An Utterly Serious Warning

[ecosophia]

There's an old Wall Street legend that came to mind today...

"In 1929, at the height of an economic boom in America, Joseph Kennedy Sr. (father of JFK) was working as a stockbroker on Wall Street. As the story goes, Joseph was walking around when he decided to sit down for a shoeshine. While polishing his shoes, the young worker gave Joseph some of his favorite stock picks. When Joseph heard the shoeshine boy giving out stock tips, he figured the party was about to end, and it was time to get out of the market. Joseph proceeded to exit his positions in the market and bought short positions that bet on the market going down. Shortly after that, the stock market entered a free fall." (Source)

The reason this came to mind is that I get therapeutic massage regularly these days, and my massage therapist mentioned today that she is getting into real estate investing. She's an extremely capable massage therapist -- but then I'm sure the shoeshine boy who did old Joe Kennedy's shoes was good at his trade, too. The rule remains the same: when people who have no previous background in investing start piling into some investment vehicle, a speculative bubble is in full swing, and will collapse catastrophically in the not too distant future.

I watched this same thing happen in real estate about a year before the 2008 real estate bust hit. When that arrived, everyone I knew who'd gone piling into real estate ended up in the bankruptcy courts. I also watched it in the stock market about a year and a half before the 2000-2001 internet bust hit, and a lot of people who'd put everything they had into interrnet stocks lost it all.

So, dear readers, if you find you're suddenly thinking about putting a lot of money into real estate investment, may I offer a piece of advice? You'd be better off shredding it all and flushing it down the toilet. Don't let yourself get suckered, because the market will sucker punch you.

Oh, and while you're at it, get ready for a whopping economic crisis, possibly as soon as this fall. The Dow Jones just hit an all time record, btw, and speculative investments are soaring while the productive economy lurches further and further into dysfunction. We're probably going to be in for a world of hurt within a year or so. Brace yourselves...

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I think they will be needed when the cloud fails, but by then maybe will have been retired from the work field by health and poverty issues.

A perfect storm. There's also a mismatch between interns/juniors and seniors, juniors and interns learn now from LLMs, and the have a big part of the mental map in here be dragons mode.

[(Anonymous)]

People don't sit still - they move on and change into other things. You tell an engineer that he's done, he'll find something else to do. And he'll stop being an engineer.

Labor markets in general are broken, even when nobody is interfering. You get these shortages, management starts complaining but after a while they start raising rates. Those higher rates attract people but usually it takes time to train. And by the time all those people attracted to whatever finish training, the market crashes and all those jobs disappear. Only people who seem to win are those doing the training. And those few lucky enough to catch the bidding war at the right time.

I replace "LLM" with "Bullsh** Fountain". More like here be manure...

[(Anonymous)]

I replace "LLM" with "Bullsh** Fountain". More like here be manure...


Since the internet is a massive dump of shale. LLM is just a big powerful fan to spread it all around. That's why it consumes so much energy.

Of course shale consuming critters are enthusiastic since it lands in creative ways and they are tired of the same delivery.

[(Anonymous)]

I replace "LLM" with "Bullsh** Fountain". More like here be manure...

And when there is a gem in the AI manure pile it is probably just a ripoff of copyrighted material.

AI is just a way for these startups to sell copyrighted material without having to pay.

[open_space]

Here's something to give you a chuckle. It is recent that tech companies don't give computers to their engineers. Yes, that's correct. They give them a laptop that can connect to a more powerful "dev box", in some other cases they just have them connect through their own computers. Which is neat, I guess, but guess where that devbox is running? Correct, in the cloud. What happens if the cloud comes down? Yes, it would happen exactly what you are thinking would happen. A gigantic deadlock. It is not as widespread in the core engineering teams, but enough that concerns have been raised.

LLMs are useful to learn a programming language, search documentation and bounce ideas or get inspiration but it can't teach you how to program because that is a craft. It would be like saying that having a book on carpentry, or heck, having a robot tell you everything you want about carpentry makes you a carpenter. By itself it makes for messy and inconsistent code. To the point that LLM generated code is being banned from open-source code repositories and I certainly have banned them from my team, you can use them, but you have to write the code yourself. And I don't think that will ever change unless someone actually figures out how to make a machine think, reflect and self-correct, instead of knowing probabilistic relationships between words.

I think we will make better gardeners when the time comes, honestly: https://engineerdog.com/2023/05/29/why-do-so-many-programmers-want-to-be-farmers-how-to-build-a-corrugated-steel-garden-box/

[(Anonymous)]

Isn't this ironic that US had an edge on software on Russia and China and not only they cannot win their war on hardware but about to lose their software edge.

Russia and China, or India or other players, will probably take a few of the very good engineers!

[open_space]

At that point I will be far away from the software world. But yeah, actually, a lot of my Indian friends returned to India in the pandemic and are not coming back. That said however, the US is still top, though it's declining, whereas China is going upwards for example, especially in military tech.

[(Anonymous)]

I think the US is declining and at some point can fall over a cliff. This desperation of putin everything in the cloud and making everything in software as a service is detrimental.

Cloud is very centralized completely opposed to the decentralized nature of TCP/IP etc.

I think the on-premise servers and private small cloud will make their way back in the near future, and with it the need for a lot of expertise and technicians, and a lot of the older folks will come back to work.

https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/google-cloud-accidentally-deletes-125-billion-australian-pension-fund-124051800606_1.html


The biggest problem of the cloud is the grid, as to my knowledge no one tried to cold reboot a cloud, I think there were already cases of race conditions, I remember on from Azure due to a UPS firmware but I am not searching for it. An the grid is in the risk in the next years because as the fracking oil goes so the fracking gas eventually goes.