zlacker

>>tedsan+(OP)
After they build the Multivac or Deep Thought, or whatever it is they’re trying to do, then what happens? It makes all the stockholders a lot of money?

>>moffer+i4
The way I think about this project, along with all of Trump's plans, is that he wants to maximize the US's economic output to ensure we are competitive with China in the future.

Yes, it would make money for stockholders. But it's much more than that: it's an empire-scale psychological game for leverage in the future.

>>dekhn+I6
> he wants to maximize the US's economic output to ensure we are competitive with China in the future.

LOL

Under Trump policies, China will win "in the future" on energy and protein production alone.

Once we've speedrunned our petro supply and exhausted our agricultural inputs with unfathomably inefficient protein production, China can sit back and watch us crumble under our own starvation.

No conflict necessary under these policies, just patience! They're playing the game on a scale of centuries, we can't even stay focused on a single problem or opportunity for a few weeks.

>>llamai+Te
Things can always change, but today China is significantly more dependent on petrochemicals than the US. I'm not sure what you're referring to with regards to agriculture, both the US and China have strong food industries that produce plenty of foods containing protein.

>>SpicyL+yq
Things are changing.

In 2023 China had more net new solar capacity than the US has in total, and it will only climb from there. In order to do this, they're flexing muscles in R&D and mass production that the US has actually started to flex, and now will face extreme headwinds and decreased capital investment.

Regarding agriculture: America's agricultural powerhouse, California's Central Valley, is rapidly depleting its water supplies. The midwest is depleting its topsoil at double the rate that USDA considers sustainable.

None of this is irreversible or irrecoverable, but it very clearly requires some countervailing push on market forces. Market forces do not naturally operate on these types of time scales and repeatedly externalize costs to neighbors or future generations.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35582-x

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/57-billion-tons-of...

>>llamai+0t
It sounds like those countervailing pushes are ongoing? The Nature article mentions how California passed regulatory reforms in 2014 to address the Central Valley water problem. The Smithsonian article describes how no-till practices to avoid topsoil depletion have been implemented by a majority of farmers in four major crops.

>>SpicyL+NC
Uhhh I’m going to describe a specific case, but you can extrapolate this to just about every single sustainability initiative out there.

No-till farming has been significantly supported by the USDA’s programs like EQIP

During his first term, Trump pushed for a $325MM cut to EQIP. That's 20-25% of their funding and would have required cutting hundreds if not thousands of employees.

Even BEFORE these cuts (and whatever he does this time around), USDA already has to reject almost 75% of eligible EQIP applicants

Regarding CA’s water: Trump already signed an EO requiring more water be diverted from the San Joaquin Delta into the desert Central Valley to subsidize water-intensive crops. This water, by the way, is mostly sold to mega-corps at rates 98% below what nearby American consumers pay via their municipal water supplies, effectively eliminating the blaring sirens that say “don’t grow shit in the desert.”

Now copy-paste to every other mechanism by which we can increase our nation’s climate security and ta-da, you’ve discovered one of the major problems with Trumpism. It turns out politics do matter!