3 ms·

Because money, in the end, is just a proxy for labor, energy, land and raw materials. One can print money, but cannot print factors of production

rhn_mk1 5y ago
Sure, but then the poster said that we can't allocate labor to this specific goal without taking it away from that specific goal. Why would that be true? Energy supply takes a minuscule fraction of our total labor, and nothing stops us from supporting fusion without unsupporting solar. Or am I missing something?
- hallway_monitor 5y ago
  The argument is that it would be far more effective to take all of the allegedly wasted fusion research money and spend it immediately on wind and solar. No one knows the future but with the way things have gone so far, fusion in its current form looks like a giant waste of time and money.
  - rhn_mk1 5y ago
    Yeah, I'm not really seeing the justification for that argument, especially not when expressed as a dichotomy.
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      Have you really never had to choose between spending money on this or on that? Few lack that experience.
      - rhn_mk1 5y ago
        Why don't we choose between spending money on coal/war/farm subsidies/health care or fusion? There are more than two options.
      - stormbrew 5y ago
        The amount of money spent on fusion research sounds large but it's really not that much in the grand scheme of things. And most of it is really being spent on efforts to improve things that have widespread application outside fusion, like material sciences and superconducting. It's really likely that a lot of major advancements will come of this research, in line with the space race advancing technology at an accelerated pace for a while. At least fusion has, from an optimistic perspective, an inherently worthwhile goal besides climbing an absurdly tall virtual mountain to go with it. Anyways, at the scale of international project budgets, "killing fusion to increase money spent on other green projects" is, at this point, like not buying a daily coffee so you can afford a car. Even pessimistic estimates of ITER's cost are still under $100B for a 5 decade long project. Or, put another way, less than $2 billion dollars a year. There are highway interchanges that have cost that much. And the EU and the US alone of ITER's contributors have a combined GDP of $35 trillion.

rhn_mk1 5y ago

Sure, but then the poster said that we can't allocate labor to this specific goal without taking it away from that specific goal. Why would that be true? Energy supply takes a minuscule fraction of our total labor, and nothing stops us from supporting fusion without unsupporting solar. Or am I missing something?

hallway_monitor 5y ago
The argument is that it would be far more effective to take all of the allegedly wasted fusion research money and spend it immediately on wind and solar. No one knows the future but with the way things have gone so far, fusion in its current form looks like a giant waste of time and money.
- rhn_mk1 5y ago
  Yeah, I'm not really seeing the justification for that argument, especially not when expressed as a dichotomy.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Have you really never had to choose between spending money on this or on that? Few lack that experience.
    - rhn_mk1 5y ago
      Why don't we choose between spending money on coal/war/farm subsidies/health care or fusion? There are more than two options.
    - stormbrew 5y ago
      The amount of money spent on fusion research sounds large but it's really not that much in the grand scheme of things. And most of it is really being spent on efforts to improve things that have widespread application outside fusion, like material sciences and superconducting. It's really likely that a lot of major advancements will come of this research, in line with the space race advancing technology at an accelerated pace for a while. At least fusion has, from an optimistic perspective, an inherently worthwhile goal besides climbing an absurdly tall virtual mountain to go with it. Anyways, at the scale of international project budgets, "killing fusion to increase money spent on other green projects" is, at this point, like not buying a daily coffee so you can afford a car. Even pessimistic estimates of ITER's cost are still under $100B for a 5 decade long project. Or, put another way, less than $2 billion dollars a year. There are highway interchanges that have cost that much. And the EU and the US alone of ITER's contributors have a combined GDP of $35 trillion.