The economy does not rely on ever-increasing amounts of debt to function. With a reduction or reversal of debt growth, the economy would be somewhat different, not damaged. The economy runs on production and consumption. Debt is a side issue.

I'm going to make some rough approximations here.

There are difficulties in dissipating power in high speed processors. Assume that the power that can be dissipated is proportional to the area of the chip. Relative to a single active layer chip, the power that can be dissipated per layer is 1/(number_of_layers * thermal_conduction_to_coolant). Thermal conduction to coolant is dominated by copper in the heatsink and SiO2 in the chip. Copper is at least 200 times more thermally conductive than SiO2. Assume that the maximum acceptable temperature rise is 50 Kelvin across a 1 cubic centimeter copper cube; that corresponds to 200 Watts. Assume that diminishing returns occurs when the thermal drop across SiO2 equals the drop across the copper. Since they add, if we keep the limit at 50 K the limiting power is 100 Watts. The implied thickness of SiO2 is (1 cm)/200 = 50 microns. How many layers can be squeezed into 50 microns?

A brief internet search seems to yield a minimum layer thickness of 100 nm (0.1 micron) for gate logic -- (1 active layer plus many interconnect layers.) Thus 500 active layers can be squeezed into 50 microns. What happens then?

Power dissipation in CMOS logic, ignoring leakage, is proportional to freq * V^2. Let our single layer CPU performance be 1 unit, limited by 1 cm copper and running at 1.2 volts (There's very little SiO2 for the heat to pass through.) At first glance, our 500 layer CPU with same voltage limited by 1 cm copper plus 50 micron SiO2 is 1 * (500 layers) * (1/500 heat per layer) * (1/2 thermal conductivity) = 1/2 unit. Layering loses. However, that is not the whole truth. Layering allows many more transistors, thus more clever circuitry, which might be enough to improve the performance some. 3D means shorter interconnects, shorter interconnects means less capacitance, less capacitance means less power dissipation. (The other major contributor to capacitance is the FET's gate.) I can only guess how much lower heat (more speed) that allows. Maybe 1.5X? speed is then 3/4 unit. That (1/500 heat per layer) is (1/500 speed) and with CMOS reduced speed allows reduced voltage.

Over a limited range, CMOS speed is proportional to voltage. By lowering voltage, heating is reduced. Thus reducing voltage means speed does not have to be reduced to 1/500 of the single layer CPU. With a supply voltage of 1.2 x 1/10 = 0.12, speed reduced to 1/10, power per layer is reduced to 1/1000 compared to the single layer CPU. 500 layers operating at 1/10 the speed is a 50x performance improvement.

Alas, we can't do that. Huge CMOS CPUs can't be made to operate at 0.12 V, and I don't know if it will ever be possible. I'll guess and say that somewhere in the range of 0.3 V and 0.6 V will some day be practical. If it's 0.6 V, speed could be 1/250, times 500 layers = 2 units. If it's 0.3 V, speed could be 1/62.5, times 500 layers = 8 units.

The above is too optimistic, because of difficulties in controlling threshold voltage and leakage, and the difficulties in massive parallelism and massive multi-threading.

I'd like to repeat the calculations for 10 layers and 50 layers. I'd like to check my work. I've already spent about 2 hours on this reply, so I'm giving up. Have fun.

In my estimate, the speed improvement in AI chips is going to see the same slowdown we've already seen in CPUs: single threaded performance is almost at a standstill and multi-threaded performance is increasing much less rapidly than it used to. If this slowdown occurs, there will be less pressure to replace existing AI machines with faster AI machines. This means a longer life cycle for existing machines.

Whether new facilities continue to be built will depend upon the degree to which AI is useful, and whether AI's usefulness requires more hardware. Nobody really knows.

The historical success rate of students from various schools and their GPAs is available to the colleges. Colleges that act wisely can adjust the GPAs reported by various grade schools by the school's historical reputation.

Do colleges still require a pre-acceptance interview? That should weed out many dullards and ignoramuses.

Some grade schools, even public schools, teach and test in a manner consistent with SAT preparation. No special paid SAT prep classes required.

Intelligence helps a person be financially successful. Successful people can provide at least two advantages for their children: better genes for intelligence and money for SAT prep classes. Without lots of data and good statistical analysis, the relative influence of those two (and other) factors cannot be stated with certainty. (Other factors include tendencies toward good study habits, good manners, and good nutrition.)

It's also worth noting that there's some similarity between SAT tests and tests in college, so SAT results correlate with college success. Thus SAT tests are partially predictive of college success.

Extracurricular participation and volunteer work are disguised DEI.

Stacking chips is not the same as a monolithic chip with multiple active layers. When chips are stacked, each chip can be tested before stacking, and the final yield becomes a question of successful interconnect and not damaging chips during assembly. With multilayer chups each layer must be perfect for the device to work.

I'd guess that they're not using a process with the smallest geometry. That way they can have a process that is basically very high yield for each layer; the resulting die will have acceptable yield.

An advantage of monolithic multilayer over stacking is that there's no risk that the thermal flow will have gaps.

The Rastafarians have the distinct disadvantage of being recent, being well studied historically, and having been denounced by the person they consider their figurehead.

America was founded mostly by religious fanatics escaping countries that were either less fanatical or that pushed different fanatical beliefs. The result was a higher per capita fanaticism than Europe during that time period. From a higher starting point it takes longer to get to any particular lower point.

There are probably other reasons, perhaps in the US there's less punishment for believing silly things.

The Gospels are deliberately constructed fairy tales formulated to fit into cultural religious beliefs popular then.

There is no evidence for resurrection, all that exists now are writings (which are not evidence) and proven frauds like the Shroud of Turin.

Richard Carrier has published what is currently the best summary and evaluation of Christian claims. In short, the odds of Biblical Jesus ever existing are at best 1 in 3.4; the chance of resurrection being true is 0. (approximations based on my watching Carrier's youtube videos)

You might find Answer by Fredric Brown entertaining. It's only a page long; well worth the time.

How has porn corrupted open heart surgery?

Ignoring the religious aspect, America has twice the per GDP generosity of the 2nd most generous country, New Zealand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Another reference puts the US at number 6, behind a very peculiar list of countries.
https://worldpopulationreview....

It's a lot easier to be charitable when you're rich, and the US is rich.

If I'm a perfect teacher, teaching 17th century French literature to one human and 9 golden retrievers, they should all get A grades?