I don't understand your question. Only India and Brazil's hold mentionable amounts of US debt, and neither are in the global top 10. Can you clarify your point?

Yes, ... sort of. I'll bet my understanding iis flawed.

Japan is the crazy outlier. But almost none of the Japanese debt is held by foreign entities. Almost all of it is held by the Bank of Japan, other Japanese banks, and Japanese citizens. As such, they remain functional because nobody is weaponizing their state of indebtedness. Everybody knows that fleeing the market en masse will destroy the value for everybody.

It's precisely because the US currency and debt are the global standards that it's open to the circumstances that will contribute to its demise. And in this case, he who panics first, wins. Large holders of that debt have no political or sentimental reason to keep it.

Especially when basically all methods of sabotaging cables(except possibly very near shore) are 'remote'/disposable; if only at the tech level of 'put anchor on rope because water deep'. Nobody is going to give a damn about losing an inert metal chunk.

Reportedly, none of that is public, the business of tapping a fiber line underwater is considerably more fiddly, and enough mines might make that a hassle; but it would also make install and repair far more expensive and probably just theatre when you consider the risk that someone at the telco isn't updating their ASAs.

That will be tested soon. As the price that the US has to pay to find buyers for their new issuances rises, they should find buyers in the short term. But eventually the market simply won't want the new bonds at any price. But risk will outweigh reward soon enough, and those bonds people hold will be illiquid. Or, liquid at fire sale prices, well below face value.

But the reality of a global reserve currency is less than 200 years old, and there really have only been two. The dollar and the pound sterling. So currency exchange is not new. And given technology today, managing it would be (tentatively) easier than ever. Even today some trade happens out of the dollar ecosystem.

I think we'll figure it out. If something doesn't bubble to the top in short order, we'll get by. Trade won't stop for something as trivial as that.

I think the parent commenter was proposing an analogy to the various temples-overtaken-by-jungle and cathedrals-and-hovels societies; where the competing c-suites of the magnificent seven and aspirants suck our society dry to propitiate the promised machine god.

I have to say; datacenters will not make for terribly impressive ruins compared to historical theological white elephant projects. Truly, the future archeologists will say, this culture placed great value in cost engineered sheds for the shed god.

At least for new builds/major conversions; it's often a matter of incentives.

There's certainly some room for shenanigans with power prices; but unless it's an outright subsidy in-kind you normally end up paying something resembling the price an industrial customer would. Water prices, though, vary wildly from basically-free/plunder-the-aquifer-and-keep-what-you-find stuff that was probably a bad idea even when they were farming there a century or two ago; to something that might at least resemble a commercial or residential water bill.

If the purpose is cooling you can (fairly) neatly trade off between paying for it in power and paying for it in water; and when the price differs enormously people usually choose accordingly if they can get away with it. In the really smarmy cases they'll even run one of the power-focused datacenter efficiency metrics and pat themselves on the back for their bleeding edge 'power usage effectiveness'(just don't ask about 'water usage effectiveness').

You can run everything closed loop; either dumping to air or to some large or sufficiently fast moving body of water if available; but the electrical costs will be higher; so you typically have to force people to do that; whether by fiat or by ensuring that the price of water is suitable.

There is inevitably someone with absolutely no sense of humour.

Also clearly not British, we tend to enjoy that kind of self deprivation.

We know it weakly interacts electromagnetically, which means one of the ways in which it is posited planets form, initially via electrostatic attraction of dust particles, isn't likely to work. This means dark matter will be less "clumpy" and more diffuse, and less likely to create denser conglomerations that could lead to stellar and planetary formation.

What this finding does suggest, if it holds true, is that some form of supersymmetry, as an extension fo the Standard Model is true. Experiments over the last 10-15 years have heavily constrained the masses and energy levels of any supersymmetry model, so it would appear that if this is the case, it's going to require returning to a model that some physicists had started to abandon.

The question is not if they replace 3 million jobs (even if we believe such a number plucked out of nowhere).

The question is does it REMOVE 3 million jobs.

Or, like every automation that ever happened (and AI is just automation, it's not intelligent at all), is it just the case that the jobs become obsolete because they were basically worthless and could be automated out of existence by anything that came along, and then they allow other jobs to do more, or require other jobs to be created, etc. etc. etc.

Because, in history, if you look at it over the years (not days or weeks), the number of JOBS just keeps increasing, and pretty much in line with the number of people that need them. Of course there are blips, but pretty much over the last few hundred years... more jobs, all the time.

It's not even a question of "do jobs just stop being created", historically, it's far more "can ALL jobs keep pace with population expansion". Sometimes they waver a bit in that aspect but pretty much... there are always jobs. Because as the lamplighters get obsoleted, the electricians, street-light technicians, etc. come in to replace them, and then people have 24/7 lighting so now you need more people to secure the factory, or whatever other examples you want to pluck out of the air. Secretaries weren't obsoleted by email. Retail shop worker's job were replaced with online delivery drivers, and so on.

Sure. Not the SAME JOB. Of course. But the fact is that the jobs evolve just like the people, and the number of jobs - and thus the unemployment rate which *roughly* corresponds to the number of jobs (but also health, social security and thousands of other factors) stays... pretty much the same. Countries like Greece have high unemployment not because AI came round and stole all the jobs... because the rest of the world are doing just fine... but one of a thousand other factors. But if you look overall... the unemployment rates aren't changing JUST because of AI, and aren't likely to. Because even if that happens, you now need someone to wrangle the AI, a dozen people to help run it, a dozen people at the electricity company to keep the lights on for it, more people to make and sell and transport and fit the GPUs and so on.

This is yet another evolution, marketed as apocalyptic catastrophe. And I fucking hate AI. But it's just automation. Yeah, someone's worthless job copying Excel figures from one box to another might be obsoleted. But you know what? I bet nVidia, the cloud providers, datacentres, software-pushers, even electrical installers, etc. are hiring like crazy to take up the slack.

Not the SAME job. It will be REPLACED. But there will still be jobs, probably more of them. They won't be REMOVED.

It's right, though.

Both quantum mechanics and relativity were based on solving part of a partial differential equation which derived - ultimately - from Newtonian physics, but which had extremely bizarre and unpredictable output.

When you solved the maths that you could (a p.d.e. doesn't have a single complete "solution" as such), you ended up with incredibly weird stuff that few initially believed was possible.

It was only when we confirmed the maths, went out into the world and looked for this bizarre behaviour that we managed to confirm it.

It's quite literally a true statement. Nobody sat there saying "oh, I wonder is space is a bit curvy" and then found it, the same way that they didn't say "I wonder if there's stuff that works probablistically below the atomic level" and then went looking for it.

Both spring from the solution of a p.d.e. given a bizarre and often-thought-impossible (at the time) answer resulting in a world based on rules we couldn't have imagined... and THEN we confirmed that's what was actually happening in real life.

High-end physics pretty much mostly comes from solving maths equations and then going "What the fuck..."

Duh.

Show me how your insights have enabled you to create more advanced functionality, and then I'll be interested.

Much of the critique seems irrelevant to AI other than LLMs, such as self-driving cars which map visual input to actions.

BYD, at least, have a reasonable footprint in Mexico (taken several Uber rides there in BYD’s).And unless you’re already in the western US, Mexico City is as close as LA or closer - and that’s one of the farther-south places in the country. The one driver I asked about his was very happy with the car, and it certainly seemed nice enough. Not a luxury car, but comfortable and spacious.

The illusion of intelligence evaporates if you use these systems for more than a few minutes.

Using AI effectively requires, ironically, advanced thinking skills and abilities. It's not going to make stupid people as smart as smart people, it's going to make smart people smarter and stupid people stupider. If you can't outthink the AI, there's no place for you.

My wife and I bought a used 2024 Mini Cooper EV just last weekend, for roughly that amount. It seems well-built and is very fun to drive. However it is only useful for driving around town because its range is only 120 miles. Technologically this is clearly out of date. I couldn't help but think that if not for trade restrictions we could be paying the same for a new car with more advanced batteries and motors. In fact the Mini Cooper EV, the 2025 model with almost double the range, is not available in the US because of trade restrictions.