Any energy source is going to be able to have a price tag and a logo slapped on it as long as energy generation requires infrastructure and capitalism is a thing. Wind, solar, and tidal are great; we desperately need more of them as part of our energy strategy. But they can also have a price tag and a logo. In fact, home solar has become quite a lucrative…well, not exactly scam, but “bad deal” in my area.

And fusion will have to be here, too, to fill the gaps that wind, solar, and tidal leave; at least for now. There’s no “forever” answer here, only some that’ll last longer than others.

“While you didn’t post the rule-breaking content, reading content that breaks the rules is also considered a violation.”

“While you didn’t post the rule-breaking content, thinking about breaking the law is also considered a violation.”

“While you didn’t post the rule-breaking content, protesting human rights violations is also considered a violation.”

“While you didn’t post the rule-breaking content, being an unapproved minority is also considered a violation.”

“While you didn’t post the rule-breaking content, not drinking enough verification cans is also considered a violation.”

They’re scared. Spez knows his neck is on the line in a more literal fashion than ever.

Cool. I can’t wait for my immunocompromised friend to die of a preventable disease that we had eradicated in the US until this year.

He doesn’t deserve “cooler.” How about the Secretary of Infection?

Yeah, that’s a good point. She’s pretty good about not falling for scams for now, but she’s not going to be this sharp forever.

My parents are generally pretty good with tech. But where I end up pulling my hair out is when I look at my mom’s notifications. She lets any app notify her, and she has lots of apps. The other day when I looked she had two different weather apps reporting the temperature as a non-dismissable notification, and neither one of them was right.

I honestly don’t know how we’re related.

The other thing is when my mom says “but you told me to use this!” I got her to switch to Chrome from Internet Explorer, a dozen years ago. Now when I want to switch her over to Firefox (not even Waterfox!) she says, “but you told me this was the one to use!” Yeah, it was, during the Obama Administration. Same story with LastPass and Bitwarden. Sometimes the best tool changes, mom.

Those are cool old buildings, I’d prefer not to see them destroyed…

Yeah, having grown up in a very deep-red area of a deep-red state, and the moving to a blue dot in that state, I have seen this in both majority and minority positions: and where it’s the minority, I will say that the conservatives are much quieter about needing to “win.” Maybe they’re quietly seething, but they aren’t shouting as often.

But there’s something even more insidious that’s cropped up more recently, which wasn’t there when I was a kid: not only do “they” have to win, but someone else has to lose. It went from the assertion that the world was a zero-sum game to the almost-gleeful insistence that it be one. In your youth sports example, you can see it in the fact that they’re still shouting at the refs even when their team is winning handily. “It’s not just our right to win, but they have to lose and be stomped into the dirt.” Basically, the bullies got older, were told that they were actually being bullied, and became MAGAs.

Almost all of the “classical” Republicans have already resigned. The best case scenario for the GOP at this point would be enough infighting due to purity tests that everyone who’s left rips each other apart.

It will have to get really bad before people actually say it out loud. There are probably already a significant number of people who are thinking it, but to actually admit they were wrong or shortsighted?

The American conservative machine is built on always doubling down, never admitting you’re wrong, never conceding, and never expressing doubts. Admitting you’re wrong is “losing.” They might vote in accordance with the belief that they were wrong (though more likely they’ll just stay home), but they won’t say it out loud.

cheaper,

Once commercial fusion comes out, it’s likely to be about half the cost of wind.

[more] reliable

There’s absolutely no way to know how reliable human-generated fusion is, but it powers every star in the sky for billions of years, so it could probably last for a few decades here on Earth without much trouble.

and safer alternatives

Nuclear fusion, when begun, creates water as its byproduct. This water is, admittedly, very slightly radioactive; if you drank the “nuclear waste” that is produced by a fusion plant as your only source of water, it would increase your radiation exposure the same as if you flew from New York to Los Angeles and back once per year. Now, that’s not nothing, but it is almost nothing.

As for large-scale disasters from nuclear fusion, that’s almost impossible—and you can see why by the fact that this very article is news. With a nuclear fission reaction, the difficulty is in containment; get the right things in the right place, and the reaction happens automatically. There are natural nuclear fission reactors in the world, caves where radioactive materials have formed in an arrangement that causes a nuclear reaction. But in order for nuclear fusion to happen on its own, you need, quite literally, a stellar mass. So if something goes wrong in a fusion power plant, where we’re manufacturing the conditions that make fusion possible at great energy cost and effort, the reaction just stops unless there’s a literal sun’s worth of hydrogen hanging around. It cannot go critical, it cannot explode, it cannot break containment; it can only end. It’s hard to sustain a fusion reaction, and that’s why stories like this are news: because it’s a major breakthrough anytime we get closer to a reaction where we can feed enough power that it generates back into the machines that keep it running. Once the power to those machines is cut, a fusion reaction cannot continue.