Seriously, the idea that we know all the practically important physics there is is the kind of thing only somebody who's never done science or engineering would believe.

Sounds like some good learnin', but Republicans, "Conservatives" and MAGA don't really want a well-rounded, well-educated electorate who can think for themselves, especially if it would disadvantage those in charge.

Industrial R&D is important, but it is in a distrant third place with respect to importance to US scientific leadership after (1) Universities operating with federal grants and (2) Federal research institutions.

It's hard to convince politicians with a zero sum mentality that the kind of public research that benefits humanity also benefits US competitiveness. The mindset shows in launching a new citizenship program for anyone who pays a million bucks while at the same time discouraging foreign graduate students from attending universtiy in the US or even continuing their university careers here. On average each talented graduate student admitted to the US to attend and elite university does way more than someone who could just buy their way in.

Over the next quarter or five-ten years? 'Cause U.S. companies only really seem to care about the former, while the Chinese seem to care more about the latter.

To be fair, they don't all hoard all of it; some buy really, really expensive yachts - and slightly less expensive backup yachts for those yachts - or media companies, like TikTok and Paramount, a Nth back-up mansion, or donate money to the President for favors, etc...

Don't worry, all the cuts and changes by RFK, Jr. will even things out. /s

It'd have to support full-text search by default. Mastodon, last I checked, was still in practice stuck with tags-only search that fails unless both the poster and searcher manage to correctly #GuessTheHashtag. I've read that Mastodon added in version 4.2.0, but I've never got it to work because it's not the default: the posting user has to deliberately seek out how to opt into full-text search before sending posts, and the administrator of the searcher's instance has to spend a lot more money for a much larger VPS with the RAM for Elasticsearch or OpenSearch.

People will have to pay $20/month for a browser w/o AI. :-(

Republicans equate being pro-market with being pro-big-business-agenda. The assumption is that anything that is good for big business is good for the market and therefore good for consumers.

So in the Republican framing, anti-trust, since is interferes with what big business wants to do, is *necessarily* anti-market and bad for consumers, which if you accept their axioms would have to be true, even though what big business wants to do is use its economic scale and political clout to consolidate, evade competition, and lock in consumers.

That isn't economics. It's religion. And when religious dogmas are challenge, you call the people challenging them the devil -- or in current political lingo, "terrorists". A "terrorist" in that sense doesn't have to commit any actual act of terrorism. He just has to be a heathen.

(a) Declare bankruptcy.
(b) Use money to buy - I mean, lobby for - I mean get pardon. (Will work for 3 more years)
(c) Successively rename company: "MacroStrategy", "MegaStrategy", ... "MAGAStrategy".
(d) Goto "a".

Scale matters. And how serious an issue does depend on percentage, not just absolute levels. Moreover, percentage is especially important when one is considering issues of prioritization, where I explicitly compared it to golf. So far, you've doubled down on insulting people rather than making any argument involving sources. It might also occur to you that you are apparently assuming that everyone you disagree must have some dishonest agenda. But if you bothered to actually read my comment with a minimum of good faith understanding, you would not that the comment explicitly notes specific problems from AI data centers, which should suggest to you that the agenda you apparently want to impose on the comment is not accurate. Now, it would be appreciated if you could actually attempt to respond with something resembling reasoning and sources and less insults. But I do appreciate from our prior interactions that is apparently difficult for you to do, so have a good day.

Hegseth double-tapped it for him. :-)

Cogent sailed a while ago. Here's a quote from Trump announces $12 billion bailout plan for farmers hit by trade war with China (12m:16s) :

Noting that's technically true, but nonsensical: Farmers need a bailout because of tariff / trade war that Trump started and he says bailout wouldn't be possible without the tariffs -- which are paid by U.S. companies and consumers. Once again, solving, or at least mitigating, a problem he started and proud of it. For example, China was buying tons of soybeans from the U.S. before he imposed tariffs, now they're buying them from Brazil.

There appear to be two interrelated issues with your sources. (Although thank you for giving sources, which was much more than the person you were replying to did.) First, there's a substantial issue with how representative these environmentalists are from the general movement. The ability to point to specific people doesn't really say much about the movement as a whole (although I will grant there's a decent fraction of the environmental movement which really does seem stuck in a 1970s sort of "degrowth" or "antigrowth" attitude). But you seem to also confuse sources saying "Hey, this is creating a serious problem" and not wanting to have that thing at all. The Science.org article for example is about the actual fact that steel production really does contribute seriously to climate change, but then much of the article is about the effort to make steel manufacturing more environmentally friendly. So the article is not about getting rid of steel manufacturing but about making it work better. Others in your list are not about getting rid of things, but moderation. To use the very last example, large scale car use really is creating a lot of problems. But one can recognize that and favor more moderation in terms of car use without getting rid of cars as a whole.

no problem.