https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/1...

Fracking is absolutely not harmless. I posted elsewhere in this thread about how I have had family property damaged by fracking-induced earthquakes. This is in a region with no active faults, with no record of earthquakes before the fracking started, and the wells are tens of miles away, not next door. I certainly hope data centers are better than fracking wells because those things are a plague.

I know this is a bit of a tangent, but fracking is an absolute plague, and I would encourage you to do more research about it's downsides if you think it is mostly benign. Aside from the better known ground water poisoning from leaks and dumping, fracking creates actual earthquakes that can be felt tens of miles away. My family has property that has been damaged by these earthquakes---in a region with no active faults where there wasn't an earthquake in living memory before the fracking started. Now there are at least several per year strong enough to rattle a tea cup off the table. A few people get paid, but it's a horrible deal for almost everybody else in the county.

<https://thehill.com/policy/international/5205954-french-scie...>

"Korean Scientist With Green Card Detained for a Week and Denied Access to His Lawyer"

<https://www.commondreams.org/news/korean-legal-resident-deta...>

"A US-born NASA scientist was detained at the border until he unlocked his phone"

<https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/12/14583124/nasa-sidd-bikkan...>

"Russian scientist working at Harvard detained by ICE after being stopped at Logan Airport"

<https://www.boston25news.com/news/local/russian-scientist-wo...>

"Chinese American researchers targeted at US border"

<https://concernedscientists.org/2023/03/chinese-american-res...>

These are just cases that make the news. There is a very real possibility of being detained, having devices confiscated, or being refused entry if you are an outspoken critic of the president.

> This comment is devoid of data.

So is yours...

The ultimate problem with your first point---that tariffs boost domestic industry---is that the time horizon for reshoring manufacturing and domestic supply chains is longer than the expected lifetime of these tariffs. Trump is a second term president, there isn't broad consensus or even majority support for the tarrifs, and there is a great deal of opposition from business owners: all signs the tariffs are not for long. Who wants to invest in an expensive factory and workforce when the only thing guaranteeing your competitiveness is the remaining years of Trump? It's actually much worse than this, of course, because the tariffs are being used primarily as diplomatic leverage rather than economic policy, so they change frequently and unpredictably.

There are also serious downsides to the Trump tariffs that don't exist for traditional tariffs that are predictable and operate on a long time horizon. These tariffs create price shocks to domestic industry and retailers, which tend to disproportionately hurt smaller businesses and those with slimmer profit margins. They've also damaged the US's reputation with long-term partners, particularly Canada and the EU, which are now exploring competing trade deals with China and are figuring out how to extract themselves from dependence on US arms and tech companies, two major exports.

The effect of these tariffs is not going to be short-term pain for long-term gain. A great deal of US economic competitiveness comes from investments in diplomatic and military partnerships that have now been undermined. These tariffs will spur reciprocal tariffs from other nations and will accelerate the remodeling of the global economy away from US exports, trading competitive US exports for uncompetitive and commodified domestic industry.

Historically, the formation of most large states was not a voluntary merger of smaller states for the benefit of all but the conquest of smaller states by larger states.

1) *All major players open source their unobfuscated training data.*

a) The evidence so far shows that every major AI company engaged in intentional and historically unprecedented copyright violation to obtain their training data.

b) LLMs have now poisoined future data for any new players. This is a massive negative externality, and we shouldn't accept this externality as a moat locking out future players from competition.

2) *Levy a 20% royalty on all future genAI revenue to authors and artists who appear in the dataset and exempt genAI from future copywright violations.*

a) The current copyright model is bad for both authors and AI companies. It's hard for authors to collect from violations, and it's expensive and tedious for AI companies to comply with innumerable individual copyrights. Simplify the regime for everyone, and properly reward the people whose work is the foundation of these models.

b) The specifics can be worked out, but, among other things, the royalty should be proprotional to the token count of a work, not just number of works.

The solution is to recognize that ease of observation interacts with expectation of privacy and legislate what can be done at each point on the spectrum. I have no expectation that someone won't take a picture with me in the background while I'm in public, but I would find it jarring to be filmed at every public location I went, have that video indexed to my name in a database, and have all my behaviors tagged. You write the law so that the latter thing is illegal and the former thing isn't. When there's a dispute about what's illegal, you have it resolved by the courts like every other law.

The irony is that the commenters saying we must go back to the moon are more like the Spanish: sticking to a sentimental 1960s vision of human-based space exploration despite evidence clearly favoring robotics and remote control.

I love space exploration too, but its expensive, and we should focus on areas that have the best scientific or economic payoff. Sending humans back to the moon just isn't the best use of resources.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45319633

Points: 3

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> Without those standards, the profession would lose its weight, its dignity. If becoming a doctor were simply a matter of competence and compassion, we’d all be wearing name tags and making $60,000 a year.