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Retailers Respond To HDD Squeeze By Limiting Purchases, Raising Prices
SKYMTL writes "With Thailand experiencing its worst flooding in generations, component manufacturers have been especially hard hit. The trickle down effect is having a huge impact upon hard drive manufacturers in particular. Retailers have responded by drastic price increases and even limiting hard drive purchases to 1-2 drives per person."
15%-30% price spikes? The 2TB drives I bought on Tuesday increased 46% in price (from $80 to $117) and not too long before them the had them on sale for $69.99.
For once in my life I bought before the prices went up. :) ;)
I just bought a pair of 2TB drives for storing all my "Legally acquired media files."
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
This is a good example of how raising prices works to distribute whatever resources in efficient manner, allowing those, who truly need whatever the resource (HDDs in this case) to come up with the largest bid on it, which means that the resource was most needed for that situation. It definitely beats artificial rationing.
You can't handle the truth.
Jesus titty fucking christ.
From 75 to 100 dollars in one day. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136697
Its like the industry is begging for SSDs to take their market. /begging/
This isn't supply shortage it's price gouging. The industry has consolidated to four players, and one of them only makes laptop drives. Expect more of this shit in the future. Expect an SEC probe too and finding of price fixing, followed by a slap on the wrist a decade later. Fire in a dram factory anyone? Fuck me.
What am I bid for this classic 5 MB 5 1/4 Full Height drive?!? Muah ha ha ha haaaa!
Of course I'm kidding - it's a collectors item!!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
My scheme of buying computer parts to sell them on at a later date finally pays off.
If you were a commodity speculator, you'd have placed an order for way more than one hard drive a month ago for later delivery, and you'd be selling the right to have the billing and shipping information changed. You would never, yourself, actually have the ability to pay for, accept delivery of, or use, those drives.
Over 300 people have died (not huge, I know, but still not small... and the fact that I can say with all honesty that 300 deaths seems small says volumes by itself), homes and lives are ruined, ancient temples are threatened... and what Americans are most worried about is the fact that they have to pay an extra 20-30% for hard drives. Just to put this in perspective. TFA does at least have the decency to issue a "our hearts go out blah blah" at the end.
Just watch, the next story will be something about Occupy Wall Street and people protesting those huge companies and all the cheap goods they make. Really, Americans (and most of the rest of the world) really need to look closely at the consumerism that has overcome our culture to the point people dying seems far less significant than money. I realize this is a tech/ nerd site (so it wouldn't focus on the deaths anyways), but still, this is the second story about this with no mention (as far as I remember) about all the other effects this flooding is having.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
I suspect it's still a lot cheaper to buy a 1 TB hard drive than a 1 TB SSD (or 1024 GB SSD I suppose), if they even exist. But you do have a good point.
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
And i needed a couple of new drives.. i guess i will just wait.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
In name only. TigerDirect acquired the rotting corpse of CompUSA when they went tits-up and closed most (all?) of their stores a few years back. So CompUSA is effectively TigerDirect's B&M division now. They've been (re)opening CompUSA stores in a few areas (mostly Florida, Texas, and Illinois) over the past couple of years; the one near me used to be TigerDirect's Chicago-area outlet store (so they basically just changed the sign on the front from TigerDirect to CompUSA).
The store itself is actually kind of ghetto -- it tends to be disorganized, the customer service ranges from mediocre to awful, and some of the stuff they're selling is junk. But if you know what to look for (and what to avoid!) you can get some decent deals; they're also really handy for those "geek emergencies". The local one is on my way to/from work, so fairly convenient.
I dislike when people try and pretend that they feel the loss of every human life with the same tragedy. No, you don't. If you did you'd never accomplish anything because when you lose someone close to you it is amazingly tragic, and people die literally every second for all kinds of reasons. You just don't feel the same. The closer someone is to you, the more it matters.
The reason we feel for large tragedies is because of the scale. When hundreds of thousands die, we feel the scale of that, even if we knew none of them. It is that so many die.
As you said, 300 lives lost is nothing. That doesn't mean each individual life didn't have a great deal of value to their communities, it means that on a global scale it is trivial. WE lose more than that every day globally and you don't like about it. Heck we lose more than that to natural causes in short order and you don't think about it.
Don't pretend like the loss of 300 lives matters to you because it doesn't. It matters to the friends, families, neighbors, communities, etc of those people lost.
When an old man in a country I've never been to who I don't know dies, I am not even aware of it. Even if you told me my response would basically be "Oh." When an old actor dies that I know from the movies only I think "That's too bad," but not a whole lot more on it. When a friend's grandpa died that I had met, I was saddened. When my grandpa died, I was quite broken up.
It is all a matter of how close I was to the person, how deeply they touched my life. That is how everyone works, how we must work. As the parent said, we have a limited amount of emotional reserves. We cannot mourn every loss to the core of our being.