Fusion

"To talk about energy and economy is a tautology: every economic activity is fundamentally nothing but a conversion of one kind of energy to another, and monies are just a convenient(and often unrepresentative) proxy for valuing the energy flows. Frederick Soddy, a Nobel physicist approaching the discipline for this perspective, argued that 'the flow of energy should be the primary concern of economics.'" – Ivan Illich, Energy and Equity, 1973

The latest version of finance developed over the last 18 years, let's call it Finance 6.0, where reality is largely secondary to hype, is represented by a number of iconic grifts - bitcoin, Elon, and most recently fusion - to name a few. While the grift is strong with AI and it may be the catalyst that tumbles the whole thing, I hesitate to add it to the list only because what's marketed as AI is simply the latest generation of compute.

Compute needs to be taken seriously, though as with all technology, we in the 21st century still have no politics to address the issues technology creates.

The FT has a fine piece of journalism on the fusion grift, well worth reading.

"In 2022, the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a leading nuclear weapons research and development facility in the US, made a breakthrough when it achieved so-called net energy gain by producing more fusion energy than the laser energy delivered to its 2mm-diameter fuel target."

"While the experiment achieved a scientific milestone, the electricity required to operate 192 lasers was not accounted for in the headline results, nor were the wider costs of building and operating the facility.

"The experiment produced 3.15MJ of fusion energy, while the laser system consumed about 422MJ of electricity — more than 100 times the fusion energy produced."

That's state of the art fusion.

And absolutely priceless,

"A senior fusion executive who does not wish to be named says it is difficult to estimate costs for a technology that has never operated commercially. Some price pledges amount to companies 'just making things up', the executive says, in order to attract enough investment to continue their research — “the most Silicon Valley-type bullshit you could possibly do”.

More energy is not by any means necessarily better. That energy is neither created or destroyed is one of the great physical laws of conservation. Energy moves mass around, reshaping physical reality.

We are now two centuries, it should be added only two centuries, into industrialism. During this time, we unleashed 10s of million years of stored ancient sunlight by burning coal, oil, and natural gas. This energy, let's use a Star Trek term, as this seems to be the basic science education of Techbrodumb, "terraformed" the planet's previously established ecologies.

We have at best dealt inconsequentially and at worst completely ignored the resulting changes to the planet's ecologies this energy release produced, great changes to the very ecologies that created us. Promoting the generation of ever more energy to and far worse automating systems that are already massively energy and resource wasteful as some sort of "advancement" isn't even stupid.