I won a Pulitzer for explaining the Great Depression. The AI spending boom terrifies me

OpenAI and Anthropic's IPOs +2-4 weeks is my best guess for when the market starts sliding. Investor money is already drying up, but too many rich people haven't cashed out yet, helping themselves (like SpaceX) to our index retirement funds to countersign withdrawals at the inflated valuations.

I'm on the fence after that if it'll happen slow or fast. Possible we'll get a Bear Stearns/Lehman type failure that brings down the world's markets, after a major player no longer has a blank check at multi-billion/quarter burn rates, and hits insolvency like a freight train. But also likely it could unravel more slowly like a sweater, as de-escalating levels of market access pull on the thread in turn.

shocked that the “euphoria” hasn’t collided with the disappointing reality yet. At least not catastrophically.

I think part of the problem is that a significant part of the hype is being shown as not hype. By significant, I mean a small percentage, less than 10%, but with so much hype being pumped up out there, even 5% is highly significant.

they have the levers and means to come out on top of it.

To delude themselves that they'll be coming out on top... they'll suffer too, and the more they strive to climb, the more they'll be risking everything.

CEOs are smart people who are legally bound to safeguard their companies and they wouldn’t be so heavily invested in AI if there was any chance of its being a bubble.

Reciting his training - were I your mother, I'd never speak with Lameman James' Tool again and ensure that they receive no further comissions from her assets.

I would immediately change brokers. That's a level of uneducated and propagandized that is truly dangerous.

except this time, AI costed them more than it returned.

• install a solar system, no matter how big or small

Gee, get a load'a this one, goin round whackin heliocentric planetary systems in people's yards. Kickin off the gravitational alignment of Earth with their extra "sun and planets" next to the lavender.

I hear they even do dual-star solar systems.. pffft... thats just showing off.

start a garden

Just start with that one, because if you're really prepping, you'll never store enough food for a reboot from a real end of the supply chain shitstorm.

Don't just talk about a garden, read some books, plant a few seeds and watch them sprout and bloom, really try to garden enough to grow your food instead of buying it from the store. My challenge: 10% - can you replace 10% of your grocery purchases with home-grown heirloom seed stuff that you can replant from year to year without having to buy new Miracle Grow soil for your raised beds every year. Most people will find that they can't. That they don't have enough time and attention in their busy lives to even supply 10% of their own food from a garden on their land without buying all kinds of inputs to the garden that will not be available right about the same time the food for purchase goes away. Those who are successful will find that the $600 worth of food they grow costs them 300+ hours a year of labor to produce, protect from consumption by birds, rodents, deer and other pests. Now add human neighbor poachers to that list of pests - which one of you will be running out of ammunition first?

Oh, those deer, we can shoot enough deer to make jerky all year! Yeah, it will have to be jerky because refrigeration isn't a thing after the food stops coming to the grocery stores, and how long do you think it will take for 350 million Americans to harvest every single deer on the continent? After year 2 or 3, any deer remaining will still be alive because they run hard the other direction at the first sight, sound or scent of man.

Investment banking 101.

You're training the AI on tactics to avoid

It is absolutely one of the goals. The goals are many, the benefactors are few.

But that will only be bad for you if you're poor.

No, people just think your petty response to the headline, in the absence of any meaningful response to the article, doesn't contribute anything to the conversation.

you couldn't have addressed the writer, when you were referring to the person with the pulitzer