Comment Old Laws (Score 1) 18
Fortunately, with them being old laws piracy was defined as the sort involving ships not computer games.
Maybe some day we will actually get electricity that is “too cheap to meter” out of it.
That is exceptionally unlikely. All current designs for fusion reactors are complex and expensive to make and, even if you have a magic wand that can produce fusion reactors for almost no cost, they are all going to be large power-station sized facilities unless you also discover some completely new physics and that means expensive transmission lines whose size and hence expense depends very much on the amount of power being consumed.
So unless you also think we will have cheap, room-temperature superconductors as well, or a new way to generate clean, almost limitless power at power in the home, we will be metered for the forseeable future.
Dude that heat energy has to go somewhere.
It does, it radiates away into space. That's why the Earth, which receives over 1.3kW/m^2 in energy from the sun, has not been baked to a crisp over the billions of years it has received such energy: it just wamred up the to point that the rate of radiating energy matched the rate at which the sun adds it. Since the rate of radiation is roughly proportional to the temperature to the power 4, adding additional heat sources to the Earth (especially ones many orders of magnitude less than the power of the sun's heating, has negligible effect on the temperature.
The reason that global warming occurs is because CO2 is very good at absorbing radiation in the wavelengths that objects at the Earth's temperature want to radiate at. This traps heat from the sun by reducing the amount that is radiated until the Earth heats up enough that the new rate of emission overcomes the effect and since the sun's power is many orders of magnitude higher than any human power sources this effect is many orders of magnitude larger than direct heating. For reference the total global power generation was about 3.5 TW in 2024 averaged over the year while the sun's power hitting the earth is about 167,000 TW.
But expecting fusion to be in production in 7 years is still risky.
It's not risky it's insane. The only way that could possibly happen is if someone came up with a brilliant idea that turned out to be spectacularly easy realize. The problem is that the last ~70 years of fusion research has been filled with the exact polar opposite: brilliant ideas that all looked easy to realize but that all, without exception, turned out to be impossibly hard to make them work.
We'll achieve fusion in the end but expecting it to be 7 years away is insanity - I suspect it is still several decades away at best although nothing would make me happier than to be wrong.
Of course, many gas stations actually have these things called "employees" and sometimes they will put clearly-visible somethings (like a cone) at a downed pump. I see that very rarely, though.
So you do see them!
But, even for an idealist, it's hard to ignore the salary discrepancy when it gets to a certain point - especially if you have a family.
It's not the discrepancy between academic and industry salaries that matters, it's the absolute value of that salary. That's why I ended up in Canada instead of the UK as an academic - UK academic salaries are not enough to be able to afford a house and support a family on, Canadian ones are. I don't really care what I might have been able to earn in industry because I enjoy my job as an academic too much to want to work in industry. However, I have to have a job that earns enough to afford a house and support my family at a reasonable standard of living - that's my bottom line and the UK salaries for academics are well below that, even up north where I am from and the cost of living is lower.
Really? I don't think I have encountered a completely non-working gas pump in at least 10 years.
If you mean that you drove up to one, got out and found it not working then I'd agree with you. But I find it hard to believe that you have never been to a petrol station in the past 10 years that did not have at least one pump that was down for maintenance or refilling the underground tank. The difference is that you probably saw that the pump was blocked off and just went to another without thinking about it like most of us do.
"I've finally learned what `upward compatible' means. It means we get to keep all our old mistakes." -- Dennie van Tassel