I think the US is in such a fucked up place economically, that the stock market is so overheated and will cause grave inflation, but it's the only lever left to pull for the government, that it will cause havoc within the next 10 years.
SpaceX or any of AI companies for that matter is absolutely not worth their money, but they will be carried through by government legislation, because otherwise the economy will be fucked for the US.
SpaceX ... 4.3 trillion...what the fuck are you on about
I mean, the entire predicted value that the company will be worth is like 6mo of the US budget (>$7 Trillion per year). I don't think that's all that much, even if they accomplish half of what they're all trying to do.
The economy is already F'd because so few people are actually working productively- it's been a laptop-class driven economy since the 80s.
You must be for extremely large government or very small companies. Governments aren't designed to be economic entities- they use pooled resources and redistribute but it's not like they're in the game to be profitable and expand. When the colonies got in an uproar over "taxation without representation" they were paying 1-1.5% income tax. I get that politicians need to be paid, the military needs funding, and some pooled resources at the federal level make sense over state and municipal, but the idea that an entity whose primary responsibility is to settle disputes and offer protection needs more money per year than the future forecasted sum of lifetime earnings of large swaths of workers who are literally doing the work to expand the economy to me is crazy.
"The people that start "tech" companies are often soulless and maladapted to society, having hid behind computers to escape their inability to deal with the real world".
Yes. Of course.
You cannot trust anyone to have a rounded mind unless they have actually done more than one thing, broadly speaking.
Having worked at one of these companies, I don't buy for one second, that these companies are not obsessed with financial benefit. You would be an absolute idiot to believe that.
Stocks and money should be boring for most people. I'm not a financial adviser and this isn't financial advice but I believe no one with a net worth less than $2m should ever buy an individual stock. Invest in a target date retirement fund for your 401k. Same for Roth Ira. If you have more money to invest after that, invest in an index that aligns with you values (for example I invest in an ESG index for environmental, social, and governance, ie no weapons or drugs). I've kept my money boring for over ten years and my boring investments have over tripled in value. I consider it a point of pride that I don't know what the DOW is at or how much NVIDIA is trading at right now.
It always boggles my mind when someone who is middle to maybe upper middle class tries to time the market or buys/sells stocks in reaction to random news like this. At best you're going to be up maybe 50% on this trade, and you're going to pay commission to your broker, and may even need to pay taxes. At worst you're going to be down a lot and still pay the broker.
On the contrary: People with a low net worth have very few opportunities to scratch and claw their way out of their holes in this global feudal system. They are the ones who need to be able to make high-risk, high-reward investments.
A conservative 10% return on a 2 million dollar investment is a very nice 200 000. A conservative 10% return on a 20 000 dollar investment is just 2000.
If you're not born rich in this world, there are but a few doors that are open to you to try to improve your station in life. Hard work will never help you out of the hole. Not even dangerous work. Nor will an education. At least with high risk investment you have a fair chance, and at worst you loose your savings and are back where you started. You're not going to lose your life or your limbs.
Anecdotally, I know more people who have clawed out of poverty with hard work/education than I know people who got lucky with an investment. And I know plenty of non-poor people who got lucky with investments via IPO or crypto.
> at worst you loose your savings
This is a pretty optimistic take on how much money people who live paycheck to paycheck can actually save. I'd probably suggest that poor people with savings start a business over investing.
Hard work is the first stepping stone, to crawl your way out of complete poverty. Where would a person otherwise get money to invest. But that doesn't mean you're out of the hole.
What I'm talking about are things like being able to own your own home without being born into it or getting it from inheritance. That is a big gamble trying to do with just hard and smart work.
> I'd probably suggest that poor people with savings start a business over investing.
I'd like to adjust that: Starting a business is a better option than hard work, because with your own business you can actually get a good return on working hard and smart. But unless you're a business genius, it's a good idea at one point to invest your proceeds into the stock market rather than investing all back into your own business.
>and there is a tremendous amount of marketing online for passive.
There’s a lot of advocacy for passive investing because it’s practically the only good option for retail investors. Managed funds can actually afford to advertise.
There are problems with passive investing becoming such a large portion of public investment, it is practically corporate welfare. But when the alternatives are at or around 2 and 20, with most performing worse than index funds, it’s irrational for the average person to do anything but passive investing.
Passive has been good and I’m mostly a passive investor. I’m arguing that we are seeing structural changes which expose you to more risk and may make alternatives more appealing.
> because it’s practically the only good option for retail investors.
If you’re hearing about something, it’s because someone organized that message
> Managed funds can actually afford to advertise.
Have you seen how much money and corporate influence Vanguard and black rock have?
That's true, but what are the alternatives? Personally I do have alternative investments (crypto, random held stocks) but it's because it's fun money - if it goes to zero, I'm not going to lose the house.
If it's the first time it's failing then there's really nothing anyone can do to prepare for it, and I certainly wouldn't recommend laypeople to try to time the market.
Alternatives include
- paying a mutual fund manager (who will skip the SpaceX ipo)
- other assets classes like real estate and bonds
- less diversified stock holdings
In this story we determined that S&P is going to choose a path different that other ETFs. Does that mean these ETFs differ in quality? Which should you pick?
A properly diversified portfolio should have bonds even with a lower risk profile. Some even include real estate now, since REITs are so popular. Target date funds do this automatically, and rebalance, cheaply.
Mutual funds aren't bad but the average person won't realize that they're paying a percentage of their assets, not a flat fee, to the manager. If the fund class can beat the market by more than that percentage then it could be worth it, otherwise pick an ETF that has the risk profile you can tolerate. But the first step would be to understand that.
Yeah yeah we're all above such gauche matters, it's only the entire reason SWEs have high paying jobs, paper wealth, and all the comforts that come with both, including the freedom to earn enough to walk away and act like you're above it all.
(I obviously don't know your circumstances but am commenting about a general phenomenon I see parroted by many professionally successful SWEs who seem to take glee in being ignorant of economics/finance while enjoying the spoils.)
I will go ride my horse, and get a bit drunk off some ale at the local pub. You go enjoy your automobile, electricity, and telephony.
Electricity is overhyped anyway. Nikola Tesla is a scammer with his crazy ideas. Not to mention the scam that is Bell's telephony. Electricity is causing a copper shortage for us common folk. This electricity bubble is built only on hype, and will pop soon enough!
You've named technologies that people were heavily speculating on that did experience bubbles. A useful technology and a painful misallocation of resources is far from mutually exclusive.
Don't worry. This is being laughed at in the factories in maranello.
But Ferrari has an obligation to the populistic world too, trying to wheel in customers for an EV end ending up selling them a real car with a V8-12 engine.
It looks exactly like a black economy compact wearing a differently coloured body kit. There’s a ton of lovely design moments and thoughtful touches, but it never resolves into a cohesive design aesthetic.
I think better when I have been off work for 4 weeks and beyond. My mind is dancing into new and glorious places, not being caught or dumbed down by idiotic automative repetitions, inhumane and corporate politics so dumb, walled-off-elite and cargo-cult like that no one can ever convince me that humans in an office space has decreased declining cognitive abilities.
People in the workforce are dumber than people outside, no doubt.
and once you've got your wish: ugly code without tests or a way to comprehend it, but cheap!
How much value are you going to be able to extract over its lifetime once your customers want to see some additional features or improvements?
How much expensive maintenance burden are you incurring once any change (human or LLM generated) is likely to introduce bugs you have no better way of identifying than shipping to your paying customers?
Maybe LLM+tooling is going to get there with producing a comprehensible and well tested system but my anectodal experience is not promising. I find that AI is great until you hit its limit on a topic and then it will merrily generate tokens in a loop suggesting the same won't-work-fix forever.
What you wrote aligns with my experience so far.
It's fast and easy to get something working, but in a number of cases it (Opus) just gets stuck 'spinning' and no number of prompts is going to fix that.
Moreover - when creating things from scratch it tends to use average/insecure/ inefficient approaches that later take a lot of time to fix.
The whole thing reminds me a bit of the many RAD tools that were supposed to 'solve' programming. While it was easy to start and produce something with those tools, at some point you started spending way too much time working around the limitations and wished you started from scratch without it.
I'm of the opinion that the diligence of experts is part of what makes code valuable assets, and that the market does an alright job of eventually differentiating between reliable products/brands and operations that are just winging it with AI[1].
I would think that the better the code is designed and factored and refactored, the easier it is to maintain and evolve, detect and remove bugs and security vulnerabilties from it. The ease of maintenance helps both AI and humans.
There are limits to what even AI can do to code, within practical time-limits. Using AI also costs money. So, easier it is to maintain and evolve a piece of software, the cheaper it will be to the owners of that application.
SpaceX or any of AI companies for that matter is absolutely not worth their money, but they will be carried through by government legislation, because otherwise the economy will be fucked for the US.
SpaceX ... 4.3 trillion...what the fuck are you on about
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