Those upsides could have also been accomplished by pointing the CIA at Venezuela to do the same thing they've been doing across South America for the past fifty years.
> Those upsides could have also been accomplished by pointing the CIA at Venezuela to do the same thing they've been doing across South America for the past fifty years
Has the CIA actually advanced American interests in South America? Legitimate question. My layman's understanding is they serially fucked the theatres they were assigned to alongside America's reputation in exchange for, at best, short-term U.S. wins.
"Has the CIA advanced American interests" is the wrong question. The CIA does not work for "The United States" proper, it works for a tiny section of it that comprises the ruling elites. Those people certainly enjoyed significant material benefits from CIA actions in Guatemala, Panama, El Salvador, etc.
> 4 decades of James Bond, Tom Clancy, Homeland, Zero Dark Thirty
Not really. See [1]. A competent clandestine service lets one achieve foreign policy goals without going to war.
But more to the point, pretending everything one doesn't like is an elite conspiracy is self defeating. If you want to gut the CIA, convince voters to hate it.
>Not superbly. But more than the IRS, DoJ or Department of Education.
Three letter agency that mostly harasses people outside US borders polls higher among US voters than three letter agencies that do most of their harassing within US borders. Water is wet.
The only vaguely valid dual use technology I can see coming out of this is improving space-rated processing enough that deep space probes sent out to Uranus or whatever can run with more processing power than a Ti-82 and thus can actually do some data processing rather than clogging up the deep space network for three weeks on an uplink with less power than a lightbulb
Nah, they are pretty similar in difficulty for interception - the first US ASAT program used essentially the same Nike Zeus missiles used for ABM duty during the late 50s
Worst part about it was all the people fretting on about ridiculous threats like the chatbot turning into skynet sucked the oxygen out of the room for the more realistic corporate threats
Right. But then the AI firms did that deliberately, didn't they? Started the big philosophical argument to move the focus away from the things they were doing (epic misappropriation of intellectual property) and the very things their customers intended to do: fire huge numbers of staff on an international, multi-industry scale, replace them with AI, and replace already limited human accountability with simple disclaimers.
The biggest worry would always be that the tools would be stultifying and shit but executives would use them to drive layoffs on an epic scale anyway.
And hey now here we are: the tools are stultifying and shit, the projects have largely failed, and the only way to fix the losses is: layoffs.
Most ICE vehicles with automatic transmissions (aka 90% of them) either explicitly open the clutch or do torque converter things when off throttle, the result being that the vehicle starts freewheeling. Air resistance and friction and what not means the vehicle will eventually stop, but in a modern car at highway speeds that stopping distance can still be multiple miles; and that's before you bring hills into the equation.
My point being for most people expected behavior is for a car to only slow down during active braking and maintain momentum otherwise, and trying to change that otherwise would bring more danger than it's worth.
I find it hard to believe continuous consumption of potable municipal water is cheaper than running chillers or exchangers cooled by a river/ocean, especially considering powerplants and the like have been doing the latter for decades
That is only ~2,000 m^3/day (~2 acre*foot/day). Even if they exclusively used the most expensive source of water, seawater desalination, that would only be ~800 $/day.
Your average almond tree uses 3-4 acre*foot per year [1]. So the yearly water consumption of the data center is ~200 almond trees. Your average almond tree produces ~50-60 pounds per year [2] and ~4500 pounds per hectare (2.5 acres), so that is the water consumption of a tiny 5 acre almond farm producing ~10,000 pounds of almonds per year.
The internet indicates the wholesale price of almonds is ~2 $/pound, so you can either have a data center or 20,000 $ worth of almonds.
That consumption figure is per acre of almonds. But your point is still valid. In total almonds or other crops like alfalfa consume millions of acre-feet of water a year in a dry state like California while a single data center only consumes ~500-1000.
Indeed, that is my mistake. I misread the denominator of the consumption figure. Luckily the orders of magnitude are so dissimilar that mere factors of 100x do not affect the calculation.
3-4 acre*foot per year per acre of almonds results in the data center consuming ~200 acres of almond. ~4500 pounds per hectare results in ~1800 pounds per acre. So, that would produce about 360,000 pounds of almonds or ~720,000 $ worth of almonds.
That is certainly vastly less economically productive per unit of water consumed compared to a 750,000,000 $ data center which probably has a expected payback period of 10-20 years or about 37,500,000-75,000,000 $ of produced value per year.
It really shouldn't be, but part of the site selection process for these things is finding a place with cheap enough power and cheap enough water that you can rip them off by dangling the "jobs!" carrot. So it's not exactly random. And there are enough locations in the US that view providing cheap utilities to their citizens as a benefit (which, when things weren't getting arbitraged on a national scale, was probably a reasonable policy) that they can always find someone.
Maybe building a heat exchanger in a river requires loads of environmental / planning permits, but just producing millions of gallons of (warm) "sewage" doesn't, because it's already allowed?
Arguably if India had the intel and military means/technology to quash Pakistan's nuclear program without a full-on invasion at the time they would have. I'm sure several other countries would have too, but the ability just wasn't there during the 70s
5 minutes breaks the point from where charging time is something that has to be planned around to an inconvenience equivalent to hitting a red light after leaving a traditional gas station
Yes, water quality matters a lot in coffee enthusiast land. They actually make little mineral packets that you add to a gallon of distilled water to get a "perfect" brewing water - I know since I actually use them for my espresso machine to fight scale buildup from my +10 grain tap water.
Note this excessiveness is really needed for espresso though; a regular Brita jug handles more tolerant methods of brewing perfectly well (and to be honest most people murder coffee enough that the water is the least of their concerns)
Just a suggestion as well, theres countless 'water recipes' that let you easily do the same thing for a fraction the price. They arent doing anything complicated. Some mixes are simple two ingredients, some go up to several, but all are pretty dead simple.
Lets you fiddle and fine tune things more for your own preferences too.
I've heard in some lighter procedures (think bone setting or dental work) just an amnesic drug is given as apparently not biologically encoding/remembering a traumatic event seems to produce just as good an outlook as blocking the tramua through unconsciousness/painkillers
>as apparently not biologically encoding/remembering a traumatic event seems to produce just as good an outlook as blocking the tramua through unconsciousness/painkillers
I'll have to look it up, but there is at least one known case of a man who went through conscious but immobilized general anesthesia, through excruciating surgery pain, before the doctors (in this case) realized that they'd forgotten to first give him a certain specific sedative drug as part of his anesthesia cocktail. They rectified this and apparently did so knowing that it would make him forget the trauma he'd just gone through.
However, later, when he woke up from an otherwise successful and complication-free surgery, he soon began to have extremely severe, brutally traumatic anxiety attacks, derived from subconscious memories of what he'd experienced. This went on without resolution to the point where he could no longer socially function at all.. If I remember correctly, he then eventually killed himself as a result.
After his death, his family investigated the last major medical thing he'd gone through (his otherwise routine surgery) and somehow got wind of what the doctors had done, and that they'd known of their own fuckup. The familiy then did manage to gather enough evidence to have the doctors criminally charged, aside from also getting a massive settlement from the hospital itself.
Long story short, I wouldn't count on "just as good an outlook", and especially if I know that, going into such a surgery, the me that feels it before later forgetting what happened will go through a brief living hell of horror.
It's no consolation knowing your future You won't remember a thing if you still have to fully experience that nightmare prima facie.
Colour me skeptical of that notion. Trauma and anxiety have a way of driving themselves deep, and somebody who has anxiety problems emerge or worsen an indeterminate amount of time post-intervention is unlikely to ever establish the link, let alone then go on to prove it to anybody else if they somehow did stumble upon the answer.
