I hope this AI craze will crash soon enough. Maybe then various things normalize in price again. And consumers get cheaper products with less limitations.
(You can have inflation while your currency go up relatively to all the others on the FX market, like what happened to USD in 2022-S1, or you can have massive inflation difference between countries sharing the same currency, like it happened in the Euro Area between 2022 and today).
Not to mention that "debasement" doesn't make sense anymore given that there basically aren't any currencies on the gold standard anymore. At best you could call a pegged currency that was devalued as being debased (with the base being the pegged currency), but that doesn't apply to USD. "debasement" therefore is just a pejorative way saying "inflation" or "monetary expansion".
> "inflation" or "monetary expansion".
This is my second pet peeve on the topic, inflation and growth of the money supply are independent phenomenons. (they are only correlated in countries with high inflation regimes and, hyperinflation aside, the causation is essentially reversed: the money supply grow because of the inflation, higher price leading to an increase of loans).
>A gold standard is a monetary system in which the standard economic unit of account is based on a fixed quantity of gold.
and
>The Zimbabwe Gold (ZiG; code: ZWG)[3] is the official currency of Zimbabwe since 8 April 2024,[2] backed by US$900 million worth of hard assets: foreign currencies, gold, and other precious metals.
>...
>Although the rate of devaluation of the ZiG may vary,[13] the ZiG has consistently lost value since its introduction, and its long-term prospects are dim so long as large grain imports continue and the government continues to overspend.
sounds like it's not "fixed" at all, and "backed by ... hard assets" just means it has central bank reserves, which most fiat currencies have.
Absolutely prices should adjust appropriately… once… oh never mind
Part of what made PC gaming in the late 90s/early 2000s so exciting was that the improvements were real and substantial instead of today where we're stuck with minor improvements including bullshit like inserting fake frames generated by AI, and the cards back then were usually pretty easy to get your hands on at a normal price. You might have had to occasionally beat your neighbors to a best buy, but you didn't have to compete with armies of bot scalpers.
Now if only major studios would budget for optimizations..
Or, for $300, you can buy an RTX 5060 that is better than the best GPU from just 6 years ago. It's even faster than the top supercomputer in the world in 2003, one that cost $500 million to build.
I find it hard to pity kids who can't afford the absolute latest and greatest when stuff that would have absolutely blown my mind as a kid is available for cheap.
RTX 5060 is slower than the RTX 2080 Ti, released September 2018. Digital Foundry found it to be 4% slower in 1080p, 13% slower in 1440p: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57Ob40dZ3JU
The shareware/unlock-code economy of the 90s was probably the closest you'd get to cutting out the middlemen, where you could download from some BBS or FTP server without the dev getting involved at all and then send them money to have them email you an unlock code, but it was a lot of manual work on the developer's part, and a lot of trust.
Stripe is way more expensive than regular payment processors. Convenient for sure, but definitely not cheap.
This is a global issue that is most severe in the US due to its share of hyperscalers and their, uh, scale. You may not feel the effects yet, but it is matter of time until someone notices your market has a RAM glut, while 30-55% of their orders aren't being fulfilled.
In all likelihood, the supply channels to your locality have a low turnover rate, and DRAM has a long shelf-life. If the high prices stay high for long, it's going to impact prices when your retailers try to restock. If the price shock ends soon, your retailer may not even notice it. Whether you ought to buy or not depends on your outlook on how things will shake out
Do you have some concrete examples of where I can look?