Bottom lines:
Demand in the current model has peaked
Demand for paid versions is declining

IOW, few of of us need this shit. Fewer of us are willing to pay for it.

You're fighting the wrong fight. Taxes don't fund spending.

We can promise a secure retirement for ALL generations if Congress changes the law:
1. Lower the retirement age
2. Increase benefits to all retirees
3. Pay it out of the general fund, i.e., net federal spending.

The Fed sets interest rates based on faulty assumptions.

Interest rates do not affect employment
Employment does not affect inflation
Inflation is always a function of supply chain
GDP growth is always a function of net federal spending

@edzitron.com Loved the Gen X quips, but I can attest this little badge of honor is 100% true. I did something like this more times than I can count, as did every kid in my neighborhood. For those who weren't born yet this was what we did for fun around the time Pong came on the scene.

The entire Democratic Machine exists to serve donors, not voters.

Today is one of those days to realize how many e-commerce operations have my email address. My birthday is another day.

While many call this "Black Friday" I call it "Unsubscribe From All Day"

I hope all my fellow AI haters are watching Plur!bus

a man in a suit talking on a cell phone with the words yep there 's a bubble below him ALT: a man in a suit talking on a cell phone with the words yep there 's a bubble below him

Where have I heard the phrase "credit default swaps" before?

Who's going to pay for the output of this "world model" and how much will they pay for it?

Except, taxes don't fund spending.

More circular investment as SoftBank sells its stake in NVDA to invest in OpenAI, so the non-profit can buy more GPUs from GPU maker. When one of the world's largest VCs has to shift its portfolio like this, it indicates there is not enough venture capital to sustain this. There is no new revenue entering this space.

More circular investment. Sell stake in GPU maker to invest in company (non-profit, actually) so it can buy more GPUs from GPU maker.

There is no new revenue entering this space.@edzitron.com

The more we use ChatGPT and Claude the faster we bankrupt OpenAI and Anthropic, respectively. They lose money on every transaction, including from their paying customers. Every day each of us should be submitting dozens of stupid and senseless prompts. Let's burn out the machine and bleed them dry.

As of Nov 4 the U.S. Treasury is running a surplus of $48,760,000,000 for FY26, which started Oct 1.

$14.6B surplus on Nov 4
$13.3B surplus since Nov 1

To summarize, nearly 49 billion American dollars have been removed from the economy.

This is why layoffs spiked.

Global trade policy: We sell you more sh*t than you sell to us. We get more dollars.

These guys think the country is a business and its revenue comes from taxes, including tariffs.

Nobody in the conversation (Democrats included) understands that federal taxes remove US dollars from the economy.

As a lifelong baseball fan, AI from Google Cloud has zero impact on how I watch the game. I’d rather see another insurance commercial than Google telling me about bat taps.

To provide services their costs to one vendor equals all their revenue. They have other vendors. Being generous let's assume the true cost of these services is 3x revenue. They would need to charge 6x to have industry-level ROI.

Today's $20 service would be $120
Today's $200 service would be $1,200

14% is a good profit margin for a big-box retailer.

Plenty wrong with this story, but FFS please understand that taxes don't fund spending.

They are keeping it shut down so they don't have to release the Epstein files.

The government can "save health care and lower costs for working families" regardless of who pays what in taxes.

Please cease framing the argument like this and please understand that taxes do not fund spending.

Paging @edzitron.com ...
Paging @edzitron.com ...

100% this

The GenAI economy explained ...

Measuring AI’s true business value: Beyond the ROI paradox Measuring AI’s true business value: Beyond the ROI paradox

There's not a single quantifiable fact in this article. It's a puff piece advitorial written to promote a well-funded industry that is actively diverting nearly $1 trillion in real resources with the goal of mass unemployment and environmental catastrophe.

www.theguardian.com/business-bri...

Love the brief conversation about aye eye attempting to dehumanize us by "solving" shit and recognizing patterns. This needs a much deeper dive.

@bloomberg.com daily email teases a piece about xAI rasing $20 billion (curious number) while also linking to its own piece about a "Trillion Dollar Bubble"
www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Maybe there's a new Ohm's Law (V=IR) in the works around AI.

The variables would be:
* Power (gigawatts)
* GPUs
* Venture Capital

I'm unsure of the equation's structure.

Regardless, their model is missing the key variable: Demand for the output

Commerce sites serving unique results based on known information about the user is at least 20 years old. They call it "AI Commerce" but it's essentially a search algorithm that's as old as search.

"Dotcom" busted because the "Clinton Surpluses" removed dollars from the private sector.

AI will be worse because:
* It's much bigger (as % of GDP) than dotcom
* Tariffs remove dollars from the private sector economy
* Demand for output has peaked

Simply, there is not enough money to support this

When govts print money it becomes private sector income. Then it is spent into the economy driving up demand. Then prices can rise. The private sector doesn't know how much is being "printed" so we don't increase our consumption based on new money. This is why "money printing" is not inflationary.

$AMD is up 30% today on news it is giving away 10% of the company to an organization that will never be profitable and will never build anything.