I lost my job during the dot com bust (it preceded the GFC) and since that shook me, I was very skeptical of properties making people rich overnight but they literally were!
"There's no free lunch!", I told myself, but it was becoming increasingly hard to ignore my barber, the cashier at the grocery store, my dentist, my landscaper - all who had bought highly leveraged properties and had actually made profit. I'm not ashamed to say I started to look into it myself - I was even ready to purchase some leveraged properties myself but kept getting outbid by even crazy offers.
Then 2008 happened. It happened suddenly. First it was on the news. Then quietly, people began to stay at home. Then move out.
It was both unsettling but also reassuring. My home value halved overnight (it's 800% up now so I'm doing OK) and mu neighborhood went mostly empty (bankruptcies, foreclosures).
Now again in 2026, my barber, the cashier at the grocery store, my dentist, my landscaper - all cannot stop talking about Grok Bot, about "Chat" (they usually mean ChatGPT or Gemini).
Maybe this time I can get in and get out in time, get real rich!
Consumer. Their usecases seem pretty valid - the landscaper is using it to drum up more business, has agents responding to incoming emails and texts, just like my dentist and barber.
The cashier uses GrokBot to transcribe notes to her manager. Her company has a very bad inventory app (I don't want to name names but it's a very large nationwide chain) so she literally exports inventory into an excel and feeds it into GrokBot as a way to run queries.
I can see nothing wrong in them just like I could see no wrong in buying properties and flipping them for a profit because there was so much demand at that time.
If you weren't buying houses 2003-2009, you have no idea how crazy it was. People would buy homes unseen in Olathe, KS.
It's likely just me but it just feels eerily familiar. I hope we are all wrong this time around.
uh, there's a huge difference between using an AI agent(s) to make yourself more efficient in your line of work, v.s. buying leveraged properties valued in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
> Well, since you seemed to know what you needed to do back then (but didn't take action), what do you think you need to do now to "get rich"?
You give me too much credit. I didn't know how to "get rich" back then and neither do I, now.
I didn't take action because I didn't know. I kept getting outbid because I didn't know how I would pay $1M for a home that I would struggle to rent out for more than $800/mo.
My answer, as always, is: Organize as workers against our capitalist exploiters, and overthrow this system of capitalism in favor of a system which rewards us workers for the wealth we create and not our capitalist exploiters who’s only contribution is rent seeking on the wealth we create.
> Well what did you and them do after "getting rich"?
I never got rich as I never ended up buying a property for investment. I just kept on getting outbid by others. I kept getting outbid because I didn't know how I would pay $1M for a home that I would struggle to rent out for more than $800/mo.
The others reinvested their profits into the next purchase until the music stopped. Everyone but my dentist got wiped out.
My dentist just made a payment everytime he got a late notice which was like once every 4-6 months as the note changed hands, often getting lost in the chaos. He refinanced all the properties around 2012-2013 and invested the proceedings all into one multi storey clinic which is doing very well.
I believe that was Joseph Kennedy, father of JFK and RFK. He realized that he didn't understand what was going on in the stock market at all, and so he got out, a few weeks before the 1929 crash.
Off topic: I first wrote "2029" instead of "1929" because habit. Wow, the start of the Great Depression was 97 years ago? I find that surprising.
> Now again in 2026, my barber, the cashier at the grocery store, my dentist, my landscaper - all cannot stop talking about Grok Bot, about "Chat" (they usually mean ChatGPT or Gemini).
I mean, they should be. It's a transformative technology that is doing something that was science-fiction five years ago, and it going to make a few people trillionaires, and it's not entirely clear where it will leave the rest of us.
That doesn't mean that you should, like, be rushing to be a bagholder.
I agree that there's much wild speculation, but some of the speculation is pretty mild in comparison. Micron trades at a forward P/E multiple of approximately 4.3 x to 5.0 x based on consensus forward earnings estimates. Those aren't bubble numbers. Those aren't even utility numbers anymore.
I think everyone is worried and, at least in this case, being cautious.
Countrywide traded at like 6x earnings in 2005. The market not putting a high multiple on peak earnings for a cyclical is better than the alternative but it doesn’t imply there’s no bubble.
I think the system is more fragile than that. Infra providers even now have to raise money with junk rates meaning that are entering a debt spiral. If that compute doesn't come online because the infra providers are bankrupt Anthropic/Open ai can't hit their growth projections and Nvidia sales will drop as well.
And I am not even speculating if the growth/revenue projections are realistic in the first place, which, if not, would be another trigger
The markets appear to be hitting their limits first, and it’s the money that’s keeping this show on the road. Why do you think Anthropic is racing like mad towards an IPO?
And because everybody sees the risk, it is already priced in.
The stock market is unpredictable precisely because everybody is trying to guess what is going to happen next. Dollar cost averaging takes the guessing away.
I came across https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2nA2szz8dY a few days ago from during the financial crisis, and the things he listed as the four causes all apply here too just replace Property Developers with businesses adopting AI as part of the hype cycle. The debt and capital markets have their part to play this time too, just not the primary problem. But the ingredients are all still there for AI.
Goverment regulation... when goverment has regulated wall street and banking industry no issues... as soon as "we will let them regulate, no mam, door plugs will not start failing on airplanes..." things go south.
I would think if they were mining with them before, they had the capacity at that time.
After bitcoin halfed enough, the electricity cost more for the miners.
Now with the AI boom, people are paying premium prices for low end cards, because they run AI tasks exponentially faster than CPUs do.
So the electrical load that was once centralized at the mining site, gets distributed.
Being able to schedule your AI agents to work during off peak electrical prices, and sleep during peak pricing, seems to be a stablizing factor for the grid.
Im talking about the used video card market.
Not the billion dollar data center market.
Prices are up 35% in the last 3 months alone, and I just paid way too much for a RTX 5060 Ti 16GB for the ram.
I get it, I'm just saying when people point to GPU prices as some sort of proof this is all logical, it's actually the place where the logic begin to unravel the most blatantly. They have more GPUs then they will be able to plug in for at least a few years.
I'm pretty sure that the worst things will not come from AI/tech, but from other things – education freefall, population crisis, pension system collapses in Europe etc. If at all, AI and the current situation in tech is one of last false hopes to ignore all this.
AI is going to be a driving force behind it if it begins to work. What do you think the results of most humans suddenly becoming economically irrelevant will be?
Keep in mind that today, if essential workers go on strike, those in power have to listen. What happens if people on UBI refuse to... something? Especially in a world of increasingly automated policing and surveillance?
If Ai works there is no reason there has to be a pension system collapse. I think the problem will be complexity. Ai will allow such complex systems that fewer and fewer people will be able to maintain the systems because the complexity will be so high. We'll need to plan for what it looks like that people with IQs less than 145 won't be productive in any meaningful sense of the word.
High intelligence is overrated. Medieval knights didn't dominate the battlefield because they had the potential to become the best fighters. They dominated because they had access to weapons, armor, and horses, and because their social status and wealth let them focus on combat training.
Well, either it's going to fail or the trillions going into finding breakthroughs are going to find breakthroughs. How much gasoline do you want to give arsonists, even if at the moment they're only pouring it onto concrete?
I would like to take away the gasoline before they figure out that wood burns better.
The goal of God In A Box wasn't a good goal anyways.
Most people can't agree on what God In A Box (AGI, the singularity, whatever) even is. We don't have a widely-accepted definition for it.
The SMART criteria for creating goals has been around since 1980 [0]. Goals need to be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. This is stuff that they teach most people in bachelor degree-level college course. Not even. Maybe in high school or associates degree-level courses.
If God In A Box was the goal that SV sold all of these investors on to the tune of over a trillion dollars of investment, the best thing we could do with everyone involved is have a massive settlement where all of their money just goes to pay off a fraction of the national debt and they're banished to live in the Alaskan wilderness, never allowed near more than $50 at a time or long-distance telecommunications devices again for as long as they live.
"There's no free lunch!", I told myself, but it was becoming increasingly hard to ignore my barber, the cashier at the grocery store, my dentist, my landscaper - all who had bought highly leveraged properties and had actually made profit. I'm not ashamed to say I started to look into it myself - I was even ready to purchase some leveraged properties myself but kept getting outbid by even crazy offers.
Then 2008 happened. It happened suddenly. First it was on the news. Then quietly, people began to stay at home. Then move out.
It was both unsettling but also reassuring. My home value halved overnight (it's 800% up now so I'm doing OK) and mu neighborhood went mostly empty (bankruptcies, foreclosures).
Now again in 2026, my barber, the cashier at the grocery store, my dentist, my landscaper - all cannot stop talking about Grok Bot, about "Chat" (they usually mean ChatGPT or Gemini).
Maybe this time I can get in and get out in time, get real rich!
Maybe this time it's different!
Consumer. Their usecases seem pretty valid - the landscaper is using it to drum up more business, has agents responding to incoming emails and texts, just like my dentist and barber.
The cashier uses GrokBot to transcribe notes to her manager. Her company has a very bad inventory app (I don't want to name names but it's a very large nationwide chain) so she literally exports inventory into an excel and feeds it into GrokBot as a way to run queries.
I can see nothing wrong in them just like I could see no wrong in buying properties and flipping them for a profit because there was so much demand at that time.
If you weren't buying houses 2003-2009, you have no idea how crazy it was. People would buy homes unseen in Olathe, KS.
It's likely just me but it just feels eerily familiar. I hope we are all wrong this time around.
Well, since you seemed to know what you needed to do back then (but didn't take action), what do you think you need to do now to "get rich"?
You give me too much credit. I didn't know how to "get rich" back then and neither do I, now.
I didn't take action because I didn't know. I kept getting outbid because I didn't know how I would pay $1M for a home that I would struggle to rent out for more than $800/mo.
That helps us decide whether there is some purpose and meaning to the entire story about the system.
I never got rich as I never ended up buying a property for investment. I just kept on getting outbid by others. I kept getting outbid because I didn't know how I would pay $1M for a home that I would struggle to rent out for more than $800/mo.
The others reinvested their profits into the next purchase until the music stopped. Everyone but my dentist got wiped out.
My dentist just made a payment everytime he got a late notice which was like once every 4-6 months as the note changed hands, often getting lost in the chaos. He refinanced all the properties around 2012-2013 and invested the proceedings all into one multi storey clinic which is doing very well.
Off topic: I first wrote "2029" instead of "1929" because habit. Wow, the start of the Great Depression was 97 years ago? I find that surprising.
I mean, they should be. It's a transformative technology that is doing something that was science-fiction five years ago, and it going to make a few people trillionaires, and it's not entirely clear where it will leave the rest of us.
That doesn't mean that you should, like, be rushing to be a bagholder.
I think the challenge is, in 2026, no one has a clue what the bagholding will look like
I think everyone is worried and, at least in this case, being cautious.
And I am not even speculating if the growth/revenue projections are realistic in the first place, which, if not, would be another trigger
The stock market is unpredictable precisely because everybody is trying to guess what is going to happen next. Dollar cost averaging takes the guessing away.
My finances are in crisis.
You know whos winning ... the bitcoin miners retiring unprofitable cards, if they still have them.
Good job guys.
Bitcoin mining hasn't used GPUs in ages. They've been all-in on ASICs since 2013 or so; even if the GPUs were free, they wouldn't be worth running.
After bitcoin halfed enough, the electricity cost more for the miners.
Now with the AI boom, people are paying premium prices for low end cards, because they run AI tasks exponentially faster than CPUs do.
So the electrical load that was once centralized at the mining site, gets distributed.
Being able to schedule your AI agents to work during off peak electrical prices, and sleep during peak pricing, seems to be a stablizing factor for the grid.
Im talking about the used video card market.
Not the billion dollar data center market.
Prices are up 35% in the last 3 months alone, and I just paid way too much for a RTX 5060 Ti 16GB for the ram.
Adapt to the worlds problems.
Don't adopt them.
Makes the binance crypto incident look like nothing (and everyone was made whole).
The hidden $3.2T AI debt on the other hand...
Keep in mind that today, if essential workers go on strike, those in power have to listen. What happens if people on UBI refuse to... something? Especially in a world of increasingly automated policing and surveillance?
China is ready to step in with millions of PhD-level graduates.
I would like to take away the gasoline before they figure out that wood burns better.
Most people can't agree on what God In A Box (AGI, the singularity, whatever) even is. We don't have a widely-accepted definition for it.
The SMART criteria for creating goals has been around since 1980 [0]. Goals need to be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. This is stuff that they teach most people in bachelor degree-level college course. Not even. Maybe in high school or associates degree-level courses.
If God In A Box was the goal that SV sold all of these investors on to the tune of over a trillion dollars of investment, the best thing we could do with everyone involved is have a massive settlement where all of their money just goes to pay off a fraction of the national debt and they're banished to live in the Alaskan wilderness, never allowed near more than $50 at a time or long-distance telecommunications devices again for as long as they live.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria