Got an email from a friend, “Some links about a guy as crazy as us.”
And the first link turned out to be this youtube vid that’s been going around about a guy who claims to have built a cold fusion reactor in his garden shed or something, which prior to this I had never clicked on because call me when you can plug a lamp into it, right? So yeah, I have no opinion on the fusion thing except that I notice he hasn’t taken the solar panels off his roof.
Looking past that, the video got kind of interesting. Like in the very last minute. Nobody as smart as he claims to be would ever use a phrase like “libertarian communism,” but his neighborhood’s approach to community sounds refreshingly familiar.
He’s got a forum on open-source tech, too, though it doesn’t seem all that active.
Believe it or not, he does have a real fusion reactor. More specifically, it’s a Farnsworth Fusor. They are not “cold fusion” and they’ve been around for 50 years. I think the current record for the youngest builder of a fusor is 13yo. Fusor mostly get used as neutron sources for NDT and the like. No one has made one generate more power than it eats, but a lot of smart people who aren’t eccentric “libertarian communists” living in VA think Farnsworth variants hold more promise than multi-gigabuck crap at the National Ignition Facility (which is schizophrenically alternating between Tokamak magnetic confinement and laser-induced inertial confinement).
“Libertarian communism” sounds like good old fashioned Kropotkin anarchism, which works well enough in groups small enough for everyone to know each other.
Correction on the NIF. They’re laser inertial confinement only. I was thinking they had a tokamak on the side, but apparently I was mistaken.
Bear is right….Fusors (electrostatic confinement) reactors have been around for a *very* long time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor and http://www.fusor.net.
Since about the mid 60’s.
It does work, it *will* fuse hydrogen into helium.
you need a source of very high vacuum, and a way to maintain that vacuum, some fairly high voltage electricity, and some stuff to fuse (tritium, deuterium, boron, etc), and a bit of know how.
there are two main problems with it:
1. it does not, and never has produced more energy than you put into it.
2. even if it did, most of the energy produced (for hydrogen fusion) is in the form of moving neutrons, and non-useful radiation (which is the problem with all the other types of big expensive fusion). You *can* go for the ‘high temperature’ fusion, using other elements than hydrogen, which require even *more* power to get fusion going.
Quite a few folk are playing about with these things. Maybe somebody will figure it out.
But nobody…nobody is even close the the break even point. I think the big boys have gotten close, but only for a vanishingly small instant. It is a long long long way from making a ‘Mr. Fusion’ reactor.
But….I doubt that there is a huge conspiracy by the power companies to hide this tech. They would LOVE for it to work so they could build cheap reactors and sell us the power.
Libertarian communism could exist, I guess, if everyone joined willingly and participation in the commune was not compulsory in any way. The thing is that you would never get buy in to such a scheme at anything much larger than the family level. At any level larger than that, no one in their right mind would ever willingly join.
To be quite honest, it is the only way that I could ever foresee communism actually working as it is supposed to, instead of devolving into a mass-murder fest like it always does on the large scale.
But it would have only worked in agrarian societies, at best; to have such an arrangement in modern society would require members o the commune to opt out of the commune enough to bring in income (have to work outside the commune to do so) but opt in enough to allow themselves to be stripped of that income to have it redistributed to the other members. Hence, my assertion that the largest unit in which such a thing could work is the family unit, because at any size larger than that, that guy, instead of being “father and patriarch” would be “hard working dupe salaryman.” That, and they would all be poor. So there’s that.