In a sane world, you might expect the Windows 'integrated' AI to be wired up to just... adjust the brightness..

But *fine*, you don't wire it up, you might then at least hope the AI to say "That capability is not enabled, but here is some help text telling you to do it".

But nope, "That sounds like something an ioctl would do, and I don't know the ioctl per se, but let's just submit random bullshit ioctls and *maybe* it will happen to do as user requested?"

Switch your pension funds, if you can, from NASDAQ to S&P.

... by getting angry at a person for not knowing a definition of a word that you have to use Urban Dictionary as a reference for.

It'd be fun to be that rich,

The funny thing is that he seems to constantly be miserable, at least when he's raging online inside the anger-echo chamber he built for himself.

I think wealth taxes are fundamentally a distraction from the giant loopholes in current systems, and even if you oppose wealth taxes, you should still fix said loopholes.

First off, people like Musk just take loans against their stock. This is not a realizing event, so they get to enjoy their gains without paying taxes on them. Using stock as collateral in any way should be a realizing event. If you're doing something that lets you enjoy the gains, you should be forced to realize the gains and pay taxes on them.

Secondly, capital gains are just income. They don't deserve a special lower rate. They should be taxed the same as other income, at normal income rates.

It's fair to argue about whether we should be doing more on top of these things, but can we at least agree that we should be doing these things, and make this the standard globally?

That's the way we've been counting net worth, an extrapolation of the volume that transacted and assuming that *all* of the rest could transact at that price. Nothing particularly new.

I haven't seen really any better ideas deployed, but you are right that it's only "worth" a Trillion while most of it just sits unused. Even "unused" it bolsters the parts he is willing to leverage for loans to basically do whatever the hell he could possibly imagine.

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.

(For the record, I didn't plan to go reading your Wikipedia page, I just searched your name and "fusion" so I could go read the papers you had written, and this is what came up instead, lol)

Fission is perfectly good in space. What, you worry about the radiation?!

Oh for fuck's sake, you cannot be this ignorant.

Fusion in space (beyond the power side, where it's in general higher temperature (higher Carnot efficiency / easier to radiate) and lower mass than fission) is about being able to exhaust fusion plasma as a high-ISP rocket engine.

ORLY?

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Maury_Markowitz&action=history

Because your wikipedia user page started out saying that you're a programmer working at a hedge fund who got into programming by working in tech support.

I work at a medium-sized (for Canada) hedge fund during the day, primarily writing the program they use to enter and track orders. I'm formerly a Mac guy, but holding a day job pretty much means you've got to work on the PC, and so I do. I can't say I really mind it though, and I have to admit that Microsoft Access does the job well.

I got into programming in a roundabout way, originally working in tech support for FirstClass. That was one odd company; there were the programmers, and then "everyone else", the peaons. I never managed to break into programming there, the barrier to entry was just too high. Then back in '97 Apple Computer announced it was buying NeXT and using OpenStep as the next Mac OS X. So I started looking into OS and got completely hooked, posting about it a lot on the UseNet. Then one day I got a email from a developer in Toronto who wanted to hire me to help him write a program on OpenStep, but I declined, saying I liked my job and didn't really have that much experience anyway. The next day I got laid off. The day after that I worked for him. The rest, so it goes, is history.

Then when you started editing fusion-related pages, you changed it to say:

The quick-n-dirty description of me is "failed physicist" - I took physics in U but I completely bit at the heavy math. So now I'm a programmer, like all the other physicists out there. Eh, I don't mind that too much. I'm also a pilot, so unsurprisingly most of my edits are on science, tech or aircraft.

Then you later edited it to say:

The quick-n-dirty description of me is "coding physicist" - I took physics in U, and like so many others of my era, today I'm a programmer

Now here you're:

A physicist who has been writing about fusion since my 3rd year E&M thesis

Go home, poser. You're a programmer who took some physics courses in school, failed them, and are now pretending to be a subject matter expert.

The cost of a fission plant outside the nuclear island - that is all the things like steam generators, turbines, cooling loops, etc. - is about 60% of the total cost.

It's even more than that on average. But this isn't a fission plant. It's much more akin to a coal or NG plant than a fission plant. ARC is dealing with superheated steam (540C, like a coal plant), not the ~300C or so you might get in a fission plant (fission plants require enormous turbines per unit power, and MSRs). Plus you also have to reject a lot more heat due to the lower thermal efficiency (*on top of* the much greater steam volume). You're also not having to meet nuclear quality assurance standards on the site - backup generators, emergency cooling, and a whole slew of other things, which are not only fundamentally expensive, but you often can't use off-the shelf systems.

Bringing up the cost of this stuff from fission plants is nonsensical. This has nothing to do with fission. If something goes wrong, the reaction stops instantaneously, and the only thing you do is damage your inner core, which is a consumable item anyway. It just means moving up your maintenance cycle. Your balance-of-plant costs are coal-like.

Assuming MIT's ridiculously low estimates of reactor cost

It's only "nonsensically low" because you don't like it. There is nothing unreasonable about it relative to the size of the undertaking.

This isn't ITER where they're employing a veritable army of scientists and engineers on government contracts for decades as a jobs programme.

PV systems in the US currently cost about $1/W

[Capacity Factors have entered the chat]

"1W" of solar nameplate capacity averages 0,24W in the US.

A fusion plant, when mature, can be expected to have a capacity factor similar to a fission plant, e.g. downtimes mainly just once every 1-2 years for maintenance (in a fusion plant, replacement of the inner core structure). 90%-ish. Otherwise, it's just constant (pulsed, accounted for in the 400MWe) generation.

Also, for the record, 1W-ac of nameplate solar power in the US averages ~$1,60,W-ac not $1 (as of 2024 at least). Don't compare W-dc with W-ac (also, even $1/W-dc, while "in the range" in the US, would be a good price - 2024 average was $1,22/W-dc)

Also, I don't know how to break it to you, but not everywhere on Earth is the US desert southwest. Hey, I live in Iceland - want to take a wild guess how well solar is taking off here? Even in the summer fixed PV sucks because the sun does an azimuthal 360 around you (and our peak electricity demands are in the winter). Also, PV isn't compact. You're not going to power a large ship with PV. You could with a fusion reactor. And we're not even bringing up space here.

The development cost is, compared to the amount that gets invested in the grid every year, basically in the noise threshold. It's well worth it.

With storage, that goes to about $2/W.

By "storage" you don't mean "able to handle a dunkelflaute".

Don't get me wrong, I like solar. But this is a terrible argument against fusion.

I can read. Of course expected, that's implicit in "future" unless someone discovered clairvoyance.

So again, in other words: What do people base those expectations on when so far the company hasn't made any profit at all? In a profitable company, I can extrapolate. I can assume "with X additional cash raised, they can build Y more factories, selling Z more goods." - but for a company that is negative and is making a LOSS on every customer at the moment, growth does not equal profit, it equals more loss.

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