China dervies a ton of authority and Legitmacy from the PLA (peoples liberation army) and Russia is run by from Inteligence service members of the KGB low level ones to be sure but I don't see how China and Russia are counter examples. The US isn't their yet we will see if the backslide happens in the next two years but I think its of a different qualia than we see in the "typical" Authorithian State.
Ironically I was watching Nuremberg last not and is is schocking how close some of the leaders of this country are to characters like Hermann Göring, or Hitler himself in talking points. They are certainly populists but the language they used is MGGA (make german great again) so to speak. And factually that were not particular that good at it either most of Germans recovery is really due to the liberal government that pass laws that built the Autobahn were laws not by the Nazi party. They certain jumped on them and accelerate them but effective governence is not really for the populist
In fact, the current administration, not headed by someone from the military (and VP has military credibility but not leadership) is not at all aligned to the military except in that their base appreciates the imprimatur of honorable military service. In fact, Trump 1 was in many ways a huge refutation to Trump of the idea that the military guys were leaders he could count on. Their brain-trust positions had more left-alignment than he maybe imagined. His administration, in 2025, fired high-ranking officers in a way that suggested he entered with the reverse conclusion: not military leaders as high-competence straight-shooters, but as all being suspect for having risen unstoppably in a system pervaded by partisan platitudes and shibboleths. Fortunately, the administration didn't take the Soviet approach of purging all those under suspicion.
They just finally had to fire their SecNav because reality butted heads with their ideological conclusion was that business experience was more conducive to military success. Unfortunately for their very-much-not-military-led plan, SecNav probably needs a bit more user experience from time in Navy leadership to successfully work within that labrythine bureaucracy.
I disagree any of the bloat you are talking about exists because puffying paper numbers is basically required to justify your work. Its because they were distrusted extensively so they have to ritually say their work is useful. Also I think its very challenging because most extra committees and stuff exist because people complained about how streamlined science use to be. Those committees exist because science got wrongfully accused of wasting money in the 80/90s with the golden fleece awards among other things, where republican's claimed someone's basic science research was a total waste of government money. Ironically many of the things that won a golden fleece ended up saving the country billions if not trillions of dollars overtime.
I think the major struggle with basic research is there is no way to conduct it in which results are guarenteed. If you could do that you wouldn't need basic research. But there are a ton of questions whose outcomes are not really valuable at all but you simply don't know. On net science dispite those many useless questions answered still is extremely net posititve because some of those apparently meaningless questions ended up being the right question to drive research to useful good answers.
I think that is the Nixon effect followed up my the messaged opinion of the Regan administration that the government shouldn't be trusted despite doing 1000s of things that should earn a little bit of trust.
I don't know to much about photonics but if they ever figure out the boolean algebra and register storage it would be really cool. You have 1 photo cpu core but just use different wavelengths for different threads running in the core. I am sure its way more complex than that but articles like this make you dream about how much we don't know
The article is about privacy tracking spyware cookies. I think making statements in that context about how modern logistics don't work with out location data implies you mean location data from those sources. I mean i suppose it doesn't have to but than it just feels off topic no?
Not over the last few months, obviously. But in general I've never known a serious trader who didn't maintain a cash balance at some non-trivial level, if only to maintain liquidity for low-latency bets.
But regardless, the point was that all the "cash" you see in your investment accounts (even if you, personally, don't carry any) is predominantly treasuries and other short term high-confidence debt. Everyone owns treasuries, it's only true that very few people "buy" treasury notes.
Well, your statement was that a "meaningful population of the target audience" did not "have any meaningful amount of treasuries in their portfolio". And that's wrong. Basically everyone holds treasuries. Some people don't. Most people do.
You're goalpost-moving to the converse of your point, though. You weren't claiming that there was merely a meaningful population who wouldn't benefit, you were stating that there was NO meaningful population that would. Go check. And again, that's wrong.
I think AI emphazes brain dead computer science and script kiddy culture. It just lowers the bar enough to make bad ideas easy enough to implement quickly but good ideas still take longer to produce and argue for. Maybe its a skill issue on my part but I've watch my team rebuild a model I maintain, with AI for been estimating performance changes based on trace following. The Model isn't accurate and was build to bypass working on the real model. They spend someone's full time work for 4 months at this point but the thing they wanted modeled took 1 day by just adding it to the real model.
The managers and everyone are so excited by the fact the person did it with AI but I just get really confused because it seems like they just made some worse that has less value because it cannot actually correctly simulate the thing we want to test. Maybe i am being petty and salty but I think the that this is time wasted by any measure. And net-negative value but the team wants to emphasize we are using AI. There have been some productive uses but the productivity trap-doors are about the same as with normal development just people seem more willing to take the trap door ideas now.
>just people seem more willing to take the trap door ideas
It's mainly due to pressure from above. People who want to do a good job and are allowed the time to will be fastidious with or without AI. But now AI provides a shortcut and band-aid where things can be papered over or products can be launched quickly. Ship fast and then iterate" doesn't work when you're building on shaky foundations, but good luck convincing people of that.
Local municipalities collect this and often get tricked into not collecting it via agreements to host it in or near their town for multiple year agreements. Also the assessed value of the property may not come anywhere near the costs of increased electricity demand, water usage and noise pollution problems. For locals
Their is typically high paying jobs in factories but these places dont employ a large staff beyond construction. It a tough spaces.
Property tax is often assessed on capital equipment owned by a business as well as real estate. So while the real estate may be of limited value, the hosted machines could drive significant tax revenue as AI machines are spendy.
You're right though, that municipalities often waive taxes to woo big projects.
Yeah but i think server farms are tricky to access because they have accountants to argue about depreciating CPUs, second hand CPU deppreication is enormous so its possible to wiggle the numbers down. Not to zero but the challenge is that you have to recoup not just hthe land value but the value related all the infrastructure and resource drain this type of business does which is very non-trivial
The consequence of saying they cannot choice to not have them. Is saying your requiring them to have them whether or not the people their want them. Its also a temporary moratorium. Maybe the industry should have been more responsible and not pasted so many externalities on to the public sector if they didnt want to face regulations.
I think the highest parent comment basically hasn't engaged in any of the cost benefit analysis just strawman the subject to banning all industry. They are not doing that and allow other manufacturing to exist maybe the data center business should learn from those industries how to conduct themselves
So if companies are actively trying to build them in the state. And your claim is the state has to allow them to be built? Isn't this just a delay requirement to force them to have data center? Sure they aren't build today but if the government cannot stop them at the permit, or at any point after its a requirement to have them. If you want to deny a state that right to decide via democratic processes you are effectively requiring them to build in their state.
How else could states that deny those data centers if they cannot pass legislation to prevent them or require XYZ parameters before they are allowed to be built? Your argument is nonsensical in my opinion especially in context. I get that if you do a string compare they are different sentences but the semantic effects of the two statements are equavalanet in the framing that comapnies are actively trying to permit and build them.
Bad dichotomy they aren't saying no to data centers to spite them. They are saying no because that data centers are a major public drain and net negative on public resources.
Often they don't pay high taxes nor do they employ large numbers of people. Most of the money made by leeching of public power infrastructure and cheap electricity and export the profits to somewhere else. They are building and selling a non tangible good i.e where do you tax it?
Their is also noise pollution concerns which can destroy communities near by and water usage concerns. These plants drain aquaifers.
I just think you haven't substantially thought about the effect these have on the actual people living nearby. AI being .000001cent cheaper just doesnt help people that much
> Often they don't pay high taxes nor do they employ large numbers of people... They are building and selling a non tangible good i.e where do you tax it?
You could easily charge a property tax (could even have a higher rate for data centers, specifically), or an excise tax on number of servers, or a tax on excess energy/water consumption. There's lots of options here, if that's what you're worried about.
> Their is also noise pollution concerns which can destroy communities near by and water usage concerns. These plants drain aquaifers.
Factories also do both of these things. They're noisy, often have emissions much worse than anything coming from a datacenter, and most factories use large quantities of water as well.
We need to go full Oracle and charge an excise tax per logical CPU core. For GPUs we can count SIMT lanes.
More seriously they should be taxed per watt, likely in an asymptotic manner because most of the externalities don't scale linearly. Any additional infrastructure requirements should be directly rolled into their electric and water bills, which is to say that they should receive a very unfavorable rate.
I mean yeah it think their are some ideas around how to tax things better and rolling up the real infrastructure and resource costs. All these things can be done but the conversation above has that as the last thought which is what many towns that get destroyed by data-centers do. They job to conclusions about these things being universially good or making jobs but dont' engage with the reality of the math that goes into that decisions. Whether towns can do that hard to say but I believe the state government has an obligation to aid its local governments and stake holders i.e people to not get ripped off and forced in to terrible contracts that hurt the states long term
Yeah but the data centers write contracts that making changing the laws around property contractually impossible if you don't argree to their hostile terms they just move to the next town willing to accept. Towns are not a necessiarly smart enough to do all contractual footwork especially when companies heavily lobby the towns population with empty promises. But even if they do the best thing that happens is the company moves to a more willing town. Most data centers are build in poor places because those towns are looking for something to change their circumstances.
Also I am not saying factories are all good they pump stuff like TEFLON in rivers but at least the people locally get a good job out of it. And they make those trades even when the negative impacts exceed the positive gains like with data centers. Its from position of depressed town where the people want to see the golden days return.
Also this is a deal with negatives and positives you haven't listed a positive for these data centers in your reply I think is indicitive that you haven't explored the effect of data centers in places like Louisiana which is very permisive.
I think just saying maybe towns should do better laws doesn't recognize the power differential between a town and likely a poor town and a Trillion dollar corportations. Idea's like an excise tax like that is way more complex than you are thinking does a server excise tax effect just these data centers or anyone doing data center processing i.e local hospitals. The Law is very complex when it comes to inventing new taxes but yeah some of those things should be investigated it might be a good case to have a pause to study those proposals and implement them so that towns don't just get screwed over. And I am not saying there isn't a dynamic in which data centers can help local communities its just that has not been the case for more data centers than the public is potentially willing to tolerate. Make the economics better for people and I am sure governments would not stand in the way its just at this point their is little effort to do so.
Ironically I was watching Nuremberg last not and is is schocking how close some of the leaders of this country are to characters like Hermann Göring, or Hitler himself in talking points. They are certainly populists but the language they used is MGGA (make german great again) so to speak. And factually that were not particular that good at it either most of Germans recovery is really due to the liberal government that pass laws that built the Autobahn were laws not by the Nazi party. They certain jumped on them and accelerate them but effective governence is not really for the populist
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