Oppenheimer, as well as many other Manhattan Project researchers (eg Rabi & Weisskopf), were first or second generation German-Jewish immigrants/refugees. Max Bonn, Oppenheimer’s mentor, was also a refugee in the end; Oppenheimer was born to immigrants in the US but studied under Bonn in Germany prewar.
Moreover, the physical foundation for atomic power was largely the work of German, often German-Jewish, scientists.
So it’s plausible to suppose a counter-factual in which Germany, one less crippled by bigotry (and it is a disability…), develops the bomb.
And it’s not just the bigotry: it’s the anti-intellectualism. Einstein could write a letter to a well-educated patrician of the New York Dutch aristocracy (FDR), and so help change the world. The pig farmer and the corporal would never have read such a letter (even if were they not already trying to murder the writer and all his cousins for nonsense reasons).
There are two major tax loopholes. Fixing them both would fix the deficit.
- billionaires. This isn't an easy fix, it would require a wealth tax or similar.
- the rest of the 1%. They are collectively far more wealthy than the billionaires, and the fix is actually quite simple: close the corporate pass-through tax loophole. Most of them are wealthy "small" business owners. The fix is simple, but difficult politically. There are a lot of people taking advantage of this loop hole, and they're quite influential and connected and.
Historically there was a big patent moat in (Graphics) GPU design. This continues with CUDA, but obviously Intel and AMD could find ways to support eg PyTorch. What we don't know is how much effort that cost them, or why they decided they couldn't make a CUDA API compatible competitor.
Intel could have beat the pants off Nvidia a long time ago with Arc if they’d bothered to ship usable drivers. But they refuse to, and simply can’t figure it out, so Arc cards remain cheap because they’re so #%£€ing hard to get working well, and everyone is nervous they’ll lay off the driver team again.
There are many microarchitecture patents used in NVIDIA chips. I'm sure they have a team that rips apart AMD chips looking for infringement. The way CUDA works is tied to many GPU architecture decisions and it would be hard to decouple them efficiently. Obviously a huge effort was made to get PyTorch decoupled from CUDA.
I’m totally guessing, but I can’t imagine CUDA has any significance at the frontier lab scale. The operational and capex costs are so massive that the convenience of the platform becomes a minuscule consideration.
It’s just that Nvidia’s stuff works, and available at scale, and includes the full stack with networking, cooling and such.
It's becoming less of one. Previously I would have shied away from buying an AMD card because of CUDA, but with local LLMs getting good enough to be usable and frontier models becoming as good as they have, I bit the bullet and got an R9700 for local inference. Dealing with working around CUDA used to be more of a manual process, but when you can point an agent at it and get stuff working, it's dramatically less painful and scary than it used to be. Plus, at least in ComfyUI and local LLMs I'm finding support for AMD has gotten really good. Lately I've been witnessing a lot of people using agents to write custom kernels for RDNA4 and improving performance dramatically.
IMO, yes a lot of the "nvidia pays lots of people to make non-portable, tightly coupled backends to open source projects" is potentially going to be less of a moat?
(Though it could turn into "nvidia pay lots of people to use LLMs to make non-portable, tightly coupled backends to _even more_ open source projects")
It turns out the moat is “writing drivers that work”; Nvidia drivers simply work, and Intel’s are poor quality. So if I want stuff that works I need to buy Nvidia gear.
Isn't this basically the phenomenon known as low-end disruption/upmarket migration? [1] Which is often viewed as an unhealthy sign for a company that recognizes it can't keep up with efficiency of a new market entrant but unwilling or unable to make changes to their business model to stay competitive.
The trap being that it's a rational decision at the beginning to focus on the most profitable lines of business with highest margins. But the disruptor then captures the value of the abandoned market to finance innovations to move up into higher margin tiers, forcing another retreat.
The cycle can repeat until the once dominant firm is relegated to a tiny niche with no growth prospects or until fixed costs exceed dwindling revenues thus eventually resulting in insolvency/acquisition. I remember learning about it from a case study of how American companies like GE and GM reacted in different ways to Japanese competition emerging in the 70s and 80s.
It's not always a bad strategy but I think a pre-IPO company that's only a fear years old would generally prefer to grow the size of their potential market vs. shrink it preemptively.
The US is still one of the leading CO2 emitters, both per capita and in absolute terms. And for cumulative past emissions, it's not even close.
The expectation is not a mere 18% decrease but something closer to halving emissions just to be on a per capita level comparable to the EU or China.
It doesn't mean China doesn't need to make efforts. China's emissions are yet to be stabilized.
But the US need to make their share, and at least honor and (re-)ratify past climate agreements, if anything to dampen the economic arms race between China and the US.
Sorry, but, at this point ... why? Oil will run out before 2070 (read a bit of peak oil talk, oil running out doesn't mean zero oil pumped up, it means zero used for transport. There will still be reasons to dig up a little bit of oil). The strongest climate agreement was essentially status-quo in 2050, which now seems unlikely to actually happen, for 2 different reasons.
First, the very very bad news: the most recent climate agreement was less ambitious (because Russia, China, India and essentially all of Africa refused, even more than the US did under Trump). The secretary general of the UN got accused of joining oil trade deal meetings at the climate conference in Azerbaijan. At this point, a political solution is just not going to happen, nobody wants to make it happen. The other side of the equation, oil producers, Russia, Saudi Arabia refused to even discuss any kind of limits AT ALL, an even more extreme position than the US. So there's no political options there either.
What the EU decides to do or not do is a rounding error, every European country except Russia (insofar they're European) just can't do anything, and even the US matters less and less.
But the good news: if you look at production quotas and solar replacement, ie. the economics of oil, oil should run out sooner (because the maximum price anyone will pay will drop, but of course same caveat, run out does not mean 0) than the agreement puts in place.
So why do anything at this point? God, so to speak, will interfere. By that I mean digging up oil will become difficult/expensive while solar and batteries becomes cheaper, which will result in a faster drop in oil use than actually respecting the most recent agreement.
So, no, nothing needs to happen.
And now we are in the situation we are already in for 50+ years: You want to help climate change? Go study chemistry. Find new energy conversions that work. Find new battery chemistry that works better. Find a way to carry electrical energy with 10x the density of the best batteries (so even militaries have zero reason to get away from oil, ie. this is the only way to convince China and India to use less oil). THAT will accelerate oil's decline.
Politically? There is no reason here whatsoever for political change in Europe. And while I want Trump gone, so far he's by far the politician pushing the hardest for solar, despite his rhetoric.
Yes, let's look at "Asia" (as if that's some meaningful grouping in this context when the countries are so different culturally, geographically, and economically).
Since 2005, a huge amount of US manufacturing and resource processing (both large emitters) have been outsourced (largely to Asia, and more specifically China). Our economy doesn't function without these imported emissions, yet they don't count as "US emissions". Even excluding these emissions, the US makes up 4% of the world population and emits 13% of world emissions. Asia makes up 60% of the world's population and emits 52% (more than 3x less per-capita than the US). If you actually consider that the countries in Asia are vastly diverse, you'll find the large majority of these emissions are from China (from said manufacturing and resource processing), and India for example emits far less than its share of the population.
This also completely ignores that the effects of warming are from cumulative emissions (not just point-in-time emissions) because CO2 doesn't just disappear every year. As a share of historical emissions, Europe comes off far worse than Asia per capita, and the US even worse than Europe.
Even despite this, at least China (and the rest of Asia to a lesser extent) is investing in clean energy. China produces > 80% of the world's solar panels and > 70% of the world's lithium batteries. Meanwhile, in the US the administration is doubling down on subsidies for fossil fuels and issuing stop-work orders on renewable energy projects already under construction.
And because I know I have to give this disclaimer these days: I am no apologist for everything else wrong with China and their authoritarian government. But I can't bear this attitude of absolving ourselves of blame for climate change because some other continent has a bigger number than us.
The population in the US has grown 17%, but emissions have reduced 18%. I think it's doing a good job and merely needs to continue that trajectory. The Trump administration is making some poor decisions there, but won't last much longer, it matters more if that's a long-term Republican position or merely an aberation.
Asia does about 50% the global emissions while having 60% of the world's population. The US alone does about 12% being 5% of global population.
US approaches 15t/CO2 per capita. Every single country in Asia is under 9t, China and India included. This is despite the US having outsourced most of its heavy manufacturing to, of course, Asia.
Blaming Asia alone and refusing any responsibility is a massive cop out.
Per capita is rather pointless when talking about climate change, but yes, it doesn't absolve responsibility.
You'll note that's not what I said, just that the US is doing well at reducing CO2 emissions. The population has grown 17%, but emissions have reduced 18%. That's a good job.
US manufacturing has not decreased either, it has just not increased while offshoring elsewhere. So for the most part that decrease in CO2 is not simply moving the problem elsewhere.
That's less an issue than the new emissions going forward from Asia and Africa.
We can't very well tell them to stay poor. They're going to increase their energy usage and they're right to do so.
Hopefully renewables and EVs are competitive enough to reduce the impact of the rest of the world developing to Western levels. Which they may well, thanks to China and Elon Musk's Tesla for jump starting that transition.
Yes, I think so. I doubt a court would interpret that as being reasonable use of force though. In English common-law it's not just the wording of the laws that matter, one must also look at how the courts have interpreted and applied them.
Yes, if you want a good stable foundation for any structural base you want your medium to be sharp and irregular so it locks together. Round material, be it sand or rocks, can be pushed around more like a liquid. Sharp and irregular get tangled together and acts more like one solid object.
This is true. But it’s more of a pricing power problem. The US can no more rid itself of the dependency on Canadian heavy oil than Canada could on exporting to the US. We’re bound together on that front, and it’s why oil has been exempt from tariffs.
If Canada had the ability to sell that oil on the global market, we’d get a better price for it (if you only have one customer you can sell to, you have little pricing power). Western Canada Select trades at a discount to WTI.
US refineries are built for a mix of heavy and light oil and that’s not practical to change. The US can’t just replace Canada with its own oil or imports from elsewhere.
What about Venezuela? Another potential source of heavy oil? It would take decades of investment and development to bring that up to the point where it produces an extra 4 million barrels a day for export. With the uncertain political environment there, it’s unclear where that would come from.
Maybe I’m missing the subtler geopolitical point here, but I don’t think it’s about oil. It’s about preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons and threatening the region via their missiles, drones, and proxies.
Whether they succeed at it or not is an open question, but it seems clear that’s what it was about. Take operation midnight hammer last July. That was clearly only about the nuclear issue.
How many of these tiger deterring rocks can I put you down for? They're $1T each but we've got a 3-for-2 offer going. You may think you're not often attacked by tigers now, but can you afford not to own one of these rocks to keep that record?
Well Trump claimed Iran's nuclear threat was completely obliterated after Operation Midnight Hammer. Then when decapitating the Iranian regime in coordination with Israel failed to produce regime change this year, all of a sudden Iran was "two weeks away" from making a nuke.
Trump doesn't give a flying flip about Iran having Nuclear weapons. If he cared at all, in the slightest, he wouldn't have unilaterally broken our treaty with them.
