Global AI tech spending is said to surpass 2.5 trillion this year.

Sorry, Gates is a small fish in that pond.

There is a grand conspiracy theory about imposing a sales tax to get rid of income tax but the numbers just don't work out. Especially when your sales tax is limited to imports.

In reality, the US deficit is 6% of GDP. If that doesn't change then there's going to be hell to pay, the only argument is about when. There are two ways to fix it: spend less or make more. Cutting taxes to stimulate an economy sounds great, and the voters love it, but it didn't work. Cutting spending is less politically acceptable but they tried that too and it also didn't work. The only thing left is raising taxes, which is political suicide, particularly when you ran on a platform of cutting them.

Fortunately there's a special kind of tax that you can convince people isn't a tax at all. It's even got a fancy name that is essentially medieval Arabic for tax. Even better, you can convince people that it's protecting their jobs from dirty foreigners! And bonus, US law provides a variety of emergency powers for the president, who is absolutely not supposed to be setting tax rates, to set the tax rate.

To be fair, tariffs are not math or science. They are business.

When I was an undergrad someone figured that the CS students would benefit from a compulsory business course. So we're all sitting there while a business professor explains supply, demand, and price optimization. He proceeded to walk us through very carefully drawing a graph, plotting lines (the course assumed they were linear) for supply and demand, and measuring with a ruler the location of the intersection point.

We all stared for a bit and then did it algebraically.

Tariffs are one of the things he is not supposed to do, at all. Trump is using emergency powers to usurp arguably one of the most important powers a government wields.

The US constitution, backed up by lots and lots of text from the authors of it, assign the power of taxation and allocating those funds to congress, specifically to balance the power of the executive. That wasn't their idea either, it's something England did and does, and a bunch of other European monarchies, going all the way back to the middle ages. They also didn't really think of it; even the Roman Republic assigned taxation to the legislature, not the executive.

Even when Rome assigned emergency powers to the executive, by appointing a dictator, they did not give that person power over taxation.

The logic is economic autarky -- the belief that we're always better off having complete political sovereignty over every part of our supply chains than having to depend on imports for anything.

This is likely also behind Trump's trade war with Canada. His demands with Canada aren't about discirimatory tariffs -- those were negotiated away with NAFTA then re-negotiated in his first term. His demands are now infringe on Canadian sovereignty, to give US control of Canada's external trade policy, and even on its internal markets (e.g., the use of French in Canadian internal commerce). Symbolically, that's why he wants to rename Lake Ontario to "Lake America". HIs establishment of US control over the Venezuelan oil industry is his greatest foreign policy achievement -- although it's not clear he understands the legal limits on what he can do with their money.

There's a foreign and military policy angle to this too: Taiwan is absolutely critical to the US economy, so we are absolutely committed to defend them if China invades. Semiconductor autarky would mean it's not our problem.

The problem with autarky is that even if it's a good idea (which economists don't believe), you can't conjure it into existence overnight. It will take many years, possibly decades for the US to replace the Taiwan's semiconductor industry. In effect, the administration is proposing to inflict the very damage on the US economy that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would inflict.

And, once the US has voluntarily self-inflicted that damage, China would be free to invade Taiwan.

To be fair, I was also curious what Trump would do when he didn't have to worry about reelection or, indeed, living much past the end of his term. Curious in the way you see the edge of a cliff and wonder what it would be like to jump off.

"As people do better, they start voting like Republicans—unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing" - Republican strategist Karl Rove

"It is a well known fact that reality has liberal bias." - Stephen Colbert

"The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant" - Maximilien de Robespierre

Is this just something fascist autocrats do?

Not just the fascist ones.

https://www.harvardmagazine.co...

Suppose your kids figure out that if they ask you permission you're likely to say no. So they just say "oh, it's an emergency, there's no time to ask permission, I need to make a decision right now" and go and do whatever they want.

That's why Trump keeps declaring emergencies. The US has so many emergency acts that the president can give himself most powers, including ones that are explicitly forbidden in the US constitution, just by saying "it's an emergency" in an executive order. It's also not just Trump. No president since Roosevelt has been able to resist using emergency powers.* Trump's currently got fifty some on the go.

* Ford, Johnson, Kennedy and Eisenhower didn't make new emergencies, but they did continue their predecessors'.

Curious how if you or I take something illegally

You did. Your duly elected representative did something illegal. He's not going to jail or getting fined because apparently he's immune to the law. You're not either because collective punishment, etc. You're also not getting a refund of the money you stole from yourself. Consider it a lesson in taking important shit seriously.

Weight is a huge issue. More sensible would just be to put exposure limits on the staff like they do in other radiation exposed professions. The staff won't like it though, because those long intercontinental flights are sought after. The airlines might, because its a great excuse to replace your expensive senior staff with cheaper, younger workers.

People use "ionizing radiation" a little carelessly. Technically the lowest energy UV is not ionizing (it cannot remove an electron entirely) but it can break bonds and damage DNA. UV is higher energy than visible light. The radio waves from a cell phone or a microwave are lower energy than visible. A lot lower energy.

You've been reading Slashdot too long. I understand, it's very, very easy to assume that every reply is disagreeing with you.

Also, here you go.

The two articles were probably written by two different ghost-writers.

AI isn't actually smart. It's an at best average intelligence thing with an insane amount of available knowledge. Like the village idiot with eidetic memory.

As soon as you do any work with AI that's not available as a ready-to-apply solution from its training data, you begin to notice how much you need to correct it, keep it on track, remind it of basic constraints you already mentioned five times, etc. - it's performing at a level I'd accept from an intern, but not from a co-worker.

What it does have is data. Tons of data. Any question that would take you and me half an hour on Google and Wikipedia to answer it can answer in 10 seconds. That's a great tool. It is not intelligence, however.

How is this "news that matter"?

Bill Gates is an old man who has zero AI credentials and has long ago become irrelevant. Not to mention his previous predictions of future developments are not exactly brilliant.