The stock started the month at $208 and was down to $185 on 11/19 when earnings were released. The next day (when this article was released) it had opened at $196 and dropped to close at $180. A week later, it’s sitting at $176.

I guess you can call all that a nothingburger because it’s only down a few percent, but I think the story is that any downward slide after announcing blockbuster earnings is… unusual, and therefore indicative of something bigger going on. At the very least you’d expect it to arrest the slow and steady slide it’s been on this month, but the fact that the positive sentiment from that incredible earnings report didn’t even last a full trading day is noteworthy.

To be fair, the article is over a week old. Not sure why it got reposted now.

Ridiculing someone in an autism community for being pedantic is… a choice.

That was the punchline to the last comic.

I am simultaneously horrified that she didn’t do any research to see if she could insert text into the image and incredibly impressed at her problem solving skills. Honestly, the more I think about it, the more I lean towards impressed; good on her!

Everyone knows that the only year with 25 months was 2020.

Which is fine and dandy until the gold miners realize that they aren’t going to find enough gold to make it worthwhile and stop buying shovels and the market value of your company depends on your ability to continue selling shovels. Twenty five years after the dot com bubble burst, shovel seller Cisco is only just now reaching the same stock price they peaked at in early April of 2000.

real sales of physical bullion on the domestic market

I’m going to guess that you’re younger and if you were alive through the dot com bubble that you weren’t really old enough to understand what was going on. Back then, no one was seriously saying that the internet was a fad or going away or anything like that, although you can find a few prognosticators that will contradict me, no one took them seriously and ridiculed them even then. No, it was a bubble because people were irrationally throwing money at companies that did “web stuff” and added “dot com” to their names. Investors were so hyped up about the potential of the internet that they threw all common sense out the window and gave money to anyone, and companies in turn dumped money into salaries and expensive perks to hire people who barely knew what they were doing.

The amount of waste and excess was appalling to people when the bubble popped and they saw how much companies had spent on unnecessary bullshit. I remember auctions where you could pick up super expensive Aeron chairs for dirt cheap because clueless companies didn’t know how to spend money and all the big internet companies had plenty of chairs like that. There was a ton of money dumped into infrastructure too. Cisco made a boatload of money during the bubble and after it popped they had so much used equipment floating around that their stock is only now recovering to their dot com peak twenty five years later. Companies like Worldcom blew up because of this infrastructure boom, but when the bubble popped they engaged in fraudulent accounting shenanigans in order to appear healthy.

I would argue the demand for “the web” in 1999 far exceeds that of AI today, and yet there was absolutely a crash like the housing market collapse. It’s not that there’s no use for AI or that some of the capital expenditures might prove useful in the decade ahead, it’s that so much money was thrown around irresponsibly to anyone that claimed to have a web presence or something to do with the internet, even when they didn’t, that there was a huge economic contraction when people finally sobered up - ie. the bubble popping.

I see the exact same excesses now:

• Companies that have nothing to do with AI shoehorning it in to claim they’re part of this big boom
• investors throwing money at ludicrously bad ideas because they are added “AI” to a product no one wanted to begin with
• People with expertise in the field having absurd amounts of money thrown at them to gain competitive advantage
• Brand new companies worth billions of dollars that are not pulling in a fraction of the revenue necessary to justify that valuation

That said, I believe that this is even worse than the dot com bubble for at least two reasons:

1. Back then, these companies were public, and were required to disclose a bunch of financial information as a result. Sure a lot of people ignored the warning signs and got caught up in the hype and FOMO, but the fraud was so much easier to unravel because their numbers weren’t hidden like today’s private AI companies.
2. Dark fiber after the bubble popped is still useful today, so a lot of the money spent then enabled future services, as you alluded to. On the other hand, today’s GPUs will be obsolete in a few years. Aside from being surpassed by newer technologies, the cards themselves will only run for so long before failure. The data centers themselves will still have some value, and some of the electrical generation being built will be useful, but overall, the long term benefits won’t be nearly as transformational.

So yeah, it’s a bubble, it will pop, and it will suck when it does. AI isn’t going away but most of the companies soaking up money now will end up as historical footnotes, like Netscape or Yahoo are today. LLMs and other generative AI will remain inefficient, continue to “hallucinate”, be used for propaganda, and further alienate people from one another. Yay?

Not bragging or gloating; great job!

If you’re not planning to live there long, I don’t think you shouldn’t be buying; that’s one of the few times I’d choose to rent. I guess maybe if home prices are rising then you can accrue some equity, but then you risk buying at the top of the market. I genuinely how it would compare to a fixed rate mortgage though.

If you think interest rates are going to decline, you can easily refinance a fixed rate mortgage as well. I don’t see any benefit in that scenario, but there’s a downside in that if rates don’t go down you still have that balloon payment to worry about, and if you don’t qualify for a traditional mortgage, you’re really in a bind.

Maybe if you’re flipping a house it makes sense, especially if you want to minimize cash outflow. Otherwise, there are so many more downsides that are much more severe than the mild upsides that you might gain. Perhaps there’s a few niche applications that I haven’t considered though.

Not sure if this is what they were talking about, but balloon mortgages are a thing here too. I can’t ever imagine considering one, but they exist.

It’s a perfect analogy because it seems like an improvement because it seems like an improvement and on paper it is. But as I got a bit older I realized that:

• I primarily used one color, meaning that it would run out of ink before the others
• The colors that didn’t get used would be gummed up by the time I did switch to them because it didn’t have a proper cap
• The barrel of the pen was wider to accommodate those extra cartridges inside making it more uncomfortable to use.
• The pen was more expensive than a box of cheap pens, so I only had one; since I’d lose pens all the time this meant that I’d have to use a cheap pen anyway, if I even had any.

Like AI, it’s a novelty that is worse in almost every way while appearing to convey an illusory benefit!

Yes, I reserve the bulk of my sympathy, empathy, and compassion for the people who didn’t vote for Trump in the hopes that he’d be “hurting the people he need to be hurting”.

To be clear, I want to help even the half of people who did vote for this, but I still have little to no sympathy for those who wanted this to happen, just to other people and not themselves. I want policies that help everyone, including people not like me. That said, I’m not above taking satisfaction from those who voted for this; they either lack critical thinking or are so willfully ignorant to think that they’re one of “the good ones”. I want them to feel the pain of their decisions because it seems that experiencing that suffering personally is the only way they can develop any sort of empathy or understanding for their fellow citizens.

No shit. As the person you replied to said: “have the life you voted for”. If you voted for this and now you’re caught up in it, congratulations on the self own.

In an ideal world, no one would be enduring the hardships he’s facing, especially not without the support of his community and his nation. I would happily support policies that would ensure people like him didn’t have to deal with everything that he’s had to, and would provide him a safety net when he’s going through it.

This man on the other hand is a “three-time Donald Trump voter”. This is what he voted for. Everyone who wasn’t getting all their news from conservative media knew that this exact kind of situation was going to happen when he got elected. He supported policies that hurt other people, whether or not he thought those policies would include himself.

Don’t feel too bad for him though, he managed to get in just before the cut off though. He feels bad that he can’t work any more, but hasn’t expressed any concern for people like him (or better yet, aren’t like him but need the same assistance). There are so many other more deserving of my sympathy, especially when he got his before the door closed on the person behind him, and especially people that didn’t vote for this.

As far as Jews in Nazi Germany… if they supported the Nazi rise to power, they’re not going to get a bunch of sympathy from me either. If you helped bring about suffering, I’m not going to burn myself out feeling bad for those that found out the hard way they were one of the undesirables.

Anyone remember when WeWork filed their S-1 and interest in their IPO crashed in the ensuing reality check? This seems like it will be so much worse, at least in terms of numbers. I just hope we don’t have to wait that long to pop this bubble.

Because teacher Christa McAuliffe was onboard. I believe they previously broadcast earlier shuttle launches, but by 1986 they were no longer novel; putting a teacher onboard who was planning to teach some lessons in space made educators more interested and so many schools pulled out the TVs to show the launch live. Turned out to be a different kind of education than they expected.

Dowsing rods are basically chance. Facial recognition has well known problems with non-white faces.

I went to the Tilted Kilt not knowing what that was… it was more uncomfortable for me than my date. Never went back and that location has been long closed.

A while later, another partner and I were driving past a Twin Peaks restaurant under construction when I joked that with a name like that it sounds like an upscale Hooters… and a few seconds later we both realized that’s exactly what it was.