Storage and Memory Prices Are Rising Not Because of High Demand (Production Can Match Demand), It's Partly Because of Price-Fixing (Same as Food Price Increases)
Well known problem: (prevailing this year, a worldwide phenomenon)
How much can the so-called 'consumer' bear when there's regulatory capture, systemic corruption, collusion, and cartels? How much does an ordinary buyer (a mythical "Average Joe") know about the factors determining and ultimately severely impacting the price of electronic goods? If "Joe" knew, how would "Joe" react and what can Joe feasibly do? Boycott? Engagement in protests? Shouting at the staff at the store (because of prices the stores themselves do not control because it's decided further 'upstream' in the supply chain)?
See, let's suppose that the so-called slop industry (bubble, debt) is ordering and even pre-ordering a lot of storage devices (some to be unopened, still packed, hoarded as "spares" to 'beat the rush' - i.e. stockpiling), both volatile and non-volatile (e.g. disks). Do we lack the material to produce more of the same? Who stands to benefit from alleged shortages that drive up prices while manufacturing costs remain largely the same? Where's the much-needed intervention we saw when COVID-19 spread through dramatic headlines in the UK's press and our government repeatedly instructed us to stop panic-buying toilet paper?
Who needs to be regulated here? British companies? Or Japanese/Korean/Taiwanese/Chinese companies that make a lot of memory chips?
What about the RAM sellers? Should the sellers themselves be subjected to sanctions and ultimatums?
An associate of ours wished to make it more clear that there are two things going on here, with overlapping and intertwined elements going in both directions. One is the highly visible slop-reliant Ponzi scheme built around white elephant datacentres. The other is the potlatch of hardware sales: GPUs, RAM, and non-volatile storage to aforementioned builders of datacentres. So while the second layer is making a profit off of the debt incurred by the first layer, that is - still - a bubble.
This bubble comes at a great cost to the general public and the extra (additional) spendings find their way into the pockets (or already obscenely full bank accounts) of few people who don't know tech and merely view tech as means of "business" (extracting more money out of other people to enrich themselves, exploiting a necessity associated with storage every computer must have).
We can point out that many OEMs that have long sold GNU/Linux laptops with the Freedom-respecting software preloaded either reduce the RAM and disk capacity or announce considerable price increases (rendering them less competitive when the competition is subsidised by mass surveillance/slop loans).
We can moreover point to the Raspberry Pi price increases, to name one SBC among several which have the same problems right now (competitiveness curtailed). Notice the anecdote from Jeff Geerling's latest blog post. The Pi is the low end of the market and yet look what damage has happened!
Let's examine who stands to gain from all this. From what we can gather, based on publicly available data, Samsung is "making a killing" out of it (mostly volatile storage devices and SSDs) after years of considerable struggles and even record losses, Sandisk seems to have fully paid off its debt, Western Digital is rapidly getting there too by overcharging for storage. The list goes on and on. Seagate is the same. So while slop boosters borrow hundreds of billions of dollars the storage giants mass-deliver to them (no retail overhead) and don't produce enough for the rest of us. If they do, it'll lower prices. Lower profits. Boo!
Where are the regulators? Knifed by Cheeto, who also allowed circular financing (accounting fraud going on and on to feed the scammers)? The FTC was investigating this in Joe Biden's last week in public office, then it suddenly stopped.
The Ponzi scheme of slop helped them increase prices and deliveries got rerouted away from those who need them most. So not only do we get higher energy bills; all things connected with computers (even hosting bills and ISP bills) go up in price.
Going back to the white elephant datacentres, they are destroying communities, they create virtually no jobs, they destroy the environment, and their existence seems to be solely intended to protect a bubble and maintain spendings, loans, speculations thereof. With greater emphasis on the circular financing, it can be noted that those white elephant datacentres serve to maintain the "flow" in a pyramid scheme. At the end they will end up like unused Olympic stadiums - rotting, unloved, neglected (like high street stores boarded up and left empty due to a real estate bubble). What is needed to illustrate the first layer's misguided promises is announcements like these by Microsoft, followed by many cancellations and shutdowns. Last month it was reported that about half of all datacentre plans got binned, suspended, halted, or scrapped for good. The contrast between expectation and reality is suggestive of a scam.
Who gets richer? Check their accounting. Sophisticated robberies are still robberies. █
