We may have to wait for another three years.

Which is also a clue that he isn’t short selling.

There are two ways of making money when a stock goes down. One is to sell the stock short. The other is to buy a put option.

A short sale is extremely risky. Say the shares are at $50 and you think they’re going to go down, so you sell 1000 shares you don’t own (short selling) and agree to buy them back by some date in the future. If you’re right and the stock tanks to $20, you can buy the shares and pocket $30,000. But, if the stock doesn’t sink, you might have to buy the shares for $60 each, so you lose $10 per stock, or $10,000. If there are tons of people shorting the stock, you can get a short squeeze, where everybody needs to buy shares to close out their short position, and because everybody needs to buy, the stock price rockets up, so you get people having to buy a stock that used to be $50 for $200, leading to $150,000 in losses for a 1000 share short where the maximum possible gain was only $50,000.

An option is much safer. There you’re buying the option to sell the shares at a certain price at some time in the future. Say you think a stock is going to crash. It’s currently trading at $50/share. You can buy 1000 put options at a strike price of $40 with a date 1 month in the future. It will cost you something to buy those options, say $1 per share, so $1000. If the stock goes up or stays at $50, your bet didn’t work out. You don’t have to sell the shares, you just tear up the options contract. You’re out whatever you paid for the option, say $1000 here. But, say the stock tanks and it’s now at $20/share. Now your bet did pay off. You can buy 1000 shares at $20 each for $20,000, then immediately exercise your option and sell them for $40,000, netting you $20,000. With put options the upside is significantly smaller, but the potential downside is tiny. It’s just the cost of the options.

Someone predicting a crash within 3 years isn’t going to short sell the shares. Between now and then the shares could continue to rise for a while, and they’d be on the hook for a huge payout in that case. If they buy options the down side is much smaller. They may have to re-buy new options a bunch of times. But in the worst case they just have to let the options expire unused and eat whatever cost they paid for them.

For the coming AI crash, I don’t think it will be very soon. I think there will be a crash. But, I think the government will try to keep the bubble from bursting. Too much of the US economy is now invested in AI. So, even under Biden, or Harris, or Obama they’d try to prevent a catastrophic crash by using taxpayer money to prevent the most damaging bubble burst. With Trump, there’s going to be even more government interference in the market. His backers are crypto bros. They’re the ones making him billions on his meme coins. They bankrolled JD Vance’s political career. If they demand that he rescues their failing companies, he’ll do it. And, since the GOP does whatever Trump wants, they’ll just fork over literal trillions in taxpayer dollars to keep things from crashing. But, eventually there will have to be a crash, because there’s just not a sustainable business model in any of this, at least not at anything like the current scale.

Also, the way short positions work is that the people who are most successful at shorting a stock are the ones who have a megaphone to announce they’ve shorted the stock. They go on as many podcasts, news shows, interviews, etc. as possible to say things are going to crash. Because, the more people who hear about it, the more hesitation there will be to invest, which means the more chances of their prediction coming through.

So, he’s not just some guy who is betting on the bubble bursting, he’s a guy who is now heavily incentivized to cause the bubble to burst so he can make his investors a lot of money.

Which bubble was that?

AFAIK none of the previous AI bubbles really had much investment. There was hype, but it was hype within the computer science, or cognitive science fields. But, maybe there’s a financial bubble bit that I’m missing.

Uber used accounting tricks to hide their true losses for years. They’ve only recently managed to become profitable by squeezing both drivers and passengers at the same time. Is that sustainable? Almost certainly not, but, for the moment, they’re getting away with it.

That’s the only reason I don’t think it will pop in the next 6 months or so. Even Biden or Obama would have stepped in to try to prevent the economy from crashing. But, there’s the Trump factor. First of all, some of his biggest backers are from the AI “industry”. His VP is tied to Peter Thiel, his biggest donors are Crypto and AI bros. The vast majority of his own personal money is tied up in the current Crypto bubble. In addition, he’s obviously so easily bribed. Even if he he wasn’t interested in intervening otherwise, he could easily be bribed to intervene.

Because of Trump, and the fact that the house, senate and judiciary are all Trump lackeys, I think the bubble will survive until at least the 2026 midterms. If the Democrats take back control of the House and Senate they could take control over spending from Trump, which might mean the bubble is allowed to pop. But, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Trump hand over literal trillions in taxpayer dollars to keep the bubble inflated.

Comparing the coming crash to the dot com crash is like comparing a rough landing to the various crashes on Sept 11th, 2001.

The dot com crash was mostly isolated in high tech. Because it was lead by the Japanese economy starting to fail, and followed by the Sept 11th attacks, the various combined crashes resulted in the S&P 500 falling by about 50% from its peak to the bottom, but it was already back up to the peak value in 2007, then the global financial crisis hit.

This bubble is much bigger. Some analysts say the AI bubble is 17x the size of the Dot Com bubble, and 4x the size of the 2007/08 real estate bubble. AI stocks were 40% of all US GDP growth in 2025, and 80% of all growth in US stocks.

Nvidia’s stock price has gone up 1700% in just 2 years. OpenAI is planning to go public on a valuation of $1 trillion despite losing vast amounts of money. Just 7 US tech companies make up 36% of the entire US stock market, and they’re all heavily betting on AI.

At least when the dot com bubble popped, it left some useful things behind, like huge amounts of dark fibre. But, the AI processors are so specialized they can’t be used for much of anything else. They also wear out, sometimes within months. The datacenter buildings themselves can maybe be repurposed to being general purpose datacenters, but, a lot of the contents will have to be thrown out.

I also remember hearing how the Japanese word “ramen” is comes from a pretty different Chinese word.

It’s cool though that a tonal language like Mandarin / Cantonese is strongly related to a non-tonal one. I wonder what happened there historically.

What were digits 10 to 59 like in Babylonian?

IMO it should be called “base 9+1”. It is a “base 10” system because each order of magnitude is 10x as big as the previous one. But, the key thing is to know which digit is the last one before you roll over.

Is your issue with metric, or with the fact that everything in life uses a base 10 (which should really be called a base 9+1) system?

I don’t know much Japanese, but the bits I do know suggest it’s a very different language than English. Not just different sounds, but also just a different approach to expressing things. Like, I think instead of saying “I’m hungry”, they just say “hungry!” Presumably though, they do use “I” when it’s needed for disambiguation.

For, example, if you’re with a friend and someone asks “are you guys college students?” The response would probably be something like “He is but I’m not”, right?

Yeah, well it’s hard to do it without any errors, but it’s an error every 5 minutes or something, whereas a perfectly competent normal person when sight-reading text will probably make an error every 30s.

Watashi wa nihonjo ga wakarimasen.

I’ve heard, and I don’t know if this is true, that voice actors who specialize in narrating books have to be superstars at this. Not only are they expected to be able to sight-read an entire book without making mistakes, they also need to do the required acting so exciting scenes are exciting, happy scenes are happy, gloomy scenes are gloomy, etc. Plus, as they come across new characters in the book, they’re supposed to be able to give them distinct voices and remember and recreate those voices as they show up later in the book.

Of course, a blockbuster book with a big budget for the audio version won’t have an actor wing it. They’ll be able to pay to have an actor and a director read the book first, and then have the director work with the actor to tease out the best possible performance. But, for a smaller budget, you have to deal with tighter margins so every second in the voice over booth counts.

One thing I love doing is to learn to say “I don’t speak <language>” as well as possible in a language I don’t speak. If you’re good enough at it, people will assume it’s a joke and try to speak to you in that language you don’t actually know. Apparently I’m pretty good at saying it in Portuguese, but I wouldn’t know.

I always read emphasis as “em-FASS-is” just for fun.

I have to believe that as soon as there were accurate maps of South America’s east coast and Africa’s west coast, someone must have looked at them and said – you know, I bet those two were joined at some point in the past.

You mean the thing where we put tons of greenhouse gases in the air which warms the planet and makes it even better for photosynthesizing life, but even worse for mammals?

The issue is that their brain appears to have been damaged by becoming a parent.