• Octavio@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    The funny thing about people who say it’s not a bubble because AI has value is that the asset category having value doesn’t prevent valuation bubbles from forming.

    Houses have value: you can live in them. Yet there was a housing bubble.

    The internet has value: you can watch cat videos on it. Yet there was a dot com bubble.

    Tulip bulbs have value: you can grow pretty flowers with them. Yet there was a tulip bulb bubble.

    In my experience, whenever you start reading news stories asking if something is a bubble and quoting investment bankers say, “no, it’s not a bubble,” well, usually it’s a bubble.

    • ubergeek@lemmy.today
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      6 days ago

      Goldman Sachs also though NINA mortgages were a good idea, and they also thought it was a good idea to bundle bad mortgages in with good mortgages, and find a rater to mark them AAA investments.

      And then we saw how that worked out.

      • mojofrododojo@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        yeah, how could this go wrong?

        at least after the crash those houses could be lived in. these datacenters are made for one purpose, AI, and really would have to be completely gutted and refurbed for general purposes… fun.

          • Jyek@sh.itjust.works
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            6 days ago

            I wish it were safer to make these sorts of sweeping gambles. Shorting Nvidia right now is like a pretty obvious bet but getting the timing right is the difference between generational wealth and a lifetime of poverty and debt.

      • mojofrododojo@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        right? I just figured the “it’s not a bubble, guuuuys” crowd could find someone a tiny bit more credible lol

  • xylogx@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    There is definitely a bubble. But also what Nvidia is doing is smart. They have boatloads of cash. They are investing that cash in the companies that are using their products to create money making services. If one of them can create a killer app or viable service this will create demand for their products and they will have an ownership stake in it. Is this guaranteed or even likely? Probably not. We have reached the point where we were in 1996 where the chairman of the fed came out and said we are in a period of “irrational exuberance.” That bubble took four more years to pop. This one may end quicker, but it is impossible to tell when it will end or what will come out of it from where we sit today.

  • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    I don’t think it’s a bubble, first there is absolutely zero comparison to the housing bubble, which was a financial problem that caused housing prices to inflate, while the inherent value of housing stayed the same. This alleged AI bubble is mostly driven by companies that have lots of money, so it is not credit based, and there are underlying products that actually have increasing value.

    The better comparison would be the dot com bubble, which was dominated by companies that didn’t even have a product and didn’t make any money. The frenzy is similar, but the fundamentals are different.

    AI investments may cool down because obviously there is a frantic race in an attempt to get ahead.
    But the reason I don’t think the AI bubble will burst is because it is driven by companies that actually make money.
    They may lose money investing too heavily in this, but the most companies investing in this can afford it.

    I think the most AI bubbly company isn’t even in the diagram, because that is Tesla. Tesla might actually go down, because Musk is insane.

    But in general if it is a bubble, it is a very very long one, Nvidia value has been exploding since 2016 based on their AI product dominance. If this is a bubble, I think it will go down in history as the longest living bubble ever.

    Is the market frantic? Yes absolutely.
    Is the value of some AI companies extremely high? Yes absolutely.
    Is it a bubble that will burst? No if it’s a bubble, this one will be more like deflating to a less frantic level, because ALL the main players have the money to weather losses.
    And the main AI companies have actual products that make money for them rolled out already. So it is not like the dot com bubble.

    • ThirdConsul@lemmy.ml
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      6 days ago

      And the main AI companies have actual products that make money for them rolled out already. So it is not like the dot com bubble

      Citation needed.

    • ubergeek@lemmy.today
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      6 days ago

      I don’t think the AI bubble will burst is because it is driven by companies that actually make money.

      Last I looked, the big AI companies are all hemorrhaging money.

    • 1984@lemmy.today
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      6 days ago

      Its not a bubble but most people here dont think for themselves. They dont even seem to understand the connection between what news is put out, which analysts they choose to give attention, and for what purpose.

      Imagine living your life and just believing whatever someone says in the news just because he has the title of analyst. And never thinking about who profits from that specific guy being on the news at that specific time. Who picked that guy to say what he does and why? Its not random.

      Being able to influence the market is key to making a lot of money. How do people think they influence the market? This is how they do it. How else?

      Sometimes they probably lose money too, specially when orange man opens his mouth and says something very stupid, like last Friday. But then they position themselves for the coming uptrend and make their money back, maybe even more then they had before, since they have giant pockets.

    • Mrkawfee@feddit.uk
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      6 days ago

      Well argued. Also, even if it is a bubble, it’s arguable that most technology innovations are preceded by necessary bubbles which are important for directing investment into emerging technologies. The railroad mania in the 19th century or the fibre optic rollout in the late 1990s, during the dot com boom, benefited humanity long after the froth and excitement subsidied.

    • BarbedDentalFloss@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      6 days ago

      I think the biggest difference between this bubble and the ones that pop are whether the valuations were built by debt. In this case - no. So when their products turn out to be less useful than they claim, it will devaluate. But the debt issued to build the bubble wont go through a sudden correction that is amplified and causes an even bigger collapse like in 2008 or the dotcom bubble.

  • Dr. Moose@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    Unpopular opinion but this will not as bad as housing bubble and we’re way past bubbles actually popping in contemporary economy. Even China corrected for its massive ghost city housing bubble just recently and that was actually worse than ai tech overvaluation.

      • Dr. Moose@lemmy.world
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        7 days ago

        Yes, contemporary economy and free markets are so imaginary now that cascading effects and bubble pops like 2008 are very unlikely. American stock market in particular is so far off reality (even before AI boom) that it’s basically a video game with no actual relevancy to true gross product. While China/Russia is a dictatorship with no representation of reality at all and can easily hide the burden of bad economic policies in the obedient peasant class.

        So we have dictatorship with imaginary worlds vs “free markets” living in their own imaginary simulation. Economy is all made up now and cascades are basically impossible because that requires rationality.

        • KeenFlame@feddit.nu
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          7 days ago

          Perfect explanation, also; since 07 thing where the hedge bros were not punished, there stopped existing any incentive to imagine any scenario where anyone lose any money due to bank runs

        • ubergeek@lemmy.today
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          6 days ago

          The problem isn’t the imaginary market, which I agree with the description. Its the leveraging of debt, to gamble in the market, which is what low interest rates enable.

          And yes, our interest rates are VERY low still. I’m looking at some ARM packages right now, and their max lifetime interest rates are on par with what a typical mortgage was about a decade ago.

    • Part4@infosec.pub
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      6 days ago

      This turned out a little bit long. I wonder if anyone will bother reading it.

      A lot of this so-called ‘bubble’ is based on capital expenditure in support of a technology that probably doesn’t have the capability AI company ceo’s claim, but does have fascinating, and in terms of how society is currently arranged possibly extremely harmful, potential.

      I know what ai companies have done, and what they are likely to do, in the pursuit of profit is shit; I would say that is a capitalism and fascist billionaire issue, rather than a tech issue but ymmv.

      And there is the energy consumption problem. I think ai ceo’s and tech broligarchs would privately say ‘compare the energy consumed by my datacentre to the energy consumed by the workers it has replaced and you will see it is fairly efficient…’ (I am saying what I expect they think, not what I agree with).

      The concern that the economy currently has all of its eggs in the ai basket seems reasonable, but I see why capital is betting on it as big as it is. Any concerns regarding the economic disruption of an ai bubble popping is nothing compared to what could happen if 50%+ white collar workers are made redundant. We saw the number of essential workers needed per 1 million people during covid: it wasn’t many. Most jobs exist because the people exist to do them, corralled into the pyramidal structure of capitalism, where money trickles upwards. AI might push us into an era where the people exist but the jobs do not.

      Anyway, I see this ‘bubble’ as being like the dotcom bubble, which didn’t kill the web when it popped. The gpu’s this capital expenditure has paid for are going to continue to be used, even as this economic period shakes itself out. They aren’t just going to evaporate. It isn’t like worthless debt being packaged up and resold without a chance of it being recouped, even if the prospect of what can be achieved with AI is currently over-valued.

      • Timecircleline@sh.itjust.works
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        6 days ago

        Comparing to the dotcom bubble is what finally made it make sense in my brain. Though I know the toll it took on that sector’s workers and I don’t envy those in fields that are going to be affected the same way.

    • GreenShimada@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      I’ve been saying the same thing.

      The 2008 housing bubble was predicated on cheap lending. It was all debt. It was massive amounts of toxic debt sold around Wall Street, like using Trump Coin or counterfeit cash used to buy a house.

      The vast majority of what’s happening here is not debt. Sure, some, but very little. Even the OpenAI AMD stock swap thing is swapping a gamble on stocks worth real money, not debt.

      IMO the first sub-bubble to pop will be all the time and effort wasted on “Startups” that are nothing more than a couple people acting as a wrapper for an AI agent. That’s not really going to impact the economy too much on its face, but suddenly a lot of people are going to go from being “entrepreneurs” to being truly unemployed.

      Edit: Also, just saw this gem, and THIS is how you get a supercharged 2008 repeat, bank deregulation and $2.6 trillion in lending. Which is exactly how we got to 2008’s subprime lending.

      • ubergeek@lemmy.today
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        6 days ago

        The vast majority of what’s happening here is not debt.

        Most of what is going on in the AI sector is most certainly debt leveraged. Like, I’m looking at the books for several companies deep into AI.

        I mean, how much profit is OpenAI turning right now?

        • GreenShimada@lemmy.world
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          6 days ago

          I’m looking at the books for several companies

          Well with all that proprietary information, please do enlighten us with specifics. Who has loans, and how much? From which banks?

    • Jankatarch@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      Idk if ghost city thing was a bubble tho.

      China used planned infrastructure and bunch of confused journalists in US were like “what kind of government plans for housing of their citizens”

      • KeenFlame@feddit.nu
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        7 days ago

        It was a textbook bubble. They made and gambled on theoretical apartments where nobody involved had any intention of living there or any responsibility or connection to the underlying structure, to the point where building cardboard skyskrapers became a business… the is no point in denying it. Capital housing investment is a plague on humanity.

        • ThirdConsul@lemmy.ml
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          6 days ago

          There are always bad actors in the system (see: hedge funds). But bubble? It can be argued that Ordos (the ghost city) was build too early, but it’s filling in nicely. From 30k in 2009 to 2.000.000+ in 2020.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordos_City

          On the other hand noone ever build a damn whole modern city before for the people, so I’m not surprised they jumped the gun.

          • KeenFlame@feddit.nu
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            6 days ago

            When Investors own houses only because it will appreciate in value from time only, that is a fundamentally flawed system because in reality houses decrease in value as they get older. It creates an environment where everyone involved is a bad actor

            • ThirdConsul@lemmy.ml
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              5 days ago

              I’m sorry, I’m a little bit lost. I do agree that investment in owning rentals should be forbidden (and if city needs rental units they should be owned by the city).

              I do not agree that “ghost cities” were built for speculative purposes. Speculants were buying them like crazy, yes, but the actual need for housing in regions planned (expected?) to undergo urbanization is real and the buildings were fulfilling that purpose.

              • KeenFlame@feddit.nu
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                5 days ago

                Let me guess… is it because the people’s republic is flawless in every concievable way? I saw some footage from someone that was there, not a news agency. I won’t pretend that couldn’t be wrong, but I am known to occasionally enjoy Occam’s razor.

                • ThirdConsul@lemmy.ml
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                  5 days ago

                  Yeah, my server end with ml so I must be a tankie, makes sense.

                  It cannot be that I genuinely appreciate long term vision policies. I must be a tankie. And you’re right, those cities were not needed, and planned urbanization must be planned only 2 years ahead because everything else is speculative bubble made for speculation.

        • Jankatarch@lemmy.world
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          7 days ago

          I was mostly going for “modern journalism is is sad and biased towards clickbait” ngl. Especially now they have AI edited articles.

      • Pycorax@sh.itjust.works
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        7 days ago

        I mean even if it was planned the amount of excess given falling birthrates, doesn’t check out either.

  • EzTerry@lemmy.zip
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    6 days ago

    I see “gold rush” the company selling shovels is making out like a bandit, everyone else is make a profit on the previous gen but requires a 10x cost increase for the next gen. And thus 10x more shovels… As soon as 10x more shovels stops giving 10x+ improvements this is the wrong investment.

    Hints are we already reached this point.

    Some AI companies will pivot and improve in other ways with more linear costs/results… The ones hoping the line continues to the moon… I think they overshot… I just don’t know when it will fall back…

    • mcv@lemmy.zip
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      7 days ago

      Well, they now control all the money, so they can decide all the value.

  • rumba@lemmy.zip
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    6 days ago

    If not for the banks investing hevily into it, i’d not be all that worried.

    Every company in that list could shrink by half and we’d all be at worst back to covid times. Sure unemployment would suck, but do we REALLY need microsoft and NVidia to be as huge as they are?

  • nexguy@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    All ai companies should direct all resources to medical research. I mean we would have to do without ai slop summaries for search engines and ai slop images. Well on second thought I guess slop is worth the human cost so let’s keep it as it is. I bet I get my wish.

  • inclementimmigrant@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    The housing bubble encompassed a metric ton of banks and companies that bought and sold shares of subprime mortgages in the billions of dollars and when everyone stopped paying and started defaulting, that caused a entire economic collapse.

    Now unless someone can point me to an analysis where we have some tangible proof that banks and tons of companies are invested, not just using, AI, it seems to me the fall out would be limited to tech companies, which yeah would involve some job losses but nothing on the scale of the housing or dotcom bubble.

    Now if you’re referring to rich jackasses who are all in and banking on AI taking our jerbs? Sure that bubble will hurt them but they’re not driving forces in the economy, just politics, which I guess could cause a economic crash if they get your idiot politicians more scared of them than the people with France on their minds.

    • UltraMagnus@startrek.website
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      6 days ago

      Timing is a fools game for sure. Bubble could pop next month, next year, or even later.

      If you’re old, make sure you have a good percent in bonds. If you’re young, make sure you have 6-12 months saved in case of layoffs and keep saving - market will look completely different in 20-30 years anyways so it’s not worth worrying about.

  • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world
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    8 days ago

    It’s objectively a bad thing when a country’s entire economy is being propped up by seven companies and the vast majority of consumer spending is concentrated in the top 1%.

    • TeamAssimilation@infosec.pub
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      8 days ago

      Specially when those companies are valued in TRILLIONS. Nothing is worth trillions, somehow these surreal numbers have been accepted as hard fact.

      • ILoveUnions@lemmy.world
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        8 days ago

        Nothing is worth trillions,

        There is things worth trillions. Like full countries, and the largest pension funds and social security funds. Having a single company be comparable to those massive collections of people is insane, and it’s because they think it can replace workers–when it can’t, not yet, and not for a long time

        • bobalot@lemmy.world
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          6 days ago

          Production must equal Consumption plus investment.

          An excess of production leads to companies closing down.

          Reducing consumption (via getting rid of workers, reducing wages, etc.) will lead to an imbalance that must correct itself.

          This can be forestalled by private debt, government debt or exporting the surplus but this is unsustainable.

      • IllNess@infosec.pub
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        8 days ago

        Evaluations of everything is crazy. Net worth of celebrities with make up lines in particular is crazy. Look how many celebs are worth a billion dollars. To be worth that much, they should be selling at least $50 millions a year of product with no prediction of winding down.

    • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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      8 days ago

      The most optimistic take I’ve seen: AI is a drain on the entire economy that sucks up all investment and this is why the rest of the economy is basically in a recession. Once the bubble pops, investors will flood back into the real economy and correct the problem.

      I’m not optimistic.

        • halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world
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          8 days ago

          The way to make a big dent in that is to tax unused housing, with peogressivwly increasing amounts as they continue unoccupied. And limit or outright deny ownership by companies and investment firms.

          We have more than enough housing for everyone, but a large portion of it sits unused. In many cases only because no one will/can pay what some of these companies are demanding monthly for them.

      • jabberwock@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        7 days ago

        I’ll play devil’s advocate here: agreed that the rest of the (US) economy seems to be slowing or shrinking but remains buoyed by AI / Mag 7 stocks. That said, a lot of the investment reflected above is in data centers and hardware (Nvidia, Coreweave, Oracle, Microsoft).

        The bubble pop will hinge on whether there is value in this data center buildup beyond AI. Unless everyone starts paying fistfulls of cash for AI chat, these companies may be able to find another use for all that compute and avoid a total crash. That could be a target for all that investment you mention.

        • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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          7 days ago

          The hardware is specialized for chatbots, it’s not just something they can plug-and-play for other use cases. That means using it for other computing tasks is even less efficient per kWh and per litre of water, which will make it hard to justify the resource requirements.

          Surely some of this hardware can find new life, but assets will be stranded.

      • Valmond@lemmy.world
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        8 days ago

        I feel money itself is our new Dutch disease. We live and die according to the flux of money in the global economy/stock markets…

        Are there any theories like that out there? Because money start to no longer function correctly IMO.

  • Em Adespoton@lemmy.ca
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    8 days ago

    Looks more like the dot com bubble to me.

    Is it just me, or are the bubbles coming closer together these days?

    • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
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      7 days ago

      Is it just me, or are the bubbles coming closer together these days?

      Yes and no.

      Yes in the sense that we have a lot more “fad” economies. There is something new so that needs to be EVERYTHING and the market course corrects, often at the cost of hardship for many.

      But “no” in the sense of what “bubbles” tend to refer to. Things like the Japanese Bubble Economy where it causes (I forget if it is officially one but) recessions and even depressions.

      The AI Bubble is not going to do that (on its own…). Yeah, a LOT of companies are going to be left holding the bag when they realize LLMs can’t solve all problems for them AND manifest a Cyber Stana Katic to give them a blowie while it does that. But what will they be left with?

      1. A LOT of “prompt engineers”: This is bad because that is going to be a LOT of people who, increasingly, went to school to get a degree in something with very little utility. That said… Art History majors have been showing us how to do that for decades and at least they did something they loved on their way to service industry jobs.
      2. For the companies that gutted their workforce over the past few years: A need to rapidly hire talented workers who don’t require ChatGPT to do their job: This is REALLY good for the people who have been hurting and should actually lead to a lot of job mobility… for the old hats who predated this fad
      3. For the companies that purchased hardware: A lot of edge computing devices are going to be of questionable value. But for the folk who “just” bought a shit ton of GPUs from Daddy Jensen? They have a shit ton of GPUs they can either sell for cheap (not horrible) or repurpose (good)

      Don’t get me wrong. There is going to be upheaval and it is going to be bad. But it is also important to remember that drawings like the above are actively misleading and bordering on manipulative. Because basically all the biggies, except OpenAI, have non-AI uses. Oracle ballooned massively because of the OpenAI injection but… they are still god damned Oracle. Same with nVidia who, when they aren’t powering every LLM on the planet, are also one of the companies that makes all the cards that power stuff like computer vision and the like in cars and what not.

      Because… remember the dot com bubble? Remember how basically the entire world still runs on The Internet? It was just a case of rebalancing and pivoting for the most part.


      All that said… the US is in a really bad way because the fascists have been increasingly gutting the economy and stopping basically any industry that involves manufacturing or communicating with external countries. We are gonna have a massive stock market crash when OpenAI et al pops…

    • henfredemars@infosec.pub
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      8 days ago

      Yes! The problem is that we won’t accept the full correction that is actually required. We print money, we buy securities, we find ways to prop to reduce the pain but we end up shifting the weakness to other areas of the economy.

    • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip
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      7 days ago

      Global economy has inflation since what, middle of the last century? Since slavery and colonies stopped being a thing?

  • balsoft@lemmy.ml
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    7 days ago

    This doesn’t really tell me anything, I’d have to compare it with other charts. E.g. what does the chart for agriculture look like? Airplane manufacturing? Internet in early 2000s?

    • scarabic@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      I know right? It’s not a bubble if there are transactions between the different companies in an industry. Nothing here shows that these investments are self-supporting circular, nor that all of this is propping up the economy.

      Circle != bubble

    • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
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      7 days ago

      All the economy is a big circle if you draw the circle big enough.

      Actually scratch that. There is an economy that is not just one big circle jerk, such as the development of new technologies or the terraforming of deserts into fertile land; as neither of these things ends the way it started; it brought lasting change, and that is true progress.

      Actually did you see my presentation that i made about this recently?

      The point is to convince the americans to invest in new technologies.

      To all those who say that human spaceflight is impossible:

      • balsoft@lemmy.ml
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        7 days ago

        There is no good economic reason to colonize other planets. We have plenty of space here on earth, with conditions already much more hospitable than that of mars - deserts, for example. The resources needed to turn these into habitable land is so much less than the resources required to make even a tiny part of Mars inhabitable (i.e. establish a colony that relies on life support systems) it’s insane to go for Mars first. The reason colonizing Mars is talked about at all is because a rich white dude wants to go to Mars, since deserts are too boring for his spoiled ass.

        I actually agree that it would be cool if we went to Mars, not to colonize it but just to be there. But comparing it to white pillaging of the Americas is just incorrect. Mars is not inhabitable by humans, the Americas very much were. The external resources needed to colonize America were zero, in fact pillaging local lands meant a lot of resources for the Empire. Mars is going to be a much more expensive and much less profitable endeavor.

        Actually I replied to you before, pointing out the very same fallacy: https://lemmy.ml/post/33824723/20134917

          • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
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            7 days ago

            Only slightly better than mars, frankly speaking the ocean is about as hostile as you can get without going to space. Maintenance alone would be a fucking nightmare, look at cruise ships or oil rigs for example and you can get a pretty good idea. Unless you are talking about artificial islands since we’ve been doing that for millenia.

      • AppleTea@lemmy.zip
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        7 days ago

        Settling mars is a centuries long undertaking. You basically have to nurture a whole ecosystem from scratch… that would be a brutally difficult and lengthy process in the best of conditions. But of course, these aren’t the best conditions. We aren’t doing particularly well with the ecosystem we’ve already got.

        If you want a historical project, then look to balancing modern industry within the planet’s biosphere. It’s a prerequisite to anything happening on mars.

      • shane@feddit.nl
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        7 days ago

        Europeans caused massive death in the Americas. I do not think we should replicate that model.

        Also, the chance is small, but there might have been a separate biogenesis (beginning of life) on Mars. Sending humans with our dirty microbiome would almost certainly wipe any evidence of that, and possibly cause an extinction of an entirely separate form of life, which would be a crime even more horrible than the extinctions and genocides which we have caused so far.

        Let’s just leave Mars alone until we’ve studies it more and are certain there is no life. Colonizing the moon seems challenging enough for a couple centuries…

    • Djehngo@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      I think it’s hard to definitely call something a bubble until it pops.

      The definition of a bubble goes something along the lines of market prices exceeding the intrinsic value of the investment they represent, which may be true here?

      If you want to read more about this the rough name for these companies was “the magnificent seven” a year or so ago when I last looked at this. A quick Google suggests represent about a third of the SNP 500’s value now and have a cape ratio (cyclicly adjusted price to earnings) of ~37 compared to 15-20 being normal.

      Edit: the above baseline is incorrect; see sugar_in_tea’s comment for a more accurate baseline and some interesting counterpoints

      I can’t find a good numerical source for the correlated risk within this group, and I suspect analyzing it is very difficult. Given they all used to be a lot more diversified in the past but now a large % of their valuation is predicated on AI historical correlation analysis probably fails. But the diagram linked here suggests it’s probably bad to put all your money in these companies. (Or even a 3rd if you are in an s&p 500 index tracker 😶)

      Like, none of this definitively says this is a bubble, since if it were possible to divine that the bubble would immediately pop, but it does suggest there is a strong likelihood we are seeing a bubble.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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        7 days ago

        ~37 compared to 15-20 being normal.

        15-20 was normal for the 100 years ending 40-50 years ago. But of we look at the last 40 years or so, the CAPE has been higher, suggesting that we don’t know how what “normal” looks like going forward. More people are buying stocks than ever before due to retirement plans and poor bond yields, which pushes up the PE.

        So whether ~40 is high for a PE going forward isn’t clear. The CAPE hit ~45 in the 2000 crash, and reverted to ~20 after the crash, yet the 2008 crash only hit ~26 and crashed down to ~14 and quickly bounced back to ~20. The 2008 had little to do with CAPE and more to do with corruption in the banking industry, whereas 2000 was almost purely oversized hype in the burgeoning tech market.

        So is the normal range 20-30? Idk. Maybe 20 is actually low going forward, it’s unclear. Either way, 40 isn’t as outlandish as it was in the 2000s, and that pushed up to 45 before crashing.

        there is a strong likelihood we are seeing a bubble.

        Agreed. But if you drop out of the market and invest in other stuff, you would miss whatever the rest of the runup will do before it bursts, which could leave you worse off than someone just investing in the entire market by market cap. Ot could continue to run for 10-20 years, or it could pop this year, it’s impossible to know since it relies heavily on investors continuing to believe the hype and companies continuing to have something to back up that hype.

        • humanspiral@lemmy.ca
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          7 days ago

          But of we look at the last 40 years or so, the CAPE has been higher, suggesting that we don’t know how what “normal” looks like going forward.

          As you listed, crashes lead to sub 20 PEs. Mag7 PEs is not representative of Russel 2000 PEs. High PEs expect high growth for long period. Reality checks usually happen, but PE’s are not universally high. Just with the oligarchs with White House guest passes.

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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            7 days ago

            crashes lead to sub 20 PEs

            The 2000 crash didn’t though, it was just over 20 at the trough. Jan 2003 was 21. That was almost as high as the peak in the 60s, and higher than the moment before Black Monday. So the market reverted to a mean that would be considered a peak just 20-30 years prior. 15 used to be a good marker for “average,” and now that’s the marker for the Great Recession.

            Crashes used to lead to sub-10s, and now they crash to 15-20. The market has fundamentally changed with 401ks and IRAs.

        • Djehngo@lemmy.world
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          7 days ago

          Valid, I got 15-20 from a Google search, but further research puts your numbers as more reasonable, I will edit the patent post.

            • humanspiral@lemmy.ca
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              7 days ago

              CAPE is a weird measure in that it looks at last 10 years of earnings for PE ratio. It is not especially relevant in that a fair expectation for next year’s earnings is this year’s earnings. It is intriguing that there wasn’t significant earnings growth levels in the past, though, which because PE based on this year’s earnings would have high CAPE if high recent growth.