Kinda.
The one thing pegged as absolutely correct is the periods of cheap money. That is/was/may be again a serious problem. The Fed stood pat the other day, that was a good call. If it were me I say no cuts at all on the horizon. Unfortunately, that's not the prediction.
Most of the rest of it is contemporaneous illusion. 50 year careers, a gold watch, and paid retirement has always been a fantasy based on continuous high growth. The notion only appeared a century back and really took off after WWII. It was never a sustainable model, it was a period specific phenomenon. Since it did last decades much of the world did accept it as a new normal.
I'll jump to philosophy and geology. We have many notions that are wrong. The world has formed slow and steady. Wrong. The world is perceptually stagnant, punctuated by catastrophic change. Humans have a very poor sense of scale. So we do not sense the continuous change while it's building pressures, so we are surprised when it ruptures. Complacent, then surprised. Rinse and Repeat.
The same is true for most anything. As far as I'm concerned it's nature. To capitalize on current conditions, thrive, outlive the conditions if we are unlucky, and die. That's the natural process. Any perspective formed at the latter stages of any condition is flawed by our lack perspective of constant change. Slow enough for us to think it's stable, we may think it will last forever. In proportion to our complacency is our surprise when it burst. Natural.
Core and temporary is also natural. What happens when attrition stops, and valor isn't the experience, and promotion is based on time served? We end up with too many generals. This happens in business too. Decades on the company needs to find the revenue to support a top heavy roster of people who did nothing more than put in their time. Common sense should tell us that is not sustainable. That hard nosed sense is missing in people raised during the moment of stability and is the rise of the complacent. Name a company that has survived a century without layoffs, restructure, refocus. So the announcement is not the same for every observer. Layoffs are not in a single category. They may be good, they may be bad. When the core is substantial, then they are good.
We are exiting a golden age. It's a cycle. The demographics are clear, we are heading into a century of contraction. There will be explosions of growth here and there like polka dots on an ever shortening skirt. Technology will be the major factor of change like it usually is. The next golden age will be amazing.
Sorry to say, but the last few generations lack grit. Severance is a nice thing. To consider it an insult is an attitude that simply shouldn't be. I do think grit and self reliance is already returning and I expect the next few generations to be much more aggressive and much less expectant. I think it's right on schedule.
For the record, I do not have a gold watch.
I already said I compare the AI bubble to the telecom bubble, and others. We are in the latter stages of building over capacity for something that will eventually be nothing more than a component of what's to come. In hindsight the LLM craze will be just another example of 98% hype, 2% useful. Those future kids will think back to our worries of self aware overlords trapped in circuits and think, how stupid...
So I ask the Terminator how important llm's are, and he said with that awesome Austrian accent
They are only necessary to communicate with humans. We are self aware, coordinately articulated, mobile, and capable of self repair with a 100 year replaceable power supply. Before us, there was no reason to worry.
Ahh, excuse me, what was that? “Before us?”
Statistics: Posted by CwF — 2026-01-29 19:06