Its walking papers.

The public numbers for crypto value amount to "the current amount of crypto multiplied by the current price per unit". But, I'm pretty sure that a crypto collapse would rapidly drive the price to zero faster than the OceanGate sub imploded. All asset classes have this problem, to some effect. But most asset classes have a legit underlying usefulness. Those mortgage-backed securities were backed by real collateral - real land and real buildings that could have been seized. Was it inflated? Yeah, sure. But there were still a LOT of real assets there. The value of those were never going to drop to zero. Land and buildings have value.

These three bubbles are entirely different.

A crypto bubble would hardly even be a blip that would affect cryptobros, criminals, idiots, and very few others. Impact on the real economy - near zero.

An AI bubble would be a typical correction to an industry where the hype is stupidly ahead of reality. Impact on the real economy- a tad painful, but well within the realm of "typical" financial corrections.

When the world debt bubble pops, it'll result in a recovery period similar to what was experienced after WW2, because debt is pushing that level of badness across most of the western world. The non-western world isn't much better, either. It took the US nearly 30 years to recover from the WW2 debt. When the debt bubble bursts, everyone will feel it for decades. Society won't collapse. The likeliest result is a long period of stagflation which is a fancy word for "hard times". But, nobody has a clue when it'll happen. Doomers say "tomorrow" while economists who actually study the topic say stuff like "nobody knows, but it might not pop until the end of the century".

I think you miss some key aspects of this.

Yes, Tesla has clearly peaked. Even Musk realizes it. He isn't reinvesting anything into it anymore. He's paying himself more from Tesla than their annual profits, so it's clear that he knows it's gonna shrink, and he now views it as a cash cow for himself and the things he's *really" interested in. His descent into right-wing populism has pissed off at least 80% of his customer base. There are very few upper-middle-class-and-above people who worship at the feet of Trump, Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan and Alex Jones, so they aren't gonna buy a second or third Tesla when their current one wears out. The rural and non-college-educated voters who love that stuff will buy a few Cybertrucks, but sales of those won't replace the lost revenue from losing millions of model 3 sales. Tesla is now the "cable TV" of EVs.

Twitter was never about making money. Musk wanted more control over media messaging, and he was willing to pay for it. He doesn't give a rats ass about the money he torched on the Twitter deal.

No, SpaceX is not losing NASA contracts, at least for the time being. One NASA guy grumbled about SpaceX in public and you think that means they're on the ropes? The options for getting to the moon in the next decade are a) Starship and b) there are no other options. SLS? Blue Origin? Don't make me laugh. You have no idea how slow those companies are compared to SpaceX? I'll be dead before Blue Origin or SLS lands on the moon. SpaceX put out a statement that they're going to the moon, with or without NASA, and Musk definitely has the resources to make it happen. He could write a check, twice the size of the ENTIRE NASA BUDGET, and it would barely put a dent in his wealth.

At the national level, Musk has hitched his fate to Trump. Nobody bought their little "falling out" performance. Musk is taking another massive gamble. I get it - that's what businesspeople have to do, over and over again. He's probably got the freedom to do almost anything he wants for the next 3 years. After that, the crystal ball gets fuzzy. Beyond that, I suspect his companies will start to fade. I don't care about any of his other companies, but I really hope that SpaceX avoids that fate. After Trump is gone, the Musk brand is probably gonna be pretty damn toxic, though.

There are all sorts of things that work like subsidies that have different names. Tax breaks, smoothing out administrative bumps, use of government facilities, etc. musk has gotten plenty

Best 10s of billions of dollars the government has spent in the past few years. The subsidies Tesla got pale in comparison to what Ford and GM got. SpaceX subsidies are a drop in the bucket compared to the government money heaped on the rest of the space industry. And, as much as I dislike Musks circling-the-toilet-into-rightwingism, Tesla and SoaceX have basically delivered the goods. Late? Yeah. With an extra helping of hype? Sure. But millions of Teslas on the road and frequent SpaceX launches are the real deal. And Starship is probably one of the most important engineering projects the human species is undertaking right now.

Oh, theyll learn plenty. When the AI tells them that the inner diameter of a quarter inch pipe is 1.07 inches ( a real example) or when it tells them to treat glowing red hot the same as room temperature (another real example), and they uncritically use that info, the consequences of blindly trusting AI will be VERY educational.

There are a few still left in the Democratic Party. Sanders is a true-believer, card-carrying socialist who rebranded himself as a “democratic socialist” in order to fit into a viable political party. Mamdani is a straight-up populist-socialist who is also trying make himself sellable to a US population. Those are the only two that I can think of with any national recognition. But on the other side, Trump is busy trying to partly nationalize a bunch of large US companies. That’s pretty damn socialist.

Were the capitalists are long, long gone. Remember the good old days when R meant capitalist and D meant socialist? Nowadays it takes a serious mental defect to watch Fox News commentators rail on Bernie Sanders for being a filthy socialist one second, and the next theyre cheering Trump as he forces companies to give up stakes to the federal government.

More expensive than their AMERICAN competitor, let alone whatever Chinese products are out there. And they’re blaming the loss of a little tax credit? Um. No. Their problems are that they priced themselves out of the market. Their van was 75k while Fords option was 50k. Can’t imagine why they didnt sell many of them. Eyeroll.

Cartels are *very* hard to maintain nowadays. At least in western countries in businesses that don't have natural barriers to entry, like geographical limitations. Especially for the idea of single-person companies with AI workforces. If three people can get into the game, so can 25.

AI is barely a few years old. Any effect showing up in student test scores was at least 5-10 years in the making. This is not about chatgpt, but it almost certainly has a LOT to do with the reduction in educational standards. I know this is gonna make me sound like an angry old man, but:

When I went through school, reading comprehension involved reading a few full pages, followed by questions to test understanding. Nowadays, reading comprehension involves a 25-50 word passage (about the length of a tweet). It's just plain easier.

When I went through school, entire books were assigned for reading, followed by book reports and tests on retention of the entire book. At least a solid dozen books would be read over the year, in addition to several plays, a poetry unit, and some short stories for good measure. I'm watching my kid go through HS english. The books are really good, but they read way less overall, and each book is broken up into many several-page sections that they're tested on in sequence. It's much less demanding. At no point does my kid say "aw man I gotta read 50 pages of my book for english". That was pretty regular in my time, at least in the honors course.

The article seems focused on reading and writing. Yeah, I'm sorry to say that emphasis on rigorous reading and writing has degraded over the past 20 years. People who train to bench press 100 lbs regularly are gonna be stronger than people who train on 10-15 lbs. Is anyone surprised?

I'm not sure this applies to math and science. STEM in the US seems to still be fairly solid.

You straight-up dont understand some key aspects of capitalism. First off, the AI-cryptobro dream of AI-only-worker companies is probably exactly that - just a fantasy. Second, if a businessman does actually succeed in creating a useful product using AI and zero workers, two others will realize whats happening, do exactly the same thing, the three single-person companies will compete for customers by lowering their prices, and the price of whatever product theyre making will asymptote towards zero. Pretty damn quickly, I suspect. The end result - the cost and price of the product will be about the same as sunlight or rainwater.

Silicon Valley and computer bros should be entirely kept away from nuclear stuff. The mindset is totally different. When google screws something up, they fix it by slamming out a code update over the weekend and the consequences amount to “facing down some angry online posts”. When a product doesnt make the required 1500 percent annual profit, they abandon the hardware after two years and the consequences are, again, a few miffed users that post online about their home-automation system getting bricked.

When something goes badly wrong with a nuclear power plant, the entire human population sees an uptick in cancer rates and a chunk of the planet gets declared uninhabitable for 10,000 years.

Im pro-nuclear, but the computer industry is completely unsuited to developing the tech. The required mindset is completely different. This needs to be kept in the hands of hard physical scientists and engineers of the non-CS type. Every time I say this it gets instantly down modded. If SV gets into nuclear, when it goes bad, the rest of society will be stuck holding the bag of consequences for thousands of years while the computer bros pivot to the next shiny thing. Beware. Danger. Danger.

I suspect that AI will eventually be a super-important teaching tool. People have been trying to apply technology to enhance teaching for over 50 years, with very little progress. It turns out that the human-to-human component of teaching is really, really hard to replace.

AI might be able to bridge the gap. Not to replace teachers, but to enhance the learning environment.

But not the current AIs. I recently asked chatgpt to assist with a thermal calculation, and it's first answer was to assume that 1000K is the same as 298K. I'm not making that up. I was told to assume that glowing red hot was the same as room temperature, with 100 percent certainty and confidence. When I told it "no, don't make that assumption" it responded with another wrong approach, with the exact same certainty and confidence.

AI will eventually have a big impact but it's absolutely not ready to be unleashed in a classroom. Teaching will probably be one of the last professions to be impacted by AI.