That wildly overstates how far off we are. To take the most conservative example, tokamaks have very well-known scaling laws and based on those, CFS is generally expected to exceed breakeven with SPARC and get to practical power levels with ARC, over the next several years.
More like decades. The earliest time any planned fusion reactor will make net electrical output -- but not yet an economically useful amount -- is the mid 2030s, a decade from now.
Commercially relevant amounts of electrical generation is uncertain, but most plans start around 2045 and then would take decades to replace fossil fuel plants at scale.
There's a big difference between "it will be decades before we've replaced fossil plants at scale" and "we won't have net power until we invent magical new technologies that we have no clue about today."
My point is, that's a pretty positive view of fusion. They think it's too good to be true, but if it actually happens then I doubt many people will suddenly switch into thinking it's a dirty old explodey thing like fission's public image.
Part of that cost is from ITER being so huge, which is because they use obsolete superconductors. CFS is doing the same thing in a reactor a tenth as big, using newer superconductors that support stronger magnetic fields.
The size and also the complicated governance have made ITER very slow to build, which also increases expense. The JET tokamak is about the size of the reactor CFS is building, and JET was built in a year for the reactor itself, plus three years before that for the building they put it in.
>You can easily go through a couple hundred rounds in one visit to the range.
Range shooting is not what they're trying to legislate though.
Whoever killed that healthcare CEO didn't need a hundred rounds.
This legislation is insanely, horrendously bad and harmful, but "3D printed gun components are useless" isn't a solid argument against it. They're useful enough.
The real arguments, as others said, are:
1. You can achieve much more already without 3D printers
2. The legislation won't achieve its stated objective as any "blueprint detector" DRM will be trivial to circumvent on many levels (hardware, firmware, software)
3. Any semblance of that DRM being required will kill 3D printing as we know it (the text of the law is so broad that merely having a computer without the antigun spyware would be illegal if it means it can drive a 3D printer)
> Range shooting is not what they're trying to legislate though.
It's the thing gun manufacturers are selling to their customer base though. The theory was they were lobbying for this to prevent competition, but it's not good enough to actually compete with them.
> Whoever killed that healthcare CEO didn't need a hundred rounds.
Luigi Mangione didn't have a criminal record. Given his apparent political alignment, he presumably used 3D printed parts for trolling purposes since there was no actual need for him to do so. He could have bought any firearm from any of the places they're ordinarily sold.
>It's the thing gun manufacturers are selling to their customer base though. The theory was they were lobbying for this to prevent competition
Does anyone actually believe this? Is there any funds for this theory?
Seems to be too far fetched to be even worth sitting.
>Luigi Mangione didn't have a criminal record
That really isn't the point (he still doesn't have a criminal record, by the way).
The point was that the stated danger of 3D printed guns is their use by criminals for criminal purposes, not economic competition to established gun manufacturers.
> The point was that the stated danger of 3D printed guns is their use by criminals for criminal purposes, not economic competition to established gun manufacturers.
I guess the counterpoint is that it's not actually useful to criminals either, so there is no incentive for any non-fool to want laws like this and then all incentive arguments are weak because foolishness can be attributed to anyone.
One, you succeed in never being identified or apprehended. Consequently you, rather than the police, have the gun you used, and you can file off the serial number and throw it into the sea or whatever. They don't know who you are so they never come looking for the gun you no longer have and it's just one of millions that were sold to random people that year.
Two, you get caught before you do the murder. Some cop thinks you look too nervous or you get into a car accident on the way there etc. and they find the gun. Having one without a serial number at this point means you're in trouble when you otherwise wouldn't be. It's a disadvantage.
Three, they catch you in the act or figure out who you are because your face got caught on camera somewhere after you took off your mask etc. At this point it's extremely likely you're going to jail. This is even more likely if the weapon is still in your possession because then they can do forensics on it, and it not having a serial number at that point is once again even worse for you. This is apparently the one that actually happened.
Whereas the theory for it allowing you to get caught would have to be something like, they don't know who you are but they have a list of people who bought a gun (which, depending on the state, they might not even have) so they can look on it to find you. But that's like half the US population and doesn't really narrow it down at all.
There is no criminal benefit in doing it so that leaves the remaining options which are either trolling or stupidity.
If he's a suspect but not confirmed, they'd know if he purchased a real gun, and a ballistics test would confirm it matches the bullet. Conveniently "losing" it would raise suspicion too. Or if that's not why, there has to be some reason people make ghost guns in general.
It comes back the same thing, there is zero evidence that gun manufacturers are lobbying for this while Everytown is very publicly and proudly announcing that they are pushing this exact legislation.
I'm not sure that's a big strike against it yet. Kinda the whole point of engineering in academia is to work on hard things that are far from commercialization.
The fact that a product has not yet been created from a given technology does not mean the technology or the research itself is useless, or will not turn out to be useful in the long term. You can also learn a lot from research or development that does not ultimately work out.
First, Gen Alpha is in their teens, so it's kind of hard to say what is happening there or will happen.
Second, there is a growing divide between gen Z males that are skewing conservative in some ways. Their church/religious attendance is up, but overall attendance is still down.
Gen Z females that are the most liberal demographic in history.
At this point I don't see any difference between the two. Modern religions are shaped (warped, really) by the larger organizations that control them.
Sure, the concept of "spiritual/non-scientific belief" isn't a parasite in and of itself, but even if the existing organized religions ceased to hold their sway, and people treated religion as a personal thing without centralized authorities, I still don't see an end to (for example) people trying to get their religious beliefs enshrined in law. That's parasite behavior.
That's why they followed up with an actual experiment with mice, where they found that just adding the bacteria made them stronger.
Of course we won't know for sure before doing human experiments, but it'd be an odd coincidence if we saw the correlation in humans and causation in mice, but there was no causation in humans.
Someone else here pointed out that when your biggest asset is a network of thousands of satellites that all have a five-year lifespan, earnings after depreciation is unusually important.
Those are a lot of great points but I'll nitpick a couple things. While it's true that Starship has never reached orbit, they have reached orbital velocity several times. They could have gone into orbit if they'd aimed in that direction, but they didn't because it's a test rocket and they didn't want it to stay up there if anything went wrong.
And I don't think the multiple failure causes mean they aren't iterating. They're making changes with every launch. It might mean that everything's a tradeoff, and a lot of times when you fix one thing, you create a problem somewhere else. Building a fully, rapidly reusable rocket is a really difficult task.
Something you didn't mention is that even on the "successful" flights they suffered some damage on reentry. They'll have to fix that if they want rapid reuse, which is essential for the super low costs Elon estimates.
I'm not sure what you mean by "never caught a ship" but they did catch a landing first stage with their launch tower, which was a pretty fancy trick nobody had tried before.
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