Stop selling stuff you haven’t made yet to people who have no money and haven’t paid. Wtf is wrong with businesses these days?
this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2026
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Why would you think there is anything wrong with them? They now get to scalp people with outrageous prices for the 20% they are selling. If the AI sloppanies pay, they made big sales. If the slop producers producers are unable to pay, they will sell the reserved stuff for normal or even slightly elevated prices. It's win-win. Basically an excuse for industry wide price-fixing.
The point of capitalism isn't "make a widget/sell the widget/to a customer" anymore, it's "create market value/sell the value/shareholders are the entire point." The widgets are just a prop in a way, the customers an abstraction. If it's making money, if it's growing above 3.5, we worship it. If it's growing at thousands of percent, then it's a god who cannot be stopped. Everything else just supports this - government, social programs, people's life and death and joy in between - that's all an abstraction. Shareholder value is the only thing that matters.
This is why we must restrain capitalism with regulation, but it's too late, it's metastasized into its final form now.
The point about capitalism has always been being able to live off of property without moving a finger and securing that position with all that you have. What you are seeing is are the dynamics of capitalist class society. The numbers game is itself nothing new, nor anything that has especial depth.
We choose capitalism and we could choose not to do capitalism. So to capital, which comes from this social structure, you are like an abstraction, only because it exists in an less concrete way because it needs intangible property relations. To a fish you are trapped in air while you view fish as being trapped in water.
But the point of the economic critiques known from history is to show exactly this:
There is the numbers economy, the stock market, taxes and money. There is culture, there are political systems (liberalism, fascism) and political skirmishes. Then there is what actually exists in a very clear and tangible way. Schools, cars, machinery, fields of corn, people, their relations and so on.
One creates the other. The abstractions arising from the soil of the "real world" can not strike back and make the real world abstract. That is impossible. Capitalism and capital is not a demon that keeps you from undertaking modifications on the structures that birth it. It possesses no special or poetic qualities.
So everything at this point?
Yep, literally the whole habitable layer of our planet.
Anything it takes to set up a data center. I bet network cable is next.
They‘re going full tech feudalism. There will be a shortage of everything. Especially of electricity and clean water.
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Bubble please burst
It will burst the same way the dotcom bubble bursted.
Just like the internet, AI will be here to stay.
Some form of "AI" will always be around. It has been around nearly as long as we've had computers. We've even had AI chatbots since 1966.
But, the dot com bubble is a bad comparison. If you look at a graph of Internet users over time you can barely even see the dot com crash. The Internet was a massively useful phenomenon and more and more people kept using it. The dot com crash was basically an overestimation of how quickly people were going to adopt it combined with a massive drop in the value of Internet-based ads.
What's much more likely with AI is another AI Winter where a few things stick around, but mostly AI goes back on the back burner for a few more decades.
Comparing the dotcom bubble to the AI bubble is like comparing a corn kernel to a corn cob at this point.
The US economy was more spread out and varied back then, and the bubble wasn't over a third of the entire economy.
And you know, the internet actually had market value and was producing profit immediately at least. AI still has yet to turn any profits.
Except AI in its current form is actually mostly useless.
AI wouldn't be so bad if the planet wasn't being turned into computronium.
0 productivity increase. 0. Once this bubble is over the clean up will set us back years and that is if we're lucky.
That's the part of all this that truly blows my mind...nobody wants this shit. You dont even need to be a technophobic boomer to fucking hate dealing with AI when youre trying to get an answer to a question that isnt something you can find on wikipedia, like for example, "How much will this particular software license cost me if Im installing it on two host VMs serving approximately 200-250 concurrent users?" The AI isnt gonna answer that right...I know it wont, because Ive spent at least 2-3 full fucking 10 hour days in aggregate playing this stupid fucking game as phone lines are getting closed left and right and I always end up running in circles until it will even permit me to get an actual human fucking being involved, if that is even a possibility, which 70% of the time, it just dumps you to an email and a wait for a response email that also didnt answer the fucking question.
And the thing is...its getting harder and harder to opt out. I cant even vote with my wallet because its either deal with the AI trash, or deal with some fly by night company that no one has ever heard of and goes radio silent for weeks when they cant fix a problem in 3 minutes.
This is gonna make me sound old but I saw this coming 25 years ago with self checkouts. Look at what a piece of shit the average self checkout is. Just last weekend the lines at my local grocery store were out the fuckin door because all the self checkouts somehow decided the cart itself was an item in a cart that wasnt scanned and thought everyone was stealing. Rather than get humans on the checklanes and shutting the self checkouts off, the store just had an extra person at the self checkout to enter their code after literally every single transaction to bypass it. Im talking rows of 20 self checkouts that had two people that had to code through every single transaction. Human cashiers wouldnt have had that problem, but human cashiers cost money, so better your service as a customer suck fat ass then bring in a couple teenagers extra to cover some weekend shifts on a register.
I see this at the doctor now with their self checkin machines that take fifteen minutes to get through what you could do with the person in three. I see this when trying to ship a fucking package and the machine runs out of labels and theres no human being for miles around to put more in so you can get on with your life.
This shit fucking sucks, and they no longer have any incentive to improve, because theyre all doing it, so everybody sucks, and we just get to deal with it.
Remember this when you see the lack of savings being passed on in lieu of all the payroll theyre saving. Every minute you fight with AI to answer a simple fucking question, some oligarch is screaming CHACHING!!!
Another 2008 crisis and not being able to find a job or afford simple necessities, no thanks.
You have got to be goddamned kidding me. Literally this weekend I said to myself “time to get a UPS”.
I mean it depends on what you're used for a UPS is. The smaller ones can still be had on Amazon for under $100 and if you hurry you could still get that pricing. But by the sounds that those ones are going to be jumping way up in price for no reason because literally those are useless to anybody in the Enterprise level. Unless they're being used at a desktop level which they do tend to purchase pallets worth of but this is more along the lines of Enterprise server level UPS's.
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I wonder if there's going to be a point in the future where we all look back at this massive over-investment and kick ourselves for making so much expensive electronics waste.
They learned nothing from the NFT/"Metaverse" hype cycle, but a century of hindsight might help. There's always going to be that golden goose that can make you insanely rich based on vague bullshit a lot of people don't fully understand.
Some entities have too much money to invest in stupid endeavors, money that they took from everyone else and they can lose without worrying too much. It's a rotten society.
Well yeah but money now.
Hopefully soon - I'd love more homelab upgrades
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I'm tired boss....
That joke aside, does anyone else find swapping out UPS batteries bizarrely satisfying? Every time I heft one of those APC rack batteries and slot em in, I walk out of the server room with a smile on my face!
Fuck, maybe I need to answer the call of the void and work as a tradie XD
i used to go in there and fart
Based!?
The just in time economy is running a little bit late.
If there's a shortage of AAAs, and my TV remote stops working, we're gonna have a problem.
Get yourself some rechargeables. Yeah they don’t last as long per charge. But I’ve got a stockpile and I keep rotating them out so I’ve always got a fresh pair ready to go.
Honestly? I'm on the 3rd cycle with my AAAs (used for an MP3 and small electronics) and the 2nd for my AAs.
I've not noticed them lasting less, and I've already made back what disposables would cost.
Bonus: I charge them at work because why not.
I do this with underwear.
I doubt that there's actually a substantial impact on battery cell production. Might be on rack-mountable batteries containing those cells. But setting that aside:
Panasonic plans to expand lithium-ion cell
Non-rechargable AAA batteries are typically alkaline, and rechargeables are typically NiMH, not lithium-ion.
EDIT: Looking at a handful of rack-mount lithium-ion batteries on Amazon price history using camelcamelcamel, prices are either unchanged or very slightly up. Could be Panasonic looking to get into the news, but it's not clear to me that there's a shortage of even rack-mount lithium-ion batteries.
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This might not be the worst thing, if it results in better stationary batteries. Unfortunately they will probably just keep using lithium ion.
don't most enterprise ups use lead acid?
Yes yes they do. In fact most UPS's from small desk ones all the way up all used lead acid not lithium ion. Lithium ion batteries are far more expensive.
We use rack mounted LiFePO for some of our network nodes that don't have local facility provided UPS. But I do notice Lead Acid often as I visit various small datacenters. My guess would be that Lithium is still more niche
Yup. My old job had liebert (now vertiv) UPSs for our data center and those suckers were essentially just thousands of pounds of lead acid batteries stacked in a metal chassis
All this for what? AI Big Becky diving videos?
Shut it down
Supply and command, Ricky!
Oh this one is going to be interesting, cause the other component shortages were not something thin clients needed.
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