You know what property taxes are, right?

I mean, not surprising really. The military is less white than the general US population, and lower income than the US average.

I can also understand how the current administration's actions may be... less than popular.

Every single day, it seems like the White House does something to keep the ongoing Epstein Obstruction Scandal in the news. It's been the top story for months and every single day there's new news about it.

On Thursday, Todd Blanche, presumably acting under orders, spent all day obstructing the release of the information. And then he did the same thing on Friday. And now there's this UFO story, looking almost custom-made as a silly distraction. Blanche or Trump clearly wants to keep the illegal obstruction on voters' minds, as an evergreen topic so that it never goes away. But why?

What does Trump get by working so hard to persuade every American that he disagrees with a law that he signed, implying that laws is a bad idea and shouldn't be applied or enforced? What advantages are gained by an explicitly pro-crime agenda? What's the advantage of campaigning on releasing the files but then breaking my campaign promise?

I (naively?) think if I were in his position, I would comply with the law so that I don't go to prison for obstruction, and so people wouldn't notice every day that I'm still casually and continuously committing crime. I would let, no make the files come out, so that everyone can see the criminal witnesses confused me with the actual rapist, Biden. That would put me in a position where I'm seen as pro-law instead of anti-law, and it would also put to rest all the speculation that the "Epstein" files are actually mostly about me. Seems like that would be good for everyone, including myself.

So why commit obstruction when the releasing files will exonerate you and make all the problems go away? This strategy doesn't make any sense. What could I possibly be missing?

I feel like there's something incredibly obvious that everyone with a more-than-50 IQ has figured out about the president's lily-white innocence, but somehow I'm just too fucking stupid to figure it out. It's humbling, and makes me question my deeply-held faith in the president's genius.

so called LLM's

LOL

likely use the same backend technology

LOL

differences may be the weight

LOL

of the database'ed responses

LOL

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?

Then We The People need (or have needed) to become post-newspaper, indeed post-any-sort-of-centralized-media, since all centralizations are pressure points for coercion and compromise.

Make Usenet Great Again? There is No Cab-NO CARRIER

We decided "I really really don't want x to happen to me, so I won't x someone else." And then we agreed that x will be categorized as "terrorism" instead of "war."

Then recently (yesterday?) we Americans apparently changed our mind about whether or not it would be ok if Iran (or anyone else) blew up America's civilian water supply infrastructure, no big deal, so we're doing that now, telling the whole world that it's acceptable. It's just war, what can ya do?

For now, people can worry about what type of weapons to use and whether or not certain types should be banned.

But in the future, all the debates will be about will be "how do we pick just the right grid squares in which to Kill All Humans?"

(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.