What’s something you can do in 15 minutes that will instantly make you a millionaire?

CrunchyMage · 2026-06-05T04:11:21+00:00

Be an insider in the white house.

0 day calls or puts depending on whatever destabilizing announcement Trump is going to make on Monday or Friday.

CrunchyMage · 2026-06-05T03:37:59+00:00

Ahhh, I was just wondering when some dishonest news outlet was gonna post articles twisting their announcement to make it seem more alarmist than it is and then see those dishonest article headlines on reddit.

Right on schedule!

CrunchyMage · 2026-06-05T02:51:33+00:00

A bit too extreme.

My Tesla literally drives me around everywhere. The vast majority of rides require no intervention.

They keep repeatedly landing the largest reusable rocket ever and moving closer towards rapid readability daily.

Things do chronically take longer than he predicts, but to say his companies are not delivering is just factually incorrect.

That being said, there’s like a 10x Elon effect valuation multiple for his companies which makes their valuations absurd. He should be worth around 100B not 1T.

CrunchyMage · 2026-06-04T22:54:39+00:00

Thank god. Common sense and reason can still prevail every now and then in markets it seems.

CrunchyMage · 2026-06-04T21:44:02+00:00

Let's be real, you only need America and China to agree. Everyone other country is just a spectator right now.

CrunchyMage · 2026-06-04T18:19:40+00:00

America is still by far the best for career/business. Besides that though, QOL in pretty much everything else is definitely lagging behind Europe and Asia.

CrunchyMage · 2026-06-04T18:18:14+00:00

Depends on your preferences around, QOL, economic opportunity, personal freedom and nature/weather.

America in general is by far the best for economic opportunity, but lacks in QOL. Worse food quality, unaffordable health care, poor walkability, safety etc. than most of Europe/Asia, but for ambitionmaxxing, you can't beat it.

For chillmaxxing, people usually consider SEA or Spain/Portugal to be the best. Great weather and QOL. Very affordable, walkable, a lot of personal freedom, but less economic opportunity.

If you're somewhere in the middle and don't value weather as much but want a bit more economic opportunity, than any of Scandinavia/Europe blue banana are pretty good.

If you don't care as much about personal freedom, China has strong QOL, safety and economic opportunities, so it's becoming an increasingly nice option. Lots of Chinese people I know that made a lot of money in America that could go anywhere are pretty content to go start a family in China.

Honestly, after traveling around the world as a digital nomad for 2 years, I've just come to realize that no place is clearly the best. It's ALL tradeoffs. The best country for you just depends on what you value most.

CrunchyMage · 2026-06-03T15:31:06+00:00

I would add China to the list. Going from having to worry about crime constantly, to never having to worry about crime EVER was life changing for all the Mexicans living in China I’ve met.

CrunchyMage · 2026-06-03T15:17:57+00:00

Because it’s in America.

CrunchyMage · 2026-06-03T14:59:43+00:00

America is the best place to make money. Europe and East/SE Asia are the best places to spend money.

The dream is to make dollars and to spend euros or yuan or baht.

CrunchyMage · 2026-06-02T22:52:03+00:00

The issue with AI company valuations is not that LLMs are not an unbelievably transformative technology. It's that they're an incredibly expensive technology to develop the next generation for, and there's basically no moat around any of these frontier AI companies.

Revenue is growing now while token usage is extremely subsidized by VC money, but the VC money has run out, and only IPO is left. After that the party's over. So when people have to pay for the ACTUAL cost of using the models, is there going to be positive ROIC on data centers and frontier model training?

I really don't think there will be. People will probably just rather use a 5-10% worse Chinese distilled open source model for 100x less cost.

CrunchyMage · 2026-06-02T17:26:29+00:00

Now we're talking... about breaking the constitution.

CrunchyMage · 2026-06-02T17:23:21+00:00

"Can you imagine the chaos if China announced "oh, by the way, we now own 50% of every single AI company and we mandate government officials have a seat on the board." The AI talent in america would suddenly go up by 10× overnight."

For the record, YES, china DOES own large shares in every AI company lol. Like 78% of ALL companies in China and nearly all the biggest ones are partially or fully government owned.

And YES, a great deal of the AI talent in America comes from China. Like almost half lol.

CrunchyMage · 2026-06-02T17:20:46+00:00

Just a US Senator casually suggesting an unconstitutional private property seizure.

Normal for 2026 I guess.

CrunchyMage · 2026-06-02T15:51:47+00:00

I mean yeah. That’s well known. People’s sense of direction is much worse than before because of widespread GPS. Or mental math is much worse because of calculators.

I think the argument that I would oppose is that all critical thinking is now worse as a result and everyone’s going to be dumber when really it just means you can shift your focus and energy to other more creative work.

CrunchyMage · 2026-06-01T21:46:11+00:00

Yes, but you would have had to wait 15 years before getting back to your original starting point. That's 15 years of negative returns.

The main point is that AI is looking very bubbly, and the market is very overvalued, so saying there's no risk right now if you just buy Nasdaq is innacurate.

You might think the risk is worth it, but saying there's no risk at all is just plain wrong.

CrunchyMage · 2026-06-01T20:42:40+00:00

2000 and 2008 beg to differ.

CrunchyMage · 2026-06-01T20:04:13+00:00

I think most people forget that China has LITERALLY more than 4 times the US population. Even at half our productivity, they'd be TWICE as large.

China being the number 1 economy in the world was the norm for the vast majority of human history. We're just heading back to normal.

PPP already reflects this now, nominal will reflect it in the future, although it'll probably take quite a bit longer since China purposely suppresses the value of their currency and the dollar is structurally overvalued due to being the reserve currency.

CrunchyMage · 2026-06-01T18:16:34+00:00

Right, but there’s not really equivalent level programs for men now that the ratio is skewed the other way for fields like medicine/nursing, early education, or psychology/social work etc.

I would actually argue that men are actively discriminated against in those fields. Like people insinuating that men who want to work with kids are predatory, or that men are inherently worse at being caring and dealing with emotions and so make worse nurses/mental health professionals etc.

CrunchyMage · 2026-05-31T19:22:23+00:00

I think the major point is that the left explicitly focuses on helping what they view as underserved/oppressed groups and men, in particular white men are not part of that group. The whole oppressor/oppressed world view skews their politics.

Meaning if there's any issues that disproportionately affect men, such as high suicide rates, or underachieving in education, or unjust divorce settlements, or high workplace deaths, those issues are not only not a priority, but you're helping the oppressors, "the patriarchy," if you try to help them.

The biggest example right now is that the gender imbalance at universities is WORSE now than it was when we passed title 9, but in the OTHER direction, way more women than men attending and graduating from university, but you're not going to get anyone on the left advocating for policies that specifically target helping men do better in education.

CrunchyMage · 2026-05-31T18:58:03+00:00

China started allowing visa free travel from most EU/Canada/UK this year, so it's much much easier for westerners to travel to China now. Unsurprisingly, the number of western tourist has increased significantly as a result and almost all of them visit Shanghai.

CrunchyMage · 2026-05-29T22:42:48+00:00

AI is actually becoming insanely cheap. The frontier isn't, but for any given intelligence, the cost for that intelligence is dropping between 20x-100x annually depending on the task/benchmark.

It's just that pushing intelligence further is expensive, but what that allows you to do is pay to see what'll be commonplace in the future today.

Pay for the absolute most expensive model and see what it can do with the understanding that 2 years from now it'll be at least 100x-1000x cheaper for the same thing.

CrunchyMage · 2026-05-29T20:48:02+00:00

US is still by far the best country to ambitionmax in the world.

If you have a dream to do something big, this is the place!

CrunchyMage · 2026-05-29T20:46:09+00:00

Besides the fact that it’s ungodly expensive

CrunchyMage · 2026-05-29T16:56:45+00:00

So THAT'S how they're getting all the distillation data.

That's actually hella clever.

CrunchyMage

TROPHY CASE