The average American lives a vastly different lifestyle to someone in china

That hasn’t been true in decades.

for the majority of people in the US their standard of living is probably objectively higher

What are you using to calculate standard of living?

Certainly not life expectancy, education, housing, or cost of living.

The United States is a major energy exporter and importer, especially for petroleum

China has vastly more energy capacity that the US and, 3-4x what the USA has.

Okay, now look at per capita energy.

the competition around energy has been a moot point for China

That is extremely inaccurate

The important thing is that the Chinese government took steps to protect it’s other sectors

But At What Cost?!

Also, so much of this seems to undersell the global common denominator: skyrocketing energy prices.

China is getting hit earlier because they’ve relied so heavily on the Persian Gulf and Russia to date. By contrast, the US - a major energy exporter - can remain insulated (and even reap a fat dividend) as their energy export values balloon.

AI is voracious for energy, so Chinese data centers got hit faster and harder than their American peers. I would not assume this rebounds the same way in the States, because the US is willing to subsidize AI development AND fossil fuel consumption in a way China is not.

I’m just tired of the non stop infantilization of women.

Really, anyone younger than the reader’s age. It’s how you get some moldy NYT editor insisting 40-year-olds (of the wealthy and powerful) described in the same language as a child.

Simultaneously, we get low income school kids caught in drug stings or busted for petty vandalism or arrested for loitering described as adults.

And don’t even get started on abortion or gender affirming care. Too young to decide for yourself, but never too young to be prosecuted as an adult.

Feels like we’re always moving the goalposts on when adulthood begins.

It is OK to be uncomfortable about age gaps but don’t yuck anybody’s yum and let me have my agency

It’s curious to see people who champion gender affirming care for 20 year olds suddenly get skittish when they find out 20 year olds might do other things with their genitals.

Like, are you an adult or aren’t you?

Refugees fleeing the Middle East and Ukraine after decades of war have become an agitation point for easily gulled Finnish isolationists.

Finally, I can pay money to use Lemmy

Don’t buy paper

👍

I have hope that Finland will do something about it.

The current government is fully JD Vance tier corporate drones. National Coalition Party parallels Bolsonaro’s PL with its regard for environmental issues. They are only interested in getting their fellow empty-suit fuckwits bigger salaries, at the expense of everyone else in Finland. The only thing they campaign on is “Immigrant Invasion!” and “Communists are ruining the Country!”

Just a whopping 80 billion loss in only 6 months?

Enormous amounts of capex spending to build out the hardware to run the machinery of business. What’s incredibly isn’t the losses but the willingness of large financial institutions to extend this kind of credit in the first place.

It’s just freaking insane, and CoreWeave being downgraded & losing 54% in 12 months is the sort of thing I would expect from the crypto market, not mainstream big tech companies…

The crypto market is an excellent parallel, in so far as its a market everyone paying half-attention has insisted would collapse into fine powder at the slightest bit of financial pressure. And yet… It seems like crypto banking has stubbornly endured as the utility of an entirely unregulated and obnoxiously difficult to trace digital currency with direct links to the traditional banking sector becoming more apparent. Hey look! You can straight up dump cash directly into the back pocket of a sitting President and NOTHING stops you.

As to CoreWeave, losing 54% would be bigger blow if the company wasn’t still sitting on a $30B market cap. FFS, they’re still 6% over their 2025 valuation. I can’t help but think doubling your YoY revenue has helped them along.

The only real “mainstream application” I’ve witnessed thus far is an influx of low-skill hackers pulling off things they couldn’t have done otherwise

Well, then - firstly, you haven’t been looking hard enough. AI is getting itself insinuated everywhere, from accounting and legal to engineering and construction to sports betting and big finance. I don’t like it, but I can’t deny how much of the decisions at a mega-institution like JP Morgan or Blackrock are increasingly outsourced to some cloud computing machines in Israel owned by Larry Ellison.

But secondly, low-skill hackers pulling off things they couldn’t otherwise just describes your average small-cap IT department. Everyone touching a computer has experimented with these tools. And we all find something useful in them. Again, I don’t like that this is happening, but you’re a schmuck high on your own supply if you simply ignore it.

I’m sceptical that mainstream businesses implementing these applications will be reporting enough substantial revenue growth to offset their running costs in the end. That only leaves protein folding in medicine to “cure disease”, as if that will ever happen lol!

Protein Folding is one of those “only a computer could do this efficiently” problems that AI is exceptionally suited for. But churning out basic-bitch legal contracts with minor client-specified variations, based on a complex and constantly evolving common law system, is also a problem well-suited to AI. Really, anything that involves a high degree of nuance and complexity across a variety of niche fields with a host of very specialized tools can see a tangible benefit from the big Natural Language Input/Ouput Box.

You can be skeptical as you please. Lord knows I was. But it’s increasingly difficult to deny that these highly sophisticated and centrally hosted digital tools are flooding damned near every white collar field you could name.

You’ve Skroobed up

Quarterly revenue growth rate was half of Q2’s.

They went from $4.7B in Q1 to $11.6B in Q2 to $16.8B in Q3

I’m hard pressed to call that bad news, no matter how you want to slice it.

Not good if it keeps halving

If they only see $3B in Q4? Yeah, I’m sure they’ll be crying about it. From $4B to $19B in a year. What’s a disastrous business model.

they’re hemorrhaging money

Are they? This is productive capital being rented out at a profit to the end users. And the end users are, as often as not, big public institutions with near bottomless accounts.

I might argue they are rapidly exhausting scare natural resources. And you’re welcome to do the material analysis on whether dumping 50 gal of water and 100 Mbtus of energy through a digital engine to make a “Farting Peach Says It’s Voting For The Green Party in 2026!” viral Facebook ad is benefiting humanity.

But merely observing that money is changing hands between big economic players doesn’t let us know if something is profitable. You’re describing the basic functions of a financial economy.

Anthropic is anxious to do their IPO because they know their business model is fucked

That’s the popular line. People said the same thing about Tesla when it went public.

Yes, exactly

It’s the theory of the growth investment. Race to first place, monopolize industry, then extract the revenue.

Everyone from Monopoly Microsoft to Google to Facebook to Palantir have successfully capitalized on this strategy

So much of their revenue is government contracts. Especially with the Pentagon.

Really can’t be overstated how they’ve wormed themselves into the Military Industrial Complex.

Anthropic posted a 45% revenue gain between Q2 and Q3, from $11B to $16B. If they can keep growing at that rate, the annual losses are eclipsed in short order.

Only question is whether they can actually do that or they’re headed for a soft ceiling. The $80B in loses is a product of their enormous capex budget, which won’t be an issue forever.

if you invested in the makeup of the DJIA in 1929 and left it in those companies

Then you would no longer be investing in the DJIA as new companies were added.

But if you rebalanced periodically, you’d get the listed results.

So “line goes up” by definition is not really an endorsement that all companies lines go up

Diversification is one of the first lessons of practical investment. And blue chip indexes help simplify this process

If you switched from the DJIA to the S&P 500 or the NASDAQ, as these indexes emerged, you’d outperform the DJIA as it stood. I use the DJIA because it existed in 1929 while the others did not.

$100 of the entire DJIA on September 3, 1929 adjusted annually: $13,633

If you’d invested in January of 1929: $16,913

If you’d invested in January of 1920: $72,275

January of 1930: $31,708

It’s never gone to $0