Nope, sorry... we just can't afford socialized medicine, in the US. /s

Even worse, $3000 which goes to the private equity firm running the EMS system. And $3000 which the Medicare part C insurance company probably got a $5000 recoup from the federal government. 90% of the money we are spending is going into admin fees for private middle men companies which serve to only bloat the cost for everyone. Why shouldn't the EMS system be publicly funded? Why shouldn't cities/counties/states all own the ambulances? Why shouldn't all the costs be payed through taxes? What's nuts is neoliberal thinking that thinks that magically we can get better and cheaper services by relying on the free market. The truth is we are far more likely to just end up with a company founded by the mayors brother which robs us both ways. We pay to contract the company and insurance pays for the ride. The only people getting rich are the owners of the now 20 different companies involved in something that should just be directly ran by the government.

In my experience the system runs a hell of a lot better when the two are closely intertwined/run by a single department. Some fire departments are bad at EMS but that’s a culture problem, not a problem with the system itself. I’ve seen private ambulance services that are even worse tbh

I volunteered for a fire department out of high school and saw the requirements for being an EMT and said screw that. The amount of crap you have to deal with for the pay is not worth it to me.

Some context worth knowing. Healthcare providers spend a third of their adult lives achieving clinical competence, along with making sacrifices that most people would never be willing to make. We pay for the care and knowledge that comes with that. Provider offices already choose which insurance plans to accept based on reimbursement rates. Cut those rates further and practices will drop plans, go cash-only, or close outright. The people who lose access first aren't the wealthy; they're the Medicaid patients, the rural retirees, the working families on marketplace plans. Hospitals can't exist without paying their providers. Underpay them and they leave. We're already staring down a projected physician shortage while burnout is causing experienced clinicians to retire early. Even if healthcare isn't profit-driven, providers still need to be paid what their work is worth. Cut my salary and I'll walk. I didn't kill myself for a decade and go above and beyond for my patients to be turned into an interchangeable cog absorbing the cost of a broken system, while your favorite basketball player makes $50 million a year and your state governor buys another mansion. The answer is more funding to healthcare programs, restoration of subsidies, and LESS cuts. Otherwise we're going to continue down this trajectory of a failing healthcare system. Medicare and Medicaid are government-run public insurance programs, not profit-driven entities, and they need adequate funding to be able to compete with commercial health plans.

Some context worth knowing. Healthcare providers spend a third of their adult lives achieving clinical competence, along with making sacrifices that most people would never be willing to make. We pay for the care and knowledge that comes with that. Provider offices already choose which insurance plans to accept based on reimbursement rates. Cut those rates further and practices will drop plans, go cash-only, or close outright. The people who lose access first aren't the wealthy; they're the Medicaid patients, the rural retirees, the working families on marketplace plans. Hospitals can't exist without paying their providers. Underpay them and they leave. We're already staring down a projected physician shortage while burnout is causing experienced clinicians to retire early. Even if healthcare isn't profit-driven, providers still need to be paid what their work is worth. Cut my salary and I'll walk. I didn't kill myself for a decade and go above and beyond for my patients to be turned into an interchangeable cog absorbing the cost of a broken system, while your favorite basketball player makes $50 million a year and your state governor buys another mansion. The answer is more funding to healthcare programs, restoration of subsidies, and LESS cuts. Otherwise we're going to continue down this trajectory of a failing healthcare system. Medicare and Medicaid are government-run public insurance programs, not profit-driven entities, and they need adequate funding to be able to compete with commercial health plans.

To me this seems similar to my industry, tech, and zi say that because my sentiment is that too much management that are always covering their ass or gunning for their succes have ruined every industry. Always too many pointless KPIs/Metrics that these people hoind employees on that destroy the soul of the worker. Same everywhere. Fuck bad managers. That's the real epidemic.

Looking in from the outside, it's bizarre to watch Americans tolerate this, and to watch over half of their politicians behave like there's just no other way of doing things.

I recently asked my local sub for pcp recs and almost all of them were concierage doctors that don’t take insurance. It was eye opening and depressing.

I was really impressed with Chewy for this actually. Called a few months ago and instantly got a person, who was very nice and not irritated-sounding, who quickly figured out what I needed and connected me to a pharmacist to solve the issue I was having. Whole thing was sorted in less than a half hour including the pharmacist calling the vet for refill authorization. Absolutely blew me away.

I believe potatoes, corn, and rice (amongst others) all have the partial proteins that can pair well with beans to complete the proteins. I'm happy there are a lot of people that responded talking about how much they like quinoa. It's a great food to eat.

Idk man I think you’re in the minority for being savvy enough to learn of and buy that

I was an apprentice, embalmer’s assistant and going to mortuary school for a semester. As soon as I saw the future of what my pay, benefits, and worked schedule looked like I ran far far away. Mom and pop places nickel and dime you, major funerary providers like SCI work you like a dog and they pay is still very limited. I just don’t see any appeal of going into the industry in its current state every single funeral director and embalmer even told me it’s not worth it

The crazy thing about nursing is that there is a shortage at higher levels of nursing but because of Medicare and Medicaid and other federal funding cuts hospitals slashed their after school new grad programs so if you are a new nursing grad it is impossible to get your first job right now. And post acute care or non acute care jobs don’t count as experience for acute care jobs in the hospital. So the hospitals have a ton of open positions at higher experience levels but are not helping new nursss get experience necessary to apply for those positions. I should also add senior care nurses and hospice nurses are not paid nearly enough and we are going to need a lot more soon. There is going to be an elder care crisis when we have too many elderly people and not enough people to care for them.

Bingo. MILLIONS of Silent Generation, Boomer, and early Gen X were societally forced to have children, which they actively resented. It's no surprise said children grew up to resent their parents in turn, leaving them to rot in some home somewhere.

I put it in quotes because it isn't true. It is the exact opposite because we actually see what really happens when there is no guardrails or literally anything coming back to people who are making the money. It is entirely obvious what would happen when those who make money are not liable for how they earn that money. It is a race to the bottom with worsening goods and services. "So what?" Some investors might say, well when one of those services is health related, you are gonna care when it is you getting bottom of the barrel care.

It’s a known strategy that every pet owner should talk about: private equity is trying to strangle the veterinary market. Ask your vet if they are owned by private equity. Like your optician, ask if they are owned by Luxxotica.

My optician refuses to stock Luxxotica brands and has a hate boner for them. It's wonderful.

I appreciate your response. Good point it’s hard to know where this admin will take things.

This is a big reason why after getting my PhD, I left for a university position in China. The research funding here is not drying up at all. If anything, the opposite. The wages are lower (relative to the US), but job stability, research funding, etc. is a billion times better, especially for foreigners. I can’t recommend it enough honestly. I feel there are so many misconceptions about the country from westerners who have never set foot here. But unless something massively changes in the US, I’ll likely never be coming back

It's amazing to think about how much money is sucked up by the middlemen of healthcare. In fact, they have so much money they can buy naming rights to every stadium, the biggest buildings in town and the splashiest ad campaigns and STILL be nonprofit. Imagine that money instead going directly to providers at a realistic rate and hours spent on documentation instead being used for treatment.

I knew a dentist who stopped taking medicaid(?) payments, and just did the work for free. Filling out the paperwork cost him so many work hours, that it was more profitable to just move on to another patient.

A lot of folks don't realize how much A&P goes into massage school, like... I think somewhere around here I still have my list of the 21 steps of circulation. Why does a massage therapist need to know the 21 steps of circulation? Obviously so we don't fuck it up and push blood backwards through the body, but like... I think we could've safely broken it down to just 'here are the four chambers of the heart, this is their cylinder firing order, if someone needs a tune-up that's not your job tell them to talk to their doctor about tachycardia'. I do not off the top of my head remember the 21 steps of circulation. School was back in '09 for me. I don't think it has ever once come up in all the time I was licensed (I haven't been licensed for about a half a decade now) [Edit: Wait, half a decade is 2021, I've been unlicensed for longer than that, what the fuck is time]

A lot of folks don't realize how much A&P goes into massage school, like... I think somewhere around here I still have my list of the 21 steps of circulation. Why does a massage therapist need to know the 21 steps of circulation? Obviously so we don't fuck it up and push blood backwards through the body, but like... I think we could've safely broken it down to just 'here are the four chambers of the heart, this is their cylinder firing order, if someone needs a tune-up that's not your job tell them to talk to their doctor about tachycardia'. I do not off the top of my head remember the 21 steps of circulation. School was back in '09 for me. I don't think it has ever once come up in all the time I was licensed (I haven't been licensed for about a half a decade now) [Edit: Wait, half a decade is 2021, I've been unlicensed for longer than that, what the fuck is time]

> Why does a massage therapist need to know the 21 steps of circulation? Obviously so we don't fuck it up and push blood backwards through the body, but like... I think we could've safely broken it down I mean, how is it more complicated than massage from the extremities in? That's what I've always heard to not fuck up veins

I think the value of universities has been unclear long before ai, ever since the popularization of the internet. Most classes are discussing information that is already open source or open intellectual property. I’ve attended every level of higher education from ivies to community colleges and the argument for expensive schools has always boiled down to “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” or “it’s about the network”. Which I frankly think is not worth the price of admission for those of us who just want to learn skills that will get us job security in stem, medical, or whatever desirable career requires schooling beyond high school. Not everybody wants to work for a big consulting firm or finance, for which the networking thing matters. There should have been a free online option 20 years ago. I also can personally vouch for income share agreement programs too, where they don’t get paid until you get paid.

> Which I frankly think is not worth the price of admission for those of us who just want to learn skills that will get us job security in stem, medical, or whatever desirable career requires schooling beyond high school. This is a misunderstanding of what a university actually is and it is sadly a sign of how commercialised education is in the USA (and a trend which is happening elsewhere as STEM gets a disproportionate focus in the web 2.0 era). A university is not skills-training centre designed to funnel people into whichever careers currently appear most secure or profitable. Society needs engineers and doctors but it also needs writers, artists, historians, teachers, researchers and people who know how to think critically. Turning university into nothing more than job training sells both universities and society short. Your comment is of course also very specific to the USA in general.

Its actually the opposite. The center of gravity is shifting more to the Flagship Southern Schools. Smaller schools all over the country are struggling regardless of their perceived politics.

And the insane thing is the ones on the bubble are dumping money into sports complexes and programs. How about stripping all that out, dropping tuition and fees and see where we're at. The SEC and Big 10 can keep rolling and everyone else should just nope out. Have club sports for a 10th the cost.

I mostly think this is a good thing. We went through decades of making graduates broke, just for the opportunity of competing against each other on the job market—in which that education at college hardly mattered for most job positions (I’m taking direct aim at liberal arts here). It was a broken system, and deserves some big changes.

I mostly think this is a good thing. We went through decades of making graduates broke, just for the opportunity of competing against each other on the job market—in which that education at college hardly mattered for most job positions (I’m taking direct aim at liberal arts here). It was a broken system, and deserves some big changes.

I went to a small liberal arts college in the south that had an education program. The people in it were the most devoted and passionate individuals and they wanted to be teachers above all else. Almost 20 years later, less than half of the ones I graduated with and knew in the years ahead/behind me still teach. The school system broke them. The lack of parental engagement broke them. The vitriol from politicians calling them pedophiles and groomers and transgender activists broke them. America has failed, but we haven't hit rock bottom yet.

I've already planned with my mom to be her EOL carer. She gets disability payments and has a decent pension so at least we will be somewhat compensated for her care. My husband and I have been looking into moving to somewhere with a ADU or MIL suite, but it's hard to find ones that are accessible, so we'll probably have to build it ourselves. It will still be cheaper than LTC.

I’m curious about your assertion regarding student loan servicing. What makes you say that? I haven’t heard literally anything about an impeding collapse, and as someone who’s worked in student financial aid for over 15 years, and who was the sole employee in charge of the student loan portfolio at a school I worked at, I would have expected to hear a hint of this. There are certainly problems with the servicers that ED contracts, but the more concerning issue isn’t the present loan market but what predatory action will take place/resurface given the elimination and restriction of student loan funds by Congress.

The coal mining industry, particularly in the eastern United States/Appalachia. It’s been happening for a few decades, but really started to hit the last few years. Mainly at the moment it’s effecting more rural communities in Appalachia, but the effect is intense. A lot of layoffs, plants and mines shutting down, which is essentially killing many of the small, very rural towns as much of their economies were based around the industry. In addition to this, in a lot of those towns, that was a very large amount of the populations main source of accessible income/work, again, due to the towns being very rural and often unreasonably far away from other jobs that pay as well, or simply too far away from businesses/industry centers that had the sheer amount of jobs available to accommodate so many people in said towns. It’s left a lot of people in Appalachia suddenly without jobs, broke, and little way to access new work unless they move, only…they’re broke and don’t really have money at the moment, and to be honest, they were already pretty poor (coal industry is not known for paying great, and much of Appalachia is very poor) and so moving is…not necessarily feasible. Truth be told, a lot of Appalachia is about to backslide so to speak in a **very** bleak way towards levels of poverty the likes of which simply haven’t been seen in the region in years, decades, if the industry continues to go the way it is in the region. A lot of the towns I imagine will probably just be abandoned and become ghost towns of the modern age, if it does, I believe.

I know there’s a lot of “no support from admin” vibes here, but another perspective: my spouse was a principal and left after 20 years because the central office didn’t give one shit about protecting the admins and the teachers threw admins under the bus for everything. The entire setup is broken from top to bottom, so everyone involved gets f8$ked. Education isn’t about education anymore. It’s about avoiding lawsuits and giving parents a free option for daycare/monitoring. AI isn’t helping anything but until the system itself is fixed, the content and tools don’t really matter.

AI lacks intuition, and it's going to try and funnel you down the most-common-but-incorrect path even faster than the average call center rep.

The problem with that logic is that you only notice the common-but-incorrect times. The common-but-correct is much more frequent (hence why it is common), just much less notable. Troubleshooting *should* go from most common causes to least common causes

>if they pushed us so far forward, why are non-enterprise models so close on their heels? Because it's far easier to maintain one codebase, one pipeline, merely adjusted to reduce compute costs at the expense of capability rather than trying to maintain and develop eleven different models. In the CPU world it's binning. Also, AI companies use the chats with users to improve their models, so you want everyone contributing toward that. >Chinese models are as close as six months behind. China (and some others) have grown exceedingly adept at ripping off western R&D and then figuring out how to do basically the same thing far cheaper. These models aren't even hidden; you can gain access to the best ones available for a couple hundred bucks a month. >they've tried to pass more realistic costs on These aren't realistic costs yet. Not even close. What they're passing on are heavily subsidized costs to help show some revenue and lengthen their runway as they whip up more hype to pull in the real money. >they did essentially anchor people's pereceptions on the cost AI should have at an artificially low point. ATMs were free for years after their introduction; operated at a loss. Even drug dealers will tell you the first one's free. And by drug dealers I mean pharma reps handing out samples for doctors to distribute. This is a very well developed business model. >they thought they were on the cusp of AGI. Generative AI has been under development for several decades and nobody involved in the research and development for it actually believes it leads to an independently thinking, self-aware artificial intelligence. The people selling that are the same ones trying to raise massive amounts of money to keep their companies going. And there is some real AGI work happening behind the scenes, but it's not what you're using on their website or in their dev suite. >call centers Call centers will be one of the first ones to abandon generative AI once the real costs show up. The humans doing those jobs work for nearly nothing. The numbers just don't add up. If you look back at the actual history of generative AI development, you'll see we have actually massively accelerated progress. Costs came down enough that somebody was able to get a model to do enough to spark the mass investment. I absolutely do agree with you that the sudden investment surge is inefficient from an R&D standpoint, but you're incorrect in assuming little progress has been made. That doesn't change the fact that the likely fundamental limits of this approach are deeply at odds with the very public claims of various AI company founders. And it doesn't change the fact that - at the end of the day - much of what it's being used for today is only remotely financially feasible because it's massively subsidized by investor dollars. Those can all be true at the same time.

I work in a call center. I do technical troubleshooting. It does require a human touch due to how complex it is but I know at some point they will implent AI. Either way, most of these call centers are fucked. The other day I called my bank. The AI speaking to me sounded like a real fucking person. I was thinking it would fail with some of the wording, nope! It did just fine lol

Yeah, seeing people suddenly claim that **AI** is what's ruined the call-center customer service experience is hilarious. Even 30 years ago there were already whole sitcom episodes where characters are stuck spending hours navigating endless automated trees and optionless answers without ever being able to reach a human, or reach one who only has a script of the exact same answers as the bot tree. This wasn't some cozy human institution that AI has suddenly derailed. AI agents are vastly better to deal with than sitting through nine *"if x, press N"* options over and over.

Yeah, seeing people suddenly claim that **AI** is what's ruined the call-center customer service experience is hilarious. Even 30 years ago there were already whole sitcom episodes where characters are stuck spending hours navigating endless automated trees and optionless answers without ever being able to reach a human, or reach one who only has a script of the exact same answers as the bot tree. This wasn't some cozy human institution that AI has suddenly derailed. AI agents are vastly better to deal with than sitting through nine *"if x, press N"* options over and over.

As someone who works in advocacy for Medicaid and Medicare insurances. Good. The communication breakdowns between those call centers with strict scripting obfuscates people getting the help they actually need communicating their issues with real problem solving from people familiar with their own infrastructure, laws, rules, culture etc. I hope AI is found to be broken as the Cebu call centers are and goes away too. Insurance companies do this to people because they know they can't go elsewhere for their coverage.

That's a strong assertion. What this guy said, but the opposite.

> translation softwares aleady existed before LLMs, and LLMs have only marginally improved the quality of machine translations This I disagree with. Machine translation before AI was really bad, and borderline incomprehensible when two languages did not share compatible grammar structures. The most egregious was always English --> Japanese or Japanese --> English. LLMs really excel in these kinds of translations. If Google Translate wasn't able to fix Japanese --> English in the 15 or so years I used it before AI, then they weren't able to fix it. It's not like Japanese is some obscure niche language.

I tend to disagree. I have co workers that will tolerate zero complexity.

If you're talking about the picture mount, it's a combination of factors. the mats are thicker than Cricuts handle, and are cut on a 45 degree bevel to create defined edges (which cricuts don't handle I believe?) That leaves you with either manually cutting (easy to screwup where angles meet and ruined the whole cut) or very large computerized cutters that are a) temperamental/expensive and b) a lot of picture framers are older generations that can't handle complex software. (Early 00's I worked for a company that supplied one of the big computerised cutters to picture framers. I did a lot of store visits to fix issues and support for designing complex cuts on top of dealing with frame making equipment!) Had great relations with our supplier and customers, but sadly less so with my own company!

I'm a (small time indie) game developer and I can give a little extra insight on Unreal Engine as it's what I use. No one is being 'shoved into the Unreal Engine pipeline'. Everyone is free to use whatever tools they want. They can even make their own engine (although this isn't realistic for most teams, that's hardly Unreal's fault). Unity has had issues in recent years but it is still viable, Godot is totally free and open source, and the Unreal Engine code is public and so can be customized for a specific project however the developers see fit. Unreal is becoming industry standard simply because it offers more and better features, with pretty favourable licensing terms. **Unreal Engine can not release a poorly optimized game any more than a typewriter can release a poorly edited book.** What causes problems is that advanced lighting and rendering effects like lumen and nanite are turned on by default. It's easy enough to turn them off, but then the devs have to do a lot more work to get realistic lighting, and have to set up complex LOD systems with multiple different models for every asset, etc. It's a lot more work. Leaving Lumen and Nanite on is easier, but they eat a fair bit of performance, and so optimization has to be pretty tight. But it isn't, this is the problem. Developers are CHOOSING to use tools which eat performance because it makes less work for them, and they aren't doing the necessary trade-off work of optimizing in other areas to compensate, or offering other options for slower hardware. **Unreal Engine does not make games, developers do. If it wasn't the best tool, developers wouldn't use it.** I'm getting really irritated seeing this kind of talk everywhere because I am immensely grateful for Unreal Engine and how much easier it makes the whole process of game dev. Most of the rest of your post was correct but this line about Unreal missed the mark badly and this seems to be common opinion now.

Here's the big one quietly cracking beneath the surface: **Private Credit and "Extend-and-Pretend" Private Equity** 🌱 — with the **Property Reinsurance market** running a close second. While public stock markets get daily coverage, these two massive pillars of the global economy are operating on borrowed time through accounting illusions that haven't hit mainstream consciousness yet. ✨ # 1. Private Credit & "Extend-and-Pretend" Private Equity 🪵 During the decade of near-zero interest rates (2012–2021), private equity funds bought thousands of everyday middle-market businesses — HVAC suppliers, healthcare clinics, software vendors, manufacturing plants — using massive amounts of cheap debt. Now, that debt is coming due to be refinanced at much higher interest rates. The problem? **A huge portion of these businesses don't generate enough cash flow to cover the new interest payments.** Instead of marking these assets down or letting them go bankrupt (which would reveal huge losses to investors), the industry is using clever financial maneuvers to delay the reckoning: * **Payment-in-Kind (PIK) Debt:** Borrowers who can't pay their interest in cash are allowed to pay in *more debt*. It keeps the lights on today while compounding the debt burden for tomorrow. * **Continuation Funds:** When a private equity fund reaches the end of its life and can't find a buyer for a struggling company at its valuation, the fund sells the company to *itself* inside a newly created fund, using fresh investor money to pay off old investors. Because these assets are private, they are "marked to model" — meaning the owners set the price tag based on internal estimates rather than open market bidding. The industry has effectively built a shadow banking system holding trillions in debt that cannot be serviced under current rates. When the wall of debt matures and forced liquidations finally begin, those phantom valuations will evaporate overnight. 🌾 # 2. The Property Reinsurance Market 🌿 Most people notice their home or commercial property insurance premiums skyrocketing, but few look at the layer directly above it: **reinsurance** (the insurance companies that insure primary insurance carriers). Reinsurers rely on statistical models to price risk. Between compounding climate events, severe inflation in building materials, and rising litigation costs, those risk models have fundamentally broken. * Reinsurers are quietly reducing their capital exposure or pulling out of entire regions entirely (not just Florida and California, but major pockets of the Midwest and Gulf Coast). * When primary insurance companies can't buy reinsurance protection, they are legally or financially forced to cancel coverage for entire communities. The hidden danger isn't just higher monthly bills — it's the mortgage system. **You cannot hold a standard bank mortgage on a property without active hazard insurance.** If millions of residential and commercial properties become uninsurable, local banking systems, property valuations, and municipal tax bases face a sudden, systemic freeze. 🌳

>if they pushed us so far forward, why are non-enterprise models so close on their heels? Because it's far easier to maintain one codebase, one pipeline, merely adjusted to reduce compute costs at the expense of capability rather than trying to maintain and develop eleven different models. In the CPU world it's binning. Also, AI companies use the chats with users to improve their models, so you want everyone contributing toward that. >Chinese models are as close as six months behind. China (and some others) have grown exceedingly adept at ripping off western R&D and then figuring out how to do basically the same thing far cheaper. These models aren't even hidden; you can gain access to the best ones available for a couple hundred bucks a month. >they've tried to pass more realistic costs on These aren't realistic costs yet. Not even close. What they're passing on are heavily subsidized costs to help show some revenue and lengthen their runway as they whip up more hype to pull in the real money. >they did essentially anchor people's pereceptions on the cost AI should have at an artificially low point. ATMs were free for years after their introduction; operated at a loss. Even drug dealers will tell you the first one's free. And by drug dealers I mean pharma reps handing out samples for doctors to distribute. This is a very well developed business model. >they thought they were on the cusp of AGI. Generative AI has been under development for several decades and nobody involved in the research and development for it actually believes it leads to an independently thinking, self-aware artificial intelligence. The people selling that are the same ones trying to raise massive amounts of money to keep their companies going. And there is some real AGI work happening behind the scenes, but it's not what you're using on their website or in their dev suite. >call centers Call centers will be one of the first ones to abandon generative AI once the real costs show up. The humans doing those jobs work for nearly nothing. The numbers just don't add up. If you look back at the actual history of generative AI development, you'll see we have actually massively accelerated progress. Costs came down enough that somebody was able to get a model to do enough to spark the mass investment. I absolutely do agree with you that the sudden investment surge is inefficient from an R&D standpoint, but you're incorrect in assuming little progress has been made. That doesn't change the fact that the likely fundamental limits of this approach are deeply at odds with the very public claims of various AI company founders. And it doesn't change the fact that - at the end of the day - much of what it's being used for today is only remotely financially feasible because it's massively subsidized by investor dollars. Those can all be true at the same time.

Web Development is an interesting case because there is such a preponderance of freely-available code that can be used to train AI models on. Every single website ever makes their JS, CSS and HTML code available for plain-text download (that's how you see the website in your browser). An AI model can easily see with millions of examples "this code makes this appearance". Plus there's not a lot of cross-cutting concerns with websites: You don't have the security, concurrency, correctness or performance concerns that you have on a backend service, for example. A bank website can show an incorrect balance, and a quick call to a support rep will assure you that "it's displaying wrong, but rest assured that your money is still here". A website gets downloaded and executed on the user's browser, which is *somebody else's computer*, somebody else's expense, and the browser is a hardened security sandbox. The most impressive AI code-gen demos I have seen so far all involve UI. There's nothing behind them, of course, but they look very pretty. This is what CEOs and executives are seeing when they decide to fire a bunch of programmers, though they don't understand that what they don't see is the vast majority of the backend engineering effort. So far AI hasn't been able to do that part nearly as well.

Yeah, AI allows for a lot of quick, flashy frontend stuff, but once you get into the extreme failure cases, you really still need people to verify stuff. Even if it works 99% of the time, if the 1% is something like an incorrect bank balance or trying to steal someones info, or have the AI just go token-crazy supporting your site, that 1% is going to not be worth the costs that AI will also eventually get to per token.

I tend to disagree. I have co workers that will tolerate zero complexity.

Here's the big one quietly cracking beneath the surface: **Private Credit and "Extend-and-Pretend" Private Equity** 🌱 — with the **Property Reinsurance market** running a close second. While public stock markets get daily coverage, these two massive pillars of the global economy are operating on borrowed time through accounting illusions that haven't hit mainstream consciousness yet. ✨ # 1. Private Credit & "Extend-and-Pretend" Private Equity 🪵 During the decade of near-zero interest rates (2012–2021), private equity funds bought thousands of everyday middle-market businesses — HVAC suppliers, healthcare clinics, software vendors, manufacturing plants — using massive amounts of cheap debt. Now, that debt is coming due to be refinanced at much higher interest rates. The problem? **A huge portion of these businesses don't generate enough cash flow to cover the new interest payments.** Instead of marking these assets down or letting them go bankrupt (which would reveal huge losses to investors), the industry is using clever financial maneuvers to delay the reckoning: * **Payment-in-Kind (PIK) Debt:** Borrowers who can't pay their interest in cash are allowed to pay in *more debt*. It keeps the lights on today while compounding the debt burden for tomorrow. * **Continuation Funds:** When a private equity fund reaches the end of its life and can't find a buyer for a struggling company at its valuation, the fund sells the company to *itself* inside a newly created fund, using fresh investor money to pay off old investors. Because these assets are private, they are "marked to model" — meaning the owners set the price tag based on internal estimates rather than open market bidding. The industry has effectively built a shadow banking system holding trillions in debt that cannot be serviced under current rates. When the wall of debt matures and forced liquidations finally begin, those phantom valuations will evaporate overnight. 🌾 # 2. The Property Reinsurance Market 🌿 Most people notice their home or commercial property insurance premiums skyrocketing, but few look at the layer directly above it: **reinsurance** (the insurance companies that insure primary insurance carriers). Reinsurers rely on statistical models to price risk. Between compounding climate events, severe inflation in building materials, and rising litigation costs, those risk models have fundamentally broken. * Reinsurers are quietly reducing their capital exposure or pulling out of entire regions entirely (not just Florida and California, but major pockets of the Midwest and Gulf Coast). * When primary insurance companies can't buy reinsurance protection, they are legally or financially forced to cancel coverage for entire communities. The hidden danger isn't just higher monthly bills — it's the mortgage system. **You cannot hold a standard bank mortgage on a property without active hazard insurance.** If millions of residential and commercial properties become uninsurable, local banking systems, property valuations, and municipal tax bases face a sudden, systemic freeze. 🌳

> Which I frankly think is not worth the price of admission for those of us who just want to learn skills that will get us job security in stem, medical, or whatever desirable career requires schooling beyond high school. This is a misunderstanding of what a university actually is and it is sadly a sign of how commercialised education is in the USA (and a trend which is happening elsewhere as STEM gets a disproportionate focus in the web 2.0 era). A university is not skills-training centre designed to funnel people into whichever careers currently appear most secure or profitable. Society needs engineers and doctors but it also needs writers, artists, historians, teachers, researchers and people who know how to think critically. Turning university into nothing more than job training sells both universities and society short. Your comment is of course also very specific to the USA in general.

I worked at one of them around 2017. In my experience the whole advantage of Big 4 Consulting was that it was a marketing company, not a consulting one. It created a need, and then solutioned for it with wild slide decks, "trusted advisors", and posturing around stakeholders. Back then I realized we didn't need to exist with the knowledge that exists on the internet and the expertise that companies can hire, and yet we were profitable. I don't think its going away because they are really good at making money without actually delivering on actual artifacts (e.g. "what did you actually build?"). They deliver value by being a point person for internal stakeholders and being thrown under the bus; its to break up the inflighting and stagnation that hinder companies from moving forward. AI can make content and decks, but it can't replace that, because its a human problem. And companies aren't better run than they were before; probably the opposite.

I disagree. As more and more expert civil servants get laid off or don't get replaced, consultants are more in demand than ever.

Makes sense until the true costs of using LLMs begin to get charged down to the users.

needing a degree to be a zombie paper pusher fucked so much up

> There's plenty of white collar jobs that will hire anyone with a bachelors degree even if it's completely unrelated, but the career trajectory is normally harshly limited by that. and a lot of those white-collar jobs are being shuttered with things like insurance call centers being all that's left in many areas. Getting a certificate in a healthcare related field personally due to this factor.

> There's plenty of white collar jobs that will hire anyone with a bachelors degree even if it's completely unrelated, but the career trajectory is normally harshly limited by that. and a lot of those white-collar jobs are being shuttered with things like insurance call centers being all that's left in many areas. Getting a certificate in a healthcare related field personally due to this factor.

Practices will need patients if they all refuse to see a midlevel. There is power in numbers.

I mean, google translate is enough for that. We had that 10 years ago. AI did nothing for that use case. The issue is we're supposed to be using AI for legal docs, documentation, marketing materials and like that guy said: its not good enough for that.

> translation softwares aleady existed before LLMs, and LLMs have only marginally improved the quality of machine translations This I disagree with. Machine translation before AI was really bad, and borderline incomprehensible when two languages did not share compatible grammar structures. The most egregious was always English --> Japanese or Japanese --> English. LLMs really excel in these kinds of translations. If Google Translate wasn't able to fix Japanese --> English in the 15 or so years I used it before AI, then they weren't able to fix it. It's not like Japanese is some obscure niche language.

I’ve had the opposite experience with regional dialects. It’ll even call out that it appears to be in one.

I needed a medical translator a few weeks ago for a specific dialect of an already not commonly spoken language for my area and I cant imagine ai being able to translate efficiently. We were trying to determine if this patients sperm was ending up in the urine and the procedure has specific instructions and the patient had detailed questions. It would have taken forever and probably been incorrect with ai but the translator did a beautiful job and we were able to get the test done.

I don't know man. I use both Google Translate and/or ChatGPT every day for a couple of languages and have done for years because I'm too stupid to learn them and too broke to afford a translator. Google was always good at translating words but not necessary the sentence and context and over the past year or so has definitely got worse. ChatGPT is much better at context but loves to miss stuff out and start talking about something else. With both I have to typically rewrite my sentence multiple times and I always have to translate it back into English to make sure it works for what I want to say. It's possible that the original gobbledegook was correct and I thought I had to translate it back into English and rewrote it as the language's grammar and speech types may be something I just don't know but a formal translator would and could drop each of my 20mins into 20secs in their mind.

A lot of their digital offerings are terrible too. Now it’s all first to post by the second instead of racing to meet a printing deadline. If you follow a couple of newspapers and wait around for a big event to come up, they’ll all post within 5 minutes just throwing out whatever they can. Misspellings, completely incorrect info, they dgaf. It’s crazy.

It's hard to justify paying for journalism when someone already broke the news on youtube three days ago, and the reliable, timely news mainstream media do put out is extremely sanitized and skewed to support whatever narrative the news source feels is appropriate.

It's hard to justify paying for journalism when someone already broke the news on youtube three days ago, and the reliable, timely news mainstream media do put out is extremely sanitized and skewed to support whatever narrative the news source feels is appropriate.

24 karat magic! The radio ruined that song by playing it 1000 times a day

I'm a (small time indie) game developer and I can give a little extra insight on Unreal Engine as it's what I use. No one is being 'shoved into the Unreal Engine pipeline'. Everyone is free to use whatever tools they want. They can even make their own engine (although this isn't realistic for most teams, that's hardly Unreal's fault). Unity has had issues in recent years but it is still viable, Godot is totally free and open source, and the Unreal Engine code is public and so can be customized for a specific project however the developers see fit. Unreal is becoming industry standard simply because it offers more and better features, with pretty favourable licensing terms. **Unreal Engine can not release a poorly optimized game any more than a typewriter can release a poorly edited book.** What causes problems is that advanced lighting and rendering effects like lumen and nanite are turned on by default. It's easy enough to turn them off, but then the devs have to do a lot more work to get realistic lighting, and have to set up complex LOD systems with multiple different models for every asset, etc. It's a lot more work. Leaving Lumen and Nanite on is easier, but they eat a fair bit of performance, and so optimization has to be pretty tight. But it isn't, this is the problem. Developers are CHOOSING to use tools which eat performance because it makes less work for them, and they aren't doing the necessary trade-off work of optimizing in other areas to compensate, or offering other options for slower hardware. **Unreal Engine does not make games, developers do. If it wasn't the best tool, developers wouldn't use it.** I'm getting really irritated seeing this kind of talk everywhere because I am immensely grateful for Unreal Engine and how much easier it makes the whole process of game dev. Most of the rest of your post was correct but this line about Unreal missed the mark badly and this seems to be common opinion now.

Recession kids are turning 18 as we speak, the cliff has arrived

Yup. This is already happening to elementary schools in my extremely large city of over a million people (san jose). They have recently closed some elementary schools and diverted those children to the other ones that are still open, for the exact reason you mentioned. there simply are not as many children anymore. probably doesn't help that my $2M house is one of the cheapest in my neighborhood, how the fuck are people supposed to afford to live here? I was only able to do it with family help.

I'm a (small time indie) game developer and I can give a little extra insight on Unreal Engine as it's what I use. No one is being 'shoved into the Unreal Engine pipeline'. Everyone is free to use whatever tools they want. They can even make their own engine (although this isn't realistic for most teams, that's hardly Unreal's fault). Unity has had issues in recent years but it is still viable, Godot is totally free and open source, and the Unreal Engine code is public and so can be customized for a specific project however the developers see fit. Unreal is becoming industry standard simply because it offers more and better features, with pretty favourable licensing terms. **Unreal Engine can not release a poorly optimized game any more than a typewriter can release a poorly edited book.** What causes problems is that advanced lighting and rendering effects like lumen and nanite are turned on by default. It's easy enough to turn them off, but then the devs have to do a lot more work to get realistic lighting, and have to set up complex LOD systems with multiple different models for every asset, etc. It's a lot more work. Leaving Lumen and Nanite on is easier, but they eat a fair bit of performance, and so optimization has to be pretty tight. But it isn't, this is the problem. Developers are CHOOSING to use tools which eat performance because it makes less work for them, and they aren't doing the necessary trade-off work of optimizing in other areas to compensate, or offering other options for slower hardware. **Unreal Engine does not make games, developers do. If it wasn't the best tool, developers wouldn't use it.** I'm getting really irritated seeing this kind of talk everywhere because I am immensely grateful for Unreal Engine and how much easier it makes the whole process of game dev. Most of the rest of your post was correct but this line about Unreal missed the mark badly and this seems to be common opinion now.

That's Taiwan my guy, it's so small. It's always been harder to be placed there than China. The upper class will always want English teachers, as long as English is the world language. Those who cannot afford a teacher or English school may resort to AI sure but it's like those Chinese English books that have broken grammar lol

Yep, FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE... or you could just tweet it.

AI is a symptom, not a cause. Holding companies were collapsing prior. They raced to the bottom and commoditized themselves. It all stems back to CEOs trying to cut costs everywhere, so they tried to cut advertising budgets and maximize working dollars. Holding companies allowed this and got to the point that they make supermaket-esque margins.

Why have real people take surveys and answer when bots are going to take over the world anyway, we humans will just be sweeping up their metal shavings and their oil spills and crying in our cardboard boxes.

To me this seems similar to my industry, tech, and zi say that because my sentiment is that too much management that are always covering their ass or gunning for their succes have ruined every industry. Always too many pointless KPIs/Metrics that these people hoind employees on that destroy the soul of the worker. Same everywhere. Fuck bad managers. That's the real epidemic.

And the average yearly tuition for med school in the UK is $12.5k while it’s almost $60k in the US. The average salary for physicians in UK is $99k. The average salary for physicians in US is $400k. The average salary for a healthcare CEO is $11 million. The average salary for a healthcare VP is $223k. The average salary for a hospital administrator is $119k. All this is from a quick google search. Please tell me again how it’s all really the doctors’ fault that our healthcare system is broken.

Plot twist: concierge primary care aka DPC (direct primary care) is actually WAY cheaper than most insurance plans, and includes office visits, which are typically an hour with the doctor. I used only DPC clinics for 5 years when I didn’t have insurance. Insurance would have cost $500/month, DPC cost $100/month. And the care was great - I actually was able to get a diagnosis and ongoing help with a complex chronic condition that most doctors won’t even approach. Pair that with the fact that self-pay rates for scans and bloodwork are wildly cheaper than the rates places charge when billed through insurance… and it is better in literally every way, except for the obvious - no coverage for catastrophic events. So if you’re willing to live on the edge a bit, concierge care is a great option not only for the rich, but also for the semi-broke and disabled and out of work. Or really anyone who wants to prioritize actual doctor care over hedging their bets against the possibility of major injury or acute illness.

Here's the big one quietly cracking beneath the surface: **Private Credit and "Extend-and-Pretend" Private Equity** 🌱 — with the **Property Reinsurance market** running a close second. While public stock markets get daily coverage, these two massive pillars of the global economy are operating on borrowed time through accounting illusions that haven't hit mainstream consciousness yet. ✨ # 1. Private Credit & "Extend-and-Pretend" Private Equity 🪵 During the decade of near-zero interest rates (2012–2021), private equity funds bought thousands of everyday middle-market businesses — HVAC suppliers, healthcare clinics, software vendors, manufacturing plants — using massive amounts of cheap debt. Now, that debt is coming due to be refinanced at much higher interest rates. The problem? **A huge portion of these businesses don't generate enough cash flow to cover the new interest payments.** Instead of marking these assets down or letting them go bankrupt (which would reveal huge losses to investors), the industry is using clever financial maneuvers to delay the reckoning: * **Payment-in-Kind (PIK) Debt:** Borrowers who can't pay their interest in cash are allowed to pay in *more debt*. It keeps the lights on today while compounding the debt burden for tomorrow. * **Continuation Funds:** When a private equity fund reaches the end of its life and can't find a buyer for a struggling company at its valuation, the fund sells the company to *itself* inside a newly created fund, using fresh investor money to pay off old investors. Because these assets are private, they are "marked to model" — meaning the owners set the price tag based on internal estimates rather than open market bidding. The industry has effectively built a shadow banking system holding trillions in debt that cannot be serviced under current rates. When the wall of debt matures and forced liquidations finally begin, those phantom valuations will evaporate overnight. 🌾 # 2. The Property Reinsurance Market 🌿 Most people notice their home or commercial property insurance premiums skyrocketing, but few look at the layer directly above it: **reinsurance** (the insurance companies that insure primary insurance carriers). Reinsurers rely on statistical models to price risk. Between compounding climate events, severe inflation in building materials, and rising litigation costs, those risk models have fundamentally broken. * Reinsurers are quietly reducing their capital exposure or pulling out of entire regions entirely (not just Florida and California, but major pockets of the Midwest and Gulf Coast). * When primary insurance companies can't buy reinsurance protection, they are legally or financially forced to cancel coverage for entire communities. The hidden danger isn't just higher monthly bills — it's the mortgage system. **You cannot hold a standard bank mortgage on a property without active hazard insurance.** If millions of residential and commercial properties become uninsurable, local banking systems, property valuations, and municipal tax bases face a sudden, systemic freeze. 🌳

Here's the big one quietly cracking beneath the surface: **Private Credit and "Extend-and-Pretend" Private Equity** 🌱 — with the **Property Reinsurance market** running a close second. While public stock markets get daily coverage, these two massive pillars of the global economy are operating on borrowed time through accounting illusions that haven't hit mainstream consciousness yet. ✨ # 1. Private Credit & "Extend-and-Pretend" Private Equity 🪵 During the decade of near-zero interest rates (2012–2021), private equity funds bought thousands of everyday middle-market businesses — HVAC suppliers, healthcare clinics, software vendors, manufacturing plants — using massive amounts of cheap debt. Now, that debt is coming due to be refinanced at much higher interest rates. The problem? **A huge portion of these businesses don't generate enough cash flow to cover the new interest payments.** Instead of marking these assets down or letting them go bankrupt (which would reveal huge losses to investors), the industry is using clever financial maneuvers to delay the reckoning: * **Payment-in-Kind (PIK) Debt:** Borrowers who can't pay their interest in cash are allowed to pay in *more debt*. It keeps the lights on today while compounding the debt burden for tomorrow. * **Continuation Funds:** When a private equity fund reaches the end of its life and can't find a buyer for a struggling company at its valuation, the fund sells the company to *itself* inside a newly created fund, using fresh investor money to pay off old investors. Because these assets are private, they are "marked to model" — meaning the owners set the price tag based on internal estimates rather than open market bidding. The industry has effectively built a shadow banking system holding trillions in debt that cannot be serviced under current rates. When the wall of debt matures and forced liquidations finally begin, those phantom valuations will evaporate overnight. 🌾 # 2. The Property Reinsurance Market 🌿 Most people notice their home or commercial property insurance premiums skyrocketing, but few look at the layer directly above it: **reinsurance** (the insurance companies that insure primary insurance carriers). Reinsurers rely on statistical models to price risk. Between compounding climate events, severe inflation in building materials, and rising litigation costs, those risk models have fundamentally broken. * Reinsurers are quietly reducing their capital exposure or pulling out of entire regions entirely (not just Florida and California, but major pockets of the Midwest and Gulf Coast). * When primary insurance companies can't buy reinsurance protection, they are legally or financially forced to cancel coverage for entire communities. The hidden danger isn't just higher monthly bills — it's the mortgage system. **You cannot hold a standard bank mortgage on a property without active hazard insurance.** If millions of residential and commercial properties become uninsurable, local banking systems, property valuations, and municipal tax bases face a sudden, systemic freeze. 🌳

Damn, it's almost like the business that singularly forces everything it touches to focus on profits and shareholder returns over everything else is a net negative for society as a whole

I'm getting a genuine sense of schadenfreude just thinking about it. Is it too soon to make the popcorn?

As someone in a rural town this is my frustration when reddit discusses wfh/remote work. So many people don’t realize that earning a city wage while living in an entirely different community has a cost for the community. You drive up the rent prices, as well as amenity prices, and in the meantime don’t provide a service that actually serves the community you live in. People who actually work in their own community can’t keep up. It’s just another form of gentrification. Older people who bought a home while they could end up being fine, and maybe even benefit a bit when they sell to retire, but the children that grew up there (me) are priced out of our own homes. It happens even worse at an international scale when you throw in foreign currency exchanges.

Yeah it would be best to keep. My prediction is we’re going to see real estate prices rise in the New England and Midwest area while everything else tanks. I studied climate in school and we had to do a project on water levels and real estate and tons of houses are completely screwed. And there’s really no point in trying to delay this (there are mansions sitting on the cliffs of La Jolla where some have lost parts of their yard to the erosion) and they’re trying to spend money to move their houses back. It’s just a waste of money and time really.

Bought a rural house to retire to in a few years. It's hard to find anyone that can do work at my place. Well work, sprinklers, landscaping, handyman, etc. I called 7 pool cleaning services and only one guy called back and he drives an hour to get to my house. Fortunately I got him two more customers in my area so it's worth it for him. Had to wait a week for a plumber to come fix a broken pipe in my wall. And if you find someone, you don't tell anyone else about them. On top of that, they are charging more and more because the "city folk" drove up the pricing. Oh yeah, they mostly want to be paid in cash because they don't pay taxes. I don't think they realize they can't get social security when they retire. My mother-in-law had friends from China that opened a restaurant and did everything in cash. Went to retire and were told they didn't have enough credits to receive social security. They were in their late 60s and had to get legitimate jobs just to get their credits. Husband died before he could properly retire.

I live in a semi rural community. All the new builds are 55+ communities. All the non farm (aka not 1-10 mil of land) homes are cheep enough but the cost to get them livable is more than the house is worth. I finally saw one that looks decent the other day but then the outside just was so broken down compared to the inside. The ground was dead there was a propane tank right up next to the house and the siding was falling apart.

Commercial real estate isn’t just office, however. Think of the all the apartment complexes and warehouse buildings, shopping centers, etc. It is the largest asset class and it will never go away. The newest, modern offices in certain markets (NYC, Boston, Miami, etc.) are doing very well. Tenants are just more picky. But you’re right that a lot of older, suburban office buildings are having issues.

Retail is also suffering due to online shopping and direct sales. Restraunts are doing less and less sit-down buasiness, I don't know if delivery has replaced it or not, but it does mean less demand for space, even if the number of kitchens active remains. Comercial real estate is in trouble. I wonder if demand for libraries, community centers, and general use spaces will rise as we see a drop in non-residential spaces.

We bought our daughter a pristine 2019 Honda Fit during her last year of high school. Another teenager at the school backed into the driver door in the parking lot. Put a good sized dent in the door. The girl's dad agreed to pay for the repairs out of pocket to avoid his teen's insurance going up. We figured it would be maybe $1500-2000 to repair. Nope. It was $5500! The structural beam in the door was bent, so new door. The metallic blue paint had to be blended across the entire side of the car. And that model Fit has driver assist features. So a full recalibration was required. The girl's dad about shit, but he did pay it. I was floored.

I'm torn on this, when I was growing up, these services were nothing short of "shady as fuck" - selling you a new pain job that would flake off 1 day after your 1 year warranty. The massive buildings these places used to have are abandoned and a blight and often a toxic cleanup - all over every major highway across america. Part of me feels like cars "not sucking" with factory paint/body was the biggest factor and the other part of me can't disagree with "smarter cars" because people are surviving accidents more today than ever before. oh.. and while modern repairs are more expensive, they're matched 100% - unlike growing up when i got hit in the door and the door repair was a shade off and pretty obvious but nothing i could do because the place that did it shut down...

I dont disagree with your assessment on how complicated new cars are, or how much everything costs, but my experience after getting into an accident (a few years ago) was kind of the opposite. I had the car towed to the shop my insurance company recommended, and got a fairly exasperated call from them around lunchtime. Had dropped the car overnight and I assume the tow driver put the keys in their drop box, but when I answered the phone the person on the other end was basically upset that the car was there, said they spent all morning trying to figure out who it belonged to (my info was in an envelope with the keys) and they said that I had to come pick it up, and right away. They flat out refused to even look at it and they were upset that I had had it dropped off at all. This was a national chain too. So I called another shop and they gave me a similar story, booked something like 2-3 months out. I finally found a shop that would even do it and it ended up being like 2/3rds the value of the car, took a couple months I dont think these guys are worried about their corner of the market collapsing, unless something has drastically changed in the last couple years.

What's really amazing is, I see neighbors and coworkers going to the smartphone model, upgrading their car every two years. I always knew a few people who lived like that and everyone agreed they were idiots, but now I see it becoming quite common and normalized. Not even because they broke or wrecked their car, but just because they want this year's new features.

It seems like American automakers didn't learn their lesson in the 70s. They underestimated Japanese and European automakers and it almost ruined them. Now they're repeating the same mistakes with China.

To be fair, when cars cost as much as they do these days, what else can be done? The accident my car got totaled in *would* have killed me if I had been driving a car that wasnt modern. Some prick hit me near head on going double the speed limit while drunk going twice the speed limit. Instead of dying I hobbled away with a broken leg. As much as Id love to buy a 10 year old car in cash and drive it into the ground, the amount of new safety features and crash tech thats standard on new cars makes it hard to buy anything but. When everyone is driving these massive behemoths as crazy as they are these days, of course people want the newest they can at a price they can actually afford. Its an arms race. On a related note, reminder to everyone: get your uninsured motorist coverage on your insurance. Id be crazy fucked right now if I didnt have that

> Which I frankly think is not worth the price of admission for those of us who just want to learn skills that will get us job security in stem, medical, or whatever desirable career requires schooling beyond high school. This is a misunderstanding of what a university actually is and it is sadly a sign of how commercialised education is in the USA (and a trend which is happening elsewhere as STEM gets a disproportionate focus in the web 2.0 era). A university is not skills-training centre designed to funnel people into whichever careers currently appear most secure or profitable. Society needs engineers and doctors but it also needs writers, artists, historians, teachers, researchers and people who know how to think critically. Turning university into nothing more than job training sells both universities and society short. Your comment is of course also very specific to the USA in general.

> But it doesn't know it's playing chess; it's chasing value and reward as it was designed to do and all its efforts are directed in achieving the goals provided to it within the scope of the only thing it can do I don't disagree with you at all, but it always strikes me as a little ironic to hear people say this when it basically describes us as well. "Real" biological intelligence is arguably just a long series of misaligned reward functions.

Maybe the first positive example of an industry dying. Car dealerships are propped up by legal lobbying that made them the only way to buy a car for a long time. Every time I drive down the high way in Texas I'm baffled at how much space is dedicated to huge dealerships that if they didn't create laws to protect wouldn't exist in a free market

As someone who just had their car totalled, the good news is that the insurance payout on the car is super inflated too. My car somehow lost no equity in the 4 years I owned it. Because of the down payment Im going to have, for a more expensive car monthly payment is somehow going down by about $100.

At the same time, I’m not sure I’m sad about this. NAPA branded parts that aren’t OE source are often crap quality. 20 years ago I stopped buying NAPA parts for my personal projects after repeated problems with the same parts. My joke was, “if it’s from NAPA and it moves or connects to something that moves, it’s garbage.” I have acquaintances in service that don’t disagree… but they still use NAPA because of the parts support availability. Similar with Fram. Long known to be poor quality entry level filters despite being popular. Whatever “business” did to extract all the capital from these brands ultimately hurt consumers for many years before this result. Nothing super positive will come of it, but nothing super bad either.

Sadly, Fram didn't actually go bankrupt. The company that bought them did some real screwed up financial stuff and it sinking a lot of good brands because of it. It's basically Toys-R-Us all over again. It got bought and ruined for financial gain.

We bought our daughter a pristine 2019 Honda Fit during her last year of high school. Another teenager at the school backed into the driver door in the parking lot. Put a good sized dent in the door. The girl's dad agreed to pay for the repairs out of pocket to avoid his teen's insurance going up. We figured it would be maybe $1500-2000 to repair. Nope. It was $5500! The structural beam in the door was bent, so new door. The metallic blue paint had to be blended across the entire side of the car. And that model Fit has driver assist features. So a full recalibration was required. The girl's dad about shit, but he did pay it. I was floored.

I'm torn on this, when I was growing up, these services were nothing short of "shady as fuck" - selling you a new pain job that would flake off 1 day after your 1 year warranty. The massive buildings these places used to have are abandoned and a blight and often a toxic cleanup - all over every major highway across america. Part of me feels like cars "not sucking" with factory paint/body was the biggest factor and the other part of me can't disagree with "smarter cars" because people are surviving accidents more today than ever before. oh.. and while modern repairs are more expensive, they're matched 100% - unlike growing up when i got hit in the door and the door repair was a shade off and pretty obvious but nothing i could do because the place that did it shut down...

I dont disagree with your assessment on how complicated new cars are, or how much everything costs, but my experience after getting into an accident (a few years ago) was kind of the opposite. I had the car towed to the shop my insurance company recommended, and got a fairly exasperated call from them around lunchtime. Had dropped the car overnight and I assume the tow driver put the keys in their drop box, but when I answered the phone the person on the other end was basically upset that the car was there, said they spent all morning trying to figure out who it belonged to (my info was in an envelope with the keys) and they said that I had to come pick it up, and right away. They flat out refused to even look at it and they were upset that I had had it dropped off at all. This was a national chain too. So I called another shop and they gave me a similar story, booked something like 2-3 months out. I finally found a shop that would even do it and it ended up being like 2/3rds the value of the car, took a couple months I dont think these guys are worried about their corner of the market collapsing, unless something has drastically changed in the last couple years.

What's really amazing is, I see neighbors and coworkers going to the smartphone model, upgrading their car every two years. I always knew a few people who lived like that and everyone agreed they were idiots, but now I see it becoming quite common and normalized. Not even because they broke or wrecked their car, but just because they want this year's new features.

Truth. A lot of the replies here making fun of the repair quotes they got are forgetting one thing- that's what it takes to get rid of the damage entirely. Autobody (especially collision) is about taking broken cars and taking them back to pre-accident condition. That requires proper steps, removal and inspection of parts, and bodywork. It takes time and money to do right, and oftentimes they're undercut by insurance anyway for the time and effort that goes into it. Lots of folks get mad at their quotes forgetting this. If they cut corners and did sketchy stuff to get it "good enough" or to save a client a quick buck, it would come back to haunt them. You might be able to pull that off at home, or buff out what you think is good- but a shop that cares will refuse to do anything but straightforward, thorough work. Cars are getting more expensive to fix- waterbased paints are harder to blend into the rest of the paintjob- components for radar and driver assist are thousands even through vendor connections. Your mirror with a cracked lens or taillight with broken glass is a 2k part because of this. It's a dying trade, there's less incentives every year to do it, and apprentices are told in their first years to expect insurance to do everything they can, with every book, to cut their hours or justify paying them less. It's not a recipe for success.

Truth. A lot of the replies here making fun of the repair quotes they got are forgetting one thing- that's what it takes to get rid of the damage entirely. Autobody (especially collision) is about taking broken cars and taking them back to pre-accident condition. That requires proper steps, removal and inspection of parts, and bodywork. It takes time and money to do right, and oftentimes they're undercut by insurance anyway for the time and effort that goes into it. Lots of folks get mad at their quotes forgetting this. If they cut corners and did sketchy stuff to get it "good enough" or to save a client a quick buck, it would come back to haunt them. You might be able to pull that off at home, or buff out what you think is good- but a shop that cares will refuse to do anything but straightforward, thorough work. Cars are getting more expensive to fix- waterbased paints are harder to blend into the rest of the paintjob- components for radar and driver assist are thousands even through vendor connections. Your mirror with a cracked lens or taillight with broken glass is a 2k part because of this. It's a dying trade, there's less incentives every year to do it, and apprentices are told in their first years to expect insurance to do everything they can, with every book, to cut their hours or justify paying them less. It's not a recipe for success.

then cars from the 80s, then 90s, then 2000s become classics and quite a few old Porsches get the massive upgrade of "modern" fuel injection

It’s on the verge now. But I don’t think it’s boomers. it’s the price. Classics are just too expensive right now. I think those prices will crash and collecting will come back. Reason, cars today are built so cheap with plastic parts and are crazy expensive to fix. Old cars are much easier and cheaper to maintain. You can fix them yourself. Electric cars are great, I’ve had a couple but electric prices keep going up to the point it’s about the same cost as gas. I’m seriously thinking about old cars again but at $40k it’s tough to justify

A company pulling out of AI spending can affect more than just the revenue the industry is pulling in. The negative publicity that it would generate can have a larger impact, especially if the company has been gargling GenAI’s nuts for almost 4 years now.

Comes with a free CyberTruck - the vehicle by bachelors, for bachelors that helps you stay a bachelor forever!

Which is probably why it's always on the verge of collapse - the execs know they'll never face a lick of consequences and will always get their golden parachutes from the gravy train, so why change anything?

Almost every advertised fare nowadays is just to secure your spot on the plane. You then have to pay for your seat!

I mean, google translate is enough for that. We had that 10 years ago. AI did nothing for that use case. The issue is we're supposed to be using AI for legal docs, documentation, marketing materials and like that guy said: its not good enough for that.

Bought a rural house to retire to in a few years. It's hard to find anyone that can do work at my place. Well work, sprinklers, landscaping, handyman, etc. I called 7 pool cleaning services and only one guy called back and he drives an hour to get to my house. Fortunately I got him two more customers in my area so it's worth it for him. Had to wait a week for a plumber to come fix a broken pipe in my wall. And if you find someone, you don't tell anyone else about them. On top of that, they are charging more and more because the "city folk" drove up the pricing. Oh yeah, they mostly want to be paid in cash because they don't pay taxes. I don't think they realize they can't get social security when they retire. My mother-in-law had friends from China that opened a restaurant and did everything in cash. Went to retire and were told they didn't have enough credits to receive social security. They were in their late 60s and had to get legitimate jobs just to get their credits. Husband died before he could properly retire.

I mean shit, the older generations are slowing down too. The cost of a cocktail literally anywhere has gotten so ridiculous that I would straight up go broke if I regularly bought drinks when going out. I'm not paying 15-20 dollars for you to put 3 ingredients in a cup and shake it. 3 beers at a restaurant/bar costs as much as a 24 pack at the local grocer. And drinking at home is just sad.

Man, double whammy for me. I have 2 businesses. I sell parts that get imported and I fabricate cases for art exhibits. Parts have gone up in price because of tariffs and people are more broke than ever. Exhibits have paused a lot of spending because people are broke and lots of federal funding has been pulled. Guess I'll go back to flipping burgers.

We were commenting yesterday that every time we drive by the local fast food joints by us they're completely dead. We have a Wendy's, Burger King, carls Jr and it's pretty rare I see a car in the drive thru. We live in an area with a big population. The only "fast" food near us I see busy is Panda and Cafe Rio. They tried making a drive thru meal for two cost $35 it just doesn't work anymore. When you can cook lunch and dinner at home for the same cost

There’s Chopsticks in Edmonds, it was closed for 1/2 of July and we all panicked.

Not identical, but there's a Mexican restaurant in Yonkers that's all family owned and operated. I was asking the teenage waitress (who's mom is the owner) and she said neither she nor her brothers currently have any plans to take it over someday. Maybe that'll change in the next 10, 20 years. I hope so.

I mean shit, the older generations are slowing down too. The cost of a cocktail literally anywhere has gotten so ridiculous that I would straight up go broke if I regularly bought drinks when going out. I'm not paying 15-20 dollars for you to put 3 ingredients in a cup and shake it. 3 beers at a restaurant/bar costs as much as a 24 pack at the local grocer. And drinking at home is just sad.

Man, double whammy for me. I have 2 businesses. I sell parts that get imported and I fabricate cases for art exhibits. Parts have gone up in price because of tariffs and people are more broke than ever. Exhibits have paused a lot of spending because people are broke and lots of federal funding has been pulled. Guess I'll go back to flipping burgers.

And this year, na barrels are down. It’s all on a downward trajectory. I don’t believe in na as a continued growth segment. I’ve been laughed at for it, but it’s starting to show. And yeah, craft will still be around but never see the growth it did in the early to mid 2010’s. I don’t think it’ll completely crash, but it’s been a long spiral.

> Craft beer/small beer because a lot of them taste like crap

And with alcohol in general becoming much less popular. Who wants to go to a strip club sober

I think travel agents will be around but mainly for businesses. My company policy requires agents be used for any international travel to areas that have a level 2 travel advisory or higher, even if it's just a layover.

The high end ones are thriving. Rich folks don't want to plan their own safari or eco trip

The gambling industry is far closer to collapse than anyone realizes. The combination of people going broke + gambling house shenanigans is about to pop the bubble much sooner than people think.

>Tech is fine but not when what its replacing is now more difficult because of it Businesses/restaurants aren't creating apps to make the customers' lives easier. They create apps to make their own jobs/lives easier, but also, and probably more importantly, to lower overhead. This is even more true with AI. Companies that are utilizing AI for their customer support are eliminating their need for humans which saves $$ on call center overhead.

Last time my wife was in a brick and mortar, she went to try out clothes at certain sizes. When she couldn't find the sizes she needed, she was directed to their website. Like bitch, we don't want to buy 4 of the same thing online only to return the 3 or 4 that don't fit.

Bought a rural house to retire to in a few years. It's hard to find anyone that can do work at my place. Well work, sprinklers, landscaping, handyman, etc. I called 7 pool cleaning services and only one guy called back and he drives an hour to get to my house. Fortunately I got him two more customers in my area so it's worth it for him. Had to wait a week for a plumber to come fix a broken pipe in my wall. And if you find someone, you don't tell anyone else about them. On top of that, they are charging more and more because the "city folk" drove up the pricing. Oh yeah, they mostly want to be paid in cash because they don't pay taxes. I don't think they realize they can't get social security when they retire. My mother-in-law had friends from China that opened a restaurant and did everything in cash. Went to retire and were told they didn't have enough credits to receive social security. They were in their late 60s and had to get legitimate jobs just to get their credits. Husband died before he could properly retire.

Here's the big one quietly cracking beneath the surface: **Private Credit and "Extend-and-Pretend" Private Equity** 🌱 — with the **Property Reinsurance market** running a close second. While public stock markets get daily coverage, these two massive pillars of the global economy are operating on borrowed time through accounting illusions that haven't hit mainstream consciousness yet. ✨ # 1. Private Credit & "Extend-and-Pretend" Private Equity 🪵 During the decade of near-zero interest rates (2012–2021), private equity funds bought thousands of everyday middle-market businesses — HVAC suppliers, healthcare clinics, software vendors, manufacturing plants — using massive amounts of cheap debt. Now, that debt is coming due to be refinanced at much higher interest rates. The problem? **A huge portion of these businesses don't generate enough cash flow to cover the new interest payments.** Instead of marking these assets down or letting them go bankrupt (which would reveal huge losses to investors), the industry is using clever financial maneuvers to delay the reckoning: * **Payment-in-Kind (PIK) Debt:** Borrowers who can't pay their interest in cash are allowed to pay in *more debt*. It keeps the lights on today while compounding the debt burden for tomorrow. * **Continuation Funds:** When a private equity fund reaches the end of its life and can't find a buyer for a struggling company at its valuation, the fund sells the company to *itself* inside a newly created fund, using fresh investor money to pay off old investors. Because these assets are private, they are "marked to model" — meaning the owners set the price tag based on internal estimates rather than open market bidding. The industry has effectively built a shadow banking system holding trillions in debt that cannot be serviced under current rates. When the wall of debt matures and forced liquidations finally begin, those phantom valuations will evaporate overnight. 🌾 # 2. The Property Reinsurance Market 🌿 Most people notice their home or commercial property insurance premiums skyrocketing, but few look at the layer directly above it: **reinsurance** (the insurance companies that insure primary insurance carriers). Reinsurers rely on statistical models to price risk. Between compounding climate events, severe inflation in building materials, and rising litigation costs, those risk models have fundamentally broken. * Reinsurers are quietly reducing their capital exposure or pulling out of entire regions entirely (not just Florida and California, but major pockets of the Midwest and Gulf Coast). * When primary insurance companies can't buy reinsurance protection, they are legally or financially forced to cancel coverage for entire communities. The hidden danger isn't just higher monthly bills — it's the mortgage system. **You cannot hold a standard bank mortgage on a property without active hazard insurance.** If millions of residential and commercial properties become uninsurable, local banking systems, property valuations, and municipal tax bases face a sudden, systemic freeze. 🌳

The problem is that these actually are NOT the kids who are going to grow up to be doctors and architects and engineers. In upper-middle class circles, it's widely accepted that if you want your kid to grow up to be one of those professions you do NOT enroll them in public school. You find another way to educate your kids. Anyone with the means now is taking their kids out. It's unfortunate that it's come to this. It's going to widen the class divide.

You're good. Added to the discussion with a point of view not many people have the privy to. You're essay was incredibly interesting, and by the upvotes, others agree. Thank you for taking to time to educate us.

As someone in a rural town this is my frustration when reddit discusses wfh/remote work. So many people don’t realize that earning a city wage while living in an entirely different community has a cost for the community. You drive up the rent prices, as well as amenity prices, and in the meantime don’t provide a service that actually serves the community you live in. People who actually work in their own community can’t keep up. It’s just another form of gentrification. Older people who bought a home while they could end up being fine, and maybe even benefit a bit when they sell to retire, but the children that grew up there (me) are priced out of our own homes. It happens even worse at an international scale when you throw in foreign currency exchanges.

Bought a rural house to retire to in a few years. It's hard to find anyone that can do work at my place. Well work, sprinklers, landscaping, handyman, etc. I called 7 pool cleaning services and only one guy called back and he drives an hour to get to my house. Fortunately I got him two more customers in my area so it's worth it for him. Had to wait a week for a plumber to come fix a broken pipe in my wall. And if you find someone, you don't tell anyone else about them. On top of that, they are charging more and more because the "city folk" drove up the pricing. Oh yeah, they mostly want to be paid in cash because they don't pay taxes. I don't think they realize they can't get social security when they retire. My mother-in-law had friends from China that opened a restaurant and did everything in cash. Went to retire and were told they didn't have enough credits to receive social security. They were in their late 60s and had to get legitimate jobs just to get their credits. Husband died before he could properly retire.

I live in a semi rural community. All the new builds are 55+ communities. All the non farm (aka not 1-10 mil of land) homes are cheep enough but the cost to get them livable is more than the house is worth. I finally saw one that looks decent the other day but then the outside just was so broken down compared to the inside. The ground was dead there was a propane tank right up next to the house and the siding was falling apart.

Easy to keep the grift alive when you are basically guaranteed a 100% success rate!

I'm not disagreeing with that assessment, just saying I've never bothered looking into it, so I'm not agreeing either (though my basic instincts do agree with your assessment).

"Fun" fact: many of the people who fought the California wildfires were prisoner firefighters. They train and become emergency firefighters in exchange for a reduction in time served. But, once they are released, they are often barred from working in real firehouses due to being a felon. So they risk their lives and health to save us, then we turn around and prevent them from rebuilding their life. Obviously we don't want certain types of criminals in public service, but weed dealers shouldn't be held back by their past mistakes if they're actively saving lives.

To be fair my buddy did *exactly* this 10 years ago. He's now pushing $5M a year in sales. Started with a used tire machine and a used balancer selling the cheap Chinese tires. He's got 12 or 14 bays now, plus detailing.

This is one of the most horrifying responses in here. Thanks for taking the time to bring it to light

Why are the governments constantly trying to sue ?

And parents. The amount of battery-operated crappy toys that people buy for my kids…

Nah. People will be hungry because they can't afford it. From the opposite perspective in JIT distribution we are definitely sourcing globally even on a moments notice. The shelves wont be empty but the sticker shock will be real.

Nope. They just got big. Really, really big. Farm to Taber goes over a lot of the nostalgic bullshit myths about it.

Already gone, my family owned a mink farm, everything went bust during covid, almost all of them are gone in the US, Scandinavia killed off all the Mink due to bad information and to scam the Gov't, lost everything.

For some reason not having an ASL translator is a violation of the American Disability Act… I wonder why…

Oracle and the frontier models are the most at risk companies in the AI bubble. Essentially the training/operating costs incurred by OpenAI and Anthropic are obscene and any attempt to turn a profit off of them is essentially futile. Oracle has positioned themselves where they go down if OpenAI fails to pay their bills. The likelihood of OpenAI being able to is so low it's creating Oracle's credit rating, and they currently sit one step above junk bonds. This should be scary because its all the AI build out thats stopping the US from being in a technical recession.

"Once that cracks" What in your imagination is going to cause any "crack" in their power? They are completely in control. They have a plan to sell every last drop. The destruction of the Earth will not stop them. The only hope is to nationalize them all.

The stronger hurricanes are also America's doing, in a way, indirectly, considering that they're the #1 contributor in historical CO2 emissions.

The coal mining industry, particularly in the eastern United States/Appalachia. It’s been happening for a few decades, but really started to hit the last few years. Mainly at the moment it’s effecting more rural communities in Appalachia, but the effect is intense. A lot of layoffs, plants and mines shutting down, which is essentially killing many of the small, very rural towns as much of their economies were based around the industry. In addition to this, in a lot of those towns, that was a very large amount of the populations main source of accessible income/work, again, due to the towns being very rural and often unreasonably far away from other jobs that pay as well, or simply too far away from businesses/industry centers that had the sheer amount of jobs available to accommodate so many people in said towns. It’s left a lot of people in Appalachia suddenly without jobs, broke, and little way to access new work unless they move, only…they’re broke and don’t really have money at the moment, and to be honest, they were already pretty poor (coal industry is not known for paying great, and much of Appalachia is very poor) and so moving is…not necessarily feasible. Truth be told, a lot of Appalachia is about to backslide so to speak in a **very** bleak way towards levels of poverty the likes of which simply haven’t been seen in the region in years, decades, if the industry continues to go the way it is in the region. A lot of the towns I imagine will probably just be abandoned and become ghost towns of the modern age, if it does, I believe.

Comcast made 3x more from Internet connectivity than it did from media last year.

Once cable collapses, expect cutbacks in national sports leagues and broadcasting. The NFL and NBA are in part funded from cable sales, and once those dry up, expect the spectacle of modern sports broadcasts to do the same.