three times a year.

WTF is up with MS doing this rate limiting? I just learned that Win11 will lock you out of your own machine for 2 hours if you restart too many times, like if you have a dualboot and are doing something that requires restarts to resolve.

Yes

I’m looking at the books for several companies

Well with all that proprietary information, please do enlighten us with specifics. Who has loans, and how much? From which banks?

I’ve been saying the same thing.

The 2008 housing bubble was predicated on cheap lending. It was all debt. It was massive amounts of toxic debt sold around Wall Street, like using Trump Coin or counterfeit cash used to buy a house.

The vast majority of what’s happening here is not debt. Sure, some, but very little. Even the OpenAI AMD stock swap thing is swapping a gamble on stocks worth real money, not debt.

IMO the first sub-bubble to pop will be all the time and effort wasted on “Startups” that are nothing more than a couple people acting as a wrapper for an AI agent. That’s not really going to impact the economy too much on its face, but suddenly a lot of people are going to go from being “entrepreneurs” to being truly unemployed.

Edit: Also, just saw this gem, and THIS is how you get a supercharged 2008 repeat, bank deregulation and $2.6 trillion in lending. Which is exactly how we got to 2008’s subprime lending.

Hey! Don’t insult ducks like that! This clownshow website would be about 20% better if ducks were involved.

That’s the bet-swap. They have both have a contractual obligation to exchange investments in each other. It’s a suicide pact OR it’s a bromance glow-up, depending on your point of view. AMD is giving them chips on the (accurate so far) bet that buying chips will inflate AMD’s stock value.

Again, this is not a thing a rational person would do because it’s both not sustainable and not realistic unless you expect the value of everything to got up for 10+ years. It’s a recursive bet on a bet on a bet. It’s like buying T-bills.

The issue here is this isn’t debt!

Debt would be SoftBank giving OpenAI $78 B in cash and then in a year or two asking for payments of cash back.

This investment/stock circular thing is like if you were building a house and lived next to a brick yard, and convinced the brick yard owner to give you bricks to build your house. Your house would be the demonstration of how lovely the bricks are, and in return you’ll give them 10% of the title of your property. If you sell that property in 2009 or 2024, the value will change, but that’s a risk and gamble you both take. And they can sell small parts of that 10% whenever they want, if they want.

None of that is debt. Debt would be a loan from the bank that requires payments over time.

Someone somewhere took debt

the simple answer is that the people buying AMD stock are the ones paying for those chips

In my eyes this deal is a speculative investment leveraging debt.

But so you have to pick one. Unless you’re suggesting that all the day traders and retirement funds and investment funds are buying or already holding AMD bought it all with credit cards. Which is not the case, which is why this isn’t debt.

Ask yourself - If it’s debt, then who is the creditor? Who holds the loan paperwork? What rate did they get? What’s the collateral? None of those things are true here.

Stock value isn’t real any more than the value of gold or silver or bitcoin, but it’s all relative to the value of the stock when sold. But it being sold is the point. The stocks are worth money. Real actual money. If the market hits a correction - as other more bubble-like parts of the AI industry and the current general economic shitpile are likely to afford us all in the next few years - then OpenAI and NVIDIA and AMD won’t be carved up and sold for parts after a bankruptcy by a bank because they’re still able to sell the stocks to fund payroll. As long as no one sells off a ton of stock quickly and the stock value doesn’t collapse, then it’s simply a risky circular a bet on themselves.

Don’t get me wrong, I think this is an innovation in stupidity and shortsightedness. But call it what it is, which is not debt.

Then you see a pack of them getting off a Ryan Air or Wizz flight for a stag party in a place they picked for the sole reason of cheap pints and realize how misguided you were all along.

You get 10 fun points, 10 adventure points, and 30 hard drinking points. We’ll treat you like people treat every American in places where they don’t see a lot of Americans.

“So, uh, do you know Mel Gibson/Hugh Jackman/the Flight of the Concords guys?”

“Mate, I used to live the next Cattle Station over from Mel Gibson/Hugh Jackman/the Flight of the Concords blokes!”

This isn’t the way economic bubbles are typically structured. At all.

Typical economic bubbles are built on speculative investment leveraging debt until the whole thing reaches a point where the debt can’t realistically account for possible growth anymore. This would be OpenAI asking SoftBank for $78B to buy chips that have at most, a maximal 5 year life cycle, and then OpenAI not having cash on hand to pay down that $78B in 2 years.

Using this stock reacharound is actual money changing hands. Yes, stock dividends and sales are part of that, but it’s not debt. It’s certainly not sustainable, but it’s not something that will lead to bankruptcy for OpenAI or NVIDIA or AMD if they fail to turn profits. But the money is real at the time it’s moved around. Surprisingly, the LLM crowd has been fairly consistent in not running to highly leveraged debt for funding.

This is a pump and dump scheme if anything, and seems like a great way to find out later that people buying stock in AMD “invested” in shrinking their portfolio over the long term. IMO only a fool would buy stocks that funded this, but it’s a slow-mo bubble for those people, not the economy in general.

There’s a whole hierarchy about pay and credit with actors and roles, and the SAG-AFA union. Typically anything that’s a guest role means it’s an episode-by-episode contract for a limited block of episodes.

“Guest Starring” would mean that she’s a lead character, but not for the entire run of the show. So the writers and producers are free to kill off the character if they want, for example.

Wallet, keys, phone, pocket knife, smile.

When will people learn that any advertising that occurs during extortion like this is the focal point of hate and fear?

This is like anti-advertising.

Same, I used to have some Caliber extension that stripped DRM. Last used it 2-3 years ago and worked for Adobe DRM at least.

I like to go check out the book I want from the library, and when it gives me the Amazon DRM version I just go search for the epub version online and download that. IIRC, completely legal as I have legal access to the book…somehow.

You have 2 neighbors where it’s basically a public good.

I saw a guy in a park in Milan at almost midnight filling up a few 5 liter bottles from the carbonated water station. He clearly lived across the street and just…needed to bathe in fizzy water right then? No idea. But it’s not just you all.

Bonjour, mon aime.

I was going to bring up the Interpol bust all around Africa of SIM farms that is referenced in this article. Usually all about international calling and for scammers to use.

Reporting on this said that this setup had been involved with nation-state level threats. I wonder if it’s that these spammers were just doing their spam stuff and have all their stuff automated to sell bandwidth. Like you just send them a CSV with numbers and messages, and they don’t care what the content is. So then nation-state just books a few campaigns that are what kick off an FBI/Secret Service investigation because the nation-state isn’t actually affiliated with the spammers.

This setup is worth a ton of money just chugging along, and realistically, this is not built to overwhelm a few key mobile towers. These things are built to spam and scam.

I really don’t think that a weird DM from 1 person in 1 comm on piefed counts as “The fediverse.”

I mean, don’t we still have The Fediverse Chick? What ever happened with that? She totally undoes, like, 7 weird DMs like this.