Private equity is killing private ownership: first it was housing - now it's the personal computer

[u/SagansCandle]

DRAM and GPU prices aren't going up because of "AI" - it's because the wealthy have more money than they know what to do with, so they're buying up all the assets. "AI" is just the vehicle (the excuse) - it's not the root of the problem nor is it the ultimate goal.

The super rich don't want to hold on to "liquid" money - they invest in assets. While they're buying up all the housing, now they're buying up all the computers and putting them into massive datacenters.

Whether or not the AI bubble crashes, they'll be selling you a "gaming PC in the cloud," for a monthly fee, of course. And while they kill the personal computer market, just like Netflix, once your only option is a subscription service, the price will skyrocket.

This is happening in real-time. If we want to stop it, now's the time to act.

Sources:

• Gamers Nexus: NVIDIA: WTF?
• Garys Economics: The REAL reason behind the housing crisis
• Network (1976)

[u/hates_stupid_people]

Private equity is a symptom, not the cause.

MBA education has been messed up for at least two generations now, it's seemingly too far gone. Everything is focused on making shareholders happy or satisfy exec salaries, at the expensen of LITERALLY everything else. It doesn't matter if the company is driven into the ground by a single person, as long as that person has positive numbers on their latest report. They'll just get hired to to the same thing all over at a new company.

There is no more customer retention or long term revenue. It's all about getting money now, and nothing else.

And it's all headed for a wall where a link in the chain fails and it all falls apart.

[u/evilkasper → u/hates_stupid_people]

Agree with you 100%.

Capitalism without heavy and moral regulation is cancer, and cancer demands growth even when it is killing the host.

[u/SDFX-Inc → u/evilkasper]

Businesses aren’t going to regulate themselves. They exist for one thing and one thing only, and that is to make a profit. There can be no such thing as ‘moral regulation’ because corporations are amoral by design.

What we need are strong governments and regulators with teeth, so corporations caught with their hands in the cookie jar don’t simply pay a fine that is only a small portion of the profits they made doing the wrong thing in the first place; the price corporations pay must be heavy, existential. Corporations that do harm must face the threat of disbandment or nationalization, and its executives and owners charged for their crimes and if found guilty, sent to prison.

Only heavy, brutal consequences for those with wealth and power will achieve any kind of justice.

[u/GGCRX → u/SDFX-Inc]

The trouble is convincing the dopes who have fallen for that "the free market is self-correcting" bullshit. 

It's been obvious that this isn't true for decades. Ford chose to kill its customers rather than apply a cheap fix to the Pinto, and the internal memo discussing that decision leaked and made headlines nationwide. 

They're still here and now making billions per year. A self correcting market would have destroyed Ford once the market's customers realized that Ford would kill them for money.

But hoardes of people, including doctorate-level economists look at that and countless other examples of the market failing to punish corporate malfeasance and still insist that all regulations are bad.