I kind of wish most of LLM/AI dashboards out there just does it in excel/google sheets to have a normalized interface. One of key benefits of spreadsheets is almost everyone, technical or not have had some exposure to them.
The opposite, all historical clear paths i.e. manufacturing/export led model is closed/closing (geopolitics + being automated away). Less clear service export also closing. The growth path that employs 100s of millions and 10s of millions are not available to Indian.
Reality is even PRC with most favorable conditions still left behind ~400m people because there's only so many opportunities. It's one thing to have ~1B who made it supporting ~400m who didn't vs India trending towards 1.7 B... and if they end up with 500m that makes it, and 1.2B that doesn't, then things may get very ugly in terms of governance. Now that 500m middle/upper class is large enough that India will in aggregate "make it" as geopolitical power, as in climb the tech tree, but due to sheer population and opportunities that looks now foreclosed, most of Indian's statistically, simply, won't. And when numerator/denominator of haves/have not too skewed, there's nothing haves can do (redistribute) even if they wanted to, which lbh, they won't. IMO this pretty much baked in dynamic for India for next few generations, unless we discover abundance.
TBH India going to sanctioned if they ever make meaningful inroad. Outsourcing some IV design to Bengaluru, Hyderabad, prune is not the same as if India wants to start stepping on leading edge fabrication money printing toes. But short/medium term, western semi projected to have 100,000s talent shortage so India probably best hope for western semi to stay staffed. VS PRC who is brrrting out enough talent for entire indigenous vertical semis supply chain.
TBH Anthropic was used for target selection in Iran and if Amodei oversold operational AI and was reason why US bled so many highend munitions... only for Iran to survive than basically everything downstream of the shit show including energy prices is on their heads.
Plenty of democracy -> social democracy models to work from in last 60 years. This isn't feudal peasant -> babies first populous governance transition.
Some of rich eating may happen, but blood of landlord refresh tree f socialism etc etc... sometimes you just slap the reset button when accumulation out of control
I don't want to eat the rich. Every rich person I've seen looks like they taste awful. Like how long would you have to cook Musk just to get the stink out of the meat?
Larger airborne lasers have been tried and failed, i.e YAL1 needed magnitude more power, but that was to intercept ICBMs shielded to survive rentry.
100 kW and 10s dwelling in atmosphere theoretically works for AA intercepts.
What's slept on is it lasers also potentially like scifi tier infinite ammo laser gun vs subsonic targets... like drones and cruise missiles. You don't have to line up gun runs (which J36 doesn't even have). The limit is basically how fast heat exchange dumps laser heat into fuel burn, but lazy llm math suggest like... multiple targets per minute with off boresight engagement - i.e. all targets within 10km cone/swath. This absolute game changer / flips economics against any budget drone precision complex adversaries.
Succession is going to pick someone from standing committee, i.e the candidate pool is known, and the pipeline to that pool is known. At minimum it's going to be a career bureaucrat with decades of experience, and with anticorruption drive, likely clean candidates even if it skips generations. What they won't have is miscellaneous candidate with unknown governance ability parachuted in on popularity vote.
>“we don’t make anything anymore” narrative I see so much."
This conflating US financializing manufacturing vs actual industrial capacity, i.e. the entire manufacturing by value / MVA "cope". US objectively doesn't make much relative to past and a lot of shit US makes, US doesn't actually make, others does the actual making while US financializes and capture via spreadsheet maxxing, hedonic adjustments etc, and do insert "I made this meme" on things US fundamentally did not "make"
Like US does make some legitimate frontier stuff in house - the reality is is in aggregate industrial base terms, US MAKES / FABRICATES very little vs pre industrial chain hollow out, US does import a lot of subcomponents that others make, integrates, or outsource actual MAKING abroad while capturing intangibles like IP/patent fees that get bundled up into value add stats, but when people talk about making they're talking about extraction to factory gate pipeline. Not US can sell a bunch of foreign made goods with some CONUS final assembly or IP accounting because muh smile curve that attributes disproportionate "value" to US "makers". Consider a US widget co imports $10 of components assembles and sells for $40, the statistically manufacturing value add is $30 even though US did very little making. Now add tariffs, regulatory capture etc and widget sells for $50 and that's $40 of MVA for basically doing minimal M. Said US widget factory makes 10 widgets and adds $400 to MVA. Meanwhile a PRC widget company makes 100 identical widgets at $2 each... but their MVA is only $200, but they did literally all the making. These two industrial bases are not the same. Then a few years later, US BLS/BEA applies a statistical adjustment because widget X is slightly more performant... (prevalent in tech), so that widget is now listed as $100 equivalent utility, so hey manufacturing expanded (it didn't).
SpaceX... doesn't make that much... they make a few thing that are reusable and due to techstack can lift a lot, i.e. operational improvement (not discounting how game changing resuable is). But compare to PRC, who made like 2x-3x more first stages, i.e. their output is significantly higher, which is to say SpaceX is "making" at about American scale. For reference Boeing like ~30% domestic content, US auto ~50%. Reality is the ONLY thing US is REALLY good at making is refined fossil, agri, wood products etc. Almost everything else US very good at making money, but not the stuff.
TLDR US got much better at MAKING money from other people MAKING things. The other caveat is regulatory capture = US grossly overpay for mediocre shit, a lot of stuff that makes in US are just... not good, i.e. vehicles, but people trapped paying domestic premium which inflates value add but not actual relevant when people discuss US making things. US broadly makes a lot of mediocre overpriced things while population stuck shopping in company store for large items, that looks good on value add / productivity stats... but it's not reflection of industrial capacity which is what people think about in terms of real manufacturing.
More correct to say there is a way to keep AI more grounded, you can ask AI for counter factuals, pushback, reevaluate, verify etc... most people can't/won't do that. There needs to be more AI literacy, but it sure as hell beats dealing with humans.
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