Sam Altman's Dirty Dram Deal

From the article

> OpenAI isn’t even bothering to buy finished memory modules! No, their deals are unprecedentedly only for raw wafers — uncut, unfinished, and not even allocated to a specific DRAM standard yet. It’s not even clear if they have decided yet on how or when they will finish them into RAM sticks or HBM! Right now it seems like these wafers will just be stockpiled in warehouses – like a kid who hides the toybox because they’re afraid nobody wants to play with them, and thus selfishly feels nobody but them should get the toys!

I guess we'll have to see if they in fact just keep "unfinished" RAM in warehouses like the article says and not roll them out into datacenters for a legitimate use as they are finished.

They tried it and lost their shirts. When you hoard a critical input, that input doesn't just disappear. You spend huge amounts of money pushing the price up, and then the market price turns against you as people finally figure out that the hoarding was just a stunt, that you don't really have a higher-valued use for the stuff you hoarded, and all of it is going to be right back on the market sooner or later.

and here's a followup from the same commissioner https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/speeches/vertical-issue...

There's also the question of if OpenAI operated In good Faith (from a search: "Another sign of bad faith is withholding crucial information..."), and- of course- the South Korean government can step in as well. In fact- as a worldwide issue- any sufficiently large State(or group of States) can take issue with it.

OpenAI will have issues if they find themselves unable to buy power equipment (Schnider, Eaton). Or, perhaps anybody associated with OpenAI management or funding is arrested the second they step foot in Europe. This is already a nightmare of an International Incident.

It is the malicious purpose and the clear harm to most of America that ought to provide motivation to enforce any law this is at odds with.

Pretending computing is a luxury in 2025 is nonsense as is ignoring the obviously manipulative purpose that is so clear.

So it's really just tariffs and taxes making it that expensive elsewhere.

The phrase "left-winger" is also kind of vague; lefties in America are very specifically left-libertarians and it was specifically that strain of leftism I was referring to. A lot of, say, European lefties are far less internationalist and far more authoritarian for my tastes. There's an argument in here that American lefties haven't ironed out the contradictions in their political ideologies yet. A lot of the support for free migration from American lefties and liberals only started because Trump took the opposite position and did so extremely. But I'd rather that than, say, mainstream American politics' obsession with endianness[0].

Additionally, the welfare state is currently being crushed under the weight of a bunch of retiring Baby Boomers. Which isn't a uniquely American problem. Every rich country with a welfare state has too many old people in the system. That's due to demographic collapse, which is itself a consequence of children being too expensive to raise in a world where effective birth control is easy to access. Immigration can actually make this less of a problem, by adding to the tax base. They don't even have to be highly-skilled immigrants, they just have to be generating taxable income that goes into the welfare system.

The Globalist Nationalist argument is that this is bad because Those People™ are criminal or uncivilized in some way. But that begs the question: where do we find more taxpayers to keep our welfare state solvent? The answer is to take away birth control and hope enough horny teenagers get pregnant to fix the shortfall eventually. Except this doesn't solve the affordability problem[1]. So all those kids are going to be in broken homes or no home at all. This creates a crime wave. In fact, this is exactly why Those People™ from Those Countries™ are so damned scary!

tl;dr The integrity of the welfare state is only tangentially related to the openness of its migration programs, because migrants can be both beneficiaries of and contributors to the system.

[0] In the original sense of endianness being a culture war over what side to break eggs on.

[1] The affordability problem is itself a cluster of related cost diseases endemic to urban centers. More people want to live in the city than there is housing available for them, so prices have to rise until somebody loses. And increasing the housing supply creates further demand for land, construction labor, and materials. That raises cost, meaning that housing has to get more expensive to make new units economic. And as housing gets more expensive, there's less children being born, which means less people working to build that housing, which makes the housing more expensive, so there's less children being born...

But having access to large tracts of land with resources ( like oil ) is. I guess you missed the "chock full of oil" part.

> (see South Korea).

Perfect example. How did Korea industrialize? By being annexed by the japanese ( who went about acquiring tons of land with resources ) and then being annexed by the US with our global network of resource links.

> Also, as an aside, yes, most of the American West was largely lucked into.

It wasn't "lucked into". We won wars against the british and spanish and mexico. And we intimidated the french. And we fought wars against the natives.

> but it was a weak power.

Yes. Because major world powers cede a continent sized piece of territory with an infinite amount of resources to a "weak power".

If the US was a "weak power", then the french, british and russian empires in the 1800s must have been a joke.