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.

If you are earning $10M/year it does not need to last long.

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.

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.

Has to be the USA government, I mean 30 billion yearly... serious money.

Scene: a queue of customers in a shop. Customer at the head of the queue with a total of $19.10, hands the cashier a $20 note to pay. There is no till just an electronic card reader and a cash drawer.

A frown appears on the cashier's face as the sudden realization that skills learned in their "advanced" maths class will now be called on after years of neglect. They reach for the calculator only to remember that the batteries died this morning and nobody has had a chance to replace them. Concentrating hard finally an epiphany - $19 is just $1 less than $20 so they quickly hand the customer a dollar.

But no, the customer hands it back saying this is too much change. Panic sets in as the cashier realizes that they had forgotten the decimal place! How can they be expected to do university-level maths? They don't have a maths degree! Faint wisps of steam rise from their ears as mathematical machinery deep in their brain rumbles into action straining against the buildup of forgotten Tiktok videos and What's App messages. Finally, seemingly from nowhere comes the answer - it's 90 cents! With a flash of relief the cashier opens the cash draw only to be confronted with 25, 10 and 5 cent coins and a new seemingly impossible puzzle of how to choose the right coins to make up 90 cents....

My takeaway is that given the wonerful level fo maths education we now seem to have, sadly even cash transactions require working technology today.

You're wrong, and the reason you're wrong os because you're projecting your own resource consumption mechanism (where 90+% of the environmental cost aassociated with your person goes towards your everyday life) onto the megarich.

But with them, barely 0.000x% count towards their personal consumption habits. The largest part of their energy footprint is the very thing that makes them rich in the first place: 8 mostl wealthy people in the world.have as much as the bottom 50%.

All this wealth had to be generated somewhere. Millions of people had to drive to work for that. Millions of factories had to overproduce, oversell, under-delicet quality etc, to produce that excess wealth.

That's about 1.3% for my example, BTW, given the bottom 50% are really poor; but if you shift the thresholds a bit (e. top 1% holds about 50%, top 0.1% close to 20%).

That's excess wealth that we didn't have to produce. Everyone except foe the top 0.1% would be living exactly the same life as now, if we produced only 4/5-ths of what we did.

That's where the megarich's environmental footprint is. And yes, they carry all the blame for it, and yes, they continue to stack the cards such as to keep ot that way, and yes, they're also fully to blame for that. It's not like rest of us wantto working hours, drive long commutes, and buy a washing machine every 7 years becsuse that's what they're made to last instesd of 35.

It has been brewing for a long time, if someone declared to be Napoleon, he would have been assessed for schizophrenia. Today when a man declares he is a woman, he is be offered a way to transition (mutilate himself) and his experience is glamorized and presented to children as a heroic act of self discovery that should be admired and followed. It is not only that we don't treat mental disease, we celebrate it. What else can one expect from society that promotes body positivity as a way to justify unhealthy behavior? If someone is obese, a doctor should suggest that it is not healthy and propose a treatment plan, society should help, not goad the person into showing it off in a weird and sick exhibitionist parade.

Both Canada and the UK have national health care and their academic salaries are on very different scales so clearly healthcare is not relevant to the level of academic salary.

Even after this change it will still be the BSOD just with a different value of B.

Right, Bernie will have you believe that this means that the men loading trucks by hand became more productive, yet they are the ones who will not be working at all once their jobs are automated. It is always the company that becomes more productive, the people who own the company invest in new tools and by doing it they reduce their future expenses and improve throughput, this makes *them* more productive, not the people who used to do the work that is about to be automated. The company spends its capital, becomes more efficient. For whatever reason Bernie says that now, that the company is more productive, he will take the productivity gains away from the people who risked their capital to achieve it.

When the society discourages productivity, it loses productivity, this is why Americans lost their manufacturing sector.

When the society discourages capital formation, it loses capital, that is what America will find out as well.

Oh, my goodness, so many excuses. Everyone I know, who runs their own business did it *against* odds, not because they had something given to them, like 5 day pay for 4 days of work. I know people who mortgaged their own houses, sold their cars to start their business. I know people who run multiple properties and they are doing all of the work themselves, cleaning, renovating. I know people who ran a successful business, sold it, started another business and again, it was a success. They complain about things, but they do them and nothing can stop them short of death.

Lets say you start a company and you use AI to build a bunch of code and help you to devise processes that deal with client lead generation and new client onboarding, client retention and such. You do it all by yourself, lets say it brings you 100,000USD a month (you think it's impossible? I think it's very possible today, for example you can do that with a youtube channel). Does this mean that you do not deserve something and a lid should be put on something, so that what? So that a guy from the street, who doesn't have anything to do with you can get a cut of money you generate? Why?

But that's not what most businesses are like, most businesses are people starting something on their own, eventually hiring a few more people and maybe scaling up a little bit. A few shawarma shops, a few laundromats, a few properties, maybe a delivery business, maybe a few convenience stores, that's what most people would do and that's if they are successful at running at least one of them first.

If they find a way to use AI for example to make themselves more productive by automating their phone lines, by doing some marketing with AI that they have never had a budget for anyway, Bernie thinks now they have to do what, cut the hours of all of their stuff by 4 days a week? OK, who is going to be manning the stations the 5th day, the 6th day, in some cases the 7th day? (yeah, I think it's really great if a business is open 7 days a week, over 300 days a year hopefully, very useful).

The question of 'deserve' is funny, what does it mean, who deserves what? Are you an IG girl, who dates older guys so that they would pay for her traveling and expensive shopping habits? If you talk to those girls, that have it down - they *know* they 'deserve' this and that and the other thing, they always know it. It's because it's easy for them, 'if you're done with your ex, move onto the next', etc.

Unless you are in this much of a demand, you can't have this type of a world outlook, thinking that you 'deserve' something, it's nonsense. You take what you can make, what you can get, that's the reality. If you can put up another shop and make another 5K or whatever a month, good for you, that's why you are going to be a millionaire and not a bum. There is no such thing as 'collecting money', by the way. The moment I have a few spare dollars I either buy something for myself (rare) or I put it to work, I start another project, I buy more parts, I invest into more development or marketing or think of a way to use it to lower future expenses, whatever. Money is a *tool*, it is not a thing that people collect for itself. It is a tool that allows one to build more income streams. Who taught you economics, Marx?

Somehow Bernie thinks that businesses owe to hire people and pay them for the sake of hiring people and paying them. Businesses are started to make the money for the people who start them, wow, a huge revelation. Have you ever started a business, tried running anything, a proverbial lemonade stand? If you have, have you hired people to sit there and do nothing? What if you started a lemonade stand, made some money, bought a juicer, used that to make more money, started another stand, hired a person. Would you pay them above the market rate? What is a market rate, you may ask? It is the rate that people in the area would be willing to show up for and to interview for your new lemonade stand position. You would have a few different people, mostly without any experience, you probably wouldn't have to pay much to man your point of sale. Would you pay them the same for being at work for 4 days as for 5 days?

Bernie can point out whatever he likes, you cannot escape a simple fact - if running a lemonade stand brought in money, there would be competition and people would be willing to find ways to automate as much as possible and to reduce prices in order to gain market share. Keeping prices low enough for people actually to buy your product while paying people for 5 days of work while they are only working 4 days is an incompatibilities in goals, you can do it until competition comes in and shows you what true efficiencies may look like. Ideas like that of Bernie is what moved production out of the Western world (USA in this case) and to places like China (and now Vietnam and others). Trying to put a lid on this development at this point is not going to work.

Years ago on this very site I noted that a country that loses manufacturing due to its socialist policies will inevitably lose engineering and will then lose education system as well. America is about half way there, there is still engineering, but it sure lost manufacturing. Try to go down the road and find a company that can make a tool that you need to make tools that you need to make products that you want. Even if you find some old guy somewhere, making dies and casts, the prices are still not going to be anywhere near close. AI is nothing without manufacturing.

I work for myself, I have 3 companies to run, who is going to give me a 4 day work week and what would that look like? Also if I could have a 4 day work week today, I would start another company and would run out of the week days anyway. Actually I have people working for me 4 days a week, this is because we run around the clock, 24x7x52 and some shifts are less attractive to the hires, especially the weekends, so we have to compensate with flexibility, but everyone is on the clock anyway, it is up to the person to decide if he or she wants to work more hours. I am always amazed at people just coming up with broad statements like that: everyone must have a 4 day work week! What does that mean? Silly simple solutions to real world problems don't work.