If the container is sealed (airtight) while it's still above the temperatures that (most) bacteria can survive at, and then cooled while sealed, it might actually do better than open-air for a while.
It's apples and oranges. Lines of code is just a measurement. You can't look at a whole codebase and say "these X lines are essential, those Y lines are excess, delete those" -- the lines interact with each other to create the whole thing.
It would be like saying "Weight in kilograms of course is an asset for an airplane. That's what keeps it in the air. What other real asset is the airplane made of?"
If you discover a precancerous polyp, and it gets removed during the colonoscopy, you just might avoid ever getting colon cancer instead of dying from it prematurely. But you do you.
The benefits are recruiting the best and brightest students from a pool of 8b people instead of only 300m people. And some of them (most, if encouraged?) will stay in the US after that and contribute to the economy.
I agree, I think we should go back to the old system of letting them be fully private and just taxing their gains heavily to pay for the public debts/needs.
The parent comment has a lot of "if this" and "if that", but the linked Wikipedia article has a thorough sequence of events. The point is clearly: we don't need to surmise.
Yes, it's quantized (4 bit). Sure, it's... not quite as good as what's on offer via API. And sure, "up to" does a lot of work (I don't have an average/median for you but it feels fast to me).
But it's usable, fully local, fully private, and has no subscriptions and no operating costs other than electricity.