2025 Near Year End Review (so soon)

As the year comes to almost a close, a year end review is required.

What has been achieved, what has been learned, and what is to be done next year. Although I have not had any significant changes in my life, a lot has happened. Most of the time was spent on stacking cash and building myself up financially.

Some of my new goals are, learn Chinese, keep building businesses, and taking control of my time.

Now I will record a wrapped of 2025 and my predictions of 2026.

Themes of 2025

1. FUD

Fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Whether on blaming of immigrants, tariffs, or H1B, everyone was on edge. As economics conditions deteriorate for the average person, it gets harder and harder to get by. When such times occur, a scapegoat is needed, whether that is the current leader in power, or immigrants, or some other non-sense. The systematic situation will never be addressed. Decades of no progress on cost of living, housing, youth unemployment, and inflation are not caused by a single leader or immigrants. Regardless, since they are easy to point to, they will be blamed. This problem will get worse, even as the scapegoats are culled. Nothing will cause the cost of living to go down or housing to get better unless the underlying system is put in question. Why should inflation be high when it was promised that technological innovation would bring down the cost for the same quality or increased quality for the same price? Why should housing value go down when we have built the system to support and protect the value of housing for boomers and the privileged?

1. AI

AI was written everywhere but what actual useful products did it create? See predictions for a detailed breakdown.

1. Alternative facts

The internet is no longer attached to reality. Soon this will spread to the offline as well. Because of the speed of disinformation (disinformation spreads faster than facts because it is more sensational and thus more viral), people can no longer agree on reality. While this may present some people hope in creating arbitrage opportunities (see Kalshi interview), this presents a disaster for the rest of the world. The polarization and divineness means “solutions” presented by anyone will face increasing scrutiny. However, instead of causing deadlocks, in our bourgeois democracy, the will of the public matters little and the instruments of capital will further consolidate. AI is speeding this up along with general capital accumulation like media mergers and manufacturing consent.

Predictions for 2026

1. More gambling, infinite gambling

Gambling is one of the most addictive vices with a 10% suicide rate for addicts. This trend will accelerate as gambling or “prediction markets” capture the market, but especially the whales. Additionally, all aspects of life will be gambling. Perhaps banking will have a lottery system or other horrors beyond human comprehend. Already, our lives have many gamification features like infinite scroll and even AI code generation which have probabilistic rollouts.

1. AI bubble partially pops

AI is not going anywhere but it has far outgrown it’s usefulness so far. No one is using AI features and no one has found useful AI features for general or business consumption. Per consumer side, there has been a huge backlash to non-human works and so called “AI-slop”. Going forward, AI will be used to enhance current apps and only create durable usefulness for currently dominate apps. For example, Google search embedded with AI. As such, this will result in larger monopolies. No new huge vertical will challenge existing players. Control has been centralized such that mergers and acquisitions are no longer challenged (see groq, windsurf, etc). They will simply be folded into old players. There has already been a pushback on AI art and in studies, users refer features that doesn’t advertise AI to those that do claim AI enabled.

Now per business side, there will be a huge gap with rhetoric and praxis. Since AI was a justification to reduce variable costs and employees, efficiency did not actually improve. AI slop in the workplace will require more people down the line to fix and remediate. This realization will not happen in 2026, but soon after as businesses break down from AI slop. AI is truly a 10x engineer in requiring 10x the amount of work after to fix it. AI is so far from useful, it is challenging to see the hype stay so high. As such, I do expect a general slowdown. When such a case happens, the economy will go down the toilet as majority of growth sectors are supported an otherwise un-useful tool. Massive bailouts and stimulus will be provided that rebound the markets but otherwise do not solve the structural weakness underneath the foundations. Current AI may at max expose bullshit work, but could have happened with or without AI.

1. Market Capture

Monopolies will get fatter and profit margins will explode. When companies increase profit margins, they have 2 ways to do this. 1, increase prices or 2, reduce costs, the highest cost most often human labour. Currently both affects are active to a large degree. Companies may hide price increases in shrinkflation or decreased quality or they may use algorithmic pricing. Companies capture all value by segmenting pricing based on how much each individual can maximally pay. Additionally, lots of companies are cutting from the other end by reducing wages and increasing efficiency.

While all companies and firms will do this, increasing prices can be addressed in a competitive market. In a competitive market, that would be an opportunity for other firms to compete since as Jeff Bezos put it: “Your margin is my opportunity”, however, firms have been too big to compete against. They will price you out (sell at a loss) or buy you outright. Thiel and this theology of massive moats and blitzscaling is another way of saying building massive multi-vertical monopolies without competition because this maximizes profitability. As the economy moves more and more into rent extraction, the average person will get further and further behind. Capital always grows faster the more capital you have.

It’s me