Jeff Bezos-Backed Company General Fusion To Build Nuclear Fusion Facility In UK (businessinsider.com) 138
Last Thursday, a Canadian company backed by Jeff Bezos, called General Fusion, announced it's building a nuclear fusion facility in the UK. Insider reports: General Fusion and the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) announced the project together, which will see General Fusion build a fusion demonstration plant in the village of Culham, near Oxford. The facility will be a proof-of-concept, allowing General Fusion to demonstrate its Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF) technology before going on to build its first commercial facility. According to General Fusion, construction will begin in 2022, and it is expected to be about three years before the plant is able to open.
"This new plant by General Fusion is a huge boost for our plans to develop a fusion industry in the UK, and I'm thrilled that Culham will be home to such a cutting-edge and potentially transformative project," the UK science minister, Amanda Solloway, said in a statement. The BBC reports Bezos has been an investor in General Fusion for over a decade, and the company raised $100 million in its latest funding round.
"This new plant by General Fusion is a huge boost for our plans to develop a fusion industry in the UK, and I'm thrilled that Culham will be home to such a cutting-edge and potentially transformative project," the UK science minister, Amanda Solloway, said in a statement. The BBC reports Bezos has been an investor in General Fusion for over a decade, and the company raised $100 million in its latest funding round.
Thirty years away (Score:3)
For the last forty years I've been hearing that fusion-based power is only thirty years away. Is it possible that it's likely that these predictions are finally going to be wrong?
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Re:Thirty years away (Score:5, Funny)
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Just like the non profit sector. Quite a lot of charities spend a large percentage of their money on fundraising. The people at the top at least have a career of it.
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Re: Thirty years away (Score:2)
The main problem, according an article by a nuclear engineer I read years ago, is small funding.
According him, the predictions about how much time it'll take to get fusion working are all based on a single metric: the current state of knowledge and how much it needs to advance, assuming proper funding to do that advancement.
Engineers calculated it'd take, if I remember right, about $50 to $100 billion USD to get there, at the full rate of potential technological development -- in early 2000's USD values min
Re: Thirty years away (Score:5, Interesting)
Not true. It is a factor, yes, but there are other limiters. For example, the Wendelstein X-7 Stellarator was basically build only after computers were powerful enough to allow the design. Factor all things in and that meant completion in 2015. Yes, things take long. But the X-7 is a plasma and materials research installation, still, say, at least 2 generations removed from a working experimental power station. That gives a time-frame with perfect funding of something like 50 years to that working experimental power station and 25 years or so more to the first non-experimental power station. This is a lower estimate and actual numbers may be 100 or 150 years to that working non-experimental power station. Still, the goal looks quite reachable and the payoff will be significant, so it is worthwhile research.
People need to stop thinking that because crappy software can be written in a year or two, things go as fast in other areas. Most engineering stuff takes a lot of time. Incidentally, software written to proper engineering standards does too. I would claim that we can mostly still not do that even today. Slapping together something insecure, inefficient, unreliable and generally crappy can be done a lot faster and even when you do not really understand what you are doing.
Re: Thirty years away (Score:4, Insightful)
Not true. It is a factor, yes, but there are other limiters. For example, the Wendelstein X-7 Stellarator was basically build only after computers were powerful enough to allow the design. Factor all things in and that meant completion in 2015. Yes, things take long. But the X-7 is a plasma and materials research installation, still, say, at least 2 generations removed from a working experimental power station. That gives a time-frame with perfect funding of something like 50 years to that working experimental power station and 25 years or so more to the first non-experimental power station. This is a lower estimate and actual numbers may be 100 or 150 years to that working non-experimental power station. Still, the goal looks quite reachable and the payoff will be significant, so it is worthwhile research.
Fusion is problem with many avenues of advancement where sufficient advances in any one area can significantly impact overall viability. This is why I believe with sufficient investment there can be more advancements akin to discovery of h-mode that eventually push the technology far enough into the realm of viability. At that point it is a safe bet there will be a ramp up of interest and funding including great power competition as viability approaches certainty.
Another point is that all these projects benefit from each other. Whether a stellarator, tokamak, hybrid or none of the above they all contribute to understanding and exploitation of plasma dynamics (NIF excluded) and associated R&D superconductors, magnet design, materials, diverters..etc which benefits and influences advancement of all fusion projects. The efforts (cash) push technology and create markets for further R&D into a large number of supporting industries.
ITER by itself placed a large enough order of niobium superconductors to significantly ramp up global production capacity.
The 7-X was designed for research within a specific budget. It was never designed to push technology as fast as possible at a higher cost. To cite one projects timeline as an excuse to take forever is not reasonable. It does take considerable time and effort to build things and there is always diminishing returns yet the world isn't even trying to take Fusion seriously. More money means faster iteration, more risk taking, parallel experiments and funding development of necessary advancements in supporting technology.
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"crappy software can be written in a year or two": Some of us take much longer than that.
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Thanks. As a PhD level Computer Scientist (engineering PhD), what I see slapped together out there constantly offends me. And the people hired to do code? A few are very good, most are not. And even the good ones _with_ an engineering degree in the field mostly taught it to themselves. I do some teaching (secure software) and the whole thing seems to have at least half a century to go to turn into actual engineering.
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Too often I see "the good ones" promoted into management, where they generally suck. One of the most talented programmers that I've met happened to be the second-worst boss that I've ever had. We only found out that he was good at something when there was a emergency while people were on vacation and he built a replacement for the failed service from scratch that would have taken his team a month.
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That is a really stupid problem in software engineering.
The only career path at a certain point, that gives you more money, is management.
The existing management simply does not want to accept that some programmers are indeed 10x programmers and deserve more money.
I guess I would not suck at management as I would leave them mostly alone and only fix problems ... a good team does not need management.
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My boss spends a lot of time in meetings, to a great extent it's so that we don't have to. We get to be productive and people higher in the pecking order see someone fairly respectable looking (and vocally reserved, which most of us are not!) representing our team, so everyone wins.
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Indeed. Fusion will also make the energy mix more diverse eventually, and there will be spin-off technology. But most people here just see the half-assed software creation we do today as actual engineering and have no idea how long science plus engineering plus industrialization for new things actually takes. This is not because the numbers are not available. It is because people are willfully ignorant as they want to push their pet fantasies.
As to fusion, it is at least 50 years ahead as a serious energy s
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Bezos founded a rocket company for over twenty years ago, which has still failed to reach orbit.
So Bezos funding this Canadian company does not fill me with confidence.
Re:Thirty years away (Score:5, Funny)
Blue Origin has not failed to reach orbit. Blue Origin has yet to attempt to reach orbit.
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I guess that it was fitting for them to name themselves after the *source* of their journeys, since they haven't strayed far from it.
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Funding - founding even - a company has nothing to do with its performance.
It is just moving money from one account to the other one, and it has even less to do with the person behind that money.
the natural next step (Score:2)
come, now: the *natural* next step after building a rocket that can't reach orbit is *surely* a fusion reactor that can't meet breakeven generation . . .
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For commercial purposes, all fusion power requires fission: it's the only viable source of the tritium for deuterium/tritium fusion. If you've done the work to build that many fission plants to provide the fuel, why waste the effort on an unproven technology?
Thorium fusion would make much more sense, but it's not found in so many old science fiction stories, and is nowhere near as romantic.
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I can't tell if this is meant to be tongue in cheek, or if you meant fission instead of fusion. Building up nuclei heavier than iron is not energetically favorable [wikipedia.org].
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It was a typo. I meant lithium.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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For commercial purposes, all fusion power requires fission: it's the only viable source of the tritium for deuterium/tritium fusion.
Right now, fission barely creates enough tritium to supply glow-in-the-dark watch faces and refills for aging warhead triggers.
The idea for D-T fusion reactors is to use the huge neutron flux from that reaction to breed tritium from lithium surrounding the fusion reactor. Managing that is undoubtedly going to be a problem at least as hard as maintaining the fusion reaction itself.
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Are you referring to the "lithium blanket" approach? Which has never worked to produce, or recover even a microgram of tritium?
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Who knows if it ever has produced tritium, as we have no reactor with sustained reaction yet, that is a pretty moot point. Obviously it would work, so no reason to be sceptical.
My question would be how: to the tritium out of the lithium matrix.
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So yeah it's a huge financial risk, with almost unimaginable potential reward. Almost certainly it is possible and will be done eventually, but maybe not in our lifetimes especially if other tech meets near-term needs more cheaply which is a distinct possibility.
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The site is right next to the research labs at Culham/Harwell just south of Oxford. There is a long history of advanced research into Nuclear energy in the area.
Re: Thirty years away (Score:4, Informative)
The reality is we have yet to have a Q=1 (break even) without removing laser inefficiency from the math with fusion. I'm in no ways saying the research isn't useful, but the idea of having a fusion reactor generating power in 3 years is ludicrous. Show me one that can just sustain a reaction for an hour+ without losing plasma containment and I'll be impressed (something ITAR has failed to do, Germany's Stellarator think they can do it this year). Again, not saying impossible, but that timeline isn't plausible when we don't have even have research reactors that can do it. I know there are a few wildcards out there like Lockheed's Skunk Werks reactor, but little concrete is known about it (heard the press, but want to see it shown).
Links: Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (Score:3)
Culham Centre: Fusion in brief [ukaea.uk]
Wikipedia: Culham Centre for Fusion Energy [wikipedia.org]
Short Quotes: Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (Score:3)
What is nuclear fusion? Fusion is the process that takes place in the heart of stars and provides the power that drives the universe.
To produce energy from fusion here on Earth, a combination of hydrogen gases -- deuterium and tritium -- are heated to very high temperatures (over 100 million degrees Celsius).
Abundant fuels: Deuterium can be extracted from water and tritium will be produced inside the power station from lithium, a
Re: Short Quotes: Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (Score:2)
re: Capitalization (Score:2)
Yes. Round about our parts we always capitalize "Nucular" (from the "Nucule") but never "nuclear",
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Unlikely I fear. Also the UK is an odd choice for something like this, as it is experiencing a massive brain-drain and huge shortage of skilled workers due to brexit.
Also, despite being one of our main industries and it's proven success in emergency vaccine work (the Oxford/AZ vaccine), the Tories are determined to gut the university sector, so no new people will be trained.
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That's a great point, the number of foreign students is falling and Brits can't afford it any more, so the skills shortage is only going to get worse.
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Re: Thirty years away (Score:2)
That booze money for some Sheikh going down the drain. Not on.
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Nothing to do I suppose with the UK's decades of work on Fusion at the JET project, membership of ITER or it's indigenous industries in pressure vessels, high vacumn systems etc as a World Technology Leader.
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Do you see everything in terms of Jews or is this just something you save for us?
Back to the Future? (Score:5, Funny)
So Mister Fusion is a General now?
Re:Back to the Future? (Score:4, Funny)
So Mister Fusion is a General now?
Just hope Major Disaster doesn't show up!
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Just hope Major Disaster doesn't show up!
We just took a year off under General Debility.
It's a con. (Score:2)
I've seen the Vancouver test facility (Score:2)
A friend of mine works there.
The idea is that you magnetically inject plasma into a core, where hyper-synchronized pneumatic cylinders compress the plasma into fusion, pulsing maybe once a second. The heat is taken away by the surrounding protecting liquid metal into a heat exchanger.
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Ah, so basically an extremely speculative experiment, nothing more.
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Suck, squeeze, BANG - the three stroke piston engine is born.
Re: I've seen the Vancouver test facility (Score:2)
Yeah but that thing can 0-100 in less than a nanosecond
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Suck, squeeze, BANG, flow - it's still a four stroke engine
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Solar and Wind Work, Tidal, Likely (Score:2)
Re:Solar and Wind Work, Tidal, Likely (Score:4, Insightful)
It is not actually improbable. It just has a realistic time-frame of another 100 years or so until it becomes relevant for energy generation. As the general public does not understand such time-frames, this becomes "30 years" in the press.
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"The future" has been defined as 30 years away at least as far back as 1985. It's already been proven in cinema form that mankind is really terrible at looking even that far away with any realistic prediction whatsoever.
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But you fail to mention the safest and cleanest one -- good ol' nuclear fission.
Second safest, after photovoltaic. But has the big advantage of reliability, not just 6-8 hours per day. The two work well together.
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It is a pretty biased site considering how many deaths from mining uranium aren't counted.
I take it the photovoltaic deaths are mostly unqualified homeowners falling off roofs, nuclear will have similar problems if people start installing reactors themselves.
Likewise, a lot of hydro deaths are companies taking shortcuts and governments forcing through dams that shouldn't be built. Nuclear on a large scale is going to have the same problems. Kind of like how spaceflight was very safe until management overrul
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There are no solar (power) deaths .... idiot.
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Never speak in absolutes, [gulfnews.com] Angelo.
Idiot.
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I'm not arguing against that nuclear is fairly safe but many of these sites that make claims do leave out all the Navajo, for example, that died, which is a sign of bias. Mining uranium is mostly safer due to needing much less uranium (and we've learned), not because it is inherently safe, especially the methods that were first used were quite unsafe, coal mining likewise was also much less safe before companies were forced to care about things like black lung.
Wonder what besides falling off roofs makes sol
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It is always the question by what you measure safety.
For my nuclear (fission) is the worst safety ever.
But alas, I lived in Germany when the Chernobyl fallout went over us ...
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You know if only there were chemical or mechanical systems for storing electricity
In stating the obvious, I'm sure you did not intend to come across as a complete arse ... oh wait, I just spotted the username. Well played.
Yes one day. Meanwhile, a small fraction of one percent of electricity production is stored more than a few seconds.
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Fusion actually makes sense, but in solar fusion. For bulk sources of solar power, we can use orbital solar mirrors, beaming power to microwave receivers on the ground. A failed solar mirror is much easier, and safer, to shut down than a failing nuclear plant, and has none of the awkward physical waste. There are some practical limits to its expansion, but even fission plants have limits.
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solar mirrors?
how are mirrors going to let us beam power to the ground?
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You ever looked at an ant with a magnifying glass on a hot summer day? Probably not for very long...
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You want to put the solar in orbit and use frequencies which interact minimally with the atmosphere to beam the power to the ground. It's much less likely to cook wildlife, and also causes less atmospheric heating and is therefore much more efficient. You can also receive the signals with a nice cheap rectenna array. Reflecting more sunlight to the surface makes literally no sense on this planet. It might be a good idea on Mars, though.
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I was giving an example. I was not talking about literal light mirrors. There are metamaterial mirrors being developed that are transmissive to just specific frequencies. Of course, there's a reason that satellite communications use microwaves and it's that sunlight doesn't have many.
I can only imagine that this is not what the poster was talking about. The mirrors would probably be set up to focus sunlight for generating, and the microwave transmission of power would be a completely separate component.
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The Wikipedia article is pretty thorough about the idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The space based mirror refflects sunlight to a focal point, where a customized receiver turns the energy to microwaves and aims it at a collection array on the ground. It's much easier to maintain focus on that transmitter and to aim that array's output at the right target on the ground than to constantly be tuning the focus of a mirror a kilometer wide.
Re: Solar and Wind Work, Tidal, Likely (Score:2)
There is a complicated problem with that. A device in space beaming energy to earth can be either a wireless cable or a death ray, depending on your perspective. And there are international treaties preventing the building of death ray ships in space. Also, if you get the aim off by 0.5 degreesâ¦.
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That _is_ a problem. Ensuring safe control of reactors which consume lithium in any kind of bulk is also a safety issue.
So the UK has become the land of fairy stories now (Score:2, Interesting)
Our Cosplay Prime Minister has been wanting to build bridges to Narnia and a Tunnel to the Falklands after all.
Anything to divert from the disaster of Brexit.
Reality not required.
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Yeah the Brexit disaster where the UK economy is growing quickly whilst Europe is in the shitter.
Odd choice .. (Score:2)
Seeing how much electricity we sell here and abroad ( US ) it's a bit odd to me that Hydro Quebec would not have been first on the list for that one.
that neither the USA or Canada would get the " first " actual working unit up and running just tells me that the tech must be faulty and/or needs way more development before serious clients consider it. Matter of costs/kWh ? Cheaper sources available without the hassle ? Let's see the results of that first installation
then by all means , with the electrificatio
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No need to be skeptical. This is a highly experimental research station. May work, may not work, will not work as power station.
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What's odd is business investment at all. This is going to be pure research for probably a long time. Anyone taking investor money at this stage is little better than a snake oil salesman.
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Why would Hydro Quebec be interested? They've got more hydroelectric resources than they can exploit, and the existing dams produce lots of excess to sell to the US.
The UK has offshore wind, but other than that they're dependent on gas and oil that is both awkward to get and isn't going to last forever.
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A lot of noise about fusion lately (Score:2)
A good point was brought up earlier that there is no natural fuel source for these designs which should be a red flag. I have also read elsewhere that they also have some of th
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Lots of interest in and money for clean energy
Lots of wealthy high tech companies with very smart people who are badly Dunning-Kruger'd on fusion. Many don't understand just how much is known about fusion, and that many of these schemes fail for well understood reasons (like Rayleigh-Taylor instability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] which is the death of most clever fusion ideas.
Lots of semi-shady scientists / engineers, happy to milk wealthy companies for money b
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"Temperature" is a measurement of the average speed of particles. ...
Here we have a plasma. And that plasma is basically a high vacuum.
So you have a big chamber, which is really a vacuum, and have a finger hut full of deuterium/tritium (not sure what ITER is using) compressed and heated by a magnetic field. Some yards away from the walls.
While the "temperature" is a million C, you could put your hand into the fusion reaction and feel nearly nothing. The neutron flux would be a different matter
Meh. Another Deuterium-Tritium reactor. (Score:2)
I'll get excited when someone builds a reactor that might reach break-even when you don't count the worse-than-useless neutrons, which are 80% of D-T yield.
Neutrons (Score:2)
Light element fusion produces neutrons, which cannot be confined using magnetic field because they have no electric charge. Hence a fusion reactor must deal with a flux of run away high energy neutrons hammering the device, and that tricky solutions must be found to deal with them.
The holy grail of fusion is Hydrogen+Boron, which does not produce neutrons, but we are not yet there.
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Don't worry, the US has lots of old (for the US) money aristocracy too.
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Functional aristocracy then. The US senate has little enough turnover that it's basically the House of Lords, and the party leadership is even worse. US socioeconomic mobility is among the worst in the OECD.
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As for the US being warlike, the rest of the world has nothing but itself to blame. After the trauma of WWI and WW2, terrorists that fly planes into our buildings, and the emergence of dictatorships afraid of democracy and freedom who threaten us with destruction while flooding us with propaganda, can y
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>Fewer people in poverty?
A lot less. Starvation is rare in the US.
>Less wealth disparity?
It may not b
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So now climate change is the United States fault?
Actually it is.
a) top contributor to CO2 over the last 150 years
b) running a "there is a climate change conspiracy" campaign for nearly 25 years - which is basically still not over
That's easy - we have a very high standard of living here.
You have not, you only think you have. You never have been in a country with a high standard of living, like e.g. the simplest that come to mind: Germany, or for that matter, the rest of the top countries in the EU, or Austra
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You clearly don't know me. Why make such assumptions? Denmark is considered #1 and I was there a year and a half ago in November 2019 and have travelled abroad extensively. I grew up across the river from Canada. The US is a very large country with the world's third largest population. A more fair comparison on standard of living would be China and India. The US ranks 15 in standard of living and th
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can you blame the US? ... tam tam: the US.
Yes. Most dictatorships in the last 70 years where set up by
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I think gaining power thru money is a better deal than gaining power thru massacring cities, like the old aristocracia would do.
It's not perfect and some people still try the old ways, but, well at least you're not in some shitass army, ready to die for your leader.
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Indeed.
Ideally you don't want to let anyone have all the power, as they get to do the hell they want.
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Now the Fed. Debt is so high and the yearly deficit so large, the U.S. won't be funding much of anything except on inflated dollars.
That's deliberate, Neo-con 'thought leader' Grover Norquist laid out the plan in the 1990s to run the deficit so high that there was no room for anything but debt repayment and the military. They intend to reduce the Federal government to the size where (per Norquist's own web site) "I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the tub."