Most of China's large projects are actually some type of competition with the US. The Tianjin Grand Bridge was basically built to eclipse the Causeway and showcase China's engineering prowess. The massive Shanghai subway buildout was a direct challenge to New York City's subway hegemony. Those 20+ story pig towers? Totally unnecessary way to do farming, but a source of national pride when compared to the already impressive scale of US factory farming. China is building record numbers of both solar and coal plants, which seem to be at environmental cross-purposes, but it makes sense when you consider they are trying to beat the US at both clean AND dirty energy. It's in the five-year plan.
Unlike the Soviet Union, China did not have much of a competitive mentality towards the United States, because for most of the time China lagged far behind the United States.
Sure, except this is the first time in my life I've seen the term "pulse" used for a vegetable. And, honestly, only in the last 10 years have I been hearing the term legume in common conversation. Grain is definitely the more common term.
I think your second point is a good one, although most economists would probably say this is an argument against the minimum wage rather than an argument for tariffs.
The ultimate problem with your first point---that tariffs boost domestic industry---is that the time horizon for reshoring manufacturing and domestic supply chains is longer than the expected lifetime of these tariffs. Trump is a second term president, there isn't broad consensus or even majority support for the tarrifs, and there is a great deal of opposition from business owners: all signs the tariffs are not for long. Who wants to invest in an expensive factory and workforce when the only thing guaranteeing your competitiveness is the remaining years of Trump? It's actually much worse than this, of course, because the tariffs are being used primarily as diplomatic leverage rather than economic policy, so they change frequently and unpredictably.
There are also serious downsides to the Trump tariffs that don't exist for traditional tariffs that are predictable and operate on a long time horizon. These tariffs create price shocks to domestic industry and retailers, which tend to disproportionately hurt smaller businesses and those with slimmer profit margins. They've also damaged the US's reputation with long-term partners, particularly Canada and the EU, which are now exploring competing trade deals with China and are figuring out how to extract themselves from dependence on US arms and tech companies, two major exports.
The effect of these tariffs is not going to be short-term pain for long-term gain. A great deal of US economic competitiveness comes from investments in diplomatic and military partnerships that have now been undermined. These tariffs will spur reciprocal tariffs from other nations and will accelerate the remodeling of the global economy away from US exports, trading competitive US exports for uncompetitive and commodified domestic industry.
Economies of scale aren't specific to states. That's something every cooperative group benefits from.
Historically, the formation of most large states was not a voluntary merger of smaller states for the benefit of all but the conquest of smaller states by larger states.
1) *All major players open source their unobfuscated training data.*
a) The evidence so far shows that every major AI company engaged in intentional and historically unprecedented copyright violation to obtain their training data.
b) LLMs have now poisoined future data for any new players. This is a massive negative externality, and we shouldn't accept this externality as a moat locking out future players from competition.
2) *Levy a 20% royalty on all future genAI revenue to authors and artists who appear in the dataset and exempt genAI from future copywright violations.*
a) The current copyright model is bad for both authors and AI companies. It's hard for authors to collect from violations, and it's expensive and tedious for AI companies to comply with innumerable individual copyrights. Simplify the regime for everyone, and properly reward the people whose work is the foundation of these models.
b) The specifics can be worked out, but, among other things, the royalty should be proprotional to the token count of a work, not just number of works.
Simply, the scale of observation matters. Making observations at scale is categorically different than manual observations. And yes, there is a spectrum. But the important thing is that there is a difference between the ends of that spectrum.
The solution is to recognize that ease of observation interacts with expectation of privacy and legislate what can be done at each point on the spectrum. I have no expectation that someone won't take a picture with me in the background while I'm in public, but I would find it jarring to be filmed at every public location I went, have that video indexed to my name in a database, and have all my behaviors tagged. You write the law so that the latter thing is illegal and the former thing isn't. When there's a dispute about what's illegal, you have it resolved by the courts like every other law.
>Making observations at scale is categorically different than manual observations.
No it isn't. It's evidenced by the fact that you will need to decide some exact scale at which surveillance becomes illegal and under which it is legal
>When there's a dispute about what's illegal, you have it resolved by the courts like every other law.
Okay, but what ought they resolve to? That is what we are debating.
> need to decide some exact scale at which surveillance becomes illegal and under which it is legal
Surveillance of specified individuals should be allowed, but just random surveillance of the public should be declared illegal except for very particular events and purposes (e.g. searching people for entry to a music gig). If there is public surveillance in an area, it should be made clear with signs etc unless it's for the express purpose of locating specified individuals (e.g. tracking a criminal's movements on public transport).
No, you are simply wrong but ignorance of scaling properties is the spirit of the day.
I suspect in the future a word will evolve for the stupidity of believing if a person can walk 3 miles in an hour then that scales to walking 500 miles in a week.
No, JFK consulted extensively with the engineers beforehand. The end of the decade timeframe first came from a NASA study published February 7, 1961. Kennedy's budget had actually rejected the initial proposal from Webb to fund the moon program for an end of the decade moon mission just a few weeks prior to Gagarin's flight. A new proposal was put together and presented May 8, 1961 for Johnson by James Webb, Abe Hyatt, and Robert Seaman which pushed for a moon landing by end of decade. Von Braun was even more aggressive, telling Kennedy that it could be done by 1968.
The British won out over the Spanish because they realized they didn't need enormous warships to win naval battles. The Spanish weren't ignoring the need for a navy--they miscalculated and misallocated resources.
The irony is that the commenters saying we must go back to the moon are more like the Spanish: sticking to a sentimental 1960s vision of human-based space exploration despite evidence clearly favoring robotics and remote control.
