When I was a young lad in the southern wilds of Louisiana, I would love to grab a random volume of our World Book, flop on the sofa, and just thumb through it. I was a curious kid, and one of the entries I enjoyed was in the “C” volume – – Computers – – which at the time discussed these electronic machines that only governments and large businesses could afford.

One of the illustrations I vividly remember showed a very tall skyscraper next to a person, and the caption explained that a computer that equaled the thinking power of a human being would be 28 stories tall. God only knows who dreamed up that “fact”, but as a kid I felt pretty proud to be walking around with a squishy organ in my head that was just as powerful as a skyscraper-sized computer.
I was reminded of that little anecdote this week when Trump took the opportunity to announce a project that had been in the works months before, and without any of his involvement until then, called Stargate. Below we see three tech titans, each of whom seems to be engaged in some kind of genital-protecting stance, that were a part of this ostensibly $500,000,000,000 announcement.

The general idea was that a cadre of giant U.S. companies would be working together to make a series of colossal data centers, all for the purpose of powering artificial intelligence.
M’kay.
Let me take a moment right here and now to confess a fundamental bias I’ve had my entire thinking life (and keep in mind the aforementioned skyscraper and just how much power is going into this thinking): I have long held that, for any given endeavor, at any era in history, if you want to have it royally and utterly screwed up, just get the government involved. It’s a virtual sure thing.
If you think about all the worthwhile goods and services things in your life, both old and new, I doubt a single one of them came from any government initiative. Your cell phone, your car, the gas that goes in it, your sink, your fridge, the shingles on your roof.
As far as the government is concerned, in the scope of your life, probably the only service that is relevant and present has the words Internal Revenue in front of it, and that’s seriously about it.
I suppose one could argue that the Internet was a result of the government, and that’s only because they needed a network that had a chance of surviving a nuclear holocaust, so, yeah, thanks for that. But my intuition on this entire thing is that the less D.C. gets involved in any of this stuff, except for thoughtful regulations, the better.
To be clear, I’m not under the misapprehension that tax dollars are going into Stargate, because they aren’t. I would, however, like to remind you of some of these massive “joint venture” type arrangements that have taken place in the past and noting where they wound up.
There is, for starters, Foxconn. The general notion, I think, was that the US was weary of all of its iPhones and iPads being made in China, so Foxconn made a big show about a gargantuan manufacturing facility they were going to put in the middle of nowhere in Wisconsin. Below is cringeworthy snapshot of the four principals, hard at work to get this factory up ASAP.

I was curious where things wound up with this project, which at the time Trump predicted would be, and I quote, “the eighth Wonder of the World“. Looking at Google Maps, there are a smattering of buildings, yes, located near a mobile home park and a Jehovah’s Witness church and just a stone’s throw from the Apple Holler.

I mean, to be fair, there was in fact a building constructed, but in the end the project wound up to be about one-tenth its intended scope and making much more low-end electronics than was originally conceived.

And Foxconn was not the singular exception in a sea of government success stories.
There was also the Supercollider project (remember that one?) down in Texas. Countless billions were spent on it back in the late 1980s, but by the early 1990s, the entire enterprise was abandoned. The massive project sits, to this day, surrounded by weeds and debris, and it is usually described as the world’s most expensive hole in the ground. No one wants it.

How about Yucca Mountain? Haven’t heard about that in a while, eh? That was another monstrous project which was supposed to let the U.S. store its piles of radioactive waste. Once again, countless billions were poured into yet another hole in the ground, and the project was completely abandoned.

Every single one of these is nothing more than an epic waste. Plenty of dewy press briefings and news releases, but in the end, absolutely nothing to show for it except more public debt.
Of course, “government” doesn’t just mean the hardworking folks in D.C. It extends to states as well, such as California and its utterly ill-conceived High Speed Rail Project, which I’ve written about repeatedly.
This thing was approved by voters in 2008, which feels like approximately twelve centuries ago. At the time, it was said that for $33 billion, California would have a high-speed train that could take people from San Francisco to Los Angeles (read: Disneyland) in just over a couple of hours.
As always, reality has struck:
- The $33 billion price tag is now said to be more like $108 billion, and I can assure you that, before this project is utterly abandoned and unfinished, the amount spent will exceed even that estimate;
- Experts on the project have long ago abandoned the pledge that trains will actually go anywhere as fast as originally promised. It’ll be more like a fairly zippy drive in your car;
- And, just in case you want to know how much progress has been made in 16 years, please examine this diagram. The completed portions are shown in green, as the legend indicates. This color is actually not needed in this map, as absolutely nothing has been completed.

I suppose was troubles me most of all about the Stargate announcement is this: what, precisely, is the point?
When JFK did his “we choose to go to the moon” speech in 1962, the goal was clear, measurable, and easy to understand:
- the U.S. would land a man on the moon;
- bring him back safely;
- and do so before the 1960s was over.
These were all achieved, with just five months to spare. Point up for Jack!
But this Stargate project has no such clarity, except for a big-ass financial commitment. There were some vague ramblings about how maybe computers could figure out how to cure cancer (a speculation that was swiftly rendered ridiculous by actual oncologists, sort of like how real medical doctors tried to explain in the early days of Theranos that what Elizabeth Holmes was proposing was scientifically impossible).
At best, I think what’s going on is that this is driven by fear.
Fear of China “getting there first.” But what, precisely, is “there“? I don’t think anyone knows.
In the spirit of Donald Rumsfeld, one might say that there are known knowns, unknown knowns, but, in this case, unknown unknowns. The government doesn’t know what, precisely, AI supremacy by China would be like, but they sure don’t want to wait and find out. It’s like a half trillion dollar insurance policy.
Thus, they’re talking about spending half a trillion dollars Just in Case.
There is an advantage, however, in having no clear goal and no real way to measure it, particularly since there isn’t even a timeline.
I mean, even the eight years JFK had in front of him was specific, even though it was very long term!
The advantage, in this case, is that it will be a very, very, very long time before anyone can point at Stargate and state, without contradiction, that it was a ridiculous waste of time and money.
I’m confident, however, that day will eventually arrive. In the meantime, we can all keep pretending together, and, as the modern saying goes, hope to fake it until we make it.
Even if we won’t.
