> The artificial-intelligence-powered manufacturing hub is planned for a 4,000-acre site given to the U.S. by Manila, said undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg. The U.S. will occupy the site rent-free and administer it as a special economic zone.
> The hub will have diplomatic immunity, such as the protections afforded to an American embassy, and operate under U.S. common law—the first arrangement of its kind anywhere in the world. The two-year lease is renewable for 99 years.
That's weird.
It should be noted that tge person quoted in the article Jacob Helberg who is currently the Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment has ties to both Sam Altman and Peter Thiel.[0]
> Helberg served as a commissioner for the U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission, and senior advisor to Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir Technologies.[6][7][8] Helberg has commented extensively on US–China relations, and the national security implications of Chinese-developed web apps like TikTok.
> He married American investor Keith Rabois in a 2018 ceremony officiated by Sam Altman.[13]
> Helberg is one of the top donors to Donald Trump's 2024 reelection campaign, donating $2 million in 2024.
What are we doing here man? Like what are we doing?
America has been completely taken over by a certain faction of silicon valley and they seem to be parting out the country for sale to the highest bidder.
It's like the rise of a new East India Trading Co. but on the other hand -- I just can't see this infrastructure remaining in the hands of America / Philippines if major conflict with China breaks out.
It's like they're building it to hand over to the Chinese in a few years. What are we doing?
Trump is a red herring here. It's the Thiel and Altman connections that are significant.
This guy is married to one of the Paypal mafia, He's worked for Palantir, and Altman officiated his wedding.
He entered government while retaining investments in OpenAI, Anduril, SpaceX, the Boring Company and Neuralink. These are all Thiel or Musk connected companies and they stand to benefit directly from his policy decisions.[0]
Interesting choice to do this after depleting years of production time’s worth of missiles. Missiles with lead-times measured in 12-24 months, and that require rare earth elements that come from a supply chain that China dominates. Against an ally of China that is currently being resupplying with air defences.
I have exceedingly low expectations that the US will be able to rise to this occasion like they did in World War 2.
Big tech is chasing obscene government contracts (handouts really) for AI because they know that's the quick path to enriching themselves personally with little regard to the consequences for anyone else or the nation.
Generations of institutional knowledge in manufacturing was left to wither on the vine after manufacturing capacity was exported to Asia.
Social cohesion is at an all time low and reasoning skills are absolutely pathetic after social media turned everyone's brain into bitter mush.
Obesity and diabetes rates are so bad that millions of people in the country need to take injections to manage their addiction to food. Mental health issues abound.
America is falling down and it isn't going to get back up.
Simply put the people in those countries who spend the money care about the people who gave them the money.
They view themselves as stewards of these resources and genuinely want to spend them optimally to ensure the best return for everyone in society including future generations.
That isn't the case in America and will never be the case.
I would not put this on America being a failed state. Rather the more 'successful' European countries are far more homogenous in demographics than America ever will be. In Denmark, nearly everyone has the same cultural background and similar values, and are striving for a relatively unified vision/goal for the country. In America, there is such an overwhelming diversity in values and cultures, and added animosity between different groups of people that there is more infighting over government&private resources and less efficient use of them.
> Rather the more 'successful' European countries are far more homogenous in demographics than America ever will be. In Denmark, nearly everyone has the same cultural background and similar values, and are striving for a relatively unified vision/goal for the country.
Can you explain this reasoning without implying American political leaders (or perhaps broader society) are racist?
As a counterpoint France, Germany, Canada and Australia are far from homogeneous, but offer far stronger social safety nets than the US. IIRC, 1 in 4 Australians were born elsewhere.
Is it really on just the political leaders and not the society at large that supports them?
One need not go that far back in history to learn that codified in the legal system was the concept of separate but equal, red lining,, etc. Lynchings were often ignored and thus a public spectacle.
Today you still see the public discourse about women’s rights (e.g potentially jail for abortion in certain states…regardless of the reason), debates on mass migrations/immigration (e.g. little sympathy for legal citizens being deported or killed by ICE, etc).
Public agreement on these issues is a prerequisite to social safety nets.
American history is plagued with examples such as these that have contributed to the culture of rugged individualism.
Perhaps the closest period where some semblance of social safety net wins were achieved were in the FDR years (eg social security), and that was mainly through labor unions / working class pressure.
Do those counterpoint countries have similar histories? and were their social safety nets not from the side of labor vs capital?
Downvote all you want, but y'all still haven't explicitly named the linkage between demographic diversity and American tax policy vis-a-vis threadbare social safety. Instead of asking the reader to fill in the gaps, I challenge anyone who believes it to explain the mechanism linking the diversity prior/stimulus to the tax policy result, and why it only happens in America.
In a place as diverse as America, democracy starts to resemble a racial headcount. Elections start to hinge on explicit appeals to particular ethnicities or sub groups. Political parties are very loud about this and they don’t try to hide it at all. I thought it was clear why this only happens in America (the aforementioned diversity).
If some groups are disproportionately benefited by certain social spending while a different group is disproportionately impacted by the associated taxes to fund said spending, you get a divergence in the ability to burden share across groups (this is the case in the United States). As a result of this, spending is funded by debt.
That's not the only way at all; all I'm saying is it becomes harder to convince the whole of society to adopt social safety nets if they positively affect people that look/act different from someone. I'm just trying to be honest that many many many Americans are racists.
The board is part of the CI pipeline for the OS. The kernel is built in the normal CI pipeline, unit tested, etc. then platform-specific images are built.
Those are picked up by GitHub CI runners (could be anything but I'm using GH for now) that pull those image artifacts and send them over the internet to the board, which stores them on the microSD slot.
Then the board will boot the device-under-test (either by enabling a USB VBUS line, asserting PS_ON and pressing the power button, whatever the device needs) and will serve the image either a via USB mass device or by switching on access to the microSD card directly via a ribbon connector/custom microSD PCB and ribbon cable.
The kernel then communicates over serial back to the Link, which proxies that back up to the CI runner for evaluating test runs, etc.
Everything is configured using MQTT and mDNS. Using async Rust via Embassy for the firmware.
5-pin on the bottom left is for power - 5V 2A 'always on' supply (on the ATX24 adapters that's the 5vsb line), 5V 3A aux line (for VBUS, optional and not otherwise used to power the board itself), a sense line for the aux power (board will shut down and display an error on over-current of the main line if not sensed), active-low aux line enable signal (PS_ON for ATX24 sources), and ground.
This means that it's used to cut power on x86 machines, or to use a stock desktop PSU even for arm/riscv dev boards. In the future I want to make this all rack mounted and have a dedicated power supply for multiples of these.
Unable to find the article quickly, but, I read a compelling perspective recently: DoD vendors seeking to restrict use of 3d printed replacement parts that they would normally supply. There was some speculative tie-in with the recent wave of consumer level regulation.
“We’re basically saying, ‘Hey colonel, hey general, you have to make the decision. If a door handle is broken on an ISV, you need to get it into the field. If you think that replacement door handle is sufficient, send it out.’
“A lot of howitzers are down right now for very simple pieces that we could 3D print and have known how to 3D print, and actually have the design files to 3D print, but we haven’t done it,” Driscoll said. “So we, the Army, have kicked off a very aggressive approach to that.”
It completely eliminates the physics and durability considerations of firing pin design.
For chemical primers there is a non-trivial lag between the trigger breaking and the firing pin being accelerated to sufficient velocity such that it ignites the primer. The mechanics of maximizing acceleration of the firing pin is adversarial to durability, reliability, and precision in a number of respects. In automatic weapons it is made worse because the same physics must run in reverse to support the desired rate of fire.
With electronic primers, you mostly only need to worry about switching electric power fast enough (trivial). The relatively fragile firing pin mechanics don't need to exist. But you do need electronics, which has its own issues.
How should people who live in allied countries that the US has recently threatened to economically annex or invade feel about US military contractor oligarchs being attacked?
The way I see it, the pragmatic choice is to prefer to see Americans attack themselves because a divided America is less of a threat to my country.
Sometimes less civilized countries fall into civil war, sometimes they invade neighbours. If you're the neighbour which would you prefer?
How is a person from a nation that the US President has threatened to annex or invade supposed to feel about seeing domestic violence in the United States? From their perspective a divided United States is less of a personal threat to them.
All this talk about how 'we can't have this in a democracy!' forgets that many of us don't live in that particular democracy, and that particular democracy is threatening other democracies.
What should my response be if a North Korean General is executed? Or if a Russian oligarch 'falls out a window'? Or a corrupt Mexican politician is beheaded by a rival cartel?
These American oligarchs aren't my countrymen, They don't have my best interests in mind, they fund the people who threaten my country, and now they provide the American military with technology that it can use to attack my country.
Their lobbying and campaign contributes have resulted in a Mad King waging an unwinnable war that has severely damaged the global economy and has made my life demonstrably worse. I have never done anything to these people and yet they callously did this to all of us for personal profit well beyond what any human being could never need in a thousand life times.
At the end of the day the less cohesive the American tribe is the better off my tribe is. I wish our incentives were aligned but they just aren't and I am not in any way responsible for that.
I actually had this 10 guy sort of thought last night:
There was a point where an organism became self aware, and then there was a point sometime after that where an organism realized that it was the first that had become self aware and all the implications of that.
To me that's a demarcation point in all of life -- the moment a creature realized that it was different from all the things that had come before it on the earth, whether they be non-living or living, as if there was a third category, living and self-aware.
I wonder if it considered it important to spread self-awareness or if it lamented that it had more important things to deal with like just surviving.
And what kind of organism was it -- was it a mammal? Or was it something that came before that?
> The hub will have diplomatic immunity, such as the protections afforded to an American embassy, and operate under U.S. common law—the first arrangement of its kind anywhere in the world. The two-year lease is renewable for 99 years.
That's weird.
It should be noted that tge person quoted in the article Jacob Helberg who is currently the Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment has ties to both Sam Altman and Peter Thiel.[0]
> Helberg served as a commissioner for the U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission, and senior advisor to Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir Technologies.[6][7][8] Helberg has commented extensively on US–China relations, and the national security implications of Chinese-developed web apps like TikTok.
> He married American investor Keith Rabois in a 2018 ceremony officiated by Sam Altman.[13]
> Helberg is one of the top donors to Donald Trump's 2024 reelection campaign, donating $2 million in 2024.
What are we doing here man? Like what are we doing?
America has been completely taken over by a certain faction of silicon valley and they seem to be parting out the country for sale to the highest bidder.
It's like the rise of a new East India Trading Co. but on the other hand -- I just can't see this infrastructure remaining in the hands of America / Philippines if major conflict with China breaks out.
It's like they're building it to hand over to the Chinese in a few years. What are we doing?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Helberg
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