> The poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. DRINKING BUDDY IS WATCHING YOU.
> 'Does Drinking Buddy exist?'
'Of course he exists. The Party exists. Drinking Buddy is the embodiment of the Party.'
'Does he exist like you or me?'
'You do not exist', said O'Brien.
> Oceanic society rests ultimately on the belief that Drinking Buddy is omnipotent and that the Party is infallible. But since in reality Drinking Buddy is not omnipotent and the party is not infallible, there is need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of facts.
Also, it wouldn't matter if they tried to sell it below the market rate. It would turn into a crazy scalping game, and consumers would have great difficulty obtaining what they want anyways.
There's plenty to criticize the RAM manufacturers for. They've formed a cartel to undersupply for a long time now, keeping prices artificially high. GamersNexus did a recent piece[0] that spends about 5-10 minutes scratching the surface of that, but really gets the point across. If they hadn't done this, there would likely be more supply available today.
Without the collusion, RAM prices and supply would follow a pretty classic commodities cycle of boom and bust, with manufacturers overbuilding capacity, going bankrupt, leading to a shortage and high prices, and repeat. That was pretty much all of 1990-2010 or so.
RAM factories also have to choose between making DRAM, HBM, or NAND. These all compete for capacity planning. The GamersNexus piece also goes into how China was making a very strong contention in the NAND space through YMTC until the USA added YMTC to the Dept. of Commerce's "Entity List" and basically kneecapped that company. If USA hadn't done that, we'd also have more supply available today.
China's CXMT entry to the DRAM market is looking very strong. Their wafer production, from 2020-2025 has gone: 20k, 40k, 70k, 120k, 160k, 270k. They've increased production 70% in the past year. OpenAI recently purchased 40% of 2026's global DRAM supply, which works out to 900,000 wafers for OpenAI. CXMT's production is 30% of that order. I found numbers indicating 2025 RAM production was around 1.8 million wafers.
If CXMT can increase continue increasing production at their current trend, they could be producing today's entire global production by 2028. By then, almost all new RAM will require EUV lithography machines to produce. Many people have doubts that China can get EUV working and ASML is not allowed to sell them the world's only existing EUV lithography machines. China poached quite a few ASML employees and announced [1][2] just last month that they have a working EUV pilot. China could potentially deploy that EUV by 2028.
I'd cannot recommend strongly enough to watch this video [3] detailing what EUV lithography actually is and how it works. It's an amazing exposition. The next technology breakthrough will be Hyper-NA EUV. That will require a 1-meter diameter mirror so impossibly smooth that if it were scaled up to the diameter of the solar system, then irregularities must be less than the height of one SpaceX Starship rocket. Specifically, tolerances for surface defects averaged over a "wide" area of 1mm^2 or so are on the order of 50 picometers, which is less than half the distance between two oxygen atoms in a single oxygen molecule.
In 20-30 years we might have devices that have millions of tiny Scanning Electron Microscope tips that reliably arrange individual atoms across an entire silicon wafer. At that point, no further improvements in feature size could ever occur again. Zyvex Labs in Texas is probably the leader in this, which they're using to assemble qubits for quantum computers, but it's only using a single STM tip at the moment, rather than a coordinated array of many tips.
I mean, yes, because it's clearly intended to have a chilling effect on speech.
But also Global Entry isn't really a thing, it's kind of just like a weird privilege some people can get ... because ... ??? It's just a fake-privilege thing. Taking it away doesn't actually prevent anyone from doing anything/going anywhere they would have anyways.
It's a privilege pretty much anyone can get if they have a clean record, pay the fee, and do the interview.
Taking it away can mean a much longer wait returning to the US. And while that certainly isn't an earth-shattering problem that is going to cost people their lives or general freedom, it is absolutely unconstitutional for the government to retaliate against someone for exercising their constitutional rights.
The idea that you can be so dismissive about that concept is a bit chilling, to be honest.
I also find Global Entry, TSA Precheck, and especially Clear to all be problematic, along with the fact that people flying on private jets don't need to go through the same TSA checks that the rest of us do. Hell, I even think it's bad to have different lines at customs for citizens vs. non-citizens. I think the most-privileged of us should use the same public infrastructure as the least-privileged of us.
My comment was a reflection of multiple different opinions on different topics.
Fair. I’ve seen this site posted on HN before, mostly in the context of business travel and tech in the airline industry, so I didn’t consider it too low quality.
Congress is supposed to remove ineffective executives from power, or change the laws/constitution to make the enforcement legal. Some would say they're abdicating those responsibilities.
Oh sure, I'd be one of those people. I was talking about an alternative approach under our system of dual sovereignty. The federal government is currently in gross violation of our Constitution that spells out the relations between the co-sovereigns. Both in terms of good-faith executing the offices laid out in the Constitution document itself, and overtly violating our natural rights including ones described in the Bill of Rights.
We do not charge sales tax when you exchange Dollars for Euros. Bullion advocates argue that exchanging dollars for physical gold is a currency exchange rather than a consumption purchase.
If you were to turn that bullion into an actual product like jewelry, then it would be taxed.
When a firm with tank capacity takes delivery of an oil contract they secured via the CBRE, do they pay sales tax on that? No, because it’s intended for resale.
Unmonetized gold bullion is similarly generally intended for resale. Generally no one is “consuming” gold bullion.
Currency exchanges are exactly why I differentiated between monetized and unmonetized bullion. I don't see why going to Costco and buying a bar of gold is fundamentally different than buying the same weight of gold jewelry. That jewelry may very well be intended for resale the same way.
Whereas to me, it's wild that thousands of years of gold bullion trade as a form of currency exchange is supplanted basically overnight and now only "gold but only on paper" would be considered the only form of real gold currency.
"Monetized" gold has only existed for 50 years since gold futures started being offered in 1972. But the real "retail era" of "gold but only on paper" started just ~20 years ago with gold ETF's in 2003 (Australia) and 2004 (USA). So in just 20 years, we're now arguing that the norm from the past 3,000 years of gold trade is completely invalidated.
That said, you're not completely out of line with the views of the USA federal government. Gold has fascinating history of regulation. There was the 1933 total ban on private ownership when U.S. citizens were given until May 1, 1933, to surrender all gold coins and bullion. That lasted until 1974. Or that gold bullion is not subject to FinCEN Form 105 (currency) but rather CBP Form 6059B (goods).
I believe that is a widely misunderstood conception of the origin of money. Gold has generally not been used as currency. The sovereign right to dictate the value of a coin struck in a metal is called "seigniorage", and exists for all of those 3000 years. The value of the currency comes from the demand for it by the government to pay taxes, not the value of the metal in the coin. The metal in the coin makes it expensive to counterfeit said coin, with punishment by death doing the rest of the disincentive.
There is a reason the coins have the emperor's face on them. They are what he will accept as payment for the taxes he requests, and in assessing taxes according to his power, he dictates their value by fiat.
> The value of the currency comes from the demand for it by the government to pay taxes, not the value of the metal in the coin.
That's the fantasy, not the reality.
> The metal in the coin makes it expensive to counterfeit said coin, with punishment by death doing the rest of the disincentive.
What actually happens is the government declares a dollar value for the coin, and then alloys the gold with cheaper metals. This results in inflation. The usual content of counterfeit gold coins is less than the gold in the government issue, which is where the death threat comes in.
Only one counterfeiter ever put more gold in the coin than the government, that was Baraha. The government got mad at him because a Baraha sovereign was worth more than the government issue.
> he dictates their value by fiat
Governments always try that, and it never works. Governments are always alloying the precious metal with cheaper metal, but nobody is fooled, and the result is inflation.
Why do you think the government no longer issues gold coins? why there's no silver in a dime anymore?
>Why do you think the government no longer issues gold coins?
Because it became self evident in the 1800s and first half of the 20th century that a commodity backed currently is not a good idea in any non static economy with a reasonably stable government?
Deflation and constant boom and bust cycles (something like the 2008 crisis would have been pretty mild back in the gold standard days) are somewhat of a drag on economic productivity.
Just because the gold standard had flaws doesn’t mean the fiat system that replaced it is flawless or even better. There are tradeoffs involved in both systems.
In a fiat currency system there is no meaningful constraint on the supply of money. We’re experiencing the effects of that feature of the fiat system currently. Tying the supply of money to a rare commodity like gold may create other problems, but it completely solves the issue of currency devaluation.
For the record, the world was on the gold standard when the agricultural and industrial revolutions occurred. It’s not at all obvious to me that the gold standard prevents productivity growth.
Much of the 3,000 years of history you're referring to saw precious metals used as wealth storage primarily in the form of objects like jewelry, silverware, and candlesticks. All of which have sales taxes.
The question I'm asking is why it's unreasonable that bullion that we've agreed isn't currency isn't being treated differently than these other things?
A fork is a finished consumer product. Even if it's made of silver, you can use it to eat with.
Bullion isn't a finished consumer product, it's the packaging format for the raw material.
Sales tax applies to finished consumer products. The intermediary stages are traditionally exempt, i.e. the person who buys bullion in order to make silver forks doesn't pay sales tax, the person who buys the fork does.
Craft stores still add sales tax to raw material. Costco charges sales taxes to business accounts, unless given a certificate of resale or buying from an exempt category in whatever state. I could go on, but clearly sales taxes apply to more than "just" finished consumer products. They apply pretty broadly to retail sales as a whole.
It's at least a distinction though, unlike the other arguments.
> Whereas to me, it's wild that thousands of years of gold bullion trade as a form of currency exchange is supplanted basically overnight and now only "gold but only on paper" would be considered the only form of real gold currency.
I mean, it's not a coincidence. For example, the US government has laws against using gold as currency, and they take those laws seriously and enforce them with vigor. They don't want dollars to suffer the competition.
Given the laws, it is necessarily the case, by definition, that gold is not currency.
> the US government has laws against using gold as currency
I don't think that's true, or I can't find any evidence of it. If you want to buy a car and the seller agrees to accept 50 gold coins instead of $100,000 cash, that is perfectly legal. Hell, the US makes currency out of pure gold that are currency at face values of $5-50 (but the gold in the coins is worth 100x more than the face value).
Are you talking about the Gold Reserve Act of 1934 and Executive Order 6102? That banned private ownership of gold and demanded that citizens turn in their gold. But it was lifted in 1974.
Using gold (or any metal) as currency ["current money"] is specifically illegal if the metal is coined.
You'd need to establish that it never crossed the seller's mind that he might later exchange those coins for something else. As an isolated incident, you'll have a fairly strong defense. If there's been another transaction in gold coins in your area recently enough that either of you might have known about it, you won't.
How do goldbacks fit into this? They contain gold (up to 3 grams, a non-trivial amount), they are accepted by a (small) number of businesses, and they are supposed to be reused for further transactions.
If you were prosecuted under 18 USC §486 for manufacturing or spending goldbacks, you'd presumably be relying on the argument that, while they are gold intended for use as current money, they aren't "coins".
> That jewelry may very well be intended for resale the same way.
It isn't.
There is a widespread belief that jewelry is a durable investment, that if you fall on hard times you will be able to sell the jewelry for an amount similar to what you paid for it, or more.
It's fair to say that many people have this idea in mind when they buy jewelry, and that it pushes up the price.
But it isn't true; if you resell your jewelry you're going to get basically nothing compared to what you paid, unless you like to wear gold chains. The resale value of new jewelry is more like the resale value of a new car.
If there was any significant demand to resell jewelry, everyone would know this. The fact that they don't is sufficient to demonstrate that they have no intention of actually reselling.
> But it isn't true; if you resell your jewelry you're going to get basically nothing compared to what you paid, unless you like to wear gold chains. The resale value of new jewelry is more like the resale value of a new car.
This entirely depends on the type of jewellery and the premium you pay for it over the price of raw materials.
I know for a fact that there's quite a lot of jewelry that trades at a fairly tight spread around the price of weight in gold (10-20% between bid and ask). Losing 20% isn't getting "basically nothing"
Of course, if there's a brand name involved you're not really paying for just the gold content anymore so there the resale value sucks.
You can sell jewelry for the same price as the equivalent weight in whatever purity of precious metals it is and I specified same weight in the parent comment. They won't be the same price originally, but that's not particularly germane to this discussion of whether there should be a sales tax on one vs the other.
And for what it's worth, people buy things for different reasons. It's very common for Indians to explicitly value jewelry as a wealth store (among other reasons), to give one example.
> You can sell jewelry for the same price as the equivalent weight in whatever purity of precious metals it is and I specified same weight in the parent comment.
Yes, of course. Didn't you see my aside?
>> unless you like to wear gold chains
But you can't buy jewelry for the price of the precious metal content. You get charged for the jewels too, and they have very limited resale value.
> It's fair to say that many people have this idea in mind when they buy jewelry, and that it pushes up the price.
Jewelry is the single biggest usage of gold, worldwide. It makes for nearly half of all the gold's reserve and usage. Jewelry alone represent as much gold as all the gold held by central banks and hoarded by individuals (be it bars or coins). There's also some gold use by various industries but that gold is often lost.
So it's fair to say that jewelry does, indeed, push gold's price up.
(1) Many people believe they can sell jewelry for something approximating the purchase price;
(2) This belief is false;
(3) But the false belief that the money they are spending is recoverable makes those people willing to pay more for jewelry, pushing up the price of jewelry compared to what it would be if people knew they couldn't resell it effectively.
That's not consumption as it applies to sales tax rules. In almost every jurisdiction, raw materials and inventory purchased for resale or industrial processing are exempt from sales tax.
Which is why Value added tax is superior system. Though gold is in some jurisdictions treated different when it is considered investment. But for rest it is like any other metal.
Wouldn’t that be for the same kinds of reasons things like purple dyes were valuable: rare to find, hard to harvest, hard to transmogrify (insect/sea life guts into clothing dye, gold into chains or other wearables), hard to break, which all culminates into a quick visual indication of wealth.
Now? Gold is a great conductor of electricity (of course silver is better) and some people still like wearing lots of flashy jewelry.
I have no earthly clue why people find it valuable to invest in other than it’s like bitcoin: it’s valuable because everyone else also thinks it’s valuable.
Never once have I read a quarterly progress report from the CEO of the element “gold” outlining profit strategies for the next year.
> I have no earthly clue why people find it valuable to invest in other than it’s like bitcoin: it’s valuable because everyone else also thinks it’s valuable.
Unlike bitcoin there is a price “floor” because of its use in jewelry and industry. Even if no one hoarded it, it would still have some value.
Just because it doesn’t generate a yield doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value. Fresh drinking water is incredibly valuable and will be more so as its supply dwindles.
> Bullion advocates argue that exchanging dollars for physical gold is a currency exchange rather than a consumption purchase.
One can argue that until they're blue, but it'd still be wrong. Gold is a commodity, and if you're buying it shell-packed at Costco you probably should be paying sales tax on it.
I would generally use McMaster-Carr whenever possible. They will almost never go out of stock even during national crises. I don't generally trust Amazon for items that I can't validate myself due to counterfeiting, e.g. there's a lot of fake knockoff HEPA filters marketed as OEM.
Actually, just a normal <$10 N95 [0][1] (without an exhalation valve). But they won't stop chemicals, just particles. My family have found they prevent COVID transmission from masked sick members to unmasked family members, as well as from unmasked sick members to masked family members.
Honestly the 3M 60923 cartridges don't restrict breathing at all. They have great airflow. I've used them all day long in chemical plants, no one complains about that.
Seconded. I've used those exact cartridges. Not for as long of shifts as you, but I'd say the face mask fit is much more important for that.
My DIY-perspective tip is that when you're getting to know the respirator, you can take the filter cartridges off and put your hands over the input ports to feel what fully restricted breathing feels like, make it a known sensation in case it ends up happening. Likewise you can cover the output port and breathe out to do a kind of rough fit test.
> 'Does Drinking Buddy exist?' 'Of course he exists. The Party exists. Drinking Buddy is the embodiment of the Party.' 'Does he exist like you or me?' 'You do not exist', said O'Brien.
> Oceanic society rests ultimately on the belief that Drinking Buddy is omnipotent and that the Party is infallible. But since in reality Drinking Buddy is not omnipotent and the party is not infallible, there is need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of facts.
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