I complained about it already https://tickerfeed.net/articles/whitehouse-genesis-mission-b...
I have a brilliant idea. Why not start this now?
The US government will give every child born $1000 in money in order to hand it to the small number of families who own 70% of equities in order to purchase equities the child can't touch for 18 years. That is US Government -> child -> rich person who currently owns the equity, although the rich person gets the cash in hand the child has to wait 18 years to sell the equity.
Where does the US Government get this $1000 per child from? Borrow it, adding to the $38,000,000,000,000 in national debt.
Here is the interesting part of my brilliant plan. That child will inherit, calculated per capita, $111,000 in debt the moment she is born. That child will be responsible, calculated per capita, for ~$3,000 a year in interest on that debt.
In order to sell the idea, every time the US Government gives $1000 to a child to purchase stocks I own, I will give $250 to another child to purchase stocks I own. Let's do the math: $1000 profit - $250 loss + $250 profit = $1000 profit. Best part is the media will run this as the leading news story for 3 days making me look like God.
It is a brilliant idea.
We could argue about the risk if things start to fail, but in an emergency the US could change its constitution and abandon its debt.
With debt, along with the proverbial "cash" comes an opposing "IOU" -- any change* is thus only temporary, in the time dimension (essentially that's what's being exchanged: time)
Printing money out of nowhere is different, because it's missing that other half
* at the risk of stating the obvious: "change" meaning "difference" and not "cents"
* Social security used to have a huge surplus, that was savings that had to go somewhere (even if it was just a savings account in a bank, the bank would then be able to lend it out). They instead buy treasuries and that savings becomes debt to the USG.
* China likewise needs to save dollars because it doesn't want them sloshing around in their economy leading to inflation, so instead of using it to buy things they buy treasuries, and their savings becomes debt to the USG (not always a great deal for China if interest rates are below inflation).
The dollar has been so useful in the past as a currency of trade because you could save large amounts of it easily by buying US treasuries. One reason China doesn't want the RMB to be used so heavily for trade is that they don't want to do the same yet.
When a bank issues debt, the money is created 'out of thin air'. When the debt is paid off, that money is destroyed. However usually more debt is being created than redeemed as things go on, so the total money supply increases (this is a good thing, as it allows the economy to expand).
Various regulations and central bank market interventions (quantitative tightening/easing) control this process, which thus can be induced to 'print money' if the government wishes - assuming they have a sovereign currency.
If you borrow $100 USD from the bank, and pay it off immediately after, it's clear no money was "created" as such
If $100 USD is "printed" outright, it's clear that there's no way to achieve that same result
The fact that the debt isn't generally paid back immediately doesn't change that fundamental. That's what I meant when I said any apparent "change" is about "time" rather than "money"
It is true that the money supply should expand with the economy. Turning raw materials into finished goods represents a larger "net economy" at the end of the process than at the beginning. (Indeed that's basically how it makes sense to have interest on debt in the first place)
Nevertheless, printing money out of whole cloth is different from issuing debt
The bank "printed" money by handing out cash that it didn't have. It only had a fraction of it. That new money went free into the world with the same respect any other cash gets. You and I can't pull that off.
Along with a "-$100" IOU on the books
That is different from merely "printing money"
Some talk about how China has some strategic issues, such as do they have a reliable supply of food and energy? (Zeihan etc.)
I guess the energy portion is being solved with renewables. And I guess if they solve the issue of demographic collapse with robots and AI, that's something.
But really, if there's less people and they're getting older, what's the point? What are they really working towards?
This question is also becoming a problem post-Trump immigration ban in the U.S.
Who knows what the U.S.'s demographics are going to look like now?
Trump inherited a U.S. with some of the best demographics of all nations on the planet, especially in the West. And he managed to throw that in the garbage.
What kind of sources are you looking for? The Five Year Plans are the best source of truth for what they are planning on doing nationwide. The annual Statistical Communiqué on National Economic and Social Development and China Statistical Yearbook from the NBS contain statistics on how that implementation is going. Then every year the NDRC delivers the Report on the Implementation of the Plan for National Economic and Social Development and on the Draft Plan to the National People’s Congress which packages up the statistics on how the plan is progressing.
Are those statistics reliable?
In the US there are often good alternative sources for data: the discussions about unemployment numbers have been interesting (e.g. after private ADP numbers released). https://seekingalpha.com/article/4850656-jobs-data-from-alte...
The lies in the Soviet 5 year production stats were relentlessly mocked in 1984.
Alternative sources to verify are a bit harder to find without knowing the languages (lots of the NRDC and NBS stats are available in English).
Yes, people also compare some of these statistics with export/import data and with data from other countries on the other side of these transactions, and the numbers match.
> But really, if there's less people and they're getting older, what's the point? What are they really working towards?
China wants to be a rich country even if their population stabilizes at only 900 million people or so. Mostly they want to avoid the middle income trap, which would have been a problem regardless of their demographics falling off a cliff. Automation is the best way to get around it, and they have enough tech, production know how and capacity, and smart people to pull that off.
China is going to continue doing what is best for it, and they haven't gone stupid like the USA has. Embracing AI for productive uses rather than just fixating on the slop produced is one place where they are racing past the west.
I've always assumed that there is such a source of truth, but that I had never heard of it, wouldn't have access to it, and couldn't afford it if I did.
Reading a few tweets from Musk was all it took to correct that misapprehension. It's increasingly clear that nobody at any level of play knows jack shit about anything.
Isn't this simply the answer?
That what's going on is gaslighting of the public and that there are people behind the scenes and they don't want hoi polloi to know what they're up to?
This geo-politics (or politics) talk is 'intellectual' men's astrology.
When a woman asks me my astrological sign, I know she's a deeply unserious person. When a man says 'do they have a reliable supply of food and energy'...
I'm asking to know how much owning a model is actually worth, not in how much it could make money by selling use, but in how much it deprecates and keeps value to make a new one. If say one side of China/US lacks out on a model generation, do they only need to follow progress on the science behind it and when they own the data, the algorithm and the hardware all they need is "just" time and energy or is it important, that they actually have their on instance of a large model from every generation continuously?
There is no scenario where the American vote for a party will fall below 48%, and elections will continue to be decided by how 3-4 states vote.
Narrator: As it turns out, they can.
The difference now is instead of banks holding the risk, they are now the safest portion of the loans. The risk is now moved to private credit, so if this bubble bursts, they will panic sell other assets to cover the AI losses, which will crash unrelated sectors as well.
Since the now bad AI loans can't be sold, they need liquidity form elsewhere to cover. AI bursting means other S&P 500 stocks, treasuries, gold, crypto, commercial real estate will all go down with it.
The .com bubble wasn't like this, but it was a minority between bubbles.
If we separate the tech from the industry, it's clear one has some value (albeit very hard to say just how much) and the other is a lot of smoke and mirrors. This is not a healthy space.
AI Winters. I finished school in 2008 and have seen it happen twice.
Convnets. LSTM (and various RNNs).
Both are in wide use today.
I have a feeling the word "actually" is doing a lot of work with this. I shipped AI facing user products a few years ago, then worked in more research focused AI work for awhile (spending a lot of time working with internals of these models). Then seeing where this was all headed (hype was more important than real work) decided to go back to good ol' statistical modeling.
Needless to say, while I think AI is absolutely useful, I'm bearish on the industry because current promises and expectations are completely out of touch with reality.
But I have a feeling because I'm not currently deploying a fleet of what people are calling "agents" (real agents are still quite cool imho), you would describe me as not "actually" using AI.
You're in your own little bubble and completely oblivious to the thousands of man hour wasted every day to unfuck AI slop
And as it turns out 80% of users aren't willing to pay a cent and will abandon ship as soon as there is an alternative
Having a LLM run as "fact checker" /coach for everything that you write also would be a great addition.
In what world would a corporation pay a full yearly salary for 1/8th to 1/4 the labor hours? The current world already looks to labor as the juiciest place to cut cost for the profit margin.
> Banks are lending unprecedented sums to technology giants building artificial intelligence infrastructure while quietly using derivatives to shield themselves from potential losses.
And who is their counterparty? Aliens? What a dumb click-bait article.
Liquidating other assets. The point of the banks using SRTs is to push the default risk off of the bank and onto investors.
So now, instead of banks failing, private credit gets to bear the risk of the bubble popping. Since they can't sell the (now bad) AI debt, they will need to liquidate all of their other assets to pay the banks.
That's why a potential AI bubble burst can cause the markets to enter a death spiral and bring down a bunch of other, unrelated markets.
If private credit can't cover the losses by liquidating everything else, well, then they fail, and we either let it all crumble or do bailouts again.
Plus the problem of 2008. You cannot offload risk if everything is synchronized, the math still works but doesn't take "either everything crashes or nothing does" into account.
That kind of reflexivity has powered past bubbles. George Soros’ reflexivity thesis applies: rising prices attract more investment, which inflates prices further, until reality forces a reset. If many AI-related companies can’t quickly deliver expected growth, the eventual correction could be sharp.
In short: hype begets cash, cash begets price, price begets more hype, and at that point, we’re no longer betting on value, we’re betting on the belief itself.
- Most participants in the economy are creating very little real value. They're shifting things around or temporarily solving problems that are highly localized to the organization they're in.
- There's a lot of unrealized value stored in the corpus of knowledge that AI companies have ingested— the millions of webpages, the scanned books, wikipedia, the blogs and Q&A sites. So even if AI companies are not creating new insights, just the act of locating, filtering, and summarizing knowledge that was already present somewhere in the world is valuable. Indeed, one could use this same argument to declare that Google in 1999 was creating no value, which is of course obviously untrue.
AI proposes to solve: a content supply side problem which does not exist, and an analysis problem which also only maybe exists. Really what it does in the best of cases (assuming everything actually works) is drive the cost to produce content to zero, make discovery less trustworthy, make the discovery problem worse, and launder IP. In the best case it is a net negative economic force.
All that said, I believe the original comment is about the fact that the economy exists to serve market participants and AI is not a market participant. It can act as a proxy, but it doesn't buy or sell things in the economic sense. Through that lens, also in the best case the technology erodes demand by reducing economic power of the consumer.
That said, I'm stoked to hear about the next AI web site generator or spam email campaign manager. Lets setup an SPV to get it backed off-balance sheet.
