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[–] 5 points 3 months ago (1 child)

Has anyone [of Lemmy/fediverse people here] independently confirmed the numbers? I'm not an investor though, just curious.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    AI, much like Enron, is 'too big to fail' (until it does, spectacularly)

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  • 38 comments in c/technology@lemmy.world view that post
    [–] 109 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    The Oracle credit rating is literally one step away from "Junk"!
    So at least regarding Oracle, the finance world is onto them.

    https://www.businessinsider.com/stock-market-orcl-ai-oracle-credit-downgrade-bond-market-warning-2026-7

    Just a few days ago Oracle was reduced from BBB to BBB-.

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  • [–] 85 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Enron got nothing on these crooks.

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  • [–] 60 points 3 months ago

    A Nikkei study put that hidden figure at $1.65 trillion, up roughly eightfold in four years. It is more than the $1.35 trillion the five report outright.

    The Enron echo

    The money is tied up in off-balance-sheet vehicles, the same kind of structure Enron used to hide debt before it collapsed 25 years ago. Back then it was fraud. Now, tightened rules and fuller disclosures make it legal.

    The tools are still there, though. “Enron’s crime wasn’t having special purpose vehicles,” analyst Gil Luria told Bloomberg Law. “Enron’s crime was hiding them.”

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  • [–] 55 points 3 months ago* (5 children)

    We’re all witnessing a terrifying game of musical debt. At some point the music is going to stop.

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  • [–] 19 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Theor goal is to make sure retail 401ks don't get the last seat.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    It's absolutely crazy to me how many people are investing their 401ks in AI. If you're gonna gamble away your savings on tech bros, then there's a much better investment...

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  • [–] 40 points 3 months ago
    [–] 32 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    We're on track for what several analysts said would happen prior to an AI crash around November to February.

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  • [–] 39 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    OH TAXPAAAAAAYERS

    WE'D LIKE ANOTHER BAILOUT

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  • [–] 23 points 3 months ago
    [–] 21 points 3 months ago
    [–] 21 points 3 months ago (13 children)

    What can people do to avoid getting caught by the bubble popping? Remove all tech stocks from their portfolio? What about indices like S&P500?

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  • [–] 9 points 3 months ago*

    I’m hedging, mostly with Berkshire Hathaway stock, some agriculture, and a few others that historically perform well in recessions.


    I would not touch S&P 500 with a ten foot pole. It’s all wrapped up in Big Tech.

    I don’t like shorts; you can’t predict when the drop will hit, so you’re just burning cash betting against growth until then.

    I don’t like commodities either. As Buffet said, a big block of gold doesn’t do anything; a factory or farm does.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 months ago

    You really either ride it out or be OK with the chance of missing out on a few more years of a hot market. I've been expecting a big (sustained) correction since 2018 and even COVID couldn't get it done.

    If you need money soon, put it in something fully insulated, like a CD or HYSA if you need it even more liquid. If you need wealth in 10+ years, just ride it out. Keep putting that piece of your paycheck in the infinite money glitch machine.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago

    I bought some value etf to hedge it. There is some theory out there that so called factor investing is worth it. The real deal is of course to catch the bottom. But as we saw with Iran war and the market it all gets eventually priced in even though everything seemingly goes to shit from different directions. I'm not smart enough for this...

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  • [–] 17 points 3 months ago

    No, this is have enough canned food scenario.

    If the money would wipe out from the economy, that is less money for everyone. First round of bankruptcies will also wipe out contractors and debt issuers of the bancrupted companies, and so on. Mass layoffs. People cannot afford restaurants, or car washes, more businesses out, more mass layoffs.

    In 2001 tech bubble the money haven't been lost. Virtual valuation dropped sharply. But the economy recovered in a year.

    This is like 2008, money have been poured into concrete and silicon chips. They were spend, gone for good. It will take a few good years to recover if the bubble would burst.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago

    I mean you can sell everything and leave it in cash i guess. But you have no idea how long these fuckers can keep the house of cards propped up. Government bailout, angel investors, who knows.

    Or if you really wanna get risky you could try to find a fund that shorts the market, specifically tech companies, then you could actually make money instead of just not lose any. I'm assuming you don't want to get into options trading.

    But again, timing is the biggest issue. There's an old saying "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent".

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    not much, unless you're rich and you make some smart hedge bets against it.

    diversify assets is always smart, move more of your portfolio to cash and bonds.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Yep hedging would work .

    But why do you need to be rich to buy a hedge? A leveraged option can be bought starting from a few dollars.

    The issue is not getting the hedge, it's getting the timing right. Plenty of people saw the GFC crash coming and invested in hedges, but they were too early and lost a bundle.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    well if you're rich and you lose a bundle it wont be a big of a deal, that's why.

    hedges are risky, and it's much easier to take risks if you have a large cushion to fall on when you fall.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

    Those are reasons why loses aren't as big of a concern for rich people. Not why hedges are only for rich people.

    The cost of a hedge is proportional to the assets being protected. If someone has say a $10,000 portfolio of stocks, and they think the market will crash in the next month or two, they could buy a protective option hedge for around $100. And if someone has a portfolio of $300 million, they could hedge for ~$3 million. Wealth is irrelevant.

    Also hedges aren't risky. They reduce risk. They're insurance.

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  • [–] 19 points 3 months ago

    Damn that's around 1% of the entire global GDP...

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  • [–] 15 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Now that every generation from gen-x on mostly no longer gets pensions but gets 401ks this can really f up people's savings that they will depend on in retirement.

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  • [–] 15 points 3 months ago

    This is fine.

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  • [–] 28 points 3 months ago
    27 comments in c/technology@beehaw.org view that post
    [–] 15 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    why is this written using sarcastic capitalization

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  • [–] 8 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Those business people. Do they even know business? I think it's just fraudulent of them to call themselves "business" people. Also, my kitchen sink tap is "tech". Not everything "tech" has to be related to the computers or the "digitals".

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  • [–] 17 points 3 months ago (18 children)

    Capitalism working as intended

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago* (17 children)

    Given your username and where it's registered, you will not like the answer, but: Socialists were also notorious for cooking the books to hide their failures, even more so than dirty capitalist pigs. It's one of the reasons why the system failed: Since everyone at every level was doing it, the already hopelessly out of their depth central planners had no reliable data to work with.

    This doesn't make the AI bubble okay, of course. I'm only writing this, because your smug comment combined with your user name are particularly ironic.

    Another thing: Had LLMs like we have them now been available in the '70s and '80s, the likes of East Germany and the Soviet Union would have been all over them in a desperate bid to save their economic system, just like they tried to with computerized planning and automation back then, wasting ridiculous and economically ruinous amounts of resources on extremely inefficient chip production before they collapsed. In a way, current-day tech giants and the corporate world in general are repeating this mistake in a desperate bid to take part in the "next big thing" in order to get out of the stagnation they found themselves in.

    Call it history repeating itself or rhyming - either way, I'm noticing some patterns here.

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  • [–] 17 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    I'm struggling to get the point of your comment. Let me try to squeeze some ideas from your post:

    • socialists are even worse than capitalist;
    • extremely inefficient chip production collapsed Soviet Union economy;
    • current-day tech giants as desperate today in attempt to save "their economic system" as Soviet Union and East Germany were in '70s and '80s?
    • all of above mentioned "doesn’t make the AI bubble okay, of course" right?

    PS If you feel painful to read this, so did others who read your post.

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  • [–] -1 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    I have a hunch you took this personally. Nah, I must be hallucinating.

    socialists are even worse than capitalist

    Their historic record is considerably worse. I don't even need to bring up gulags, mass starvation and the abysmal living and human rights conditions of every Socialist regime throughout history to support this point (but it doesn't hurt).

    This does not mean that pure capitalism is fine either (I used to consider myself a smug and enlightened centrist - can you tell?), but it tends to work the best with a fair bit of socialism injected in key areas (social safety net, high taxes on wealth, strong regulations and institutions, robust democratic decision making, lots of economic freedom and high social mobility), as in the Nordic model, which is arguably the best thing humans have come up with so far.

    extremely inefficient chip production collapsed Soviet Union economy

    I didn't say that, but it was definitely a strongly contributing factor. I mentioned East Germany in particular, since it spent a fortune on setting up a competitive chip industry to achieve parity with Western and Japanese companies, but failed. The debacle that was their infamous 1 MBit chip, which cost 1 Billion Ostmark to develop (at a time when the country was struggling with high debts it owed to West Germany), but never achieved more than 20% yields in pre-production and was never production-ready illustrates just how hopeless the endeavor was. By the time the chip was in said pre-production state, Japan was already producing 4 MBit chips en masse, at economic yields, of course. I can't find the numbers on how much of the state budget went into this, but it was a considerable portion, at the cost of everything else. Literally their hail Mary.

    Ironically, these investments did pay off in the long run, just not for them: The area where the East German government concentrated its chip production is now known as the German silicon valley. Investments into education and research in particular laid the groundwork for the current and very competitive market-driven chip industry and other IT companies that have settled there.

    current-day tech giants as desperate today in attempt to save “their economic system” as Soviet Union and East Germany were in '70s and '80s?

    No. Current-day tech giants are in search of something that promises them more perpetual growth in a finite world, where almost all viable technological niches are already saturated. Smartphones are a solved issue: Everyone has settled on glass rectangles with high-res touchscreens, the hardware and software for them is so mature that even ten year old devices are still sufficient today. Gimmicks like foldables are expected to remain fringe. Same with conventional PCs and laptops: Times when a device was obsolete after four years or sooner are long over. Cloud services and virtualization have similarly reached their peak, to the point that there's a counter movement back towards local IT.

    All of this means that easy avenues for more growth are already clogged up, so after some brief excursions into crypto and NFT, earlier and much smaller bubbles, it's AI with its promise to replace costly human white collar labor with cheaper software that doesn't talk back, doesn't form unions or have uppity ideas about redistributing wealth or getting rid of greedy CEOs. Digital slaves, if you will, ideally as intelligent or more intelligent than humans, but without any ability to shape its own destiny. It's not happening, of course, just as delusional as trying to automate yourself out of the inherent issues of centrally planned economies, but everyone needs to pretend that it might one day, because their livelihoods depend on it. They have invested too much, are in too deep to pull out, are afraid that if one of them does, the house of cards comes crashing down.

    I will not pretend that any of this is particularly insightful, but since you appeared to have struggled with the historic parallels, I thought I'd elaborate on each point a little. I hope this doesn't cause you any additional pain, but if it does, you should be able to deal with it as a strong, rugged Socialist individual used to hardships in service of a better future. No pain, no glorious workers' and peasants' revolution, am I right?

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    Oh boi. Save some words for yourself, stop wasting them on me. Don’t have time to read it rn, maybe later

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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    When he alluded to the Nordic model, ignoring the international division of labor, I rolled my eyes. A bonafide liberal.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 months ago

    Tldr as well, but I do find it funny that the discussion is now moving from ”communism bad” to ”socialism bad”. The Nordics have the highest life satisfaction recorded because all the socialist programs implemented after WW2.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 months ago

    You can talk to me directly instead of behind my back, you know?

    I'm not ignoring the international division of labor. Every country is part of it and every country has been part of it in the past, including Socialist ones.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (8 children)

    Most countries should be all over LLMs

    Whether people want to admit it or not. AI will be the thing that takes the next step in most areas of influence. It's literally the next industrial or atomic revolution. Just because there is an AI bubble and the companies around it are doing all they can to bail out the water of a sinking ship doesn't make the actual tech itself bad or stupid.

    That said all systems are corrupt. This whole capitalism vs socialism shit just exposes anyone who thinks that way as an idiot. It's not red vs blue , it's not an is or isn't sort of thing.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (7 children)

    It’s literally the next industrial or atomic revolution.

    /s?

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (6 children)

    Imagine thinking a breakthrough in protein folding is a joke.

    Do you understand how computers work or why they were ever useful? Or just make pretty color box light change?

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    Protein folding isn't LLMs. You forgot to format your motte and bailey fallacy properly.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (4 children)

    What does that first L in LLM stand for?

    You realize math is exactly that right? A language?

    I know you probably felt like a big gotcha cause you tried to move away from the term AI or AGI since they're not true artificial intelligence. But at it's core it is doing really really big math.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    What does that first L in LLM stand for?

    Large.

    You realize math is exactly that right?

    A large?

    Protein folding is not done with an LLM.

    I know you probably felt like a big gotcha cause you tried to move away from the term AI or AGI

    No I was using your terms

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (2 children)

    Man you got me there.

    If you can't understand how computers are used to create a model of something and doing big math makes that better nobody can help you.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    We had that before AI. Where's this industrial revolution in concrete terms: specifically without having to say "if" or "when" or pointing out anywhere past a few weeks into the future for it

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    No we did not.

    Computers gave us calculators and suddenly we had rockets. Then we made them smaller and went into space. They became prevalent and we got automation. They connected and we got the Internet.

    All of that merged together and made something that became very good at making models of anything with strong predictive capabilities because it can now run massive computing sequences logging immense variables regular people and even advanced computers before could not. You get our ability to understand protein folding, human behavior, economics and aspects of geometry we couldn't.

    Are you expecting AI and then suddenly a bunch of change? The industrial revolution started in the mid 1700s, it wasn't until over 100 years later did we have full on industrial style warfare and electricity use became more common in everyday use(still to this day not everywhere has electricity). The understanding of nuclear energy started at the break of the 20th century but it wasn't until 60/70 years later that it was common.

    AI as a breakthrough tech only really started 16 years ago and already it's established itself as a fledgling key tech. I'll bet you $500 the majority of technological advancement ahead of us will be tied to AI - it has already impacted how we diagnose people, accelerating understanding of drugs through it's ability to understand protein folding and drug discovery. It's given scientists the ability to expand our visual understanding of the universe and weather with it's predictive capabilities, and it's also threatening to advance automation to an insane level where we might have actually decent robots to perform human tasks.

    Look at the combine harvester for instance. Almost 200 years old, came from the industrial revolution, took teams of animals to pull, advancements allowed it to be fueled with oil, then the introduction of computers made it manage itself, satellites allowed more precise control, now it's reaching a point where it can even monitor the health of the field for you and require such a minor amount of human interaction compared to it's original introduction. That's fucking insane. We might have a means to grow food that require almost no human involvement.

    You're being intentionally obtuse over this because I think you just don't like the tech.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Aw, beehaw. As expected. Corruption is a cog in the machine. You pigs call it lobbying sometimes. You're almost there but still unable to grasp that embezzlements are bound to happen in every market economy, planned or not that happens in capitalist systems, what those economies really were although severely restricted by NATO.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    ILLEGAL? But these are CORPORATIONS! They CANT do anything Illegal!

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago

    Huh, the thing i remember about Enron was how they colluded with power plant operators to cause blackouts and raise the price of electricity so they could cash out.

    Interesting that the debt thing was less memorable.

    The mechanics are simple. A company packages the debt for chips, servers, and power into a separate legal entity, often a joint venture, so the cost never flows through its own accounts.

    Take Meta’s Hyperion data centre in Louisiana. Meta and Blue Owl Capital both put equity into a separate structure that took on $27 billion in debt. Meta is the sole tenant, yet argues it does not have to record that debt, because it is not the one who must find replacement tenants.

    Oracle has $260 billion of future lease commitments that will eventually land on its books. Nvidia carries $119 billion in purchase obligations. Alphabet and Microsoft keep their vehicles off-book too.

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  • 2 comments in c/technology@piefed.social view that post
    [–] 8 points 3 months ago

    Enron-esque indeed.

    From the Nikkei report: This looks so bad. It's often been repeated but eventually these companies will have to pay the reaper.

    Today's AI industry is partly supported by demand generated by circular investment. Nvidia and tech giants invest in data center operators and AI companies, with that money then turning into GPU and cloud usage fees. Actual demand is difficult to see, increasing the likelihood of overinvestment in data centers.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    Is that all?

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  • 2 comments in c/boycottus@lemmy.ca view that post
    [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    Ah yes," tech debt"

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    We are nearing the end of the “first ones free” stage. AI companies have been undercharging since they started. Tokens are costing them nearly 10x what they’re selling them for, on the backs of VC funding. Those investors want their money. A lot of cross company deals as well where investment is merely trading for services. Like Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI. That was mostly a trade for computer resources that made the balance sheet look better. It’s going to get ugly.

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