Re: OT: Chinese tokamak

On 22/09/2024 1:38 am, john larkin wrote:

On Sat, 21 Sep 2024 09:03:45 -0400, legg <legg@nospam.magma.ca> wrote:
 

On Thu, 19 Sep 2024 07:41:35 -0700, john larkin <JL@gct.com> wrote:
>

On Thu, 19 Sep 2024 09:49:30 GMT, Jan Panteltje <alien@comet.invalid>
wrote:
>

The US led on nuclear fusion for decades.
Now China is in position to win the race:
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/19/climate/nuclear-fusion-clean-energy-china-us/index.html
>
China's EAST tokamak in Hefei held plasma stable at 70 million degrees Celsius
- five times hotter than the core of the sun - for more than 17 minutes,
a world record and an objectively astonishing breakthrough.

>
Sounds expensive and useless, like the Chinese moon landings.
>
Feed the kids first.

>
Pot and kettle.

 Yes, they need pots and kettles and stuff to cook in them.
 I was just reading about lots of people in Cuba scrounging through
garbage dumps looking for something to eat. Cuba used to be the
richest place in the Carribean, before Castro liberated it.

It made a lot of money out of growing sugar-cane, before the price of sugar crashed. Under Batista the rich were very rich and the poor were remarkably poor.
Once Castro took over the US imposed drastic economic sanctions, and the Cuban economy declined in direct consequence.
The USSR then provided generous subsidies, but when the USSR fell apart in 1990 these stopped.
In large measure John Larkin is gloating about the effectiveness of the US economic sanctions - Trump did ramped them up when he was in power - and ignoring the fact the Castro regime did a much better job of looking after the poor than Batista ever had. The US doesn't look after the poor all that well either - the relatively low US life expectancy is a side effect of it's remarkably high income inequality.
--
Bill Sloman, Sydney