Technology

Capitalism gonna Capitalism.

We are watching one of the greatest wastes of money in history, all as people are told that there “just isn’t the money” to build things like housing, or provide Americans with universal healthcare, or better schools, or create the means for the average person to accumulate wealth.

This could have been written about the War on Terror.

I can find no analyst commentary on Meta making sixteen billion dollars on fraud, because it doesn’t matter to them, because this is the Rot Economy, and all that matters is number go up.

I'm not sure why he thinks morality is a factor in market movement. You'll not find the stock market negatively reacting to money being spent on genocide in the Middle East or murders in the Caribbean, or to Palantir expanding into a mass-surveillance apparatus either.

Analysts that do not sing the same tune as everybody else are marginalized, mocked and aggressively policed... By not being skeptical or critical you are going to lead regular people into the jaws of another collapse.

Yes, market collapses are actually loved by large wealth holders, because unless the entire currency itself collapses, the people with the most currency are the ones best-positioned to benefit from the collapse. Investors will ride the economy off a cliff so they can salvage the scrap at the bottom. Sam Altman literally opined about 'redefining' the social contract when AI collapses the economy in his White House presser.

Analysts have, on some level, become the fractional marketing team for the stocks they’re investing in.

Because major news, analysis firms, and banks are all owned by the oligarchy, and no one is being punished for using that power to manipulate the market. They know that if they're a big firm and they say, "this stock is amazing!" it will go up, and since they own that stock, they get richer.

When it happens, I promise I won’t be too insufferable, but I will be calling for accountability for anybody who boosted AI 2027, who sat in front of Sam Altman or Dario Amodei and refused to ask real questions, and for anyone who collected anything resembling “detailed notes” about me or any other AI skeptic.

It's sad to me that Ed lived through 2008 and still thinks there will be accountability in this system. At some point you have to accept that the purpose of a system is what the system does. Our system cyclically collapses, economically, in order to enrich billionaires. It happened during the DotCom bubble, it happened in 2008, and it happened during COVID, and that's just in my short lifespan.

I realize I’m pearl-clutching over the amoral status of capitalism and the stock market

I really don't think you are. You haven't even begun to reach the bare minimum level of disdain and disgust-inducing realism one should have about capitalism, nevermind anything being remotely close to pearl-clutching.