thorhammerz

And when it doesn't work, the customer then refunds (or tries to...) the product, wasting everyone's time (and more importantly, the vendor's money in labour / customer service and return shipping fees) . In such a world, why on earth would they possibly make it not work to begin? It's not like the manufacturers / vendors would be the side with the asymmetric (and lopsided) risk profile against them, amirite?

Those prioritizing security uber alles, are typically not too stingy with whether the IPC and/or clocks are running at last decade's i3 speeds (or the sticker price, for that matter) .

Let us revisit the plans for actual implementation in 5 to 10 years then .

Yeeep. But now with the prospect of say, enacting a -10% value per annum (spend-it-or-lose-it) regardless of where it's placed. Demographics are a cruel thing when it comes to shaping how economic systems live (and die...), and a large swathe of the world is about to learn, over the course of the next 5-10 years, how to make do with a future of "less". Capitalism, socialism, fascism, communism, were all ism's based on the notion of "more" (with a few technical tweaks on who gets to decide who gets which part and how much of it). It's time to find some new "isms" (and the wars to go

A couple things come to mind: 1) Enforcement of deeply negative interest rates (hiding money in paper cash will no longer be an option) 2) Ability to enforce spending controls (e.g. this specific batch of coins can only be used to purchase certain goods / services) 3) Eventual elimination of middlemen (most notably, the banks, so they can eventually have a system where you interact with the central bank directly) Welcome one and all, to a new age of financial repression .

Are you inclined to believe that they actually "took their own medicine" (even if off-camera), as it were?

The "miners" ponied up the money for first dibs on the goods, end of story. What they do with the cards, is their own business. If the local power companies / governments have issues with said "mining", it is laughably easy for them to create economic (dis)incentives. Same goes for "gaming" really (China has already moved on that). If the local authorities have issues with the "advertising", then NVDA will simply change the messaging. Supply distribution remains unchanged (first dibs to those who are willing to hit the bid in sufficient volume, even if it goes through t

Didn't you get the memo? Some animals are simply more equal than others .

The entity that dictates what constitutes "fair distribution" is NVDA itself, and no other. He who bids the highest, receives the goods ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Unfortunately for "gamers", it just so happens that the "miners" are willing to bid in both price and volume, at the time where supply is already constrained. In the retail world (note: excluding high-volume deals such as OEMs) where individual cards are effectively treated as depreciating commodities, they don't particularly care whether the supply goes to the miners or to the gamers, so long as they can get it off their balance sheet

Good and easy times breed weak and complacent people .

One never runs out of currency if one also controls the supply. Although whether the real (and/or relative) purchasing power of each nominal unit is preserved, is a whole other issue .

Welcome to academia. You see it all the time in "climate science" .

I totally get that. I'm just saying, from NVDA's perspective (which is the one that matters for the purposes of deciding what configuration a consumer card gets at a given price point), hampering performance, especially with RTX, on an xx50-tier card is probably not an unwanted outcome, given their incentive to induce people to pay for the more expensive xx60/xx70 variants for the more enjoyable experience.

Crippling the performance (intentional or not) on a xx50 tier card with VRAM configurations is a good outcome, yes? It isn't even particularly costly if the yields for the GPU dies are good enough, and they leave themselves room to release a higher VRAM model in the future if segmentation needs dictate a need to do so.

This. Have fun building on-the-ground infrastructure to link up those tiny communities sprinkled further north - it's mostly muskeg, forest, broken rocks, and tundra. It'd be more efficient to pay for a few extra satellites, but that would be categorized as efficient spending (i.e. not enough money flowing through the fingers of the bureaucrats / consultants / contractors).