"The dot-com parallel from '96 to '00 is actually the best proof that the long-term bull case is right, even if the next couple of years are going to be incredibly messy. MrBayAreaHokie is spot on about corporate reality. Right now, companies are burning millions on AI tokens just to show off fancy PowerPoint decks and fake productivity metrics to their boards. It’s the late 90s all over again, when every legacy company spent a fortune on "e-commerce consultants" who didn't actually change the underlying business. And he's right about the danger—the moment corporate America faces a margin squeeze and pulls back that superficial spending, over-leveraged startups like OpenAI and Anthropic are going to have a brutal wake-up call with their debt obligations. But here is why the tech wins anyway: Look at what happened after the 2000 crash. The hype faded, and the bad business models went bankrupt, but the physical fiber-optic cables and server infrastructure remained. Because the infrastructure was already built, the cost of tech plummeted, and the internet finally became the actual foundation of the global economy. If the current AI bubble pops and these startups default, it won’t mean the tech was a fraud. It just means the market is doing what it always does—clearing out the idiots and the over-leveraged hype to make room for real, disciplined deployment." ** Edited by VTVOICE at 7/3/2026, 9:43:43 AM