It’s because of movies and TV.

How many TV shows or movies would have lasted 4 minuets and had no drama or action if someone had just picked up a cell phone? Same thing here.

This is actually the right way to approach them.

Exercise the scary house and banish needy house spirits like gnomes or brownies. If it’s fae, tell them to get fucked, fae are the worst abusers. Don’t let parasites dictate how you run your home.

No way.

In about 1965 someone would have asked Icelanders what they do on their summer holidays, because so few of them show up in continental Europe, and they would reveal that they’ve been building a massive resort empire named Eircksonland on the coast of what we would call Florida. All Viking-themed, and packed with absurdly sunburned blonde people.

Hey! Don’t insult ducks like that! This clownshow website would be about 20% better if ducks were involved.

That’s the bet-swap. They have both have a contractual obligation to exchange investments in each other. It’s a suicide pact OR it’s a bromance glow-up, depending on your point of view. AMD is giving them chips on the (accurate so far) bet that buying chips will inflate AMD’s stock value.

Again, this is not a thing a rational person would do because it’s both not sustainable and not realistic unless you expect the value of everything to got up for 10+ years. It’s a recursive bet on a bet on a bet. It’s like buying T-bills.

The issue here is this isn’t debt!

Debt would be SoftBank giving OpenAI $78 B in cash and then in a year or two asking for payments of cash back.

This investment/stock circular thing is like if you were building a house and lived next to a brick yard, and convinced the brick yard owner to give you bricks to build your house. Your house would be the demonstration of how lovely the bricks are, and in return you’ll give them 10% of the title of your property. If you sell that property in 2009 or 2024, the value will change, but that’s a risk and gamble you both take. And they can sell small parts of that 10% whenever they want, if they want.

None of that is debt. Debt would be a loan from the bank that requires payments over time.

Thanks - I’ve been forgiving the effects for 30 years, no reason not to keep going!

To be fair to Barack Obama, I think that even he didn’t think he deserved the Peace Prize for basically just being elected. His response after finding out was very much a “uh…ok…really? You sure about that?” because it undermined him and the Peace Prize

But my relief at not having to hear gloating vs. the usual orange-flavored aggrievment is real.

Someone somewhere took debt

the simple answer is that the people buying AMD stock are the ones paying for those chips

In my eyes this deal is a speculative investment leveraging debt.

But so you have to pick one. Unless you’re suggesting that all the day traders and retirement funds and investment funds are buying or already holding AMD bought it all with credit cards. Which is not the case, which is why this isn’t debt.

Ask yourself - If it’s debt, then who is the creditor? Who holds the loan paperwork? What rate did they get? What’s the collateral? None of those things are true here.

Stock value isn’t real any more than the value of gold or silver or bitcoin, but it’s all relative to the value of the stock when sold. But it being sold is the point. The stocks are worth money. Real actual money. If the market hits a correction - as other more bubble-like parts of the AI industry and the current general economic shitpile are likely to afford us all in the next few years - then OpenAI and NVIDIA and AMD won’t be carved up and sold for parts after a bankruptcy by a bank because they’re still able to sell the stocks to fund payroll. As long as no one sells off a ton of stock quickly and the stock value doesn’t collapse, then it’s simply a risky circular a bet on themselves.

Don’t get me wrong, I think this is an innovation in stupidity and shortsightedness. But call it what it is, which is not debt.

Then you see a pack of them getting off a Ryan Air or Wizz flight for a stag party in a place they picked for the sole reason of cheap pints and realize how misguided you were all along.

You get 10 fun points, 10 adventure points, and 30 hard drinking points. We’ll treat you like people treat every American in places where they don’t see a lot of Americans.

“So, uh, do you know Mel Gibson/Hugh Jackman/the Flight of the Concords guys?”

“Mate, I used to live the next Cattle Station over from Mel Gibson/Hugh Jackman/the Flight of the Concords blokes!”

They gave us participation awards for things they invented around us.

I swear, it was all to placate Boomer parents.

And miss the hilarious 90’s cheese of the Technodemon? For shame!

Came here to post this exact same link.

The spouse and I watched in this order, and you get more out of both shows like this. Neither of us loved Angel as a show or a character (Angelus is a hilarious dickbag, though), so adding in the direct connections to Buffy was the only way we would get through Angel. That and Lorne. And Skip, Skip is the best.

Merciful Zeus! I had totally blanked about Xena having a musical episode. I might have to find Bitter Suite and give it a watch again.

The first thing I said when the credits finished on seeing Once More With Feeling with friends back when it originally aired, was “wow, some real shit went down in this episode.” As if singing blunts the edge of the realizations. Willow tears up at the unimaginable horror of what she’s done…and then 2 minutes later is singing again.

Great article, thanks for posting!

Totally expected it to be 2 hot dogs

This isn’t the way economic bubbles are typically structured. At all.

Typical economic bubbles are built on speculative investment leveraging debt until the whole thing reaches a point where the debt can’t realistically account for possible growth anymore. This would be OpenAI asking SoftBank for $78B to buy chips that have at most, a maximal 5 year life cycle, and then OpenAI not having cash on hand to pay down that $78B in 2 years.

Using this stock reacharound is actual money changing hands. Yes, stock dividends and sales are part of that, but it’s not debt. It’s certainly not sustainable, but it’s not something that will lead to bankruptcy for OpenAI or NVIDIA or AMD if they fail to turn profits. But the money is real at the time it’s moved around. Surprisingly, the LLM crowd has been fairly consistent in not running to highly leveraged debt for funding.

This is a pump and dump scheme if anything, and seems like a great way to find out later that people buying stock in AMD “invested” in shrinking their portfolio over the long term. IMO only a fool would buy stocks that funded this, but it’s a slow-mo bubble for those people, not the economy in general.

Holy shit, is this a real thing now? You’re not allowed to restart your machine too much?

Thank the gods I ditched my dualboot setup months ago, I would have ran into this same issue.

If you loved Firefly (I also loved Firefly), you’ll love Buffy. There’s a great balance between funny moments with clever writing, and taking things seriously to move the plot along.

The characters feel like people we all know without being stereotypes, and grow over the course of the series. The spooky-woo-woo MacGuffin stuff isn’t overly contrived usually, and when it is, it’s supposed to be like that. The show is an ensemble show, and so dynamics that swirl around a group of friends, for good and for ill, are what keep is grounded. Story arcs are clear and planned, and not every character is safe or safe to be around. There’s a whole, expensive cinematic universe that develops over time, all ultimately built around the concept that life is complex and you can’t just punch your problems in the head and expect them to go away.

I will say that the series had a shoestring budget to start, so Season 1 is bare bones and a bit rough at times. Season 2 is not my favorite, but Seasons 3 and 5 especially are some of the best television that has ever been. I’ve never seen Supernatural, not even an episode, and have no desire to do so.

Edit: I’ll add that once you get invested in the characters, the show leaves an emotional impact on you. There’s a couple episodes that when I see them on TV, especially one in particular (some of y’all know which Season 5 episode I mean), I simply won’t watch because they’re too real and will just change the trajectory of my day.

There’s a whole hierarchy about pay and credit with actors and roles, and the SAG-AFA union. Typically anything that’s a guest role means it’s an episode-by-episode contract for a limited block of episodes.

“Guest Starring” would mean that she’s a lead character, but not for the entire run of the show. So the writers and producers are free to kill off the character if they want, for example.