No problemo, the agent can use your crypto to buy more tokens./jk (as of 6/12/2026)


Are the cryptobros that stoopid or do they think we're that stupid?!!

Government has a role in helping a new technology reach economies of scale

Governments are (supposed to be) first and FOREMOST answerable to the people and acting at their bidding...not the other way around.

So, the govt is not there to try to force or guide the people any one way....or the other.

Not to worry in India about all this.

I hear they're still hiring at the Kwik-E-Mart.....

When my mother was a child, any child who was displayed left-handed traits was considered possessed and had their left hands restrained.

My mother started school a little over 100 years ago, and was left handed. As was normal in those days, the teachers tried to break that "habit" and make her right handed like the rest of the class. When her mother heard that, she went to the school and told them that if they didn't cease and desist that barbaric practice RIGHT NOW she'd take Mom out of school and teach her at home, with the result that she was the only left handed student in her class. As the desks in those days had only a small writing surface on the right side, she had to learn how to write in a rather unusual way, but learn she did, with a very clear hand. I've heard that a similar "education" is part of what caused George VI's speech issues, but that's just speculation.

See?

The market will win out and winners, the superior will emerge in the leads.

No need for the Govt to issue mandates and tip the scales (often too early)....let the people and the market make the choice and the superior tech will win.

In this case...solar is coming out ahead which should make some "greenies" ecstatic.....

because as we all know, all people are right-handed

Well...the good, proper normal ones are....

;)

(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.

I don't know about empty rooms, but it's very normal in Britain, if you're walking through a field, to turn left and walk clockwise around the edge of the field. But the problem there is potential for bias because of the area.

When rambling through the British countryside, the standard protocol is to turn left immediately on entry but then walk clockwise around the field. So turning left seems to be fixed, but the direction of preference is determined by when.

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.

Famous last words of ineffective protectors since the dawn of time.

I'm retired, so I have time to download and install any patches on my Fedora box while I'm making breakfast every morning. Generally speaking, there's a new kernel available every week or two, but recently there were two in the same week. I guess that the kernel devs don't think that a monthly patch schedule is adequate to keep Linux safe.