A matter of degree of course :)

I think the takeaway is that tea tree oil is not nether-compatible. TIL!

You have a point, although the “summary” is a bit lacking in detail :). The pine tree oil IIRC also has the “no razor burn” admonition even though it seems comparatively inert.

TIL. Thank you! Pine it is for us then.

Have you actually read that label on that particular soap? Can you summarize it for us? I bet you can’t. What does it make your reading comp then?

I tried. Gagged from the verbal diarrhea. The product is good but the BS they put on the bottle is insane.

Really? Me & my wife use the pine oil version regularly with no ill effects. Is the tea tree oil that much worse?

Actually, fusion made more efficiency progress than solar in that same time frame! Like, several times higher efficiency gain.

Solar and wind absolutely has the power density needed to completely replace fossil fuels for stationary (residential, commercial) and storage battery use (EVs and such).

Once you have a lot of solar and wind energy available, it’s no big deal to use thermal storage systems. Yeah they waste about 50% of energy but they also are much more durable and energy dense than any battery storage system using research-stage tech, never mind what you can actually buy.

The lasers we use for practical purposes in production environments you mention only share the name and general operating principle with those used at NIF. Calling both “lasers” is technically correct but practically absurd.

Lasers don’t directly induce fusion. They take some other “working fluid” like gold plasma and dump energy into it. That then can fuse something else that’s the actual nuclear energy source. Of course dumping a bunch of photons close to the visible spectrum (UV and IR are not far at all) will not cause anything to fuse on its own - not even if the photons had unceasingly high energies AFAIK.

It’s also worth mentioning what does it mean to be “expensive”: it’s not about numbers in a database in a bank somewhere. It’s about how much energy it takes to make all the stuff that you need for a fusion power plant.

Let’s now imagine that we’ll get to a stage when the first commercial fusion plant can be built

The design, build, and commissioning process of that plant will take about as much energy as that plant will produce through its entire lifetime. It’ll be basically sunk cost for investors just to get the design and operating process shaken down and ready for the next build. And that’s optimistic.

High tech plants like that take hundreds of thousands of man-hours of work, if not millions. While that work is going on, you’re spending resources just to feed and keep the workforce happy - a gross oversimplification, but think of how many resources it takes to run the equivalent of a large residential subdivision. That’s just to keep those people alive and happy so they can do their 8 hours of work per workday. And those people live across the planet pretty much, since many different industries will be providing raw materials, machining, design, assembly, and a host of other services.

As the technology advances and more plants are built, it’ll become profitable to operate one. Not the first one. Not the second one either.

*Happy workforce is a relative term and I’m far from claiming working people everywhere are happy with their jobs. What we should strive for, though, is for big projects to contribute to workers’ well-being everywhere in some way.

Given how inefficient it is to feed people with animal products - yeah, knee jerk downvoters got something to think about first.

I agree. Reading papers with understanding is real work, at least in disciplines I’m interested in (engineering-related mostly).

It’s not only about thinking. It’s also about access to information. A lot of science is behind paywalls. Not everyone is a student or lives close to a campus to get access to papers “for free”. I go to campus biweekly just to download IEEE papers I need. Had I had to buy those at list price, it’d have been hundreds of dollars each month. I graduated almost 2 decades ago.