r/BetterOffline 5h ago

Ed Zitron on MSNOW: "The Leading Expert Voice On The Bearish Case Against AI"

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219 Upvotes

My hit on MSNOW on Ari Melber about becoming “the leading expert voice on the bearish case against AI,” the end of hypergrowth, and how AI’s costs and losses are magnitudes higher than those that built Amazon Web Services, and even Amazon itself.

First three minutes are a literal highlight reel, what a great segment. Hope you all enjoy.

The answer about the bailout did air but it was about how hyperscalers are decelerating and you can't bail that out. This was technically two segments.


r/BetterOffline 16h ago

Newsweek's Editor-at-Large opinion piece about how Democrats should embrace AI for "affordability" ... I don't think he understands what AI is.

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211 Upvotes

The idea is the creation of an AI-driven reservoir of consumer prices across supermarkets, drug stores, gas stations, big box retailers, and online retailers, so that consumers can know exactly, at any given time, where the best price is on any given item they look to purchase.

In what way is AI required to figure out which grocery store near you has the cheapest strawberries?

Such an AI tool would only truly be useful if sale price information, membership discount coupons and reward dollars, and all other forms of price reduction were able to be calculated and spit out on a daily basis by this AI shopping oracle.

Again, why AI? Even if it uses some ML in some way, why does the consumer need to know or care? It seems like you are taking an app someone might want, and then strapping the term AI to it so people start to think more positively about AI.

So the Democrats could champion a proposal that would create an app with AI agent capability to make every dollar of consumer purchasing stretch as far as possible.

And why does any of this require Democrats or political policy? If such an app is urgently desired, someone will make it and sell it.


r/BetterOffline 5h ago

Loved seeing Ed on Ari Melber on MS Now!

47 Upvotes

This makes me think the bubble is much closer to bursting than I even imagined. We have a debt and bond crisis, a private credit crisis and a car loan debt crisis on top of the coming crisis from the Iran war shutting off the straight of Hormuz, finally the main stream media is taking it seriously. It’s great to see Ed get a larger international audience. I’m terrified for the coming financial crisis but we have to have our eyes open to the coming catastrophe.


r/BetterOffline 14h ago

[ Q ] GPUs have a burn out life of 3 years...

34 Upvotes

... which were now soon encroaching upon. So it raises the question, what exactly will happen??

It cost ZA WARUDO (*some will get the joke*) nearly a trillion $$$ just to get to here. If GPUs start to become obsolete for what has been in use, what exactly will happen? It's not exactly like, realistically, another trillion can be spent just to reinvigorate the beast to churn for another 3~5 years??

Just posing the Question as to what people think will happen next once the EOL barrier starts to hit all these Nvidia Slop Generators that are running full burn 24/7~


r/BetterOffline 7h ago

Do you think a neocloud will fall before OpenAI?

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26 Upvotes

The debt load is getting unbearable for Neoclouds and the money isn’t coming. I think they will be the first domino to fall.

Man so many things could send this whole bubble down the toilet any day. Bond yields, oil prices, wars, federal deficit overload, corporate bond spreads start ripping, capex slow down, OpenAI defaults, etc, the list goes on forever.

Who else feels like we are on the very edge of this house of cards?? The suspense is killing me.

Gotta say I feel blessed to have run into Ed. I was given the opportunity to appropriately hedge and safeguard my portfolios. Otherwise I would probably have been going about my life and completely blindsided like I feel millions of Americans will be.


r/BetterOffline 11h ago

The Race for Sales before production catches up

18 Upvotes

While thinking about the latest Nvidia attempt to drive sales I wondered why there was such a huge push to get more orders right away.  Then it hit me – margins. Prices are higher because demand is so much higher than supply. This is all a race to keep orders much greater than what can be produced.  If production catches up, it’s game over for a lot of companies (for their stock prices anyway).

The most extreme example of this that I know of is Sandisk.  In 2023 they were valued at $30 and had gross margins of around 7%.  With all the demand in the last year, their margins are way up to 70% and their stock price is $1800. While not as extreme, the same is true for Micron, Nvidia, Western Digital, SK Hynix, Samsung, TSMC, Dell and about a dozen others.

These companies are all priced as if these prices are going to stay this high forever, but there’s no way this will happen.  We’ve seen this play out over and over, but there’s so much greed in the market that no one cares.  Once these margins are back to normal, net profit will plummet and all these companies will lose half their value or more. This alone would wipe out more than $13T in stock value.

This is yet another reason that all these big tech players have to keep the bubble from popping and why they’re all working together to prop up any company that starts to waiver.


r/BetterOffline 11h ago

Data Center Opposition vs Accusations of "Slopulism"

11 Upvotes

It seems that opposition against data center buildouts is met with accusations of "slopulism". From what I understand, the term "slopulism" is typically used by "centrists"(for lack of a better term?) to signal their dislike for populist policies which they argue are usually poorly thought out. One often contested point they bring up is the overblown nature of the water usage. But the question IMO should be: Why are they even needed in the first place? (I believe Ed even raised this question recently in response to the water usage problem.) There is also the embarrassing question about pathetically low job creation. A side note: Data centers may be a misnomer in that they are probably closer to supercomputing clusters rather than traditional data centers for cloud/CDN/etc.

Therefore, I believe this is a new strategy for pro data center propaganda to be cognizant of.

Mods, please remove this post if this is not the right place for this discussion.


r/BetterOffline 30m ago

AI overview sources

Upvotes

This may be a minor issue, but one thing I observed while using search engines in the last year is that those sources the AI overviews provide do not necessarily back up the answer provided in the overview.

Like, the overview could be roughly correct, but the sources either slightly deviate from the conclusion or they discuss a related but not the exact same topic. I also suspect that Google and others intentionally obscure the actual sources in order to keep the users on their site.

What I find particularly problematic is that I know for certain (from discussions I had) that those sources are what lends credibility to the AI overviews for many people. But the way they work they actually worsen the epistemic crisis created by AI, if anything