alt Hacker NewsI'm definitely not saying it's a binary can/can't afford situation. The point is that people don't "afford" things equally. I might some need RAM so badly that I'm prepared to take a huge risk and spend half of my paycheck on it. But that doesn't matter because someone else has 3x my paycheck, savings, and investment portfolio and a good credit score. How much money someone can spend on somethong is no indicator of how much they need/want it.
Something like "GPUs are actually scarce" doesn't even make sense to say, since scarcity is more a function of demand than supply. The supply of GPUs wasn't exhausted because people suddenly needed more GPUs or because Taiwan couldn't produce as many of them as they used to, it was because a few rich bastards were buying into a bubble so they could make as much money a possible before it all comes crashing down. They didn't "need" those GPUs much more than even the scalpers. They were just a vehicle to make short-term profits at the expense of everyone else.
And yes, of course those willing to buy things are the ones enabling the peice gouging. But that's not a useful observation. You either need something, so you'll buy it even if it doesn't make financial sense, or it makes financial sense to buy it, so you will. Notice how scalpers also fall into that second category, along with the rich bastards draining the supply.
Replies
>since scarcity is more a function of demand than supply
This is incorrect. Anything that is bound by something like TSMC production is only made scarce when nvidia realizes they could sell out the entire run at $1000/card or whatever.
They were supply limited for years during the crypto boom. The way you know it was a supply problem is that you couldn’t even buy new cards because they were so frequently sold out.
Nvidia cards became really valuable overnight in the same way as any other asset. You trying to scream at “rich bastard” buyers will not change the fact that there is a shortage of cards so the price is going to go up across all sellers until the supply and demand curves intersect.
This is basic econ in action and history is fraught with attempts to try to fix supply shortages by capping the price.
Scarcity is a function of demand. That doesn't change the importance of what I said! In fact, it proves my point. The reason that "some rich bastard" is willing to pay such prices for gpus or ram or anything else is because they expect it to generate revenue for them equal to or greater than the amount they paid for it. How do they generate revenue? By selling a product! Who do they sell the product to? People like you and I who also compete with them to buy ram and gpus. In other words, the importance of what I said about prices depending on demand is that it depends on your demand. Rich bastards don't care much about ram per se; they could get it anyway. They care about it because of what (they expect) you're willing to pay for its products. Prices are what they are because people, on net, would rather spend the equivalent they could spend on ram by buying products of ram.
Putting this in view to the idea that people don't "afford" things equally: by your assumption, this implies people can indeed "afford" other non-ram things better when it comes to the more important alternatives they could buy with the ram-equivalent funds. Not only do ram-equivalent funds compete with alternate uses, but ram as a factor of production competes with other factors of production. And all factors of production compete, by way of the so-called rich bastards, for your and my dollars. In other words, if ram is more expensive, it is to support alternate uses of ram whose products are valued more highly by consumers than the direct use of ram. And, most importantly if one were to try to get around this higher resulting price for ram, it would cause higher prices for the products of those alternate uses of ram. People would be less able to get the thing they value more highly than ram because ram competes with all our needs, and less ram can be used for its indirect use.
All of that is to say that efforts to combat so-called price gouging bounds those who can less afford ram to be in a worse spot than otherwise. They can't afford ram as before, that much is true. But they prefer the alternatives to ram. If they would be better off by having ram, they would purchase that. Waving a magic wand to redistribute ram to them will give them ram, but now they lose what they valued more highly than ram.