RAM prices; or, on the suckage of being a regular person

Published: December 10th 2025 (week 50 of 2025)

Gamers Nexus published a couple of new videos, both with a juicy WTF in their titles. Sadly, the WTF is not just for clickbait... It does not matter if you are a PC gamer, a hobby programmer, or if you like hallucinating GPUs in the privacy of your own computer—it is a sad time to be interested in any of this.

Steve puts out surprisingly political content for a hardware reviewer. However, it is political in a way that is nowadays, I would say, unusual. He does not bash people; he just states that the current economic system is broken, and that the straw the people are drawing gets shorter and shorter every passing day.

Unless you put your hands over your ears, shut your eyes, and start singing kumbaya as loud as you can to drown out reality... you cannot just disagree with Steve's assesment of what is happening. And what is happening is we, regular people, are getting shafted.

This is nothing new. Plenty of things have gotten so expensive that they may as well be taken out of the domain of goals and put into the realm of dreams. The tang-ping concept did not appear out of nowhere, after all. There is a reason for its emergence: if you cannot win you may as well not play the game at all; and if long-term goals are unachievable, you may as well drown the feeling of aimlessness with short-term shots of pleasure using whatever floats your personal boat.

However, it looks like the things that you could use for boat-floating purposes are also becoming unavailable.

The other angle, the one that Steve focuses on, is that ownership becomes ever more difficult and expensive, and people are pushed into perpetual renting. This is basically the road to serfdom and slavery. We are definitely not going to enjoy arriving at the destination, but we are not even going to enjoy the ride there!

So much for end-of-year optimism and the typical "eh, this year may have not been great, but the next one is surely going to be better"...

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