Don't feed the trolls, particularly the ones like this who almost certainly work at a troll farm in some other country.

Locally, yes, but the moisture that is accumulating previously evaporated and went somewhere else. What will the impact be there? Very hard to say.

Correct, but knowing that there's an AI bubble and knowing that a whole bunch of people are making life and purchasing decisions based on this inflated value of their investments, this is the root of the problem. When the bubble pops and everyone holds off on making that next big purchase, that's what causes companies to lay off employees and pause investment, which is what causes the vicious cycle of a recession. It would be nice if we could interrupt that mostly psychological cycle somehow.

There's a logical discrepancy in your thinking. Assuming our new leaders figured out how to make machines that were 100% obedient and could do anything that humans could do, they wouldn't then use that to enslave us. There would literally be no use for us. They'd exterminate us. We can only exist so long as we are useful to someone who is willing to trade the necessities of life for what we have, or we can forcibly take what we want, or we can forcibly hold on to enough land to eke out an existence, and defend that land. Any other possibility that lets us survive can *only* be due to the powers-that-be caring enough to not get rid of us. And let's face it, some group of us will never be satisfied with whatever scraps they pass our way, and will try to forcibly take their stuff, so they will have lots of incentive to end us.

To the average investor with their 401k or mutual funds or whatever, the only number the investment firm gives them is last share price times number of shares, so they absolutely take the latest purchaser's valuation as the actual value of all the shares they own.

I'm not an economist, but the fundamental issue is that we take the last price that something sold (like a stock) as the actual real price of all the stock of that company.

So if you were holding 100 shares of Nvidia stock which you bought in January 2024 for $50 each, you would think you had $5000 of stock at that time. Recently people have been trying to buy Nvidia stock and have pushed up the price to nearly $200. You look at that and think, "Wow! I have $20,000 now!". And as a small investor, sure, you could unload those 100 shares for close to $200 and take that profit.

The "real" value of a company is actually the net present value of all it's future income. But the future growth (or decline) of a company is uncertain, so people who buy stocks are betting on what they think the future income of the company will be. A lot of people are buying Nvidia because they think AI will produce so much future value that Nvidia will make enormous profits in the future. And some people are just buying Nvidia because of the logical fallacy that stocks that are increasing in value will continue increasing in value.

You don't actually have to believe that the future of AI is bright yourself. You can ride the price of the stock higher as long as lots and lots of other people believe AI will be huge in the future and Nvidia will be part of that.

But once evidence comes to light that AI isn't all it's cracked up to be, then people's perceptions of how much Nvidia might pay out in future profits can drop substantially. When that happens, lots of people who own Nvidia stock will want out, and fewer people will want to buy it, and the price will drop like a rock (maybe even back to that $50 level). That's just supply and demand.

Did any money go anywhere? No, it just got shuffled around. Some people won and some lost, but there's no more or less money in the system. What there is right now is the perception of having more money. If you think you have $20,000 in your investment, you think you have more money than if you have $5000 in your investment. And realistically, what you really have is 100 shared of Nvidia, and all the future profits that those 100 shares entitle you to.

That is essentially what happened. They didn't fire 35%, those 35% just transferred their reports to others and became ICs (Individual Contributors).

The 35% figure at Google is misleading. The vast majority of those people weren't pure managers they were software engineers who managed small teams as part of their duties while also doing productive technical work. A policy requiring a minimum of 5 direct reports for each manager was put in place, forcing all of those people to decide to either increase their management and cease doing significant technical work or cease being managers and focus entirely on technical work. Many chose the latter option, often quite happily (there is no additional pay or other concrete benefit to being a manager vs being an IC (individual contributor)). This partitioning of people who were in mixed roles into roles that were either managerial or technical provided most of the reduction in line and middle management.

Yes, I expect Alphabet would decline. I worked there for 15 years and understand the culture and motivations pretty well. Culturally, doing something like that would cut against the grain, hard. Pragmatically, they wouldn't like to oppose the administration but they'd get a lot more PR mileage out of leaking the request and publicly declaring their opposition than it would cost them.

I like the lyrics. They're relatable. But they represent ideas that are mostly found in younger people who are just coming to terms with their emotions. Now that I've lived a while, I've gained some insights into my feelings. There are at least four different separate groups, philosophies, or lines of thought that have all tried to tell me one simple message: how you feel is not so much the result of external events as it is the result of your reaction to those events. And you have significant control over that reaction, which means you have control over how you feel. The places I've heard this same message is: in books about cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), in books about stoicism, in the alcoholics anonymous mantra, and in some bible stories (with the understanding that early Christianity borrowed heavily from stoicism). The fact is that humans have always struggled with these same issues, and even talked about them, and wrote stuff down about it in order to help others. Too bad literacy rates are falling now.

Remember that the technical definition of a disorder in psychology has to do with whether or not it impacts a person's day-to-day life. If you can't get out of bed in the morning, you might have a depressive disorder, but if you feel sad and go about all the regular actions of your day, then you're just sad, not clinically depressed. So gender dysphoria would only be considered a disorder if it left someone so distressed that they couldn't go about their lives, and then they should see a therapist. But the mere existence of the term gender dysphoria in a mental health diagnostic manual is offensive to certain people who feel like society is telling them that there's something wrong with them for being trans. The autism thing is similar... a diagnosis is sometimes beneficial because it opens doors to supports you can get, but when you make it all one spectrum then a person with level 1 (high functioning) autism might be offended that this mental health manual appears to say there's something "wrong" with them. This is what I mean by saying that concessions were made in the DSM 5 in the interests of politics, which was at odds with the views of the psychiatric and psychology professionals.

We absolutely loved our TiVo back in the day, back when it had two analog tuners. But once cable went digital, TiVo decided to only support cable card digital TV, which is common in the US, but wasn't available in Canada, so we unfortunately had to give it up. But it was definitely one of the top products I can remember using. It was great while it lasted.

I volunteer with a high school team, and a couple years ago there was a bunch of students standing around talking, and they were all discussing their mental health labels. Everybody had some "thing" they had, and there was a kind of bragging going on. It struck me as weird. I turned to another mentor who graduated high school in about 2014 and asked, "when you were in high school, did you all stand around talking about your mental health diagnoses?" and he was like, "no... that's weird". There's clearly some kind of social contagion going on, which isn't that uncommon in teenagers. When I was a teenager it was goth kids, and "cutting". In some ways I can see how this is better than that. But a recent survey of students in our school board showed over 40% identified as LGBTQ. Given that we have survey data going back decades showing the incidence is around 10%, it's pretty clear this is more about fitting into a social group. Kids who just said they were "nonbinary" were counted in that 40% but if you dig into it, that label is almost meaningless and could apply to anyone. In Hollywood, movie production companies now survey all the people working on the productions to see how many people are from marginalized groups, so it's beneficial to be in one of those groups because it means you're more likely to be called back next time. There's stories of cameramen who just claim they're nonbinary for that very reason because nobody can dispute it and you don't have to look abnormal or anything to pass.

I'm married to a psychologist, and I can assure you that the DSM 5 (the guidebook for diagnostics) was created by a committee that was heavily influenced by politics, and there was a significant pushback within the psychology community about it, and it was pushed through anyways for political reasons. I'm not sure if the psychology profession (and medical profession as well) truly understand how much they're contributing to the falling public trust in institutions by doing stuff like this, but it's plain as day to me.

I would agree that the efficient market hypothesis doesn't take human tulip-investing into account. But I've noticed that privately owned companies don't seem to suffer from this problem. Still, the AI thing is how you separate dumb investors from their money.