I don't know why you're conflating the issue of income and wealth inequality with the fact that investments in "the internet" (and all the associated hardware and infrastructure) proved to be some of the best investments in history. And not because of monetary policy, financial engineering, and the like, but because the internet proved to be a civilization-changing technology.

> Ed Zitron already completely defeated the comparison that this is just another dot com boom/bust with eventual payout

"This time it's different" is a story told by people at both extremes.

"There is unsustainable excess and malinvestment but it's not going to be the end of the world and there will be some really important and successful things that are left standing alongside some carnage" is a narrative that doesn't appeal to the masses for a variety of reasons. And people like Zitron, who profit by selling narratives, often avoid narratives that require nuance and balance because it forces them to produce more complex and detailed, and less bombastic, analyses.

A reporter doing his job well (in this context) would understand that using non-cash accounting events to make hyperbolic posts about cash burn is simply not honest.

I don't have a problem with skepticism around AI investments (I agree with a lot of the skepticism) but if you're going to make public arguments about these investments, you should have a grasp of basic accounting principles.

I don't disagree, but there's a big difference between 'this is massively overinvested and valued and that's distorting the market around a useful product' and 'this is all basically a scam with no value to it whatsoever'. For some reason a lot of AI critics seem to be really hard pushing on the latter part despite it being by far the least credible take at this point. It might be overused, it might have some big negative externalities (though these are often overstated), it might have sucked up way more capital than it deserved, but it's also still very useful and valuable for quite a lot of people.

(to me it's a bit like criticising oil companies by claiming that oil doesn't actually produce any useful power after its refined. There's a lot to criticise about them but the fact that their product is very useful is in large part why it's so hard to do something about the rest of the problems they cause)

I won't dismiss the human cost but boom and bust cycles have existed for a very long time. This isn't a new thing today, and it wasn't new then either.

You can view these things 100% cynically, or you can also consider the possibility that markets over (and also under) shooting are also a form of discovery in which the value of new business models, technologies, etc. are determined. While I'm not personally a fan of today's financial engineering and have concerns about direct government investments in particular, net-net it's probably better to live in economies where capital is abundant and malinvestment is possible, than to live economies where the opposite is true.

From the .com days, I personally observed four categories of outcome:

1. Total financial ruin. If we're being honest, this was often the result of individuals who got rich very quickly and spent even more quickly.

2. Survival. Lots of people got laid off and eventually found new jobs when the economy recovered. Their experience was valuable. A decent number of these people went on to ride the recovery boom and are comfortable if not "rich" today.

3. Survival with a story to tell. People who survived and came away with a story to tell ("at one point I was worth millions on paper and 6 months later I was laid off").

4. Huge windfall. Some people made a lot of money and through luck and/or smarts, managed to walk away from the implosion wealth intact.

The truth is that nobody can predict with certainty the future. Markets are the place where humans make bets about the future. Expecting entirely orderly markets in which everything moves at a predictable pace in a predictable way, where no participants win or lose too much, just isn't realistic.

Not sure how you would do things better without a centralized planning committee. Most people believe that bubbles are bad, but what's the alternative? People want to get rich quick.

I never said it was useless. But you better be able to quantify the value of something you’re spending trillions of dollars building.

This seems like common sense to me.

The header looks not too bad until you realize that 2/3 of the industry revenue is Nvidia ... If you remove the shovel sellers (Micron/Nvidia/AMD) revenue is left at $183B.

Some logic for those who don't do numbers:

Token rates need to double in order for the industry to "break even".

In reality, just "breaking even" is not enough. Venture capital expects a sizeable return on their investment. So look for token rates to triple.

In reality, most companies are not at all prepared to feed AI vendors what they need in order to become profitable.

Uber is an early example of what is in store.

https://aimagazine.com/news/why-uber-has-already-burned-thro...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/janakirammsv/2026/05/17/uber-bu...