Without entering (and winning) some kind of major conflict, this was always going to happen.
Two things are important to think about.
1. Power should be measured in relative terms not absolute. (For a good treatise on this, read Paul Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers). The US would have to be keeping up with China, India, and rest of world to maintain its previous pole position.
2. Great nations/empires generally become so at least partially through population growth. This can be organic or engineered (ie: continuously conquering more and more territory) but rising dominance almost never coincides with demographic stagnation, which the US is experiencing. This population plateau has been accurately predicted by the US Census for my entire lifetime.
Also nothing about this decline is unusual or unexpected. This is the course of empire, which is not a new concept.
>Power should be measured in relative terms not absolute.
I would argue everything should be measured in relative terms. More often than not this is not the case.
>The US would have to be keeping up with China, India, and rest of world to maintain its previous pole position.
This is the biggest problem I see. US is not keeping up. Nor its willingness to compete. Taking the US dollar as world reserve currency for granted. Along with host of other benefits ( and responsibility ) that came with it.
There are signs that we may see a global market recession next year. And China may benefits even more.
> Taking the US dollar as world reserve currency for granted.
It's the exact opposite: US citizens got fed up with the domestic problems created by Triffin's Dilemma and wanted out.
Remember, the "imperial revenue" in our model doesn't get helicoptered into the economy, it pumps assets. Stocks, bonds, and real estate. Your share of the imperial loot is proportional to the value of the assets that you own, and worse, even if you don't have a big house and fat brokerage account you still have to compete with people who do and they're going to bid up the price of anything that doesn't have highly elastic supply. Health care, housing, and education are the ones creating problems. America got a great deal, but most Americans got a raw deal: costs went up, income didn't, misery ensued.
Pumped bonds allow (force, really) the government to run deficits (homework: what breaks if they don't? It happened in Clinton's term, you can go and check) and to some extent that distributes the money. There's the whole services narrative which held that the services sector would pump hard enough to backfill manufacturing, but it never did. The people who got the door slammed in their face are no longer convinced that the door is their path to prosperity and now they want to tear the whole thing down.
If you want to hear an actual economist talk about this, see "Trade Wars are Class Wars" by Klein and Pettis.
The fact that successive US governments choose to use their economic hegemony to pump assets rather than invest in their education and healthcare, or at least in their infrastructure, doesn't contradict the fact that it was a great gift, engineered since Bretton-Woods, confirmed at the Smithsonian institute and a few years later at the Kingston accords (and btw, had nothing to do with gold standard but the convertibility of the Dollar. The gold standard realistically ended in the 50s (died for the 5th time in the US alone), and for the 1st time, stayed dead).
True. We could have taxed and spent enough to spread the wealth around. We chose not to, and now the proverbial children who weren't embraced by the village are burning it down to feel its warmth.
I'm not against calling reserve currency status a privilege so long as you are crystal clear on the point that it was a privilege for America but a curse for most Americans.
Demographic stagnation? compared to who? everything is relative and I don’t think US demographics has it at a disadvantage over EU, China, Japan, South Korea, does it? So then who is left to take seriously as a competitor?
High skill demographics. PRC is going mint more STEM in next 20 years than US is set to increase population, all sources total. That's more or less locked in from past 20 years of births. In relative terms, PRC is going to have OCED combined in just STEM, excluding all the other technical skilled workforce. It's the greatest high skill demographic divident in recorded history, in country with superstructure to allocate talent. All the rapid catchup PRC made in last 10 years was built on fraction of highend human capita they will have.
That PRC talent cohort are going to stick around 2060/70/80s. Past that, it's hard to extrapolate, but ~50 years with that much talent advantage can build very durable advantages. Meanwhile the population PRC sheds is overwhelmingly going to be the old, undereducated etc, think 200m rural farmers left behind by modernization that bluntly is net drag on economy/system, but they're also relatively cheap to caretake vs US silver obligations.
Short of AGI, US is not a serious competitor vs PRC in terms of skilled demographics that sustains strategic hegemonic advantages, at least not in our lifetimes.
But that's just a function of their large population size.
Even if you wanted to, you cannot bring the majority of your population to a high-skill level.
That's not surprising, but still it is debatable whether China is producing value in line with their large, highly skilled cohort. They seem to be stuck on the hard problem, relying a lot on the import of foreign-invented technologies.
That may change over time; we will see…
Yes, the entire point is their population denominator so large that, past 20 years of birth + ongoing shit tier TFR still gives them incredible technical talent generation advantage now that they sorted out tertiary and industry pipeline. They don't need majority of their pop to be high skilled, and it's not, we're simply talking about PRC workforce upgrading from 20% -> 30%/40% skilled workforce vs OCED already maxing out at 50%+, that ~30% PRC skilled already exceeds entire US workforce. PRC relatively shit TFR still gives them absolute and relative global talent advantage.
Skilled job supply: labour supply is definitely issue, and there is theoretical ceilling on how much high skilled technical jobs there can be. But PRC only country with talent glut, vs everyone else projected shortage. That automatically gives them both strategic and economic advantage (unlimited cheap high end labour). And part of the shortage (i.e. source of youth unemployment) is simply they spammed academia harder than industry. real estate to industry pivot lagged academia machine going brrrt by 10 years. Industry is going brrrt now, but will still take time to generate 10s of millions of high end jobs, which btw will simultaenously erode western high end. Every industry where western incumbants gets displaced by more efficient PRC players basically lose significant portion of their operating profits and downsize.
>be stuck on the hard problem
They are manifestly not. They have been brutally accelerating / demolishing / catching up / and recently leading. Look at actual timeline, bulk of tertiary talent generation is post 2000s academic reforms (add 10-15year masters+industry pipeline), they didn't explode academic system and talent output until ~2010s, bulk of new talent + a few years for cohorts to integrate into and simultaneously expanding high end industry = almost all the high end catchup was done in the last 10 years shortly after workforce composition STARTED STEM/skilled shift. And most of that catch was done when PRC was growing from 20m-40m STEM, i.e. from half US STEM to parity, and exploding before it reached parity due to PRC industry cluster advantages.
Like the amount of progress/catchup they have made across every sector relative to execution time is objectively stupendendous, as in historic outlier tier, and now they're leading/frontier in various sectors, which already invalids they can only fast follow. They're simply not retarded with industrial policy until coldwar 2.0 that forced them to decide to indigenize everything and that was 7 years ago, they're pretty much caught up in nearly everything except the absolute pinacle, and even then they seem to be beating western projected catchup timeline (see today's Chinese EUV prototype report).
This all happened in basically 10 years, when PRC cultivated pool for mid-career professionsals in 2010s from 2000s tertiary reforms. They will have conservatively 50 years and 2x-3x larger skilled workforce and much larger/developed industrial base going forward, i.e. OCED combined, but not paper workforce, workforce with actual access to the densest and most complete industrial chain in the world brrrting at PRC speed.
IMO this is talent/industrial base advantage that is as insurmountable as US WW2 advantage that sealed US hegemony for 50+ years. Like even if US AGIs first cope strategy is true, LBH, said AGI is going to look at the numbers, the industrial chain density, the sheer abundance of power and abillity to generate atoms, and immediately defect to PRC.
There is an unspoken alternative for dealing with being out-populated by rival states. That is to reduce their populations through sanctions, blockades, starvation and outright war. These methods have been used by the Soviet Union in Ukraine, Germany/USSR in Poland, Imperial Japan in China, Belgium in the Congo. It continues to happen today, most openly in Palestine.
>>That is to reduce their populations through sanctions, blockades, starvation and outright war.
Speaking as Indian, Our population growth happened when we were poor, and masses were uneducated/illiterate.
I have one more theory that- Population growth happens when poor people have access to lots of carbohydrates. Plus having lots of children is somewhat akin to having meat robot automatons whom you can send for physical work and make money.
If you want to use sanctions to do reduce population it doesn't work in the modern era. Poor people eat well and make babies.
An important caveat to #2. Rising populations can only be leveraged into more power if they can be channeled into import substition. Countries where import substitution is suppressed can not gain power.
Import substition is a process where domestic industry develops by adopting the processes of overseas industries contributing to imports, so that the country can import the raw materials and make the product, instead of importing the full product at the market price. Most surveys of macroeconomics reveal that it is integral and foundational to the development of most industrialised countries today, e.g. China.
The exporter countries contain smart people who may seek to suppress this process to maintain revenue flows. This prevents the development from happening.
Two examples:
1: the 'unequal treaties' between 19th century Japan and America prohibited certain kinds of tariffs and subsidies by Japan. This allowed westerners, prominently Americans, to maintain market share in Japan by product dumping.
2: in 18th and 19th century India various British offices at different times had policies of having their sepoys arrest textile workers and maim them by the forcible amputation of both thumbs, to preserve the market share of British textiles.
Agreed. For a while, importing stuff “on the cheap” looks like a good deal, but overtime if that makes your own industries weak, you are just losing power.
You can't win by just buying stuff from someone else; it appears that people have a hard time understanding that nowadays.
China has grown old before it grew rich. The past decade has been one of a collapsed houehold sector (and birth rate below the already gloomy concensus back in 2010), general deflation, and bright lights and conspicious technology achieved only through throwing government spending at ritzy projects - centrally planned growth and waste. Being unable to escape the domestic security agenda will forever neuter global aspiration, from currency to technology.
India is yet to harmonise widespread organisation.
Relative gaps are smaller, but the persistance of gap is never more entrenched than ever.
That is not a decline. It is however a Great Game, not played with nations but with ideology and where the US and China are quite aligned. That game is less visible until it is seen.
> India is yet to harmonise widespread organisation.
I've always said that if India got a unified national language they would become a nearly instant world power.
Imagine an India where English was mandated in every public school - and every child, regardless of caste (which officially doesn't exist...), attended school. English, because it's more internationally useful than Hindi, and doesn't have the same ethnological competition (Hindi vs Bengali vs Tamil vs <297 others>).
Then imagine that, now that all of India can actually speak to each other, they get their shit together, and build a truly functional national highway system. Top it off with a safe railway system, complete with modern trains. Enough trains that you don't have to ride on top. (OK, I'm starting to dream big.)
One generation later India is a dominant world power. Pakistan is completely fucked, sure, because Delhi will never get over their petty sibling hatred. But India can start power-brokering between all other nations.
Isn’t English the de facto national language in India? Everyone who can afford to, teaches their kid English.
India’s big problem is lack of natural resources, and lack of clear hierarchy to manage the limited resources (including choosing to screw some people for the greater good). China had the same issue of enormous population relative to natural resources, but it had the clear hierarchy to be able to execute.
Natural resources aren't that important anymore. Look at Singapore with essentially no natural resources, but a high standard of living for example. And the U.S. has strong natural resources, but they represent a fairly small portion of the economy.
A highly educated small island city state protected by larger countries due to the very nature that it doesn’t have anything to take is not at all comparable to feeding, moving, and sheltering 1.5B people.
India is divided by its caste system and religion to a much greater extent than it is by language. Successive governments have put far more effort into dominating its Muslim and Sikh minorities than implementing a high - quality universal education system that harmonizes a base level of skill across the population. The most educated state in the country is the Communist-run Kerala where the people speak Malayalam.
India is similar to the USSR in that it buckets disparate languages, religions and cultures into a single nation with inevitable separatist tendencies.
The "centrally planned growth is hollow and doomed" narrative doesn't seem to fit China like it fit the USSR. Did the USSR ever make 80% of the stuff in your home?
As for making friends, the US empire is highly atypical in its "friendliness" and it's entirely plausible that its successor will revert to the mean.
> Without entering (and winning) some kind of major conflict, this was always going to happen.
If only there was a conflict somewhere with a perieved superpower, maybe a nuclear country or something that would be relatively easy to win without even entering into a direct altercation. Oh, wait!
America could’ve easily won the war in Ukraine by just ging away a bit more weapons, specifically long range missiles. It could even just tell European countries to give their long rhange missiles in exchange for a resupply for some plausible deniability.It could’ve been a bit more generous with intelligence.
Unfortunately, America elected Trump. A person who doesn’t believe in anything that doesn’t directly concern him. If it doesn’t benefit (or hurt) him personally it might as well not exist. Which make it easy to sway his foreign policy. Russia is actively trying to buy him and he thinks it’s great. It’s going to be a very fast decline of American influence as more and more countries around the world will see that it takes very little to buy an american president, allegedly the most powerful person in the world. And if any petty dictator can buy him, what worth is his power?
Data centers should do everything they can to reduce water usage.
That said, this is masterful scapegoating. The ag lobby must be gleeful if they're not directly responsible for this narrative.
In 2003 my middle school in Central Pennsylvania had this exact same problem. All our water fountains had to have signs posted stating that the water was not safe to drink. Many of my classmates had the purple-tinged skintone that is characteristic symptom of consuming the polluted water.
The issue stems from high input, fossil-fuel based farming, and most of society simply looks the other way because no one has figured out a cheaper way to produce enough food. Data centers are just a red herring.
Cyanosis is the medical term is but I should clarify its not like their skin was purple all the time. What happens is that if you drink a lot of the polluted well water then when your veins narrow (like from cold) it gets a more purplish hue. This happens naturally (like when your lips are cold after swimming) but its just more noticeable if you are drinking polluted well water from farming runoff.
A thing kids would do at my school is stick their hand out the window of the bus in the fall/winter and then compare whose hand is "more purple". Dumb kid stuff. I still remember a single person I knew whose cheeks would be super purple every time we came inside from playing in the winter. Almost like the character in the willy wonka movies.
So like its well known the color is simply more noticeable when you are being constantly exposed to nitrates. The person I am thinking of -- he was almost certainly drinking bad well water at home, perhaps for his whole life. I can't imagine that was only from the fountains at school. As far as I know its not a huge deal but like the article is saying... it quite obviously has knock on health effects.
The short answer is nitrate poisoning. It usually happens in infants before it hits adults. The reduction in water volume in the aquifer is reducing the dilution of existing nitrate contamination from agriculture.
From the article:
> Morrow County, Oregon, has recorded nitrate readings as high as 73 parts per million (ppm) in household wells—more than ten times the state’s legal ceiling of 7ppm—following reports that local data centres are intensifying aquifer contamination.
From the CDC:
> The first reported case of fatal acquired methemoglobinemia in an infant due to ingestion of nitrate contaminated well water in the United States occurred in 1945 [Comly 1945]. This condition is also termed “Blue Baby Syndrome”.
As someone who keeps backyard chickens and recently got a new flock, I will say anecdotally this spike was observed even in livestock.
In March 2025, I tried to order baby chicks to replace some of my aging flock. Not only was every hatchery sold out, but going in person to farm stores meant waiting in lines on the days shipments were received and dealing with rationing (3 chicks per person, etc).
I opted to order chicks for the fall instead of doing a normal spring brooding and luckily the weather cooperated, but as is normal I ordered some extra chicks as padding. The extras I have now been able to sell locally at a premium, covering my entire cost.
Let me just add I don't think backyard eggs are cheaper, even at the height of price spike, because when externalities like feed and enclosure are calculated the resulting product won't have the economies of scale. But I think many people decided they wanted a steady supply after eggs became hard to come by. I personally keep chickens for reasons besides eggs but I am still happy that more folks are keeping chickens.
The other thing about chickens is they are pretty easy to care for. If you feed them grain and provide them decent shelter and clean their cage out every week or two, they will be perfectly happy.
Of all issues predators are the biggest risk I've seen in small raising operations. Especially if they wander open range or have a sizable fenced in area. Raccoons can be the worst as they are good at getting in places they shouldn't be, but Hawks, foxes, coyotes, and ferel pets cause problems too.
huh, maybe I got in just before that. I ordered 1/31/2025, ship date 3/25/2025 from Hoovers in Iowa (even though I'm in NH they are very reliable), and there was plenty of stock.
Not to be that guy, but feed/enclosure are direct costs.
Externalities are costs/benefits to someone uninvolved with the chicken/egg transaction (noise or free insect control affecting your neighbor are negative and positive cases).
Your phrasing of the last sentence caught my interest. Is the other reason fresh chicken meat, or is there another benefit to keeping them that I can't think of?
Chickens are incredible composters. Put in your raked leaves, almost 100% of your food waste, paper towels if they don't have chemicals in them, grass clippings, etc. They'll be clawed through and pooped on and turned into fresh soil. If you have the space for the chickens, they can be worth it for this reason alone. They're less work than bagging up your leaves and you'll reduce the food volume in your trash to almost zero.
This. How do you harvest/refresh the compost though? Just move the cage over? Do you kind of suspend the cage a bit and let the little stuff fall through?
For me we have a coop and then a fenced in run which is relatively large. I built my gate so I can fit a wheelbarrow inside. I just shovel some out and smooth out the pits I've made. The ground doesn't need to be perfect because the chickens will always be making more compost and shuffling it around. If you had a smaller setup, I'd think a mobile coop & mobile run would serve you really well.
Laying chickens are very different from broiler (eating) chickens. You can eat laying chickens but the meat is much stringier. You can stew them though, coq au vin is a French dish more or less made for these types, even though its the norm these days to use regular eating chickens when making it.
As others have already said, the reason is mainly to cycle yard and food waste, as well as some garden tasks (they can be used to prepare beds as well as cut my lawn). I also plan to raise black soldier fly eventually.
> Let me just add I don't think backyard eggs are cheaper, even at the height of price spike, because when externalities like feed and enclosure are calculated the resulting product won't have the economies of scale
The math checks out if:
1) You build your coop and enclosure basically out of junk or otherwise for near-free (good luck with the, ah, “spouse test” on that);
2) You lean heavily on kitchen waste for food;
3) You place no value on the time spent on anything chicken-related;
4) You butcher and eat each chicken after ~3 years when their rate of laying drops off (you stop wasting food and space on an unproductive layer, and gain “free” chicken meat);
5) You raise more than you eat and sell the excess (ten chickens aren’t much more effort than four chickens, and the extra may cover feed and replacement costs for the flock);
So yeah it doesn’t really work out, just buy $5-$8/dozen backyard chicken eggs from someone else who’s bad at math or has different priorities (loves the smell of chicken shit, maybe?), you’ll come out ahead. Or get them from the grocery store if you don’t care much about the chickens’ diet and conditions.
I've seen folks doing both. Certainly, once you understand the OTP well enough, it makes sense to build all your systems on it. I've been doing that for seven years now; the only real issue was trying to train juniors to be productive on those systems. It did take longer to get them going I found.
As someone very naive on this topic, can you elaborate on where he pushed boundaries? I follow his YT channel and he obviously pushes boundaries from an activist perspective, and I'm a fan[0], but I'm not able to judge his scientific credentials.
[0] (love that one video where he shows how to get away with replacing poorly chosen non-native plants in public parks that will inevitably die out within a few years with native species that will thrive; basically, put on a yellow vest and dress like a gardener and nobody will bother you)
Looks really cool, exciting to see. I have two questions around this:
1. Given that you are concerned with providing access a class of folks that are traditionally ignored by technologists, do you plan to make these models usable for offline purposes? For example an illiterate person I know from Uttarkhand: his home village is not connected to road. Interestingly he does speak Hindi, but his native language I believe is something more obscure. To get home, he walks five hours from the terminus of a road. Connectivity is obviously both limited and intermittent. A usable device might want the voice interface embedded on it. Any plans for this?
2. I have minimal understanding of this but as someone who has learned Hindi/Urdu as a foreign language but in the US, I am often in mixed conversation w/ both Indians and Pakistanis. There never seems to be any issues with communication. I have heard that certain terms (like for example "khub suraat", "shukria", "kitaab") are more Urdu than Hindi. I also studied Arabic, Farsi, and Swahili so I am familiar with these as loanwords Arabic and/or Persian, but in practice I hear Hindi speakers using these terms often. Is the primary value add here political? Is it an accent thing? Thanks in advance for any explanation. This is still very much a mystery to me.
To increase access we’re also exploring telco hotlines. Carrier penetration is much higher than internet, so this could let people use AI through a simple phone call. Some users already pay for similar services like weather updates (for farmers) via SIM balance. But to scale it will likely require government or telco partnerships.
1. Offline models: Yes that is on the roadmap.
There is a big demand for them especially in interactive educational use-cases.
2. Urdu and Modern Hindi can be cross understood in spoken form. The authentic Hindi is much different though and I can't understand the press releases that are done in super authentic Hindi.
The writing systems in Urdu and Hindi is completely different too, so even if there is a great TTS system in Hindi, I cant use it. Accent are very different too.
Looks like a really cool project. Do you have any opinions on which transcription models are the best, from a quality perspective? I have heard a lot of mixed opinions on this. Curious what you've found in your development process?
I'm a huge fan of using Whisper hosted on Groq since the transcription is near instantaneous. ElevenLabs' Scribe model is also particularly great with accuracy, and I use it for high-quality transcriptions or manually upload files to their API to get diarization and timestamps (https://elevenlabs.io/app/speech-to-text). That being said, I'm not the biggest expert on models. In my day-to-day workflow, I usually swap between Whisper C++ for local transcription or Groq if I want the best balance of speed/performance, unless I'm working on something particularly sensitive.
Nice. Yeah, we are dogfooding some systems I built in my household. We use whisper.cpp and I haven't had any issues. I get told frequently I should be using eleven labs but I just have been too lazy to build a benchmark that would help me decide
This is true but also your API needs to actually implement all the use cases (often its only for a subset) and it needs to work well (often there are many nuances or inconsistencies). But I agree there are lots of overlap. No need to completwly reinvent the wheel here. Actually CQRS systems work incredibly well with LLMs already.
Yeah, this is so true. Well designed APIs are also already almost good enough for AI. There really was always a ton of value in good API design before LLMs. Yet a lot of people still said, for varying reasons, let's just ship slop and focus elsewhere.
I think its likely that soon the "AI" aspect of the "models" get worse and worse with each iteration. This is because:
1. data pollution/dilution -- with each subsequent generation more and more LLM-produced content will make up the bulk of the web this means it either gets into get into the data set, which makes the model "spikey" or reduces the relevant knowledge available which dumbs the model down
2. LLMs were sort of a freak breakthrough in deep learning and while its remarkable, tuning them only makes them marginally better. Diminishing returns apply here. Its a new LLM but its still an LLM -- years old technology now
However, despite these two realities, the total utility/productivity/societal gain from a product (note I didn't say model) like ChatGPT can still increase by orders of magnitude. That is because companies like OpenAI, and many, many, other technology corporations and startups are figuring out how to leverage LLMs to do stuff much more powerful than just answer questions from the corpus (ie: perform quality research, reevaluate itself, computer controls, etc, etc).
Consider for example, flat screen displays were pioneered in like the 50's and arguably, they didn't become disruptively useful until the advent of smart phones. So yeah, the model may get sort of worse or maybe more brittle, but it almost doesn't matter if they are figuring out what to do with the model and making the model more useful for actual tasks. Sure its cute to talk to an AI persona and ask it questions but that is probably the least important aspect of these type of models. Microsoft word had Clippy, and yeah that was cool. But productivity gain came from word processing, the '.doc' filetype, filesharing, editing, etc. Clippy is just a meme now and that's a likely future scenario for the "chat" features in LLM products IMHO.
Two things are important to think about.
1. Power should be measured in relative terms not absolute. (For a good treatise on this, read Paul Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers). The US would have to be keeping up with China, India, and rest of world to maintain its previous pole position.
2. Great nations/empires generally become so at least partially through population growth. This can be organic or engineered (ie: continuously conquering more and more territory) but rising dominance almost never coincides with demographic stagnation, which the US is experiencing. This population plateau has been accurately predicted by the US Census for my entire lifetime.
Also nothing about this decline is unusual or unexpected. This is the course of empire, which is not a new concept.
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