They didn’t, either time. But reality got in the way of the meme so OP ignored it.

The first Iraq war was an unqualified success. There’s really no way around that. Should they have gone the whole way and removed Saddam from power? Maybe. But the goal of the war was to protect Kuwait and that goal was accomplished.

The second Iraq war was stupid, unnecessary, messy, pointless, badly mismanaged, and came at a staggeringly high cost. But it was successful. They achieved the regime change they wanted and ultimately created a puppet state in the Middle East. They’re using Iraqi bases right now in their attacks on Iran, something that would not possible if that war had been a failure.

Doesn’t make it a good idea. Getting what you want isn’t great if you massively overpay for it.

Afghanistan, on the other hand, absolutely counts as a loss. The US got nothing that they wanted - it didn’t even lead to the death of Bin Laden since he was hiding out in Pakistan - and wasted a tonne of lives and resources to ultimately just put the country back in the hands of the Taliban and give them a whole bunch of military hardware.

Listen, the Epstein files are really big. That’s gonna need a lot of distracting.

Yes, the bottom of the ocean is a terrible place to put a data centre. And the fact that it is, somehow, still a more practical option than space is a really good indicator of how unbelievably stupid the entire notion of space data centres is.

Seems reasonable. This case is substantially similar to previous cases that were taken up by the supreme court - in particular a finding over whether a selfie generated by a monkey was copyrightable - and the lower court decisions are in line with the previous precedents set by the supreme court. So they’re effectively just saying “Our opinion hasn’t changed.”

A lot of people do. Otherwise mainstream media wouldn’t exist anymore. They’re not run as charities.

And those people all vote.

Yep. Radiation is deadly to computers, and without the atmosphere to protect you there is a LOT of radiation in space.

Basically the way you would make a stealth spaceship would be by focusing as much as possible on energy efficiency. At every juncture you would try to use as little power as possible, and use every bit of it as efficiently as possible, so that you’re not remitting waste. That waste, in the form of heat, radio waves, etc, is what gets you spotted.

You could also run heatsinks temporarily for enhanced stealth as you suggest, then open up radiators to cool them - or eject them - once it’s safe to do so.

(For the Elite: Dangerous players, yes, that game got it right.)

The entire ISS has 14GW of cooling (and a lot of that just goes towards keeping the sun from cooking it). A single server rack can produce around 72GW of heat.

The ISS cost about $100 billion.

Basically, if you took the entire budget of Sam Altman’s “Stargate” project (money that, to be clear, he does not have and will not get) and put it into space data centres you might, optimistically, put one rack in space.

Most data centres have dozens to hundreds.

You’re absolutely correct, but “quite big” might be the single biggest understatement I’ve seen in my life.

You need to think about how an infrared laser works. You’re taking electricity, converting it into light and then focusing the light.

So you’d need to take the heat from your GPUs, inefficiently convert it into electricity (a lot of it would remain as heat), then inefficiently convert electricity into light (much of the electricity would turn back into heat in this process) and then focus the light away from the space data centre.

Now, we already have a process for moving heat away from things as infrared light, without going through all those steps (which would just reduce the efficiency of the process). It’s called a radiator, and it’s how we cool things in space. That’s literally where the name comes from; they radiate heat away as infrared light. That’s why hot things glow in thermal cameras.

It is incredibly inefficient. Radiation (ie, infrared light) is, by far, the worst way of cooling things. But in space its the only option you have, because there’s no convection or conduction across vacuum.

A top end GPU puts out about 1,000 watts of waste heat. The entire International Space Station has enough cooling for 14 of those, if it was doing nothing else whatsoever. An average server rack contains 72. The ISS cost $100 billion dollars. So at a minimum you’re looking at around $500 billion to put one single server rack in space. And that’s before accounting for the heat from the sun, which we can’t avoid because we need solar power to run this thing. So probably closer to a trillion. In other words, twice the already ludicrous price tag of Sam Altman’s “Stargate” project. For a single server rack.

Phrasing this as “from Supreme Court’s tariff ruling” is a hell of a choice given that Trump’s decision to enact these tariffs was always blatantly and egregiously illegal and there was never any doubt about that.

Given the current USSC’s track record of just blatantly inventing law, I think it’s really worth noting that in this case their decision was blindingly obvious and the only reason there was ever any doubt was because of the possibility that they might just decide to throw out all legal precedent and invent some bullshit. Otherwise, it would never even have been a question how they were going to rule on this one. The administration’s arguments for their case amounted to diddly and squat.

For anyone who doesn’t know, this is because space is an absolutely terrible place to put computers. Getting power is actually the easiest problem to solve, and is still really hard, because building any kind of infrastructure in space is hard. Then you’ve got all that radiation you have to shield against because you’re no longer protected by the Earth’s atmosphere, and worst of all you’ve got the cooling problem because Jesus fucking Christ, space is not cold!

This is why I get annoyed every time a scifi movie shows people freezing to death in space. Because it leads to this level of mass delusion and then suddenly it matters and everyone just unquestioningly believes the lie that space is cold. Space is a vacuum. A vacuum is what your Contigo travel mug uses to keep your coffee scalding hot after four hours. If vacuums are that good at keeping something hot when it naturally wants to get colder, think about what they’ll do to something that is actively generating heat. All of your components are going to cook.

There are proposals to put data centres at the bottom of the ocean that are substantially more credible than this idiocy.

This should terrify every single corporation that does business in the US.

The US government has now declared that any company that holds a government contract either does so on the government’s terms, or never ever gets to do business with the US government again.

They’re claiming the power to write their own contracts and force you to sign them, under duress. Congrats billionaires, this is what you paid for.

Those government contracts are generally loss leaders for AI companies. The rates they get per token are horrendous. They eat shit every time some clerk tells Claude to draft an email for them.

Anthropic basically only have these contracts because the image of being a major government supplier is good marketing. They’re reasoning that the PR hit from being seen as making “kill bots” will be a lot worse for them marketing wise.

Don’t buy the hype. They’re not acting in good conscience, they’ve just weighed the pros and cons and decided that the PR hit isn’t worth it.

This is just them sticking to their principles.

I’m not so sure about that one.

AI company Anthropic amends core safety principle amid growing competition in sector

AI safety leader says ‘world is in peril’ and quits to study poetry

They’re not. Conscience has nothing to do with this.

They just don’t think the PR hit is worth it.

Whenever companies choose to act in a way that we perceive as good, we were the voice of reason, not them.

ICE has 22,000 agents. They couldn’t even sieze power in Minneapolis.

Again, I’ve been very clear; he has supporters. A coup would not be defeated easily or bloodlessly. But having support and having sufficient support are not the same thing.

Never said it was.

This basically kills the new James Gunn led DC film universe. Ellison will have his head as the first order of business.

This is absolutely the most important thing to keep in mind here.

Remember, this is a memo being circulated by Trump supporters. It’s actual legal basis likely sits somewhere around “political fan-fiction.”

The same thing happened in 2020. Trump supporters invented completely nonsensical legal justifications for how Trump could sieze power. None of them held water.

Can Trump just ignore the law and declare shit anyway? Sure. Self-coup is always an option in any democracy. But he is deeply unpopular; I don’t really see that working out for him, although the process of it not working out certainly might be a very violent one.

Trump tried to self-coup in 2020, and the result absolutely fizzled. It was violent, and messy, and innocent people died, but in the grand scheme of attempted insurrections it was pretty fucking pathetic. He’s got a cult of personality, but he’s never actually done the work to build the kind of organized support he’d need for something like that.

I’m never going to tell Americans that the danger is over and everything is fine. There has probably never been a more dangerous time for American democracy. But don’t mistake that danger for inevitability. While Trump is carving a path of destruction through your government, norms and institutions, he’s also bleeding power every single day. You can win this.