Yeah this is more like a return to the norm, just more blatant and overt. And even earlier than 100 years, before America was strong enough to reach out into the world and do this to other countries, it was manifest destiny against the indigenous. You won’t find a corner of this planet unmolested by American imperialism, and the hardest hit are still problems that persist to this day.

Whether it’s the Panama Canal, the Monroe doctrine, the Banana republics, or atrocities in Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos. Intervening in civil wars and conflicts that would eventually create Taiwan and South Korea and Israel as American vassal states built with the purpose of serving American interests. Fomenting a coup in Iran over oil which would usher in the Iranian revolution, or smashing Iraq which created a power vacuum for isis to form. Wherever and whenever America reaches out into the world, death and destruction will typically follow. And if it isn’t leaving a shattered and broken state for whoever is left to pick up the pieces, then it’s funding and arming one side of a war to create a satellite state to enrich itself which leaves a conflict ready to reignite at any moment.

And the hardware providers got a lot of that money from their stock valuation which increased from the last deal they made with the last AI company. And this deal raises the valuation to fund the next deal.

All of these datacenters and the semiconductors inside them are like the housing supply in 2008, assets that exist on paper whose construction was funded by the speculation of future returns of the AI companies, who have yet to turn a profit or come up with any useful revenue generating venture out of their glorified chatbots.

Its only a matter of time before the AI companies run out of investor money without having a source of revenue and profit generation to pay for all this infrastructure, and that’s when the bubble pops. However I think we will be waiting for a very long time for that to happen, since the funding ultimately comes from tech companies who have stashed away probably a combined trillion dollars in cash over the last decade. The problem is, that pulls in more than just Nvidia and openAI; by market cap we’re talking about a handful of tech giants that make up like 40% of the S&P500.

Not who you responded to but it depends entirely on the location. In the northeast there is decent and consistent appreciation and there has been for decades because it has always been populated. But home appreciation over 20, 30, or 50 years will struggle to beat the S&P500. Factor in property taxes and upkeep and you may just barely keep up with inflation. Just from inflation $216k in 06 would be $358k in 2025. As an asset its primary function is being a store of wealth that happens to be the roof on your head, something you can refinance to borrow money, and something to sell basically to pay for whatever you downgrade to when you enter the stage of preparing for death, whether it’s a condo or a nursing home.

All the money to be made comes from buying in bulk and renting out to people who cannot afford because everyone bought to rent out, while local government restricts supply through zoning because it would lower property values of everyone who only had their house as retirement because wages have not kept up with productivity or inflation and pensions and unions have been gutted.

Because it was 2020 during the height of a botched Covid response and a few months after George Floyd. And Biden barely won. If you do the math, it was about 21,500 people across three states that determined the outcome, where them voting for Trump instead of Biden would have been an electoral tie that would have been decided by Pence. That’s a technical margin of 0.012% that Trump electorally lost by.

Yeah the financial crisis bankrupted the banks themselves. The structural foundation of the financial and banking industries were interconnected to bad mortgages that were distributed into financial instruments everywhere and speculated on like crazy by everyone, because they were mortgages and considered safe like bonds. Part of the reason why companies like GM went bankrupt was because their financial arm was significantly invested in mortgages, banks failed because their entire financial model was centered on mortgage returns, and people defaulted on houses en masse because they were allowed to get mortgages they were never able to afford.

But no one investing in stocks, particularly tech stocks, is doing so without explicitly gambling that money. A lot of venture capital might collapse, retail investors are going to get shit on, the general economy will slow as it does during a recession, but mostly this will play out like the dotcom bubble and be a large asset correction in the stock market. A few years of correction, consolidation of the industry, and everyone will pile onto the next bubble in a decade.

A massive shedding of stock market wealth that triggers a recession as everyone pulls back on consumer spending since their primary retirement savings have taken a huge dip.

It would hit every good and service in every sector because the entire economy revolves around consumer spending and the consumption of goods and services. If you lose your job then good luck finding anything during a recession, as if it weren’t hard enough already. And you may not lose your job, but your employer would feel the pressure to cut costs and pump revenue. The stock market would take a few years to recover effectively adding another year or two before retirement for some people, which also has workforce implications.

Plenty of other indirect costs to you that filter through wider society and the workforce, even if nothing direct actually happens to you. Like your favorite spots reducing hours or having worse service or raising prices to make up for the drop in demand.

I worked the math out to be one person out of 400 shot to death either by murder or suicide every 17.12 years. Definitely not every 21 days, but it is still actually crazy when you think about just how few 400 people is.

Unfortunately I think it’s very possible that it’s not. I had a professor in college that somehow managed to have this many tweets back in 2018 or so. I distinctly remember that it was 96k. She wasn’t a great professor, I’m talking 300 level courses that felt like they could have been taught in high school. Probably on account of spending her entire life on twitter.

Aussie.zone is the server that you created your account on, think of it like having a yahoo email address. Some people have Gmail, some have outlook or iCloud, some have their own private domain. It really doesn’t matter too much because everyone can talk to everyone else, generally. Local is just every community hosted on Aussie.zone. All is everyone else and every other community in every other server that Aussie.zone is federated to (hasn’t blocked). Discover ability is certainly a problem and I’ve been here for two years and haven’t figured that out except stumbling on new communities on all just like you. You’ve pretty much got a handle on it it seems, I would just suggest a good client like Voyager to make things more intuitive on touchscreens if that’s what you’re looking for.

It’s incredibly easy, in fact there’s already a website where you can do it yourself. Put in a phone number, address, or name, and you’ll be amazed and disturbed by how much information can be connected to you. https://www.truepeoplesearch.com/