I follow your extrapolation in the first part, but this is where you lost me.
Why is the Iran war guaranteed to have long-term net negative consequences? It seems far too early to predict the outcome with any kind of certainty.
I follow your extrapolation in the first part, but this is where you lost me.
Why is the Iran war guaranteed to have long-term net negative consequences? It seems far too early to predict the outcome with any kind of certainty.
The predictions of Armageddon failed completely after the tariff war began and will fail now.
If you believed otherwise truly you'd be selling all your US ETFs and equities, but nobody making those predictions will.
Did you really mean that? He may not have been a child, but he does sound like an innocent victim. If he were sufficiently mentally disabled he would get some similar protections to a child because of his inability to consent.
The 1990s boom was in large part due to connectivity -- millions[1] of computers joined the Internet.
[1] _ In the 1990s. Today, there are billions of devices connected, most of them Android devices.
Maybe different areas of expertise aren’t equally valid, and even good experts often can’t see the forest for the trees in terms of developing actionable advice.
> What will the world will be like in the future is decided by us every day.
That's the problem.
This "us" you're referring to. People. They're the problem. They have no principles. They stand for nothing. They think they do, but the reality is their principles are easily compromised. They are highly susceptible to manipulation by way of emotion. Powerful emotions like terror and rage.
Conjure up some drug trafficking, money laundering, child molesting terrorist boogeyman and they'll compromise immediately. Suddenly freedom is being traded away for security. Suddenly free speech is no longer absolute. Then you see that these weren't principles that entire nations were founded upon, they were more like guidelines, thrown away at the first sign of inconvenience.
The harsh truth is that danger must not only be accepted but embraced in order to have true freedom and independence. The internet that connects us also connects criminals, the cryptography that protects us also protects criminals. There is no way around it. Compromise even a little and it's over.
People are the problem. They endlessly compromise on things. No ideal can ever be reached. It's an existential problem that cannot be solved.
To be an idealist is to be an extremist. Sadly people are not prepared to pay the costs of idealism. The ideal of a decentralized, encrypted and uncensorable communications medium, for example. It requires that they accept the cost that criminals will not only use it but be enabled by it. They won't accept it. Thus we march not towards the ideal but towards its opposite: centralized plain text surveilled and controlled communications.
No, please throw SourceTree into the garbage can.
That's the story for Wall Street. Oracle went on a huge run in the market, that it did not deserve, and they're going to attempt to hold on to as much of that gain as they can. Wall Street will applaud slashing jobs if you can give them a good reason for it (and sometimes with no reason at all).
Amazon, Meta, Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Google are producing $700+ billion per year in op income. They have nothing else to spend it on. They will continue to fund a gigantic AI build out.
It does end well eventually, just as the dotcom era build-out ended well over the following decades. It ends with continued US dominance. Yes, the dotcom era saw a crash. The build out continued.
Browsers? The US won.
Ecommerce? The US and China won.
Search? The US won. China didn't win the search war, Baidu was supposed to be a serious global challenger to Google, that was widely hailed across tech circles as a known fact - it was inevitable. Nope. Google won. And Europe never did field a competitor at all.
China didn't win the smartphone war. Apple and Google won globally. Apple has produced trillions of dollars in profit on the back of that fact.
Cloud? China didn't even come close globally. The US won without any challenge at all. Europe never showed up. But but but Hetzner.
China didn't win the GPU war. Nvidia has the market, at least for this decade. That will produce over one trillion dollars in profit in just the next five or six years.
China didn't win the AI war. It was OpenAI's ChatGPT that shocked the world and set everything in motion. Now the US has the top three models in GPT, Gemini and Claude. Europe? Not even in the running (although they'd like to believe they are).
This all ends with the US remaining on top, with China as its only real peer.
Europe? There is no Europe in the equation, just as there wasn't for cloud or mobile apps or smartphones or personal computing.