My savings are mainly in Gold. Actual physical gold, in a vault, in Switzerland, not some kind of paper gold certificate that’s supposedly equivalent to the real thing but in fact is just a contract with a company with all the associated risks of it for a piece of paper that supposedly tracks the value of gold.

That position is a massive rejection of the entire Financial system, Gold being it’s own currency and a really old one at that - essentially I’m positioned to counter the devaluation of the very fiat currencies in which investment assets are priced, mainly because I don’t trust how they and the nations backing them are managed. (I’m in that position since 2012 and I would say that what’s going on in the US is kinda proving that view I’ve had since then). Putting money in agricultural land would be a similar position, that that has geographical (and thus country and climate) risk plus I’m not quite ready to become a prepper.

So most of my savings are literally outside any main currency such that I’m basically shorting main currencies.

(You see, I worked in the Finance Industry for almost a decade and it’s kinda like working in a sausage factory: once you see how they’re made you stop wanting to eat them)

Mind you, I have a very long investment horizon - 14 years now and counting, with a return of so far around 500% vs the EUR - and whilst Gold is currently sliding down since its all time peak at the end of January, it’s price now back to the level of the start of the year, that’s fine when one is sitting on 14 years of gains and not really aiming to take money out until retirement, since in the current fucked up deregulated shit that passes for a Financial System nowadays there will be plenty of financial crisis in the meantime and Gold invariably goes up when shit hits the fan, the worse it is the more it goes up.

If your investment horizon is shorter, things are different.

Now, outside this specific ultra-low risk position I’m in, I’m not going to advise you on specific funds - all that stuff works as legal contracts in that to really know the risks you’re taking you have to read the small print plus as we’ve seen from the changes to the Nasdaq 100 index rules, there’s even more contracts under those contracts and they can even change those from under you to fuck you up.

Obviously I’m not gonna read the small print of that for you.

So here’s a few more general things you probably should consider:

• Try and go for things that reduce the number of intermediaries between you and the value you’re invested in. Every intermediary adds risk (not just of shenanigans but also of them just going bankrupt - a lesson I learned in 2008). Holding physical Gold is maybe a bit extreme but it certainly reduces the number of intermediaries (though I personally use a custodian, accepting the risk added by having that single intermediary).
• By all appearences the cycle of empire for the US is at an end and by all indications China will be next. If you’re going with traditional and more liquid investment classes, you might want to be exposed to China stuff. I’m in Europe and, frankly, I suspect Europe will be dragged down by the US - maybe not fall as bad as the US but certainly it’s not going to come out unscatted.
• Spread your eggs across several baskets: in other words, diversify your investments, even across investment classes, in case something goes wrong. Diversity is robustness. I still have a little actual cash at home (for things like interruption of access to electronic payment systems, like it happenned recently with a long blackout) and money in bank accounts in more than one country (and in different currencies if one counts Gold as a currency).

Yeah, it doesn’t make much since if you think in terms of how many transistors are needed to implement each of them as the microcontroller probably uses hundreds of thousands more transistors than a 555.

That said, given reasonably recent processes die size for both are probably pretty close (I reckon most of the size of a modern 555 die would be the points to place the wires to the package) and with pretty similar yields (pretty close to 100%)

I wouldn’t be surprised if the reason has something to do with economies of scale since a cheap microcontroller can pretty much be used for the same things as a 555 and a whole lot more than that, so it makes sense more of the former are manufactured than of the latter, plus I bet the process generation used in making the microcontroller is probably more recent and hence one where there are more fabs operating. This latter reason would also explain why this more recent 32-bit microcontroller is actually cheaper than older 8-bit ones with less built-in memory and fewer peripherals (such as the ATTiny ones).

And in 2000

And in 1997

And even in 1973

Yeah, as per the analysis I did in another post, even a 555 and a couple of transistors to just blink an LED is more expensive than putting a microcontroller like this one there.

Designing a board to run a microcontroller like that is actually pretty simple.

I’ve done it for fun with a couple similar microcontrollers, and whilst I’m an EE by training I don’t do it professionally plus my training is from before embedded system, so I count as a Junior EE for that.

I’m pretty sure that even a freshly graduate Chinese EE can even on their own figure out the general recipe for integrating something this (following the datasheet, add crystal + load caps, plus about 1 caps each power pin for power filtering plus 1 global power filtering cap, plus possibly a pull-down/up resistor on the RESET pin) in a week or two and then for subsequent projects it will be feasible to do it in a few days.

Really, there’s other shit in there (say, battery management) that’s more work to figure out than how to add and place the parts for an entry level ARM microcontroller to work.

A search in Digipart shows the cheapest price of this microcontroller as $0.10 whilst the cheapest price of the NE555 is $0.13

It really is THAT ridiculous.

Digipart is showing me price for PY32F002B with a minimum purchase of 5000 as less that $0.10 (not the factory price, just the cheapest store).

The price for the cheapest NE555 (random manufacturer implementation of a 555) variant in Digipart is $0.13

(Granted, you also need at least a crystal and 2 caps, plus 1 power filtering cap per power line for the microcontroller, but those are all cheap)

It’s ridiculous how modern microcontrollers are so stupidly cheap that even though they can run a lot more digital logic (in the form of software running in them) they almost always beat using older and much simpler digital parts even for something as simple as this.

Even microprocessors are getting stupidly cheap: somebody recently pointed me out the Allwinner F1C100s, which is about the smallest microprocessor that can run Linux, and it costs $2 in bulk to the point that some embedded engineer has made a business card with one running Linux which he just gives away.

Well the PY32F002B (costing a few cents) even though it has a 32-bit (entry level) ARM core @ 24MHz is literally cheaper than older and less powerful microcontrollers.

Granted, if you don’t do anything else than react to a push button it’s still cheaper to use discrete electronic components than a microcontroller, but given that this device has a LiPo battery (meaning there’s battery control involved) and judging by the picture a USB-C connector, there’s probably a bit more digital logic in it, by which point a 3 cent microcontroller plus a cheap SMD crystal and some caps is cheaper than using discrete components.

The domain of embedded systems has evolved to the point that it’s the best option for almost everything in consumer electronics, mainly because at the lower end there are so many stupidly cheap and easy to use choices were you don’t run an OS in it but instead just a single block of single-threaded code directly on the bare metal accessing registers directly.

An analysis from early 2025 showed that the median life expectancy of a 1st generation Starlink satellite was 5.3 years, though expected to improve in v2 and v3.

Beyond that, the solar lifecycle means that every 11 years the earth’s orbit expands increasing drag on low-orbit satellites (which brings them down) as well as bombarding them with more radiation (increasing the likelihood of failures).

Other sources I’ve found in searching for it give their median life-expectancy as being 5-7 years.

Land-based telecom operators don’t have to replace pretty much all of their transmission infrastructure - worse, in a costly to access location - more than once a decade.

Space-based tele-communications is more than proven as a viable business model, what’s nowhere near proven (or anywhere close to being mathematically demonstrable) is one single operator of those being worth more than many major land-based telecom operators each with many times the number of customers of that space-based telecoms business and providing much faster network access (somebody else gave Deutsche Telecomm as an example) put together.

(How exactly in terms of actual PHYSICS will Starlink deliver via radio waves to for example all 245 million European households - necessary to justify such valuations - a reliable 1Gbps connection for €10/month needed to to beat the land operators?)

SpaceX’s IPO valuation which itself is mostly anchored on Starlink, is totally unjustified and unjustifiable by fundamentals.

“This time is different” is always bullshit. In fact there’s even a book called exactly that which covers 500 years of History of financial crashes and people saying that for some reason or other “things are different now” to justify “no more Crashes”, is an incredibly common occurrence just before major Crashes.

Markets exist in a human society context, which exists in a real world context, were the only Laws that never break are the Laws Of Physics: no matter how much of a fantastical and magical imaginary fairyland the Financial Investment universe has become, there is always some link back to the real world (what would be the point for investors if their investment didn’t somehow translate back into being able to get more concrete things in the real world), at the very minimum through the value of the currencies in which the investment assets are valued (if the Economy supporting a currency collapses, the real value - aka purchasing power - of investment assets which are priced in that current goes down, the number which is that asset in that currency can keep going up and yet it’s actually worth less - you can see a good example of that by looking at the FTSE100 and the GDPEUR cross-currency pair when the result of the Leave Vote in Britain came out: the FTSE100, which is listed in British Pounds, went up right after it at the same time as the British Pound collapsed around 20%, so the real value of the FTSE100 and thus the stocks in that index actually went down even though the number itself was up)

(EDIT It doesn’t matter how much of the transformation from “imaginary asset worth” to actual real concrete goods and services in the real world uses and abuses the subjectivity of “convincing people that this imaginary shit is worth as much as it is worth” to swindle people to give real stuff in exchange for la-la-land fantasy tokens - as shown every single time by Ponzi Schemes, such things always end up in running out of fools or the fools running out of money, and then collapsing, the only question being how far they spread before that happens)

This is why in my post I pointed out several links back from the stockmarkets to the broader Economy.

Beyond that, the broader Economy links to the broader society by in the extreme how humans react to being fucked up repeatedly (i.e. having difficulty accessing resources required for survival and seeing their quality of life plummet). I suspect that the current movements when it comes to ever more extreme surveillance, ever more shrill blaming of scapegoats (such as immigrants and transsexuals) by the billionaire-owned Press and Politicians and ever more extreme use of Force by the State against civil society movements trying to change things, is the current elites preparing for just that human reaction - a lot of very wealthy people are preparing (some even openly stating things around those lines) for turning Democratic countries into Autocratic ones rather than accept any changes to the machinery that makes them ever richer and lets them de facto be the top power.

I would say that the only uncertainty is not IF things will break, it’s how far they will stretch before they break - judging by all that’s happenning, there really doesn’t seem to be any chance for enough of the people holding most of the money accepting that “this is unsustainable” and taking a loss for things to go back enough that a different route can be taken - as the Economy increasingly sputtered and growth stopped, they just doubled down on pillaging wealth from the rest of society and funding political movements scapegoating minorities and outsiders rather than addressing the reasons for the Economy having stopped growing.

As for specifically your point on algorithmic trading, that kind of trading applies to very short time frames - money goes in and then out sometimes in seconds - and its mainly a way of making money by front-running the information about trades done in different Stock Markets or things like news that will impact prices: it doesn’t create market movements, it just tries to run ahead of them, so its not actually a sustained force to push the Markets in any direction.

I would say that the current overabundance of speculative bubbles (including the AI bubble and realestate bubble) are not the product of algorithmic trading but rather the product of the increasing concentration of wealth - especially following the 2008 Crash - which has moved a lot of money from those who have little and mainly Spend most of their money to those who have much and thus Save/Invest most of their money (something which also explains the current record level of Household Debt - the people at lower end of the wealth scale increasingly require more debt merelly to survive) so A TON of money was seeking any and all investment opportunities thus pumping out lots of asset prices purelly via more demand for those assets rather than due to the fundamentals of what backs them (for example, corporate profits) having got better. If you search for it, there are several people out there explaining it much better and in more depth than me.

It gets even worse.

From this article from early 2025, we get a median life for Starlink satellites of 5.3 years, though expected to improve with newer versions of the satellites.

From other more broad analysis of the life expectancy of low orbit satellites we get that the solar cycle - which is 11 years - means that at its peak many more such satellites die due to the Earth’s athmosphere expanding (so the satellites are more impacted by athmospheric drag hence are less likely to manage to remain in orbit, which they do using engines which have limited propellant). This is in addition to normal hazards of space, such as failures due to solar activity.

So expect that even for the lastest generation, half-life of these satellites is between 5 to at best 11 years.

Deutsche Telekom does not have the capital costs of replacing half its network every 5 - 11 years.

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Now that even main Indices (which were supposed to be much safer to invest in - via things like ETFs - than individual stock picking) are being shamelessly rigged to feed Retail and Fund money to the IPO pires, you should literally not be invested in any US Stock Market by the time this and other AI IPOs happen.

Literally even having money under your matress (even with the current inflation) is safer than being in any way form or shape invested in the Nasdaq 100 and if this shit is the straw that breaks the camel’s back, matress savings storage is safer that being invested anywhere in a US stock market.

I was in none other than Lehman Brothers in the 2008 Crash and saw that shit from the front row and all of this crap (the ever more articles about how AI is not delivering returns for companies using it, the steep increases in AI usage fees - which stink of desperate attempts at monetising it, which in turn mean that either the companies selling AI services have run out of runway or believe AI cannot improve further hence their investment must start producing returns NOW - these 3 AI IPOs pretty much at the same time all with insane valuations and the shameless rigging of Indices) are making alarm bells ring in my head like crazy.

Think of it as alarmism if you want.

I can tell you one thing for sure from my own experience in 2008 Crash: there were but a few obscure signs that shit was about to hit the fan back then (for example, there was an article in The Economist about how the Credit Derivative positions of both Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers were 2x higher than the 3rd largest and the rest of the Industry, plus some wispers of Goldman Sachs reducing their exposure to Credit Derivatives) and between that and the first big crack - Bear Stearns collapsing and being sold the JPMorgan for peanuts - it was but a few weeks and between that and Lehman Brothers going bankrupt and the markets going into an uncrontrolled crash, it was about a week, so expect the same kind of time scale in the transition from “this all looks kinda suspicious” to the first “oh shit” (maybe OpenAI’s IPO?!) to an out of control fall of the markets that no matter what they try Central Banks are unable to stop until it hits a stable new and much lower level, and meanwhile all that shit will be throwing shrapnel into the rest of the Economy, not just via retraction in Financial Markets such as the Money Markets but via the complete collapse of everything proped up by the current data center projects (most of which not even yet started yet already propping up things like land acquisition and long term equipment purchasing contracts).

Judging by how P/Es in the Nasdaq 100 are now literally TWICE as much as in 2022, in the least bad scenario the Nasdaq market will collapse to half its value right now as P/E levels go back to 2022 (which was much closer to historic average), though judging by my experience in 2008 Crash plus there being other massive asset price bubbles in other markets (such as realestate), IMHO as the the bursting of the bubbles feed each other and impact the broader Economy which in turn impacts back all kinds of markets - via retractions in Consumption and Investment as well as spiking Loan Default rates in turn feeding into retractions in credit from traditional Banks and Money Markets - this shit will go much further than a mere 50% fall in the Nasdaq).

The thing is, the bigger the amounts of money involved the more idiots you need to actually push the price up and keep the fleecing going.

Mind you, the 5% float of SpaceX’s IPO means you only need enough idiot money per cycle to move the price of $87 billion worth of stocks rather than the full $1.75 trillion, which is probably why they’re rigging Indices to force Retirement Funds to be the idiots as it would be a lot harder to source enough idiot money out of Retail Investors.

Even the greatest most infallible gun detection system imaginable can be defeated by having the gun inside a plastic bag.

Yeah, it really is painfully obvious that the fatcats are trying to cash out on the bubble before it blows.

Here’s an even more interesting one:

It’s the P/E ratio (the ration between the stock Price of a company and it’s Earnings) of the Nasdaq vs the Price.

Notice how the Nasdaq price has tracked the P/E, with since at least 2020 the stock prices not increasing because company earnings are going up but rather just from increased speculation hence the rise in the ratio of stock Prices to Earnings.

The P/E (in other words, the company stock prices relative to the actual money a company makes) is now about twice as much as back in 2020.

Allwinner F1C100s

That’s pretty interesting. I wasn’t aware of those.

That said, Allwinner call in an application processor, so it’s a microprocessor not a microcontroller - 32MB RAM is quite a bit above even higher-end microcontrollers (which generally are more like 8MB Flash and a lot less than that RAM).

Looking at the specs you could do like a mini Linux phone with one (resolution 1280x720 😀), though 32MB RAM isn’t enough for X-Windows.

They openly talked about their “Final Solution for the Palestinian problem” and Starvation is a lot cheaper and less obvious than Zyklon-B.

I most places I worked in (all in Europe), Junior Devs are generally hired as an investment, since their productivity sucks until they become more experienced so the idea is to teach them until they become more senior.

You can’t really replace such Junior Devs with LLMs because the LLMs don’t learn (at best they’ll somewhat follow past guidelines still in their context until those guidelines are push out as the context fills over time).

Maybe in the US (were job security is a joke) there’s more a tendency to hire Junior Devs as cheap manpower.