven help us all if there’s an actual flashpoint in the Pacific Rim, because that’ll shut down the transit that companies like TSM and Broadcomm need to produce at current scales.

I just wouldn’t hold my breath, especially under the current protectionist political environment. You’re not going to be buying outside of the US sphere of influence any time soon.

4kb of RAM and an office packed with hundreds of engineers using slide rules, sure.

The latest semiconductor manufacturer specializing in RAM is ChangXin Memory Technologies

As of 2019, CXMT had over 3,000 employees, and runs a fab with a 65,000 square meters clean room space. Over 70% of its employees are engineers working on various research and development related projects. CXMT uses its 10G1 process technology (aka 19 nm) to make 4 Gb (gigabit) and 8 Gb DDR4 memory chips. It has licensed intellectual property originally created by Qimonda.

So… whatever that costs. Although, I think this wiki is a bit behind the times, as they’ve got DDR5-8000 memory in flight according to TechInsights.

I remember how the combination of Internet mass distribution of file data and the blossoming gray market for file-share applications really super-charged the technology of file compression.

I wonder if we’ll see skyrocketing RAM prices put economic pressure on the system bloat rampant through modern OSes.