Looking at what’s happening with RAM pricing and Crucial being shuttered, the doomer in me thinks they could just pull the same thing with every other PC component. It’s not like some plucky band of upstarts can start 3D printing organic free-range FOSS processors, hard drives and motherboards in their garage- all of this shit comes out of a couple of giant plants in Asia. If porky strangles the supply, that’s it. In the end all the average joe schmoe will be left with are cloud-based terminals that rely entirely on subscription services and that require strong identification to even use (and that will monitor and log every single fucking thing you do while drowning you in ads)
Wanna install Linux? Go ahead! What are you going to install it on though, your grandpa’s old Pentium? 
Wanna ditch subscription services and sail the seas? Oops, it looks like hard drives cost 5,000 dollars and are only sold to enterprise customers. I guess you’re not storing that media anywhere
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The thing with the current shortage is that it’s way more profitable to sell the chips used for RAM and SSDs to giant corporations building AI data centers than to bother with the consumer market at all. It’s not a co-ordinated push to ban personal computing per se, just a side effect that happens to align with the push for cloud/subscription bullshit Microsoft and others have a huge hard-on for and will probably dovetail nicely also the West’s even bigger hard-on for doing every single fucking
authoritarianthing they have been accusing China of doing for the past 20 years