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From: johnl@ima.ima.isc.com (John R. Levine)
Newsgroups: misc.forsale,comp.misc
Subject: Re: Dram Prices...
Summary: horsefeathers
Message-ID: <3143@ima.ima.isc.com>
Date: 7 Jan 89 21:19:27 GMT
References: <18814@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Reply-To: johnl@ima.UUCP (John R. Levine)
Followup-To: alt.flame
Distribution: na
Organization: Segue Software, Inc.
Lines: 27

In article <18814@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> c60a-4fl@widow.berkeley.edu (Antony A. Courtney) writes:
>'Scuse me for saying so, but I think you are out of your mind.  
>...
>Fortunately, the US Government caught the problem in time. ...
>Fortunately the US acted on this in a respectable, moral way.

Oh, give me a break.  I would have considerably more sympathy for the
government's DRAM action were it applied in an even partially rational way.
They took action specifically against DRAMs.  Did they do anything about
boards with RAM chips on them? Nope, so that rational manufacturers had their
boards stuffed overseas thus exporting American jobs.  Ensuring a domestic
supplier of RAM chips is a reasonable security goal, but I can think of a
lot more effective ways than jacking up chip prices from $2 to $10, thus
sending billions of American dollars to the Japanese chip makers who dominate
the market.  For example, the gov't could have specified domestic chips in
government computers.

It seems to me that the Japanese were doing us a great favor by shipping us
all those cheap chips to subsidize our large and growing computer industry.

I also note that I'm now seeing European chips here (Siemens, specifically.)
Should we slap tarriffs on them, too?

-- 
John R. Levine, Segue Software, POB 349, Cambridge MA 02238, +1 617 492 3869
{ bbn | spdcc | decvax | harvard | yale }!ima!johnl, Levine@YALE.something
You're never too old to have a happy childhood.