Over the last decades I have lost count of the number of startups that funded with the intent to bring fusion reactors to commercial reality. Yet they all end up like this. Who funds these things?

I personally have participated in VC funded startup and met with dozens if not hundreds of funding organizations large and small. VCs, institutions, investment funds, investment bankers, corporate and you name it. They vary in their orientation and approach and technical acumen a lot but they all do due diligence. More than once I have been interviewed by highly credentialed academics on the tech I am asking funding for because if the investor is interested and don't understand, they hire that expertise. At the teeniest tiniest inconsistency or weakness they discover it gets reported and the money backs out. "Call us later when you get to break even"

So the track record here on fusion technology is pretty much 0% for quite a while. The technical theories have to be quackery. I don't know what they are in individual cases but WTF the money flows into them nonstop. Yes I get it. If it "works" then the potential gain is staggering. But where do they get mainstream physicists to sign off on this or do they just skip that part or maybe just not care? Or are the quacks just that good at selling their novel new idea in high-energy physics that somehow nobody else has realized until now? Any insights on this welcome. Been wondering about this for a while.

All these posts and so far nobody is blaming woke.

For many years I have heard about the prevailing theory about how the Earth's oceans accumulated due to the impact of water-heavy comets. What I never understood was why comets would have so much water in them where the material that made up the Earth did not.

Can someone explain how the theory covers this?

And a lot of them think that Trump is doing a great job. A savior, actually. MAGA.

Then there are people who stayed home and didn't bother to vote. Some were MAGA types as well but many many more were people just too busy too tired or too complacent to vote. Or stupidly thought that even if Trump was back in office again sensible people would contain him.

So there you have it. Minority rule by assholes.

So I looked at their video clip of what they consider "harmful" to the public snowflake.

Personally, I thought the graphics were so crappy I couldn't even figure out what was going on. The avatars, such as they are, are barely recognizable as human and in fact aren't in many cases. Pixelated blobs moving around.

Back in the day they worked in suggestive themes and dirty jokes into Bugs Bunny cartoons. This is nothing compared to that, and that was back in the 50s and 60s.

This is no more than an effort to generate clickbait.

Uh, no. The Texas State Lottery itself is the biggest theft in history from the people of Texas.

Same can be said for any State Lottery. People in general are very bad at understanding a statistical models and even worse at making good risk/benefit calculations. So the rubes are milked and this is legal because a few of them win and the rest dream of being one of the few. Also there is maybe a fig leaf "helping public education" message makes it seem somehow virtuous.

It amounts to extra taxation on the poor, because rich people don't play state lotteries much.

Of course the response to this from the conservative/MAGA crowd will be that it is the EPA's fault and it should be de-funded and eliminated. After all if the EPA didn't report this stuff we would never have heard about it and it wouldn't have been a problem.

Nice little pose there. Implying that it is all fake news and stuff. It isn't as if this is hard.

List of dozens of offices to close.

If you are inclined to disbelieve an article from the "liberal" media, it links to DOGEs OWN LIST of all government offices it is aiming to close. I haven't read through it all to see if SSA is still on it, but I'm sure you can do that for yourself since you are so concerned about accuracy of reporting. And if SSA isn't there now you will be no doubt delighted to pretend that it never was.

Trump is not that hard to understand.

There are only a few things he really cares about, but most prominent among those when he "decides" what action to take is how it will play out in the media for the next news cycle. That's the way it has been with him for over 8 years now but if you accept that you understand the mechanism by which he takes action.

Right now, he thinks slamming down tariffs left and right makes him look "strong" and "decisive." Not like those wimpy ass liberals who try to use diplomacy for things. His PR organ Fox News is crowing about all the nations obsequiously lining up to negotiate (i.e. sue for terms of surrender). The rubes are buying it so he will keep doing it. Economic expertise, much less sound policy, has nothing to do with it and never has.

Just a short while ago the Trump team was confidently forcing a plan for SSA office closures. They had a list and they published it. Guess what it did NOT play well in the media. Trump was getting trashed and he couldn't blame it all on Musk. None of them have enough education to know what the "third rail of American politics is." Then guess what. They are now pretending they never said they were going to close offices. That was just a figment of your imagination and you do not question the Ministry of Truth.

So it will be the same with the tariff project. It will play out that way. Right now they are trying to spin the chaos in the equities markets as just a necessary but temporary thing, then we will all get rich. The rubes are buying it for now, but when the news cycle sours on them and they lose control of the media narrative the tariffs will melt away like the spring snow. They will claim the outcome was always what they intended -- to show the world who is boss. They will pretend they will got what we wanted. The idiots in red hats will buy it.

It will be completely lost on them what the real consequences are. They will just blame it on Biden if they are forced to notice.

The cultists think he is doing a great job everything they ever wanted and he was brought to us by Jesus.

But it is not a cult. According to them, anyway. So stop calling it that.

Good for him. It seems that a) objectivity, b) basic utility, and c) lack of the drive to monetize has some value after all.

Dairy companies pay huge amounts to pasteurize milk because that fits their business model. They save more money than they spend on it. You can't handle raw milk intended for human consumption the way you do with industrially processed milke.

Humans have been drinking milk from farm animals for 10,000 years or more. They weren't dying in droves over it or they would have stopped.

It was only when factory farming practices became sufficiently widespread that things got bad enough that governments had to step in and mandate pasteurization.

If you go back in time on the web sites that promote raw milk they have been writing about this for a decade or more. Also Mercola.

Although I started drinking raw milk (reliable source) and seemed to get some benefit from it, I never bought into all the new-agey "here's the study that shows" type of hype that the fan base cultivates. It is sort of interesting to see this go mainstream.

My team has adopted Cursor (VScode fork) as the IDE of choice. (It isn't mandated but everyone likes it and we pay for a business account).

For quite a while you can do inline AI code editing and chat, and they have user-level and project-level rulebooks for you to set up and the AI to use. By default the LLM used is Claude, but you can select many others including OpenAI.

So I don't see why this is big news. And who uses Xcode anymore?

AI models can, however, hallucinate. I'm dealing with a lot of that now at work, albeit on LLMs not what Tesla is doing.