It's not government stimulus driving this. It's that when you start with a "successful" company, the financial consequences of bad decisions or bad leadership can take a long time to have a negative effect, if at all, because financial success has a momentum to it.

I left Microsoft during the windows 8 cycle in large part because I could tell nobody knew what the hell they were doing, which is an objectively true statement about the time and place. My dad happened to buy Microsoft stock at that same time and did very well with it.

That's the paradoxical problem that I think all big tech has. Poor decisions by incompetent people, met with inexplicable financial success.

A prediction definitionally includes an outcome, and it _can_ include a timeline. (if you’re serious about your forecasting, then you generally include a timeline; forecasting is non-actionable if it does not include a timeline).

You might choose a different timeline for Ed’s outcomes. Okay: those are now your predictions, not his.

Zitron has done us the favor of including timelines with his predictions, so that Dan can invalidate almost all of them.

Would you say the 2012 apocalypse doomsayers were correct but just "early"? After all the sun exploding in a billion years will ultimately prove them correct.

The US can safely reduce its deficit spending by $1 trillion and absolutely nothing big will happen.

The US typically adds that much annual GDP every 16-24 months at this point. The notion that somehow the gigantic ~$31 trillion economy will fall apart if the outsized deficits don't continue, is very absurd.

The exact same things were said of the Bush deficits. The US economy was supposedly dead in 2009-2010. Here in 2026 the economy is 50% larger inflation adjusted and it has left most of Europe in the dust. The housing bubble contagion was much worse than anything we're sitting on now with AI spend.

Why do I say $1 trillion instead of $2 trillion? There are plausible scenarios where increased taxes bring down the deficits (the Dems will take the House + Senate + Presidency, we'll see how much taxes go up), there's no plausible scenario where the deficits go away completely.

>> I think it's fair to call his specific predictions "early." I'm saying his timelines are too short.

That means his predictions were either wrong, or meaningless.