You don’t have to guess at the text of the Budapest Memorandum. I will link and quote it, it’s pretty short.

Ukraine, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the United States of America,

Welcoming the Accession of Ukraine to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons as a non-nuclear-weapon state,

Taking into account the commitment of Ukraine to eliminate all nuclear weapons from its territory within a specified period of time,

Noting the changes in the world-wide security situation, including the end of the Cold War, which have brought about conditions for deep reductions in nuclear forces,

Confirm the following:

The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and The United States of America reaffirm their commitment to Ukraine, in accordance with the principles of the CSCE Final Act, to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine.

The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and The United States of America reaffirm their obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, and that none of their weapons will ever be used against Ukraine except in self-defense or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.

The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and The United States of America reaffirm their commitment to Ukraine, in accordance with the Principles of the CSCE Final Act, to refrain from economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by Ukraine of the rights inherent in its sovereignty and thus to secure advantages of any kind.

The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and The United States of America reaffirm their commitment to seek immediate United Nations Security Council action to provide assistance to Ukraine, as a non-nuclear-weapon state party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, if Ukraine should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used.

The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and The United States of America reaffirm, in the case of Ukraine, their commitment not to use nuclear weapons against any non-nuclear-weapon state party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, except in the case of an attack on themselves, their territories or dependent territories, their armed forces, or their allies, by such a state in association or alliance with a nuclear weapon state.

Ukraine, The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and The United States of America will consult in the event a situation arises which raises a question concerning these commitments.

This Memorandum will become applicable upon signature.

Signed in four copies having equal validity in the Ukrainian, English, and Russian languages.

Paraphrased more concisely, since Ukraine was giving up the nuclear weapons on its territory, Russia the UK and the USA agreed to respect Ukraine’s existing borders and sovereignty. They’re not allowed to use their weapons against Ukraine except in self-defense nor to use threat or force to damage Ukraine’s territorial integrity, and not to economically coerce Ukraine either. Obviously this part has been broken by Russia.

If Ukraine is attacked anyway then those parties are to seek immediate UNSC action. They did that, drafted a measure to reaffirm Ukraine’s territorial integrity and that the Crimean referendum held no validity, and although 13/15 of the states then on the UNSC voted in favor it didn’t matter because one of the permanent members vetoed it. Guess who.

Additionally no one is supposed to nuke Ukraine unless attacked by Ukraine in association with a state or states that have nuclear weapons. No one has nuked Ukraine.

Lastly, if Ukraine is attacked all powers are supposed to consult with each other about it. Indeed, there has been much consultation over the past more than a decade.

So technically it has been fulfilled (aside from Russia’s flagrant violation of it) since it was a very weak document in the first place. Actually, the US doesn’t technically even consider what little it does say to be binding because it was never sent to be ratified by Congress.

I had some annoyances with this. My old company had a requirement to do some annoying tasks in intervals that depended on the inverse of the number of tons of fuel used and the document controlling those tasks said just that: ‘tons’. But if you looked in the documentation behind that requirement, it was made back when we’d been involved with a European company for sourcing that fuel so that requirement was actually based on the inverse of specifically the metric tons of fuel used, not short tons. So all the math on determining the interval for doing that task had to involve converting for the metric tons of fuel used in the interval even though the newer fuel supplier we had swapped to and we ourselves were using short tons in essentially every other context. And since the controlling surface level document just said ‘tons’ without specifying which kind I was always having to correct the math of schedulers and new people on my team since they would eternally think we had more time to perform the task than we actually did and respectively plunk it down late or tell someone who was asking that it be moved that it could be pushed later than it should have been.

The average is higher but so is the median. A lot of the densely packed slums in US cities were physically destroyed which got rid of a lot of the homes that had very very small space per person, and newly built homes in the ever expanding suburbs after the roads were built out take up much more land and space is at less of a premium than in the cities where the land was very expensive and required building up and new construction standards were significantly higher than they had been.

On the good side this meant that families with a home had more space to spread out in, on the downside the destruction of the slums made it much more expensive to live in the cities with everyone competing for the remaining bigger homes and brought down the urban core populations (Manhattan is still down ~700000 prople from the peak of its population in the early 1900s) and the physically spreading out into the suburbs requires much morr inefficient infrastructure, more environmental impact, etc. Urban people who may have in olden times still been housed in cheap tenement slums now go without and are homeless because there’s a cliff between the streets and the most affordable housing whereas the slums used to make it a more gradual slope.

While the 65+ got somewhat less Trumpy over time it looks like some other age groups have tilted more right from this (particularly the Gen X sort of range that will be replacing the boomers)

People have this idea that the old conservative generations will die off and make room for younger generations with new ideas. Yes, old people eventually die. But, we are in a society where the average age is rising over time, because the old live a long time and not as many have been being born as before for an extended period of time. So the political power of the elderly is growing over time, not diminishing. Additionally if you look at how they vote, Gen X is even more conservative as a whole than the Boomers. Unlikely to be getting magically better in the near term.

Did you mean to reply to me or someone else?

I just saw some of the video. Refers to a class action lawsuit and quotes from it heavily. The class action seems to not be alleging price fixing per se (meeting in a smoky room and determining price) but rather than they are colluding to all cut DRAM supply and profit from the price spiking since the demand is unchanged. Even to the point of forgoing profits.

It doesn’t seem all that convincing though so I don’t think it will go anywhere. Something similar was tried a couple years back that was shot down by the courts. It’s not illegal for competitors in the market to behave similarly if they consider it in their rational interest to do so, it’s only illegal if they are cutting a secret deal for it so you have to have some good quality “plus factors” to convince the courts that some shady deal is going on. If there are reasonable alternatives to explain the behavior other than collusion then your case is kind of cooked.

It’s easier if they have slack production that’s being left idle to point to (which still didn’t work earlier) but now they’re all trying to churn out as much HBM as possible for insatiable data center demand and are building new fabrication plants. The video said as one example that they have better margins on DRAM than HBM but while that may be true in the current state where everyone and their mom is focusing on HBM, one question that could be posed is would that remain the same if one of the major companies swapped focus? Like one of the three biggest gives up on chasing the AI money and stops making as much HBM to prioritize DRAM. That would cut the supply for the former and boost that for the latter, which would send prices up in what they just abandoned while crashing the prices into what they’re re-entering. They could secure a lot of market share in DRAM but that could be considered to be a sucker’s bet to sacrifice the foothold in HBM and enormous stacks of AI cash in exchange for cornering the market on an older technology. Also they are reaching agreements to make HBM at longer prices but for a guaranteed period of time which makes their margins on HBM weaker but also gives them confidence that they’ll be getting that smaller amount of money for sure even if we get an AI bust.

Back in 1933 the US was on the gold standard. If the government wanted to print the money they had to have the gold to back it up so that it would be convertible to gold on request. If the economy grows but the money supply doesn’t then the existing money becomes more valuable which is deflation.

Deflation sounds great - the money you already have can buy more! - but it can lead to a ton of economic problems. For example, if your money is becoming more valuable without you even doing anything, a temptation is to just do the equivalent of stuffing it under a mattress and to try to put off buying anything for as long as possible since the longer you can wait before buying anything, the more you can afford. That causes business to dry up because people are buying goods and services less frequently. So business revenues go down. Businesses with lost revenues have strong incentives to downsize by cutting their existing employment or reducing their wages. Those employees who are fired or with cut pay can’t spend as much which further reduces revenues. So that deflationary cycle keeps repeating and worsening the problem. In addition, consider loans and investment. Existing loans become more burdensome because they’re also worth more each day, so a lot of people will be defaulting because they didn’t expect the loan to be expensive. Those who lent the money can strike it rich if lucky or be ruined if unlucky so higher risk lending is disfavored in favor of low risk stuff like government bonds, similarly investments aren’t doing so great because so many companies are having worsening revenues so investing looks like setting money on fire and is less popular. No loans and no investment makes it extremely difficult to start or improve a business if you don’t already have money which means not many new startups are coming in to replace the folks downsizing or shutting down or come up with a new idea of doing things.

So a lot of government efforts were put at the time in trying to beat deflation. The one this guy fell afoul of was that Roosevelt had by executive order suspended the convertibility of the dollar to gold and demanded that people with amounts considered in excess to take that excess to the government and be compensated for it for a defined exchange to paper money. That would get the government enough gold to make enough new currency so that it could pay for the many ambitious projects and programs Roosevelt envisioned to get the massive number of unemployed people back to work and making money so that they would buy goods and services and break the deflationary cycle. This guy however did not exchange his gold and had 160 kg of gold in a deposit that he was trying to reclaim (then valued at ~$100000 which is what we would now consider millionaire tier money), so he ran afoul of that restriction against hoarding. But if he had converted the gold to dollars earlier they would not have confiscated it. There’s no particular reason for the government to go around confiscating our accounts because there’s no gold in them, even if it were the dollar is no longer tethered in any way to gold, and even if that were the case we aren’t experiencing a deflation cycle that the government wants to create more money to break itself out of.

They have fixed prices before but that looked different. See the circled area on the graph where there had been declining RAM prices but that decline suddenly stopped and became really stable? That period of 1998-2002 is where Hynix, Infineon, Micron Technology, Samsung, and Elpida were all found to have been fixing prices on RAM because all the supply they were bringing online was crashing the prices but they hoped to collude with each other to keep the prices stable rather than continuing to decline in price competition.

That coordination worked well for the way down (except when they got hit for hundreds of millions of dollars & euros in fees when it got discovered but eh), just a matter of agreeing on a number they all won’t go below. But how would they coordinate a continuous rise in lockstep with each other, that’s a LOT of phone calls anytime someone wants to buy? Why are many committing the billions of dollars to building new plants if they know that the only reason they’re making money hand over fist is avoiding selling product until it reaches a high price, why shell out money to bring supply up in that case? And why did their previous price fixing look only like a flat line if they were capable of having it go straight up? If they had that ability all along I don’t think you would have seen this somewhat sinusoidal graph with a sharply downward longtime trend for prices.

More demand exists so they can raise prices and still sell out their product to someone, most anyone will take free money on the table. Would expect the prices to go down only if more fabrication plants come online in numbers enough to satisfy that demand with way more supply, or if the demand plunges (ex. AI bubble pops)

But it can take billions of dollars and years of work to build fabrication plants so new supply is slow to come online… and they want to be REALLY sure that they won’t become bagholders of epic proportion by investing that kind of money into plants only for a bubble to pop which would leave them with a lot of debt but only able to sell oversupplied RAM at very low prices

Imported types (ex. from the German states) for printing presses didn’t have it because it was an English only letter. Rather than coming up with expensive home modification (which some did anyway eventually but not en masse) there were easy alternatives because use of th was already established and also the letter y kind of looked like thorn in the fonts of the time so you could also sub that in.

Convenience of just doing a workaround rather than paying more money for a more English type modification won out and with so many using th and the thorn disappearing soon the use of the y that looked like thorn dropped out also.

It’s not necessarily the vote itself that does all the heavy lifting. Politicians pay a lot of attention to the stats of which groups are consistently voting and which issues are important for them, much more so than for what is important to the population at large because their bottom line is appealing to the people who show up to vote. Even if those votes are associated with their opponent if it’s a big enough block then throwing a bone to attract their vote becomes appealing.

For example, old people are one of the most highly consistent blocks of voters and (in our aging society) a growing one, too. Everyone wants to appeal to them as the math gets a lot harder if old people totally reject you! So with politicians competing for their support, social security & medicare make up over 50% of all the increase in government spending (not including more interest in the loans to pay for that which is also very substantial), even though the government already spends six times more on the average 65+ person than on the children and young adults <26, despite the latter group being substantially more likely to be in poverty. It’s not an economically sound decision, investing in the youth would provide better returns for society by setting them on a better trajectory for all the working life they have yet to live. But most of the ages in that younger block are not allowed to vote and the older near 26 are very inconsistent at voting, so their concerns really do not matter to politicians except insofar as the children are a concern of their parents who are much more likely to be voting.

Even if a movement is very popular with the general public, if that movement isn’t in the habit of voting politicians aren’t likely to stick out their neck for it if there are other more reliable voters they can appeal to. Because that would be seen as a wasted effort that won’t help them to win. But if a generally unpopular movement or view is popular with voters then politicians will tend to stand by it no matter what the general public has to say.

Dr. Oz is also nuts so it was kind of cooked regardless of what happened past the primaries