The problem in this story is not the wealth, but its form. Cryptocurrency transactions are generally irreversible and not subject to the layers of process and protection that have been built up around large banking transactions. Keep your money in banks and brokerages like a sensible person and you don't have much risk.

Uh, yes, the 24-hour cancellation option is always the most expensive one for a given room (ignoring paying extra for add-ons like free breakfast or extra points). What other option would be more expensive? The one that gives the consumer the most flexibility is the one with the highest risk to the property, and that's priced in.

Yeah, TFA overstated it. Though if you're not booking through the chain directly, in many cases it is hard to get a 24-hour cancellation policy. Many of the travel aggregator services hide them.

Yep. That's all true even if AI is the most transformative technology ever invented, even if it generates trillions per year in economic output -- it might not do it soon enough to prevent another crash. You don't have to believe that AI is "sand-castle based or vapor based" (which it's really not) to see a big problem coming.

They went from buying low to selling high and are now shorting the stocks.

They're winning either way.

The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

The better strategy, IMO, is to keep your money safe and wait for the bubble to burst, then pile in for the recovery. Where to keep money safe is a good question, though. Just holding cash might be risky if inflation comes back, and the current administration seems anxious to pump up inflation.

There's a pair of seriously bad assumptions underlying your analysis:

(1) What AI does right now is all it's going to do. Given the way capabilites have grown recently, this is a ludicrous assumption. Keep in mind that ChatGPT was launched November 30, 2022... it's less than three years old! And the reasoning models are barely a year old. There is no reason whatsoever to assume that this technology has peaked.

(2) We already know how to take full advantage of AI. Every time a new technology comes along it takes decades for us to fully understand how to effectively use it, and to deploy it everywhere it is useful. I'd say we still haven't fully incorporated the Internet into our society, and we've been working on that for over 30 years now. We're barely beginning to understand how to use what AI we've already got, and it'll take years, if not decades, for the full economic benefits to be achieved -- and in the meantime AI is probably going to continue improving.

The AI thing absolutely is a bubble, but it's not "sand-castle based or vapor based". It's very real. The problem is that the massive wave of investment is going to have to start generating returns within the next 3-4 years or else the financial deals that underpin it all will collapse. That doesn't mean the technology will disappear, it just means that the current investors will lose their shirts, other people will scoop up their assets at firesale prices, and those people will figure out how to deploy it effectively, and create trillions in economic value.

Well, assuming AI doesn't just kill us all.

That tech is not even remotely ready for use outside of a carefully isolated lab setting.

Fortunately, I will likely not even have to turn it off. The data-collection makes this illegal without informed consent in Europe. And they will not want to tell the world what they are collecting and what they are doing with it.

It's like the railroads. Enormous fortunes were made and then lost as the railroad boom played out and then the bubble burst. When people were driving hard to push rails across the continental US, the business case for doing so wasn't there. Yes, linking the east and west coasts had some value, but not much, since there really wasn't that much on the west coast. And there was a whole lot of nothing in between. But it was obvious to everyone that when the railroads connected the coasts and opened access to the interior, there would be enormous value. What exactly, no one knew, in the sense that no one knew where all of the railroad-enabled interior cities would be constructed or what kinds of things they would do. But it was clear that there was value in access to all of that land and that someone would do something with it.

On the other hand, realizing that value didn't happen right away. It took decades for all of the land granted to the railroads to become really valuable, because it wasn't valuable until people came and built farms, dug mines, established ranches and generally built lives and industry. The return on that massive investment was there... but it came far too late for most of the people that invested it. Lots of bankruptcies resulted, and others swooped in and snapped up the resources for bargain-basement prices, and they're the ones who became incredibly wealthy (well, they and the ones who supplied the steel, e.g. Carnegie).

It's been the same with pretty much every technology-driven bubble. Remember telecom/dot-com bubble in the 90s, with all of the "dark fiber" that was laid everywhere? Bankruptcies and consolidations resulted, and all of that fiber got lit up and used. That bubble built the Internet, and huge fortunes were made as a result -- the top half-dozen most valuable companies on the planet are all a direct result.

OpenAI and Anthropic are betting that this time will be different, that the payoff will come fast enough to pay back the investment. Google is betting this somewhat, too, but Google has scale, diversity and resources to weather the bust -- and might be well-positioned to snap up the depreciated investments made by others. If history is any guide, OpenAI and Anthropic are wrong. But, then again, AI is fundamentally different from every other technology we've created.

Like most racists, your critical thinking skills (assuming you have them) are shoved aside by overwhelming confirmation bias. Otherwise, you'd have noticed that the US was also a lot whiter before the Pendleton Act, and that the post-Pendleton boom continued and even accelerated after the Civil Rights acts and a large influx of non-white immigrants. We became the world's sole superpower and continued increasing our economic, political and cultural dominance as a diverse, melting-pot society. The rise of China as an economic power (oh, wait... how is that, they're not white, how can they possibly do well?) has flummoxed us somewhat, but even with Trump beginning to throw away the apolitical civil service, our international partnerships and, well, the rule of law as a whole, we're still on top. But the decline is beginning, and it's not the brown-skinned immigrants who are taking us down, it's the white nationalist administration.

If you could discard your biases and examine the situation objectively and critically, you would notice that the timeline you're referring to completely and utterly refutes the conclusion that you're trying to draw.

I think we are going to see a 'correction' we go down 10% or or less from recent highs and trade sideways for a while.

Most of the big guys in AI are already down more than 10% in the past week. Today isn't looking any better. Once Nvidia reports tomorrow after the bell will we see stabilization, assuming they have good news to report.

I was wondering why a site I was on this morning decided to stop loading. Since other sites were still working I thought it might be the site itself. The hamsters got too tired and took a nap.

... not enough baskets. Not the only place in tech where this is going massively wrong.

Wait until you find out about American car companies