#tech bubble

[tilbageidanmark]

Bitcoin mining

[alpaca-clouds]

How we ended in the darkest timeline

I actually wanted to talk a bit more about the French Revolution, but given recent events, I fear like I need to talk about this for now. Mainly because over the weekend I had so many talks about this, and have reached the point where I just need this blog to link back to.

You know how people keep joking about how we ended up in the darkest timeline, right? Well, what can I say? It is probably right. And by now I can tell you pretty definitely why.

Now mind you, like with everything there is a multitude of reasons for this. Technically we can go and say: Yes, we are here because colonialization happened - and it would not be wrong. We can also say that it is because of Napoleon, and because the failure of the French Revolution - and that would not be entirely wrong either. And we absolutely have to also say, that a bit reason is that instead of fighting fascism everyone decided after WWII, that fighting communism would be so much more important.

But I think a lot of the stuff we deal with right now is very much linked to one specific thing: The 2008 financial crisis - and the lack of regulation that lead up to it.

This is the moment where I am gonna tell you to watch The Big Short. I know most of you have probably not done that before. Because the movie feels like Oscar bait and also, who wants to watch a 2 hour movie about the financial market, but trust me on this: The movie is actually made really well and explains what happened back then very, very well and in a way that at least hits my autistic humor very well.

But basically, you need to understand two things: For the longest time the financial market really only traded companies and investments into them. But at some point during the late 70s and early 80s someone realized that there is something they were not trading on: depts. Because obviously most credits are given out by the banks and the financial industry. Not really investments, because there is a promise this stuff gets paid back eventually. And so they started trading depts with each other.

If you do not see the problem with this, let me explain: If you buy the dept someone has with another company, you basically are just making a bet with them the long way around. If you buy a dept, you bet that the person will pay the debt back - if you sell it, you kinda are betting against it.

There is a lot of weird financial tooks for this kinda stuff, but this is what it comes down to. The financial market became more and more a big ass casino, only that other than any other gambling it was not treated as this - and the money they were using on gambling was actually money that did not belong to them.

Because here is the thing: The main players in the financial market are either banks or groups that invest for their customers. While in the second case the people at least are fully aware of the fact that the financial institution will trade with their money, a lot of bank customers are not really aware of this. Sure, they kinda know that when they keep their money at the bank they might get interest, but most of them do not understand why. Because really, it does never get fully explained to them, that the bank will use that money to trade and invest with it.

And this is kinda part of the issue.

See, what happened in 2008 was, that the banks traded with indexes (so basically bundles) of thousands and thousands of house mortgages. And in those bundles were so called sublime mortgages, which is financial speak for "dog shit mortgages we knew the people taking them out would be unable to pay, but we didn't give a fuck". And a lot of those mortgages were due in 2008, which is why those indexes failed in 2008, resetting their value to close to 0. But the banks had spend money on those indexes as if they had an actual value. Especially because it was always the common wisdom, that mortgages were one of the most secure financial tools.

So. Now, what happens when you spend money on something that you think is an investment, but turns out to be completely worthless? Eh?

Yeah, exactly, you just threw a lot of money into the wind. And that money now was GONE. The big financial companies were just out of money. The money had simply disappeared, which is always what happens when a financial bubble burst.

See, financial bubbles happen when people overestimate how much something is going to be worth. They expect something to raise in value, so that when it ultimately fails a lot of people have put money into it which will just be GONE.

Gone, baby, gone.

But again: The money the banks had been using was mostly not their money. It was the money of their customers. Some of whom understood that risk. Many of them did not. So basically, if you had any of your money on the bank, this money technically still belonged to you - but it was not there. And of course there were also literally hundred-thousands of people working for those companies, who were now out of money.

And this is where we come to the reason why we are living in the darkest timeline.

I know it sounds cynical coming from a lefty like me, but sadly... Yeah, Obama was a big, big reason of why it came to this. While this happened towards the end of the Bush administration, for the most part it was Obama dealing with the fall-out.

See, the government at the time had three options:

Do nothing. Accept that the money is gone and deal with the consequences. Build something new from the ashes.

Give out some securities for the private people who lost their money. Basically some form of check to get back up to amount X of money that you lost becuase of the banks, but prosecute the people in finance, who had messed it up. Also create laws to control the financial market and trade volume, as well as the size of banks.

Save the banks by basically paying their depts for them.

The administration decided to choose Option 3. They saved the banks to save the people's finances and all those jobs bound to the banking industry.

There were no laws. No controls. No checks and balances. And there was basically no prosecution of the people who had let this happen - partly because they did not care, and partly because they were dumb fuckers.

And pretty much everything that has happened since is in some way connected to that. Literally everything!

I mean, if you want to know what I mean with that? The MCU exists because of the 2008 banking crisis! Yeah, the fucking Marvel Cinematic Universe. The reason that streaming is fucked and your favorite shows get cancelled after one or two seasons is heavily connected to the 2008 financial crisis.

The 2008 financial crisis is also connected to the surge in right wing politics all around the world. Because the financial crisis did not only hit the USA, but the rest of the world as well. A lot of people lost their jobs because of it, and because the financial industry did not get controlled and from this learned that they could fuck up however much they liked ("too big to fail") the gap between the rich and poor got worse. Which then the right wingers used to make people angry against minorities.

And of course because all of this started with unrealistic sets for mortages, mortages were suddenly much harder to get and it ended up pretty much impossible to afford a home - just as most of millenials were leaving school.

After all: Nobody really understood, what happened during the financial crisis. Because most people stop following any explanation as soon as they hear stuff like "shorts" and "sublime mortages". So it was much easier to think that the reason that you lost your job and could no longer afford a home was because some immigrant took it, rather than that some white collar idiots at wallstreet made some trades that you could not even begin to understand.

But yeah, tl;dr: Obama decided to save the banks, put in no controls, and with this fucked pretty much both Millennials and everyone who came after us over. And everyone else - every other world leader - pretty much just went with it and did the same in their own country. Danke, Merkel, as we Germans would say.

This is also what started the Occupy Wallstreet Movement, which was trying to get SOME accountability, but in the end pretty much failed.

If I asked you to guess how many people got prosecuted because of the shit back then, I can guarantee you, that you would not guess right. Because literally everyone I have asked, said some number between 20 and 100, realizing very well that it was probably not the thousands actually at fault, but not being able to grasp the reality. One. There was one person actually prosecuted because of it.

These people destroyed our futures, they fucked us over, and they got away with it.

And you and I, we deserve to be angry about it.

Especially because it is happening again right now. There is not just one other bubble, but a couple of bubbles right now. And chances are that they will pop very soon. Fuck, I am writing this on Monday early afternoon German time. Chances are that by the time this goes online some might have started popping, because of the Trump administration's inability to deal with shit. And let's face it, the Trump administration is not gonna be capable of dealing with this, when it goes into freefall.

[charliejaneanders]

As augmented reality, self-driving vehicles and other innovations slowly creep into everyday life, we’re going to be faced with these kind of situations more and more often. Tech companies will ask us in the words of Groucho Marx, “Who are you gonna believe: me, or your own eyes?”

Google Told Me To Walk Into Traffic (my latest newsletter!)

[thatstormygeek]

Q: How did the AI hype start? A: OpenAI became the first American company to demonstrate that if you take a snapshot of the whole known internet and all digitized books in existence without worrying too much about copyright law, you can create a model so good that its output would be almost indistinguishable from that of a DC bureaucrat with mediocre intelligence.

DeepSeek just proved Lina Khan right

Khan warned that enabling protectionism for tech monopolies wouldn’t just hurt all of us, it would hurt them too. Now they’re getting wiped

Q: How is China involved? A: As a part of its larger effort to contain China, the U.S. government has been on a mission of stopping Chinese companies from becoming leaders in different areas of technology. It has done so by wielding control over global supply chains and protecting American tech companies from competition in the process. The U.S. blocked Huawei’s entry into the United States just as it was overtaking Apple to become the second biggest smartphone manufacturer in the world; it stopped European countries from installing Huawei manufactured 5G infrastructure when it was clearly more economical; and most recently, it passed legislation banning TikTok, a Chinese social media app that had become massively popular in United States and whose recommendation algorithm no American social media app had been able to outperform. The U.S. claim that Huawei and other Chinese tech companies are inextricably linked to China’s geopolitical strategy and put Western companies and people at heightened risk of surveillance and corporate espionage is, of course, grounded in reality. DeepSeek isn’t shy about how much data it collects on its platform, including even your keystrokes ... However, because DeepSeek is open source and can run locally on a separate device, Chairman Xi Jinping’s prying eyes can be shielded. Maintaining global technological dominance is one of the key concerns U.S. policymakers have repeatedly cited, and have identified AI as a crucial technology in maintaining that dominance. In 2018, when the U.S. government was in the process of banning Huawei, it realized that it would need to do the same with downstream technologies like semiconductor chips, the main component used in CPUs and GPUs. The severe chip shortage due to global supply chain disruptions during Covid-19 showed that advanced chips are a global supply chain bottleneck and a scarce resource. By 2022 the Biden administration had put comprehensive sanctions on China, stopping the export of these chips to the country and preventing Chinese AI companies from accessing the latest and most efficient GPUs. At the same time, it passed the CHIPS act, subsidizing national semiconductor manufacturing with over $50 billion.

[thoughtportal]

A Twitter thread

[bikeroar]

Unused rental bikes pile up in bicycle graveyards... 😢

LEARN MORE → http://snip.ly/11lhhb

[vignalistudio]

Serendipity.

[charliejaneanders]

I don’t see how else to make sense of it. 2022 was the year the 20-year tech bubble finally burst. 2023 was still bad for startups, and was full of bad headlines for the big platforms. And yet, in the markets, tech investors just took a deep collective breath and started inflating the next bubble, as though the previous year had never happened.

Silicon Valley runs on Futurity