Amid the ongoing shutdown, the HHS secretary wiped out entire offices that investigate disease outbreaks, manage infectious disease responses and collect data.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. laid off more than 1,000 CDC scientists, doctors and health officials Friday night amid the shutdown as Trump administration RIFs continue
This was the actual color of the mountains. That year it was warmer and a bit wetter than normal, so the trees went unusually red. On the drier years, you tend to get more oranges, golds and yellows. Taken from Vt. Rt. 102, looking east across the Connecticut River (yeah, it's there at the far edge of the field and not wide at all, that far into the north country..) into New Hampshire.
Was taken with a Sony DSC-P93A (honestly a tiny spitfire of a camera!), was 8 or 9 shots then stitched them together and did a bit of spot touching to hide the seams using Photoshop. No color adjustments at all though. This ended up a bit shorter than I wanted, as at the time I did not have a tripod to do pan shots with, so of course the camera was not as steady as I'd wished as I was taking the shots. lots of up and down.. Urgh. But.. a beautiful year up there..
When bulldozers rolled into Hebron on July 31st and destroyed Palestine’s only national seed bank, they weren’t just tearing down a building; they were attacking a living archive of Palestinian res…
A few months ago, I tried my second attempt at my game matsuri idea. I wanted to revisit it at some point, using some props that I had forgotten about.
I ended up taking about two hours to build the set, and another four to shoot. I was pretty frustrated by my tripod, which had a minimum height because of a shaft on it, and for a lot of the street level shots, they were taken on a couple of soda boxes. However, the tripod was a huge boon because there were some twenty second exposures going on; turns out, I'm married to 100 ISO.
There's several neat elements happening with the set here: first, the main boulevard has been laid out like a roulette table, and every roulette table needs a zero -- I used kabufuda, an 8, 9, and 3, which is a hand worth zero points in a game called Oicho-Kabu. Coincidentally, this is where the Yakuza gets their name from. There's also a shogi king being checkmated in an alleyway, an artist painting another shogi piece, a riichi mahjong hand called thirteen orphans, as well as numerous other details throughout.
In addition, with clever editing and methods of capture, there's weather now! I was delighted to see that it came out quite well.
Though a lot of this was frustrating, I think I'm fairly-well satisfied by the end product. There's eight pictures in here, please see them all!
You're probably thinking about populations, and the Sun is a Population I star, but it's impossible to state a specific number of stellar generations that preceded our Sun. The process turns out to be more complex than a simple linear sequence of star, supernova, star. While Sun's metallicity is definitive proof that it formed from the recycled remnants of earlier stars, the interstellar gas cloud that formed our solar system was a mix of material from many different sources over billions of years. Location also plays a role since a star near the galactic center might be highly enriched after a short time, while a star in the outskirts remains metal-poor for longer. Finally, many regions of the universe experienced sustained periods of star formation lasting hundreds of millions of years. During these episodes, stars were born, died, and enriched the surrounding gas, which then formed new stars within the same ongoing event. The best answer is that our Sun formed from a cosmic medium that was cumulatively enriched by countless stellar ancestors over the course of 9 billion years.
It seems that we're getting close to a leak. Pokemon project has an update file available and from what I've seen, some people have game dumps but no one wants to leak it yet.
I've played the first two gen games when they came out. This one looks pretty interesting too. I'm excited to try it.
Kind of wish they'd do a cross platform game (that you can play at home). I don't want to buy a Switch just for Pokemon.
Edit: and yes, I'm aware of which community this is, but after GBA I never had much luck with these games, and haven't kept up. Not sure how functional they are (especially on Linux).
A few months ago, I tried my second attempt at my game matsuri idea. I wanted to revisit it at some point, using some props that I had forgotten about.
I ended up taking about two hours to build the set, and another four to shoot. I was pretty frustrated by my tripod, which had a minimum height because of a shaft on it, and for a lot of the street level shots, they were taken on a couple of soda boxes. However, the tripod was a huge boon because there were some twenty second exposures going on; turns out, I'm married to 100 ISO.
There's several neat elements happening with the set here: first, the main boulevard has been laid out like a roulette table, and every roulette table needs a zero -- I used kabufuda, an 8, 9, and 3, which is a hand worth zero points in a game called Oicho-Kabu. Coincidentally, this is where the Yakuza gets their name from. There's also a shogi king being checkmated in an alleyway, an artist painting another shogi piece, a riichi mahjong hand called thirteen orphans, as well as numerous other details throughout.
In addition, with clever editing and methods of capture, there's weather now! I was delighted to see that it came out quite well.
Though a lot of this was frustrating, I think I'm fairly-well satisfied by the end product. There's eight pictures in here, please see them all!
Anyone have any suggestions for a decent linux podcast client. Doesn't need to be fancy or anything, basically just "Download and keep the last N items in the following podcast feeds." Extra points for cli/TUI.
These are recommendations for other FOSS podcast apps by the developers of AntennaPod, since they only have the time and resources to develop their app for Android
The url made me think AntennaPod was available on other platforms, it is not
I head about Audiobookshelf and I already use Escapepod on mobile, LMS for music (self hosted), so wondered few times about installing it too.
So can Audiobookshelf be used for clips and annotation?
I find that more and more often I listen to a podcast, it gives me an idea and I want to :
pause
record my idea, by speaking it aloud for e.g. 30s
unpause to keep on listening
review the idea later on, e.g. on my desktop, while maintaining provenance, e.g. this idea "monetization of own content creation for creators on my on-going VR project" (ideally as text at this stage, so using STT) was sparking by listening to podcast "Voices of VR episode 1226 on VR Chat and monetization" around 25min in.
Edit : just checked on their demo server and there is a bookmark option. It's just text for me, it doesn't clip part of the audio, but it does associate some typed text to a moment in time. It might be enough for me.
Other than that, if you want CLI, while it's not a podcast program, yt-dlp is pretty good for downloading them. You can filter by title, date, etc. It's got a bit of a learning curve, tho.
Joe Rogan slammed President Donald Trump's immigration policies as "horrific" to see play out, saying "anybody with a heart" can't support what's happening.
It's objectively a bad thing when a country's entire economy is being propped up by seven companies and the vast majority of consumer spending is concentrated in the top 1%.
There is things worth trillions. Like full countries, and the largest pension funds and social security funds. Having a single company be comparable to those massive collections of people is insane, and it's because they think it can replace workers--when it can't, not yet, and not for a long time
Evaluations of everything is crazy. Net worth of celebrities with make up lines in particular is crazy. Look how many celebs are worth a billion dollars. To be worth that much, they should be selling at least $50 millions a year of product with no prediction of winding down.
The most optimistic take I've seen: AI is a drain on the entire economy that sucks up all investment and this is why the rest of the economy is basically in a recession. Once the bubble pops, investors will flood back into the real economy and correct the problem.
I'll play devil's advocate here: agreed that the rest of the (US) economy seems to be slowing or shrinking but remains buoyed by AI / Mag 7 stocks. That said, a lot of the investment reflected above is in data centers and hardware (Nvidia, Coreweave, Oracle, Microsoft).
The bubble pop will hinge on whether there is value in this data center buildup beyond AI. Unless everyone starts paying fistfulls of cash for AI chat, these companies may be able to find another use for all that compute and avoid a total crash. That could be a target for all that investment you mention.
The hardware is specialized for chatbots, it's not just something they can plug-and-play for other use cases. That means using it for other computing tasks is even less efficient per kWh and per litre of water, which will make it hard to justify the resource requirements.
Surely some of this hardware can find new life, but assets will be stranded.
Yes! The problem is that we won't accept the full correction that is actually required. We print money, we buy securities, we find ways to prop to reduce the pain but we end up shifting the weakness to other areas of the economy.
Is it just me, or are the bubbles coming closer together these days?
Yes and no.
Yes in the sense that we have a lot more "fad" economies. There is something new so that needs to be EVERYTHING and the market course corrects, often at the cost of hardship for many.
But "no" in the sense of what "bubbles" tend to refer to. Things like the Japanese Bubble Economy where it causes (I forget if it is officially one but) recessions and even depressions.
The AI Bubble is not going to do that (on its own...). Yeah, a LOT of companies are going to be left holding the bag when they realize LLMs can't solve all problems for them AND manifest a Cyber Stana Katic to give them a blowie while it does that. But what will they be left with?
A LOT of "prompt engineers": This is bad because that is going to be a LOT of people who, increasingly, went to school to get a degree in something with very little utility. That said... Art History majors have been showing us how to do that for decades and at least they did something they loved on their way to service industry jobs.
For the companies that gutted their workforce over the past few years: A need to rapidly hire talented workers who don't require ChatGPT to do their job: This is REALLY good for the people who have been hurting and should actually lead to a lot of job mobility... for the old hats who predated this fad
For the companies that purchased hardware: A lot of edge computing devices are going to be of questionable value. But for the folk who "just" bought a shit ton of GPUs from Daddy Jensen? They have a shit ton of GPUs they can either sell for cheap (not horrible) or repurpose (good)
Don't get me wrong. There is going to be upheaval and it is going to be bad. But it is also important to remember that drawings like the above are actively misleading and bordering on manipulative. Because basically all the biggies, except OpenAI, have non-AI uses. Oracle ballooned massively because of the OpenAI injection but... they are still god damned Oracle. Same with nVidia who, when they aren't powering every LLM on the planet, are also one of the companies that makes all the cards that power stuff like computer vision and the like in cars and what not.
Because... remember the dot com bubble? Remember how basically the entire world still runs on The Internet? It was just a case of rebalancing and pivoting for the most part.
All that said... the US is in a really bad way because the fascists have been increasingly gutting the economy and stopping basically any industry that involves manufacturing or communicating with external countries. We are gonna have a massive stock market crash when OpenAI et al pops...
1) it's not AI, regardless of how many idiots repeat that bullshit. It is machine learning with glorified pattern recognition.
2) Why would anyone want to enter the market? It has no practical use that justifies the energy consumption. Because it is not targeted, for every individual application, there are much more efficient ways to accomolish the same/better results for much less energy.
It's good enough to answer most questions and it will only get better. Even if it is not AI it is a tool that knowledge workers use and will need to stay competitive.
And looking at the size of EU investments, only China will build competitors so these companies will own the market.
It’s good enough to answer most questions and it will only get better.
Reality indicates the opposite.
Even if it is not AI it is a tool that knowledge workers use and will need to stay competitive.
People who use machine learned systems to handle "knowledge" will dilute actual knowledge with billions of factual errors and fuck up mankinds knowledge base.
They're all paying each other. That's literally the point this image is trying to express.
What's especially insane is that the companies that are actually providing the service to end users, i.e. Coreweave et al, are not the ones seeing massively inflated prices, contrary to your point about the monthly fees justifying the higher evaluation.
So the real problem with calling it a bubble is that countries can't stop investing in it. It definitely has bubble like qualities, but we have hit a point where we can't stop investing in it. It's more an arms race then a bubble.
The fall may have been accelerated by portfolio insurance hedging (using computer-based models to buy or sell index futures in various stock market conditions) or a self-reinforcing contagion of fear
Algorithms and feedback loops gummed up all the crypto exchanges and liquidity disappeared.
The crypto tide went out and we all saw who wasn't wearing any shorts.
So how dangerous is that really? I assume one day we’ll finally see investors saying, “Nah, that’s a bubble. I’m not gonna see any returns from those companies - I’m selling.” Then stock prices will fall, and some investors will lose money by selling for less than they bought. After that, AI unicorns will start to lose funding and close their businesses, laying off people.
But will I - a person who does not work in the AI industry and has not invested in AI companies - be affected by this?
I don't know the answer, but during 2008 onwards (seems like the economy didn't fully recover until the end of Obama's presidency), every industry slowed down. Was hard for me to get a fast food job or consistent minimum wage assembly line work through temp agencies. Things can go into vicious positive feedback loops during downturns (investors afraid to invest due to bad economic outlook -> factories and such don't get built or expanded -> unemployment rises -> people spend less -> companies start laying off -> economic outlook worsens -> investors selling and moving to "safer' assets -> ...). The entire banking system pretty much imploded during 2008; I don't know how much exposure banks have to AI (commercial real estate is another thing to worry about though). With any luck the AI crash would be more like the dot-com crash, which mostly just hurt one industry (but I remember my father talking about factory layoffs during that too).
My family lost a great deal of invested wealth in that 2008 crash with the death of Mellon Bank. It does not seem like a lot today but ... if it had been invested in say Chase or G-S... it would have probably been double what it was by now. I am sure my dad was twisting in his coffin when that happened. I am glad he did not suffer that when it happened (he died in 2005).
Pension funds are to a large extent exposed to the stock indices. Since these companies grow and grow in valuation, a larger portion of pension funds are exposed to these companies. The so-called "magnificent seven" make up about 35% of the US stock market now. A lot of people will see a large portion of their pension savings affected by this. If you are not a US citizen, you sre still likely exposed to these companies.
One thing people didn't mention is that I'm pretty sure the top 10% of Americans by income make up 50% of consumption because of the heavily K shaped revovery that has happened. These Americans have a large percentage of their wealth in stocks, and if the stock market crashes, they will feel less wealthy and less willing to spend, decreasing their spending, tanking the US economy.
So we agree. Poor/ middle class people only hold stocks for retirement. AI bubble popping has no effect on them. The are exactly as they were pre-AI bubble.
Only rich people care about the current stock values. Only rich people are scared of an AI bubble. Only rich people are attempting the "too big to fail" FUD. Big Tech are not banks. There is no knock on effect.
AWS have now had enough outages that any serious company has migration plans and redundancies. If Google fails then the infrastructure stays running even if the current shareholders lose their shirts. The employees that are needed to bring in cash will not lose their jobs.
The best thing us poors in the US can do is eliminate our consumer debt, pay it off or do a bankruptcy and pray(hope really hard and vote) we do get a president who can effectively forgive student debt. This means no spending, strict budgeting and eliminating any and all subs, discount phone, etc. If you are already there, getting more paid work if possible.
You do realise that if 50% of consumption disappears then a lot of people from that 90% will loose their jobs as well. I don't care about the 10%, I also think the income inequality in the US is insane, but the fact is that if AI stocks tank right now, poor people will feel it as well (much more so than rich people, because they can't survive without a job and don't have wealth as a safety net)
I don't understand what your point is? I'm merely expanding on OP's question and stating the fact that the way things are currently, when the AI bubble bursts poor people will feel it the most. Trickle down economics doesn't work because if you give 100 bucks to a rich person, they'll spend like 5 of it. If you give it to a poor person, they'll spend all of it. But that has nothing to do with the fact that if the bubble bursts right now, poor people aren't going to somehow get any of that money. They will loose their jobs, because the economy slowed down and nobody is buying anything and their jobs aren't needed anymore. They will just suffer more and rich people will buy up their houses that they now have to sell at bargain prices.
They will loose their jobs, because the economy slowed down and nobody is buying anything and their jobs aren't needed anymore
No.
The AI debt creation and investment is not of any benefit to the working class (except for a few construction workers). These data centers don't create 1000s of jobs. Windsurf has 250 employees. Cursor has 30.
This AI bubble is not affecting general income, only assets. As it doesn't hit income, it doesn't hit consumption. Poor people earn and consume. They are asset poor.
A pop in the AI bubble will damage the billionaires, but not the poor.
But I'm not saying the jobs lost by AI companies collapsing is gonna cause a recession, I'm saying the AI bubble collapsing, bringing down the stock market with it, will cause a recession and loss of jobs. 35% of the S&P is made up of stocks in the top 7 US tech firms. The stock market is extremely skewed towards these 7 firms, and a large part of their current evaulation is made up from speculation of potential AI returns. When the bubble bursts, everyone who is invested in these firms will feel it. As I said, the top 10% of Americans make up 50% of consumption, can't find a confirmation but I think that's the highest in modern history. If this 10% suddenly looses 30-40% of their wealth because a stock market crash, this consumption will be severely affected. They won't buy as many fancy goods, won't go on expensive vacations, in general will do much less. We can argue whether having a class of people like that benefits the economy or not, I'd say it doesn't, but the fact of the matter is that if the stock market were to crash because of AI companies, everyone is affected, because of how much money the 10% spend.
35% of the S&P is made up of stocks in the top 7 US tech firms. The stock market is extremely skewed towards these 7 firms, and a large part of their current evaulation is made up from speculation of potential AI returns. When the bubble bursts, everyone who is invested in these firms will feel it.
This wasn't always true. When the bubble bursts the S&P investors will revert back to a more realistic valuation. AI bursting won't affect LLY, JPM, WMT, COST etc.
Nothing of value has been lost. People just have the wrong anchor points.
As I said, the top 10% of Americans make up 50% of consumption, can't find a confirmation but I think that's the highest in modern history.
These 10% are consuming their income, not their wealth. An AI stock crash will have little to no effect on their income. (Except for the small proportion actually employed in AI research).
Trump is a much bigger threat to tanking the US economy. He is working in that direction every day. Tariffs are horrible for the economy. Sure, he gets American factories built and jobs are created but things overall are going to be much more expensive for consumers.
I agree, but that's just another factor, and it will also cause the stock market to crash, among other things.
Also, the worst thing is he won't get American factories to be built. Maybe one or two, but no one in the right mind is going to relocate large amounts of manufacturing to the US when tariffs are coming in and out of effect all the time. Tariffs only work for increasing manufacturing if companies believe they will last a long time. If companies think a tariff will last a month or a year, there's no point in making a factory that will take two, three years to build and then five years to become net profitable, because by the time the factories finished and the tariffs are gone, everyone that still has a factory outside of the US will just out compeat that factory with lower prices.
Your pension is tied to these companies stocks. I can pretty much guarantee that "your" pension fund owns quite a few of these stocks.
But, and this is the important part, that isn't your pension. It is the pension for those that are retired right now. There is no saved stack of money that you earned during your life thats waiting for you. Unless there is an equal amount of tax paying workers by the time you retire, you wont be getting that pension.
I'm not sure how old you think most of us are, but I don't think pensions are a common retirement vehicle anymore, and haven't been for a while. 401k would probably be the modern equivalent, and it's still running on the stock market for the majority of its life prior to beginning to withdraw.
A pension implies benefits are distributed to the person in retirement, usually with some fixed amount per month. My understanding is that in the UK, defined contribution plans are required to be invested largely in annuities by retirement, which satisfies that, whereas in the US, 401ks don't have such restrictions. So a 401k could be depleated well before death, or be passed on to children as inheritance, unlike an annuity. There are required minimum distributions, but they don't kick in until your 70s.
If 401ks switched to a defined benefit plan at retirement, I could see calling it a pension. But since they're not, I think that's misleading, and employer sponsored plan makes more sense.
I am in the US. In regard to employer based retirement, there are a few pension programs still available, mostly union based. In other corporate environments that do not offer union pensions (as they are non-union)- they offer the 401K if a for-profit or a 403B if non-profit. As you get closer to retirement, many 401K/403B recalibrate to a larger proportion of Bonds vs riskier stocks/futures. Although I also invest in some ETFs that are not pretax (only the earnings are taxable).
Right. OP's point is that they call both defined benefit (i.e. what some union people get) and defined contribution (i.e. 401k and whatnot) a "pension." My understanding is that a "pension" is a specific amount of money paid monthly in retirement (used to also just be the wage for certain jobs, not a retirement benefit).
A quick search yielded "defined contribution pensions", which seems to be a mix: your contributions are invested during employment, and then you get a fixed payment in retirement.
With a 401k, there's no fixed withdrawal in retirement unless you set one up, the only thing is a mandatory minimum withdrawal at a certain age (73?). My understanding is that wouldn't be considered a pension since the withdrawal isn't guaranteed or fixed, and you can withdraw everything if you so choose.
Maybe I'm wrong and a pension is a looser term there, but my understanding is that a pension needs to have a guaranteed benefit in retirement.
When you’re able to take your pension, you can choose how and when you want the money. This usually includes the option of taking up to 25% as a tax-free lump sum and using the rest to get a guaranteed or variable income.
Looking more into it, I guess it's similar?
The 401k typically doesn't offer the guaranteed income, though I suppose some plans could offer annuities. You can choose to take fixed payments though, but there's no guarantee how long that will last. I don't know what the options are in the UK, but in the US, you can do whatever you like, as long as you withdraw the minimum (percentage of assets based on your age, starting at 73).
I see a pension as having some kind of guaranteed benefit. A 401k doesn't have that, so it doesn't count.
Yeah, again this is just semantics, a 401k in British English is 100% a pension. A UK defined contribution "workplace pension" is just a tax sheltered retirement account until it is annuitized, which is common and sensible but not necessary. The annuity is technically a totally different product, offered by life insurance companies (who interestingly with reference to above conversation would typically hold very little equity exposure backing it). Brits also call the equivalent to the social security retirement benefit the "state pension". It's a catch all for assets you use in retirement. Whether that's used to fund an investment drawdown product or a life annuity or just taken out and splurged on a Ferrari makes no difference.
Interesting. I think people here would agree Social Security is a state pension, we just only call it by its name.
A pension specifically refers to a plan that makes consistent payments throughout retirement and stops at death (or may pass to the surviving spouse until their death). Anything else is a retirement plan if it's tax sheltered until some age, or an investment account if it's not.
I hear annuities are unpopular here, most seem to prefer either a dividend strategy, or sell securities as needed to cover whatever Social Security doesn't.
One reason it’s dangerous is that the rest of the economy sucks, so AI is masking bigger problems which will become evident and tumble out of control when the money has nowhere left to go.
But where is Palantir on this? Because they're discernibly connected to several of these orgs, and that displays the character of what this is actually about.
This doesn't really tell me anything, I'd have to compare it with other charts. E.g. what does the chart for agriculture look like? Airplane manufacturing? Internet in early 2000s?
All the economy is a big circle if you draw the circle big enough.
Actually scratch that. There is an economy that is not just one big circle jerk, such as the development of new technologies or the terraforming of deserts into fertile land; as neither of these things ends the way it started; it brought lasting change, and that is true progress.
Actually did you see my presentation that i made about this recently?
The point is to convince the americans to invest in new technologies.
To all those who say that human spaceflight is impossible:
Europeans caused massive death in the Americas. I do not think we should replicate that model.
Also, the chance is small, but there might have been a separate biogenesis (beginning of life) on Mars. Sending humans with our dirty microbiome would almost certainly wipe any evidence of that, and possibly cause an extinction of an entirely separate form of life, which would be a crime even more horrible than the extinctions and genocides which we have caused so far.
Let's just leave Mars alone until we've studies it more and are certain there is no life. Colonizing the moon seems challenging enough for a couple centuries....
There is no good economic reason to colonize other planets. We have plenty of space here on earth, with conditions already much more hospitable than that of mars - deserts, for example. The resources needed to turn these into habitable land is so much less than the resources required to make even a tiny part of Mars inhabitable (i.e. establish a colony that relies on life support systems) it's insane to go for Mars first. The reason colonizing Mars is talked about at all is because a rich white dude wants to go to Mars, since deserts are too boring for his spoiled ass.
I actually agree that it would be cool if we went to Mars, not to colonize it but just to be there. But comparing it to white pillaging of the Americas is just incorrect. Mars is not inhabitable by humans, the Americas very much were. The external resources needed to colonize America were zero, in fact pillaging local lands meant a lot of resources for the Empire. Mars is going to be a much more expensive and much less profitable endeavor.
Only slightly better than mars, frankly speaking the ocean is about as hostile as you can get without going to space. Maintenance alone would be a fucking nightmare, look at cruise ships or oil rigs for example and you can get a pretty good idea. Unless you are talking about artificial islands since we've been doing that for millenia.
Settling mars is a centuries long undertaking. You basically have to nurture a whole ecosystem from scratch... that would be a brutally difficult and lengthy process in the best of conditions. But of course, these aren't the best conditions. We aren't doing particularly well with the ecosystem we've already got.
If you want a historical project, then look to balancing modern industry within the planet's biosphere. It's a prerequisite to anything happening on mars.
I think it's hard to definitely call something a bubble until it pops.
The definition of a bubble goes something along the lines of market prices exceeding the intrinsic value of the investment they represent, which may be true here?
If you want to read more about this the rough name for these companies was "the magnificent seven" a year or so ago when I last looked at this. A quick Google suggests represent about a third of the SNP 500's value now and have a cape ratio (cyclicly adjusted price to earnings) of ~37 compared to 15-20 being normal.
Edit: the above baseline is incorrect; see sugar_in_tea's comment for a more accurate baseline and some interesting counterpoints
I can't find a good numerical source for the correlated risk within this group, and I suspect analyzing it is very difficult. Given they all used to be a lot more diversified in the past but now a large % of their valuation is predicated on AI historical correlation analysis probably fails. But the diagram linked here suggests it's probably bad to put all your money in these companies. (Or even a 3rd if you are in an s&p 500 index tracker 😶)
Like, none of this definitively says this is a bubble, since if it were possible to divine that the bubble would immediately pop, but it does suggest there is a strong likelihood we are seeing a bubble.
15-20 was normal for the 100 years ending 40-50 years ago. But of we look at the last 40 years or so, the CAPE has been higher, suggesting that we don't know how what "normal" looks like going forward. More people are buying stocks than ever before due to retirement plans and poor bond yields, which pushes up the PE.
So whether ~40 is high for a PE going forward isn't clear. The CAPE hit ~45 in the 2000 crash, and reverted to ~20 after the crash, yet the 2008 crash only hit ~26 and crashed down to ~14 and quickly bounced back to ~20. The 2008 had little to do with CAPE and more to do with corruption in the banking industry, whereas 2000 was almost purely oversized hype in the burgeoning tech market.
So is the normal range 20-30? Idk. Maybe 20 is actually low going forward, it's unclear. Either way, 40 isn't as outlandish as it was in the 2000s, and that pushed up to 45 before crashing.
there is a strong likelihood we are seeing a bubble.
Agreed. But if you drop out of the market and invest in other stuff, you would miss whatever the rest of the runup will do before it bursts, which could leave you worse off than someone just investing in the entire market by market cap. Ot could continue to run for 10-20 years, or it could pop this year, it's impossible to know since it relies heavily on investors continuing to believe the hype and companies continuing to have something to back up that hype.
I don't think anyone should trust my numbers either. Here's the CAPE data, make your own decision as to whether the CAPE ratio makes sense going forward.
CAPE is a weird measure in that it looks at last 10 years of earnings for PE ratio. It is not especially relevant in that a fair expectation for next year's earnings is this year's earnings. It is intriguing that there wasn't significant earnings growth levels in the past, though, which because PE based on this year's earnings would have high CAPE if high recent growth.
But of we look at the last 40 years or so, the CAPE has been higher, suggesting that we don’t know how what “normal” looks like going forward.
As you listed, crashes lead to sub 20 PEs. Mag7 PEs is not representative of Russel 2000 PEs. High PEs expect high growth for long period. Reality checks usually happen, but PE's are not universally high. Just with the oligarchs with White House guest passes.
The 2000 crash didn't though, it was just over 20 at the trough. Jan 2003 was 21. That was almost as high as the peak in the 60s, and higher than the moment before Black Monday. So the market reverted to a mean that would be considered a peak just 20-30 years prior. 15 used to be a good marker for "average," and now that's the marker for the Great Recession.
Crashes used to lead to sub-10s, and now they crash to 15-20. The market has fundamentally changed with 401ks and IRAs.
I know right? It’s not a bubble if there are transactions between the different companies in an industry. Nothing here shows that these investments are self-supporting circular, nor that all of this is propping up the economy.
I dont think we are in a bubble and I think all the media posts about it are just trying to make people sell their shares.
Sure there is no obvious profit yet but there will be. Once people start using AI in their phones and ask it questions, everything from baking to coding becomes way easier since its an interactive conversation, not a search result.
People will pay for that convenience since its a huge downside to not have access to it. Search results now seem very limited to me since I cant find out more about what its saying.
Literally the entire point of searching something is to open up the links and find out more about what it's saying.... Do you need your AI to come up with the search queries too???
The technology (at least with current methodologies) is flawed: that's why people are warning of the bubble bursting. We can't properly scale LLMs on our current grid in the same capacity as China. Our technologies are also incredibly energy-intensive compared to their technologies.
There is no intelligence, the hallucinations are likely fundamental, the cases of people being given dangerous or harmful advice are rising, human AI psychosis is a real concern, the sycophancy/bias confirmation is still present, and major actors in the AI space are existentially afraid of any form of regulation of the technology/industry (which does not signal confidence).
Also, it's critical to factor in the whole copyright issue with training data... one domino is all it takes to collapse the whole thing.
Are you personally invested in the AI/LLM space? I'm wondering why you chose to engage with very few of my arguments. Is your account a troll account? If you're not trolling: re-read. I will not engage further until you adequately address my points.
I was pretty clear: there is no intelligence. AGI is an absolute pipe dream and it will also be a far cry from actual intelligence if you look into it. Hallucinations won't be fixed unless the technology evolves - adding more GPU power won't be able to fix it.
The copyright theft is an extreme issue, regardless your hand-waving of it. Copyright law reform is not perceivably on the table. Major companies are caught red-handed stealing and these companies have no intention of compensating the rights-holders they stole from.
I think you are overestimating the amount people will pay for convenience or cling to their old ways.
Did e-readers kill the bookstore? Some people will always prefer to cook out of a book or dive into docs to write code.
Or look at the modern streaming landscape. In the beginning there was basically Netflix and everyone was fine paying that monthly fee for the convenience of streaming basically everything. Now we have 20+ vendors all charging for some subset of content. And we have seen a corresponding loss in subscribers as people hit the limit of what they are willing to pay for convenience.
they're giving out ai memberships and trials constantly to try to get ppl used to it paying for it, hasnt worked, ngl I generate images ocsssionaly I like seeing random mashups sometimes, but id never pay for it if its free and fast why not, I was never gonna pay anyone to do it and im not selling anything, dont get why ppl get all pissy when ai is used for self entertainment
I suppose similar in the sense that the housing bubble involved a bunch of rich idiots speculating on bad debt that had been vaguely washed to make it look good and now we have a bunch of rich idiots speculating on AI based on vague promises that it'll be good.
I don't think you'll find a public company right now that isn't balls deep in the slop machines, desperately trying to offload staff in favour of machines that can't do the jobs.
And I would almost bet the crash will be about the time the Dems take power, just so the Republicans can whine about the situation they created and blame the Democrats for it.
GOP without fail always wrecks the economy, in what gets forecasted as the last time they will ever be trusted with power again. Dems just get 51% of votes anyway.
Is "US soft power" a euphemism for sowing destruction and proxy wars everywhere? Or do you mean things like the awful show NCIS being barely disguised pro-Israel pro-war propaganda? Like that?
I won't touch the entertainement / Hollywood reference to soft power as that deserves a discussion in its own right.
But as someone who works with ... or used to work with US diplomats abroad on a daily basis, I would urge you to educate yourself and people around you about the myriad of activities that US diplomats are engaged in. Contrary to conventional 'wisdom', US foreign policy consists of a lot more than bombing the Middle East and supporting Israel. Nobody talks or knows about all of the other things but I can tell you for a fact that American diplomats were (and in some cases still are) helping a lot of people in Eastern Europe. We were helping a lot of people. Shelters for the homeless, schools and museums for kids, whole new campuses for universities, orphanages, adn the list goes on, and on. There's a reason why over 75% of state department employees working abroad are not republicans. They are not the people most think they are.
We were doing good work with the Americans here. We were helping children, we were exposing corrupt oligarchs. We were in this fight together, not just in Eastern Europe but all over the world. Yes, even the US Marines stationed at Constanza and Novo Selo, ready to fight should the Russkies anything, deserve respect. As one marine told me recently "Don't worry, come what may, we will stay and fight with you".
Then everything changed this year. My old American friends were replaced with incompetent political commissars sent by the new idiocratic regime in DC.
The US marines are still here though, and they are still ready to die. I'm just not sure if its worth it anymore.
TLDR: Educate yourself and resist the temptation to parrot oversimplified narratives. Just because you only know about the bad and don't care to learn about the good, doesn't mean the latter doesn't exist.
Edit: in an attempt to preempt incoming windmills: I detest Trump, Netanyahu and imperialism in general. But that does not mean anything American (or whatever nationality) should be presented as black and white. There are 340 million Americans. Each one of them here is proof that America is not black and white, and neither are its citizens.
Let me guess though, Russia doing the same things is just pure evil or propaganda. Because guess what? Countries don't do any of the things you mention out of Christian charity, they do it for power and control.
Russia does not do the same. In fact, it does the exact opposite. It would be fantastic if Russia actually supported human rights and the rule of law instead of bombing children's hospitals like Israel does.
Soft power is always more effective than hard threats, because the corrupt CIA stooges pillaging their economies and contributing to destruction of humanity do so with the dignity that threats and bribes are secret and unobvious sycophancy to the US empire. Soft power means that your pawns are not explicitly exposed as your owned pawns.
That your job makes the colonization mission more effective, all glory to hypno Trump, is a cheaper and more direct path to complete capitulation by the colonial "governor generals".
I think you are just repeating the same old talking points and conspiracy theories that we're all well-familiar with without actually adding anything of substance or factology to the conversation.
People need housing, no one needs this AI crap. Even in boring engineering jobs using tools that solved problems decades ago, we are getting AI shoveled in left and right in places no one needs or wants it. And calling old features "AI" is also another problem.
And now these stupid "barking bears attacking fat sleeping people" videos are everywhere, and people seem to think they're real.
We should focus on natural intelligence first, that is to say each other, and education...
Oh and the headline should read "Every day", "everyday" is an adjective, like an everyday occurence.
Unpopular opinion, but every nascent industry looks like a bubble. What makes it a bubble is if and when it pops. It anything, LLM AI might deflate and stabilize, but it's also here to stay. In that case, what pops NVIDIA is when they can't expand any more and they go against geopolitical interests that begin stealing and making viable alternatives for the price.
If Lemmy is supposed to be the place where the most tech savvy people in the interest congregate, and everyone in the comments is unsatisfied with AI then we really do have a problem. These companies have all reached a point where they no longer listen to their most informed customer base but instead take 100% of direction from investors who don't even know what they want except a line going up.
I disagree with main post and agree with edit. I've only seen abuse material on Lemmy once and it was on an instance that didn't have an automated moderation tool for image uploads and they promptly added that mitigation step after it happened
Suddenly I’m extremely worried about using lemmy. What’s the right way to respond if something is seen. Call the police? FBI hotline or something? Certainly screenshotting anything to send to authorities is out of the question but as soon as an image is loaded a device downloads it to cache so it’s like a dirty bomb just sitting on your device at that point. I have been blissfully ignorant that anything I use in my day to day would ever share a space with such abhorrent behavior. Kind of not sure I should still use the service, like that has actually been an issue on here before?
You're fine, they go after the ones sharing it, of course if you want to tell authorities you can, just you're not going to get in trouble for accidentally stumbling upon some asshat being a pedo. It does very much keep me from wanting to run my own instance though.
Yeah, unless you prevent image uploads it's possible and easy for someone to put that shit on a drive you own which then means you're technically distributing and harboring it.
It’s always interesting to read the experiences of others. The one and only time I stumbled on cp was in the late 90s. Haven’t seen it on reddit or lemmy. Our bubbles keep us isolated.
Eh. Lemmy has a lot of ignorance surrounding technology and science compared to other sites. Hacker News is what you're looking for if you want somewhere that is full of the most tech savvy people on the Internet, and most of them are extremely pro AI (with some weird AI cultishness alongside). Myself I think AI is a bubble but there is a lot of promise in the underlying technology once you take away the hype, just like the .com bubble at the turn of the century.
Lobste.rs is probably even more on the "engineers talking to engineers" side of things. I've not visited in a while and am not sure what people there think of (the current crop of gen)AI.
Too many people equate AI with LLMs only. LLMs are mostly bubbled bullshit, with a few limited use cases. But AI is a much broader topic. The really scary AI is the stuff we hear little to nothing about.
People also forget how dramatically tech can advance over time. Spoiled impatient Americans in particular want a finished product or they quickly write it off as "garbage". They forget every product we own and use was once "garbage".
Bubble is an econ term. Whether there is an AI bubble has a rather tenuous connection to the future of AI. Not much of a connection between the housing bubble and the future of housing either.
Feels more like the brick layer is equivalent to someone paid to create training data. You absolutely would want to ask the architects and engineers researching no ways in housing and construction. Not that they know what avenues of research will work out, but they do know the avenues of research.
No one expected the splash that LLMs or image diffusion models would make. Years later, the conversations on Lemmy are still dominated by people who still haven't looked up how they work.
GPTs completely nuked the whole field of natural language processing (NLP). People had dedicated years of their lives to solving tiny aspects of that. That got solved practically over night. Sentiment analysis? Just ask the chatbot. Some of the seemingly smart people who make seemingly informed criticisms of LLMs are NLP guys, who just can't let go of their old ideas.
Because you have to be tech savvy to understand what the fediverse is or how ActivityPub works so it sets the filter for a userbase that evangelizes emerging technology.
Under the Allied occupation after the surrender of Japan, a partially successful attempt was made to dissolve the zaibatsu. Many of the economic advisors accompanying the SCAP administration had experience with the New Deal and were highly suspicious of monopolies and restrictive business practices, which they felt to be both inefficient, and to be a form of corporatocracy (and thus inherently anti-democratic).
The only difference? The zaibatsu actually diversified their operations.
Many of the economic advisors accompanying the SCAP administration had experience with the New Deal and were highly suspicious of monopolies and restrictive business practices
But what will be left after it bursts? At least in cause of the housing bubble - the houses existed physically - what will be after the AI crash? Lots of spare gear sold for cheap?
What was left after the cryptocurrency crash? A whole lot of GPUs that got repurposed for AI. They'll just get repurposed for whatever extremely computationally intensive thing some computer engineer comes up with. Until that bubble bursts, rinse and repeat. What's happening is project managers are selling the next big thing to make a lot of capital really quickly to a board of directors.
The capital comes from the profits from other markets. Which comes from exploiting workers. The original investment didn't just spontaneously expose itself, people chose to flow money into it. They'll pay for the next bubble with the profits C-suit executives stole from their workers and the little guy. They will take what should have been yours and bet it away on some fever dream that was doomed to fail from the beginning. All in the hopes that they might make their wealth get more outrageously excessive before this bubble bursts and they try again on the next.
Is that because they're so focussed on growth and advancement though?
Right now there's no incentive for efficiency. The focus is using venture capital to grab market share by implementing new products.
If suddenly everyone realised that the new iterations are more costly without any new functionality, the focus would switch and it might be worthwhile.
Right now, you can buy a $500 GPU, and run an LLM locally that can help you draft documents or code or transcribe audio. If that were scaled up to a subscription service surely it could be reasonably priced, yet profitable.
If all of that were the case... why aren't they ALREADY profitable? There are only 2 companies in the actual LLM/AI space, OpenAI and Anthropic, and OpenAI is already so dominant that Anthropic is a noncontender. Since that is the case, why aren't either of them profitable? If they were, they'd be screaming about it constantly; Altman would be on stage every single goddamn day boasting about it; OpenAI would be posting monthly, if not WEEKLY profit reports, just to show how much money they were making as """The Future™️"""; public investors would be POURING IN like nothing else mattered!!!
So where is it? Where's the profit? Where are the reports and press conferences, the investor statements and the IPO's? Where's the goddamn money, Lebowski???
And don't say they're in the "growth stage" or whatever. 4 years in and a TRILLION DOLLARS LATER, there's no profit to be seen, no remarkable products to use, nothing of substance except billions burned building bespoke data centers and polluting the planet. The whole AI """industry""" is a lie.
Because they are still chasing a breakthrough. It's one thing offering LLMs as a service or selling models, it's another to develop new and better ones. It's just a huge research cost. I'm pretty sure if they would stop research on new models and slightly increase their prices, they would be profitable. But they don't want to fall behind.
I don't agree with them, but venture capitalists believe they are inventing a god, and that the first to achieve it will enjoy never before seen power, control, and ultimately wealth.
The s&p 500 tanks a ton and banks call on loans from these AI hyped companies using the price of the stocks as collateral (previously expected to rise). Credit crunch and now companies tighten the belts even further so higher unemployment again. Federal funds rate gets slashed and those that can manage steady good work during the recovery years will be fine. Everyone else will be struggle busing as usual
If you have a stable job with good pay or good upward mobility in the company potential and don't have periods of unemployment, if it has a 401k, you're 401k is being invested while the market is down. When unemployment is high, the Federal Reserve sets the federal funds rate much lower to try and stimulate the economy. That results in lower rates for consumer loans. So people that have stable jobs that pay well enough can take out loans and/or refinance their current loans to do better than they were.
When the market recovers, you've had years of experience that you can now use for job hopping at more senior level roles when the job market recovers. Also a lot of late career people end up consulting for companies large and small with inexperienced staff. Those that didn't fare well in a career during a market downturn, it's either stagnation or hardship after hardship
It doesn't necessarily have to be office/lab work. I know people that grinded the past decade+ in restaurants until an owner would trust them to manage a restaurant including all the supplies and payroll and then trust them enough to partner on a another restaurant and then that be their ticket to financial security. Some in their 30s, some 40s, some 50s. It's a grind but at least they didn't end up drug addicts and alcoholics like so many others
you're 401k is being invested while the market is down
Sure but you just lost half your 401k, including half of what was invested while the market was overpriced.
When unemployment is high, [...] That results in lower rates for consumer loans. So people that have stable jobs [...] can take out loans
Yes, but lenders also tighten their criteria during these times because even a stable job is dramatically less stable during a recession or depression. It's very difficult to borrow money in an economic downturn.
When the market recovers, you've had years of experience
Sure but if the market didn't collapse you would still have those years of experience. During a collapse fewer people will have consistent employment.
It's a grind but at least they didn't end up drug addicts and alcoholics like so many others
Not sure where you were going with this part.
The universal economic truth is, in times of economic uncertainty the working class does the heavy lifting.
yes, We can't prevent the bubble burst. We can hope it happens sooner rather than later but the bubble is baked in. So what companies and individuals can to is basically buy up their detritus at bargain prices. And then use them to make better, more solid companies that do not require $3T investment while showing no fucking profit.
it's kinda funny how all these massive business are all giant money drains year after year after year. back in the day business people used to pride themselves being in the black.
These valuations cannot be tied to ROI, even using Olympic level mental gymnastics. The market would collapse in a millisecond. They are tied to a fictional dimension 78 years in the future where everyone decided to work overtime without collapsing and being four times as focused while the planet magically starts healing itself and no major disaster happens and all wars escalated without destroying any infrastructure or upsetting any populations and the authoritarian revenge hypercapitalist disasterpiece currently boiling over in the global standard host country suddenly is unanimously accepted as a new way of life without a single adverse reactions or any systematic issues and a spontaneous miraculous salvation from the diseases and famine it has maliciously developed due to the Christian god both existing and subscribing to the polar opposite moral and ethical alignment that the elite privileged promille has hallucinated to fit a reality that also somehow pivoted from a complete mass psychosis into firm truth by way of some unforseen quirk in the laws of physics that every great mind and scientists missed that magically flip childish commercial folly into concrete reality without requiring effort and being the first consciousless entity to achieve autonomy and an ability to replicate exponentially without consuming resources and a renneissance of unity appears around a unilateral decision to kill brown skinned people that agree to live and reproduce in the most efficient manner for the single purpose of feeding that slaughtering machine and producing goods and resources for the machine and for the now sanctioned debauchery that the new religion has prescribed all of our species to perform
Which as you might imagine is more than a little stretch
I don't think they care about ROI for real. If they cared none of that would've happened because that's just not how a real businesses are operating. You can burn the investments into R&D to an extent but if the product's money flow doesn't show a positive dynamics long enough - you get ready for some soul searching shit. My guess is that a lot of things contributing to AI bubble have something to do with money laundering.
There sure are but will there ever be a real chance to attract sober investors to make it work as a real business and not growth hacking extravaganza any time soon?
Sober investors, what do these have as a choice? As if there are "safer" alternatives like raw materials? Are these investors in the room with us now? The stock market is disconnected from the real world and when a bubble pops it has exactly nothing to do with roi or income or success of anything underlying the labels on these casino icons. It has to do with hedge fund algorithms. And those are set to full burn because there will never be a bad day (it's delusional)
They made gpus long before the gold rush and will not stop after. The usefulness of tensor cores will not dwindle with any market correction. Even before ai boom they were valued astronomically out of reality. Not a single stock is tied to actual selling or owning of anything anymore
Nvidia are very smart in that regard, ethics aside. Very early on they decided that selling cards to gamers will not give them the infinite growth everyone so desperately desire, so they started looking for what does, and they were consistent at it ever since. Every tech bubble of the recent history is powered by Nvidia cards. How much they contributed to the hype (and damage) is not entirely clear, but that's not zero for sure
They lucked into it. They made their cards for gamers, and various groups, AI researchers, bitcoin miners and others, discovered that they those gamer GPUs were really good for other tasks too. I think it took a while before Nvidia started making specialised cards for those purposes.
I can't really blame them for serving that market that they just lucked into. I can and will blame them for their terrible Linux support.
Oh believe me, it wasn't just luck. They have special labs full of people who's whole job is to find another unexplored niches that can buy their cards. And they only make specific single purpose cards only when the market is mature enough to justify the spending, which is also smart.
This only got downvotes in another thread. There is far worse that can happen than an AI bubble.
People get distracted over the fate that the pure speculative frenzy could be an AI bubble, and the harm to the hapless speculators and banksters could have a minor impact on the rest of the economy.
Reality is far worse than an AI bubble. It is a US mission for a fossil fueled powered Skynet for Israel that is too big to fail. Bubble in AI investments becomes unlikely, but total destruction of rest of US economy/prosperity becomes assured when the "plebs able to eat in America bubble" bursts is a sacrifice that a fossil fueled powered Skynet for Israel is willing to make.
If Americans are still able to afford to eat, then China or Iran wins.
please be more specific in what you don't understand. I guess that...
fossil fueled powered Skynet for Israel
US government needs AGI for US military supremacy. That is Skynet (in Terminator movies, this is the military program to install AI in all the computers, and then AI chooses genocide nuclear launch). It is for Israel's benefit, because that is who owns US government. That it be fossil fuel powered, serves another key US oligarchy. Skynet for disinformation/sediction detection purposes just as much of a threat than its use for nuclear genocide.
Regardless of whether datacenters will make money solving business and individual problems or boosting productivity, the US will keep investing in order to get Skynet. You can be correct that "frontier datacenter LLM models" will not make money, but still lose on financial bets validating that idea. Instead of an AI bubble bursting, even more money chasing Skynet will come with Austerity for rest of population. The "valuation bubble" only pops when investor money flowing in dries up. It may only dry up after the collapse of the US.
Zionism controls US and its media. Nearly all politicians in US are Zionists even if just a handful are Jews. I'm not the one who said all jews are genocidal zionazi supporters. You have no right to try denying subhuman demonic evil zionazi supremacist control over the US by pretending, passive-agressive supremacistly, me or anyone else is making a remark about Jews.
I think they're claiming TPTB are gonna try and tie dinosaur fuel and vapoware tech as "a matter of security" and constantly bail them out to the detriment of the US economy as a whole
OpenAI alone has 20gw of datacenter/gpu commitments. 20x entire current US corporate deployments. Sure as fuck, sweet US military/NSA overpayment for datacenter time is coming. Not sure AGI is needed to decide (family guy meme) "if it's brown, flush it down" or "sink any boat you find in Carribean sea". LLMs today would do pretty well at "make up a Department of War memo for backstories justifying all the people we killed today."
Unpopular opinion but this will not as bad as housing bubble and we're way past bubbles actually popping in contemporary economy. Even China corrected for its massive ghost city housing bubble just recently and that was actually worse than ai tech overvaluation.
Yes, contemporary economy and free markets are so imaginary now that cascading effects and bubble pops like 2008 are very unlikely. American stock market in particular is so far off reality (even before AI boom) that it's basically a video game with no actual relevancy to true gross product. While China/Russia is a dictatorship with no representation of reality at all and can easily hide the burden of bad economic policies in the obedient peasant class.
So we have dictatorship with imaginary worlds vs "free markets" living in their own imaginary simulation. Economy is all made up now and cascades are basically impossible because that requires rationality.
Perfect explanation, also; since 07 thing where the hedge bros were not punished, there stopped existing any incentive to imagine any scenario where anyone lose any money due to bank runs
The problem isn't the imaginary market, which I agree with the description. Its the leveraging of debt, to gamble in the market, which is what low interest rates enable.
And yes, our interest rates are VERY low still. I'm looking at some ARM packages right now, and their max lifetime interest rates are on par with what a typical mortgage was about a decade ago.
It was a textbook bubble. They made and gambled on theoretical apartments where nobody involved had any intention of living there or any responsibility or connection to the underlying structure, to the point where building cardboard skyskrapers became a business.. the is no point in denying it. Capital housing investment is a plague on humanity.
There are always bad actors in the system (see: hedge funds). But bubble? It can be argued that Ordos (the ghost city) was build too early, but it's filling in nicely. From 30k in 2009 to 2.000.000+ in 2020.
When Investors own houses only because it will appreciate in value from time only, that is a fundamentally flawed system because in reality houses decrease in value as they get older. It creates an environment where everyone involved is a bad actor
I'm sorry, I'm a little bit lost. I do agree that investment in owning rentals should be forbidden (and if city needs rental units they should be owned by the city).
I do not agree that "ghost cities" were built for speculative purposes. Speculants were buying them like crazy, yes, but the actual need for housing in regions planned (expected?) to undergo urbanization is real and the buildings were fulfilling that purpose.
Let me guess.. is it because the people's republic is flawless in every concievable way? I saw some footage from someone that was there, not a news agency. I won't pretend that couldn't be wrong, but I am known to occasionally enjoy Occam's razor.
Yeah, my server end with ml so I must be a tankie, makes sense.
It cannot be that I genuinely appreciate long term vision policies. I must be a tankie. And you're right, those cities were not needed, and planned urbanization must be planned only 2 years ahead because everything else is speculative bubble made for speculation.
All the projection.. You'll notice I didn't say you were a tankie, because you obviously are young counter culture honeymoon phase marxist. Please do me a favor and understand that actual communism will never occur either in society or your own philosophy mature, until you recognize flaws cannot be ignored. None of the actual reform leaders were ignorant of that. I also never mentioned any resemblance of urban planning. That the only path to actual societal renaissance and your own personal growth is to understand that if you overreact to something bad such as capitalism you are against the cause. Not for it. You are the breaks on developing real thoughts and ideas, and the reason is simple outrage. The most provenly useless strategy when facing adversity, completely identifiable by anyone past this first easily avoided step in processing and eventually developing personal and unique rational thought about the issue.
Objectively, it was bad to build unhabitable skyskrapers. It's humanity. When you attribute it to your ideology you perform a problem.
So you had nothing to say about whats wrong with planned urbanization, so you went again for a personal attack, and switching to something something about marxist or communism because... Well, honestly, I don't know why nor do I care.
This is the only thing of value you wrote
Objectively, it was bad to build unhabitable skyskrapers.
Yes. Those few bad actors who build tofu buildings in Tukery, Greece, China, Myanmar, Bangkok, or USA (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Re…) or wherever are bad and did wrong. What's your point?
This turned out a little bit long. I wonder if anyone will bother reading it.
A lot of this so-called 'bubble' is based on capital expenditure in support of a technology that probably doesn't have the capability AI company ceo's claim, but does have fascinating, and in terms of how society is currently arranged possibly extremely harmful, potential.
I know what ai companies have done, and what they are likely to do, in the pursuit of profit is shit; I would say that is a capitalism and fascist billionaire issue, rather than a tech issue but ymmv.
And there is the energy consumption problem. I think ai ceo's and tech broligarchs would privately say 'compare the energy consumed by my datacentre to the energy consumed by the workers it has replaced and you will see it is fairly efficient.......' (I am saying what I expect they think, not what I agree with).
The concern that the economy currently has all of its eggs in the ai basket seems reasonable, but I see why capital is betting on it as big as it is. Any concerns regarding the economic disruption of an ai bubble popping is nothing compared to what could happen if 50%+ white collar workers are made redundant. We saw the number of essential workers needed per 1 million people during covid: it wasn't many. Most jobs exist because the people exist to do them, corralled into the pyramidal structure of capitalism, where money trickles upwards. AI might push us into an era where the people exist but the jobs do not.
Anyway, I see this 'bubble' as being like the dotcom bubble, which didn't kill the web when it popped. The gpu's this capital expenditure has paid for are going to continue to be used, even as this economic period shakes itself out. They aren't just going to evaporate. It isn't like worthless debt being packaged up and resold without a chance of it being recouped, even if the prospect of what can be achieved with AI is currently over-valued.
Comparing to the dotcom bubble is what finally made it make sense in my brain. Though I know the toll it took on that sector's workers and I don't envy those in fields that are going to be affected the same way.
The 2008 housing bubble was predicated on cheap lending. It was all debt. It was massive amounts of toxic debt sold around Wall Street, like using Trump Coin or counterfeit cash used to buy a house.
The vast majority of what's happening here is not debt. Sure, some, but very little. Even the OpenAI AMD stock swap thing is swapping a gamble on stocks worth real money, not debt.
IMO the first sub-bubble to pop will be all the time and effort wasted on "Startups" that are nothing more than a couple people acting as a wrapper for an AI agent. That's not really going to impact the economy too much on its face, but suddenly a lot of people are going to go from being "entrepreneurs" to being truly unemployed.
Edit: Also, just saw this gem, and THIS is how you get a supercharged 2008 repeat, bank deregulation and $2.6 trillion in lending. Which is exactly how we got to 2008's subprime lending.
"So it is true that valuations are high but, in our view, generally not at levels that are as high as are typically seen at the height of a financial bubble," said Goldman Sachs strategist Peter Oppenheimer.
I wish it were safer to make these sorts of sweeping gambles. Shorting Nvidia right now is like a pretty obvious bet but getting the timing right is the difference between generational wealth and a lifetime of poverty and debt.
Goldman Sachs also though NINA mortgages were a good idea, and they also thought it was a good idea to bundle bad mortgages in with good mortgages, and find a rater to mark them AAA investments.
at least after the crash those houses could be lived in. these datacenters are made for one purpose, AI, and really would have to be completely gutted and refurbed for general purposes.... fun.
Timing is a fools game for sure. Bubble could pop next month, next year, or even later.
If you're old, make sure you have a good percent in bonds. If you're young, make sure you have 6-12 months saved in case of layoffs and keep saving - market will look completely different in 20-30 years anyways so it's not worth worrying about.
I don't think it's a bubble, first there is absolutely zero comparison to the housing bubble, which was a financial problem that caused housing prices to inflate, while the inherent value of housing stayed the same. This alleged AI bubble is mostly driven by companies that have lots of money, so it is not credit based, and there are underlying products that actually have increasing value.
The better comparison would be the dot com bubble, which was dominated by companies that didn't even have a product and didn't make any money. The frenzy is similar, but the fundamentals are different.
AI investments may cool down because obviously there is a frantic race in an attempt to get ahead. But the reason I don't think the AI bubble will burst is because it is driven by companies that actually make money. They may lose money investing too heavily in this, but the most companies investing in this can afford it.
I think the most AI bubbly company isn't even in the diagram, because that is Tesla. Tesla might actually go down, because Musk is insane.
But in general if it is a bubble, it is a very very long one, Nvidia value has been exploding since 2016 based on their AI product dominance. If this is a bubble, I think it will go down in history as the longest living bubble ever.
Is the market frantic? Yes absolutely. Is the value of some AI companies extremely high? Yes absolutely. Is it a bubble that will burst? No if it's a bubble, this one will be more like deflating to a less frantic level, because ALL the main players have the money to weather losses. And the main AI companies have actual products that make money for them rolled out already. So it is not like the dot com bubble.
Well argued. Also, even if it is a bubble, it's arguable that most technology innovations are preceded by necessary bubbles which are important for directing investment into emerging technologies. The railroad mania in the 19th century or the fibre optic rollout in the late 1990s, during the dot com boom, benefited humanity long after the froth and excitement subsidied.
Its not a bubble but most people here dont think for themselves. They dont even seem to understand the connection between what news is put out, which analysts they choose to give attention, and for what purpose.
Imagine living your life and just believing whatever someone says in the news just because he has the title of analyst. And never thinking about who profits from that specific guy being on the news at that specific time. Who picked that guy to say what he does and why? Its not random.
Being able to influence the market is key to making a lot of money. How do people think they influence the market? This is how they do it. How else?
Sometimes they probably lose money too, specially when orange man opens his mouth and says something very stupid, like last Friday. But then they position themselves for the coming uptrend and make their money back, maybe even more then they had before, since they have giant pockets.
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I think the biggest difference between this bubble and the ones that pop are whether the valuations were built by debt. In this case - no. So when their products turn out to be less useful than they claim, it will devaluate. But the debt issued to build the bubble wont go through a sudden correction that is amplified and causes an even bigger collapse like in 2008 or the dotcom bubble.
It is not "normal" to run a 4 year money loser and claiming to be worth billions.
Only in made up financial land does that work, and causes cyclic depressions where the working class loses wealth, and the oligarchs further concentrate wealth in their hands.
And you said its driven by companies making money... the big AI companies driving this bubble are losing money.
It is not “normal” to run a 4 year money loser and claiming to be worth billions.
Maybe not, but it is absolutely normal to lose money for years to make a profit later. Microsoft was ready to lose money on Xbox for 10 years to take a place in the console market. And it's a very profitable market for them now. Microsoft tried some of the same with Windows Phone, where they invested billions for years before they gave up.
One of the most hyped AI companies is probably OpenAI, and they absolutely have products that makes them money. They are not profitable yet. But among the bigger stock holders are Nvidia and Microsoft, and if OpenAI goes under, they will absolutely survive just fine. But I don't think they will. OpenAI is owned by companies that know how to make money, and apparently OpenAI knows how to do it too, and has been quicker to make money on for instance ChatGPT than Google was on making money on YouTube.
Some AI companies will go down, that's the nature of being in a cutting edge business, and it's the nature of competition. But I think the AI business will mature and stabilize like most businesses have, not burst like a bubble.
Nobody called it a bubble when the smartphone market exploded. Because everybody could see the value of the product, although it's not quite the same, many companies have been forced out of the smartphone market due to competition. I think the AI market will be mostly similar.
Microsoft was ready to lose money on Xbox for 10 years to take a place in the console market. And it’s a very profitable market for them now.
Is it? They recently had mass layoffs in the Xbox division and had to jack up prices for gamepass. Compared to Sony and Nintendo, their console sales are pitiful. This is after pouring billions of dollars into the Xbox brand.
The funny thing about people who say it’s not a bubble because AI has value is that the asset category having value doesn’t prevent valuation bubbles from forming.
Houses have value: you can live in them. Yet there was a housing bubble.
The internet has value: you can watch cat videos on it. Yet there was a dot com bubble.
Tulip bulbs have value: you can grow pretty flowers with them. Yet there was a tulip bulb bubble.
In my experience, whenever you start reading news stories asking if something is a bubble and quoting investment bankers say, “no, it’s not a bubble,” well, usually it’s a bubble.
The entire US economy has been running off of an asset megabubble that demands global dollar recycling via Wall St. and property for decades now. This is much worse than 2008 as there is no cushioning. We will see what 20+ of doubling down looks like in the end.
The housing bubble encompassed a metric ton of banks and companies that bought and sold shares of subprime mortgages in the billions of dollars and when everyone stopped paying and started defaulting, that caused a entire economic collapse.
Now unless someone can point me to an analysis where we have some tangible proof that banks and tons of companies are invested, not just using, AI, it seems to me the fall out would be limited to tech companies, which yeah would involve some job losses but nothing on the scale of the housing or dotcom bubble.
Now if you're referring to rich jackasses who are all in and banking on AI taking our jerbs? Sure that bubble will hurt them but they're not driving forces in the economy, just politics, which I guess could cause a economic crash if they get your idiot politicians more scared of them than the people with France on their minds.
True, but consider that a huge amount of retail investors' portfolios are tied to the S&P 500/NASDAQ. Think retirement savings, IRAs, 401(k)s, pensions, etc. Then consider that the entire market is effectively propped up by AI right now (see: The entire stock market is being carried by these four AI stocks). If the market gets a 60% correction, it's going to be the middle class losing their shirts all over again.
All ai companies should direct all resources to medical research. I mean we would have to do without ai slop summaries for search engines and ai slop images. Well on second thought I guess slop is worth the human cost so let's keep it as it is. I bet I get my wish.
There is definitely a bubble. But also what Nvidia is doing is smart. They have boatloads of cash. They are investing that cash in the companies that are using their products to create money making services. If one of them can create a killer app or viable service this will create demand for their products and they will have an ownership stake in it. Is this guaranteed or even likely? Probably not. We have reached the point where we were in 1996 where the chairman of the fed came out and said we are in a period of "irrational exuberance." That bubble took four more years to pop. This one may end quicker, but it is impossible to tell when it will end or what will come out of it from where we sit today.
Why should it pop sooner? US money can’t go anywhere else with the same profit margins. It‘ll run out if something more profitable comes around. Maybe a war or so.
If not for the banks investing hevily into it, i'd not be all that worried.
Every company in that list could shrink by half and we'd all be at worst back to covid times. Sure unemployment would suck, but do we REALLY need microsoft and NVidia to be as huge as they are?
I see "gold rush" the company selling shovels is making out like a bandit, everyone else is make a profit on the previous gen but requires a 10x cost increase for the next gen. And thus 10x more shovels.. As soon as 10x more shovels stops giving 10x+ improvements this is the wrong investment.
Hints are we already reached this point.
Some AI companies will pivot and improve in other ways with more linear costs/results.. The ones hoping the line continues to the moon.. I think they overshot.. I just don't know when it will fall back..
Zip ties. Helicopters. Crowded cells. Guns trained on bewildered workers. Foul water. Forced vaccinations. An unconscious detainee left on the floor by negligent guards. A pregnant woman in handcuffs. A detainee being called “Rocket Man” (Donald Trump’s nickname for Kim Jong Un) by sneering federal agents. A menstruating woman forced to attend to her period with only toilet paper.
These are the details of 316 South Korean nationals’ experiences in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention that have flooded the country’s media in the weeks after the September 4 raid on a Hyundai-LG electric vehicle battery plant in Ellabell, Georgia. A wave of fury is now pouring forth from across South Korean society — and the political consequences are only just beginning.
There is far more at stake than a single factory in Georgia, which by itself represented 8,500 jobs and $4.3 billion in investment, and is just one of 23 plants being built across the U.S. by Korean conglomerates. Since the raid, the U.S. and South Korea have announced that Korean workers will be able to use B-1 visas and ESTA visa waivers to continue working in the U.S. A new bill in Congress, the Partner with Korea Act, also seeks to extend 15,000 professional E-4 visas to South Koreans for the first time.
But U.S. flexibility on immigration is not all that matters. Seoul and Washington have yet to finalize their trade deal instigated by Trump’s threat to impose a 25 percent blanket tariff on South Korean goods. At the current stage of negotiations, South Korea has agreed to accept a 15 percent tariff on its exports and provide tremendous investments and other financial agreements: $350 billion in state-backed short-term investment, $150 billion in private sector contracts with U.S. corporations, and a guarantee to purchase $100 billion in U.S. liquid natural gas. Despite so much on the table, a written agreement has yet to be produced, and negotiations are proving tense as the Trump administration presses for Seoul to provide the lion’s share of its $350 billion commitment in cash. While some of the shock over the ICE raid has died down, Washington’s conduct over the course of months of negotiations has also raised deeper questions in South Korea about the real nature of the alliance — and whether this is a relationship that can last.
The Art of the Steal
The anger unleashed by ICE’s abuse of Korean workers has been building for some time. Trump’s tariff threats, announced in March, hit South Korea at a difficult time, when the impeachment of former President Yoon Suk Yeol was unresolved, and the country was reeling from years of flagging economic performance.
The issue was not only a matter of timing. The Biden administration’s CHIPS Act and Inflation Reduction Act also used similar (though less onerous) tariff threats to force South Korean conglomerates to transfer production and make large investments in the U.S. — which is how the Hyundai-LG plant made its way to Georgia in the first place. Having already complied with the previous administration, South Korea nevertheless now finds itself facing an even graver economic threat that could lead to recession: not just a 25 percent tariff on all exports (since reduced to 15 percent), but sector-based tariffs impacting most of South Korea’s key industries as well.
While much of the anger on either side of the Pacific has focused on the current administration in Washington, Trump’s tariffs are just the latest in a string of U.S. policies that have sought to deny South Korea its economic sovereignty, open its markets to foreign takeover, and degrade the rights and dignity of its working people.
A Chinese research team has developed a data-driven control system for tokamak plasmas that could bring sustainable fusion energy a step closer to reality, according to a paper published in Communications Physics, a journal under the Nature portfolio…
Hebrew-language Israeli media reports say there is a “secret clause” buried in the Gaza ceasefire agreement that would allow Israel to resume the war. Palestinians worry this is the pretext Netanyahu needs to get out of completing the deal.
Hebrew-language Israeli media reports say there is a “secret clause” buried in the Gaza ceasefire agreement that would allow Israel to resume the war. Palestinians worry this is the pretext Netanyahu needs to get out of completing the deal.
Obviously a lot of people here hide a lot of information. What is keeping you all from extreme stress considering the possibility that a government is spying on your actions despite strict privacy practices? Considering my current situation and my extreme threat model it feels like the privacy walls around me are closing in. I'm very paranoid. I do a lot of risky and dangerous shit on the internet. Every knock on my door and phone call feels like the police. I don't talk with others about what I do and I'm always hiding my internet activity from others. Any thoughts would be helpful
I don't know what country you're from but at least here in the USA the things that therapists are required to report to police are pretty slim, mostly just things that could cause direct physical harm to yourself and others.
Beyond threats to hurt another person, threats to sexually assault another person, neglect of a child, or threats of harm to oneself... almost everything else is covered by HIPAA patient privacy rules.
If you live elsewhere perhaps you could look into your local laws in terms of what is required mandatory reporting for therapists?
I'm unsure if the consequence with HIPAA could convince the therapist to not tell the police. And it is a super long story and even some of it does involve threats to harm others, and it is not drugs and not CP
Edit: I agree with you though I do need a therapist. I'm going crazy
Hypothetically, if you were the most wanted man alive you would still go to a therapist and confess all your crimes as long as it is off camera and not a HIPAA violation?
I don't know, it might depend on the crime. I believe that clergy get a higher level of privilege than therapists. You can literally confess a murder to a priest and they aren't allowed to (and won't) tell anyone.
Famously, in the 1970s, Daniel Ellsberg stayed out of jail after it emerged that Nixon's fixers had broken into Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office to get his case files. These days they would just break into a computer.
IDK how it works exactly, maybe the secrecy only counts when you confess your own sins, not someone else's. I'm sure there is theological doctrine one way or the other.
It depends. In the US I think it varies by state. And it's only for big things like murder or child sexual abuse.
If you say "yeah I stole a piece of candy once" that's not worth reporting. If you say "decades ago I touched a minor inappropriately" they probably won't pursue it. If you say "yesterday I killed my neighbor and his family" yeah they're gonna fucking bolt from that room and call 911 as fast as they fucking can.
I do a lot of risky and dangerous shit on the internet.
Maybe stop doing things that would get the police at your door?? There's only a handful of things I can think of that would actually get police at your door for your online behavior and most of them are things that kind of make me ill to think about.
I mean, drugs are probably the most common illicit þing people do online, and it's debatable wheþer anti-drug laws þemselves are eþically sound, much less effective at what þey claim to want to accomplish. CP and oþer crap is probably a fraction.
In some states in þe US, it's illegal to try to get some kinds of healþ care.
Good point, where I live weed is legal as are mushrooms, I often forget that people might still be looking for drugs beyond those.
I guess I always lived by the old adage "always know your dealer" when I was still doing drugs, which is a long time ago now. The idea of getting them online from strangers just seems risky in general.
Actually, I would personally feel more comfortable getting them online than I would in person because then I can use a testing kit on it to make sure I'm getting what I'm paying for and if the stuff is of bad quality, I can leave them a bad review so that other people won't buy from them.
I would personally be afraid to do the deal in person.
That's why in the old days it was "always know your dealer" as interpersonal trust systems were built on people who weren't screwing with the quality of what you were getting and you could easily, by word of mouth, tell others to not deal with people who had done you wrong. Same idea, different technology and time period.
Some of us think the best way to do that is to build parallel systems of mutual aid (which isn't illegal) to support each other when things become difficult instead of violence. Especially considering the fascists are trying to foment violence as an excuse to clamp down with martial law and cancel elections. Parallel systems would instead allow us to house, clothe, and feed each other during something like a general strike, which is much more likely to cause a deep impact than fruitlessly trying to violently attack one of the best outfitted and funded militaries on the planet which commands surveillance systems that make our meager attempts at privacy seem foolish at best and downright fucking stupid at worst.
Except that fascists will invent excuses whenever there isn't violence at all.
True, but why make their jobs easier? The more propaganda they have to produce over reality means more truth slips through.
I believe it is worth combatting their surveillance. Our liberty is not a given but needs to be taken. What is stupid is holding too much defeatism.
Gonna just have to agree to disagree on that. I feel capable of privacy measures intended to stop basic corporate adware surveillance, but the idea that we as individuals can battle the tools and capabilities of well funded nation state with agencies like the NSA and CIA involved seems to smack of hubris to me.
Mutual aid, as you said, is good; but it should not be the only resort.
I agree, but I don't think you're going to be able to organize and mobilize the citizens against an authoritarian takeover without parallel systems being set up first. Otherwise fascist disaster capitalists will just use their control of such systems against us.
What's the point of life if crippling, paralyzing fear is all there is to it? I work on being a good steward of my privacy as much as it brings me joy and satisfaction, not so much that it consumes every waking hour.
Whatever it is, review your threat model. What's done is done and there is little that can be done to redact any evidence you may have left on the internet. Are you able to stop doing whatever it is that is putting you at risk of legal trouble?
If it's an drug or psychological problem, you need to seek professional medical attention. Many people die or suffer life-changing illness each year fearing that their doctors will rat them out for substance abuse. Don't be one of them. Patient privacy laws, at least in the US, prevent your doctors, therapists, etc. will protect you if you go and seek help. The main thing that they would have to disclose is if you make direct, credible threats to other people.
If it's a criminal operation or worse, lawyer up and good luck.
Im not sure what to say with the risky and dangerous shit but as a person living in a country where an unmarked, untrained,unregulated paramilitary masked militia are going after people on pure pretense. I can say Im going to live my fucking life and fuck them all. Never before have I more understood this part of the lord of the rings:
“I wish it need not have happened in my time.”
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
Hey mate, besides the therapist recommendations, which are great, I would make a plan on how to make an exit from any criminal and all risky/dangerous activities you do. If whatever you're doing is seemingly necessary, someone else will fill that role. Make the plan and follow it. If it involves moving or even switching countries, do that.
Creating a plan to exit will probably be calming and at the same time helpful when you make your adieu.
I’m very paranoid. I do a lot of risky and dangerous shit on the internet.
I don't want to know what you do, however, if it's causing this much paranoia, perhaps you should not do risky and dangerous shit on the internet. I know that sounds overly simplified, but if it's that risky and dangerous, what's the roi? Sooner than later, risky and dangerous activities get noticed. When I constructed my threat model, it included a lot of potential adversaries. However, I do this because I am a rather private individual, not because I want to do risky and dangerous shit on the internet.
Because my privacy is already f'd. I don't like being tracked but the government would already have plenty of data on me if they really cared to collect it.
Maybe because I want them to try it. Like a fake tough bully you see in school taking other kids lunch money. I want them to try me so I can beat them into the ground. Never crack under pressure, transform into a diamond; hardened and brilliant.
I'm not sure what you do. Don't care, you want privacy here's my tips. Delete all your public information and only use Tor connections for the internet. If possible move and get a fresh start. Stay lowkey and don't go super sketchy should put you at peace. (If you have the ability to do it)
If you do "lot of risky and dangerous shit" then it's even more important that you do so mindfully. If you get careless because you are tired you increase the risk.
Personally my "trick" is to learn from others, e.g. in few weeks in Paris there will be splintercon.net/paris/ where tools and processes will be explained. I can learn from them.
Also my way to stay calm isn't just to be mindful or learn... but do stuff, no matter how small. If you learn about a new thread, address it today. It doesn't mean fix the problem entirely (it'd nice if you could) but rather do something, ANYTHING, about it. If it's not solved, write notes about it and resume tomorrow or whenever you can. Every small effort does add up over time.
Finally I find that sport helps a lot to "evacuate" stress. If I feel some pressure from work or the overall situation, I go outside and sweat it out. It doesn't magically make the World better but it insures I'm a bit more in shape to try to tackle whatever is thrown at me.
As national and regional efforts around digital sovereignty gain momentum, SplinterCon Paris will bring together technologists, researchers, and policymakers to consider what resilient, interconnected digital societies require today and in the future…
Finally I find that sport helps a lot to “evacuate” stress. If I feel some pressure from work or the overall situation, I go outside and sweat it out. It doesn’t magically make the World better but it insures I’m a bit more in shape to try to tackle whatever is thrown at me.
I just usually rub one out, but sports are good too.
I dont do anything actually bad on the internet. I have never even went to the dark web with the onion protocol. Im just not interested in the shit i would find there.
I use privacy tools because thats what I believe should be default. People deserve their privacy. No company or government actually have the moral right to take it away. They are supposed to be elected by the people to work FOR US. That part is just forgotten now.
You can use and support Tor! It's easy with a bootable version of Tails, I use it to access Proton Mail since they make their regular services also available on an onion site (the link is on their regular website).
It is never a requirement to perform 100% of all "Privacy best practices" 24 hours a day and 7 days a week with perfect execution. Simply put, nobody has that level of threat on average unless they are someone like Snowden, a Journalist covering a story, or are working as an intelligence agent.
It is best to assess your threat level and choose Privacy preserving techniques and tools according to what best suits your life and situation first. Don't overdo it, don't try to achieve perfect privacy, don't try to keep up with the metaphorical Joneses. There will always be new threats to your privacy to assess; and you shouldn't be ignorant of them; but you also should not ever let that growing list of threats overwhelm you.
If you need to take time to stop reading privacy news...do so. Just like regular world and national news; it can put you in a state of constant panic. Manage your mental health and state first before you ever allow yourself to address your privacy issues at hand.
Once your mental state is clear and your focus is sharp; focus specifically on little things you can easily do to protect your privacy. Maybe make sure you have a VPN set up or ensure you go over critical privacy settings on your devices to ensure none have changed or shifted since you last visited them. Then consider other small things you can do; if you can say, for example, choose a new email provider, then do so. If not, pick a new thing to address and move on. Do not make managing your privacy a chore if you can possibly help it. Take improving it one step at a time, take breaks for your sanity and make sure you don't overdo it all at once.
I mainly protect my company secrets by encrypting it and hope for the best. Else, it's just the normal stuff, that is nobody else's business. But then, i am glad that i am old and likely won't have to live in a dystopian place like this world seems to be going towards.
The kind of "privacy" you get by using a VPN or avoiding Facebook tracking your web browsing is absolutely not appropriate for using against a threat model that includes three-letter agencies or even, frankly, the local cops. They can just, like, come to your house when you aren't there and bug it. Point a camera at your screen, station a dude in the closet, replace the computer with a cunningly painted cardboard replica of the computer which is a spy, etc. Or from the other end, they simply exploit a zero-day in every one of your seven proxies, because they care enough about catching you to burn them.
Sometimes the threat model says you just lose and you can't actually get what you want by using computers, because you have an information technology hammer and a fundamentally legal or political problem.
If you think the police are actually on to your crimes, stop doing those crimes! If the crimes needed doing for some reason, someone else less likely to be known to the police will probably do them instead, and you can surely find less-crimey ways to further whatever they were meant to accomplish. If you're in it for yourself for some sort of personal gain, quit while you're ahead.
If you think you're drastically overestimating the likelihood that the police are after you for your crimes, and it is affecting your ability to function, that's definitely a problem for your therapist. Presumably one who doesn't insist you explain your various crimes to them in detail, a thing which your lawyer (which you also maybe need?) might have concerns about.
What is keeping you all from extreme stress considering the possibility that a government is spying on your actions despite strict privacy practices?
Because I'm a fan of my fucking rights and I'll defend it against an authoritarian government. I don't need to be a terrorist to value free speech.
How do you all stay calm with all this pressure?
It's hard, but by using good tools, writing out my privacy model, being informed. It will not necessarily make you calm about the current state of everything but at least be knowledgeable about how good your entire environment is.
I don't really have anything to hide... but I still believe in a fundamental right to privacy and personal agency. For a lot of people, these tools keep them alive (ex. Targeted minorities in oppressive regimes etc).
But for me, this is more of an academic exercise - I find it interesting, and the things I learn can be shared with others who need them more.
If your activities are affecting your ability to sleep and have peace of mind, my only advice is to stop.
If your own conscience is haunting you, that's a good signal for you to fix your behavior so you can have a clear conscience and you won't need to worry about the law closing in on you. What a horrible existence that must be.
Hey I'm technically doing something illegal right now that I do every day all day long and IDGAF because the law regarding this thing is stupid & oppressive & I'm not hurting myself or anyone else.
But WTF is OP doing on the internet that makes him constantly worried the SWAT Team is gonna be banging down his door? That's not normal.
But at the end the goal is to protect the freedom for everyone and give everyone a chance to live without interruptions by any entity that wants to regulate that
The Onion Router, for internet stuff, or a (reliable and well reputed) VPN. But you have an entire community of people more specialised than me for how to not get noticed on internet anyways. Stays informed on the world, and reduce risky things, for you to get some better sleep. Dunno what businesses you do, but your priority is to stop depending on them. Hiding everything you do is just like putting yourself under the spotlight.
A physical diary that only you knows about, to free yourself from your stressful thoughts and ideas, (with a lighter always nearby) will ease a lot. It works very well for me.
All evenings, take 10 mins of your free time to yell the hell out of your mood in your pillow (gotta think about neighbors). Do sports, or things of your interests. Works too.
Oh and you shouldn't post things implying that much that you are doing suspicious things, anywhere on internet. Best irl stuff about you to talk about on corporate internet is none, even mundane things like your country. Illegal things must be done irl the good old way.
What is keeping you all from extreme stress considering
Not being prone to paranoia, as unhelpful as that is
I'm also a realist, which keeps my expectations in check.
Remember that you are one person. Nobody in government censorship or reconnaissance of the public cares about you enough to spy or hack you. You alone aren't worth the effort or resources.
Remember to play. Go outside for a walk, meditate, consume entertaining non-toxic, non-fiction media, have sex or masturbate. All work and no play makes Ringpop a dull person.
Not much there for me. 99% is worn-out tropes or boring telenovela and gameshows. The beauty of drawn media is, that experiments can be published on a budget.
What is keeping you all from extreme stress considering the possibility that a government is spying on your actions despite strict privacy practices?
Threath model analysis. I do enough to not be in the bycatch as more than a IP (no cloud & social media, encrypted private communication, terminating cloud services after use) and low profile enough to not be targeted directly.
I’m always hiding my internet activity from others.
Me, too. What's wrong with us?
I think the less stressful approach is limiting Internet activity altogether rather than obsessing about whether or not what I'm up to is hidden well enough. For example, you could write your own software. I, myself, obsess about whether or not my python scripts actually work instead of inveigling my friends to encrypt everything they put in the Cloud. See, for example:
I'm not sure about your situation. But I'd recommended setting up Buskill on your laptop/pc it can wipe the luks slots on your drive making it completely unreadable all by just disconnecting a USB (this could be magnetic so if they pull you it'll get auto triggered) but then again this is only useful if you live in somewhat free country where cops can't torture you to decrypt/restore your data.
i don't know why you need extreme privacy. But what I can tell you is it's OK you can take a break from whatever you are doing that needs this lvl of privacy.
Reporting on bad regime, they'll still be doing bad stuff once you come back from a break.
Privacy is like swimming in an endless sea: Oftentimes you find yourself barely treading water; often more you're choking, trying to find your balance and your breath. Never forget that you spent your whole life drowning until you decided to swim, though.
There are entities that have declared that they want to eradicate Israel and wip it off the map. If Israel disarmed it would be the end of Israel in short order.
By invoking self-defense, Israel changes the conversation from its colonial crimes against the Palestinians to the injuries it has itself incurred as a result.
Reading the article, it seems similar. This was on a pine tree, except this was in NY and not the northwest where the mushroom you linked is apparently common.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
La paralisi della politica e il vuoto della rappresentanza
C’è un grande vuoto che attraversa la politica contemporanea. Da una parte, l’avanzata globale delle destre radicali — da Trump agli ultraconservatori europei — che cavalcano paura, rancore e identità ferita. Dall’altra, una sinistra ormai prigioniera del proprio linguaggio istituzionale, incapace di parlare alle persone reali. Nel mezzo, milioni di cittadini che hanno smesso di crederci.
Astensionismo record e crisi della sinistra libertaria in Italia
In Italia, questo vuoto si vede con una chiarezza spietata: l’astensionismo record è diventato il vero partito di maggioranza. Non è disinteresse, è un voto di sfiducia. È la risposta di chi ha visto la sinistra gestire le stesse politiche neoliberiste della destra, privatizzare i beni comuni, precarizzare il lavoro e chiamarlo “modernizzazione”.
Il mercato che ha colonizzato la democrazia
Come direbbe Noam Chomsky, la democrazia è stata svuotata dall’interno, mentre il potere economico ha continuato a dettare le regole del gioco. Non serve più un colpo di stato quando il mercato ha già colonizzato la politica.
E così, di elezione in elezione, ci ritroviamo davanti allo stesso bivio finto: o l’autoritarismo di una destra che promette ordine e sicurezza, o la gestione “più umana” di un sistema che resta ingiusto. Ma il risultato non cambia: il conflitto si sposta dai palazzi ai margini della società, dove cresce la rabbia, la paura e la solitudine politica.
Intanto, i governi — di qualunque colore — spingono nella stessa direzione: più spese militari, più riarmo, più fedeltà ai blocchi economici e strategici dominanti. È come se l’intero pianeta fosse intrappolato in una logica binaria, uno scontro tra potenze che si autoalimentano. Eppure, mentre i blocchi si consolidano, l’unica alternativa credibile — un fronte popolare, democratico e libertario — non riesce nemmeno a emergere.
E allora, la domanda è inevitabile: esiste ancora uno spazio per la speranza politica? O siamo destinati a scegliere solo tra due versioni dello stesso dominio?
L’eclissi delle alternative progressiste
La crisi della sinistra libertaria in Italia non è solo elettorale: è culturale, etica, perfino linguistica. Per anni, i partiti riformisti hanno scelto di convivere con il capitalismo estremo, limitandosi a gestirlo “con più sensibilità”. Ma la gestione non è cambiamento. Così, il risultato è stato un progressivo svuotamento della propria base sociale, un allontanamento dei lavoratori, dei precari, delle classi popolari.
Perché la sinistra parlamentare non convince più
La sinistra parlamentare italiana, nella sua forma attuale, non propone un’alternativa radicale al neoliberismo, ma una sua versione “umanizzata”. Il problema è che il neoliberismo, anche nella versione soft, continua a produrre disuguaglianze, precarietà e perdita di diritti. È per questo che l’astensionismo record e l’avanzata della destra radicale sono le due facce della stessa crisi: la prima è il rifiuto, la seconda è la fuga in avanti.
L’ambivalenza geopolitica e il rifiuto della libertà
Come ricordava Noam Chomsky, quando la politica non offre alternative, “la rabbia popolare viene catturata e indirizzata verso bersagli falsi”. Ed è proprio ciò che accade oggi: la frustrazione sociale viene trasformata in rancore contro i migranti, l’Europa, i poveri stessi. È una fabbrica del consenso al contrario, che alimenta la destra mentre svuota la democrazia.
Sul fronte più radicale, la sinistra extraparlamentare resta prigioniera di un’ambivalenza geopolitica: simpatizza per regimi autoritari solo perché anti-occidentali, ma dimentica che la libertà non è negoziabile. Si parla di BRICS e di “mondo multipolare”, ma un multipolarismo senza diritti e democrazia non è un progresso — è solo un’altra forma di dominio.
E allora, la domanda torna centrale: può esistere una sinistra libertaria e non allineata che rifiuti allo stesso tempo la logica dei blocchi e la complicità con il potere economico? Perché senza una proposta etica, popolare e coerente, la crisi della sinistra e il fallimento delle politiche neoliberiste continueranno a lasciare campo libero a chi promette soluzioni autoritarie.
Geopolitica del conflitto e logica dei blocchi
Viviamo dentro una geopolitica del conflitto e del dominio globale. Le grandi potenze — Russia, Cina, Stati Uniti, e l’Europa al seguito — hanno trasformato la politica internazionale in un campo di battaglia permanente. La corsa al riarmo non è più solo un riflesso della paura, ma un vero modello di sviluppo. In Italia e in Europa si parla ormai di portare le spese militari al 5% del PIL, come se la sicurezza potesse essere comprata a suon di missili e droni. Ma ogni euro speso per la guerra è un euro tolto a sanità, istruzione, ambiente, e al diritto a una vita dignitosa.
È una militarizzazione globale che serve a mantenere in piedi un sistema economico in crisi. Lo spiegava già Noam Chomsky: quando il consenso democratico vacilla, i governi usano la paura e il conflitto per riconquistare legittimità. L’“altro” — che sia il migrante, il nemico estero o il dissidente interno — diventa lo strumento con cui il potere si giustifica. Oggi la fabbrica del consenso passa attraverso la fabbrica della paura.
Dallo scontro tra NATO e BRICS alla militarizzazione globale
Ma il rischio non arriva solo dall’Occidente militarizzato. Anche i blocchi alternativi, come Russia, Cina o Turchia, mostrano un volto autoritario e repressivo. La logica dei blocchi alimenta l’estremismo su scala globale: lo vediamo nel sostegno acritico di molti governi occidentali a politiche estreme, come quelle del governo Netanyahu, anche di fronte ad accuse di genocidio. Questo estremismo si riflette anche nelle società: assistiamo a una fascistizzazione del dibattito politico che rende intollerabile la critica. In diverse comunità, incluse alcune comunità ebraiche, chi non accetta l’operato del governo israeliano viene marginalizzato e aggredito. Contemporaneamente, in paesi come i Paesi Bassi, le autorità arrivano a vietare organizzazioni antifasciste (Antifa), equiparando di fatto la resistenza all’estrema destra al terrorismo. L’obiettivo è sempre lo stesso: disciplinare il dissenso. Che si tratti di militarizzazione o di repressione interna, l’effetto è di soffocare la possibilità di un dibattito democratico e radicale.
La contesa tra poteri: nessun blocco è giusto
In questo scenario, le strategie di pace contro la logica dei blocchi diventano la sfida politica più urgente del nostro tempo. Come difendersi da paesi autoritari pacificamente? Come opporsi alla guerra senza restare disarmati di fronte all’aggressione?
Una risposta possibile è quella che alcuni movimenti definiscono “sicurezza umana e non armata”: costruire difese civili, sociali e tecnologiche che non passino per l’escalation militare. La difesa civile nonviolenta come strategia di sicurezza non è utopia — è visione realistica per un mondo dove le guerre non si possono più vincere, ma solo moltiplicare.
Serve un pensiero capace di andare oltre i blocchi, un non-allineamento etico che rimetta al centro i diritti umani, la sovranità democratica e la cooperazione internazionale. E qui si apre la prospettiva di una Terza Via politica ed economica, non come compromesso, ma come rifiuto di entrambe le logiche di dominio.
Una via che unisca libertà e giustizia, etica e solidarietà, riprendendo la lezione di chi — da Chomsky a Bookchin — ci ricorda che la pace non nasce dall’equilibrio della paura, ma dal potere condiviso delle comunità libere.
Verso una terza via libertaria e popolare
Ogni crisi è anche un’occasione. Se la sinistra è prigioniera del proprio linguaggio e la destra si nutre di paura e disuguaglianza, allora serve una nuova grammatica politica, un linguaggio capace di restituire senso, speranza e potere alle persone.
Costruire un blocco democratico, non allineato e pacifista
Questa nuova visione potremmo chiamarla “Terza Via”, ma non nel senso del compromesso blairiano o del centrismo riformista: parliamo di una Terza Via politica ed economica che unisca libertà, democrazia diretta, giustizia sociale ed ecologia. Un blocco democratico, popolare e libertario che rifiuti tanto il capitalismo estremo quanto l’autoritarismo di Stato, proponendo un’alternativa reale al dominio dei blocchi di potere globali.
Economia popolare e sovranità sociale
Il primo pilastro è l’economia solidale e la sovranità sociale. Non un’utopia, ma una direzione concreta: cooperazione locale, filiere etiche, comunità energetiche, mutualismo, autogestione del lavoro. Significa superamento del neoliberismo e della guerra come strumenti economici e culturali, sostituiti da un modello che valorizzi i beni comuni, la redistribuzione e la dignità. È la risposta a un sistema che ha trasformato tutto in merce, anche la vita.
Geopolitica etica: rifiuto dei blocchi (NATO-BRICS)
Il secondo pilastro è la politica di non-allineamento etico. Non si tratta di neutralità, ma di rifiuto dei blocchi NATO e BRICS, perché entrambi fondati sulla stessa logica di dominio e sfruttamento. Una nuova internazionale dei popoli per la pace e il benessere, basata su cooperazione, giustizia ambientale e autodeterminazione democratica. La vera pace non si costruisce con le armi, ma con reti di solidarietà e con un modello di sicurezza civile condiviso. Come suggeriva Chomsky, la libertà dei popoli passa dal controllo collettivo delle risorse e delle decisioni, non dalla dipendenza da superpotenze.
Municipalismo e coerenza morale: Bookchin e la base
Il terzo pilastro è quello che Murray Bookchin chiamava “municipalismo libertario”: una politica che nasce dal basso, dai territori, dalle comunità. Bookchin sosteneva che la democrazia reale non si costruisce nelle istituzioni centrali, ma nei luoghi in cui le persone si incontrano, discutono, decidono insieme. È qui che si intrecciano economia popolare, difesa civile nonviolenta e autogoverno locale: tre strumenti che possono liberare le società dal ricatto dei blocchi globali.
Ma tutto questo richiede coerenza morale. Non si può chiedere libertà senza praticarla, né giustizia senza metterla in atto ogni giorno. La vera alternativa politica nasce quando il discorso pubblico ritrova una dimensione etica, capace di unire pensiero e vita. Serve una cultura della responsabilità, capace di guardare oltre le ideologie morte per ritrovare un principio semplice: la libertà è collettiva, o non è.
La Terza Via: la forma più radicale di speranza politica
In questo orizzonte, la Terza Via non è un partito, ma una visione in atto: una rete di comunità, movimenti, lavoratori e cittadini che scelgono di costruire un’economia del bene comune e una politica della pace.
Non serve aspettare che qualcuno la fondi: esiste già in embrione nelle cooperative sociali, nei gruppi di acquisto solidale, nelle reti di mutualismo, nei municipi che sperimentano forme di autogoverno. Sono i semi concreti di una democrazia dal basso, i primi laboratori di libertà collettiva.
La nuova internazionale dei popoli che immaginiamo non ha eserciti né confini. Ha valori, pratiche e persone che scelgono la coerenza invece della paura. Solo così si può unire libertà democratica e giustizia sociale, superando tanto il neoliberismo quanto la deriva autoritaria.
La “Terza Via” non promette salvezza, ma restituisce possibilità. Ed è forse proprio questa — oggi — la forma più radicale di speranza politica.
Complimenti. Ottimo articolo e preziosissimo strumento di dibattito e costruzione culturale. La terza via è sempre più urgente e a bisogno di noi, tutt* noi.
Looking for an alt Mastodon instance that’s:
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