While neat, this is not self-sustaining — it’s taking more energy to power it than you’re getting out of it. (You can build a fusion device on your garage if you’re so inclined, though obviously this is much neater than that!)

One viewpoint is that we’ll never get clean energy from these devices, not because they won’t work, but because you get a lot of neutrons out of these devices. And what do we do with neutrons? We either bash them into lead and heat stuff up (boring and not a lot of energy), or we use them to breed fissile material, which is a lot more energetically favorable. So basically, the economically sound thing to do is to use your fusion reactor to power your relatively conventional fission reactor. Which is still way better than fossil fuels IMHO, so that’s something.

That’s the American experience.

That may be your American experience, but it’s not everyone’s. We are a huge country, and while there’s of course truth behind the stereotypes, the glib “'Murica dumb” sentiment doesn’t exactly capture everyone’s experience.

My city (San Francisco) has been continuously improving bike infrastructure and is actively closing streets off to cars, we have a diverse food culture, we don’t allow gun stores in the city, and our de facto recreational drug is weed, not coke (though yes, the city does have a fentanyl problem). And I use metric units in lab for my California-based employer.

To address OP’s question, I’ll add a +1 to all the Ken Burns recommendations. Not an exhaustive history, but it’s a great start!

My home town is in bald eagles’ historic habitat, but there were never any growing up. In the past decade or so, they’ve started to reclaim it, which is pretty cool.

Yeah, we’re destroying the planet, but we are doing some things right. And this sort of good stuff only happens because we fight for it.

“Chain migration” is how many people — myself included — get jobs.

I went to a very good school, and while I like to think the quality of education is what makes a school “good,” let’s be honest — the value is largely in your connections. Friend lands a good job, recommends you when there’s an opening, and bam, you’re already at the top of the pile of the CVs (better yet, they’re the hiring manager).

Friends from school — peers and mentors alike — are a great place to start, if you can. Ask to grab a coffee and chat about their career, and be clear that you’re in the market. Most people are happy to chat (at the very least, it’s flattering).

It’s the way the world works…

My hunch is that this is not restricted to TikTok…

I particularly like the truck/engine correction.

play(1)? I’m getting cat $FILE > /dev/snd vibes…

awk(1)ward

FTFY

Baking is chemistry, cooking is jazz.

I’m curious how the battery percentage went up

Physicists hate this one weird trick…

Is that true though? As in, is it really that dangerous? It seems that you’ll dissipate power equal to the inefficiency times the nominal charging power, so something like 5V x 2A x inefficiency (inefficiency being 1-efficiency), which will probably be of order a watt.

I can use my car battery to charge itself without any issues — I just plug the red terminal to itself, and same with the black, which is to say, a battery is always connected in a way that “charges itself.”

I think the key is that the battery probably isn’t really playing a big role in OOP’s setup — electricity doesn’t “go through the battery,” it just goes from the charging input to the power output circuits, with the additional power (due to inefficiency) being provided by the battery.

I’m not sure though — the power output and the charging input are both regulated and (almost certainly) current limited. So I think (not positive…) that you’re basically dissipating your power in the inefficiency the charging and output circuits, with this power coming from the battery.

The inefficiency should (I think…) just be the round-trip inefficiency of the charging/discharging of your power bank — this should be way, way less than the short-circuit power dissipation.

The simplest toy model is to take a battery and try to charge itself. So you put jumpers on the + terminal and you connect those to the + terminal, and same for - (charging is + to +, NOT + to -). But this is silly because you’ve just attached a loop of wire to your terminals, which is equivalent to doing nothing. With charging circuits in between things get much more complicated, but I’m not sure if it goes full catastrophic short…

For those wondering about the energy, not just the power:

When fully charged, the upper reservoir can store enough energy to power the plant at full capacity for 10.8 hours, equivalent to nearly 40 GWh.

For 75kg (roughly average South Korean male weight) and 7" step height (standard in the US I think, not sure about Korea), this is about 0.13kJ/step.

By coincidence, the human metabolic efficiency is (roughly) the same as the conversion between kJ and food (kilo)calories, meaning this would be (very roughly) 0.1 calories/step.

Not much, given a single French fry is maybe 5-10 calories. But it’s better than nothing!

good enough simulations that you can’t tell the difference.

This requires us having actual conversations with those dead people to compare against, which we obviously can’t do.

There is simply not enough information to train a model on of a dead person to create a comprehensive model of how they would respond in arbitrary conversations. You may be able to train with some depth in their field of expertise, but the whole point is to talk about things which they have no experience with, or at least, things which weren’t known then.

So sure, maybe we get a model that makes you think you’re talking to them, but that’s no different than just having a dream or an acid trip where you’re chatting with Einstein.

The USA is huge, and individual states are huge. San Francisco and Los Angeles are both in California, but you’re not going to do a day trip from one to the other.

Our beer is great! Probably stay away from the big brands (unless Sierra Nevada is considered a big brand — they’re still great IMHO). Try to find something from a local brewery — it can be hit or miss, but more fun than finding one you like and sticking to it.

We have a lot of social services that aren’t necessarily through the federal government. Food banks come to mind — some are “proof of assistance required,” others are open to anyone who feels they need the service. There is not afaik a single interface for navigating these services though, so it can be a real pain, from what I’ve heard. But services often do exist, if you have the time to track them down.

Libraries! Free wifi is common.

If you don’t like it here, try a different part of the country. Rural town in the south is completely different than a “blue city.”

Bureau of Land Management.

It’s government-owned land but it’s generally free to use for camping. The USA is very big.

Isn’t universally funny.

My city has a fleet of vintage streetcars that it runs on standard routes (i.e., it’s not just a tourist novelty — and it’s the same cost as bus and other light rail).

It’s always a joy to ride those and read the history of the individual streetcar — they all wear fun livery.

Our home averaged 7.5kWh/day in December (we did not travel and we’re home with family the entire time); this is about 10x less daily energy than the battery capacity of a modern EV.

Now, we have gas heating and stove/oven, so that adds a huge amount of load — but my numbers above are for 24hr energy, and batteries wouldn’t need to supply that whole time.

Of course, this doesn’t address cost, and it doesn’t address natural resources, like you mentioned. But that actual required amount of energy per capita can certainly be achieved with current battery technology.