>“We have a population that is not reproducing on its own with the same level that it used to. The only way we’re going to have a great future in America is if we welcome and embrace immigrants – the Dreamers and all of them, because our ultimate goal is to help the Dreamers but [also] to get a path to citizenship for all 11 million or however many undocumented there are here,”
Chuck Schumer, who is massively understating the number of illegals here, puts it at at least 11M. So yeah tens of millions is a realistic ballpark.
Voting in these countries takes place largely along ethnic lines.
Go look at maps of "if only X demographic voted", there is a clear incentive for certain parties to import people just because changing the ethnic makeup of the country will give them political power (immigrants have kids who are citizens and will vote along their ethnic lines).
Additionally there are efforts to naturalize refugees and illegals:
Chuck Schumer:
"We have a population that is not reproducing on its own with the same level that it used to. The only way we’re going to have a great future in America is if we welcome and embrace immigrants – the Dreamers and all of them, because our ultimate goal is to help the Dreamers but [also] to get a path to citizenship for all 11 million or however many undocumented there are here"
"Path to citizenship" here implies that he wants them to be able to vote.
It has everything to do with it. Some will receive amnesty (Reagan did it). Most will have kids, the kids will grow up with a different set of values and they will vote differently than native populations. They will vote outside of the national interest.
I am not talking about Republican or Democrat.
Whether English, Japanese, Australian, American, German, whatever the population being replaced with outsiders. Less unity, less cohesion and subject to whatever the whims of plutocrats may be.
What kind of mad man wants to see an Ireland with Irish? I don't want to live in Mogadishu.
Do what Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and China are doing: just let it fall, it will eventually bounce back. Boomers will be fine.
Replacing your entire culture and people doesn’t really fix the problem, it just permanently changes your country to be more like Africa, Mexico, India, etc.
I am a mechanical engineer, I have a multi decade career doing exactly these kinds of thermal analysis.
This video is basically saying that cooking data centers in space is possible. It is.
The question is if it's better, in any way, to putting them on earth. It isn't.
The common misconception I see is that people think that space is cold like Antarctica is cold. It isn't. Antarctica is cold because there is lots of matter, very cold. Space is cold because there is no matter. No matter to put the heat into and take it away.
It's the same reason that a hard boiled egg takes minutes to cook in water, but 30 to cook in the oven. Now put it in a vacuum insulated thermos and see how long it takes to cook.
Radiation is the weakest of the three heat transfer modes. So much so that in engineering school we often cross it off as negligible compared to the other two (convection and conduction).
Do the heat transfer math yourself, let us know what you find.
One of the comments on the YouTube video you linked says it best. " The only reason to do this is if you have a company who's business is to get things into space".
You obviously didn’t watch the video, he literally does the heat transfer math using radiation only, it works just fine.
Instead of just stating “it won’t work” why don’t you actually do the calculation yourself and show why it won’t work?
Yes they have an incentive to put things in space, but it actually is a decent idea if they can execute on it the same way they did with Starlink. There’s huge demand for compute, many data center projects on earth are being scuttled because of NIMBYs and lack of power, there are no NIMBYs in space and a sun synchronous orbit means you can power them without batteries.
In order to talk about these things we need to think about the power from the grid, all the way to the cooling water coming out. Not just talk about how we can calculate or optimize each little piece. Of course we can do that, it's the overall system we are talking about and need to understand.
Forest for the trees.
What do I mean by that here?
He does the calculations for 20 kW. Which sounds like a lot. It's only enough to cool one node, not one rack, one node, in a modern data center. The starlink satellite he referenced is viewed as the absolute most modern thermal design in a satellite.
Most data centers have 2000-5000 nodes and the hyperscalers have 100,000 or more.
So to replace a single data center we need 2000-5000 of these things up there, at a minimum, or one thing that is 2000-5000 times bigger.
And maintenance.
And the hardware gets obsoleted every few years.
Or you could just put it in the desert in Nevada. But we don't need rockets to get there.
It's not like his checking account has $1T in it, this is just a technicality that sums up all of the hypothetical value of the shares he owns in companies.
If he actually tried to sell it and turn it into cash it would be less than $1T.
If you borrow against it you still have to pay interest. If he somehow found someone to loan him $1T, which would probably be practically impossible, the interest would make the total amount he got less than $1T.
if you borrow against it and buy shares of stock, the stockmarket generally can be counted on for at least 7% returns, and the borrowing cost would be 5%, so no, chances are the interest would not eat up the borrowing.
Buy-Borrow-Die resets the basis for capital gains tax, but then there's estate tax when the money gets passed on (exemption is only $15 million, trivial to billionaires).
No, taxed when you earn the money that repays the loan. Income tax, capital gains taxes, dividend taxes, estate taxes, etc... However the money was acquired to repay the loan, a tax was applied.
Can I e.g. borrow against my assets and not pay any taxes?
If you have a 401(k), yes. It's a way to turn a 25% credit card debt into a 5% loan.
The hitch is that while you can pay the credit card company over 30 years, the 401(k) loan is less than a decade, resulting in higher payments short-term, but money saved in the long term.
This strategy is not a traditional loan with interest and regular payments. If you try to live on regular loans it doesn't make any sense. It's a scheme mostly only available to HNW people where they repay upon death in certain tax loophole ways.
You won't pay taxes but you will pay interest. Most forms of value (real estate, gold, stocks, your car) you can borrow against in the USA, but the interest you pay almost always makes it a dumb idea.
So? Imagine he sells all his ownership and this tanks the value of his companies by 90%. Oh no. He only has $100,000,000,000 in the bank. Enough to be ludicrously rich a thousand times over.
I have never once understood this "oh it is only paper money" argument.
I'm just saying that when you say "trillionaire" it evokes the idea that he's hoarding $1T in a bank account. But it's almost entirely just locked up in shares of companies, and if he actually wanted to turn it into cash it wouldn't actually be 1T.
It sounds like either way you could just use a break. If you have a house and retirement is tracking inflation, you can use the time to reset and figure out a career change.
>To release the model both safely and quickly, we’ve tuned these safeguards conservatively—they’ll sometimes catch harmless requests
Why is everyone so okay with these companies intentionally gimping their AI and choosing who is allowed to know certain types of information in the name of safety? Can you imagine if Microsoft shipped a feature in their OS that watched what you did and shut down the computer if it detected you were doing something it deemed "unsafe"?
We really need truly open source versions of models like this, otherwise we are allowing a few oligarchs to directly dictate which uses of our own computers are allowed and not allowed.
Ideally we’d have a project that’s truly open like Linux, trained by people in the community or possibly some benevolent _actually_ nonprofit entity like what OpenAI was supposed to be.
The next best thing is that the Chinese labs catch up and release open weight versions.
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