This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Does anyone else feel like we're heading for a good old-fashioned, 2008-tier, financial crash? I recall people bringing up the possibility ever since Covid bucks started rolling out, but even though we were due for one, and even though the money printer was going brrrrr, the crash has so far failed to materialize.
At the time, I was of two minds about this. On one hand, all the libertarian theory I used to subscribe to said money-printing => boom, boom => bust. On the other hand, the problem for me was it never felt like a boom, and I think this is changing now. A key feature of the pre-crash boom is "malinvestment"; capital going into often downright deranged projects, that are later abandoned half-finished. Well, I feel like the datacenter craze qualifies, and with the wave of AI IPOs that are coming just as major indices are changing their rules, to allow for these companies' near-instantaneous inclusion (an investment so good, you can't pass up on it. Literally, if you're American), it seems like we're solidly in the "irrational exuberance" phase.
Add this to the list of things I hope I'm wrong about, because if we get a proper crash, the political fallout is going to be massive. The script writes itself: Trump / tech bros / capitalism bad, even more gay race communism now.
To whitepillers: is there an argument for why I'm wrong that doesn't boil down to "you don't get it, chud, it's the New Economy! The Singularity is just around the corner! All the rules are obsolete!"? This argument is verboten, because this is pretty much what people say with every bubble.
To fellow blackpillers: any ideas on how to brace for impact? Any IT guys here old enough to make it through the dotcom bubble? How did you do it? Any advice you would have given your past self?
I don't know if it'll be 2008-tier, but I'm expecting an ugly correction by the summer of 2027.
I've been expecting a correction since 2021 or so, but I keep being wrong. It feels like we go from one hype to the next without any response from the market when the hype doesn't pan out. Cryptocurrency was going to change everything. NFTs were going to change everything. The metaverse was going to change everything. 3d printing was going to change everything. Hyperloop was going to change everything. Full self driving was going to change everything by 2017!
Sitting here in 2026, I'm about to get in my car that I drive myself. I'm going to buy a new spatula with cash instead of 3d printing a replacement using feedstock that I bought with Bitcoin. The Hyperloop is an expensive joke, metaverse has been wound down amid record-setting layoffs, and NFTs are basically dead.
It seems like the market is fully decoupled from the economy at this point. Everything moves up and down on vibes, and the idea of "uncorrelated assets" shit the bed and died in 2022.
At this point the only solid indicators I have left are interest rates and debt, and both of them are looking increasingly dicey. A lot of very important loans (eg: SoftBank) will by due by the Summer of 2027, and debt collectors are not known for their understanding and gentle forebearance.
I have lived through both the dot com boom and global financial crisis. The claims of AI boosters are not identical to the people caught up in those manias, but it sure rhymes. I'm told that this time it's different. I'm told not to worry about troubling financial signals, because Line Goes Up, and it goes up more than enough to cover the risk. I'm sold an increasingly rosy picture of a hypothetical future mixed into a cocktail with a stark fear of being priced out forever... sorry, a stark fear of "becoming part of the permanent underclass". I was back in 2008 for a minute.
In both cases, I just kept my head down, kept saving, kept investing, and held a death grip on my job. It probably set me back in terms of total lifetime career prospects, but I was also never homeless or counting individual beans to see how long I could go before malnutrition kicked in either. I didn't buy a house until 2012, when I had saved enough to put down a full 20%.
Right now, I'm still contributing to my 401(k), Roth IRA, and HSA investments for the tax advantage, but I'm being more conservative in my taxable brokerage. I like Dimensional and Avantis a lot. The expense ratios are higher than pure passive choices like VTI, but they have a few additional filters that seem to help against the absolute worse of the current debt bonanza. I'm also increasing my bond and securitized debt exposure. It has its own risks, but debt is senior to equity when shit hits the fan. I'd get into metals, but I don't understand those markets well enough for it to be anything other than a gamble.
Beyond that, I'm trying to keep my spending down, and trying to make myself Highly Visible to management. It's pretty clear at this point that almost all layoffs are done on vibes, so if I can make myself part of the c-suite's emotional in-group, I think I have better odds. Hopefully I can speed run a fully funded retirement, then just keep working until I can't anymore.
If you zoom out a bit, you can also see cycles of overzealous investing in technology that was hyped to change everything, and eventually did, just not fast enough to keep the investments solvent. Home computing and video game companies crashed in the early 80s, but I'd be hard-pressed to argue that investors in early Apple or pre-IPO Microsoft were wrong about computers on every desk. Or Cisco investors in the late 1990s thinking about that this internet thing would sell lots of networking hardware. It's perfectly possible for the hype to be right without the expected profits following from it.
More options
Context Copy link
Surely you can't really be surprised about any of this. What is the market supposed to do about NFTs not panning out? To what extent were public companies investing in monkey pngs with the hope of selling them to a greater fool? Why should the markets crash because some retards (technical term) were wrong about NFTs?
Except for the metaverse this goes for all of your examples. And Facebook stock took a 64% haircut in 2022 (the market overall fell only 33%) so it was hardly without consequences.
This sounds like:
More options
Context Copy link
Oh, yeah. Same old song. I lived through the Celtic Tiger era in Ireland and that time too it was going to be different. This wasn't like the last times we had economic boosts following after slumps and then petering out and being followed by the next slump. This time the good times would last forever, this time we would keep on getting richer and richer, this time we were finally a modern economy with permanent high-skilled, high-paying jobs and we'd all be middle to upper-middle class and eating avocado toast as we commuted to our office jobs in the Big City forever.
That it was undergirded by the construction boom, and that the subsequent property bubble inevitably burst, was handwaved away as pessimism. And then it all came tumbling down, triggered by the 2008 US crisis with its own property bubble and mortgage lending, but the house of cards at home was exposed as built on sand. Enter the austerity years, begging for bailouts, and the return of the emigrant ship as the solution to "too many people at home, not enough jobs". This time had not been different, after all.
The US economy is generally robust and may not suffer as much during a downturn or even a crash, but the ripple effects will be felt globally.
Is the Irish economy that bad? I thought they were still doing pretty decently in the context of EU countries, albeit with an American leash and collar.
We're much too over-dependent on the tax take from the multinationals, and for the employment in Big Tech. When the likes of Meta do global layoffs, that hits us too, and there isn't really the slack for "okay all the laid-off software engineers can instead go work for the other IT companies" because they're laying off or not hiring, too.
The government is also looking to borrow to keep programmes going, instead of socking away the surplus for a rainy day as had originally been the plan, as well as the usual budget over-runs (the health service is a constant black hole of sucking up money and running out and needing more):
We're not in crisis yet, but a bad day for the USA and/or the global economy is going to hit us hard, and the one lesson we should have learned is that the rainy day always comes:
In other news, Captain Renault is shocked-shocked!-to find that gambling is going on in here!
Irish politicians boom-and-bust spending and borrowing to buy votes? I cannot believe it! Even though I've seen this exactly playing out since the late 70s when I became old enough to understand what was going on and then old enough to vote in the 80s.
You should see the saga of our new National Children's Hospital. Will be complete God knows when, will cost God knows how much, and the builders claim it's not their fault at the same time they're sending record profits home to their parent company. Claimed it would be open in 2026? That's not going to happen.
More options
Context Copy link
Almost all US states manage to keep "rainy day funds", although the sizes and average balances (per capita) range quite a bit. IIRC it's not quite a typical partisan divide on which are which.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Add on "Prediction markets are going to change EVERYTHING" (mostly used for sports gambling, unfortunately), the Internet of Things is going to change EVERYTHING (I will now spend EXTRA money for a toaster that isn't wifi connected), OMG we might have found a room-temperature superconductor, VR/AR tech is going to blow your mind, Crypto hype moved from Blockchain hype, to DApp Hype, to DAO Hype, to NFT Hype, to Stablecoin Hype, and it was all illusory.
WHAT THE FUCK WAS WEB3?
Its funny, I MOSTLY could spot when a trend was more hype than real.
I sold all my crypto in 2019. Never bought an NFT. I thought Metaverse would become something but nobody had a good vision for it, 3D printing is indeed a cool, useful tech but don't bet the farm on it.
But I feel sketchy now because all those hype cycles leave you suspicious if the next big thing is actually arriving or there's just people who make a lot of money if you believe it is.
SpaceX seems to be real, but maybe still overhyped.
GLPs ARE the real deal, and there's some other neat drugs in the pipeline.
Smartphones continue to be a boon... if you can avoid all the gamified apps designed to suck your attention and money.
Quadcopter tech is pretty damn mature now, and is finally achieving some market penetration.
It feels absurd to focus on that right now, when the way things are going we're either going to get crash and hyperinflation wiping out a ton of that nest egg, or a new industrial revolution that goes exponential and so even modest market holdings will make you wealthy over the next 10 years.
The ONE thing that doesn't seem likely to happen is just steady 7% growth in the market (on average) over the next 25 years.
I'm old enough to remember the first VR hype in the early nineties. They made it sound like totally realistic VR sex with partners you created yourself, was only two or three years away. Seems like that isn't even on the farthest horizon now.
More options
Context Copy link
Around 5 years ago, I saw part of a huge tech webinar where a woman, presumably SF based, was talking in a very emotionally charged tone about how she would be really down on the world and its future if not for the promise of Web3 and its salvationist glory. I had no idea what that could possibly mean at the time. What difference could it make to real lives? Was I missing something important? Time would tell, I figured.
I don't think I was missing much. The promise of web3 was "decentralization" and getting away from the control of the biggest tech companies by using blockchain networks to build sites. But the companies operating the stablecoins and whatever, were mega companies like Coinbase. And the movement was marked by really low ease of use (complex seed phrases, "gas fees," etc.), and massive grift. Much like nfts, a few early ponzi schemers made obscene sums while many suffered.
Or they were inherently unstable. RIP Luna.
Its interesting that while the fundamental tech behind Bitcoin has proven utterly sound, the inability of the tech to compensate for the human/cultural element of the community we build around it has made it less effective at its generally intended purpose. I mean, it still functions as a currency, yet that's arguably the least common use case for it these days.
Either way, there was absolutely a tipping point when the core operators in the environment stopped being a majority of those who understood and supported the technology and got outnumbered by those who were about the price and keeping it pumped even at the expense of the tech, or just straight up scamming.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What else am I going to do with it? My house is just about paid off. I've got several months worth of food and water. My car is in good shape. I'm pretty well set for guns and guitars.
Hookers and blow aren't really an option either. I don't do drugs, and I live out in the sticks where the quality of prostitute is so low that I'd pay them to not fuck me.
Charitable giving? Precious metals? More expensive food?
I already donate to my local homeless shelter and animal shelter. I guess I could do more.
For now I'm just saving like crazy and trying to speed run retirement.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Solid question, in that case.
Could do what I did. Buy a classic muscle car. Gives you something to work on and fun as hell to drive, especially on backroads.
LARP as a moonshiner.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link