Yes, sadly, they do not cure mental illness.

Truth Social I'm sure. As hard as it is to believe, there are still people who think Trump is a genius, and still want to "own the Libs".

won't happen. In the US our "representatives" are owned by the corporations.

How are these people not in prison?

Even if that profit is derived by harming citizens.
- 1st rule of crony capitalism

I don't follow prediction markets that closely, but it seems to me that win or lose, this ruling shows they're screwed either way.

If they lose, showing that these are unregulated forms of gambling, then the states can come after them.

If they win and the injunction is dismissed, it's because these prediction markets are operating like credit default swaps, which are heavily regulated. This would force every prediction market to operate through clearing houses, eliminate direct holding of users' funds, force them to to become registered dealers, and most importantly limit their market to those who have high discretionary assets, because at least regulated swaps require you to have $10M in discretionary assets to even buy swaps.

Again I may be missing something here, but I read this as the injunction being put on hold because they could essentially be swaps; if that holds, then it could be argued they must then act like swaps which are highly regulated and would kill their retail business. I'd be curious to know if I'm missing something about these though that would suggest a different analysis.

You know what's funny? Weirdly enough I think they are paying more in tax revenue than they should because of this. For the AI companies to grow, they need to keep raising money. And I'm not just talking about Anthropic and Open AI, but Meta, Facebook, NVidia and the like.

Open AI and Anthropic pay no Federal Corporate income tax because they are not profitable. However, they do pay sales tax, which is a tax on revenue, so the states are getting some. Also they are paying property tax for data centers they own, although most are being built by others, but every data center pays property tax.

Meta is likely paying more in corporate tax. Zuckerberg is overspending on AI to try and catch up, adn he's behind. If the true spend was clear, Meta's stock would suffer. So they're pulling an accounting trick. When you buy equipment, you're allowed to depreciate the cost of that equipment as an expense, even though it's a non-cash expense. This is to recognize that machinery and buildings and such have a fixed life before they fail. What Meta did is change their depreciation schedule on GPUs from 3 years to 7 years. This way, their profits weren't hurt too bad. This is actually bad because teh GPUs last 3 years, so MEta will have to replace assets that ostensibly halfway through their useful life and take an asset write off when they do which won't look good, but it propped up their profitability for their earnings call. As such, becuase it increased their profits, they had to pay more corporate tax.

NVidia is likely paying more in tax than they should. WHat they do is they "invest" in groups like OpenAI. Let's say they invest $5B. However they don't give OpenAI $5B in cash. They instead give OpenAI GPUs that in total are priced at $5B. No cash changed hands, but a sale is made, and they need to pay taxes in cash on what was a non-cash revenue stream. Also likely at inflated prices because the demand is up by them doing this. So NVidia feeding everyone's addition raises the prices of their product, raising their revenue, requiring them to pay more in taxes but a bunch of it is not in cash. Of course that equity they receive goes up in value, theoretically, since it's private valuations and they have no real meaning. Nevertheless their revenue and profits are inflated, making them pay more in cash for sales tax and income tax than they otherwise would. Microsoft did the same thing; they "invested" in OpenAI, and did give them some cash, but much of it was in cloud-computing credits, not cash, but it's still revenue.

The cyclical growth of the valuations of these companies are heavily inflated, but you can't tax that because it's unrealized gains; it's meaningless value unless it turns into cash, and wealth taxes historically have done no good but damage economies.

Anyways, I think the tax part of this is entirely screwed up.

Except this time the US government doesn't have the finances to support them.

TARP was a net positive for the US. The banks that got bailed out paid back their loans with interest, and the stocks the US government took in those banks paid dividends. Eventually the US government took equity in hundreds of banks around the country through direct stock purchases and warrants (think options) of around $245B, and sold them for $275B for a $30B profit. There were several social programs to help individuals that ended up being a net loss that weighed down the overall TARP program, but the government did get paid back and in general made some money on it.

But that was when the US government was spending around 10% of net revenue on debt services and had a debt-to-GDP of around 35%. Today it's around 100% and it spends more on debt servicing than the entire US Defense budget. So a TARP-style protection program could be much more difficult.

But aside from all of this, the government won't want tech to fail. I doubt they really need Anthropic or OpenAI, but they will need Microsoft, Oracle, NVidia, and others for both DoD purposes and export purposes. So most likely there will be some kind of bailout when this all shakes out.

I would disagree with you on RAM. RAM all around is going up in price. RAM suppliers make good margins on the high-end RAM used in these data center GPU setups but the demand wasn't very high for them. Now with this buildout, the demand was very high and they made money hand over fist. But the RAM guys didn't build new production lines, they just shifted supply to the more profitable in-demand product. As a result, all RAM went up in price, because the RAM providers started making less of the lower-end, more common RAM.

So if demand dries up for AI data center buildouts, then there won't be as much demand for that high-end RAM. The suppliers will then shift production back to the more common RAM, which should bring hte price back down again. I don't see it crashing as the OP said, but I would use the term "normalize".

You're missing a big one:

5) Nvidia doesn't have the money to guarantee these loans. Nvidia has in current assets around 125B; about 50% to guarantee these loans.

We have a major issue here. These guys had all this circular finance with equity, where Nvidia would invest in OpenAI who then turn around and bought chips from them, adding to NVidia's revenue. Very little cash was exchanged, the equity was exchanged, but then the equity went up (in a private valuation) because OpenAI was spending more on Capex. Now people are calling BS on this circular finance non-sense, so they're turning to debt.

But the debt is a problem. Bloomberg came out (non-paywall source from Futurism) with a report saying they're using Enron-style accounting, essentially shell companies to hold the debt while they own 20% of the shell, so the debt stays off their books. Debt financing like this however is extremely reckless; it is the source of the Enron crash, the Lucent technologies crash (Lucent also got into trouble with risky customer financing and crashed big time), the 2008 financial crisis, etc.

These guys are headed for a fall and will bring the economy into recession with it, right when the US government is too over-leveraged too.

$50K per year is $24 dollars per hour. Since your self employed, you have to pay 100% of your SS/Medicare taxes (there's no "employer" to pay 1/2) plus the 15% self employed FIT. That's (c) $7K in MC/SS + $6K in fit. That leaves you with $37K net (less if you had to buy something to be an "influencer") or about $17.75 per hour..... AND your working 2 jobs at 60+ hours per week.
BTW, my 26 year old son makes $90K per year working for a city parks department. No college, full city paid benefits and a pension, at 40 hours per week. So, ya. keep side hustling.
I personally wouldn't get out of bed for $25/hour. I broke that level back in the early 1990's, and it's been up ever since.

40% of Canada's land area is covered in forests. It is simply impossible to "manage" that much forest, and it's utterly fucking absurd to suggest otherwise. And to try to take climate change out of the equation is just a way of misdirecting away from the actual fucking cause; GHG emissions raising surface temperatures.

When will humans stop buying the most trivially fucking moronic red herrings? What a disreputable idiotic species.

It's almost as if allowing emissions to ramp up with little meaningful effort to control them is having the inevitable consequences predicted decades ago. But let's not deal with that, because it's hard. Instead let's have the President of the United States demand Canada hold back the tides.

Sony is a big company with many divisions that do their own things and operate with their customers in their own ways. That being said, there does seem to be some consistency here. Many years ago when i lived in San Diego, a guy I knew worked for Sony Online Entertainment and he worked on Star Wars Galaxies. I recall how at a party he gleefully told stories about how players would complain about certain things, and the mods would actively punish and ban them for complaining about imbalance and lack of features. He wasn't directly involved with the infamous Teleport them into Space situation, but he knew people who were and laughed about it, and as a player when I said that seems kind of bad service to your customer his response was that "why should we care, we're Sony, we're the best and those players f*ing deserved it". The guy was a a total POS, and my admittedly long ago and minimal experience suggests they, at least at that time, hired that type.

I don't actually use Apple Store all that often. A fair portion of the software I have installed, like LibreOffice and Firefox is just installed via DMG images. It kicks up a window about unrecognized source, but then just works. iOS devices are definitely more locked down, but the Macs are really no different as far as installing software than Windows or Linux.