• NatakuNox@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2 days

        If only we were allowed to do this. I’d hand you $10 then you hand me $10, $20 of sales was just made! Capitalism baby! Imaginary line must go up!

        • anomnom@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1 day

          You both get taxed on the $10 income unless you can write off the $10 you gave each other as a business expense.

          • NatakuNox@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1 day

            Yup. We already filed our taxes for 2026, zero in profits of course. wink We’re getting a bailout to keep the doors open, but we’re going to layoff 50% of our staff anyway. Also, both CEOs will be getting a raise equal to the laid off employees pay. But that’s just a standard practice for them being such hard workers.

  • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2 days

    It’s all a giant circle jerk where they just hand money to each other.

    People always think it’s just the same briefcase being passed around, but it’s not.

    Because what’s really happening is they all own stock in AI, and if AI crashes then that stick is worthless. And because they took loans out on that stock to buy more stock, it could domino into a lot of the world’s richest people, just suddenly going broke…

    As normal people invest their pennies, it just pushed the stock price higher and higher. But it’s still not creating wealth, just transferring it to the wealthy who already have 99.999% of the stock

    • NekoKoneko@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2 days

      Yup, these are not investments; they’re not even bets that AI will continue. No, they are self-fulfilling prophecies of AI’s relevance.

      In the end there has to be an economic backstop for reality. It’s either third party vendors that aren’t part of the hyperscaler cabal, or employee payroll. We’re already seeing layoffs which reflect AI financial tie-ups rather than efficiency gains.

      But those two are where I’m hoping eventually we see missed payments as an early canary in the mine. But it’ll probably be a long time, too much money is at stake now for them to give up until they’re actually broke.

      • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2 days

        It’s incredibly easy to fix tho…

        A progressive federal government can seize their domestic bank accounts, can seize all their stocks in the world’s largest stock exchange, they can seize land/property, they can sanction specific overseas accounts or just every small country who has “hiding money” as their main economy.

        That’s all shit a government can do

        And we’re pretty fucking close to it, closer than we’ve been since FDR.

        The billionaires know this, and that’s why there’s a massive push to make people give up on the DNC, and there will be thru the presidential election.

        As Dougie Houser MD once said:

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFFlOn4VXww

  • NatakuNox@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2 days

    And this is why the stock market is doing well. Ai companies are exchanging money to show sales and uses even tho it’s all just musical chairs

  • londos@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2 days

    I’ll never forget the time Gueseppi needed investment in his AI. And I needed investment in my AI. So we invested in each other’s AI at the same time. Can you imagine that, me investing in his AI, while he invested in mine? What year was that…?

    • XLE@piefed.socialEnglish
      2 days

      Maybe Google will finish planning to invest after Anthropic follows through on its gentleman’s agreement to start giving them $40b a year for the next 5 years…

      (If two companies agree to give each other $40 billion at the same time and no money changes hands, do they enrich each other?)

  • limonfiesta@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2 days

    Oh yeah?

    And when will this deal be be finalized?

    Because pushing a press release to juice the markets is a lot different than Anthropic actually finding $200 billion in their office couch cushions.

    • HertzDentalBar@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      1 day

      It’s just a circle jerk, anthropic says 200B but that’s not “here’s 200b” it’s “here’s today’s payment” the 40b Google gave them will cover payments but will drive the line up as that’s not 240b in economic fuckery even though none of its real

  • medem@lemmy.wtfEnglish
    2 days

    Um. What? Are those ‘billions’ with a ‘b’? As in…a fifth of a trillion ?

  • Th4tGuyII@fedia.io
    2 days

    This game is so circular as to be ridiculous… Who’s actually making money if everyone’s just passing the same billions of dollars around and around?? At some point something’s gotta give.

    • agentTeiko@piefed.socialEnglish
      2 days

      Its like the silver coin bubble of the 80s. Running the same scam. Get a coin rated sell it to your buddy for a million dollars. Get headlines of coin sold for a million dollars. Then marks start rushing to get coins and more importantly get them graded and that’s how they extract wealth from the economy.

  • melsaskca@lemmy.caEnglish
    2 days

    Those “billions” and “trillions” numbers being bandied about lately are meaningless.

  • TheGiantKorean@lemmy.todayEnglish
    2 days

    This seems like a circle jerk, but with everyone involved it’s less of a double circularly linked list and more of a map. A map jerk.

      • TheGiantKorean@lemmy.todayEnglish
        2 days

        I think something we didn’t consider is that a node can only link to two other nodes. Because two hands. And a node can only be linked to by another node, because one penis.