Beautiful Japan Pool

20250605 Akabane+Omiya 11

BONGURI has added a photo to the pool:

20250605 Akabane+Omiya 11

大きな瓶に花を浮かべて実質花手水。
Photo taken at Hikawa shrine, Omiya ward, Saitama city, Saitama pref.

2025-07-01 05:50:45

home - NRC

home

Cartoonisten opgepakt in Turkije vanwege Mohammed-cartoon

Turkse autoriteiten noemen de tekening een „ondermijning van religieuze waarden”. Volgens de hoofdredacteur van het weekblad is de cartoon verkeerd geïnterpreteerd.
2025-07-01 05:50:20

Wel.nl

Minder lezen, Meer weten.

ABN AMRO grotere speler in Duitsland na afronding overname HAL

AMSTERDAM (ANP) - ABN AMRO heeft de overname afgerond van de Duitse bank Hauck Aufhäuser Lampe (HAL). Daardoor wordt Bethmann Bank, de vermogensbeheertak van ABN AMRO in Duitsland, daar een van de grootste bankspelers voor vermogende particuliere klanten en familiebedrijven.

De nieuwe combinatie heeft 2000 medewerkers op achttien locaties in Duitsland en Luxemburg. Het gezamenlijke beheerd vermogen bedraagt meer dan 70 miljard euro.

De overname werd in mei vorig jaar al aangekondigd. Destijds maakte de bank al bekend 672 miljoen euro te betalen voor de uitbreiding in Duitsland. Maar toen moesten toezichthouders nog akkoord gaan. Nu zijn alle benodigde goedkeuringen binnen.

Hauck & Aufhäuser is in 1796 opgericht en daarmee een van de oudste banken in Duitsland. De laatste jaren was de bank in handen van het Chinese conglomeraat Fosun International. Fosun nam de bank in 2015 over en kocht in 2021 ook concurrent Bankhaus Lampe, waardoor HAL ontstond.


2025-07-01 05:48:16

Omstandigheden industrie voor het eerst in jaar tijd verbeterd

ZEIST (ANP) - De bedrijfsomstandigheden in de Nederlandse industrie zijn voor het eerst in twaalf maanden tijd verbeterd. Zo kwamen er meer orders binnen, onder andere uit het buitenland. Ook steeg de werkgelegenheid licht en hadden ondernemingen in de industrie minder last van prijsstijgingen, meldt de Nederlandse Vereniging voor Inkoopmanagement (Nevi) op basis van haar maandelijkse enquête.

De graadmeter van de Nevi voor de stand van zaken in de industrie steeg in juni naar 51,2, tegen 49 in mei. Ieder cijfer boven de 50 wijst op groei van de bedrijvigheid in de industrie.

De ontwikkeling is opvallend, want de Verenigde Staten zijn onder president Donald Trump nog altijd verwikkeld in handelsconflicten met de Europese Unie en andere grote handelspartners. Econoom Albert Jan Swart van ABN AMRO stelt dat de verbetering mogelijk te danken is aan "voorzichtig herstel" van de Duitse industrie.


2025-07-01 05:39:46

GVB blijft vervoerder in Amsterdam en breidt dienstregeling uit

AMSTERDAM (ANP) - GVB blijft het openbaar stadsvervoer in en om Amsterdam verzorgen. Het dagelijks bestuur van de Vervoerregio Amsterdam heeft dat besloten. De stadsvervoerder zet in op meer en beter ov in de stad.

Het was een tijd onzeker of GVB na 125 jaar door mocht gaan met het rijden van bussen, trams en metro's in en rond Amsterdam, maar dat is nu voorbij. De nieuwe concessie geldt vanaf 1 juli en in maart 2026 gaat de nieuwe dienstregeling in, met 4 procent meer ov.

Voorzitter van de Vervoerregio Amsterdam Melanie van der Horst is "ontzettend blij" met het besluit. "Met deze concessie komt er meer en beter ov in de stad." De CEO van GVB, Claudia Zuiderwijk, is er "trots op dat onze opdrachtgever ons het vertrouwen heeft gegeven om deze rol te vervullen. Zo kunnen we bijdragen aan de groei van Amsterdam met een steeds uitgebreider ov-aanbod".


2025-07-01 05:32:15

Nog altijd problemen op A9 na dodelijk ongeval

BADHOEVEDORP (ANP) - Op de A9 bij knooppunt Badhoevedorp zijn dinsdagochtend nog altijd problemen na een dodelijk ongeval van maandagavond. De weg richting Amstelveen is voorlopig nog dicht, en Rijkswaterstaat zegt nog niet te weten hoe laat de weg weer wordt vrijgegeven.

De wegafsluiting leidt tot lange files op de omliggende wegen. Verkeer richting Utrecht krijgt vanaf knooppunt Raasdorp het advies om Zaandam te volgen, via de A5.

Bij het ongeval op maandagavond kwam iemand om het leven, ook vielen er meerdere gewonden. Er waren een personenauto en een vrachtwagen bij het ongeval betrokken.

De weg was enige tijd in beide richtingen dicht, maar richting Alkmaar werd de snelweg eerder alweer vrijgegeven.


2025-07-01 05:25:39

Detailhandel zet ruim 2 procent meer om, volume daalt licht

DEN HAAG (ANP) - Winkeliers in Nederland hebben in mei meer omzet gedraaid dan een jaar eerder, meldt het Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek (CBS). De totale omzet in de detailhandel steeg met 2,2 procent, na een stijging van 3,9 procent in april. Het volume, ofwel de hoeveelheid verkochte spullen of voedingsmiddelen, lag 0,4 procent lager dan een jaar geleden. Online steeg de omzet met 4,7 procent.

Bij winkels in voedings- en genotmiddelen steeg de omzet met 1,7 procent, terwijl het verkoopvolume met 3,2 procent afnam. De omzet van supermarkten lag 1,4 procent hoger, na een stijging van 1,6 procent in april. De omzet van speciaalzaken steeg met 3,6 procent. In april steeg hun omzet nog met 8,4 procent.


2025-07-01 05:09:02

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period.

Pluralistic: How much (little) are the AI companies making? (30 Jun 2025)


Today's links


A carny barker waving his top-hat and selling tickets from a roll; his head has been replaced with the hostile red eye of HAL9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' The background is a magnified, halftoned detail from a US$100 bill.

How much (little) are the AI companies making? (permalink)

If there's one are where tech has shown a consistent aptitude for innovation, it's in accounting tricks that make money-losing companies appear wildly profitable. And AI is the greatest innovator of all (when it comes to accounting gimmicks).

Since the dotcom era, tech companies have boasted about giving stuff away but "making it up in volume," inventing an ever-sweatier collection of shell-games that let them hide the business's true profit and loss.

The all-time world champeen of this kind of finance fraud is Masayoshi Son, the founder of Softbank, who acts as the bagman for the Saudi royals' personal investments. Remember last decade when the tech press was all abuzz about "unicorns" – startups that were worth $1b? That was Son: he would take a startup like Wework, declare its brand to be worth $1b, invest an infinitesimal fraction of $1b in the company based on that valuation (sometimes with a rube co-investor) and declare the valuation to be "market-based." A whole string of garbage companies achieved unicornhood by means of this unbelievably stupid trick:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/27/voluntary-carbon-market/#trust-me

Of course, every finance bro is familiar with Stein's Law: "anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." Sure, the Saudi royals could be tapped to piss away $31b on Uber, losing $0.41 on every dollar for 13 years, but eventually they're going to turn off the money spigot and attempt to flog their shares to retail and institutional suckers. To make that work, they have to invent new accounting tricks, like when Uber "sold" its failing overseas ride-hailing businesses to international rivals in exchange for stock, then declared that these companies' illiquid stock had skyrocketed in value, tipping Uber into the black:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/05/a-lousy-taxi/#a-giant-asterisk

Even companies that are actually profitable (in the sense of bringing in more revenue than it costs to keep the business's lights on) love to juice their stats, and the worst offenders are the Big Tech companies, who reap a vast commercial reward from creating the illusion that they are continuing to grow, even after they've dominated their sector.

Take Google: once the company attained a 90% global search market-share, there were no more immediate prospects for growth. I mean, sure, they could raise a billion new humans to maturity and train them to be Google customers (e.g., the business plan for Google Classroom), but that takes more than a decade, and Google needed growth right away. So the company hatched a plan to make search worse, so that its existing users would have to search multiple times to get the information they sought, and each additional search would give Google another chance to show you an ad:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

But that was small potatoes. What Google – and the rest of the tech sector – needed was a massive growth story, a story about how their companies, worth trillions of dollars, could double or triple in size in the coming years. There's a kind of reflexive anti-capitalist critique that locates the drive to tell growth stories in ideology: "endless growth is the ideology of a tumor," right?

But spinning an endless growth story isn't merely ideological. It's a firmly materialistic undertaking. Companies that appear to be growing have market caps that are an order of magnitude larger than companies that are consisdered "mature" and at the end of their growth phase. For every dollar that Ford brings in, the market is willing to spend $8.60 on its stock. For every dollar Tesla brings in, the market is willing to spend $118 on its stock.

That means that when Tesla and Ford compete to buy something – like another company, or the labor of highly sought after technical specialists – Tesla has a nearly unbeatable advantage. Rather than raiding its precious cash reserves to fund its offer, Tesla can offer stock. Tesla can only spend as many dollars as it brings in through sales, but Tesla can make more stock, on demand, simply by typing numbers into a spreadsheet.

So when Tesla bids against Ford, Ford has to use dollars, and Tesla can use shares. And even if the acquisition target – a key employee or a startup that's on the acquisitions market – wants dollars instead of shares, Tesla can stake its shares as collateral for loans at a rate that's 1,463% better than the rate Ford gets when it collateralizes a loan based on its own equity:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/07/rah-rah-rasputin/#credulous-dolts

In other words, if you can tell a convincing growth story, it's much easier to grow. The corollary, though, is that when a growth company stops growing, when it becomes "mature," it experiences a massive sell-off of its stock, as its share price plummets to a tenth or less of the old "growth" valuation. That's why the biggest tech companies in the world have spent the past decade – the decade after they monopolized their sectors and conquered the world – pumping a series of progressively stupider bubbles: metaverse, cryptocurrency, and now, AI.

Tech companies don't need these ventures to be successful – they just need them to seem to be plausibly successful for long enough to keep the share price high until the next growth story heaves over the horizon. So long as Mister Market thinks tech is a "growth" sector and not a "mature" sector, tech bosses will be able to continue to pay for things with stock rather than cash, and their own stockholdings will continue to be valued at sky-high rates.

That's why AI is being crammed into absofuckingloutely everything. it's why the button you used to tap to start a new chat summons up an AI that takes seven taps to banish again – it's so tech companies can tell Wall Street that people are "using AI" which means that their companies are still part of a growth industry and thus entitled to gigantic price-to-earnings ratios:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/02/kpis-off/#principal-agentic-ai-problem

The reality, of course, is that people hate AI. Telling people that your product is "AI enabled" makes less likely to use it:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19368623.2024.2368040#d1e1096

People – who have had an infinitude of AI crammed into down their throats – are already sick of AI. Policymakers and financiers – credulous dolts who fall for tech marketing hype every! fucking! time – are convinced that AI Is The Future. This presents a dilemma for tech companies, who research the hell out of how people actually use their products and thus must be extremely aware of how hated AI is, but whose leadership is desperate to show investors that they are about to experience explosive growth through the miracle of AI.

The reality is that AI is a very bad business. It has dogshit unit economics. Unlike all the successful tech of the 21st century, each generation of AI is more expensive to make, not cheaper. And unlike the most profitable tech services of this century, AI gets more costly to operate the more users it has.

You can be forgiven for not knowing this, though. As Ed Zitron points out in a long, excellent article about the credulity and impuissance of the tech press, the actual numbers suuuuuck:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/make-fun-of-them/

  • Microsoft

Spending: $80b in 2025

Projecting: $13b in 2025

Actually: $10b comes from Openai giving back compute credits Microsoft gave to Openai, bringing the true total to $3b.

  • Meta

Spending: $72b in 2025

Receiving: At most $600m in gross revenue from selling "smart" Raybans, which might not actually be loss-leaders, meaning it's possible that they're making less than $0.00.

  • Amazon

Spending: $100b in 2025

Projecting: $5b in revenue in 2025

  • Google

Spending: $75b in 2025

Projecting: They won't say, possibly zero.

As Zitron points out: this industry is projecting $327b in spending this year, with $18b in revenue and zero profits. For comparison: smart watches are a $32b/year industry.

Now, what about Openai? Well, they're one of Masoyoshi Son's special children, of a piece with Wework and Uber. Openai is projecting $12.7b in revenue this year, with losses of $14b. Add in a bunch of also-rans like Perplexity and Surge, and the revenue rises to $32.3b. But…if you chuck them in, you also get total exenditure of $370.8b.

These are by no means the only funny numbers in the AI industry. Take "Stargate," a data-center initiative with a price tag of $500b. Actual funds committed? $40b.

These are terrible numbers, but also, these are some genuinely impressive accounting gimmicks. They are certain to keep the bubble pumping for months or perhaps years, convincing gullible bosses to fire talented employees and replace them with bumbling chatbots that will linger for years or decades, the asbestos in the walls of our high-tech civilization.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Wil Wheaton’s Slashdot interview https://slashdot.org/story/05/06/27/0926218/wil-wheaton-strikes-back

#20yrsago Anti-DRM badges https://web.archive.org/web/20050701004506/http://nootropic.blogspot.com/2005/06/gallery-of-drm-related-antipixel.html

#15yrsago ACLU: America is riddled with politically motivated surveillance https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/Spyfiles_2_0.pdf

#15yrsago Toronto cops justify extreme G20 measures with display of LARPing props, weapons from unrelated busts https://web.archive.org/web/20100702002151/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/weapons-seized-in-g20-arrests-put-on-display/article1622761/

#15yrsago Copyright best practices for communications scholars https://web.archive.org/web/20100628005458/http://centerforsocialmedia.org/fair-use/related-materials/codes/code-best-practices-fair-use-scholarly-research-communication

#15yrsago G20 police used imaginary law to jail harass demonstrators and jailed protestors in dangerous and abusive “detention center” https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/29/g20-police-used-imaginary-law-to-jail-harass-demonstrators-and-jailed-protestors-in-dangerous-and-abusive-detention-center/

#15yrsago Canada repeating Britain’s dirty copyright legislation process https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jun/29/canada-copyright-digital-economy

#15yrsago London cops enforce imaginary law against brave, principled teenaged photographer https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/officers-claim-they-don-t-need-law-to-stop-photographer-taking-pictures-2012827.html

#15yrsago Globe and Mail journalist arrested and kettled at G20 Toronto https://web.archive.org/web/20100630110103/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/g8-g20/toronto/caught-in-the-storm-penned-in-at-queen-street/article1621255/

#15yrsago UK government hushed up internal analysis of anti-drug strategy to avoid ridicule https://transform-drugs.blogspot.com/2010/06/home-office-internal-document-reveals.html

#15yrsago My Twitter debate with Minister who introduced Canada’s DMCA https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/28/my-twitter-debate-with-minister-who-introduced-canadas-dmca/

#10yrsago Why I’m leaving London https://memex.craphound.com/2015/06/29/why-im-leaving-london/

#10yrsago Neal Stephenson on the story behind Seveneves http://www.bookotron.com/agony/audio/2015/2015-interviews/neal_stephenson-2015.mp3

#10yrsago Brian Wood’s Starve: get to your comic shop now! https://memex.craphound.com/2015/06/29/brian-woods-starve-get-to-your-comic-shop-now/

#10yrsago BBC’s list of pages de-indexed through Europe’s “right to be forgotten” https://www.bbc.co.uk/webarchive/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fblogs%2Finternet%2Fentries%2F1d765aa8-600b-4f32-b110-d02fbf7fd379

#5yrsago NYC housing lottery favors the least-needy https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#market-failure

#5yrsago Facebook and Trump collaborate on rule-rigging https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#fb-hearts-dt

#5yrsago How to break up Google https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#braygoog

#5yrsago Female Furies https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#apokolips-now

#5yrsago Bailouts should come with strings attached https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/28/kings-shilling/#tanstaafl

#1yrago The reason you can't buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/28/dealer-management-software/#antonin-scalia-stole-your-car

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links


A carny barker waving his top-hat and selling tickets from a roll; his head has been replaced with the hostile red eye of HAL9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' The background is a magnified, halftoned detail from a US$100 bill.

How much (little) are the AI companies making? (permalink)

If there's one are where tech has shown a consistent aptitude for innovation, it's in accounting tricks that make money-losing companies appear wildly profitable. And AI is the greatest innovator of all (when it comes to accounting gimmicks).

Since the dotcom era, tech companies have boasted about giving stuff away but "making it up in volume," inventing an ever-sweatier collection of shell-games that let them hide the business's true profit and loss.

The all-time world champeen of this kind of finance fraud is Masayoshi Son, the founder of Softbank, who acts as the bagman for the Saudi royals' personal investments. Remember last decade when the tech press was all abuzz about "unicorns" – startups that were worth $1b? That was Son: he would take a startup like Wework, declare its brand to be worth $1b, invest an infinitesimal fraction of $1b in the company based on that valuation (sometimes with a rube co-investor) and declare the valuation to be "market-based." A whole string of garbage companies achieved unicornhood by means of this unbelievably stupid trick:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/27/voluntary-carbon-market/#trust-me

Of course, every finance bro is familiar with Stein's Law: "anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." Sure, the Saudi royals could be tapped to piss away $31b on Uber, losing $0.41 on every dollar for 13 years, but eventually they're going to turn off the money spigot and attempt to flog their shares to retail and institutional suckers. To make that work, they have to invent new accounting tricks, like when Uber "sold" its failing overseas ride-hailing businesses to international rivals in exchange for stock, then declared that these companies' illiquid stock had skyrocketed in value, tipping Uber into the black:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/05/a-lousy-taxi/#a-giant-asterisk

Even companies that are actually profitable (in the sense of bringing in more revenue than it costs to keep the business's lights on) love to juice their stats, and the worst offenders are the Big Tech companies, who reap a vast commercial reward from creating the illusion that they are continuing to grow, even after they've dominated their sector.

Take Google: once the company attained a 90% global search market-share, there were no more immediate prospects for growth. I mean, sure, they could raise a billion new humans to maturity and train them to be Google customers (e.g., the business plan for Google Classroom), but that takes more than a decade, and Google needed growth right away. So the company hatched a plan to make search worse, so that its existing users would have to search multiple times to get the information they sought, and each additional search would give Google another chance to show you an ad:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

But that was small potatoes. What Google – and the rest of the tech sector – needed was a massive growth story, a story about how their companies, worth trillions of dollars, could double or triple in size in the coming years. There's a kind of reflexive anti-capitalist critique that locates the drive to tell growth stories in ideology: "endless growth is the ideology of a tumor," right?

But spinning an endless growth story isn't merely ideological. It's a firmly materialistic undertaking. Companies that appear to be growing have market caps that are an order of magnitude larger than companies that are consisdered "mature" and at the end of their growth phase. For every dollar that Ford brings in, the market is willing to spend $8.60 on its stock. For every dollar Tesla brings in, the market is willing to spend $118 on its stock.

That means that when Tesla and Ford compete to buy something – like another company, or the labor of highly sought after technical specialists – Tesla has a nearly unbeatable advantage. Rather than raiding its precious cash reserves to fund its offer, Tesla can offer stock. Tesla can only spend as many dollars as it brings in through sales, but Tesla can make more stock, on demand, simply by typing numbers into a spreadsheet.

So when Tesla bids against Ford, Ford has to use dollars, and Tesla can use shares. And even if the acquisition target – a key employee or a startup that's on the acquisitions market – wants dollars instead of shares, Tesla can stake its shares as collateral for loans at a rate that's 1,463% better than the rate Ford gets when it collateralizes a loan based on its own equity:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/07/rah-rah-rasputin/#credulous-dolts

In other words, if you can tell a convincing growth story, it's much easier to grow. The corollary, though, is that when a growth company stops growing, when it becomes "mature," it experiences a massive sell-off of its stock, as its share price plummets to a tenth or less of the old "growth" valuation. That's why the biggest tech companies in the world have spent the past decade – the decade after they monopolized their sectors and conquered the world – pumping a series of progressively stupider bubbles: metaverse, cryptocurrency, and now, AI.

Tech companies don't need these ventures to be successful – they just need them to seem to be plausibly successful for long enough to keep the share price high until the next growth story heaves over the horizon. So long as Mister Market thinks tech is a "growth" sector and not a "mature" sector, tech bosses will be able to continue to pay for things with stock rather than cash, and their own stockholdings will continue to be valued at sky-high rates.

That's why AI is being crammed into absofuckingloutely everything. it's why the button you used to tap to start a new chat summons up an AI that takes seven taps to banish again – it's so tech companies can tell Wall Street that people are "using AI" which means that their companies are still part of a growth industry and thus entitled to gigantic price-to-earnings ratios:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/02/kpis-off/#principal-agentic-ai-problem

The reality, of course, is that people hate AI. Telling people that your product is "AI enabled" makes less likely to use it:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19368623.2024.2368040#d1e1096

People – who have had an infinitude of AI crammed into down their throats – are already sick of AI. Policymakers and financiers – credulous dolts who fall for tech marketing hype every! fucking! time – are convinced that AI Is The Future. This presents a dilemma for tech companies, who research the hell out of how people actually use their products and thus must be extremely aware of how hated AI is, but whose leadership is desperate to show investors that they are about to experience explosive growth through the miracle of AI.

The reality is that AI is a very bad business. It has dogshit unit economics. Unlike all the successful tech of the 21st century, each generation of AI is more expensive to make, not cheaper. And unlike the most profitable tech services of this century, AI gets more costly to operate the more users it has.

You can be forgiven for not knowing this, though. As Ed Zitron points out in a long, excellent article about the credulity and impuissance of the tech press, the actual numbers suuuuuck:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/make-fun-of-them/

  • Microsoft

Spending: $80b in 2025

Projecting: $13b in 2025

Actually: $10b comes from Openai giving back compute credits Microsoft gave to Openai, bringing the true total to $3b.

  • Meta

Spending: $72b in 2025

Receiving: At most $600m in gross revenue from selling "smart" Raybans, which might not actually be loss-leaders, meaning it's possible that they're making less than $0.00.

  • Amazon

Spending: $100b in 2025

Projecting: $5b in revenue in 2025

  • Google

Spending: $75b in 2025

Projecting: They won't say, possibly zero.

As Zitron points out: this industry is projecting $327b in spending this year, with $18b in revenue and zero profits. For comparison: smart watches are a $32b/year industry.

Now, what about Openai? Well, they're one of Masoyoshi Son's special children, of a piece with Wework and Uber. Openai is projecting $12.7b in revenue this year, with losses of $14b. Add in a bunch of also-rans like Perplexity and Surge, and the revenue rises to $32.3b. But…if you chuck them in, you also get total exenditure of $370.8b.

These are by no means the only funny numbers in the AI industry. Take "Stargate," a data-center initiative with a price tag of $500b. Actual funds committed? $40b.

These are terrible numbers, but also, these are some genuinely impressive accounting gimmicks. They are certain to keep the bubble pumping for months or perhaps years, convincing gullible bosses to fire talented employees and replace them with bumbling chatbots that will linger for years or decades, the asbestos in the walls of our high-tech civilization.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Wil Wheaton’s Slashdot interview https://slashdot.org/story/05/06/27/0926218/wil-wheaton-strikes-back

#20yrsago Anti-DRM badges https://web.archive.org/web/20050701004506/http://nootropic.blogspot.com/2005/06/gallery-of-drm-related-antipixel.html

#15yrsago ACLU: America is riddled with politically motivated surveillance https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/Spyfiles_2_0.pdf

#15yrsago Toronto cops justify extreme G20 measures with display of LARPing props, weapons from unrelated busts https://web.archive.org/web/20100702002151/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/weapons-seized-in-g20-arrests-put-on-display/article1622761/

#15yrsago Copyright best practices for communications scholars https://web.archive.org/web/20100628005458/http://centerforsocialmedia.org/fair-use/related-materials/codes/code-best-practices-fair-use-scholarly-research-communication

#15yrsago G20 police used imaginary law to jail harass demonstrators and jailed protestors in dangerous and abusive “detention center” https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/29/g20-police-used-imaginary-law-to-jail-harass-demonstrators-and-jailed-protestors-in-dangerous-and-abusive-detention-center/

#15yrsago Canada repeating Britain’s dirty copyright legislation process https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jun/29/canada-copyright-digital-economy

#15yrsago London cops enforce imaginary law against brave, principled teenaged photographer https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/officers-claim-they-don-t-need-law-to-stop-photographer-taking-pictures-2012827.html

#15yrsago Globe and Mail journalist arrested and kettled at G20 Toronto https://web.archive.org/web/20100630110103/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/g8-g20/toronto/caught-in-the-storm-penned-in-at-queen-street/article1621255/

#15yrsago UK government hushed up internal analysis of anti-drug strategy to avoid ridicule https://transform-drugs.blogspot.com/2010/06/home-office-internal-document-reveals.html

#15yrsago My Twitter debate with Minister who introduced Canada’s DMCA https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/28/my-twitter-debate-with-minister-who-introduced-canadas-dmca/

#10yrsago Why I’m leaving London https://memex.craphound.com/2015/06/29/why-im-leaving-london/

#10yrsago Neal Stephenson on the story behind Seveneves http://www.bookotron.com/agony/audio/2015/2015-interviews/neal_stephenson-2015.mp3

#10yrsago Brian Wood’s Starve: get to your comic shop now! https://memex.craphound.com/2015/06/29/brian-woods-starve-get-to-your-comic-shop-now/

#10yrsago BBC’s list of pages de-indexed through Europe’s “right to be forgotten” https://www.bbc.co.uk/webarchive/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fblogs%2Finternet%2Fentries%2F1d765aa8-600b-4f32-b110-d02fbf7fd379

#5yrsago NYC housing lottery favors the least-needy https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#market-failure

#5yrsago Facebook and Trump collaborate on rule-rigging https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#fb-hearts-dt

#5yrsago How to break up Google https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#braygoog

#5yrsago Female Furies https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#apokolips-now

#5yrsago Bailouts should come with strings attached https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/28/kings-shilling/#tanstaafl

#1yrago The reason you can't buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/28/dealer-management-software/#antonin-scalia-stole-your-car

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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ISSN: 3066-764X

2025-07-01 05:41:30

From xiffy's contacts

ajpscs posted a photo:

TOKYO FORM - Folded City
© ajpscs

2025-07-01 05:37:31

The Register

Biting the hand that feeds IT — Enterprise Technology News and Analysis

DRAM spot prices doubled last week

Fears that DDR4 has hit the end of the road and the return of tariffs may be to blame

Spot prices for DRAM have doubled in the last week, perhaps due to…

2025-07-01 05:33:09