Trump would overcharge for Kool-Aid but buy the cheapest knockoff he could find

what is this "long-TDS" bullshit?
the fucker has been crippling & corrupting everything since his 1st admin but was restrained by some senior people who had at least a modicum of sanity.
shitheads were whinging that Obama would be rounding up people into FEMA concentration camps whereas what he *actually* did was deport significantly more without disrupting or disobeying courts, making emergency SCOTUS applications, shooting protesting citizens dead in the streets or grifting on a historic scale.

FFS, "patriots" lost their minds when the "uppity Kenyan" wore a tan suit - like Reagan used to do - and installed a basketball court
  and derided his "mom jeans".
was that Obama Derangement Syndrome? was he wrong to not insult journalists he disagreed with, to not walk out on Bill O'Reilly?

even if every Slashdotter makes sure to avoid stocks like these there are still many millions who can get burned if this goes sideways and there are many who are worse than SpaceX

then Trump will pardon him on the way out. Might do for Ghislaine too

having this money-losing company fast-tracked to be included in pension funds is crazy.
and Elon is such a bullshitter, spewing crap about how AI will make money obsolete and endless resources for everyone which continually aspiring to obtain more for himself.
I've heard he's scheming to get to $10 trillion USD.

solar deployments would still be miniscule were it not for credits & mandates

I think you're right as far adults go -- adults are having fewer children because children are unaffordable.

Teens, OTOH, were almost never making a conscious decision to try to conceive children anyway -- if they got pregnant, that was an unintended side effect of having recreational sex. So if the teenage fertility rate is falling, the most likely explanation is that teens are either having less sex, or they are using contraception more effectively (or both). It's quite plausible that teens are simply spending less time in each others' physical proximity, and therefore having sex with each other less often.

Trump ordered the immediate surrender of Iran as well. What Trump commands and what Trump is competent to actually make happen are two vastly different things.

I mean, we could, but when the total expenses for building and running a solar farm are less than just the ongoing cost of buying more coal for an existing coal plant (never mind the maintenance or environmental remediation costs), that's almost literally lighting money on fire. It takes a pretty dedicated idealogue to hold out against the capitalist temptation of making more money solely to show the libs who's boss, and anyone who does so is likely to find themselves replaced by someone else who can "better maximize shareholder value". Hence the shift; even Trump can't stop an idea whose time has come.

Read your .sig

Maybe I don't read the Zeitgeist as well as I should, but AFAICT anything AI-related is seen as extremely uncool these days (at least, outside of certain tech-topian circles). So if Visa thinks "Adopting AI means people will think we're cool", I suspect they are in for a surprise.

I"m less concerned about that than about upkeep & regular maintenance.
One of the great disappointments of NorthAm charging networks is how lackluster the reliability has been even for extensive ones like Electrify America which was backed by VW money. Afaik only Tesla has done a much better than average job of charger maintenance

If the only goal is producing electricity at the current minimum price per kWh, then you have a good point.

OTOH if you also have a long-term goal of figuring out how to effectively design and build fusion reactors, then it's worthwhile to build them as best you can even if wind is currently more cost-effective.

As for why you might have such a long-term goal, I can think of several reasons:

1. Future fusion reactor designs might be much more economical to build and run, once enough hands-on experience has been gathered to make them so
2. Fusion reactors could be used in situations where wind power isn't available (e.g. space exploration)

"The Q factor is eminently predictable with scale"
i predict it'll scale eminently up to beyond brown dwarf scale before it's viable but that poses a slight problem for commercial deployment.
"single person's two decades-old view"
it's been nearly 6 decades since i 1st heard that commercial fusion was at most 20 years away.
given my family history it'll be nearly as miraculous as fusion if i have that many years left so i'm done sitting waiting & listening to more promises that'll never happen.

"it's the most well understood type of fusion"
more like the type most understood to not work.
as Robert Bussard said in his famous Google TechTalk in Nov 2006, "we don't think it'll ever be economic but it's really good science" and "one of my friends Dr Nicholas Kroll, one of the top 3 theorists in the world said some years ago we've spent $15 billion studying tokamaks and what we know is they're no damned good".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...