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Cake day: October 23rd, 2024

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  • The SpaceX/Anduril plan is $2.5T. This initial $25B is just to pay for weapon salesmen to sell the US/public on $2.5T. Like most modern US military spending, the goal is to spend rather than produce value.

    With war on Canada, and rest of world, commercial truck and ship bombs are a good path to annonymous destruction of US, where political blame is independent of facts like 9/11. Submarines can attack with short range missiles. If you/enemy believes that golden dome is 99.9% effective, and you/enemy would like to collapse the US economically with a single nuke, as punishment for its hubris, then sending 1000 ICBMs will work. This means producing much more missiles and nuclear payloads, and the dome effectiveness will be overstated and undertested. Much more missiles are likely to get through.









  • Policy for abundance and competition matters a lot for China success. It starts with abundant raw material and processing. Steel and construction materials matters to factory building costs in addition to new energy production costs. It’s unclear how much of abundance outcomes is the result of direct incentives to material producers/refiners vs “build it and they will come” attitudes that includes confidence in supporting clean energy/vehicles downstream.

    In the west, oil oligarchy protectionism drives policy. History of oil companies patting themselves on the back with PR on clean energy while doing nothing. Funding massive disinformation and politicians for climate terrorism, and the solutions/progress that is made outside of oil companies is just extremely slow. Meant for PR and scarcity, and the hopes that high scarcity profits can be dressed up as rewarding national champions doing a little bit against global warming. Most of the IRA is not about creating US abundance, but rather setting up US monopolies in US supply chain, that have caused projects to stall because they are not competitive by US ROI standards, and the lack of confidence in usurping oil oligarchy for US only market.

    Article starts off with “do we need domestic industry?” before not making any conclusions about it later. If Aliens came to earth to trade us cheap stuff, US oligarchy would insist on losing a war against the Aliens instead. Cheap energy and materials further makes jobs. Solar especially has up to 90% of its costs as local deployment spending. Cheap energy and materials is core to competitive manufacturing, and low consumer cost of living. The political reaction to go to war with competitive goods to protect domestic oligarchy profits, and pretend to support uncompetitive domestic upstarts with subsidies, is a net social loss. We end up with a high subsidy per job level, where UBI (full society redistribution) would enable more affordability of better products instead.