Good point.  I forget I only do it for fun.

Quote from: K-Dog on Jul 26, 2024, 11:12 AMIf you want to know why tech companies have cut jobs, cutting jobs happens to be a FEATURE of capitalism.  It is ALWAYS done where it can be done to maintain the army of unemployed and increase PROFITS.  Maintaining an unemployed army is essential for profits.  Capitalism fails without it.  For real.

Of course.  The point is though that AI enables them to fire the humans because the AI enables fewer code jockeys to write code faster.  So the department that once had 20  EEs writing subroutines now has 5 using ChatGPT getting it done.  The irony is that the same guys just fired probably wrote some of the code behind the AI.

RE

Quote from: RE on Jul 25, 2024, 01:23 PMGood explanation of why Capitalism and the "Free Market" fails to build affordable housing.

https://ggwash.org/view/96392/why-no-ones-building-middle-income-housing-in-american-cities

Why no one's building middle-income housing in American cities

RE

That article was illustrative and clear.

QuoteBecause neither the office-building developer nor the warehouse developer can afford to pay $10 million—at that price, their projects will not generate sufficient economic returns to be financially viable—they cannot compete for this land. Thus, the land will be sold to become an apartment building.

The wisdum of de market!

* Caught with its pants down the wisdum of the market reveals itself.  It wants to make more rich people by making more poor people.

** Circumstances of being rich or poor can determine how you feel about the wisdom of de market.  However poor people can identify with their dreams over their realities and often go total Stockholm syndrome.  Rich people do not make this mistake.  Why would they?  Those who seem to are generally assholes pretending to be nice because they can.

*** Working day and night to grow inequity and maintain business as usual, a working man's dreams make him the ultimate philanthropist.  Driving by the new apartment building the working man imagines it must be nice to live there.

A few may find out.

In their dreams.  Because that is the only way they ever will.  Unless perhaps they are of the professional class with a huge 4-hoe-1-K. when they retire. 

Not so many like that though.  Rich people come to America from all over the world now.  It is the migration crisis nobody talks about.  Money does not always talk.  Sometimes it shuts the fuck up and makes things expensive.




To be rich and live in a faraway land.

If you are from anywhere else in the world, that faraway land can be America.

And making things too expensive for the locals is an American tradition.  Everyone with money is welcome.  Everybody else can swim a river and drown.

Quote from: RE on Jul 25, 2024, 01:23 PMGood explanation of why Capitalism and the "Free Market" fails to build affordable housing.

https://ggwash.org/view/96392/why-no-ones-building-middle-income-housing-in-american-cities

Why no one's building middle-income housing in American cities

RE

That article was illustrative and clear.

QuoteBecause neither the office-building developer nor the warehouse developer can afford to pay $10 million—at that price, their projects will not generate sufficient economic returns to be financially viable—they cannot compete for this land. Thus, the land will be sold to become an apartment building.

The wisdum of de market!

* Caught with its pants down the wisdum of the market reveals itself.  It wants to make more rich people by making more poor people.

** Circumstances of being rich or poor can determine how you feel about the wisdom of de market.  However poor people often identify with their dreams over their realities and go total Stockholm syndrome.  Rich people do not make this mistake at all.  Those who seem to are simply assholes.

*** Working day and night to grow inequity and maintain business as usual, the working man is the ultimate philanthropist.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/07/24/big-teach-cuts-half-a-million-jobs-blames-ai/

QuoteOf course, AI has its own problems, including hallucinations that invent information and phenomena that don't exist. Google pulled an AI blunder after it assured users that cockroaches living in a penis is totally normal, indeed that's how they got their name.

This article is light on facts and is presenting speculation as data.  I quote this single paragraph to show the contradiction, and other problems with AI were cited.  It makes it look like the author is vetting 'facts' the author actually knows to be made up.  The author admits AI has problems.  The truth is, at least for this year.  Is that only domain experts can use AI.  Programmers can use it to write a better program.  Only programmers can ask the right questions to refine results, and results have to be refined up the ying-yang.  Only a doctor can use AI to properly diagnose a disease.  Only a domain expert can tell if results are bullshit or not.  Currently AI generates more bullshit than a bull.

Regarding code.  AI can now teach anyone to program.  All they have to do is spend the time to learn.  Ask it questions and practice.

In other words.  Nothing has changed.  AI replaced the book.  You can now do proper book lernin without a book if you have the money to pay for AI, and you have a computer.  Free AI only gets you so far before your 'limit' is up.

If you want to know why tech companies have cut jobs, cutting jobs happens to be a FEATURE of capitalism.  It is ALWAYS done where it can be done to maintain the army of unemployed and increase PROFITS.  Maintaining an unemployed army is essential for profits.  Capitalism fails without it.  For real.

This article was written to hook you by fear.

* A new user can easily get an uncooperative AI session to take far longer to give results than if the user did the work themselves. If useful results are produced at all.  A new user will want to tell AI to  fuck itself in frustration.  And that is a total waste of time.  And hard on the keyboard.

Love this quote    :

When I used to give career advice to my MBAs, I joked that going into tech is like becoming a stripper—you make a lot when you're young, but it goes down fast. Even today you can find former senior programmers driving an Uber or mowing lawns, aged out of a fast-changing industry.

There's a half million people whose  Amerikan Dream has become a nightmare.  Those are folks with 6 figure incomes and hefty mortgages which won't get paid on a salary stacking the shelves at Harbor Freight.

Irony is it's those same programmers who wrote the code behind AI.  They coded themselves right out of a job.

Big Tech Cuts Half a Million Jobs, Blames AI

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/07/24/big-teach-cuts-half-a-million-jobs-blames-ai/

RE

Good explanation of why Capitalism and the "Free Market" fails to build affordable housing.

https://ggwash.org/view/96392/why-no-ones-building-middle-income-housing-in-american-cities

Why no one's building middle-income housing in American cities

RE

What I think is demonstrated here is that it's plain obvious now how fragile the system controlling our society has become with its increasing dependency on the complex system of interconnected computers.  Then when you consider this will be exponentially greater as AI systems are introduced as another layer on top of this layer, it doesn't matter if it's a "rare" occurence.  Forget 1 in 100, even if your failure rate is 1:10000000, if that 1 failure is catastrophic, all those wonderful benefits you claim for the rest of the time are wiped out.  It's like a Nuke Meltdown, all it takes is one failure at Chernobyl and you wipe out the neighborhood in a 50 mile radius for generations.  The computer systems are doing so many operations every day with so many code updates, failures are baked in the cake.

Imagine a software glitch update like thiss happening when Elon has a million Robotaxis on the road and a line of code that was supposed to control the brakes slipped into the accelerator module.  Or how about when they start replacing Air Traffic Controllers with AI systems?

The Chinese already drop Kill switches into cell phone chips that wwe KNOW about.  Every time you drop a new App on your smart phone that asks if it can make changes to the op system, there's an opportunity for some nefarious code to be inserted in your machine.  That code can go and replicate to other machines.  A well designed virus could probably shut down the whole banking system in na nanosecond.  If/when we have a big enough conflict with the Ruskies or Chinese, you gotta figure an attack on the networks would come quick.  Hell, even the North Koreans and Iranians have some good Code Jockeys who went to MIT or Stanford.

My recommendation is you shouldn't install a smart toilet. Hopefully you'll still be able to flush when the net crashes.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/23/business/crowdstrike-tech-nightcap/index.html

The global tech outage showed how we're just one mistake away from chaos

RE

Quote from: K-Dog on Jul 23, 2024, 03:30 PMInflation will make the price higher than 70 $ a barrel. 

Eventually perhaps, but in this cycle if inflation was going to drive it above the $80-84 range it's been trading at for the last year, it would have already done so.  In fact globally speaking we're moving into a deflationary cycle already.  China is already battling deflation:

In China, Deflation Tightens Its Grip

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/4786075-china-economic-crisis-third-plenum/

https://asiatimes.com/2024/07/china-cuts-key-rate-amid-worst-deflation-since-99/

Today, Oil dropped below the $80 benchmark again, dropping to $77/bl.  This is before the real meat of recession hits here, which looks like around Nov to me when they'll actually cop to it, and things will get seriously worse as the bubble of CRE refi's come due in 2025-26.  So, IMHO, a price target in the $65 range next year has high confidence on my part.  If I was still into  the game, I'd short with that target price.

We are of course addicted, but we're also addicted to debt to pay for it and the creditors are insolvent, so credit is getting tighter.  There will be bankruptcies, biznesses and factries will close, unemployment will rise.  UE people buy less gas and everything else.  Falling demand causes falling prices.Addicts who are broke either steal or go into withdrawal.  It's hard to steal gas, so I suspect withdrawal to be the general outcome.

RE

A $TRILLLION$ in CRE debt on office space probably not worth more than 50 cents on the dollar. lol.  AIG was Chump Change at a measely $100B.  They're gonna need a Bigger Bazooka. 


This is going to be REALLY entertaining. 

https://hbr.org/2024/07/u-s-commercial-real-estate-is-headed-toward-a-crisis

U.S. Commercial Real Estate Is Headed Toward a Crisis

RE