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.

The moon, like all solid bodies, has a surface rich in oxides.

Honestly, this to me isn't as interesting with respect to the moon as it is with respect to Venus. Venus is very hydrogen deficient. If you could dramatically up its hydrogen capture rate (e.g. magnetic lensing) and in a way that would greatly exceed the loss rate (normally we think of the solar wind as a loss mechanism), it would have a wide range of effects that would make it more earthlike. In particular, you'd get the Bosch reaction, where H2 and CO2 react to form water and graphite. Venus's surface is active (both volcanism, and while it has no subduction, it has microplates that jostle up against each other), so over geological timescales, surface carbon will be sequestered. So you're lowering the pressure, lowering the temperature, raising the water, and lowering the acidity. Also, if the water content in the crust rises over geological timescales, it becomes more ductile, so potentially - after immense timescales - you might *possibly* start/restart plate tectonics

None of this would be at all on human timescales, but it's interesting to ponder whether Venus's conversion to a hellscape could be slowly reersed.

I've never seen a hint of "kiddy porn" on Bluesky, while on X, Musk *personally reinstated* the account of a major user who shared child pornography.

The exact same situation applies to a Mastodon server. They can't ignore court orders either. If you get a court order against Mastodon.social, you've blocked half of the Fediverse's users right there. Hit the other major servers and you've hit nearly all of the rest.

At least on Bluesky you can *actually* migrate between servers (e.g. including your content), instead of just migrating your metadata.

Well, isn't that just the third squeeze of the mango...

I'd disagree.

(That said, AI Overview is a minuscule pure-RAG summarization model and is kind of hard to compare to normal LLMs)

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.

1) The above is the definition of the 14 core characteristics of fascism, from "Ur-Fascism" by Umberto Eco, who grew up in Fascist Italy, and is an influential essay on the characteristics of fascist thought (which well predates the new movement).

2) Fascism is not a synonym of Naziism. The Nazis were the the first fascist movement that had the word "socialist" in their name. Several minor ones (like the British Nazi Party) later cribbed it from them, but for example the Italian Fascist movement didn't use it at all when they came to power, the Spanish described their movement (accurately) as syndicalist, etc. In general, Fascist movements were a mix of syndicalism and corporatism, sometimes with a window dressing of socialism to smooth over alliances with powerful oligarchs.

3) The background on the name: Fascism is, as noted by Eco, an overwhelmingly middle class movement, but it likes to dress itself up in the trappings of the working class (the working class, by contrast, has historically been more attracted to socialism, which the middle class sees as a threat to its status). Fascist imagery commonly uses and glorifies the image of "the working man", with hyper-masculinization and motifs promoting the concepts of glory and sacrifice, with the leader presented as the voice of the working man.

But as for Naziism in specific: The Nazi party had its roots as the German Workers Party, which presented itself as a right-wing alternative to the Communist Party (KPD). Hitler joined and soon took control of the party, and in 1920 rebranded it as the "National Socialist German Workers' Party" (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei / NSDAP). The party sought, in the name, to tap into the working class (the country was in a massive economic crisis with large numbers of unemployed people). At the same time, it sought to set itself apart from "socialist parties", such as the Social Democratic Party (SPD), by stressing nationalism. Other parties of the 1930s included the Center Party (Zentrum), aka the Catholics (also their offshoot, the Bavarian People's Party (BVP)); the German National People's Party (DNVP), aka the monarchists (probably the closest party to the Nazis, philosophically); German People's Party (DVP), sort of a middle class-pro business party, sort of your "Never-Trump Republicans" or "Conservadems" (also similar: the German Economic Party (Wirtschaftspartei)); and the German Democratic Party (DDP), aka non-communist pro-democracy leftists.

In the early days of the party - late teens to the early 1920s - the party had a mix of left and right stances. It was from the start rabidly nationalist, anti-immigrant, anti-Jewish, and in general met all of Eco's characteristics of fascism - but it also had some genuinely socialist-leaning members like Gregor Strasser and his brother Otto, who advocated for nationalization of industry and land reform. However, after the failed Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler became increasingly dominant. Hitler increasingly marginalized the socialist wing in favour of powerful corporate alliances, and then outright eliminated them in the Night of the Long Knives in 1934.

The party still retained a number of superficially socialist policies, but, as examples:

x - They created the German Labor Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront)... but after abolishing all independent unions. This allowed them to keep the appearance of supporting workers rights, while bringing all workers under their control and eliminating their actual ability to negotiate or strike.
x - They created affordable state-sponsored wellness camps and facilities and the like, with an emphasis on the outdoors, esp. to help people detox, etc, but if you're trying to avoid comparisons when you have RFK planning basically the same thing, that's not helping
x - They set a number of price controls and invoked war production acts, but again, that's not really helping the case vs. the current US administration's trade policy either
x - They talked about improving healthcare, housing, land reform, etc, but actually did very little in these regards. Again, not helping.

But overall, they much more strongly aligned with German oligarchs. Before Hitler gained power he started heavily meeting with industrialists. In a meeting in February 1933 he got most of them to "bend the knee" and provide financial support. Oligarchs were generally wary of the Nazis, but more afraid of the communists and socialists. One of Hitler's first acts in power was, as mentioned, to suppress all of the unions, which further cemented his alliance with the oligarchs. The legal code was sculpted into one of "guided capitalism" (what one might today call "Putinism"), where oligarchs were allowed to (and assisted in) amassing wealth, so long as they bent the knee to Nazi goals when it was demanded of them. Cartelization was encouraged, rather than discouraged. Large industrialists benefited massively under the Nazis, receiving large orders, suppression of strikes, access to slave labour (late regime), protection from nationalization, etc. Krupp expanded dramatically. IG Farben expanded dramatically. Major banks expanded dramatically. German automakers expanded dramatically. It was high times for German industrialists, and again, all they had to do was bend the knee. The Quandt family for example, which owns most of BMW today, owes its fortune to largesse from the Nazis.

But again, to reiterate, Naziism was a particular variant of fascism (perhaps notable for its inclusion of an intensely virulent Jewish conspiracy - other fascist movements were hardly pro-Jewish, but most did not include this notion of Jews as a "society-destroying woke mind virus")

See, I mean, at least admit what you are so that we can have an actual conversation.

Fascism isn't "a name to call people"; it's an actual political philosophy. And one can ascribe to it or be opposed to it, but we need to be honest about what said philosophy actually is.

** high-quality tweeNing