The population decline from low birth rates isn't drastic enough. You can look up how the math works out but there is a long tail of increased population growth before you see the crash. It has to do with how you already have all these people of childbearing age going through their lives.

So long before our population could adjust we're going to get hit with huge amounts of layoffs that will cause massive amounts of social strife. There's no getting away from it.

There won't be much of an experiment per se. In practice it will quickly devolve into a few big players that control platforms people use so that they can continuously access new training material.

So microsoft, Apple maybe and Facebook and possibly but probably not Twitter (since we just learned 80% of the accounts on Twitter are Russians and bangladeshies pretending to be American conservatives) will continue to thrive because they will be able to tell the difference between a bot and a human being thanks to their control of the platform.

Everyone else was just accessing free training data goes tits up soon. Some of them will be bought out.

In addition to devastating the job market and devouring electricity and water AI is also going to result in huge monopolies because it's a technology that lends itself to monopolies inherently.

What is my conclusion? That there's an AI bubble?

World trade was headed to destruction. Now it's just heading there a bit quicker.

Because that will not pacify the poor. Printing money constantly will cause monetary inflation, so only the rich will be able to buy anything of significant value like homes. You'd have to also give away housing. It makes much more sense just to take the money from the rich and give it to the poor, the rich will end up with it again anyway.

It isn't really new information that the largest corporations in China are either directly involved with the Chinese government or implicitly involved with the Chinese government and if you are intertwined with the Chinese government then you are with their military, this separation that we are used to in the US simply doesn't and has never existed over there.

This is how it has always been and it's by design, it's a Loki's wager of private/public systems. This is feeling even more performative and desperate from the current admin who really have no concept of how to actually deal with China which is why Xi has been running roughshod over them and Xi isn't some master strategist either so it's all relative, he's just making obvious moves and playing off the fact this admin is too chickenshit to stand up to the big countries out there.

Thus we have 10% of our Navy off the coast of Venezuela instead of Taiwan because what we really need to fight China is a regionwide destabilizing civil war a couple thousand miles from our own shores.

It's not wrong to say that America is largely at fault. We got Ukraine to give up nukes in exchange for vague and non-binding promises that we would protect them from Russia. Obviously this is a deal they should not have taken, but it was our sleazy idea.

I buy from AliExpress all the time. (Same business, different storefront.) As a rule they are roughly as responsive as Amazon. Shipping takes longer but prices are much better. Pretty much all the cheap crap on Amazon comes from them and it's much cheaper from the source. So far they have processed all of my complaints gracefully.

All that can be true but it can still be a bubble and it can still be a stupid amount of money. This is also about 3x the entire military budget of Russia ($66B)

And if this is so crucial to the military then I would hope we could spare some of that free flowing money to Ukraine to you know, do the drone warfare they seem to have become experts at (at a much lower cost than all this) and provide us valuable field research and testing while also putting pressure of the geopolitical antagonists we are worried about having all this for the future.

I dunno, seems a little "sus" to me, as the kids say.

I agree that's the main problem in this context, but there are other large ones of course. The nuclear isn't just a problem in construction, it's also a problem in maintenance, and in decommissioning. Nuclear is also not cheaper than fossil fuels if you consider full lifecycle costs of operation. You might say it's cheaper because it's possible to contain the waste and that's not possible for fossil fuels, but fossil fuels shouldn't actually even be in the running.

It's supposed to be the answer to the question "if nobody buys the wealthy's products how are they going to stay rich?"

The goal here is to replace as many workers as possible and eliminate the dependency on consumers.

The ultra wealthy want to go back to being like kings. Basically feudalism.

They will have a very tiny number of guildsman and scribes and a handful of knights to keep them in line.

Everyone else has a lifestyle below that of a medieval peasant because you're not even needed to tend the land anymore, they will have machines for that.

It never ceases to amaze me how many people don't realize what's happening here. Even more so there are the people who realize it but just kind of put it out of their mind because the idea of the ultra wealthy dismantling capitalism is so far outside what people view as possible that they can't emotionally comprehend it even if they can understand it intellectually.

And of course there are the numb skulls who think that they are somehow going to profit from the collapse of modern civilization. It's a big club boys and you ain't in it.

I am still using a 13 Pro Max, so you're not alone.

This whole "buy a new expensive phone every year or two" mentality has always bugged me. Yes, "battery life is better" on a new phone versus a not-new phone... but the question SHOULD be "is the battery life on that not-new phone actually an issue?". And yes, the cameras on a new phone are probably better, but is there an actual practical difference the end user will actually see?

A lot of those arguments seem to be post hoc justifications for a purchase decision that was already made.

Who are those "many" who would assume that? Other than Bloomberg writers, I mean.

Just to realize how gobsmackingly stupid that amount of money for all the flack and conspiracies that US military industrial complex this is more money that the top 4 "MiC" classic military contractors earned in revenue for 2024. But bubbles aren't real right?

Lockheed: $66B
Northrop: $41B
Raytheon: $26B
Boeing: $66B

Forget $207 Billion, they should invest in me instead because I would keep losing money through 2030 even if you only gave me $1 billion!