It’s so fucking funny to me to see governments unwilling to do anything positive to support their constituents constantly stumbling in to this same kind of law. Like, governments that want more control over their citizens but are completely unwilling to offer them any additional benefits in exchange for that control.

So instead they frame it as “protecting the children” because who’s ever gonna object to that? But nah, it’s about actually being able to enforce other moral panic laws and forcing more information in to the hands of servaliance capitalism.

I mean, it specifically says snapdragon.

I’m shocked! Shocked I tell you!

… well not that shocked actually.

… but Apple doesn’t use snapdragon SoCs?

I switched over about… I suppose 2 and a half years ago now? Honestly it’s been a lot easier to use. Like it’s kind of shocking to me that people will act like windows is cohesive and better put together. Every time I interact with it these days, the more it looks like a taped together ball of junk crusted over with 30 years of repainting.

Like the fact that with windows I had to go to three separate settings programs to find the right toggle, that every program has a dedicated installer and its own path for updates. That there are just default always on programs running in the background eating up a 1/4 of the ram and two of my CPU cores for no damn reason. That a laptop will randomly wake up inside a bag when it should be asleep and run down its battery over 6 hours of trying to connect to an absent WiFi network to run updates.

It has burst in terms of the liquidity of the system, sure the on paper value of the asset hasn’t collapsed, but that’s because the number of people willing to sell has reduced in turn with the number of people willing to buy. Everyone who was going to cash out big time already has, and the people who bought from them are waiting on another order of magnitude increase in value before they cash out, or they intend to hold on to it forever.

They’re dependent on it indirectly. Like, most of the rest of the economic growth that has gone on in recent years has been from the wealthiest 10% of Americans increasing their consumption of various goods, or continuing consumption even as prices rise while wages stay stagnant.

That 10% has felt comfortable spending money due to the value of their assets growing, being able to liquidate some here and there or using them as collateral for loans.

If they lose a significant portion of 1/3rd of their assets in stock, and no other investments are showing rapid growth, they’ll probably pull back on their spending, which will in turn hurt the rest of the market. That won’t be as quick as the panic around “AI” companies, nor as disastrous.

It will be a slow thing, as companies that have moved towards the high margin premium side of the market see sales dry up on their most profitable products.

I mean, given that 1/3rd of the s&P 500s value is in 7 companies who are all heavily invested in AI compute.

I’m sure that the 10% wealthiest who’s consumption makes up over half of consumer spending won’t drastically cut back their spending if they lose a third of their wealth that’s in index funds.

And I’m sure private equity firms that are also heavily invested won’t start trying to liquidate their other assets at the same time.

No way this could see a massive decrease in consumer spending.

Or like, anyone one of the massively cash negative companies with in the bubble being unable to secure more money.

Hey, how’s that deal between SoftBank and OpenAI doing? You know, the one where they get the liquidity they need to keep operating if they convert to a for profit company before the end of the year? Yah? So … they managed to convert to a fire profit company yet? No? Oh, damn, I sure they’ll figure out that incredibly complicated and dubiously legal process by the end of the fiscal year.

All it takes is openAI or anthropic to run out of cash, then everyone providing them compute suddenly has giant power sucking white elephants that are basically useless for anything else (maybe crypto mining LMAO). And then they all stop buying more chips from Nvidia (you know, the company whose valuation is 8% of most index funds, and 80% of their revenue and all of their revenue growth over the past two years has been from data center sales).

Kinda crazy how 7 companies, all heavily invested in AI cloud compute, in one way or another, make up about a 1/3rd of the S&P 500.

I mean, good thing the AI bubble couldn’t possible pop any other bubbles. I mean, it’s not like nearly a decade of low interest rates could possibly have built any other bubbles in any other sort of asset markets.

The reality is, its only impact has been as a cover story to conceal jobs that were already going to be cut.

It’s patently ridiculous how many people in positions of authority have parroted talking points about this and laughable how many journalists and publications have uncritically reported those talking points as if they have merit.

To those who believe that truth derives from authority, and not from debate backed with evidence, a website where the debate is visible and clear undermines its authority. But just because we don’t see that process at other publications doesn’t make them more reliable, it just means we can’t judge the quality of that process.

Wikipedia’s system has its flaws, but the ability to know that, to see those flaws and be aware of them, makes it more reliable. It also makes it very difficult for authoritarians to seize control of for their own ends, to shut down debate and impose consensus. That’s the real reason it is under attack, because those who wish to impose consensus have justify them selves publicly.

Operating system as a service. Customers as products.

That is their goal.

I think a big part of it is the nature of the US car market over the past 10 years, where the growth has come from sales of “premium” vehicles. The standard and budget market segments have underperformed and thus most US car companies haven’t invested in them much. Consumer spending is increasingly driven by the wealthiest 10% of the population. Everyone else is struggling and cutting back where ever they can, that means buying used cars and holding on to their current cars as long as they can, if they’re even in a position to own a car. The middle and low end consumer is doing so poorly that they’re not just moving down market, they’re not buying at all.

EVs just aren’t super competitive in the premium market. One of the biggest real selling points of Electric vehicles is their low operating cost. Electricity is cheaper than gas, way less maintenance is needed, and the most expensive and failure prone parts are absent, reducing repair costs. To a wealthy person, none of that is particularly compelling. What can an EV sell on in a premium segment? Acceleration and the “saving the environment” vibes, and that’s just not compelling enough to take significant market share.

So why isn’t what remains of the budget market dominated by EVs? Because there are no Budget EVs on the US market. The cheapest EV on the US market is the Chevy bolt and that’s got an MSRP of around 30,000 dollars. None of the companies are willing to invest the money needed to make a budget EV production line and the required supply chains. They’d rather take their capital and put it in to high margin premium vehicles, and service the anemic budget market with legacy production lines.

Enterprise Resource Planning.

That makes a lot more sense than… uh… my first interpretation.