I bought a '60s VTVM recently. It needs mains voltage, uses two vaccuum tubes, and does less than my $15 Aliexpress digital meter while taking 48 times the space, but golly it's nifty.
Air-conditioned dhed with high volume air cleaning for toxic actibities like soldering, plastic models, spray painiting, 3-D printing...
And a 3-d printer with a cross section of a metre on a side. I am sick of having to cut up designs, I want to print an entire extended-ATX case in a single run.
If we're going for the cartoon reference, surely Steamed Hams would work:
"Thousands of premium car sales, in this part of the year, in his part of the country, localized entirely within the last seconds of a government incentive scheme?"
"Yes."
"May I see?"
"No."
(Musk's mother, off screen) "The company is on fire!"
One is selective enforcement. There are a long list of countries with abysmal human rights records, but it's too strategically convenient or economically essential to look the other way. Whrn was the last time they made a fuss about Jamal Khashoggi? Human rights only gets invoked when sabre-rattling is useful, not as a solid and consistent moral framework.
The other is that it's a "luxury product". Can every country support a modern human-rights model, or does it require a certain level of economic and political stability? It's hard to maintain rule of law amid active insurgency, or if you can't even deploy the bureaucratic state. Once you've gotten past that threshold, will both leaders and the broader population be eager to switch from the system that got them where they are? You've got to convince people that being able to write an anti-government op-ed is more important than security, or the price of eggs. This is a long term soft sell: berating countries for not measuring up to Western standards isn't going to get them to make that choice any faster.
I figured that when the DOGE fiasco imploded, he would scream "treason' and make Musk the fall guy to placate people. Wouldn't roll back anything but a few symbolic changes, but it would let him look the hero.
I could see him loving the idea of expansion to manufacture a legacy. Jefferson may have been a philosopher or a slave-romancer but that's college academic stuff: every middle school student learns he bought Louisiana. McKinley got us as close to an on-paper empire as we got, and they put him on the $500 note for it.
Soft power will never fill the same goal. Being the cultural or moral lighthouse for the West is inherently different from actually raising a flag over their capitals.
Oil burning was common in some regions. The Southern Pacific had a lot of oil-fired engines. Their famous "cab-forward" steam engines could only make sense as oil burners without fundamental redesign.
Part of it might be that the last holdouts for steam, who made the most technically advanced engines, were predominantly coal-carriers. They didn't have the oil infrastructure, and didn't want to burn relations eith their customers.
Don't tell him there's been women on the $1 coin since 1979, and recently themed seasonal quarter reverses that alternate between illegible and just overly busy.
Part of the "gobble all the data" perspective is that you need a broad corpus to be meaningfully useful. Not many people are going to give a $892 billion market cap when your model is a genius about a handful of narrow subjects that you could get deep volunteer support on.
OTOH maybe there's probably a sane business in narrow siloed (cheap and efficient and more bounded expectations) AI products: the reinvention of the "expert system" with clear guardrails, the image generator that only does seaside background landscapes but can't generate a cat to save its life, the LLM that's a prettified version of a knowledgebase search and NOTHING MORE
We've seen decentralized education and it tends to have problems with resourcing and economies of scale, and content policies get easily hijacked by loud people with personal vendettas.
That's what baffles me with the DOGE fracas. How long will solidarity hold when there are some very clear winners and losers within their own class?
There are a lot of billionaires who have fat revenue streams coming out of the federal budget, and I don't think they're all eager to trigger some sort of Mad Max/Medieval social collapse just so they can be the Archduke of San Jose after America implodes. I doubt they all bought the Network State story.
A fair number of them, expecting to live for more than 10 years and wanting to remain rich, probably invested aggressively into "skate where the puck is going" businesses that are now being slaughtered in the name of doubling down on fossil fuels and uncompetitive domestic manufacturers. Will Elon eat their losses? Of course, he's committing financial seppuku too.
The leadership of the DPRK transitioned across generations, but there was plenty of institutional alignment and wheel greasing.
Trump will be trying to negotiate with the reaper for six months after he's dead. I can't imagine he considers his mortality, let alone in the context of anything that has to survive after his departure. There will be a free for all to grab his mantle.
I wonder what impact a truly high end CPU being open would have on the fab industry.
Right now, there's a lot of manufacturing secret sauce; if you took an Intel design, it would require significant rework to perform well on Samsung or TSMC process.
Fab owners would have a vested competitive interest to customize the design to perform better on their tooling.
Conversely, buyers might develop a renewed interest in second-sourcing-- if you can take your chip to any fab, you have more control over your supply chain.
Could we use biomass and hydro to bootstrap without fossil fuels?
We might have to go smaller scale, but if we have a playbook to follow, we can skip some wasteful false starts