[flagged]
You comically self contradict yourself. If it was lack of ideas to invest in that drove holding of cash at negative interest rates, then what stops the european from just buying us stocks? US collapse is inevitable, until its NOT…
Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon
101–110 of 697 posts
Re: Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon
#102Some sort of an AI crash / bubble bursting is expected to be honest - now if that will take the rest of the US economy as well.... debatable. Any strong opinions on this?
Is there really a bubble though?
Most of the activity is with the same old big tech stocks, and the largest investment by far is not even market driven. Stargate is defense spending.
AI doesn't have to sway consumers, and it doesn't even have to work that well now or ever for governments to keep pumping money into it. The whole point of Stargate is to de-risk with reduced need for security clearances to handle big data (whistleblowing) and eventually get away from foreign tech. Also, there are a ton of businesses who have always done things on-premises for compliance and they can now cut costs by migrating to these government vetted data centers.
It genuinely shocks me how rarely anyone brings this up. It's been very loudly said by Trump and OpenAI since he took office, and it was going to happen regardless of who was elected.
Re: Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree that something good for China is necessarily bad for the rest of the world, which you seem to imply here includes only Europe. China alone has a higher population than Europe and the USA combined. I'd say that even if things got worse for Europe, to humanity it still constitutes a net benefit. Lives aren't of less value just because they're in a (gasp) communist country.
> communist country New things need new words to describe them, I know people love to call bad guys "nazis" or "communists" and that everyone seems stuck with 1939 lingo but come one. 1950s china isn't 1980s china which isn't 2026 china, yet they're all ""communists""
No words are not required.
Authoritarian. Totalitarian.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_fascism is an OLD term.
Re: Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
>When the bitter, frustrated pessimists on HN shift their tone to being neutral or even mildly optimistic, then I will start worrying. That seems to have happened around 2023 or so as people chose to laud over AI instead of understanding the underpinnings of society coming undone in real time. So, should I be worried?
The hourly "AI is a bubble" threads doesn't scream optimistic to me.
Its a busy site, I can also find hourly "AI brought joy back to my life" threads.
Re: Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree that something good for China is necessarily bad for the rest of the world, which you seem to imply here includes only Europe. China alone has a higher population than Europe and the USA combined. I'd say that even if things got worse for Europe, to humanity it still constitutes a net benefit. Lives aren't of less value just because they're in a (gasp) communist country.
Not necessarily. But China's aggression towards Taiwan and their recent rare earth metals move last year show that China does not have the worlds best interests at heart either. We're picking between two evils and China's evil is more predictable than the US's right now. This goes for Asia in general. Korea, Japan, and China spent centuries fighting and making them the de facto super power makes it easy to resume the…
How much coal do they burn? Did climate change suddenly become NOT an existential threat?
Are their global fishing fleets sustainable?
Where do the precursors for fentanyl come from?
Re: Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon
#106I'm kinda new into economy crashes, was a kid in 2008, is there a way to protect of it?
Assets traditionally used for such hedge are already massively inflated (look gold an silver price charts), so I'm not sure it's worth it. This all depends on what timelines you work on, how many assets you are trying to protect. Alternatively you protect yourself by lowering your dependence on steady income.
Prices of investments will also go down - stocks certainly, although precious metals were traditionally recession proof, we've never had such a bull run on gold/silver in anticipation of recession. My guess is that it won't hold - I've heard that jewelers already refuse to take precious metals at anything near market value.
Re: Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon
#107I do really hope the AI bubble will collapse soon. The sooner it blows the less damage it will do. And hopefully we can go back to doing real work without all these leadership guys breathing down our necks to see if we are doing enough of this AI all their shareholders want us to be involved in. It will suck even for us in europe due to shortsighted pension funds having invested in AI as well. But we'll just have to…
> It happened to blockchain, it happened to metaverse. I don't think AI is comparable to these technologies. AI had a real impact on certain daily activities, such as search, coding, etc. While the metaverse was just a fantasy with no tangible benefit other than Zuck trying to create his own platform to take on Apple and Google. Blockchain had some potential in certain fields, but it wasn't user-friendly or usable by…
Not really, there are good applications for metaverse tech, they just need time to mature. However I don't really see it in the realm of social media. It's not something that's for everyone, at least not yet. I don't understand what meta was thinking there.
It's amazing for gaming though, and for architecture, 3D product design collaboration. I use it a lot daily and I have 5 headsets (plus two AR ones) but I also know it's not for everyone. It's also really good for porn which somehow in America isn't seen as a real industry but in my view it's a good usecase for the tech too. Anything that relies on immersion benefits from it.
AI has its niches too where it's genuinely useful (and coding really is a niche, it's not a mainstream activity) but just like metaverse they're trying to cram it in situations where it doesn't really add any value.
Re: Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon
#108Some advice for those who are young: If every idiot (I'm including myself in this) on HN/Reddit/Youtube/Tiktok/mainstream news/etc. thinks we're in a bubble and is crazy pessimistic and thinks economic collapse is near...it means we're not actually in a bubble. When the bitter, frustrated pessimists on HN shift their tone to being neutral or even mildly optimistic, then I will start worrying. Because that will mean t…
I think its like being in a horror movie - you know the axe guy is in there with you, but you don't know when he's going to get you.
Re: Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are the ones newer to the workforce just screwed or is there a way out? Kinda sucks that all this went down around 6-7 years into my tenure and it's just been a few years of scraping together freelance + portfolio projects to try and climb out of tbis rut. (This might sadly be rhetorical given what I hear of '08, but perhaps there are new channels open to take advantage of. Or at least old channels to raise awareness…
6-7 years of experience make you prime material for employment in the sw industry. Experience but not too expensive/entitled yet. Have you considered applying?
Yes. And here I am nearly 3 yesrs post last full time, 9 years of exexperience, and still looking (feel free to read my struggles in detail below).
What do you recommend applying to? I work in games so I guess I'm playing on hard mode (especially in these times), but the common wisdom of "normal software jobs love taking game programners in" hasn't rung true this time around.
----
Life story: Laid off mid 2023. I took a few months off when I got laid off, but the last quarter of 2023 wasn't kind to me.
2024 got me some freelance work, so I wasn't out on the streets, but it was a complete circus of an interview racket. Honestly worse than my first job hunt out of college. Its bad when you feel deep down there was someone better than you, but when you go 5 rounds in with good vibes to hear... Nothing back? That's truly disrespectful. And it sadly wasn't a one off.
Then in 2025 I hit some medical emergencies so I needed to urgently find anything. So I found part time work outside of tech and made due with that as I paid down those debts. That totaled up to a part time freelance gig, a part time job, and a few (failed) attempts at some hustles over 2025 only to end up making maybe a third of what I made back in 2022.
Now it's 2026 and I'll try again next month. My freelance work covers any gaps I would have had, I have a website almost ready with some personal projects to point to, and I'm overall more adjusted to the realities of this current market and will approach accordingly. I'm optimistic, but I know we're still in the thick of the weeds here. So I'll take any leads I can get.
Re: Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon
#110Software sector basically got cut in half just on Claude Code. You have to wonder what is next. I don’t think loss in economics is 1:1 with replacement so it’s not zero sum. Production doesn’t necessarily go up. In fact, net output is going to go down if you think about all the B2B lost too. Whoever comes into power next better start thinking about universal income fast. We are gonna get there sooner than expected.
Software productivity doubling would be a huge boon for the economy, not a drag. Of course it's very disruptive for people that lose their jobs, but many of them will get similar new jobs, and the overall impact is higher output.
If all companies fire 50% of their engineers, how will anybody find similar new jobs? In an ideal world software productivity doubling WOULD be a huge boon for the economy IF companies used the increased productivity of their engineers as a way to manage tech debt, R&D and other issues that were put in the backlog because historically there were no resources for this. In reality all companies look at increased productivity as a source for layoffs which does not translate in higher output but the same output done by less people. Which is a net negative because now you have 50% of all engineers without a job and no discernible increase in quality of deliverables.