You either misunderstand which way the Earth rotates or what effect that has on rocket launches. California is limited to retrograde orbits, which nobody uses except the Israelis because they have no choice, and polar orbits.

It's not their fault. They've been immersed in propaganda since at least WWII, and somehow failed to develop the cynicism of your average eastern European.

No way man. Datacentre FLOPs are shit compared to artisanal home made FLOPs.

Datacenters are misguided. Soon enough models and hardware will be good enough that everyone will be able to run their own local AI at home.

My father had an Apple II. It was one of a wave of "personal computers" that would let you run things like word processors and spreadsheets at home.

Guess where most people run those things now.

Interesting how quickly Americans go from God given, inalienable rights to "should they be allowed to foreigners?"

To sum up, I broadly agree that one way or the other, much more sane and modest equipment will supersede the absurd designs of the bleeding edge high end GPU designs as they exist today. Beyond the facets you mention, they are fickle beasts to get working right with how they are designed hardware wise.

The push for concentrating in datacenters will continue, because there's much more money to be had to hold any facet of compute hostage for subscription revenue. See Microsoft Office, no need for that to be subscription only, and yet Office increasingly pushes the subscription model and diminishes the perpetual licenses.

While they may be contributing, I frankly think that would be a bad strategy if they had a good finger on the pulse of public sentiment here. Folks don't need convincing and are frustrated all by themselves.

On the flip side, Musk's social network announcing they are rooting out sentiment that gets in the way of Musk's ambitions and declares it to be foreign interference? Well, since there's no conflict of interest at all there, seems legit.

We do know that the companies are out talking to members of town councils and making them sign NDAs. We know that town councils after obligatory public comments and referendums are frequently going against the sentiment expressed *in person*. They are going hard on small-town corruption to get what they want without doing a thing to make the respective communities actually have *anything* long term to benefit from the inflicted stuff.

Now they could probably do things like some municipal 'permanent funds' to make the local populace interested, but the cheapest way is to just bribe a handful of people on a town council and gaslight the world to say the locals actually like the datacenters in their backyards.

Agreed. It was a bad administration, but if I knew exactly how badly his sore losing would have turned out, I sadly would have taken the lesser evil of a 2020 Trump victory.

I don't know how much of it was "Trump" using the time versus the reality of establishment folks distancing themselves (he was a loser facing litigation, traditionally considered the death kiss to a political career) versus the most vile sort of folks latching on to his scenario. Before he was surrounded by a blend of establishment and his nutjobs, after 2020 it was nutjob only. Folks like Stephen Miller being set to just have it their way without challenge.

So now his 'nutjob' crew has proven to the broader GOP that they can rig things to a single party system with repercussion and they are all in. The question is if there is a line that will not be crossed. Rigged maps are already proven, we will see about whether they will use ICE/National Guard for voter intimidation. We may not have to find out if they will overturn legitimate results if the other things work out well enough.

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

Sorry, Gates is a small fish in that pond.

If any president, regardless of party, declares a national emergency and that the only way to stop it is to block imports of something that we critically must have and cannot produce in adequate quantities for our country to not fall apart horribly, we will question that president's judgment, intellect, and/or character, because at least one of the three almost certainly must be compromised in some way to reach such a flawed decision.

Look, it's really simple. The word emergency means that something A. is sudden and unexpected, and B. must be dealt with right now, or else the consequences will be immediate and severe. This is not an emergency.

The U.S. power grid requires large quantities this hardware continually, both for expansion and repairs, on an ongoing basis. Not having adequate quantities is a national emergency with immediate implications for the country. Not having the manufacturing infrastructure to build critical power infrastructure hardware in this country could *eventually* be a national emergency if, for example, China decides to declare war on the U.S., but right now, it is just a long-term *risk* of *future* national emergency, not an actual emergency, because doing nothing will not necessarily cause immediate harm to the country.

You can't solve a long-term and likely mostly hypothetical risk to the country by creating an *immediate* national emergency. You can't put the entire country in *more* short-term, medium-term, and potentially long-term peril in the hopes that it somehow causes people to reduce some future risk that might never even materialize.

Basically, this policy is the import/export equivalent of saying, "My neighbor might steal my car someday, so I'm going to push my car off a cliff so he can't take it away from me in the future. Sure, I'll lose my job because I can't get to work, but having a car that he can steal is an emergency." See how stupid that is?

Worse, if this were an actual emergency (e.g. if China invaded Taiwan and the U.S. decided to shut down all imports from China in retaliation), there would still be a bigger problem, which is that it will take years to build the infrastructure to make the hardware needed in the United States.

What this means is that unless the emergency is so severe that every party agrees to maintain the ban, the minute the next president takes office, the policy will immediately be overturned in the name of national security, and it will no longer be financially viable to keep building those plants, and they won't ever get finished. Moreover, in the absence of such an exigent threat, the companies know that this is the case, and will drag their heels as much as possible before they even start building anything, so at best, all he will get in the next two years are a bunch of promises that will be soon broken.

So a policy like this cannot realistically have a positive impact on anything. If he had done it in the first year of his first term in office, it might have produced some success, but at this point, it's almost a decade too late.

That said, if he doesn't stop those imports, then companies might build wind turbines off the coast that he'll have to look at, so I can see why banning those imports could be an emergency for the president, and thus a "national emergency". [rolls eyes]

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.