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Then you have “acts of God” like that time when a flood or fire or something caused the only factory in the world that produced some obscure part of memory chips to stop production and memory costs double almost overnight. I remember my 4 -> 32 MB back in the 90s cost a fortune because of this.

A great example for the pork cycle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_cycle

I've often heard it refer to as the bullwhip effect, I think it was this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullwhip_effect

Old enough here to remember Intel exiting the DRAM business.

Same! And then they made new eDRAM for a hot minute as part of Crystal Well. It'd be fun to see them get back into the game in a serious way, but their on-again-off-again attitude toward dGPUs does not give me confidence in their ability to execute on such long-term plans.

Old enough here to remember Intel entering the DRAM business :-)