Signed, the Silent Majority
Agree.
What we need is a revocation of the Exchange Stabilisation Fund [1] as well as hard limits on the Defense Production Act’s Title III [2] and whatever the fuck in the CHIPS Act let the President unilaterally invest taxpayer funds in Intel.
This announcement of a non-binding resolution does none of that. It’s pure puffery.
And in case anyone thinks this is hateful or harsh, remember: bankruptcy doesn’t mean we space laser these companies. Shareholders get wiped. Creditors take over. Services probably keep getting rendered, GPUs probably keep running.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange_Stabilization_Fund
[2] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/COMPS-8323/pdf/COMPS-832...
How exactly are House Democrats supposed to revoke the Exchange Stabilization Fund or change the Defense Production Act when they don't have a majority in the House? All they can do is signal what they intend to do if they regain the majority.
Introduce an actual bill. Draft and debate something specific so that when they are in power they don’t have to start from scratch.
Use procedure to try and bring it up for a vote. At least try to legislate.
Who cares. Write a damn bill. Get agreement among your members that specific text works. That is the first step to any legislating. It’s also something Democrats know how to do—even the CPC has an energy bill drafted. It’s what you do when you’re being serious about prioritizing legislating versus tweeting.
If you care about this issue and have D representation, call and demand an actual bill.
Everyone is complaining that the current Democratic candidate has had basically no ad presence. The Republican would be in the same boat, as they both received about the same amount in individual donations, but the latter actually got national and PAC support to run ads.
We do this to ourselves.
Middle school level opinion. Laughable, almost. What possible authoritative source could you point to to even remotely beg this case that isn’t silly conjecture in 2026?
They do introduce bills in committee. Which are shot down in committee by the instrangient Republicans that lead the committees refusing to compromise often before the bill can come to the full congress. You are asking Dems to do something they literally cannot do while minority party. You are asking Dems to do an impossible thing and then complaining they cannot.
> Introduce an actual bill. Draft and debate something specific so that when they are in power they don’t have to start from scratch.
You're also complainging about democrats not introducing bills... on a post from Democrats proposing bills (well, resolution. whatever, still not starting from scratch then)!!!! You're complaining about something that literally already exists! Stop being so blind.
Sure. They also publish draft bills.
That lets folks comment and edit and build consensus while the other guys are in power. (Or snatch some across-the-aisle votes.)
It’s how effective shadow governments work in parliamentary systems. It’s what the GOP was up to while it was out of power. It’s what the Congressional Progressive Caucus does when it actually plans on passing laws about something [1].
Just not here. Because this is puffery.
> on a post from Democrats proposing bills (well, resolution
Big difference! You float a resolution when you want to tweet about it. You publish a draft bill when you want to legislate.
Edit: love the downvotes, keep them coming. “We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas.” Classic Big D.
but then the speaker also controls the schedule so republicans will just shut it down and not work for 2 months to avoid the vote.
Resolutions are cheap theater. There’s been a huge number from both parties over the last decade, with very few tangible results except from some joint resolutions that stripped away regulations.
He wasn’t saying that it had to actually get into the floor. Just make an effort and use that as an explicit position when campaigning, then follow through.
From them:
"Use procedure to try and bring it up for a vote. At least try to legislate."
"Edit: love the downvotes, keep them coming. “We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas.” Classic Big D."
They literally are. This guys is explicitly bitching about things actively happening.
From you:
"Just make an effort and use that as an explicit position when campaigning, then follow through."
He literally called making an explicit promises "pure puffery" and they cannot follow through until they are seated so no, they are not saying that. This person isn't worth defending and is not saying any of the things you are assigning to them.
They’re absolutely not. This is a non-binding resolution. It’s had none of the hard discussions around what should be revoked and how what isn’t revoked should be revised. It’s a nothing burger.
Yes. I just had a markup of one floated to me by a New York member. This is what you do when you’re preparing to go back into power.
It's Murc's law all the way down.
It is still "puffery" if they don't have the needed majority to pass it. I am sorry, I can see you try to find any excuse, purity test, "no true Scotsman" fallacy, to rationalize not voting for the Democrats, but you will have to if you want anything to happen.
However, putting legislation up for a vote is not puffery. Establishing what parties vote against and why is actually an important part of what the opposition does. Otherwise they may as well not turn up.
And because republicans are a unified block whose entire platform is to serve you for dinner. Their whole existence is dedicated to reversing any change.
You would like a third, fourth choice outside of Democrats and Republicans? Well, you would need a ranked-choice voting system for that. Remind me, who is pushing to extend that system of voting? And who is completely opposed to it and is even banning it wherever they can? Dare to answer?
I know it sounds strange, but what if the math is right, and there can actually be casual relationships?
Change the rules legally if they don’t work. Rouse your base with actual arguments legally if they don’t work.
You aren't talking about compromise on fiscal policy, you're talking about compromise on basic human rights and decency. Accepting transphobia from the Democratic party just means the transphobes get everything they want.
Democrats aren't choosing not to take sides, they're choosing to take the anti-trans side because they feel (likely correctly) that it holds more political currency in the current right-wing authoritarian climate.
>That doesn't mean someone should be against making trans a protected class for employment, et cetera purposes.
But that's just the thing - they will turn against that for the same reason, naked political opportunism. Republicans seem to actually care about principles, odious as those principles sometimes are, whereas the Democrats are constantly trying to curry favor with centrists and conservatives because they're afraid to be labelled "leftist."
Which principles straddle Reagan, Gingrich, Bush and Trump?
And why? Aren't you forgetting something?
Who is hurt most by a government shutdown? What does it solve? Would Democrats have gained something politcally or lost more support?
Earlier today I had to grit my teeth and vote for Josh Turek in Iowa, even though I think he's a shithead who threw trans people under the bus just to eke out a few more votes from conservative fence sitters. I could've made a protest vote, but the realpolitik of the situation is I'm either getting Turek or his Republican opponent, and I think Turek will do a much better job representing me despite his dumbass about-face on trans issues, whereas the Republican will be actively harmful.
The other party in question is the problem, and you're nitpicking an utterly powerless minority party's efforts to make things better.
to the dead reply: "is currently the problem" then. The party alignments have completetly flipped in 150 years. Nothing is permanent, and I thought that didn't have to be explicitly stated. Since I was incorrect about that I'm talking about the current state of the world, with no naive attachement to a particular label.
I’m holding the party that has a hope of saving our republic to account for not repeating the messaging-BS mistakes from the later Biden years.
Non-binding resolutions are a mockable waste of time. They do nothing for affordability or corruption or reducing the chances of an AI bail-out.
And this is how the game works, as easy as taking candy from babies
They're going to have a majority in about 3 days. They won't have a veto proof majority but they will have a majority.
They’ll try to pass the bills they’ve actually written and published and debated and built consensus around.
I don't understand this position. Two years of stalled government would be a godsend after the past two years. Dear lord, if we could just slow the daily assaults on people and the environment, domestically and abroad, I'd sing Hallelujah.
Conviction requires 2/3rd of those present in the Senate.
There's no veto possible.The power is exclusive to the legislative branch, the other two branches have no say at all.
They can force compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act and release the documents currently being illegally hidden.
Even when they’re in the majority they play victim. “Oh no Mitch McConnell doesn’t like our bill :( We can’t do anything”. The party is too busy trying to court Republicans to get anything done.
Or they sabotage themselves. Pushing Hillary and losing was preferred to risking a Sanders win and losing corporate funding. Pushing Biden, who promised to run one term, then running him a second. Only to undemocratically replace him cause people didn’t want a senile candidate.
You have Bush-era never-MAGA Republicans publicly making statements on how they’re voting Democrat. They seem more willing to vote D than their actual base. It’s ridiculous.
Meanwhile, Republicans actively court their base and seem to accomplish things when they’re the minority party.
In the past couple days I’ve heard glee and celebration at the idea of more non-binding things “getting things onto the record so everyone can see where loyalties lies”
So if you are a politician catering to your constituents, that makes sense to do
US Democrat Party are expected to obtain a majority in the House and Senate, remaining unable to pass any law through the Senate except an annual budget reconciliation, the vessel will continue to be stalled by the Filibuster needing 60 seats, vote to remove power that needs 67 seats, veto override ability that also needs 67 seats. Nobody in the opposition party will vote in favor, barring one or two, which will not be enough. This effectively keeps the US legislative body paralyzed but even more so than now. It will now also stall appointments from the President, so additional agency heads and judges won’t be installed but the Federal Government already did that for the last 2 years and will continue all of its own causes unabated
I think one criticism of that party are the performative nature of its constituents and representatives, where a “virtue” is demanded to be shown more than legislative change, as opposed to focusing on things that could garner consensus of which there are many, revisiting other causes when the seats are actually there. Seems to match the criticism, I suppose the other party does it too? Thats what is generally revealed to me when I make an observation. Just doesn’t seem like an identity of the other party as their control of the executive branch, military and courts is more than performative.
When Trump took over, he scrapped so many of these programs and the companies were forced to take massive writeoffs in their investments. Those executives that championed these moves to EVs are persona non grata now in the industry(at least for the time being). These back and forth demands is really causing a lot of trouble for the legacy makers.
Tesla managing to be able to detach themselves from having to answer to wallstreet and not actually caring about what the government says has allowed them to go at their own pace. The other American EV companies are on life support and the Chinese companies have always answered to one entity: the CCP.
If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem. If you owe the bank $100 billion, that's country's problem.
https://www.reuters.com/article/business/us-government-says-...
GM lost taxpayers $11B, Chrysler lost $1.2B.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program
TARP delivered a $15.3B surplus on $426.4B invested for a roughly 3.5% return.
I think the only reason Iceland nationalized the failed banks in the first place was because they had no other option, the economy is too small, and they simply could not afford to bail them out, the money literally did not exist.
Also, today’s Iceland is extremely troubled by austerity. Schools and healthcare is extremely underfunded. Teachers- and nurses strike almost every 2 years. The city of Reykjavík just started their biggest round of mass-layoff ever.
Note also that since then, all the nationalized banks are back on the public market with the state only holding plurality or even minority shares. Investment/retirement funds and private investors together hold bigger share then the state. These shares were more often then not released on a steep discount allowing investors (many of whom responsible for the 2008 crash) essentially free money from the state.
The phrase is "that would be good for the economy".
It’s still the notion of trickle down economics at play.
But they did get a 3.5% return on their investment (but not comparable to the equivalent return in the market or even in bonds for the same duration).
That return was in turn used to justify the bailout, but the global macro effects weren’t accounted for: the banks’ fuckup caused misery all over the world for the best part of a decade.
I still believe in democracy as a system however. It does need to be protected and maintained though. Jefferson said that "the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" and right now the tree is starting to look parched, but I'm still hoping we can bring it back into health with just a little more care and attention.
That's got perverse consequences. Just like with the corporate leadership, you're encouraging bureaucrats to make bad decisions because (a) they don't have to answer for their bad decisions, and in fact (b) they'll get to expand their authority should their decisions go bad.
The corporate leadership that got us to the problem should suffer, but so should any bureaucrats who had a part it allowing it to happen.
It's kinda like taxes. Who among us would say their tax dollars are and have been well spent? Then why on earth would any of us want to give these idiots more of our hard earned dollars.
Clinton worked with a Republican Congress (House and Senate). Both compromised, negotiated, and achieved something difficult and substantial.
We don't elect adults anymore.
Banks weren't over levered back then either because all the mortgages went straight into CDOs held by other people/institutions.
The problem was that nobody trusted each other because Lehman could just fail. So they stopped lending to each other (like the daily loans they give each other). Trust evaporated and the whole system stopped dead in its tracks.
Leverage is not the only thing that matters...
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-10-29/run...
The rate of growth in this sector is "1. move so fast legislators can't keep up; 2. keep going until you hit a limit, then find a way to hack around that limit; 3. GOTO 2".
They bailed out Intel and the stock recovered.
Might do the same.
Intel’s revenue is currently worse than 10 years ago, and gross profits are 2/3 of what they were around 2012.
The temporary price hike was caused by a huge temporary jump in relative valuation (probably because the US Gov started subsidizing).
See the historical graphs:
- https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/INTC/intel/pe-rati...
- https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/INTC/intel/revenue
- https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/INTC/intel/gross-p...
Big companies are like big ships. Takes a LONG time to turn.
Game is not over yet.
> They bailed out Intel and the stock recovered.
I don’t think the stock (or the company) has recovered at all. Neither profits nor revenue (see my links above).
But hey, who knows what the future brings.
It closed today above $60.
That's a stock recovery.
I was very specific. I said stock. That's a recovery.
Currently trading at 3-4x historical valuation (20y typical range of forward P/E).
It takes forever to do anything new in hardware.
This is unfortunately a VERY long game.
The stock price recovered. This is a fact. From 20 to 60.
Cannot be argued.
The business will take time to recover. There is no other way. Either it takes time to recover, or it never does. One year is not remotely enough time to know.
> They bailed out Intel and the stock recovered.
This is not demonstrated. What did the Trump admin "figure out"? Socializing private losses (especially if it's only temporary), is another problem, not a solution.
How to abuse their position to stuff insane amounts of money into their own pockets at the expensive of the American people and get away with it.
Our enemies should be throwing him parades even if he isn't a foreign agent. He's the gift that just keeps on giving.
Edit: Taking bailouts off the table forces discipline, it strips away the bloat and forces real efficiency.
I worry that one of the reasons that Anthropic has 500 billion in commitments and everyone is running to the credit markets is to make it so that if they fail everyone suffers.
Ever is a stretch. Government shouldn’t be bailing out shareholders and senior managers.
Who are you thinking of?
That’s what happened in 2023. In 2008, depositors almost got wiped out and a lot of senior managers and stockholders got bailouts.
At NetBank? Only if they were over the FDIC limit. Stockholders got destroyed, though.
At Bear Stearns? No, depositors got protected in a convoluted deal. The shareholders got very close to nothing.
At Lehman Brothers? They did "break the buck" on money market funds for a bit, but weren't depositors made whole? And weren't stock owners wiped out in the bankruptcy?
Washington Mutual? Depositors were covered by the FDIC.
Where were depositors "almost wiped out"? Where specifically? Where were stockholders bailed out?
“The [Deposit Insurance Fund] fell to the lowest point in its history, a negative $20.9 billion on an accounting basis, by year-end 2009.
…
To address this issue, the FDIC adopted a novel approach that required the banking industry to prepay its quarterly risk-based assessments for the fourth quarter of 2009 and for the next three years” [1].
Where did “significant amounts of cash” this was funded out of, which “banks were holding at the time,” come from? From the Fed and the bail-outs.
Without the bail-outs, banks wouldn’t have been able to fund the DIF and the FDIC would have faced the threat of insolvency.
> Where were stockholders bailed out?
Every institution that participated in TARP [2].
[1] https://www.fdic.gov/bank/historical/crisis/overview.pdf
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program
No. The FDIC can borrow from the Treasury. Not the Fed. The Fed backstops’ banks liquidity. The FDIC backstops banks’ solvency inasmuch as it affects insured deposits.
We needed new laws in 2008 because the Fed’s backstop alone was insufficient. These banks weren’t just illiquid, they were insolvent. TARP gave them liquidity for “troubled assets.”
I mean, look, you can point to some losses by depositors - those over the FDIC limit, and when two money market funds broke the buck. You can also point to some instances where the rescues helped stockholders, at least compared to what their losses would have been. But the general trend was that shareholders took a bath, and depositors did not.
That’s what happened in 2023.
FDIC didn’t pay anything out. The new capital requirements and conservatorship processes worked.
> that set a very dangerous precedent
I don’t like how it happened. But codifying universal deposit insurance in U.S. banks isn’t a bad idea. Maybe one caps it for foreign deposits.
You cannot do this if the big Wall Street firms collapse.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Wall Street firms as such don't have deposits; Wachovia, Washington Mutual, and a number of smaller but still large banks were handled in similar ways to avoid any loss of even uninsured deposits.
Perhaps you're under the impression that the FDIC paid out of its fund for those deposits? (e: Originally I claimed this impression was wrong, but in fact I was wrong.)
Are you further claiming that large commercial banks don't have depositors?
I do think that "Wall Street firms" in even the most expansive sense isn't generally understood to include large commercial banks. Some companies like JPMorgan are big enough in investment banking to kinda land on both sides of the line, but I've never heard anyone refer to Bank of America or Wells Fargo as a Wall Street firm.
What makes this so politically unpalatable is that having constantly bailed out the last few cycles, everyone is now operating on the assumption that they will be bailed out, so many entities who in a more perfect world would know better have done a lot of stupid things, like pensions that have a lot of bonds that will go bad if the AI bubble collapses.
Frankly we're looking at massive problems and upheaval at this point no matter what we do. But the advantage of not socializing the losses is that the signals of what needs to be changed go directly into the economy. Socializing the losses means that the signals get muted, confused, and mangled and people in the future end up doing the wrong things as a result.
Unfortunately, at this point I think the choice is between people clearly and forthrightly losing massive portions of their retirement as visible losses, or people deceptively losing massive portions of their retirement as the bailout creates massive inflation and their retirement is inflated until it has a fairly similar amount of losses. Unfortunately, it is a feature for the rulers that the bailouts obscure the losses and dampen the correct apportionment of blame, even as it destroys the underlying economy. Giving people clear, correct targets for their rage, the same process of correct pain apportionment the economy needs to become healthy again, would point people at the "wrong" clear, correct targets, and the clear, correct targets are the ones deciding whether or not a bailout occurs. Not just the literal lawmakers nominally making the call, but the entire system that makes the decision.
So plan on bailouts.
We've been living in an economy distorted by the forces that lead us to this point. We've been locked into the decisions necessary to keep things going as they have been, whether or not they make sense.
The correction that you're talking about frees us to actually make choices. Some of them will be tough choices, but we finally get to make them, with all of our resources and work ethic intact, which don't just disappear because a stock index craters.
If we want trains and local farms instead of data centers and new iPhones, we can actually make that choice, instead of being forced into the latter because every investment fund is pumping them to the point of being a foregone conclusion.
To borrow an aphorism: the bust is a feature, not a bug.
What is much less known, because it kinda kills the talking point, is that the "too big to fail" bailouts were fully repaid with interest, to the tune of an ~$17B profit.
The losses from the program were from the auto industry ($12B) and the struggling homeowners fund ($31B). Which is a bit ironic, because those two are probably the ones that would have the most public support.
1) economy tanks, people earn less disposable income or become unemployed
2) consumers spending less tanks the economy even more
We have historical precedent for this in the great depression, and the government going hands-off back then made the problem almost certainly much worse.
You could even make a pretty credible argument that the Nazis only got into power thanks to this, so there's your doomsday scenario.
I think we screwed up after 2008 and I would like to see us get it right this time. The government absolutely should be hands-on, but the focus should be on raw productivity and public well-being, not making certain that certain firms survive the bloodbath.
You know what's a great economic stimulus? You now own the house you owe a mortgage on, clear and free. "But that would bankrupt the mortgage-holding bank!" Okay.
This is what was allowed during the great depression and what we desperately tried to avoid in later crises.
Western democracies are not set up at all to let the government direct and compensate millions of workers on the turn of a dime; micromanagement by government in such a situation can be expected to be extremely wasteful and ineffective, and this only got worse, because we have less generic/unqualified use for human labor than in the past (construction, railroads, motorways, heavy industry), and specialists are even harder to manage.
If everyone stops even just believing in the ability of local supermarkets to provide toilet paper next week or, on the other end of the spectrum, starts distrusting the banking system/dollar entirely, then the consequences can be extensive, expensive and slow to recover.
It might even be worth it to feed taxpayer money to rich greedy capitalists because the public comes out on top still by avoiding that trust collapse.
This is important because it exposes the needle you have to thread: messaging that makes clear that you're intentionally throwing out the old banks and companies (or their leadership) in order to preserve their prosocial functionality without their antisocial dysfunction. People who are happy to see Goldman Sach burn still want a way to safeguard their money; people who want Mark Zuckerberg to pay the piper don't necessarily want to lose their Instagram galleries or Facebook connections.
The people who run these companies want us to believe that a collapse of the status quo is a total collapse, but it's not. And a government that facilitates transition of ownership and leadership to more capable hands doesn't have to follow the oligarch playbook; different ownership models and transition processes exist.
I'll give an example. Consider people living in a corporation-owned apartment complex. The company collapses - most such corporate landlords collapse - and maybe the bank holding the loan does too. There is no world in which the complex sells at its previous value, and there is probably a temptation to facilitate some transaction, any transaction, that would bring things back to order by designating a concrete owner. Of course, there are people living in the complex, and God knows what happens to them when God knows whoever shows up claiming rights to the units.
Or.
The government steps in. They claim eminent domain and set aside reasonable funds to pay whoever turns out to be the final previous owner. A co-op is formed and ownership is transferred to the current residents as a subsidy; they now own the units they previously rented. Their lives are not disrupted by forced eviction; the municipality is not disrupted by an explosion of homelessness. The main losers are the old owners and banks, and they're bankrupt and dissolved anyway. Life goes on.
I'm not saying that it's an easy transition. Russia showed us how to screw it up. But the successful scenario is a far better outcome for far more people than throwing our hands up, exclaiming that we don't know how to do anything without letting vulture capitalists have their way, and inviting them in to freely carry out the exact scenario (which continues to distort markets and makes the next reckoning all the worse) which is the failure mode of the above proposal anyway.
But I think more than the one-off situation is also the precedent it sets. When you can bank on the government bailing you out (pun intended I guess?), it creates a perverse incentive of just trying to get as large as you possibly can, all foundation or principles absolutely be damned - because once you get big enough you win, even if you're the biggest loser ever. And I do think that's what we're probably seeing with LLM companies.
Not that LLM's a loser - it's a revolutionary tech and will only become more so. But multi trillion dollar valuations for a product that has viable open competitors already available and whose operating requirements continue to plummet and will almost certainly continue to plummet? This is extremely amusing, but absolutely batshit insane. It's like paying millions for a pretty flower because it's novel in spite of the fact that you know, and everyone else knows, that once people start planting them there will be endless amounts available for negligible cost.
If the bank didn't properly collateralize the loan, then the banks shareholders should take the hit.
Either way the people should never bail out corporations.
Give me $100 billion and I will make the greatest pencil sharpener that has ever existed, and possibly that will ever exist.
The market for AI is very clearly there; people are willing to pay more than enough so that providing LLM infrastructure (inference) is profitable.
Just the SOTA model R&D is pretty unsustainably expensive right now, but this only means that if the status quo "bursts" (because people realize that pushing the frontier is not paying off), model improvement will (probably) be slower afterward.
Note: this could also happen because expensive SOTA progress fails to keep ahead of "garage-trained" models, in such a case SOTA-AI lab investments collapsing would not really slow AI progress anyway.
At the debt levels they have, they need to start shoreing up their books or else the ramifications for the entire market will be apocalyptic
"Correct" investment volume towards early industrialization might have looked just as unreasonable without the benefit of hindsight.
Let me guess, subscription user?
And I realize also that they are reducing churn by keeping the value there for subscribers. Not sure what that’s costing them, but it’s definitely holding me as a customer. The product works so well for me that I honestly don’t need to even glance at the competition.
And honestly, this has been the case since day one. I’ve always used Claude. ChatGPT a bit in the beginning, but it’s emoji fetish and “bro” personality gave me the ick so I dropped them.
Then you have absolutely no idea what is going on. It has exactly zero to do with what AI can do, and everything to do with how the companies are being run. The technology will not die, but the AI bubble will pop, regardless of what Claude can do.
The demand and profit margins for inference at the moment means that all these companies will make money off the physical investment.
So are they showing a profit that can pay off these data centers before the turn of the decade? If not, they aren't profitable enough to succeed.
Chapter 7, please! I would like them to *liquidate* Smaug's GPU hoard; and I would like them to do that all at once, in a swift and efficient fire sale.
These come around once in a while. Go get that seller’s Gaudi rig if you want to test the experience. It costs one-time as much as the monthly power cost on a B300 NVL72 and uses a fifth the power.
Dragons are famous for sitting on gold.
Today, approximately 7%–12% of gold is used for micro-plating connectors, contact pins, and circuitry in smartphones, computers, and GPS devices.
> 1. Total AWS Gold: 10,000,000 servers multiplied by 1.875 grams equals 18,750,000 grams (18,750 kg).
> 2. Bezos's Share: 18,750 kg multiplied by an 8.5% ownership stake equals 1,593.75 kg
They (the AI companies) are sitting on piles all right, but not "assets like dragons". Rather, what they are sitting on is piles and piles of debt that eventually will come due to be paid back. The "bet" their CEO's are making is that some "profit angle" will materialize at some point that provides the funds to pay back that debt when the bills start coming due.
> If they haven't saved any money
They have not "saved any money" (not in the sense of a "saving account" in a bank). They are leveraged as far into the future as one can see, and betting that before that lever starts to move they will have a revenue stream sufficient to pay it back.
This is hyper capitalism and accelerationism at its finest.
I have seen this used abusively too many times.
The moral majority is neither.
If your opinion is the majority opinion you do not need to say so.
Indeed they may, but they will be taking a lot of people's 401k's with them. Does anyone here have a 401k and have they analyzed the portfolio to verify none of the assets are related to the AI companies? In some cases it will not be obvious.
If one owns a standard cap-weighted S&P 500 index fund or a default target-date fund in their 401k then about 30% to 40% of every dollar contributed goes directly to the dominant tech giants driving AI.
I am not a financial expert and this is not financial advice.
> they will be taking a lot of people's 401k's with them
We had that happen in the late 90s/early 2000s with Nortel. Before they collapsed (and infamously devastated their current and former employees' pensions in doing so), Nortel represented a THIRD of the TSX. The TSX responded by capping any individual stock at 10% of the exchange's overall value, with a forced rebalancing in the event that cap is struck.
At this point, that 10% is probably higher than it should be, since it doesn't account for entire extremely-well-funded sectors being caught up in a hype cycle like AI's, the sum of whose component stocks could easily exceed 10%.
Agreed. I have no idea how to stop it. People push for legislation and then there is always some loophole that quietly appears.
I know, I know, I’m delusional.
When I first heard the scheme as a kid[1] -- that my retirement depended on giving my money back to the owners, all in the hope that it will come back to me in fifty years -- my first thought was, "I'm never seeing that money". I signed for the matching contribution and not a cent more -- getting 2 bucks of Funny Money for each buck seemed like a decent gamble. As I got older I started thinking that the system must work, all the grown ups know what they're doing, "it's the responsible thing to do". Etc etc etc. Now, I'm coming back around to my teenage opinions: they're going to figure out a way to take every single cent of my money.
Shit like this makes people into goldbugs and ammo hoarders. Or worse.
[1] My generation had some of the last pension positions, and 401ks were fairly the new thing.
You won't get any arguments from me. I have chased many 401k grifters and hawkers off corporate property. I'm just saying people may not realize that upwards of 30% to 40% of their portfolio may be impacted by a crash and maybe there is something they can do proactively (or not, I am no expert on this). It's just something to investigate, I think.
But Congress wrote laws specifically to make it a horrible idea for companies to do this. At some point isn't the Congress responsible for creating an environment that not only enables but actively encourages this?
Surely this isn’t pure coincidence!?
Jeff, the Origin https://imgur.com/gallery/jeff-origin-lp9Q2tC
The issue is that this gives perverse incentives for companies, unless you also have proper regulation, which you should have anyway. The issue is that you don't.
But in this case I agree with you, because in addition to the costs, there are also huge benefits for the general population to letting these companies fail. Both in actual behaviour and power right now, but also as a future incentive for all other companies.
I won't make a similar argument here because about an AI bailout because the counterparties know the risks, but there are pensions with requirements to hold high-grade debt buying these bonds. An AI bubble burst doesn't just show up in the Nasdaq, it hits pensions.
- your elected representatives
I hate this phrase. It's simultaneously self-aggrandizing and dishonest.
If you're silent, you're literally indistinguishable from any silent fringe minority. You have no assurance you even hold a majority opinion!
And besides, if you were a majority, the solution is easy: stop being silent.
I agree with you that we should privatize the losses; I'm just not going to make (and dishonestly push) the idea that what I believe is somehow a majority opinion.
Also funny enough - AAPL is siting on 62B$ cash according to google search.
Does someone have a storage room full of data centers?
Even my old RTX 6000 Pros would be profitable if I rented them out.
That's the usual approach yes. You want to have equipment you buy show up where it's going to be installed, installed and activated in as short a time possible. You don't want to have it sit in a warehouse for 6 months while you try to get permission to break ground because, in a normal market, the equipment will be losing value during that time.
Right now, the lead time of these racks is like 36 weeks and they’ll want payment down unless they’re sure you’re good for it which is in the $100m range. You just try to get them as soon as you can because and when the integrator and Nvidia can get them to you.
I don’t understand what the problem is here. You think they’re damaging their own economics on purpose? Every time I’ve been involved in hardware procurement, it’s been the case that you try to get things as fast as possible on everything because you never know which seemingly fixed lead time suddenly clears.
If you intentionally bake in delays you’re guaranteed to not make it work, esp. in a demand crunch. My GPUs are SMB/prosumer range and even they are much harder to get now. The smartest thing I did was lock in my purchases in January. If I had been unable to negotiate the rack space it would have been suboptimal but if I had decided to wait for guaranteed time I would have been screwed. As it so happens I should have gone to 2TB VRAM instead of aiming low.
This is the calculus that all businesses are facing, not just mine.
Now that I think about it, it would seem this may also apply to witches.
> Microsoft CEO says the company doesn't have enough electricity to install all the AI GPUs in its inventory
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-ceo-says-company-do...
Either way, it's more efficient to give whatever money to bail out individuals/consumers than to bail out rent seeking organizations
Isn't that what the IPOs are for?