To AI Or Not To AI

 

Thanks to Doña Ana County’s Project Jupiter, New Mexico, like the rest of the country, is caught up in the data center controversy. Are they going to use up all our water in operating this new data center campus? Will they cause our electricity rates to rise? Will we have to live next to noisy factories?

Much of the information we are getting on this artificial intelligence technology storage and processing media, most of it spun out from American adversaries like Communist China and Leftist billionaires, is anti-AI propaganda. Many of the proposed data center entrants will use internal water recycling and provide their own electricity from natural gas, solar, and even small fission plants.

Nevertheless, I think they’re overbuilding all this. One of these days these boxes will stand empty like unneeded warehouses.

 Why? 

Because there will be technological innovations along the way which will make design of these plants smaller and use even less electricity. All ready on science websites I’m seeing research into folding chip substrates which will create less heat.

When the first UNIVAC computers came out in the 1950s, they were as big as houses. And talk about generating heat. Their rows of glass vacuum tubes needed a whole lot of cooling to allow human beings to work in the same building. Today you can get just about the same computing power in a small laptop. And data centers and AI will see the same technological improvements. Not to mention that once reliable quantum computers are built, you’ll see that same information processing and storage in a fraction of the are currently needed. One reason to save helium and stop wasting it on birthday balloons.

Have some faith in human ingenuity and we will see further improvements in national security, computing, and in our lives.

            by Clyde James Aragón

 

Pay Off The National Debt With Tariff Money

Today I read that President Donald Trump has placed a 25% to 100% tariff on imported drones. The rationale being that they can be used both for commercial and military uses, the military uses being the problematic one if used within our country by foreign powers or those with evil intent.

The President has placed tariffs on many things since he was elected to office from imported aluminum to trucks and buses to pharmaceuticals and timber. For those of us purchasing those products, it's pretty much a tax although it may hopefully induce corporations to start manufacturing these products in this country.

However, if used right, tariff monies could go toward fixing a most vexing problem of ours, namely the National Debt.

Currently, and thanks to our 'representatives in Congress, our federal government is carrying over $39 trillion in debt and that number is growing. It takes tax money away from needed projects and leaves inflation in its wake.

May I propose a use for the billions collected from tariffs: let's use that money to start paying down our debt. It seems about the least painful way to deal with that financial menace that robs us of the value of our money. Indeed, inflation created by printing money and 'promising' to pay it back some day really effects retirees on fixed income. We made this mess and we should pay it ourselves instead of sloughing it off on future generations.

Money collected by tariffs and a little fiscal restraint in Congress could go a long way to solving our debt problem. Otherwise we are looking at the fate of 1920s Germany under the Weimar Republic when you needed a wheelbarrow to move your money around.

         by © Clyde James Aragon  - All Rights Reserved