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.

Batteries are smart and if you can read out the information contained in, you can see how much wear there is.

You get stats like how many cycles they've undergone, when they were made, their design capacity, their current capacity, and a few more items.

It's the same kind of information you need to figure out how good the battery is, just like how SSDs keep track of enough information to figure out their health as well.

Liquid damage is a lot harder since that requires taking stuff apart. Apple's liquid indicators change color when they're triggered, for example. And most liquid damage indicators are obviously placed where they may encounter liquid, which is usually not in a convenient place to see them.

I don't know about you, but Intel SGX is deprecated/no longer exists. It only exists in Generation 8-12 CPUs, but Generation 11 and 12 CPUs received a microcode update that disabled it because of the problems it had.

And for anyone wondering, no, it was not AMD compatible. AMD has their own protection system based on ARM TrustZone technology. (And it has nothing to do with Intel ME or the AMD equivalent).

SGX was used by the UHD Blu-Ray folks, so it also means you cannot play discs on any PC now, making UHD Blu-Ray drives somewhat obsolete. (Now, you can RIP the discs just fine as they don't need anything special.).

The reason SGX was removed was due to a massive security flaw in it that let it leak out the secrets, and Intel deemed it unfixable and phased it out by deprecating it for Gen 11 and 12 before removing it.

Most businesses can't operate if the registers are down either, cashless or not.

Most inventory systems are computerized, and registers are linked with the inventory system so additional can be ordered. At the same time, the registers track the payment method so it can keep tabs on how much cash is in the register.

Thus, if the backend server goes down, the register goes down, and cash may not be accepted.

Now, a small business might be able to go back to pen and paper recording transactions, but that can be too hard - I've seen people break out the calculator just to calculate change, so basic math skills are lacking to the point I don't think many could work without a calculator.

My latest vaccine shots had the 6G upgrade, to take advantage of the higher-speed web access when the networks upgrade, but if they're selling those frequencies to high-power carriers, then I won't be able to walk into any area that handles AT&T or Verizon. :P

Seriously, this will totally wreck the 6G/WiFi6 specification, utterly ruin the planned 7G/WiFi7 update, and cause no end of problems to those already using WiFi6 equipment - basically, people with working gear may well find their hardware simply no longer operates, which is really NOT what no vendor or customer wants to hear. Vendors with existing gear will need to do a recall, which won't be popular, and the replacement products simply aren't going to do even a fraction as well as the customers were promised - which, again, won't go down well. And it won't be the politicians who get the blame, despite it being the politicians who are at fault.

The tax was probably going to be difficult to enforce. If Trump is going to take that as a win than it was a good sacrifice to make. Once he has his thing to brag about he will concede more.

That is probably the calculus behind it. You have to remember the G7 agreed to a minimum income tax which includes a DST, just Canada and France implemented it early.

This was a huge thorn in Biden's side, and Biden himself was trying to get it rescinded. No doubt in another timeline, Kamala Harris would be challenging it because it could potentially violate the USMCA/CUSMA agreement.

Trump wants "wins". So this counts - the Trump administration has said they are resuming trade talks. Plus, Trump needs a win soon - his "we have dozens of trade deals in July" is coming up. So far, all his trade deals have been nothing more than status quo or worse for the US, so now is the time to get Trump his "win" of screwing over the US.

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.

Diminished maybe, but not all that much.

I think we can reasonably assume that if there's a huge blackout, it won't last forever. A lot of smart people will work hard on getting things up and running again. A few years ago in the USA it lasted for a bit longer, what was it, a week or two? Recently in Spain it lasted a few days. But all those power stations and power grid operators don't just shrug and go home. So getting through those days is probably all it takes for any reasonably realistic scenario.

And you can build things up piecewise. I've got my solar now. The next thing will be a battery. Once I have that, I can think about an electric car.

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.

It won't be long for lawyers to get in on the game - that because you were driving a vehicle with a tall hood, you knew it was going to cause more damage and thus you should pay more damages to the person you hit.

Get that going a few times and the insurance industry will adjust rates appropriately so people who drive big vehicles now have to pay for significantly more liability insurance because their vehicles are more likely to cause more damage to people.

Shouldn't take more than a few years for it to be sorted out - a few legal cases by ambulance chasers, and a few changes to insurance policies and now there's a market push for smaller vehicles again.

And most of the push to larger vehicles isn't CAFE or whatever. It's car companies - big vehicles are simply more profitable. They could sell you an econobox for $15,000, but they'd really rather you buy the F950 for $150,000 instead. That monster truck probably makes about 4 econoboxes worth of profit. I did NOT say make 4 times as much profit as the econobox. I said 4 econoboxes worth of profit. Probably 20 times the profit of the econobox.

TACO Tuesday is Canada Day this year, actually.

You also often do it as you're older and wiser and know that sometimes, the problem will solve itself as well.

A tough problem at work? Putting it aside and suddenly the next day it's no longer a problem because it's been made moot.

It helps avoid a lot of wasted effort. Experience will help tell you which problems you need to tackle immediately, which ones you need to put aside for the "aha" moment, and which ones you need to put aside because it'll disappear in a week's time.