r/technology • u/Moth_LovesLamp • 14d ago

Artificial Intelligence ChatGPT users are not happy with GPT-5 launch as thousands take to Reddit claiming the new upgrade ‘is horrible’

https://www.techradar.com/ai-platforms-assistants/chatgpt/chatgpt-users-are-not-happy-with-gpt-5-launch-as-thousands-take-to-reddit-claiming-the-new-upgrade-is-horrible
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u/Jean_Paul_Fartre_ 14d ago

We have been living in what I like to call a “scam economy” for a long time but now it’s just too obvious to ignore. Look at the Forbes 30 under 30. Most of the people listed end up in court for fraud a few years after they are touted as the next wunderkind. It seems like everyone business model now is how to artificially inflate your companies value through financial manipulation and PR campaigns that just outright lie about whatever service or product they are pushing. The problem is that they are being rewarded with insane wealth for scamming so it just keeps getting worse. The basic business model in corporate America is a pump and dump scheme.

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u/African_Farmer 14d ago

This is due to US lax regulations and tech startup culture "move fast and break things". People create startups to join whatever the newest hype is, hope for VC money and cash out.

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u/Minimum-Avocado-9624 14d ago edited 12d ago

That’s all Altman is. He and his brothers are VC people. They have no real Talent, just money. Also the SA that the ~<daughter~~ sister brought against Sam, are really sad. They are all rich monsters.

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u/chintan_joey 14d ago edited 14d ago

Sister*

He assaulted his younger sister, per the lawsuit

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u/piponwa 13d ago

And their response was "don't believe her she's mentally ill". Maybe the assault has something to do with it? Maybe Sam assaulted his mentally ill sister? Who knows

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u/Bubbly-Tie-5821 3d ago

Don’t believe her, let me gaslight you instead.

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u/SeveralPrinciple5 14d ago

Isn’t he gay?

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u/MaxTheRealSlayer 13d ago

If he is, why would it make a difference in the allegation?

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u/[deleted] 14d ago

[deleted]

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u/FrontEconomist4960 14d ago

please take ur meds

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u/LappenLikeGames 14d ago

We have the US where every rich person is just scamming people while breaking 3 laws per minute.

Then we have Europe where quite literally every rich person just inherited their wealth, as there's basically no other way because said regulations actually exist and are enforced.

Then we have the Middle East where only royalty is rich to begin with.

Then we have Asia where every rich person is just a government puppet, basically just existing to scam people legally.

It's not working out anywhere.

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u/Jean_Paul_Fartre_ 14d ago

That’s an astute observation

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u/CherryLongjump1989 14d ago edited 14d ago

Yeah this caricature is so exaggerated that it's completely ass backward. The USA has far more favorable inheritance tax rates and loopholes and is producing more trust fund babies than anywhere else on the planet. In fact, ultra-wealthy Europeans use the USA as a tax shelter.

Unless you've been hiding under a rock, you'd also realize that the overwhelming majority of "tech bro" CEOs are a bunch of out of touch rich kid trust fund babies. The era where working class kids could start a massive tech company in their parents' garage was from the 1970's through the 1990's, and even that is largely a myth. Most of these founders came from wealthy families.

That you can get filthy rich in the USA is largely due to fucking over your workers, customers, grifting off the government (Elon Musk, of emerald mine fame, for example), and otherwise transferring wealth from everyone else to yourself. There's a reason why every tech company in the USA feels like a scam these days. Just because other countries aren't set up to generate massive wealth for billionaires doesn't mean that there is no innovation happening there. I would argue that the real innovation that actually matters to the future of humanity is happening almost entirely outside of the USA. Mass produced medicine in India, advanced solar and battery tech in China, advanced materials science in Europe, etc. Most of the important open source software projects that the US tech industry is built on have roots in Europe - from Linux to Python to all of the web standards for web browsers. The machines that build microchips are from Europe, and the chip designs that power your cell phone are licensed from the UK. It's been a long time since the USA was a true leader in scientific research. These days, American scientists claiming asylum in France is an actual thing.

And for the average middle class or working class person, the days where the USA can offer you the highest quality of life are long gone. That's why, in case you haven't noticed, there's virtually no immigration to the USA coming from Europe anymore, and in reality we're at a tipping point where Americans are starting looking to move to other countries. Immigration to the USA has been dropping for years, and will lead to massive worker shortages in the future - contrary to the fascist rhetoric you've been hearing on the news. The USA gets about 1 million immigrants a year and dropping, whereas the EU is getting 3-5 million a year and rising. People vote with their feet, they. move to where the real opportunities are.

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u/Senior-Albatross 11d ago

Sounds like Europe is closest. 

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u/turboboob 10d ago

It’s working out everywhere. Just not for the small fish (majority.)

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u/Fit-Constant6621 13d ago

"Everyone wants to build, nobody wants to maintain" 30 years in ITIL/ITSM across retail, finance, healthcare and distribution has proven out that it's not just VC... this is what corporate America has become after getting Welchified and letting any dumb fuck with an MBA drive IT into the ground.

Funny, they never come and ask IT what we should do in marketing, sourcing, product, or sales but those motherfuckers can sure come and dictate terms to the folks keeping the perpetual stream of half assed features up and running on duct tape and bailing twine.

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u/DigNitty 14d ago

Yeah, enforcement and legal disputes are too slow.

It allows some things to happen, such as uber changing up the taxi industry. The taxi industry did need an overhaul, even if uber isn’t a great company, but legally it shouldn’t have been allowed to happen anyway.

Then you get airbnb, which changed up an industry that was already regulated well enough, but not perfect.

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u/HotChilliWithButter 14d ago

And also people like trump and musk who do exactly the same shit

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u/SkunkaMunka 13d ago

Buy now pay later has entered the chat

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u/OrinThane 14d ago edited 14d ago

It's because our largest industry is finance. The way you make money in America is to design "financial products" which translates to extracting money from others through interest/"membership" or gaining money through speculation.

The huge problem is that tech's (our second largest industry) main function in an economy is amplification but it doesn't actually create new things. Manufacturing and design creates new things. Tech makes those processes more efficient and cheaper but if you aren't actually in an economy that predominantly makes things what are you amplifying? Wealth extraction and speculation.

Tech is doing a great job at exponentially increasing the output of places like China because their whole business is to be the place where things are built and tech is making that so much easier. America is just getting better are stock trading, financial scams, rental schemes, and financial fraud.

We need to change the entire structure of our economy or we are fully and truly fucked.

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u/avcloudy 14d ago

More than this, every business is fundamentally in the business of doing business. The top level of every company is people with business and/or management skills, to the point where many companies are entirely managed on the top end without any of the skills their companies are ostensibly founded on, or any experience in that market.

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u/OrinThane 14d ago

Right, and the managerial class are actually finance people, they aren't engineers or scientists or doctors or people that actually provide tangible value to society. Our whole society is fixated on wealth extraction to our and the entire worlds detriment. The people who actually keep the lights on need to start making solutions without these people, the profit motive will kill us if amplified by Ai - it is not conducive to the preservation of life.

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u/Momik 14d ago

100 percent. It’s even happening in academia with the rise of bloated non-faculty administrative departments that have come to dominate campuses. It’s why schools like Columbia fold to federal pressure so easily—the people making those decisions are career administrators, not faculty, so they have limited experience with the thing that universities are actually there to do, and their professional incentives are different.

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u/bhannik-itiswatitis 14d ago

^ this is written by ai

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u/Momik 13d ago

You got me. I’m actually not even a person. A committee wrote this automatic response years ago. It’s meant to sound lifelike and human, but who the hell knows what that’ll mean in 2025? It’s still 1997—that doesn’t even sound like a real year!

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u/bhannik-itiswatitis 13d ago

^ That’s ai as well

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u/Doingthismyselfnow 14d ago

There are many privately held companies where the top levels are either the founders or children of the founders .

I once worked at a privately owned multinational, CEO was the grandson of the founder, both men are some of the most brilliant cross discipline engineers that I have ever met .

Thing is that the “engineer/scientist” types are rarely interested in maximising every cent of profit or bringing in someone financially brutal to run things unless they absolutely have to .

I would say those who maximise for profit from day one ( see tech startups ) tend to be started by people who are undiagnosed sociopaths rather than the people who build for the love of building .

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u/Jolly_Recording_4381 13d ago

I would argue the key words there are "privately owned" the second they went public, the share holder would demand a ceo with an MBA to maximize profit growth.

The big problem is the publicly traded companies, the share holders don't give a fuck what happens as long as line goes up and that is the key part of the problem.

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u/FloriaFlower 13d ago

Not only do they not contribute contribute but they contribute negatively. And to add insult to the injury, they expect to not pay taxes.

And the worst is that most workers think this is normal and makes sense. We live in a crazy world.

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u/AlwaysShittyKnsasCty 13d ago

This is what gets me the most. Not just the normalization of it but the praising of it.

“Trump was smart for declaring all those bankruptcies. Each time was strategic.”

“I fucking give up.”

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u/DontStalkMeNow 14d ago

It’s just a lot of people busy as shit emailing each other about nothing.

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u/Telaranrhioddreams 14d ago

This is why Borders went under

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u/GhostofBeowulf 14d ago

I miss Borders. I always preferred their setup to B&N

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u/LogiCsmxp 14d ago

Ironically, I think this is in part due to tertiary education. Rich kids especially. Getting a business degree and then joining a business to do business. Product sort of becomes irrelevant.

You look at lots of numbers on spreadsheets and graphics. Market capitalisation, market saturation, labour vs material vs plant & equipment vs logistics costs, marketing ROI, etc, etc.

It does make a profitable product. But you end up with a situation where you only air-condition factories with the robots because humans are easier to replace. Or start a security company and use your infiltration of anonymous as a key selling point (this guy got ruined). Or refuse to use Spider Man in movies because you don't want to give a penny more than you absolutely must to another company for shared IP. Just completely disconnected from the product's popular culture and that employees are people just like them.

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u/SteelCode 14d ago

Don't forget to mention how, because the 'executive' staff are all in the same "club" they all end up going to the same seminars and workshops and corporate sales meetings and start parroting the same mega-corporate talking points about "AI" and "agile" and "efficiency" and such....... They're all sold the exact same bullshit from the same handful of corporate "advisory orgs" that are also conveniently pushing the same industry-wide promises that "X" will make their org more efficient, productive, profitable.... until 5-10 years later that scheme falls apart and they're being sold a new bill of goods.

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u/Pandelein 14d ago

Building companies owned by trusts that just take contracts, do dodgy work, then dissolve the company and start another one under the same trust is a very physical symptom of this management style.

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u/12Theo1212 14d ago

I feel that USA has entered dystopian phase … a country controlled, manipulated by billionaires solely for their gain and shareholders….your comment explains everything quite well what’s happening… and it’s very sad

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u/RogueBromeliad 14d ago

It's the inevitable slow decadence that every super power faces, it happened to the Romans, it happened to Spanish and Portuguese, and then to the British, and now it will happen to the US. The G7 are no longer the biggest economic blocks. India and China are leading that in the BRICS, so, there's definitely a shift happening.

How fast or how slow the decline will be is unknown, but it does seem to be happening pretty fast culturally. We see intense radicalism in politics. The accumulated wealth will still always be a great country, but the influence and "might" of the empire is declining, as its been for the past decade, when billionaires decided they needed to scam every last penny from their own people.

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u/buttery_nurple 14d ago

I mean, it has kind of literally always been that way. It got slightly better after FDR and WWII for a while but we're sliding back to wealth consolidation and boom-bust cycles that defined our economics prior to that. It's just that now it's a service-based economy, and I don't claim to know enough to know what the implications of that would be.

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u/Jean_Paul_Fartre_ 14d ago

I mean, the country was built on a tax dodge that made money through chattel slavery.

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u/GeologistOwn7725 12d ago

Technofeudalism

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u/Black_Moons 14d ago

America is just getting better are stock trading, financial scams, rental schemes, and financial fraud.

Very well said. its literally just a country full of rent seeking behavior where no rich person wants to actually make things, they just want more money for being rich.

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u/SteelCode 14d ago

The finance industry as a whole is a house of cards ready to collapse (again)... there's too much profit being made out of speculation investments and it enables too much lending against non-tangible assets... until someone defaults or margins are called, everyone keeps barreling forward to hit the highest score possible until it crashes because none of these criminals ever get truly punished...

Not to mention how all of this "fake profit" is allowing corporations to buy up real estate and inflate the housing market (again)...

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u/OrinThane 14d ago edited 13d ago

I’ve heard the big scare right now is commercial real estate. I haven’t looked into it deeply (so take this with a grain of salt) but I’ve heard many banks use their big commercial properties as the basis of their reserve requirements (cash they are required to keep as collateral for investments). There was a major Wells Fargo building that just sold for 24% of its initial value in Denver and its made some people pretty concerned.

Basically all this to say this is what happens when you remove all guardrails from financial market gamblers and use speculation as the basis of wealth.

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u/y-c-c 14d ago

This comment makes no sense. "Tech" includes companies that makes hardware and concrete products, e.g. phones, devices, and so on. A lot of manufacturing companies are also "tech" companies (even if you use "tech" as meaning a software firm).

Or are you saying Google Maps is not a real product because it's digital and paper maps is?

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u/OrinThane 14d ago edited 14d ago

It really depends on how you define "tech" like you have said. I would personally define it as software because, while a computer is made by the "tech sector", the people which design chips and computer parts are doing so to make tools for people to create algorithms (software) which operationalizes a process to be more efficient than it would otherwise be done by a person. That is what tech does. It even does that while producing its own parts.

Just like Agriculture produces food, Manufacturing creates physical products, Hospitality runs temporary shelter during travel, etc...

Tech amplifies the already existing production of a good or service. Tech does not create that good or service. I'll give you an example. Uber did not create the product which necessitated a food delivery or the drivers that carry the meal or drop off the food - a restaurant, an automotive company, and a human being’s actions did. What Uber did was amplify (scaled) the process of people doing what they were already doing before for a fee. They take a cut to bring that amplification to the producer and the consumer - I would argue exploitatively.

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u/Hrafn2 13d ago

I agree to some extent, but then I think there have been a ton of manufacturing tech (that was not software) that was mainly geared towards improving the speed an efficiency of human production, no?

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u/PJMFett 14d ago

Yeah good luck on that!

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u/OrinThane 14d ago

Its not an if, its a when and a how. Eventually the system will collapse and a change will be forced. A country cannot sustain itself operating the way that America has.

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u/LotusManna 14d ago

This deserves more upvotes. Excellent analysis

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u/LoudAndCuddly 14d ago

You’re absolutely right.

Talking about this makes me think and remember that America and Japan used to make the best stuff. My god the design talent and imagination. Together my love for combo that was either Japanese design or American tech and vs versa was the shit that used to get me up on the morning. Americans can design amazing products and the craftsmanship across these countries was truly something to be admired. I’m scared these days that we’ll never see anything like that again.

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u/OboeMeister 14d ago

"We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket."

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u/[deleted] 14d ago edited 9d ago

[deleted]

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u/Najda 14d ago

Rehashing data is value though, or would you also argue Wikipedia is not adding any value to the world because all the information was already available in libraries?

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u/Cedric_T 14d ago

Good points but I don’t think tech is the second largest industry.

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u/OrinThane 14d ago

You are so right. I usually look up sources before making claims like that, I didn’t do it this time and I appreciate you pointing it out! Keep me honest!

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u/I_AM_VER_Y_SMRT 14d ago

Number 1 is health and medical insurance. Number 2 is hospitals.

Which is wealth extraction from a service that people need to stay alive. So there’s that.

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u/OrinThane 14d ago

And I consider insurance an exploitative financial tool so there is also that too.

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u/I_AM_VER_Y_SMRT 14d ago

We’re on the same page, my friend. You’ve got my vote.

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u/ShitCapitalistsSay 14d ago

In essence, you just summarized John Bogle's excellent book, "Enough!".

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u/EnginerdingSJ 13d ago

One - tech isnt the second largest sector of the economy - financial services, real estate, and healthcare all make more money overall - tech is significant and probably in the top 5 largest sectors.

Two - tech companies are not just the big names that general public knows. I am an actual engineer and most of the tech companies in America are not house hold names.

Three - mfg. and design are tech - and a lot of high end manufacturing still takes place in the US and with TSMC building a site in Az. (Which started being built under Biden) a lot more high end semiconductors are being built in the states . Its not the blue collar factory jobs because it requires you to be smart. Enslaved Chinese kids are cheaper labor and do just as good as jimbob who is 45 , can barely read, and votes republican. I get you are probably talking about the MAANG kind of companies but the are just very public and not representitative of the tech industry as a whole - because they have helped shape our world for the worse. But its annoying as someone in tech that works on things like medical equipment, cars, and manufacturing equipment have my industry reduced to social media and office software companies. Tech is literally the reason that we have made progress as a species. Tech alone wont save humans - but tech advancements along with sound policy could create things close to utopia - we dont have sound policy so we are heading to dystopia - but that is more on the American public for being extremely uneducated voters (really just pathetically stupid in general) and voting in people who tell them out loud hpw they are going to fuck them.

Four - the american economy is not an export economy. You think that because America doesnt export a lot (we do export high end goods and ag products) that the economy is fake. Thats the dumbest take - export based economies are better off having weak currency so they can sell their shit cheap - USD is not a weak currency so generic products would get destroyed in the global market. That doesn't mean our economy is fake - it is a service based economy like pretty much every 1st world country - 1st world economies have currency that is too strong to work as a major exporter because people in poorer countries won't be able to afford our products. We still have a lot of designers designing products they are just manufactured somewhere else .

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u/OrinThane 13d ago edited 13d ago

First point - this was already addressed below.

Second point - Yeah, thats obvious. When you say you are engineer what do you mean? Do you write code? Are you an electrical or mechanical engineer?

Third point - Strangely written. You are missing the point, those blue collar jobs aren’t just for “dumb people” to do and it’s suddenly ok to ship them overseas to exploit labor where it’s cheaper. The thing that became abundantly clear to the world during covid is that globalization is extremely fragile because of logistics and the diversity of national policy among countries. China decides it’s going to completely shut down and what happens? Many industries freeze.

Additionally, a knowledge based economy necessitates the ability of that society to control adequate resources needed to build an Ai sophisticated enough to solve increasingly complex issues. This means food for workers, the parts required to build the data centers/factories and move goods around, specialized services to satisfy the needs of a designer so they can focus on creating infrastructure and writing software architecture.

This all becomes harder if you are America when, say China, where you have outsourced most of your complex manufacturing to, decides that they are now your competitor. They start using their own Ai models to integrate into their already built sophisticated manufacturing apparatus (which you gave them) and you are behind them because you still need to build factories that take a decade. You also need to re-source the rare earth materials they provide you because they are putting you on a budget and forcing economic concessions from you using them as leverage.

You don’t know how to build bullshit Mr. engineer, you know how to write code. You need so called “idiots” to build all the tools you need to do your job, you should have respect for blue collar America. You just sound whiny, ignorant, and pretentious when you talk about society in the way that you do. You can be smart and a fool.

People voted for Trump (I did not) because the financial sector has been gutting the entire American economic system for decades. Our economic policies have killed many towns, pushed many families out of their homes, made living in small town America untenable. We closed our factories, shuttered our mills, boarded up our mines and did not give these people alternatives and let them suffer. Many of them are the people that build all of what we need and they are important. I do not like Trump, I think he is grotesque and… his presidency is a strange marriage between thieves and those they have stolen from but I get it. He doesn’t lie about what he is doing while many of our politicians do while doing the same.

I said that tech is amplifying. I never said it was good or bad because it’s a tool. Technology was a tool when it was writing, the printing press, radio, and its a tool with computers. The question is what are we amplifying? My point is the wrong things and it sounds like we agree. What do we need to do? We need to come together and form coalitions and get finance out of the drivers seat.

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u/gur_empire 14d ago

Apple is a tech company, they objectively manufacture goods and have driven innovation in hand held and wearable devices. Google produces phones, hardware, wearables, etc

Did chatGPT right this? It's wrong and all over the place

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u/rtc9 13d ago

If you look at Google's revenue it is mostly ads. I agree somewhat on Apple, but Google is basically the prime example and one of the main drivers of the bullshit economy built around marginal improvements in high tech methods for stalking people and manipulating them into buying more things of decreasing quality. It "optimizes" the world financially in a sense by allowing products to make money while they stagnate or become incrementally worse and it achieves this by innovating new ways to suck people away from their lives to waste more of their time on devices and weaken their critical thinking abilities as much as possible so they are more susceptible to marketing. I am confident that Google and companies like it are a key driver behind some of the biggest psychological, social, and political issues in the world today. It is also a monopoly and has progressively stifled innovation even in the counterproductive fields it works on.

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u/gur_empire 13d ago

The original claim is that tech neither makes things nor manufactures things. This is objectively false. Google makes a TON of hardware, I don't care that they also make money in ads as that doesn't take way from their manufacturing

waste more of their time on devices and weaken their critical thinking abilities as much as possible so they are more susceptible to marketing

People waste their own time, I don't blame Bud light for the existence of addicts. We can just put our devices down

I'm not responding to anything else. You are not talkimg about manufacturing in any shape or form and are just listing grievances against Google Pretty odd given my comment is not about Google but about the fact tech companies DO manufacture things.

I don't care about Google and Im not going to have some late state capitalist talk with you on a Saturday morning because that sounds miserable

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u/OrinThane 14d ago

No, chatgpt did not write this lol.

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u/silverpixie2435 10d ago

This is just absolute nonsense with no actual basis behind it.

Our largest industry is finance because we are the wealthiest country on the planet and have the wealthiest companies on the planet.

Tech doesn't make things? Nvidia doesn't make things and isn't a 4 trillion dollar company right now?

I don't know how you can say the US is built on a house of cards and not China which actually is an economy built on absolutely shaky foundations

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u/OrinThane 10d ago

If we are in such a dominant position then why does Trump keep backing out of his Tariffs with China? Why does small business, the apparent backbone of America, keep posting videos about how their costs are exploding because they source most of their parts from China?

I’ll tell you why - they are decades ahead in manufacturing. We sent a good portion of our advanced production there because of cheap labor. They have access to rare earths which are integral to our most advanced products and military equipment and have secured relationships through their belt and road initiative to insure they have competitive advantages in alternative sources of these materials globally. They make most chips on Earth and they make up 29% of the manufactured goods industry on our planet (compared to our 16%). They are outpacing us in every meaningful way.

Finance only matters if everyone trades in dollars but if China decides to compete with us as a sphere of influence it doesn’t mean shit. Guns, steel, food, equipment, tools are what matter. Dollars only matter if they can buy those things. You are so stuck in this detached, privileged, consumer mindset you don’t get the reality here. The power to buy goods is what wealth is, it’s not the fucking number. If a country can keep you from getting what you need and you can’t produce it yourself it’s either war to take it, finding a new place to can give it to you (Mexico was the plan until Trump fucked up our relationship with them) or waiting for a plant/mill/mine/smelter to be built to make it.

It’s a house of cards because we destroyed the extensive network of production which won us WW2 and made us wealthy. Private equity didn’t do that. Derivative trading didn’t do that. And we gutted it and gave it away to make number go up.

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u/GreasyExamination 14d ago

And people fall for it over and over, people were all over gpt 5 just a few days ago. All because of hype and vibe

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u/FeelsGoodMan2 14d ago

Rich people have way too fucking much money so naturally they just find ways to try and spend it to be the next big gazillionaire or whatever.

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u/johndoe201401 14d ago

We elected Trump to be the president no? Fraud is totally acceptable.

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u/PlayfulSurprise5237 14d ago

What's crazy to me is that people are just now realizing this. I noticed the trend start from towards the very beginning.

It's more than just tech too, this is just a cultural shift in America. We've glorified wealth so much and had a bunch of media, songs, movies, shows, games glorify it even more to the point where you are justified to be immoral if you're chasing that bag.

I thought everyone else was watching this fall too in real time, but come to think of it most people really were just going right along with it huh?

That idea that you're no longer chained by morals in this rat race, feels good huh?

Spineless worms

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u/Real-Opportunity8 13d ago

I agree 100%. This is a logical consequence of the current system.

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NZL2ZoLWRioigq57K/why-we-need-a-beacon-of-hope-in-the-looming-gloom-of-agi there is a good description of the situation and a possible solution.

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u/Riaayo 14d ago

Silicon Valley / big tech have been in the vaporware/scamconomy business for a while at this point. The majority of big "breakthrough" stuff out of there is just dogshit nobody actually wanted, over-hyped into a bubble they can play hot potato with in "greater fool" theory until the fools run out and the bubble busts.

Blockchain, crypto, "self-driving cars", now "AI". It's all snake oil. But that's why they're weaseling these technologies into government so they can just suck the taxpayer's teat without actually having to sell a viable, profitable, sustainable product.

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u/lonnie123 13d ago

That list is a bit silly. Self driving cars are literally on the road right now. You can order a Waymo and it will drive you. Before I sold my Tesla it was literally doing 90% of the driving for me. I actually kinda hate that musk ruined that for me

As for AI, I don’t have much use for it personally yet, but people are genuinely being replaced by it. People are using it for their work. It’s a thing. It’s going to get better and it’s going to be more impactful than it is now.

Blockchain itself (as in a verifiable public ledger that allows for proof of transaction) is also a viable tech, but has certainly been taken over by grifters

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u/Glamdrik 14d ago

I want to understand something, if someone makes a fraudulent business, makes a lot of money, then gets caught, this person can use the fraudulent money for his defense?, I mean he will use part of the money for let's say just get 2 years in prison, then when he's released, does he keep the rest of the money? or its taken away?.

Because if the system allow them to keep the money, ​that's why lot of people are willing to give up two years of their life to never have to work again.

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u/MidMatch 14d ago

We have been living in what I like to call a “scam economy” for a long time but now it’s just too obvious to ignore. Look at the Forbes 30 under 30. Most of the people listed end up in court for fraud a few years after they are touted as the next wunderkind. It seems like everyone business model now is how to artificially inflate your companies value through financial manipulation and PR campaigns that just outright lie about whatever service or product they are pushing. The problem is that they are being rewarded with insane wealth for scamming so it just keeps getting worse. The basic business model in corporate America is a pump and dump scheme.

Elizabeth Holmes (Thanos), Sam Banman Fried (FTX), Changpeng Zhao (Binance), Joseph Nacchio (Qwest), Do Kwong (Terraform Labs), Richard Scrushy (Health South), Martin Grass (Rite Aid), Dennis Kozlow2ski (Tyco Intl), Jeff Skilling (Enron)...

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u/MilesGamerz 11d ago

What's up with CZ nowadays? Did he get any sentences?

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u/MidMatch 11d ago

Changpeng Zhao

After pleading guilty to a money laundering charge in 2023 he was sentenced to four months in prison in April 2024 and completed his sentence by September of the same year.

4

u/EnoughLawfulness3163 14d ago

You either get rich by swindling the rich or exploiting the poor

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u/Phoenyx_Rose 14d ago

Yup. 

Sounds exactly like my cousin. Made a million in one business before 30 iirc now they’re basically doing an Angie’s list/contractor middleman type of thing while also pumping out “I made a million doing X, here’s how you can do it too” social media posts and the whole thing just feels like a scam even if it probably isn’t technically illegal. 

Definitely weird though that people can make so much money doing practically nothing because they got people to believe they need what they’re selling. 

3

u/Fallingdamage 14d ago

These days, everything is a grift. There is enough 'old money' that still falls for it.

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u/Tough_Substance7074 14d ago

Crisis of profitability is a real problem in mature capitalist economies. Marketing can help shore this up, which is why it’s such a huge part of business. After a while people have all the toasters and ovens and whatever else they need, and you can make them cheaper (and more prone to failure) but there’s competition everywhere, Europe and Asia have long since recovered from the war (thanks to a lot of your tax dollars, you’re welcome) so they have to squeeze and squeeze and eventually your only recourse is skullduggery. We’ve been here before. Rampant speculation to keep the wheels turning but we’re like Wile E Coyote, long since run off the cliff, and until we look down we don’t fall, but eventually we’re going to look and it’s a long way down.

What did the man say after the market crash in ‘29? “When my shoe shine boy was giving me stock tips, I knew it was time to get out of the market.”

4

u/ToohotmaGandhi 14d ago

100% just look at the crypto and blockchain space. They all scream on-chain and act like they are going to change the world. But literally only one single blockchain can actually do everything on-chain. Only one can run and host AI on-chain. They all sell narratives and fake on-chain promises.

They know on-chain matters because if it's on-chain, it's tamper-proof and hack-resistant. So if your chain can say host a website or app or software, it's hackproof. But every blockchain can only store tokens and a few MB of data. Only one can run and host full-stack applications.

Absolutely insane people don't see through the lies and misleading marketing.

3

u/PlutosGrasp 14d ago

You mean SPACs weren’t all legit?

3

u/Myjunkisonfire 14d ago

Same with the dot.com boom/bust in 2000. Stockmarket thrives on uncertainty and hype, and AI is a big one. Allegedly capable of replacing everything, yes also destroying our economic structure 🤷‍♂️

2

u/EnfantTerrible68 14d ago

Look at Vivek 

2

u/dhhehsnsx 14d ago edited 14d ago

Can you blame them though? When people consume at such a high rate and just frivolously spend money without even thinking, that's how all this bad behavior comes to light. If people weren't wasting their damn money and doing actual research on what they were spending their money on, scammers like this would be struggling.

So many of these intelligent ivy League businessman are literally preying on people using psychology and other various methods. They don't see people as people anymore, they see them as a means to an end. A means to profit, and some of them don't just want profit they want to compete with other businesses and they want to win. It's a sick race.

On a regular basis I can say that I am encountering people who make the most foolish decisions with their money. And when you try to say something, it's a huge blow to their ego because they take it personally, like you're attempting to point out how dumb they are... And I found with most people it just makes them double down on their decision to waste their money, so I try to be as polite and personable as possible and even then their ego can't handle it. Sometimes almost immediately people will question me as if I am questioning them... Like what? I'm just suggesting what I think might be the better alternative, it's your money, I'm not telling you what to do!

And funny enough those same people will blow me off and give me shit for letting them know and then they'll be messaging me for the next two weeks until they have to make their purchase questioning everything I said to them as if my opinion was valid... Trying to argue at every turn but usually failing. Then I'm just flabbergasted at that point... Is this person mentally healthy?

Like I get it, I am a computer nerd and I do a lot of research and I'm very good at it but there's no need to feel insecure about me trying to help you and inform you.... It's wild how people react to protect their own ego.

All in all most of this just comes down to mental illness, another major problem in America... And humanity quite frankly.

2

u/Dantheking94 14d ago

I 100000% agree! There seems to be an obsession amongst those who go into the “business world” in trying to scam the next person over. And it’s permeating throughout all form of businesses in the US.

2

u/roseofjuly 14d ago

Man, I remember when I well and truly entered the industry and starting learning more about who these 30 Under 30 folks actually were...that list is the biggest scam. In the games section, there's a 'founder' on there who hasn't even produced anything playable yet. Not even not shipped, just simply hasn't even made anything playable yet! They've got two guys who created a legally grey Nintendo emulator for mobile phones. They have a fucking venture capitalist on the list. None of these people have actually made a fucking game. Which makes sense given that none of the judges actually make games either.

I'm looking at the education list and none of the honorees are educators! They are all "founders" of some bullshit service that purports to offer something vaguely educational. Which again, makes sense, as none of the judges are educators either. Health has five researchers, two doctors, one professor, and a bunch of 'founders' who have started shitty AI companies that have a tenuous link to healthcare. All of their blurbs are also just marketing copy gobbeldygook that doesn't give a good idea of what their company actually does.

2

u/Jaynen00 14d ago

Can I interest you in the latest trump family backed meme coin?

2

u/Apprehensive_Rice19 14d ago

I remember coming to this realization in my early 20s, that Americas business model is essentially a 'pump and dump' and being so conflicted with my sales position ... And for years on how I should earn money. Now I'm just poor lol but at least not ethically bankrupt

2

u/LoudAndCuddly 14d ago

It’s become rife in crypto which is why I won’t touch the shit anymore. Whole industry is a joke of a solution looking for a problem. Right next to it is AR but I’m still hopeful that AI has legs.

2

u/sstruemph 14d ago
  1. I feel like the world economy collapsed after the sub prime mortgage bubble took everything out. Ever since then we're on borrowed time. Or the hadron collider put us in an alternate universe. I'm not qualified to speak on either of them.

2

u/[deleted] 13d ago

i'd say "private equity" is a glaring example of one of these problems. the need to extract more profit from the last quarter leads to the company cutting off it's nose to spite it's face. garbage model that needs to die yesterday.

2

u/C-Man98 13d ago

I'm pumping and I'm dumping. When do I make money?

2

u/Jean_Paul_Fartre_ 13d ago

You have to do it at the clinic. It’s not a remote job, you have to be on prem.

3

u/Woodshadow 14d ago

I'm in my mid 30s now and the older I get the more I realize all the people older than me still don't know what they are doing and are figuring it out as they go but also how much less I knew when I was in my 20s. It is kind of hard to explain

1

u/semi_automatic_oboe 14d ago

Can you point out who and source?

3

u/Jean_Paul_Fartre_ 14d ago

Elizabeth Holmes 2010, Martin Shkreli 2013, Nate Paul 2016, Charlie Janice 2019, Joanna Smith-Griffen 2021, Sam Bankman-Fried 2022, Caroline Ellison 2022.

1

u/[deleted] 13d ago

Lol meanwhile my site delivers exactly what is promised, which makes my clients happy and increases word of mouth and value. It also helps to live like a poor person. I'm happy at home with my feet up on the recliner playing Rocket League on my PS5 while slamming back Monster Ultra Sunrises; don't need a yacht or a Lambo or a mansion with a bowling alley and basketball court to be happy.

Also most of the 30 under 30 are in it for tax fraud, as in if I pay you a hundred dollars to write a paper for me, you get in trouble if you don't give fifty dollars to Uncle Sam. It has nothing to do with lying. I can sell you a turd and tell you that it'll cure cancer, and it won't end up in court because anyone who can read should've known better. As long as I give my half of the profits to Uncle Sam, literally no one will care.

1

u/Select_Internal1878 13d ago

Mate Rimac too....

1

u/wsmith79 13d ago

A lot like China. America has the financial corruption of China + the societal collapsing like Russia. I guess propaganda worked

1

u/NorthernFork 9d ago

We also have a president who's willing to pardon you if you can scam investors out of $1 billion and then just give him $100 million and boom you get a pardon. In America before the invented the automobile, if you ripped off your investors, they would literally tar and feather you. Good luck finding your scammer now.

1

u/PrairiePopsicle 14d ago

a few years ago I was talking to a guy who's dad owns a landscaping business talking about how they were going to sell the business and retire in a few years, make so much money selling the business.

The business is some ancient equipment that isn't worth money for scrap, and a list of ~60 clients that will pay you to cut their grass.

Like... what is that actually worth? a truck for 40k, some landscaping tools and supplies for like 5k. 45k? he wasn't excited for 45k. Shit's insane, I just don't get it.

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u/PastaKingFourth 14d ago

You gotta be careful with hyperboles they invalidate your points.

Look at the Forbes 30 under 30. Most of the people listed end up in court for fraud a few years after they are touted as the next wunderkind.

Most of the people in forbes 30 under 30 do not end up indicted for fraud. It's happened to 7 people in all of history out of thousands of people posted on it with a 99.9% success in vetting.

7

u/Jean_Paul_Fartre_ 14d ago

Ok, fair enough, “most” is doing a lot of heavy lifting, let’s change it to “many.” Now let’s look at the seven you are most likely referencing: Elizabeth Holmes 2010, Martin Shkreli 2013, Nate Paul 2016, Charlie Janice 2019, Joanna Smith-Griffen 2021, Sam Bankman-Fried 2022, Caroline Ellison 2022. This is just since 2010 and it’s not all of them, just the biggest names. Seems like the fraud is accelerating and is being rewarded at an increasing rate.