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This is so much money with which we could actually solve problems in the world. maybe even stop wars which break out because of scarcity issues. maybe i am get

• dragonelite 2y ago
  The US can't stop the wars it wants others to fight for them even if it means population collapse like in Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.
  • 4ggr0 2y ago
    well, it also starts a fair share of wars, or lets say, "brings freedom and democracy in exchange for resources and power" and sometimes even decides to topple leaders in foreign countries to then put puppets into place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change_in_Latin_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
• tim333 2y ago
  >wars which break out because of scarcity issues That doesn't seem to be much of a thing these days. If you look at Russia/Ukraine or China/Taiwan there's not much scarcity. It's more bullying dictator wants to control the neighbours issues.
  • boxed 2y ago
    Or religious fanatics wants to murder other religious groups.
  • _Tev 2y ago
    > That doesn't seem to be much of a thing these days. If you ignore Gaza and whole of Africa, maybe.
    • tim333 2y ago
      Gaza seems mostly to be about who controls Israel/Palestine politically. Gaza was reasonably ok for food and housing and is now predictably trashed as a result of Hamas wanting to control Palestine from the river to the sea as they say. South Sudan is some ridiculous thing where two rival generals are fighting for control. Are there any wars which are mostly about scarcity at the moment?
      • _Tev 2y ago
        So you are saying Hamas would have same domestic support if Gaza was economically at the level of e.g. Slovenia? People who complained about "open air prison" caused by Israeli "occupation" even before Oct 7 would disagree with you I think. Even in Europe extremists are propped up by promise of "cheap energies" from Russia. I guess if you dont see the link this is not the place to explain it.
        • corimaith 2y ago
          Have you videos of Gaza before the war? There are places in Syria and Iraq, hell even India or the Phillipines that look alot worse.
          • tim333 2y ago
            Also the "open air prison" effect was a result of trying to reduce attacks from Gaza. For example before the 2008 war there were more than 2000 rockets launched from Gaza into Israel.
      • Arkhaine_kupo 2y ago
        > Are there any wars which are mostly about scarcity at the moment? The class war
      • FilosofumRex 2y ago
        No, not really... the origin of Gaza conflict is in Zionists confiscating the most fertile land and water resources. That's why Israelis gladly handed back the Sinai desert to Egypt, but have kept Golan Heights, East Jerusalem, Shaba Farms, and continuously confiscate Palestinian farmlands in the West Bank. There is nothing arbitrary or religious about which lands Zionists are occupying and which they're leaving to arabs.
  • Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    It will be, or, it's slowly happening already. Climate change is triggering water and food shortages, both abroad and on your doorstep (California wildfires), which in turn trigger mass migrations. If a richer and/or more militarily equipped country decides they want another country's resources to survive, we'll see wars erupt everywhere. Then again, it's more of a logistics challenge, and if e.g. California were to invade Canada for its water supply, how are they going to get it all the way down there? I can see it happening in Africa though, a long string of countries rely on the Nile, but large hydropower dams built in Sudan and Ethiopia are reducing the water flow, which Egypt is really not happy about as it's costing them water supply and irrigated land. I wouldn't be surprised if Egypt and its allies declares war on those countries and aims to have the dams broken. Then again, that's been going on for some years now and nothing has happened yet as far as I'm aware. (the above is armchair theorycrafting from thousands of miles away based on superficial information and a lively imagination at best)
    • tim333 2y ago
      I was in Egypt a while and there's no talk of them invading Sudan or Ethiopia. A lot of Egypt's economy is overseas aid from the US and similar. The main military thing going on there - I was in Dahab where there are endless military checkpoints - is Hamas like guys trying to come over and overthrow the fairly moderate Egyptian government and replace it with a hardline Hamas type islamic dictatorship for the glorification of Allah etc. Again it's not about reducing scarcity - more about increasing scarcity in return for political control. Dahab and Cairo are both a few hours drive from Gaza.
      • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > A lot of Egypt's economy is overseas aid from the US and similar. The rest is fees from the Panama (EDIT: Suez) Canal and tourism. Getting into a war, particularly with a country on the Red Sea, is suicide. (Also, the main flash point between Egypt and Ethipia has receded since the GERD finished filling.)
        • kasey_junk 2y ago
  • dbspin 2y ago
    There's a terrifying amount of food insecurity and poverty in Russia - https://www.globalhungerindex.org/russia.html https://www.globalhungerindex.org/russia.html - https://databankfiles.worldbank.org/public/ddpext_download/poverty/987B9C90-CB9F-4D93-AE8C-750588BF00QA/current/Global_POVEQ_RUS.pdf https://databankfiles.worldbank.org/public/ddpext_download/p...
    • palmfacehn 2y ago
      I would wager that states such as Russia and others misallocate resources, which in turn reduces productivity. Worse yet, some of the policy prescriptions stated above would further misallocate scarce resources and reduce productivity. Scarcity doom becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. This outcome is used to rationalize further economic intervention and the cycle compounds upon itself. To be explicitly clear, the US granting largess to tech companies for datacenters also counts as a misallocation in my view.
    • tim333 2y ago
      Your first link says "With a score under 5, Russian Federation has a level of hunger that is low." The current situation with Russia and China seems caused by them becoming prosperous. In the 1960s in China and 1990s in Russia they were broke. Now they have money they can afford to put it into their militaries and try to attack the neighbours. I'm reminded of the KAL cartoon on Russia https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1424,quality=80,format=auto/sites/default/files/images/print-edition/20140322_WWD000_0.jpg https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1424,quality=8... That was from 2014. Already Russia is heading to the next panel in the cycle.
      • jeffreyq 2y ago
        > Already Russia is heading to the next panel in the cycle. Curious if you could share some links, or readings, blog posts, etc. in relation to this
        • tim333 2y ago
          I don't have special information but there is general stuff in the headlines like Putin growing concerned by Russia’s economy, as Trump pushes for Ukraine deal https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-growing-concerned-by-russias-economy-trump-mulls-more-sanctions-2025-01-23/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-growing-concerned... Also basically the whole western world are progressively sanctioning them eg. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-imposes-new-wave-of-sanctions-choking-russian-oil-revenues-with-foreign-secretary-arriving-in-italy-for-g7 https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-imposes-new-wave-of-sa... and https://kyivindependent.com/us-likely-to-sanction-russia-if-moscow-refuses-peace-negotiations/ https://kyivindependent.com/us-likely-to-sanction-russia-if-... Plus the war is expensive. Plus Ukraine's main strategy at the moment seems to be to take out their oil and related industries using drones https://www.newsweek.com/russia-map-shows-critical-infrastructure-blasted-ukraine-this-week-2016757 https://www.newsweek.com/russia-map-shows-critical-infrastru... I'm not sure it's going to change unless there is some sort of deal or Putin goes.
  • HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
    At any given time approximately 1 in 10 humans are facing starvation or severe food insecurity.
    • Octoth0rpe 2y ago
      I don't doubt that, but it's harder to connect that fact to a specific international conflict.
  • rainingmonkey 2y ago
    "Global warming may not have caused the Arab Spring, but it may have made it come earlier... In 2010, droughts in Russia, Ukraine, China and Argentina and torrential storms in Canada, Australia and Brazil considerably diminished global crops, driving commodity prices up. The region was already dealing with internal sociopolitical, economic and climatic tensions, and the 2010 global food crisis helped drive it over the edge." https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-and-rising-food-prices-heightened-arab-spring/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-an...
• neximo64 2y ago
  It actually isn't alot, about $100 spread out over a few years for every person on earth isnt enough to do these things..
  • b3lvedere 2y ago
    IF money was equally distributed then maybe. But that has never happened. Same with drinking water, food and shelter.
• rapsey 2y ago
  > maybe even stop wars which break out because of scarcity issues. Like which wars in this century?
• CSSer 2y ago
  For less than this same price tag, we could’ve eliminated student loan debt for ~20 million Americans. It would in turn open a myriad number of opportunities, like owning a home and/or feeling more comfortable starting a family. It would stimulate the economy in predictable ways. Instead we gave a small number of people all of this money for a moonshot in a state where they squabble over who’s allowed to use which bathroom and if I need an abortion I might die.
  • Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    This is the problem with capitalists / the billionaires currently hoarding the money and the US' policy, it's all for short term gain. But the conservatives that look back to the 50's or 80's or whatever decade their rose-tinted glasses are tuned to should also realise that the good parts of that came from families not being neck-deep in debt.
    • nejsjsjsbsb 2y ago
      Yes you don't want to destroy your food chain. If everyone is poor except you then you are now poor.
  • buran77 2y ago
    Repaying student loans makes a lot of people a little richer. The current initiative makes a few people a lot richer. If you ask some people, the former is a very communist/socialist way of thinking (bad), while the latter is pure, unadulterated capitalism (good).
    • A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2y ago
      That and a lot of people do not have the means to convince current power centers ( unless they were to organize, which they either don't, can't or are dissuaded from ) to do their bidding, while few rich ones do. And so the old saying 'rich become richer' becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
      • 2y ago
• ozim 2y ago
  Money doesn't fix stuff. You need good will people and good will people don't need that much money.
  • mft_ 2y ago
    Money alone might not fix stuff... but an absence of money can prevent stuff being fixed.
  • ajmurmann 2y ago
    More importantly, money, at global scale, doesn't solve scarcity issues. If there are 100 apples and 120 people making sure everyone has a lot of money doesn't magically create 20 more apples. It just raises the price of apples. Building an apple orchard creates apples. Stargate is people betting that they are building a phenomenal apple orchard. I'm not sure they will and an worried the apple orchard will poison us all but unlike me these people are putting their money where their mouth is and had thus larger inventive to figure out what they are doing.
    • ozim 2y ago
      On global scale if you have 100 people and 150 apples but apples are on the opposite side of the globe it is not like you can sustainably get those apples delivered all the time. Getting 150 apples once is better than nothing but still doesn’t fix the problem.
• farresito 2y ago
  I disagree with you. I think the impact of AI on society in the long term is going to be massive, and such investments are necessary. If we look at the past century, technology has had (in my opinion) and incredibly positive impact on society. You have to invest in the future.
• JKCalhoun 2y ago
  Five-hundred billion dollars is nothing when you consider there's a new government agency that it is said will shave two trillion from government inefficiency.
  • 1970-01-01 2y ago
    Five-hundred billion is twenty-five percent of DOGE's pie in the sky promise. It's something.
    • JKCalhoun 2y ago
      /s
• b3lvedere 2y ago
  Such mega investments are usually not for the sake of humankind. They are usually for the sake of a very selected group of humans.
• energy123 2y ago
  Very zero-sum outlook on things which is factually untrue much of the time. When you invest money in something productive that value doesn't get automatically destroyed. The size of the pie isn't fixed.
  • Nullabillity 2y ago
    > something productive So... not this.
• ActionHank 2y ago
  But then how could politicians and the wealthy steal all that money if you just gave it away or helped the poors?
• i_love_retros 2y ago
  The wars are how American tax payer money gets given to all these companies. Why would they try to end them?
• pizzathyme 2y ago
  I am surprised at the negativity from HN. Their clear goal is to build superintelligence. Listen to any of the interviews with Altman, Demis Hassabis, or Dario Amodei (Anthropic) on the purpose of this. They discuss the roadmaps to unlimited energy, curing disease, farming innovations to feed billions, permanent solutions to climate change, and more. Does no one on HN believe in this anymore? Isn't this tech startup community meant to be the tip of the spear? We'll find out by 2030 either way.
  • scottLobster 2y ago
    All of those things would put them out of business if realized and are just a PR smokescreen. Have we not seen enough of these people to know their character? They're predators who, from all accounts, sacrifice every potentially meaningful personal relationship for money, long after they have more than most people could ever dream of. If we legalized gladiatorial blood sport and it became a billion-dollar business, they'd be doing that. If monkey torture porn was a billion dollar business they'd be doing that. Whatever the promise of actual AI (and not just performative LLM garbage), if created they will lock the IP down so hard that most of the population will not be able to afford it. Rich people get Ozempic, poor people get body positivity.
    • jstummbillig 2y ago
      I continue to be amazed at how motivated some of us are to make such cruel, far-reaching and empty claims with regards to people of some popularity/notoriety.
      • gilmore606 2y ago
        Damn you're right, we should give Larry Ellison the benefit of the doubt.
        • bdangubic 2y ago
          not just larry - everyone who is 9-figure rich… no wonder they are better than all of us and hence demand that benefit… :)
• ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
  I'm sorry but unless this $500B was being invested in equipping soldiers and building navies, air capabilities, artillery, etc it could not stop even an urban gang turf war.
• jstummbillig 2y ago
  It's an indirect attempt of tackling any first order problem. So is all software engineering.
• armaautomotive 2y ago
  Won't an intelligent agent available to everyone be able to solve problems in the world? Isn't that why they (OpenAI) and others are doing what they do? To bring abundance?
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• thelastgallon 2y ago
  We could do 20 Manhattan projects with it[1]. 1) Build fully autonomous cars so there are zero deaths from car accidents. This is ~45K deaths/year (just US!) and millions of injuries. Annual economic cost of crashes is $340 billion. Worldwide the toll is 10 - 100x? 2) Put solar on top of all highways. 3) Give money to all farmers to put solar. 4) Build transmission. And many more ... The Manhattan Project employed nearly 130,000 people at its peak and cost nearly US$2 billion (equivalent to about $27 billion in 2023): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project
  • philomath_mn 2y ago
    This isn't a handout, it is an investment with an expected return. Which is good, because it is less likely to be applied to bad ideas like forcing solar roadways and solar farmers.
  • XorNot 2y ago
    You can't just compare things to the Manhattan project. The Manhattan project was large for it's time, but the thing they were doing was ultimately, simple. You can build a nuclear bomb with simply a large enough sphere of enriched U-235 and it'll explode. Which is what the Hiroshima bomb was - a gun type assembly. This is not a complex device. The relative complexity of projects only ever increases, because if they were simpler we would already have done them. The modern LHC is far more complicated then the Manhattan project. So is ITER. Hell, the US military's logistics chain is more complicated then the Manhattan project. The fundamental attribution error here is going "look the power to destroy a city was so much cheaper!"
  • ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
    (contingent on the money actually being spent, which....) This is basically an AI-manhattan project. It would employ vast numbers of construction, tradesmen, manufacturing, etc.
  • LMYahooTFY 2y ago
    > 3) Give money to all farmers to put solar. ...on their roofs? Over all their crops? What's the play here?
• cbeach 2y ago
  That’s like complaining about investments in automated looms at the start of the Industrial Revolution and claiming that the money would be better spent if handed out to the slum dwelling population. We have the benefit of hindsight now and we understand that technological revolutions improve living standards for everyone and drag whole populations out of grinding labour and poverty. And it would be foolish to allow China and Russia to out-invest the West in AI and make us mere clients (or worse, victims) of their superior technology. Industrialists understand that the way to fix the world’s problems is to advance society, as opposed to resting on the laurels of past advancement, and dividing the diminishing spoils of those achievements.
• _uxvx 2y ago
  We already tried fixing problems with throwing tax money at them. It didn't work out. You can see the result of socialism in Russia, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela and where not. Wars do not start because of scarcities. Wars start because of disbalance of power. And it is very important for the Western world to be ahead in the AI, because otherwise China may cause a real war and then a lot of Western people would die. Do you not care about them?
  • malcolmgreaves 2y ago
    Learn the difference between socialism and communism before you spout lies and propaganda.
    • _uxvx 2y ago
      Socialism is communism in progress. I have actually lived in socialist country, what about you? And lies and propaganda is what Leftists like you do, not me. Funny, you never want to live in the countries where you rule.
      • frankzinger 2y ago
        > And lies and propaganda is what Leftists like you do This sounds ridiculous to anybody who pays attention to what Trump/MAGA and the modern Republican party say.
• Aeolun 2y ago
  We flew to the moon several times for half that money xD
• kali_00 2y ago
  [dead]
• mgoetzke 2y ago
  Russia did not have a scarcity issue and still invaded its neighbor.
• ashoeafoot 2y ago
  cant bribe an exponential curve for peace through linear surplus redistribution .
• j_timberlake 2y ago
  "actually solve problems in the world." By "solve problems" you mean "temporarily mitigate problems by throwing money at them", right? Or do you actually have specific examples of problems that can be permanently solved and aren't already being tackled?
  • renjimen 2y ago
    Fusion research has had less than than tenth of this investment, but a viable fusion reactor would have far more impact than a tenth of what Stargate will likely deliver. Not to mention efforts for mitigating climate change and ecological collapse. But of course those issues reside outside our economic system, so why would anyone invest in them.