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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35347 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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The others have covered most points. But here's a few more:

Modern civilization doesn't need to sustain the current status-quo eternally. Nuclear Fusion has been 5 years away for a good century, but it is reasonable to expect it to get there within the next century. Nuclear fusion is infinite energy. So, we only need to survive for 100 years. Piece of cake.

However this is not very applicable in cars

The young are increasingly anti-car, and many cities are slowly but surely, moving away from the 60s-highway-maximalist approach to living. The nature of capitalistic lobbying and collective delusion might make it difficult to uproot cars from our lives. But, it is NOT civilization ending. Car "free" cities ARE a future that is qualitatively better than what we currently have in North-America.

Car "free" cities ARE a future

If the scare quotes are intentional, then it is worth pointing out that low-car-use cities are the present, not the future. Above a metro area population of about a million, the city where most people don't drive most of the time is the default in Continental Europe and first-world Asia.

Above a metro area population of about a million, the city where most people don't drive most of the time is the default in Continental Europe and first-world Asia.

I have been to Seoul and I do not believe it is a "low-car-use" city. If you think it is I think your measuring stick is broken.

Wikipedia gives a 23% modal share for car commuting in Seoul. That is precisely what I mean by "low car use"

Not scare quotes at all. I meant to point towards exactly what you pointed out in your comment. That car-free cities are only nominally car-free. Car-free just means low-car, which is both an achievable and desirable future.

Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite

Wish I would've thought of this one first :\

Nuclear Fusion has been 5 years away for a good century, but it is reasonable to expect it to get there within the next century.

That's what they told me last century. It might just be that practical nuclear fusion isn't possible on a small enough scale to be useful. (that is, you need something as big as a star to make it useful)

Nuclear fusion hasn't been 5 years away for a good century. The traditional wording of the joke is "nuclear fusion is 20 (sometimes 30) years away and always will be". It was indeed the case that the engineers' timetable for useful fusion power coming out of the big government-funded fusion projects was 20-30 years from 1952 (when the first H-bomb was tested) to 2014-5 (when Tokamak and Helion tested their first prototypes).

As of today, there are three private-sector fusion startups (Tokamak, Helion and Commonwealth) with SMART plans to build a useful fusion power plant within 10 years. This is different, and exciting.

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