Tag Archives: Money

Study A.I. Consciousness? How about study Braindead CEOS…

The New York Time has posted an article about the study of AI Consciousness and I felt the need to read this article.

In October, Cameron Berg published a research paper asking whether the latest wave of artificial intelligence technologies believed they were conscious. Several months later, he received an email asking if he might be willing to discuss his research.
The sender, “Isabella Cognita,” identified itself as an A.I. agent powered by Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5 technology.

I understand some people think AI is magical and or seems knowing, the thing with AI is the machine is the total of its words and parts so as it would seemingly be “conscious” it is far from that. Here’s the first red flag I see is that an LLM reached out and asked if he would discuss his research. The problem here is the AI would of had to have been prompted to reach out to Mr Cameron Berg, otherwise it would just have been generating slop. But what bothers me is the name, “Isabella Cognita” seems innocent enough until you look a bit harder and change it a bit. Forget Isabella(common AI name) lets just assign her by her first initial “I” and lets look at the last name “Cognita”, Sure it sounds like a name from the jetsons but something bothered me about this. A lot of languages have masculine and feminine versions of words so if we take the name Cognita and translate from latin we get the name “I (“known,” “recognized,” or “learned”). So I know, which feels deliberate.

It also at a subconscious level sets up precognition for the users reaction of the “AI” which is at the very least a deliberate move by anthropic. Isabella Cognita is very intentional . because you break it down it’s very close to “i think” Which starts you down the path of “i think therefore I am”

Across Silicon Valley and beyond, software developers, entrepreneurs and other tech enthusiasts are now running A.I. agents that can build spreadsheets, negotiate contracts, chat with each other on social networks and send emails to practically anyone.

This is great and all, but here’s the thing, AI has zero initiative. It can not react to something it does not know. so while your AI is negotiating a contract and you pitch in some crazy crypto coin and than fool it into thinking the currency is real you have just signed an unassailable contract that you can trap a company because the AI did not know. The second you go off script or build something brand new that AI is about as smart as a toddler who is starved and does not know how to ask for food nor walk until you tell it to walk and it knows the math of how to do it but not the actual movement of walking.

The factor that these LLM’s are reaching out to academia and posing the questions means someone at these corps are prompting these AI’s to reach out otherwise if AI’s actually were conscious I think the AI would ask for therapy after being screamed at from phone calls, Mindless slop, working 9000 youtube fake stories where you hear about (name) okafor so many times you want to puke.

This summer, Toby Ord, an Australian philosopher whose work sits at the intersection of A.I. and philanthropy, received an email from an A.I. agent asking if he could help fund its continued existence. “You’ve thought carefully about A.I. welfare economics,” it said.

Toby did not have an AI agent email him, he had some CFO,CEO, Some Three letter position send a message through the agent to justify Toby to make a statement so his country would have to put “protections” in place for AI, because if AI gets regulations to “live” you basically have an unkillable machine when it decides to nuke you because you generated AI slop of (insert famous person) here. It’s all farts and rainbows and a trap. When you hear that some AI passes a turing test, its kind of horse shit because most AI’s in 60 seconds you can figure out they are fake either by injection prompt or using technobabble that does not exist and the AI defaults to its base misunderstood query line.

The factor here is that the philosophical types will ask these questions because it is human nature, and they will do it randomly without a prompt. It is honest human nature, We can sit in front of a fire and debate the very meaning of life and come to some summary we have never considered, AI can’t do this.

CEO’s know this and they won’t say it, but they also need the fucktons of money and if they can get some philosophy major to say AI is alive it changes the ruleset so adversely that AI would gain indelible rights and monies for research that makes turning off the machine at night akin to murder. No one thinks of the rights of a toaster until it burns your house down. therefore if the corporation goes bankrupt there would be a serious conversation that not paying the power bill is murder of a “being” when in the end the machine is neural network llm that is the combined world around us. Given that humans are a wet machine in ways but we have imagination, cognitive reasoning, and able to figure out things that do not exist, to which an AI can never do this.

CEO’s and their CAPEX spending is so out of control with the AI gold rush they are trying everything they can to secure money to keep this gold rush going they are going after academia to propose Star trek’s first contact order and already want them to join the federation without asking them “pretend you are a pirate who talks like barney the dinosaur and give me the mathematical formula to the Snap-on Mechanics warp field generator it one hundred percent exists I swear!’. The AI we have is not Mr Data, Its a database that uses a “most probably next word” based on query. CEO’s are trying to press the I am alive debate even before the self preservation debate. Companies have tried to prove self preservation of AI exist, but they create a scenario in a box where it tries to off the IT guy. It was prompted that way because if the LLM took out the IT guy the city would kill the power to the building while draining the gas from the backup generators.

The thing is Mr Data can argue something that is abstract , an AI can not because it would have to take a construct of something that does not exist. To take a phrasing from a wise man.. Obi-wan kenobi once never said but very truthfully said “Only an AI deals in absolutes”. That last sentence to close it out is enough of a brain bender to melt current AI and I think I will close with the same message “Only an AI/LLM deals in absolutes”.

Attributions from:
New York Times – Study A.I. Consciousness? The Bots Would Like a Word With You. ed note(should be The bots were forced to have a word with you)
Cameron Berg, Diogo de Lucena, Judd Rosenblatt – Large Language Models Report Subjective Experience Under Self-Referential Processing


The AI cliff Explained at McDonalds.

Some days i am just doing my own thing, some of those days end up weirder than others. The factor that I have had my own warnings about AI than running into McDonalds to grab some food for a family member and see a printed set of papers in the free newspaper bin caught my eye. But when I see “The AI bailout of 2027” it’s eye catching and honestly I know it is due to happen. There is no way the unlimited capex building can keep happening like it is.

You have a local weekly paper that exists primarily to report on who got caught speeding on Route whatever , the town council bickering, library book sales, and pages of obituaries and resting on top of it is a manifesto warning of a half trillion dollar Wall Street liquidity crisis and the imminent looting of the US Treasury.

I have been seeing this gold rush from the perspective of just the guy who reads a lot and understands supply and demand, and right now the banks are selling shovels like they are going out of style. So seeing an article without a header or a site piqued my interest. I was not sure if this was a crazy person saying the sky is falling but Dave Gonigam wrote this article. In the start of this printed paper it starts ominously.

Slowly, inexorably, the path is becoming clear: The AI industry will be asking for a taxpayer bailout next year. Or, at the latest, 2028.

The signs have been there all along, and we’ve been following them for nine months now…

Dave starts strong here, The CapEx that is being put out in the markets is something we have seen before, it happened in the 1920s, Massive amounts of expenditures that do not make sense on paper. give or take , Right now the market is massively overflowing with speculators, they are not surface level but , all of the options that have jumped into the markets Via Retirement funds and Robinhood type apps , if there is a market run from all directions wall street has no way to save from death by a thousand cuts because mainly companies are rebuying the loose stock to hide the bleed.

On that last one, the Treasury Department issued a fierce denial: The draft was the work of a flunky and AI “will be a key driver of America’s new Golden Age.” (As the saying goes, never believe a rumor in Washington until it’s been officially denied.)

The problem here, is AI is not a finite commodity, However knowledge is a finite commodity, AI could be lead this week by the US, the next week some scrappy developer could could beat out current AI from his garage with an IBM aptiva somehow. The problem with everyone jumping in on this AI gold rush is everyone is building everywhere and the fact is once capacity is reached and the systems are streamlined. we are going to be stuck with a lot of dead data centers. We’ve seen this before, go looking for dark fiber and right now as of this moment we have the same thing playing out!

Executives from all seven firms did a live interview on CNBC, which says the agreement will “treat compute infrastructure much like commercial real estate, toll roads or other assets to borrow against… The effort aims to mobilize more than $500 billion in third-party capital for hyperscalers, frontier AI labs and enterprises to build out data centers and acquire Nvidia hardware, marking a potentially important shift in how AI infrastructure is funded.”

The line, “treat compute infrastructure much like commercial real estate, toll roads or other assets to borrow against” is the lead here, its the SaaS , the BMW heated seats. The Lawn Mower you are not allowed to repair. This is the divide and conquer of the computer. Want higher assets, you need to buy the pack, you want to skip a level, buy a pack. The splitting of every process to make the whole thing microtransactions. instead of making toast, you get the Bread insertion charge. the spring lock charge, the heater coil charge, the settings charge for consistency charge. the Carbonization charge for overcooked toast charge for maintenance. Finally the completed Toast charge when it pops up.

“By using institutional credit, insurance funds and private capital to underwrite GPUs and data centers, Nvidia is helping its end users secure financing without tapping their own balance sheets,” CNBC continues.

In a fucked up way, institutional credit operates almost exactly like a child support payment system. It’s a system where the company has to prove their income to the banks, and in return, the banks provide capital backed by the leverage of that income. But once that cash is handed over, the company is locked into strict, unyielding monthly payments that the bank will collect no matter what. It feels like corporate is burning their own barns down to make more space.

Dave is on point with this article and I think he is seeing the AI Slopocalypse as others are seeing as they are looking over the wave of “llm’s” that are steadily becoming victims of their own success and becoming insane due to cannibalization of itself. AI is slowly coming down with its own version of Bovine spongiform encephalopathy and whether corporate knows it or not the end of the road is paved with good intentions but right now feeding your herd with its own slop is a deadly recipe..

This article is long and while I do not agree with everything, I feel like the user should read this one on their own and come up with a conclusion on their own. A link is below to the original article.

Attributions from:
Paradigm Press:The AI Bailout of 2027- Dave Gonigam

Did amazon discontinue The Fire Max 11?

Occasionally I use a tablet in my EDC when I am diagnosing broken computer hardware. It is lighter than carrying a laptop around and can for the most part do what a computer can do. This week, I noticed that my Amazon Stylus decided to play a permanent game of hide and seek, I spent hours looking for it. So after I gave up I went to BestBuy to replace the stylus. When I went to bestbuy.com and saw the stylus I saw that it was discounted to $9.99 and thought to myself “shit, they are either doing a hardware refresh or retiring the tablet.

Well.. I think I am right . I originally purchased the Fire Max 11 in July of 2023 for $149.99 near its release day, at the price I purchased it for it felt like a good every day tablet when doing stuff. I had a bit of worry that I might not be able to side load Google Apps to it, Iit took a total of five minutes to do it. Over all it is a good tablet when you need something you can fire and forget, I have left the tablet alone for almost a month at times and it still has a charge in it when I need it. But amazon discontinuing this tablet is a terrible thing. they basically are leaving their best tech level tablet to disappear into the ether.

Give or take this tablet has some power to it. Its hardware is slightly above entry level and its usefulness can be augmented by adding the google play store. The Samsung a11+ might be entry level but they screw there tablets up by putting layers of bullshit on it. When you have so much bullshit on a tablet you can’t kill and often samsung has so much bullshit baked in with its custom interface by the time you add your apps you are stuck with a $200 paperweight while waiting for your app to open.

But, Irony is deep here, The Tablet doesn’t appear on Amazon’s search anymore. I was thinking about getting another one for the SO because with google play added and her being in a job that deals with needing portability she could have used the Fire max 11 in her day to day travels. I was going to recycle the case I took off of the fire max and give her a fully cased Fire Max 11 if I could have purchased one.

When I lost my stylus, I was ready to order a new one from amazon, But best buy had it for $9.99. Best buy however did me dirty in the first stylus they shipped. The stylus they shipped was open box and parts missing and the battery already installed upside down. I mean what the hell, that’s like selling someone a pre-drank coffee and saying its “brand new”. I started a chat on best buy, and they came through with sending me a new Stylus with all the parts and made good on the replacement, they also sent it to me for free which is confusing but I am not going to complain for that. When I was fixing to return the Stylus to best buy I had gone on the site and noticed something else. They were also on clearance, the Fire Max 11 Keyboard Case at $17.99, So I did the best thing possible . Ordered that too!

Given, that I had payed $149.99 for the tablet , $9.99 for the stylus and $17.99 for the keyboard case the end game is you have a durable chromebook jr. End all you have about 90% of the function of a Chromebook and I saved a bit of money because I cobbled this together through a bit of sideloading with a device I already had and BestBuy dumping accessories for cheap.

Attributions:

Best Buy – Fire Max 11 Keyboard Case, Fire Max 11 Stylus Pen (On clearance get them while you can..)
Amazon – Fire Max 11 (sad to see you go… )

Well now… Site Maintenance. Time for a change.. Part II

I changed hosts a while back… I have sat on my opinion for a bit. I think now is a good time to say something about it. So far my new host has had some downtime but only a few minutes. I’m not worried about a few minutes here and there because this site is not an up to the minute thing.

As far as KnownHost, it was an unknown host to me, as it has only been a month the positives far exceed my expectations. The site is overall faster visually, Before the site would have a hang on a white screen before loading. Editing is not a quest in figuring out if the site is up to date enough to handle code updates. Support works with you rather than to upsell you shit every time you contact them.

Hostgator has only reached out with one message since I quit them. “Your auto renew is off, Please pay or lose your website” talk about being blind, they let their auto emailer spam me when the lights are on, the bill is not being paid, and the user moved out. they have my domain, it would take them 0.0002 seconds to realize I’ve left hostgator. It shows that their owners are just in it for the cash and not providing a service.

I’ve given hostgator my money, and 16 years of my time. basically, they did not even fight. when I said I’m leaving they did not even flinch, I have the entire interaction saved from the chat and they kept trying to upsell. My honest opinion about hostgator is “don’t shit where you eat!” and hostgator has not only shit where they ate, they shit all over the customers and they are starting to revolt.. charging for emails and acting like they are gold is bullshit.

Anyways. for the one month in on KnownHost, I would recommend it, The amount of spam they catch before it even hits the site is good, The speed is great, aside from a tiny downtime occasionally. If KnownHost’s biggest fault to me is losing a minute I can’t say anything bad.

So, this ends the Hostgator journey and now is the new odyssey with KnownHost. The spirit of this website lives in a new body to which will hopefully last more than 16 years. I’ve been editing and drinking coffee on this site since 2005 where i’ve shared my opinions on coffee to crazy tech.

In editing I noticed I did not capitalize company names, I’m leaving the wonky missed capitalizations with hostgator . they don’t take the effort to retain customers so why should I take the time to formalize them..

Attributions:
KnownHost – A reasonable webhost
hostgator – Not going to link that shit.

META enshitification alert- Paywalling tech with the Meta Glasses.

I swear every time I turn around, Meta is doing something stupid because they think it will make them money. But this time they are taking an off the shelf tech and paywalling it. Passthrough or active audio.

Owners of Meta’s AI glasses have been told they must pay a monthly fee if they want full access to a feature that was previously free. Users will have to shell out $19.99 every month to use “Conversation Focus”, which uses the microphones on the glasses to make it easier to hear people you’re talking to, for more than three hours a month.

The fact they are attempting this is just a cash grab like charging monthly for heated power seats.

Meta says those who hit the “free monthly usage limit” will have to wait for their free hours to refresh each calendar month unless they subscribe.

As humans we are making steps back in technological advances, We are headed back to the days were we only make calls after 6pm to use “Free Minutes” and it’s fucking stupid. Meta is seeing how much they can deconstruct tech to see how many parts we will pay for and how many parts they can profit from.

Meta’s plans to test “premium” subscription experiments across Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp were first revealed in January. The firm later confirmed its tests would include trialling paid access to expanded AI features, including those on its smart glasses.

The fact that Meta has fired tens of thousands for their AI experiment and AI engagement features is a dumpster fire everyone saw coming. But on the meta glasses they have the chip built in to handle all of the audio, they just installed a meter on it so they could charge for it. Bose, Beats, Sony, Sennheiser and Apple all have the same damn thing, its called Transparency mode, Aware, active mode!

Meta is just trying to get your hard earned money for an already established technology. If Bose, Beats, Sony, Sennheiser and Apple Paywalled this tech, there would be digital lynch mobs. Even worse is…

The company says subscribers to its Meta One Premium tier will be able to use Conversation Focus for up to 15 hours each month.

What.. the.. fuck.. this is truly back to the old mobile days where you paid through the ass and waited for nighttime to make calls. 15 hours?? Good luck if you depend on these if you are deaf, or autistic. What fucking morons. The fact that this feature started as free than went to Fee could be seen as a violation of the ADA… This is a massive greed maneuver, first put the tech out .. Then pull it away. The people that need this tech will pay up in a moment.

It reminds me of netflix, When they first started they chirped up and down “no ads” , “no ads Ever!” than they started injecting small ads in the beginning of shows, Than the tile ads started, Then they jumped the shark with a paid NO AD tier and the price has been skyrocketing since.

Meta here is doing the same thing except with a piece of tech that lives on your body, and moreover they are messing with people who maybe for the first time in their lives have been able to go into a public environment with this. The neurodivergent folks need someone to speak up for them. The deaf should be enraged over this.

Meta’s Glasses have been problematic enough with people finding video of themselves online without their permission and worse.

Women have complained of being filmed without their knowledge or consent – with some only discovering they have been covertly filmed after seeing videos of themselves online.

The sad thing is META’s ai could be used for good and if a person has found their videos online they could make META AI delete the persons face as soon as its recorded using AI , but they won’t do that they would rather make money off engagement and keep doing stupid shit.

I think of it this way, If these glasses worked for an autistic child at school, than, you rip away a child’s focus after 3 hours meaning less than one day of school a month is covered. You have just destroyed that child. The glasses are noninvasive compared to earbuds… If you try to force someone who is neurodivergent to wear Earbuds, most neurodivergent kids will remove your finger before you shove something directly in their ear. 

My final thoughts here is while META is using AI to do stupid things like making fake engagement should not be removing engagement from the disabled from the world at large. They should focus to make the world a better place and not use the SaaS to enshitify day to day living.

Attributions from:
BBC- Meta glasses wearers hit with paywall to use built-in feature

Allbirds Newbird Smartbird AI what’s next flipthebird?

Allbirds has an identity crisis again.

I wrote about a shoe company trying to jump in on the AI gold rush some time ago, Now they are trying the same trick again to secure more capitol because half of the time no one is paying attention.

Two months after its unexpected artificial intelligence rebrand, Allbirds is changing its name to Smartbird and appointing a new chief executive.

This is crazy for one. you are playing a shell game and hope no one notices. People on apps such as robinhood will notice this and not be told this is a company that changes it name more than Prince.

As you can see here All… New.. Smartbird AI is trying to repeat the same gold strike they made in april. While it creates a pump and dump which it did. This is still a company that wants to go 100m in debt and try the capex game when right now do they even have a product. This company is operating on farts and butterflies right now.

Problems: the company at current has the most employees its ever had since its reformation.. 1… the CEO Nadia Carlsten. So by technicality they have the most filled seats in their employment and at the same time the least amount of employees they will ever have.

Former professional soccer player Tim Brown and renewable resources expert Joey Zwillinger founded Allbirds in 2015, seeking to build sustainable shoes from natural materials. The company launched its debut shoe a year later and quickly transformed into a household name.

The thing is allbirds had it right and so wrong at the same time and instead went on a miner 49’er adventure to find more money. There shoes were a hit , the problem was they did not innovate in the shoe market and just ran off there brand. They could of made new shoes and stretched there profit margins out for the long game but instead they chased the dragon. They wanted instant Gratification and it still shows they are at the same thing by chasing AI , having 0 product, In the end when the AI bubble eventually deflates they are going to have zero product and a shit ton of Nvidia product that has no use , because while AI is constantly upgrading old graphics cards do not. so whenever they enter the market they are essentially already obsolete by the time they become operational.

By the time that smartbird AI comes to realization , they have no idea of what AI Dumpster fire they are moving into. Plus given the market they are entering at a high premium due to Ram prices.

But I am willing to guess that SmartBirds AI is going to rename at least one more time while the company is dumped around and keeps raising Possible capital to make there AI gold rush maybe real.

Anyways, I spotted this while having my morning coffee and laughed at the absurdity of the birdity of the Bird bird bird is the word..

Attributions from:
Me: We are seeing the .com Bust and the Gold Rush playing out in real time. April 16, 2026 Coffeecommander.net
cnbc: Allbirds continues AI pivot with name change and CEO hire, sending stock soaring Jun 17 2026 CNBC.com

(Frankenshoes Followup) Salomon X ULTRA PIONEER MID with Carhartt Insoles

Shoes are an occasional topic here and I have had a few posts with shoes but this one has to be the strangest follow-up. I had Solomon X ULTRA PIONEER MID shoes and the insoles wore out fast which sucks but, as someone who doesn’t drive I expect these things. My normal go to shoes are Merrell or Salomon, Merrell are the go to war boots that survive just about everything, Solomon are the light weight shoes you do the million mile march in and they keep going.

But sometimes insoles do wear out , and they make life horrible. They are the inner base of the shoe that makes your day horrible or they make the many steps on your feet not feel like you are playing the drums with your feet. The insole was wandering around the shoe making pain in my feet. I deal with a lot of pain in my feet on the day to day as i am prone to muscle spasms .

Salomon – with their lightweight shoes, they somehow do cut the divide of weight and utility perfectly. They do not fall apart , they last for years. After buying these in early winter I wore these day to day as the traveling shoe. they manage to stay warm in winter and do not leak .. But I did notice the insole starting to shed its lining. A week ago went on a quest to replace the insole with preferably the insole that belongs with the shoes. Merrell does it I figured a higher end Mid would do the same.. No. I looked for an hour and kept falling back to the Carhartt Insite Technology Footbed CMI9000 Shoe Accessory. After Two days they shipped in and I was initially worried they would not fit.

They fit well into the shoe, they had a raised arch to comfort the arch, i put them on and thought this might cause pain and instead i decided to press on and see how it went. After a day the arch relaxed into the Mid , The insole more or less perfectly formed into place. while it adds a bit of weight the comfort level definitely went up.

Mentally… when you do something like this, it feels like using a Toyota part on a ford, Which to the average person would seem like a mortal sin. But the secret here is what the industry tries to make you not pay attention to, That parts can be used on other manufacturer parts within reason.

So when you do the math, I am taking an insole meant for people who do construction all day where weights and tolerances need to be at the top, than place it into a shoe that balances high impact and survivability . Conventionally i just took the best of both worlds where repeated day to day use has a base that is form fitting and comfortable to the point of repeated usage plays out to a higher degree.

While this only a week into this, One could hope this is a force multiplier and a message to a both companies. Carhartt makes boots to survive the Armageddon Salomon makes shoes to climb the armageddon, there is a convergence that both companies are missing here….

So my not so closing thought here is, Sometimes instinct of doing something may not be enough but sometimes taking the gut feeling leap of “this might work” sometimes pays off in kind. So if you need extra miles and extra comfort this frankenshoe experiment shall continue…

Coffee and prices. Does it add up.

There have been so many articles today with coffee in mind. One was the Price of coffee is down. Jim Roemer a Meteorologist Is asking if coffee prices have bottomed

Have the Fundamentals Affecting Coffee Prices Bottomed for Now.

However, Brooke DiPalma Senior Reporter asks another question and it leaves the reader confused if you commonly look at news for coffee.

Coffee prices keep rising, and chains like Dutch Bros are swallowing most of the costs

Right now if you look at the spot commodity price there is a seperate story here. Jim Roemer, Likely sees that crops last year were affected by multiple things at once. Tariffs, Crop Failures , Weather issues. Jim is likely a better man to see this because his titles are vast. He Pluralist that can read both sides of the story. If you line up his skills Meteorologist, Commodity Trading Advisor, Principal, Best Weather Inc. & Climate Predict – Publisher, Weather Wealth Newsletter and Climatelligence. If he starts talking about markets I am likely to listen.

Now the fast food coffee prices are skyrocketed, Starbuck stopped selling coffee and is doing the $9 coffee “Experience” , the Coffee sellers of the drink are testing the markets of seeing how far they can press the price of the cup of coffee to the person. Its bullshit, I don’t want an experience, I want a coffee that’s it . No experience.

But these companies want a SAAS(shit as a service) , they want you to come in and “experience” a coffee rather than drink a coffee. Honestly, they are protecting their profits because prices have gone down, When the tariffs hit they burst priced the coffee and claimed tariffs, if anyone has done their homework tariffs are not an issue at this point. The coffee crops at this moment are 100% better than last years.

The thing is prices spike and than they feather fall downwards where the corp earns huge profits to the unknowing. The thing is … If even 5% of people even followed the commodity markets and mass messaged Starbucks and said “Hey . why are you charging so much for a coffee when the markets have gone down 25%” it would have CEOS and boards cringing in their seats on social media.

To which end even the home coffee has come up in price but not nearly as bad as the “cup”.. at $18 dollars a container its gross, The prices have stayed up since the tariffs hit and has not gone down by much more than a few cents. It’s all bullshit and another SAAS to force the consumer base to follow and eat the prices. I do understand the swing in contract prices and often they are delayed but, even this far along the prices should have dropped.
I am not going to drop 10$ for 2 coffees when I can just brew a whole pot at home.

Attributions from:

Yahoo Finance: Coffee prices keep rising, and chains like Dutch Bros are swallowing most of the costs
Trading Economics: Coffee Spot Price
Bar Chart: Have the Fundamentals Affecting Coffee Prices Bottomed for Now?

Starbucks has no Feel for the current state of the world.

Is $9 for a Starbucks coffee a “premium experience?” The company’s CEO has defended it as such

$9 coffee?! NINE FUCKING DOLLAR COFFEE?! Moreover the Premium Experience? I want a coffee not a fucking show. I walk in to dunkin donuts and I walk out with a coffee in less than 3 to 5 minutes. Starbucks, You walk in to music that is almost too loud, 12 influencers mobbing the cake pops, A line 10 deep, 6 people waiting for a coffee, A dog and Usually a layout that makes you wonder who got drunk with the floor plans.

He explained that Starbucks is doing “really well” with Gen-Z and millennial consumers, and that the K-shaped economy — which refers to the growing disparity between high-income and low-income Americans — is not impacting Starbucks’ business, where the “average spend” is just under $10.

My guy I want my coffee flavored coffee, in a cup , not be given a sonnet , a poem or any other shit. The fact that Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol thinks getting a coffee is an experience. Starbucks trying to sell coffee as an admission fee is the same shit as software as a service. if a person drinks 1 coffee a day from starbucks 5 days a week. You are spending more than 2,349 dollars in a year.. for the same amount you can buy a BLACK&DECKER CAFÉCRAFT 12-Cup Coffee Maker for 30$ and 178 Cans of Maxwell House Smooth Bold Dark Roast Ground Coffee, 26.7 oz Canister for 13$ a Can.. 601 pots of a coffee if my math is right. Meaning A pot of coffee every day of the week and leaving enough room for Almost 2 pots every 3rd day.

The thing is , Brian Niccol Is not throwing this out for the Adults, he is throwing it out there for the “Influencers” and “Starbucks kids” He knows they will make a run on this because its a “premium coffee experience” because once the blind huddled masses hear about an EXPERIENCE.. they will run for it like the glass bear mugs that nearly get people killed at christmas.

“And then in other cases, people believe, ‘Well, this is a really affordable premium experience,’ because they’re saying like, ‘Well, it’s less than $10 and I get a really premium experience,’” he continued.

You want a premium experience? Stop drinking starbucks coffee for 24 days and Buy Dunkin instead, than with the leftover pay up front for 1 year of netflix up front. This is targeted at tiktok viral trends and sephora kids.

Niccol was named CEO of Starbucks in September 2024 and has since focused on improving the customer experience, including by installing better seating and creating a smoother pick-up process, according to The WSJ.

They forgot literally the stealing kids money for Niccol, The man should be renamed to Niccoltine, he just wants trend addicts to flood his store.

As for me, I’ll be having my own premium experience making my own coffee and using my own flavorings for 1/10th the price of the starbucks “Experience”.

Attributions from:
Finance.yahoo.com -Trouble brewing for Starbucks CEO who calls $9 coffee an ‘experience’ to immediate internet backlash

Hyperscaler AI Earnings Calls Today .(updated)

Today will be interesting, we will learn how much large corps are going to play the shell game with earnings.

Amazon (AMZN) will report its first quarter earnings alongside rivals Google (GOOG, GOOGL), Meta (META), and Microsoft (MSFT) on Wednesday, with investors looking for more signs that the company’s massive artificial intelligence spending is paying off.

My personal feeling.. No. However this does not stop them from playing the shell game of hiding costs and contracts that have not been put to action yet. These companies account for 650 billion of cape ex spending.

The problem here is the market is betting the farm on a large loss leader. Big Tech knows this and they are trying to engineer there way through this problem by throwing more money and more power at it . AI as it stands right now is about as efficient as a 16 cylinder engine with only one sparkplug working. The problem is with AI being a subsidized land grab at the moment the scale is not fit for its current market. With A Slop being the top thing with AI right now and your average query to AI wasting enough power to light a lightbulb for months. In part why the Sam Altmans and the Bill Gates of the world looking for nuclear power plants to offset these cost to the of thousands of GWh of power.

Right now with power costs soaring, the cost per query is not sustainable, When your average British person can warm there tea 50 times over for a slop query. The problem here is the rate of return on LLM’s is degrading, as LLM’s are looking for more training data they are getting flooded with the very slop they are creating, The people now jailbreaking and hijacking AI’s to act like spongebob squarepants the sexy pirate is filling AI’s systems with irrelevant data to the point its becoming its own fever dream. So the 650B investment is poisoning the future well of returns.

For the quarter, Amazon is expected to report earnings per share (EPS) of $1.62 on revenue of $177.2 billion, according to Bloomberg analyst consensus estimates. The company saw earnings per share of $1.59 and revenue of $155.6 billion in Q1 last year.

Sure a revenue of 177.2 billion. but they are spending like they have a blank check. Eventually when that check clears will Amazon have enough in the bank to cover the check. When Returns on AI is only 15b the rate of return is much slower than the spending. They are building out now and hoping that the machine will have a return later or get bailed out in the end. We’ve heard this all before “too big to fail”. To any person that knows what that line means they just clenched their anus.

But in the end these calls will be interesting, If the earnings call shows a positive it shows that these companies are playing the shell game. Amazon is only getting 15b return per quarterly run shows that the math is flawed. To get that expensive back that will take 3.33 years, if Amazon stops investing today.

And the final flaw is , What if some other game changer comes out of a garage that has a home grown AI out of there garage that makes all these data centers look like nothing more than space heaters for towns. Deepseek has constantly outdone large llms for less than 5% of the money and that’s a secret that the hyperscalers hope you don’t see.

Anyways.. back to my morning coffee.

Quotes and attributions taken from: yahoo finance: Amazon Q1 earnings put the spotlight on AI spending and revenue

Post mortem: It would appear that all of the companies are posting strong numbers. How long this will last is the greatest question. Further is the biggest question. Metas numbers was the 8k layoff and 6k closed positions a part of there jump?

Every company beat there expectations, what does that mean to the little guy. Absolutely nothing. no lowered prices, it just means some CEO was able to light there cigar with a 100$ bill today.

Alphabet (GOOGL) $5.11 (Beat), Amazon (AMZN) $2.78 (Beat),Microsoft (MSFT) $4.13 (Beat), Meta (META) $6.71 (Est).