Seen this around without alt text, so I yoinked it to post it myself.

@McWabbit Posting without alt text is giving permission for others to take your stuff without attribution as far as I’m concerned…

@McWabbit The reason RAM prices went up is the bully billionaires want to outlaw personal ownership of computers and force us to use theirs instead, at considerable cost.

@McWabbit well.. If you put it like *that*, it does seem a bit weird..

@dx @McWabbit Powered with energy that won't exist.

@McWabbit the hidden reason is to make devices so expensiventhat the only way to work or gaming is thru a basic device locked with a monthly subscription to cloud AI services.
Enshittification goes brrrr

@McWabbit cmon baby, AI crash, pc affordability boom, pls pls pls

@McWabbit surely they are operating at a massive loss and continue to do so

@yugthebug The problem is unregulated capitalism. The billionaires will take some losses when the bubble burst. But it is nothing for them compared to the ordinary people and companies who get roped into this AI hype, dismissing personnel to be replaced by AI, face sudden subscription spikes, go under or reorganize, dismissing even more people.
Which triggers a real estate crisis resulting in a financial crisis, ordinary people who live from salary to salary get effed and the domino effect goes on.
And that’s only the economy. The added waste of resources that this AI bubble brings, contributes to the climate crisis greatly, which means even more upheavals and wars for fresh water, minerals and energy.
By then, not being able to afford RAM is the least of our troubles.
That’s one possible outcome.

The techbros could also bank on us subscribing to their hardware lend-lease model. Which will still be a problem.

@McWabbit

@yugthebug @McWabbit What, like how GPUs went back down after the silicon shortage? When the AI bubble bursts what people are paying now will be the new normal because people are still paying it.

@woe2you @McWabbit yeah ig so

@McWabbit Original text by @mhoye https://mastodon.social/@mhoye/115742732861618099

@mx @mhoye Nice one! I see I had liked and boosted it already myself back then.

@McWabbit Or, you know, just boost the original, so it’s attributed.

https://mastodon.social/@mhoye/115742732861618099

@oscherler Someone mentioned it already elsewhere in the thread. I did boost it back in december. But thank you for the reminder!

@McWabbit Curious about what's going on. I just checked the price at Newegg of a SAMSUNG 990 EVO 1TB SSD I bought last April. It has gone up about 60%. That's huge, but it's not 400%.

I should add -- I'm certainly on board with the thought expressed here. There's SO MUCH here that is a deep problem, I'm not clear that this chip-futures-buying thing adds much.

@adardis Probably not affecting SSD storage memory at the moment that much.

But if one needs RAM memory and for example is located in The Netherlands like me, just visit the price watch page of our popular local tech site and look up DDR5 RAM, e.g.: https://tweakers.net/pricewatch/2064068/kingston-fury-beast-kf560c30bbek2-32.html

It has a graph in which the pricing history can be tracked. In this example the price of a kit of 2x 16GB cost around €135 last April. At the moment the pricing is around €425. The spike started around fall 2025 when the scheme began.

Similar results of kits from other brands and types:
https://tweakers.net/geheugen-intern/vergelijken/#filter:q1YqKMpMTvXNzFOyMtBRKi5ITXbLzClJLSpWsqpWMjQ2B1FliTlKVtFKxgbGhkqxtTpKppYg0VyQHiUjJR2l3MQKMAsoZWJpaICQNDTTM4DLgzm1tbUA

Browsing through Newegg, the prices of RAM are ridiculously high as well.

@McWabbit i just want to point out to people that theyre burning money to destroy resources. Data centers poison the air and water. Tech destroys the land through mining. Theyre spending billions to kill billions so that they can rule over the ashes.