Donald Trump the Megathread part II - Mod Warning updated in OP 12/2/26

Are they deliberately trying to make it a shitshow? Or is it the usual Trump's reverse Midas touch?

Perhaps it's a ploy to make football itself look bad, so that Trump can claim that American football was the greatest sport all along. No theory too deranged with that clown at the helm (apologies to all clowns).

I generally agree, but keep in mind that Ireland is well over represented in diseases like cystic fibrosis (over three times the incidence in the population compared with the US and EU) and needs its gene pool diluted a bit. Immigration is the obvious way for this to be achieved.

The Weil guy is all into autonomous robots… I can see military uses for such… perhaps the first one can be called the T-1…

Or, maybe one to plant and harvest gardens. He is an exec at the Nature Conservancy, too.

The mere mention of quantum computing triggered so many red flags for me that I feel like I'm at a communist party congress! Granted, I'm nowhere near an expert myself, however that technology is nowhere near ready for battlefield use, and will likely never get to that point!

The principle behind quantum computing is that, rather than manipulating single bits at a time that can have one of two states, 1 or 0, you manipulate so-called qubits that can exist in a superposition of both (or indeed many) states at once. This allows for certain tasks to be completed much faster than with regular computers. Having said that, the quantum nature of these qubits makes them highly susceptible to noise resulting from things like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which states that we can never measure the precise value of all properties in a system, as measuring one property, say position will increase the uncertainty about another property, such as momentum.

Google and other companies get around this in their quantum computers by chilling the machines down to a few degrees above absolute zero using liquid helium and mounting the computers on shock-absorbing plates. I'm sure I don't need to tell you why it is a bad idea to mount a bulky device that is extremely sensitive to interference and requires an industrial-grade refrigeration plant on any type of battlefield vehicle. There is work being undertaken to allow quantum computers to operate at somewhat less frigid temperatures, indeed there are some early indications that some sort of quantum processes might be occurring in our brains, however the technology isn't there yet. Microsoft, which is heavily engaged in that kind of research, has recently had to pull a number of journal articles from publication after it turned out that the results they claimed could not be reproduced. The big problem is that most of the challenges surrounding quantum computing aren't simply engineering challenges. Rather, we're running up against the limits of reality itself, such as the basic granularity of spacetime as defined by Planck's constant and Planck units, Heisenberg's s aforementioned uncertainty principle, and so on.

Now, this does not mean that quantum computing is completely useless for the military. In fact, I'm pretty sure that the signals intelligence community is following developments in that field very closely since quantum computing has the potential of rendering most current encryption methods ineffective. However, any claims that quantum computers themselves have any role on the battlefield should be viewed with extreme scepticism.

I presume you're busy enough as it is, but I highly recommend checking out some of the videos done by Matt O'Dowd at PBS Spacetime or Sabine Hossenfelder on this particular subject. Sabine is a bit controversial, as well as being crotchety even by German standards (I should know, being a German myself 🙃), but both do a pretty good job at pouring cold water (or is that helium?) on such scientific hype subjects.