A bumper post I feel is worthy of its own consideration.
Yes, there is a mortgage default wave coming, and a tech bubble crash that people pooh-poohed you for saying which is now undeniably here.
Intel fired 15,000 people in one day and said they'd slash R&D and go on a spending freeze.
They and their buddies at Microsoft have lost control of the narrative and AI and other buzzwords will fall by the wayside when people realize that the future of computing belongs to ARM for the processor instruction set and Linux and Mac for the operating systems in the traditional formats.
The chickens have come home to roost. Microsoft failed badly with mobile and lost to Android and iOS. They sold pallets and pallets of Windows Phones at a loss just to get rid of them to people who didn't want to pay anything for a prepaid phone in the end, and every port of Windows to ARM is a disaster because Windows is a bloated and crappy rolling release now that's full of bugs, and ARM is not x86, which presents backward compatibility issues even with the best dynamic binary translators out there.
For many years, Linux users relied heavily on Wine, which is an open source reimplementation of Windows interfaces that is mostly successful at running Windows programs, however in the recent years, the focus has been on having a stable and secure OS base for running a web browser, and the native programs have gotten much better. Further, with Microsoft having problems even keeping Azure running and secure and Office 365 available so you can edit a document, people are starting to realize the value in local computing and having a copy of LibreOffice.
Microsoft's actual revenue streams are threatened and in a huge contraction. They need "AI" and other buzzwords and share buybacks that don't do anything to make them actually valuable, and right now they're weighted (along with other tech companies) at multiples of their actual value, which is going to hurt people badly who invested there.
Real Estate and Tech are going to be the places people will be sorry they ever put their money and it's going to happen fast.
Nobody in the mainstream media admitted we were in a recession in 2008. They said "The Fundamentals are Strong!" and "Buy Bear Stearns" which failed the next day and was worthless. Today, we have even less of a media than we did then, just enough to repeat public relations blurbs.
There will be no warning for people who aren't smart enough to see it themselves.
Intel is a proxy for the Windows PC. There was a port for Android to x86 but it never caught on because Intels chips are so full of bugs and they're power hungry, which means that there's no scope for diversification. Every time Intel tried to make a mobile platform it couldn't compete with ARM in mobile devices, and Intel went back to the Windows PC. Now they have another problem. Apple got so fed up with them that they're not even using them in Macs anymore. There's no reason to. Intel means added costs, more bugs, more problems. It meant a worse Mac.
The first thing that happened on the M1 Mac was Apple was able to increase the realistic battery runtime from 7-8 hours maybe on the Intel models to 14-16 hours.
Part of the problem at Intel is a competence one, obviously. They ship power management then it turns out it's broken or insecure and they turn it right back off, but the problem is when you're dealing with a system on a chip power strategy that one wrong move means the PC cannot enter deep power saving.
I think we're also seeing the "rise of the bored hacker type" where hacker is a term that is commonly misused by the mainstream media, whereas hacking actually means "a person who enjoys playful cleverness". The person who designs Lady Gaga's costumes is a hacker.
In that way, why not just run down to the MicroCenter with $150 and get yourself a complete Raspberry Pi computer and hook it up to a keyboard and monitor and run Linux on it? Why give Lenovo or Dell another $1,200 for a PC that falls apart fast?
In my case, I dived head first into technical problems like making PCs run longer and fixing my own car, because I don't want to spend a lot of money to do what I need, or ask a bank for a loan with interest. So learning to stand on my own two feet saved me from dealing a lot with Mr. FICO like people who put Doordash on a credit card every night do, or people with an $80,000 financed war wagon from the car stealership.
I'm always taking stuff apart and figuring it out myself because it's easier to save money than to earn money and it's easier to save money that earns money than to earn money to make payments and earn more to pay the bank the time value of their money.
"I'm saving so much money by borrowing from the bank!" said every guy working 70 hours a week to feed the bank and feed the IRS with the extra earnings they need to pay the bank, ever.
It's called the Endless Cycle for a reason.
I'm sorry I ever engaged with the Endless Cycle and I admit that I'm somewhat saddened to see so many people who brag about engaging with it, and making what will prove to be tragic financial mistakes and bad investments.
