yogthos

joined 6 years ago
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LLMs Can Get Brain Rot (llm-brain-rot.github.io)
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submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by yogthos@lemmy.ml to c/usa@lemmy.ml
 

The reason that the so-called booming economy feels like a complete lie to most people is because the economy is bifurcated. There’s the economy for the rich, which is absolutely soaring, and the economy for everyone else, which is basically in a recession. The scary part is that the entire illusion of national prosperity is being propped up by one of the biggest financial bubbles we have ever seen.

This all starts with a deep split. The spending of the wealthiest 10% of Americans now makes up one third of the entire country’s GDP. They are responsible for nearly half of all consumer spending. Meanwhile, for the vast majority, things feel stagnant because they are. The national GDP number is a mathematical trick, buoyed by a few powerhouse states, while regions representing nearly a third of the nation’s economic output, like the Rust Belt, are in or near a recession. The reason for this divide is simple. The stock market gains you hear about on the news only benefit a tiny slice of the population. The top one percent own half of all stocks. The top ten percent collectively own nearly ninety percent. The bottom half of the country owns just one percent. So when the market hits a new high, it is overwhelmingly just the rich getting richer.

Now, let’s talk about that bubble. By the classic Buffett Indicator, which compares the total stock market value to the size of the economy, the US is in unprecedented territory. This indicator is now over 219%. To put that in perspective, it was only 138% at the peak of the dotCom bubble and 105% before the 2008 crash. This is the largest stock market bubble in US history.

But the real insanity is what’s inside this bubble. The market is being carried by a handful of tech companies, often called the Ten Titans. These ten firms represent just a tiny fraction of all public companies, yet they make up over 30% of the entire US stock market’s value. In recent months, they alone were responsible for over half of all market growth. The entire system is dangerously concentrated in a few names. The fuel for this run up is the artificial intelligence boom. But now, even the leaders of the AI revolution admit it is a bubble. Furthermore, recent studies show that 95% of corporate AI projects are failing, and the rest are making very little money. It is pure speculation that's driving this frenzy.

The most critical part of this story is that this AI bubble is now masking a severe weakness in the real economy. The overall GDP growth number for 2025 looks okay, but a deeper look paints a different picture. One analysis found that investment in AI and information processing, a sector that is only 4% of the economy, accounted for a staggering 92% of all GDP growth in the first half of the year. Without the sugar rush of AI spending, the rest of the US economy grew at a near flat rate of just 0.1%. The real economy for most Americans is already on life support, and the AI bubble is the ventilator.

This sets up a perfect storm for stagflation, meaning a stagnant economy combined with persistent inflation. Prices remain high due to supply chain issues and trade policies, while the real economy struggles. To make matters worse, the AI boom is actively making inflation worse by consuming enormous amounts of electricity and driving up power costs for everyone. So we are left with a terrifying situation. A historic bubble concentrated in a few tech stocks is creating a mirage of prosperity, hiding a recession that most people are already living through. Everyone will suffer when this bubble inevitably pops.

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[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 23 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'm not aware of a point when the Japanese turned away from right wing nut jobs. There's been the same party in power for decades now.

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

As recently declassified CIA documents show, Hungarian 'revolution' was a CIA regime change op all along. It's the OG attempt at a color revolution.

https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2025/0318/104-10110-10525.pdf

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Oh don't think it was me, but that's pretty incredible to see.

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 32 points 2 months ago

imagine being so ignorant as to think that markets are at odds with socialism 🤣

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 26 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

This happens every time. When you actually ask what the "bad" part is, they just deflect.

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 33 points 2 months ago (7 children)

A socialist country can be bad, but if this is what you consider bad the sign me up to live in a "bad" country.

90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-people-in-china-afford-their-outrageously-expensive-homes

Student debt in China is virtually non-existent. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jlim/2016/08/29/why-china-doesnt-have-a-student-debt-problem/

Chinese household savings hit another record high in 2024 https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-jones-bank-earnings-01-12-2024/card/chinese-household-savings-hit-another-record-high-xqyky00IsIe357rtJb4j

People in China enjoy high levels of social mobility https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/china-social-mobility.html

The typical Chinese adult is now richer than the typical European adult https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-chinese-adult-now-richer-than-europeans-wealth-report-finds-2022-9

Real wage (i.e. the wage adjusted for the prices you pay) has gone up 4x in the past 25 years, more than any other country. This is staggering considering it’s the most populous country on the planet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cw8SvK0E5dI

The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf

From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/China%E2%80%99s-Economic-Growth-and-Poverty-Reduction-Angang-Linlin/c883fc7496aa1b920b05dc2546b880f54b9c77a4

From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019&amp%3Blocations=CN&amp%3Bstart=2008

By the end of 2020, extreme poverty, defined as living on under a threshold of around $2 per day, had been eliminated in China. According to the World Bank, the Chinese government had spent $700 billion on poverty alleviation since 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/world/asia/china-poverty-xi-jinping.html

Over the past 40 years, the number of people in China with incomes below $1.90 per day – the International Poverty Line as defined by the World Bank to track global extreme poverty– has fallen by close to 800 million. With this, China has contributed close to three-quarters of the global reduction in the number of people living in extreme poverty. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 31 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Maybe spend a bit of time learning what words mean before using them.

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 17 points 2 months ago (1 children)

A must read on what life in Tibet was like before it was liberated https://www.historicly.net/p/tibet-china-and-the-violent-reaction

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 11 points 2 months ago

Yes, I'm sure about the fact that the US losing its grip on Africa, Latin America, and Asia is a net positive for the world. Meanwhile, the US is already a fascist state. Trump is merely pulling back the curtain and showing what the empire does without any pretenses.

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 14 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Trump has drastically accelerated the collapse of the US empire which is directly improving the lives of billions of people across the globe.

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 8 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Exactly, human societies are dynamic systems and we have to analyze them as such. We have to look at the selection pressures the rules of the system create, and interpret human behavior within the context of these rules. When we see that the rules create perverse incentives, we have the power to change the social contract. Understanding how and why the system works is one of the best antidotes to doomerism, hence why we incessantly tell people to read theory. Once you understand why things work a certain way, and the mechanics that drive the evolution of the system then it no longer feels like a force of nature. It's a machine that we've constructed, and it operates because we collectively allow it to.

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 8 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Well said. The key point is that our goal must be to deliver tangible improvements to people's everyday material conditions. Chasing some abstract, Platonic ideal of a perfect society is a pointless exercise. It's also unrealistic to expect any human society to become a Utopia.

Instead, we should focus on maximizing personal agency. That means accomplishing concrete things like reducing work hours, guaranteeing access to basic necessities, and providing public spaces like parks, libraries, and sports centers.

The goal isn't to have some nebulous "freedoms" promoted in the West. It's about ensuring that our collective labour and resources are directed toward raising the standard of living for everyone. And that process can only begin with the collective ownership of the means of production.

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