It operated ("actually sustained fusion") for a total of four seconds, in 1997. Most of the work involves non-fusion plasmas.
http://www.jet.efda.org/wp-content/uploads/jeteuropeansucess...
That was a costly experiment: the resulting radiation -- neutron activation of the structure -- made the reactor inaccessible for 18 months.
Isn't that because we now have a very large semi-parasitical managerial class that we need to support? It's almost a retreat into feudalism. Doubt anybody saw that coming.
Think of pointless meetings, smoke breaks, soda breaks, talking about sports, life, hobbies, debating/complaining, talking politics, talking about TV shows, online shopping, keeping up with twitter/FB/Linkedin, Hacker News, the average cubie dweller probably only puts in 10-20 hours a week of actual work right now.
"Everyone knows" the guy who's forced to put in 60 hours at the office who spends 50 of those hours on FB / Reddit / talking about football, etc.
There's a Russian proverb about we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.
If you define work as "hours spend on premises" then no one has worked as many hours as Americans do today since the early 1900s. If you define work as actually doing something productive, well, thats a whole nother ball game.
For actual work, maybe even less.
But not having pocession of your body for 8-12 hours every day in exchage for a pay-check, is work too. Even if you just sit there and "do nothing".
People work to support themselves, but I would wager that most would work less to support themselves if they could earn enough to do so.
Is that what you meant?
I suppose he'll next tell us that the rich are "job creators."
Job providers, I get why those are important. Not everyone wants to be bothered with the business side of living, along with its risks. I can actually see how that division of labour and responsibilities aids both sides of the equation.
But if you count self-employment, there's job providers on every rung of the social ladder. The chinese guy selling chua'r on the street is a job provider, just as much as the multimillion entrepreneur employing thousands of people. So it becomes senseless to say that one wealth bracket supplies jobs, and another one doesn't.
And then there's "job creation", which seems like a meaningless metric if you don't factor in loss of jobs, current amount of jobs, unemployment, etc. And you seriously want to pin that metric down on a single group?
By the way, if the take the logic further, and look at who's implicated in major job destruction (layoffs), it's us. Hackers. I'm going from the Systems optimization definition here, and when you optimize away a part of a system, someone's bound to get fired. Your packaging machine eliminated 5 packaging workers. Your fiber optic cable eliminated 50 post office workers.
They're being added, somewhere.
The truth behind job scarcity or not is supply and demand. Period. If there is no demand for yours, or someone elses labor, there is no job. No wealth redistribution will change that. The arguments behind why, though, the concentration of wealth was bad, is that the wealthy have fewer demands they want met relative to the entirety of everyone else. A more prosperous majority gnerates tremendous demand, millionaires generate limited and specific demand.
But you don't escape the reality of having a supply of something trying to meet the demand for it. There just isn't much demand for a lot of labor types, and producitivity multipliers in technology lets that demand be met with much less workforce supply, which means tremendous economic efficiency gains.
Me too. Apparently it's primarily a mass-media political posturing tool for the (fearing-to-be-)disenfranchised classes (ie. a huge proportion of the population).
producitivity multipliers in technology lets that demand be met with much less workforce supply, which means tremendous economic efficiency gains.
... and loads of people shifted to the bottom of the opportunity barrel, save for states with some semblance of social welfare (ie. not the US).
With regards to your comment on 1% of people being farmers and that being adequate, here's some fast facts about the US agricultural industry:
(1) 300 million people in the US, and the US can sustainably produce food for only 130 million of them. (recentish UN estimate I believe)
(2) Many US farms are net energy consumers, ie. they burn more energy in production than they give people in food.
Second, the earth will actually produce enough to support many humans using no humans (ie. "let the plants grow back, stop maintaining the concrete, stop unsustainably exploiting and poisoning the environment"). It just requires us to be a bit more in tune with the environment (eg. decentralize, consume in-season, eat less meat, start sharing a bit more).
Interesting times.
The Apollo program, as impressive as it was, was never expected to be extendable to a colony effort. Rather first a space station was to be put in orbit, then on-orbit refueling, then space 'tugs', and then you could send up things that could land on the moon and ship additional building materials there.
That said, I found the hovercraft idea interesting since the benefit of hovercraft are completely negated by the inability to push against the surface for turning force and thus to re-capture forward energy into turning energy. This is a huge problem with lighter than air airships as well. Asimov should have known that.
The IIS gets regular resupplies to keep its environmental support systems operational and habitable.
Cost per kg from Earth to Lunar surface argue otherwise.
A multi-national consortium can barely manage to sustain operations of a 6 man crew in low-Earth orbit.
2. I bet we could figure it out. Again don't see any reason why it is not possible. Very little research has gone into that particular problem which I think is the main reason it has not been done.
Hardly irritating - that's my job, which I enjoy.
Sure, moon colonies would require enormous effort, staggering cost, and some new technology. The problem isn't the engineering challenge; we put people & equipment in a habitable box, and brought them back, using half-century-old technology. The problem is the cost far exceeds the payoff for anywhere close to the foreseeable future, and the scenery there is about as interesting as Death Valley (briefly compelling, but you wouldn't want to live there).
> where productivity is magnitudes higher
Overall, yes. Per worker? Hell no. Half or more of current jobs are pushing paper and doing meaningless bureaucratic work. Related article from last week: www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
> Overall, yes. Per worker? Hell no. Half or more of current jobs are pushing paper and doing meaningless bureaucratic work.
Actually, productivity per worker has grown for most developed countries. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has a wealth of information on the subject: http://www.bls.gov/fls/intl_gdp_capita_gdp_hour.htm
Of note is chart 6, which shows GDP per hour worked has grown, albeit slowly, for most developed countries; and table 2a, which shows real GDP per employed person has more than doubled since 1960 for the US, and in some developed countries like Japan, increased 6-7x.
1. http://www.uspowerboating.com/Assets/TrainingDept/Powerboat+...
2. Do the betavoltaics [2] in some early pacemakers and the small reactor on spacecraft and the Mars Science Laboratory count as radioactive batteries? But I am assuming that, since betavoltaic pacemakers and nuclear spacecraft have been around since Asimov's time, they probably don't count.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaics
[1] https://lasers.llnl.gov/newsroom/project_status/index.php
They can be miniaturised, using the photoelectric effect, alphavoltaics or betavoltaics.
We do not use them because "Nuclear is bad, m'kay?", and the market just isn't there, so the R&D hasn't happened.
The irony is nice but misplaced. We already have a huge problem disposing the toxic waste of regular batteries.
Not to mention what other misuses those could have if accessed by the random lunatic....
1. We have at least one fusion plant I know of, the UK Joint Torus, which I know have been operating for decades. It just consumes more power than it generates. But Asimov suggests one or two, which is strikingly accurate.
2. We could probably make radio-decay batteries (maybe not AA size, but car batteries running on Thorium or some such, albeit an extremely expensive containment for something running so hot). We probably just don't do it because the radiation risks are too high.
And I'd count airport conveyors as moving sidewalks. Or just the complexity of baggage carrying systemes in those airports, lend that we easily have the technoloy to create weather resistant rotary motor systems as sidewalks, but like Asimovs suggestions of underground housing, cost is the bigger prohibitor than technology.
Also, I don't think the degree of boredom he touches on has occured. Consumerism and the wealth concentration in the US has kept people needing to maintain 40 hour work weeks where productivity is magnitudes higher. We produce vastly more, but work as much as ever. Back in the 60s the sentiment was that 21st century Americans might have 10 hour work weeks.