Every single time this meme is posted, it is pointed out that the number in the above part is delusionally low. And yet the meme is reposted again and again both on reddit and on Lemmy and god knows where else.
Right? Needs more data center dollars.
500 million could buy you a fleet of 150 buses to start a bus system for a small town.
Sure, it won’t buy you a coast-to-coast rail system, but no one said that was what the 500m was trying to afford.
We’re having trouble finishing the light rail spur that is intended to serve my neighborhood, and our transit authority needs $300 million to complete the design. The budget shortfall is $34.5 billion on a projected $42.5 billion project. And that’s one line for one neighborhood in one city.
The data centers aren’t for common man LLMs.
They’re for the police state.
“Once, men turned their thinking over to machines, believing it would free them. Instead, it allowed other men with machines to enslave them.” (Paraphrased quote from Dune)
You’re not seeing the bigger picture.
The data centers might give a slight economic boost in the short term, before becoming an economic disaster in some 5-10 years!
More like months.
The government isn’t paying to build that datacenter, the company that wants it is paying.
Everyone is more amenable to things when someone else buys it.
Oh have you not heard the Trump-class battleships are going to cost $275 billion! https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2026/08/05/trump-class-battleship-program-will-cost-275-billion-cbo-report-says/
With drones completely changing the dynamic of how the next round of major wars are going to be fought, these battleships might not be as stupid as they first sound. Especially if they are going to be armed with lasers and rail guns. Those require amounts of power that you probably aren’t going to fit on anything smaller.
There’s still going to be a weak spot and no amount of power can withstand thousand of drones to empty out the ships’ defenses.
If they are using the lasers as missile/drone defense, then they theoretically could withstand thousands of drones.
Right, but why wouldn’t the drones and missiles simply fly around it to their intended target?
This is literally the reason we stopped building battleships almost a hundred years ago and drones don’t make that less true today.
They didn’t stop building battleships due to opponents just flying around them; they stopped building battleships because aircraft were far more effective weapons than any of the big guns on the ship. Hence, aircraft carriers took the place of battleships. With improved missiles and now drones, that aircraft advantage is no longer as clear cut as it was.
The purpose of battleships was to destroy enemy fleets before they should destroy shipping and to bombard coastal targets. Both offensive and defensive tasks are supplanted by aircraft and that has not changed at all, whether that aircraft is manned or not.
Lasers and anti-air drones are the future of anti-drone weaponry, both of which are needed in addition to existing air defense solutions like CIWS, Patriot, and THAAD.
For the lasers specifically, it makes a ton of sense powering them with a nuclear reactor which mandates at least a battlecruiser sized ship. Powering them with diesel generators is just not realistic.
With all that said, lasers currently aren’t ready for prime-time; I would like to see the Trump battleship money put into laser R&D, anti-drone drones (like Ukraine has), and small frigates, a ship class we are sorely lacking on.
Once the lasers are close to fully operational, we can revisit nuclear powered battle-cruisers to power the lasers for fleet defense; as it might make sense to simply go with more nuclear powered carriers with lasers on them instead. In fact, the Ford-class carriers we are building have about double the power budget they currently use, precisely for future upgrades to radars and lasers.
Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the US does have lasers that are ready for prime time. There’s been plenty of examples in the past of them managing to keep higher tech stuff out of public knowledge until it’s already been obsoleted.
Then just wrap the drones in Cucumber or wet towels and you’re laser proof again.
Or use waterbeads/gel like tech ingredients.
No, you don’t understand.
The $500 million is money the government has to pay to have a public good built.
Whereas the $50 billion is money invested corporations, which they got from their customers… and the government as incentives, tax breaks, and other magic that normal people can’t have. And it makes a private asset instead of a public good.
So obviously the $50 billion is less money.
You can put glue on pizza?
Subject to natural limitations of the pizza’s area you can put anything in it except pineapple.
Oh thank god, I thought it was fruit in general! I was hidding and eating strawberry pizza like I was a criminal all along, so silly
Common confusion, strawberry cannot be added to pasta
Tomatoes are technically fruit, IIRC.
Where I’m from, this sentence alone would probably start some local war Dx
(true, though, I like to say that they’re "culinarily/functionally a vegetable, as it’s used more similarly to other vegetables than fruit)
$500 Million (500,000,000) = 1% of $50 Billion (50,000,000,000).
People need to stop shitting on ChatGPT. Glue on pizza is the culinary revolution of 2026!
It was actually Google’s Gemini that suggested this if I remember correctly.
Because it scrapped the data from Chat of course.
