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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?
For the first time in decades, in my entire life, the US seems to actually be excited about real huge scale projects. We lead the world undeniably in a new state of the art, we have energetic and ambitious figures fighting each other in a titanic race to innovate on projects at never before attempted scale. A site the size of Manhattan! that's small beans lets do it in space! It's just such an incredible bummer how cynical and bitter so many seem to be about it. Truly it could all go wrong, scaling could stop it's definitely within the distribution of possible future that tokens become a commodity in such a way that these investments don't pay off. But if you wanted to make America great again, if you wanted to actually build impressive physical things here at home and show the world what we're capable of, then this is our ticket. Were you under the impression regeneration was going to be a sure thing?
I feel like I'm watching people sabotage nuclear energy all over again over bullshit hallucinated fears of disaster or made up sour grapes about how huge amounts of energy from fission wouldn't even be that useful. We made computers talk like people and they've progressed in only a few years from barely coherent chat partners to genuinely useful junior programmers. I think there's a fair chance this whole thing ends up with all of us dead as well as a fair chance that progress peters out but how can you not be excited?
Are you really surprised why a technology where its proponents and developers are saying that it has a solid chance of killing everyone and/or consigning the median person into permanent unemployment at best, or creating a titanic financial bubble that's going to bring everyone's retirement with it if it doesn't pay off at worst, is extremely unpopular?
As a software engineer I enjoy using coding agents and I do think with demographics and fertility being what they are, the only real choice as a society is leaning into AI and automation as much as possible even with the commensurate risks, but frankly the median person has really not seen proportional consumer surplus from the trillions invested into post GPT-4 or so LLM development, and in return all they get is dealing with a tsunami of online slop, vibe-coded software that gets worse even as engineers boast about how productive they are, and higher prices for power and RAM.
At least in China they have the message discipline to tell people that AI is going to be used to improve people's quality of life, but all SF can do is jerk off about the AI-induced permanent underclass happening any month now and how dangerous AI is is going to be; it's obvious why the median person hates the AI build-out.
I have a snarky Freudian theory that the rise of the tech right and a lot of SV comms missteps have the same root cause - that the founder/VC elite are failing to contain their white-hot rage at having to pay upper-middle class salaries (and extend the respect the upper class traditionally extends to the upper-middle class) to mere codemonkeys who lack upper-middle class social graces.
In this model, the "permanent generational underclass" meme is founders, VCs, and people who see themselves as future founders and VCs expressing glee at the codemonkeys losing undeserved social status. From the point of view of someone who can afford a family-sized house in the Bay Area, nurses, plumbers etc. are already part of the underclass.
If that was the issue for them they’d have fired all the expensive American software engineers making $300k years ago and replaced them with French, British and Germans making a quarter or a third of that.
They tried. Didn't work. The French, British, and Germans at home weren't good substitutes, and the ones who came to the US demanded the $300k.
But I would have pegged you (along with BC) as one of most likely to be experiencing that white-hot rage at the wrong people making the big bucks.
I think nobody deserves to make one cent less than the amount they can fairly negotiate. IQ and demographics do not indicate a great superiority for American tech workers. US companies achieved dominant global positions because of larger domestic markets, far more readily available capital, network effects and superior entrepreneurial culture. But none of these suggest US engineers are far better or smarter than their European peers. That would be unlikely.
The pay is likely load-bearing for the engineers just as it is for the founders. Pay a top engineer a normal middle class salary, and you'll get good, solid work out of them. Give them a chance to get rich and you'll likely get a lot more.
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