• FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    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%.

  • Em Adespoton@lemmy.ca
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    9 days ago

    Looks more like the dot com bubble to me.

    Is it just me, or are the bubbles coming closer together these days?

    • Nalivai@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      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

  • HugeNerd@lemmy.ca
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    9 days ago

    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.

    • panda_abyss@lemmy.ca
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      9 days ago

      The GDP issue is not because of the AI bubble, it’s because of tariffs and the complete destruction of US soft power abroad

      • Passerby6497@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        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.

        • humanspiral@lemmy.ca
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          8 days ago

          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.

      • HugeNerd@lemmy.ca
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        9 days ago

        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?

        • Saryn@lemmy.world
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          8 days ago

          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.

          • humanspiral@lemmy.ca
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            8 days ago

            helping a lot of people in Eastern Europe

            to support Israel and war on Russia

            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”.

            • Saryn@lemmy.world
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              8 days ago

              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.

              • humanspiral@lemmy.ca
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                7 days ago

                Just defining what soft power means. Soft extortion and bribery just as bad as extortion and bribery.

          • HugeNerd@lemmy.ca
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            8 days ago

            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.

            GTFOH with your soft pedaling of this bullshit.

            • Saryn@lemmy.world
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              8 days ago

              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.

    • HugeNerd@lemmy.ca
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      8 days ago

      God damn it, if the US collapses who will supply weapons to all its peaceful democratic allies in the world? I’m super fucking pissed off about this.

  • Octavio@lemmy.world
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    8 days ago

    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.

  • BilSabab@lemmy.world
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    8 days ago

    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?

    • commander@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      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

    • InputZero@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      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.

  • biofaust@lemmy.world
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    8 days ago

    From the entry for “zaibatsu” on Wikipedia:

    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.

    • Glytch@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      And that is why Yamaha makes everything from musical instruments to motorcycles

  • Dr. Moose@lemmy.world
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    8 days ago

    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.

      • Dr. Moose@lemmy.world
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        8 days ago

        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.

    • GreenShimada@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      I’ve been saying the same thing.

      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.

    • Jankatarch@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      Idk if ghost city thing was a bubble tho.

      China used planned infrastructure and bunch of confused journalists in US were like “what kind of government plans for housing of their citizens”

        • Jankatarch@lemmy.world
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          8 days ago

          I was mostly going for “modern journalism is is sad and biased towards clickbait” ngl. Especially now they have AI edited articles.

      • Pycorax@sh.itjust.works
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        8 days ago

        I mean even if it was planned the amount of excess given falling birthrates, doesn’t check out either.

  • xylogx@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    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.

  • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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    8 days ago

    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.