A weekly thread to discuss financial matters - from personal all the way up to global.
Ground Rules
- Remember that we're all just Internet randos. Don't bet your life savings on a hot tip from this thread.
- Keep culture war in the culture war thread. Yes, global events may impact our personal finances, but that does not mean we have to incessantly harp on culture war aspects here. If you are going to discuss it, please stick to the practical impacts of it on an individual level.
- Be kind. Remember that everyone here comes from different circumstances. We all have different resources available and different risk tolerances.
- Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Better is better. Celebrate people when they take a step up and work to move their finances in the right direction. Don't flame out because they haven't followed what you consider the optimal path. Everybody has to start somewhere.
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Notes -
While I align with the idea that in the limit the only real possible outcomes of superhuman general AI are doom or utopic abundance, I agree that the third point is proving too much. Possibility of AI being a bubble aside, even granting that AI lives up to the hype and drives unprecedented productivity, it seems extraordinarily difficult to determine who actually ends up capturing the value from that productivity.
Nvidia is a software company in a trenchcoat vulnerable to having their moat and margins forded by sufficiently good SWE AI, FAAMG still derive a supermajority of their revenue from vulnerable middle-class consumers directly and indirectly, and the American frontier labs are potentially vulnerable to having their margins on inference undercut by Chinese lab competition and tokens turning into a commodity.
Personally, my thesis is simply to be largely all in on global total market indices - reasonably diversified against a potential bubble, while insofar as property rights are preserved and AI creates unprecedented value, it gives me the best chance to invest in the someone primed to capture that value, and presumably even the "modest" returns on an index fund are going to be good enough if AI does end up being that transformative.
Of course, in the more exotic doom / utopia scenarios one's investment mix is not going to matter very much either way; betting on the rapture has never been a winning strategy.
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