> Are they talking about using it as a consumer?

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.

> It is a sign of a deeply broken system.

Yes it is. Pulling a simple permit takes months and thousands of dollars. Building a new house is practically out of the question.

The SF Bay is deeply supply constrained but just because tech billionaires here can buy up a dozen homes while offering millions over asking, the city gets their taxes and so they are not incentivized to improve things.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

> 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

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.

Nothing is ever really priced in when it comes to layered structured debt and credit default swaps. Not even the default swaps.

Indeed. Not sure how DCA comes into this though.

The bubble can't pop until most investors believe it's not a bubble, it's the new normal. As long as they believe it's a bubble they'll have money on the sidelines to throw in whenever it goes down.

Or at least it can't pop for purely financial reasons. It might still pop if, say, Anthropic and OpenAI both announce they've hit the scaling wall, or Iran somehow bombs TSMC, or a court rules they have to pay a royalty to every book author every time they answer a prompt.

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?

Bitcoin proper, yes. But not Ethereum; that bubble didn't pop until 2022-ish. The hardware constraints of ASICs made them useless around 2020, causing yet another surge of GPU usage.

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.

The newer data centers aren’t relying on the grid. They’re more likely to be selling excess power than buying it.

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.

Anyone who truly buys into that I pity. But it's sure a useful line to help sell the magic.