Fair points. I would say the taxes is actually a drawback. It now means those local governments, because of the budget, now answer to those companies, and the people they serve, are now functionally peasants on the lords land. Which tends to stick in the craw of the people living there, they will see no benefit from those added taxes.

And what happens when the national labs are told they can't use data that isn't hooked into this system, and the system filters out all data at the model/agent layer that doesn't meet the approval of Christian Nationalists like Russel Vought?

And if they did that, they would be arrested on the spot, their US operations seized and their models dies overnight to bans on receiving any more GPU's or contracts from any US based entity.

Why? Data centers drive up local electric bills, the take up local water at below cost. They provide virtually no jobs. They provide constant noise pollution. They are a depreciating asset.

What benefit does it provide them???

Given how few jobs data centers contribute, and how much they hurt the residents electric bills, I'm going to guess... no, they won't. This is why opposition to data centers is bipartisan, even rural areas are pissed because they are being colonized by them, and they get literally nothing from it. No new jobs, just a swarm of contractors brought in from out of state for a quick build out and then they leave, the number of jobs data centers contribute even on a medium scale (5 years) is close to zero.

Unfortunately this isn't possible, the terms of the SpaceX IPO are the logical end game of how Silicon Valley structures their companies. The voting structure makes Musk literally impossible to fire. He personally retains enough class B shares to have majority controlling interest, no collection of shareholders can ever vote him out, or his hand picked board. He learned from how Tesla shareholders kept a leash on him, and he has made sure that can't happen again. By placing xAI under SpaceX, both are immune to any shareholder influence.

You are correct, but that costs extra. In the land grab/rush, data centers are bypassing that to speed construction. Often signing sweet heart deals with local politicians and functionally bribing them to let them in. Or worse, just building and daring people to sue after the fact. The issue is that if companies move fast enough, and stall long enough, it becomes fait accompli because blocking something is often legal, but taking away the fruits of a rammed through, legally stalling based construction, is more or less illegal by the US constitution (takings clause, due process, etc). So you want to go as fast as you can, skip every step you can, and get it done before the locals can organize and push back.

Which you can say "That's shortsighted" and you would be correct, a number of places are now rezoning to prevent exactly this, and either banning datacenters, or demanding exactly what you said, closed loop, all utilities/substation/power generation paid for UP front, out of pocket. Which currently just kills them, they can't operate that way, so of course they are quickly running out places to build them at all.

In the US, Trump will be gone in 2029 but the Reich Court will still be there, the Heritage Foundation, Federalisti Society, and various Reich wing law groups and oligarchs will still be in place. So the fascist oligarchy will still be in place in America, and will continue to its pogrom of non whites and non male from all positions of power and economic opportunity until it is a Christian slaver nazi state, their new Reich.

Somewhat correct. The drone supply part is unfortunately no longer true, Russia made tweaks to the base design and now almost entirely make them domestically (code name Geran).

Nothing to do with intelligence, everything to do with how competitive Chinese society is. They are ruthless, and any and every advantage will be used. Winning has a higher value there, recall that their society has a high priority on status. While they executed the people involved, remember baby powder scandal? Or other fun shit that is done to cut corners? Tofu Dreg ring a bell?

Problem is... it already is heavily automated. Thus why the US can still produce the goods it does, with an ever shrinking manufacturing workforce. We have to remember, most industries work on 5 - 15 year timelines. Often the job reductions you are seeing today are the result of a process automation or improvement that was conceived of 5 years ago and has finally rolled out to the entire company or throughout an industry. It was never going to be "OH FUCK, 50% LAYOFFS!". It has been that guys that retires that isn't replaced. Or the improvement in output that leads to less hiring. See the current AI stuff in tech, it hasn't actually caused large scale layoffs, but it has stunted hiring.

The thing that varies wildly is the skill using it, and most importantly, the existing system you are trying to apply it to. It generally just magnifies your tech stack... in every way. So tech debt explodes. Lack of testing makes things 1000x worse. Lack of documentation, ditto.

I think too many are rushing in and giving it big stuff, without building a solid foundation. Really it should be used for helping build that foundation. Focus on small things (add tests to JUST this module area, and add the documentation for only THESE classes/modules, nothing else). LLM's really, really, really exhibit the Unix philosophy : Do one thing and do it well. You try to throw LLM at some huge undefined problem, it will crash and burn. If you use it to build a sequence of well defined small problems, each verified and validated, it will do what can seem like magic.

I believe the core difference is that Anthropic was enforcing the restrictions in the model itself. So for the Pentagon to get what it wanted would require a rebuild of the model, which Anthropic refused. OpenAI however seems to have only gotten these assurances on paper in the contract, but absolutely nothing now stops the Pentagon from actually using as they desire.

And maybe people like you fail to see that the globalization bell can't be unrung. Protectionism doesn't work long run, see North Korea, Soviet Union, Great Depression in America, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, I could keep going.

No country has been "self sufficient" for over half a century now. Even at the height of the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union had to trade with each other to maintain various goods and services (they just cloaked it in political dogma, but the trade still happened).

Globalization is just the end state of your ideology. Too late to back out now. We will see some stuff draw back, but let's be clear, the entire problem is the Reich Wing and their orange moron, backed by the racists who feel entitled to a middle class job because they are a white American, nothing more, they aren't hard working, they aren't intelligent, and they sure as fuck aren't good enough in this world. I would know, I get to see them at work, and my sister has them at work (white southern dudes who don't want to learn computers, let along modern logistics tracking because that's how they've always done it, I was gobsmacked).

Yeah, knowing your death is coming in a thousand years, after living potentially for hundreds of thousand of years... terrified Kosh.