Don’t know how to tell people this, but the world doesn’t really need America to be the country everyone relies on. We may be better off with diversity. Increase your international exposure.

True. But the US want to remain the country everyone relies on if it wants to preserve the dollar as the world's primary trade, reserve and settlement currency.

Dollar dominance gives the US disproportionate leverage over global finance and allows it to shape the rules of the system. Absent this asymmetry, it is difficult to imagine US tariffs or financial pressure (or any kind of pressure) would carry comparable global impact.

Totally - it is the best outcome for the world. As an American, it is sad to see the loss of status, power, everything that is coming our way in the near future.

America's identity has always been founded on being the best, without that, it will be difficult to see what we're even about anymore.

What are you talking about? The US navy protects the commercial shipment routes around the world.

Before the US Navy did that, the Royal Navy did. The work needs to be done, but it doesn't have to be the US doing it.

Likely soon corporate owned drones will protect commercial shipping routes I would think. Not sure if bad actors (pirates?!) will have their own drones.

I’m sure that China would be happy to take over.

The gratuitous hostility undermines your point.

I have made some purchasing decisions on expensive products based on analysis ChatGPT has done for me, if they can capitalize on that, it could be a decent way to make some money, as long as they remain unbiased and basically just function as an affiliate marketer. Sometimes I do want to be sold on something.

What is the point for a company to pay OpenAI for products that it would recommend anyway? Companies are going to pay only if they can add bias to the results otherwise there is no point.

Many of the advertising targets (you) will have confessed or indirectly revealed many of their aspirations, interests, hobbies, health, life and relationship problems and preferences in “chat”

In a way they can’t get due to increased use of ad blockers or tightening restrictions on data brokers (California and EU GPDR) etc.

So it’ll be very competitive for an advertiser to go with your ai “friend” who knows all about your hemmorhoids, booze and sex problems. All of which Google and Meta can infer or at least pin on you via guilt by association.

Meta screwed that one by breaking up known connections and communities and putting AI slop and promoted content front and center . They can infer less from who you know or interact with because they stopped caring about connecting you to real humans you actually know, years ago.

Banning all your friends and breaking up all those core groups for voting wrong or thinking wrong or whatever more closely suited their interests and agendas at the time.

It might know what I do for work or living based on what I ask for help with etc.

While this seems cool at first, it does not demonstrate superiority over a true custom built AI for rollercoaster tycoon.

It is a curiosity, good for headlines, but the takeaway is if you really need an actual good AI, you are still better off not using an LLM powered solution.

That goal is no longer possible.

I agree that staying below 1.5°C is extremely unlikely at this point. But it is still worthwhile to try to keep it under 1.6°C.

Here’s the thing about stock markets: if you think it’s inflated or there’s a bubble, great, you can pull your money out. But then you look around and try to figure out a better place to put your money long term, and where does that bring you?

Back to the stock market.

What is this supposed to mean? Yes, people are unhappy with the choice of "high risk of losing 1/2 of your savings at an inopportune moment" and "watch it all decay away thanks to our inherently inflationary regime".

> high risk of losing 1/2 of your savings at an inopportune moment

Operative word being moment. The volatility is irrelevant if you wait it out long enough, hence "long term". If you need a shorter term low-risk investment vehicle, that's what treasury bills/notes are for.

> watch it all decay away thanks to our inherently inflationary regime

Any alternative investment strategy is equally affected by inflation.

These days canned food often seems like a good investment

> Back to the stock market.

It’s a very different calculus when nominal bonds are paying 5% and TIPS are paying 2.6% above inflation.

The nowhere to go but the stocks holds more water when the ten year was paying 0.55%.

> TIPS are paying 2.6% above inflation.

2.6% above CPI. Investor calculus should include a consideration of how CPI is set vs what their actual personal rate of inflation will be.

If you think it will go down you can short the market.

If you think it will go up just more slowly well that’s hardly all that bad?

Is this the answer for citizens of countries other than America? I don't think it is.

Is there a better stock market than the US stock market?

To augment sibling replies: depends on one's, subjective and highly personal, portfolio and financial strategy. But U.S. has a strong stock market(s).

VEA. Look it up. Europe, Hong Kong, etc have been outperforming the US for over a year now.

Google the ticker and compare to VTI then get back to me. And that’s without even mentioning gold.

I did, and I see most years it has not beaten VTI… and if you invested 10k in them for the past 10 years VTI is near 2.5x more money.

May be worth it for diversification, but you’d be very lucky if it outperformed the next 10 years.

> for over a year now.

What if you zoom out to say, 5 years, 10 years?

Or are you predicting that from here on out, VEA will outperform say, the S&P500 and the NASDAQ?

Yes I think it will outperform.

I don’t know if you’ve seen the recent news in the US but things are going downhill very quickly. I don’t expect us to stay out of a recession for long once our government collapses into a dictatorship.

Unfortunately you seem to forget that money movements are amoral.

A country could be a brutal dictatorship and still be a great place to grow your wealth. Investors aren’t going to willingly make themselves poorer just because Americans are in a private hell of their own making.

America is still the world’s top consumer. People are broke because they literally consume too much. Debt slaves will make you RICH.

My VT shares have risen in bear direct proportion to VTIs relative underperformance. The main difference is the international exposure of VT.

VXUS is up almost twice the S&P 500 year over year, although some of that is likely the weakening of the dollar.

Compare them over the last 5 or 10 or 15 years. Since VXUS's inception the S&P has outperformed it by over 7x.

Going back how’s many years? I checked recently and VTI easily out perform in the last 5 years.

You should also compare risk, not just returns.

depends what decade you are talking about.

Not really, but diversification often useful; it reduces variance, which is a common goal. And there have been decades (e.g. 2000-2010) where international stocks outperformed American ones.

you cannot cherry pick, you must judge stocks over multiple decade long trends.

Yes but also nobody's absolutely forcing you to keep your money if you feel like stocks are in turbulence

In fact you win even more if you feel like stocks are bubbly and wait in say gold or short term and you buy more stocks when they are cheap

Also US stocks have underperformed compared to EU when you take all factors into account and all US stocks have rather been focused on AI hype which once again is a bubble which will fundamentally break the US economy.

It's like saying 2008 crisis still made you money long term

Sure if you are 20 years deep and even then nobody could've predicted what happened. The sentiments were extremely low

I am one of the biggest index funds advisors usually and that's when I read finance books and wanted to go into finance but genuinely felt like index funds are just so great that the need is very low

In fact I must admit that I dislike saying Gold but its genuinely one of the best assets (although it may be overvalued now not sure), another investment is specifically globalize your index fund portfolio to extreme/exclude US. In fact if possible bet on index funds on the opposite side of AI which most likely feels gold and yes, I am a little sad about this fact but rules of the game changes at points of extremes so gold is valid option right now

> you buy more stocks when they are cheap

but they are unlikely to be cheaper in the future than they are right now (https://www.guggenheiminvestments.com/advisor-resources/inte...).

so if you have the money but defer buying them, you lose out on the time value of money.

I understand this but realize that there are dips of almost 25%

I invest in Index funds for peace of mind as well. That the market remains reasonably happy/sad and I can be for the long run.

People discount this fact but imagine your concerns if you feel like 25% of your savings just evaporated because a guy ten layers detached from you burnt all the money on AI compute and there is no moat (Ahem ahem)

If you don't want peace of mind, people should angel invest or build their own side hustles but then you are getting some savings anyway and its better to invest than keep it in banks (once you have a safe amount saved)

But if you are saving money and still facing 25% crisis. Yeah...

I understand where you are coming from but if you can expect a 50-75% dip in market this time (some companies are 2-5x overvalued just because they slap AI, their P/E ratio's straight up just don't make any sense at all!)

So if you are willing to consider such dip for unforseen amount of time for unforseen returns in future when you can get a pretty safe investment for X amount of years being very liquid and historically in such times there are times when bond prices have been larger than stock prices

If I remember correctly, Intelligent Investors suggests an intelligent approach towards this (in one of the starting chapters of the book)

> but realize that there are dips of almost 25%

Does that change the basic logic and strategy? I don't think so, given that it isn't possible to predict WHEN the market will drop, by HOW MUCH, and for HOW LONG.

Yes I agree, I mean in the sense to stop investing in S&P 500 entirely and much rather focus on international market index funds

There is no free lunch, people who argue that S&P 500 historical returns and the over concentration into tech stocks has more risk than people believe leading to thinking of free profit

I would still call it a foolish errands if you are unable to keep your calm and composure if american stocks can fall 50% - 75%

If you are okay with that and then sticking your profits for 10 years or so afterwards to then get your money equal then sure

People forget that japan's markets got into a stand still for 30 years to make net profit. Researching about japanese documentaries pre and after that time can just show you the devastation

I personally recommend investing into world index funds if possible. Its your savings not your gambling money. Even 25% is devastating.

Even John bogle says that the difference between S&P (US) and international is minimal giving fairly similar but he was more nationalistic but seeing the current geopolitical and economical blunders by america, I wouldn't be surprised if he might change his stance

Rest in peace John Bogle, you will be missed.

P/E ratios rarely seem to make sense and yet people have been making money for a long time buying stocks with crazy P/E.

Just because people have been making money with stocks with crazy P/E historically doesn't mean that its meant to continue

Especially when you realize on aggregate, Companies long term have to reflect profit and less P/E otherwise if your stock index fund has larger P/E ratio, then you are absolutely taking on higher risk

There is no free lunch.

You are also forgetting that the reason the extrapolation of stock markets growth from historical data correlates to future data is that there is a benchmark of productivity underneath it all. Stock markets theoretically grows when productivity of all businesses in an economy improve which can improve due to scientific and economic reasons and the faith in the system that it does improve

Quite frankly, if you can't observe this, do not invest in index funds but rather something else which can reflect some amount of productivity (Short term bonds are needed by govt to improve life of the people so that they can pay more taxes in aggregate and improve conditions thus improving productivity as well)

I recommend the book Intelligent Investing and The little book of common sense investing by the legendary John Bogle (May he rest in peace)

What’s no longer outperforming? Gold?

Bitcoin just had a down year in 2025 when it was supposed to be the bull year. One of the worst performing assets of 2025. Doing well so far in 2026.

“I used AI to make a super profitable stock trading bot” —-> using fake money with historical data

“I used AI to make an entire NES emulator in an afternoon!” —-> a project that has been done hundreds of times and posted all over github with plenty of references

> “I used AI to make a super profitable stock trading bot” —-> using fake money with historical data

Stocks are another matter. There were wonder "algorithms" even before "AI". I helped some friends tweak some. They had the enthusiasm and I had the programming expertise and I was curious.

That was a couple years ago. None of them is rich and retired now - which was what the test runs were showing - and I think most aren't even trading any more.

I vibe coded a few ideas i had in my mind for a while. My basic stack is html, single page, local storage and lightweight js.

It is really good in doing this.

those ideas are like UI experiments or small tools helping me doing stuff.

Its also super great in ELI5'ing anything

Same result if you copied and pasted from a couple passionate blogs.

Not in the same timeframe. My experiments take an hour.

It is very easy to lie about age through age gates. I have yet to find one that is actually able to get strong proof of age, fake IDs are easy to upload.

“You’ll get left behind if you don’t learn AI”

Left behind where? We all live in the same world, anyone can pick up AI at any moment, it’s not hard, an idiot can do it (and they do).

If you’re not willing to risk being “left behind”, you won’t be able to spot the next rising trend quickly enough and jump on it, you’ll be too distracted by the current shiny thing.

I read it as "compared to others, in the current context".

If you take some percent longer to finish a some code, because you want that code to maintain some level of "purity", you'll finish slower than others. If his is a creative context, you'll spend more time on boilerplate than interesting stuffs. If this is a profit driven context, you'll make less money, less money for staff. Etc.

> If you’re not willing to risk being “left behind”...

I think this is orthogonal. Some tools increase productivity. Using a tool doesn't blind a component person...they just have an another tool under their belt to use if they personally find it valuable.

I love websites, something about stumbling across someone’s random content put together with old school hand typed code just stirs a warm and fuzzy feeling, especially if the do something “weird” that doesn’t follow any kind of modern trend or convention.