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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 26th, 2023

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  • The idea is to have water or molten salt cool the walls of the torus from outside, and those drive ordinary turbines like any other generator. The main issue is that particles fly out of the confined plasma donut and degrade the walls, whose dust flys into the plasma and reduces the fusion efficiency. They’re focusing on the hard part - dealing with the health of plasma sustainment and the durability of the confinement walls over time. Hot thing that stays hot can boil water or salt to drive regular turbines, that’s not the main engineering challenge. I get your frustration where it feels from news coverage that they’re not focusing on the right stuff, but what you’ll likely eventually see is that the time between “we figured out how to durably confine a healthy plasma” will quickly turn into “we have a huge energy output” much like inventors puttered around with flight for hundreds of years until a sustained powered flight design, however crappy, finally worked. From that point, it was only 15 years until the first transatlantic flight.





  • So you want to tax all companies a percent of their stock ownership every year? Good luck with that.

    You’re falling intro a trollhill. The point is the ultra-wealthy pay very smart people to work out loopholes. If some internet retard can run around your ideas and keep you busy, a team of full time financial experts will have a field day. This is not an easy problem to solve. Pretending like it is leads to support for crappy subpar legislation that doesn’t work.













  • I am for it only because it helps avoid politicization of the armed forces. When the military self-selects recruits, you risk the organization biasing towards people with a particular worldview. It intrinsicially also leads to a military comprised of people who love the idea of being a “military person”.

    It’s much more reassuring knowing your armed forces, the people with the big guns, are your neighbors, rather than strangers with a particular ideology or biased loyalties.