Technology

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2009-08-30

Journalist reads "limit" and clickbaits it, typical

Fusion is possible. It just needs 20 years of research first.

articles such as this one usually are optimized for their audience, you just aren't the audience. that's ok. I'm rarely the audience either :) a quick search should give you what you're looking for https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adz3040

Well. At least it will guarantee the USA's eventual fall from power.

Can you imagine the tech bros and anti-intectuals groveling to rejoin the scientific community?

Unfortunately science is not a morality structure.

Stay positive buddy.stay positive buddy, if oil become obsolete the struggle of the us will end. Their trouble is price of oil. They need to inject oil in the system to reduce price and stay competitive with solar, etc. And they have to attack other country to maintain the system. It stay viable for long they will have to go renewables.

Just a few years ago US labs were the first to generate more power than they put into a fusion reactor, it was one of the most important breakthroughs to date in fusion.

Even under the shitheap Trump, the US is continuing to research into fusion and building stellarators such as Infinity 1 in Tennessee.

Europe likewise is leading breakthroughs such as with Wendelstein 7-X stellarator in Germany lasting for 43 seconds. This is being improved with the new Proxima Alpha stellarator being built.

China’s EAST reactor had a breakthrough when they achieved 1,000 seconds last year. While Europes recent ITER tokamak should be achieving its first plasma in the coming years.

Fusion is a global effort, and scientists are benefiting from the works being put in elsewhere. Stellarators and Tokamak are both breaking new grounds each year, and each has their own pros and cons.

Don’t fall for any propaganda trying to claim anyone is “winning”.

I wouldn't blame AI, I would say that overall the US is becoming more and more anti-science overall. Just look how people are against vaccines or flat-earthers. Even academics are leaving US because of funding cuts by the current administration. Schools are in bad shapes...

Nothing they've done in recent years is ground breaking.

Room temperature superconductors? Fake.

Self-driving bus using painted lanes for navigation? We have trains and trams for that.

Thorium reactor? Germany had one in the 80s, shut it down because it was expensive, there's around 20 different projects happening in Europe and North America to make it more efficient.

The fusion reactor from the article? They maybe potentially hypothetically achieved one breakthrough of the dozens still needed to make fusion viable.

Etc., etc.

The overwhelming majority of their so called breakthroughs are just media fluff pieces though. Their sources are more and more often AI generated studies and their supposed advancements aren‘t going anywhere a lot of the time. By the time people start asking questions and want to know more details they have already prepared another story for you to be impressed by. It‘s shock and awe.

At leas we won't have to repect their patent...

I'm no China expert but I lived In South China for a while between 2016 and 2024. The Chinese people I know are mostly hardworking, very motivated to succeed, and well capitalized. In their major cities you might be surprised to learn normal guys who earn half what you do are living a higher quality of life than you are, in terms of access to technology.

Their government is no doubt using uncouth methods to give their country unfair advantages. They don't play well with others.

But holy shit there is one thing this Chinese government is doing well: effectively driving growth with targeted investments in the economy. They have been focused on that one mission consistently for a long time.

While democracies fuck around trying to decide if they should tax themselves to build public transportation, China installs 10 new ultrafast subway lines in just a few years in every big city. Covers the country in a network of high-speed rail. Drives the price of shipping goods around the country to almost nothing.

A kind of monoparty like China has is very likely a net negative when we look at world history, but for moments of time, if it's the right one, amazing things can happen.