Your tone is a bit inflammatory, but I can't help but agree a bit. If someone who is selling you something is doing so by trying to convince you of a medical phenomenon that you (as a doctor) aren't familiar with, it's the height of irresponsibility to just accept that at face value. It shouldn't be a secret in the medical community that big pharma sales can be... unsavory.
As someone who has worked in the pharma industry, most doctors are very skeptical of anything a drug rep says, not in the sense that they're lying, but more that they're trying their best to make their products look good.
One shouldn't underestimate other factors in opioid prescribing: 1) the idea that pain is the "fifth sign" and should be aggressively treated and 2) that good pain control leads to positive customer experience.
It's not as simple to say "jesus those docs are stupid to believe Purdue". Some maybe are, but most probably never even saw their rep.
He would say that. Nobody likes to feel like a dupe, and there’s safety in numbers. I doubt he had a Purdue rep in his office change his mind about prescribing habits.
Still, you go to conferences and there are often a few Gladwell-caliber speakers at the big ones who get your head bobbing up and down for an hour. It’s very much in the drug companies’ interest to convince those speakers. Then the whole thing feels very organic, everyone’s new opinion feels like a reasoned medical choice.
It's also distressing that through undergrad, medschool, residency they never learned that opioids are fucking addicting as fuck and how to think for themselves.
I mean, this opioid crisis didn't just begin this year, or last, but it's been decades in the making. So imo doctors happen to be just as part of the problem as big pharma.
Also, and more importantly, fuck those drug reps - and if they were ignorant then fuck our society that has come to accept CYOAism so widely. It is your job as an employee to be aware of the effects your labour is having on others - if you're working in a paper mill that is dumping chemicals into a river it's not enough to hope folks downstream don't get sick.
Check the New York times reporting on Fred Trump and Donald Trump. It is clear to elites that just outright breaking tax law has no repercussions. More and more wealthy people are understanding this, and will not pay or will underpay taxes.
It's critical that taxes be enforced uniformly and in every case.
The energy consumption of the entire human race was about 146,000 TWh per year in 2015 [1]. That's 26 times more than before the industrial revolution. Since energy usage will still rise for a while, let's generously assume for now that the hypothetical future civilization will consume 10 times more than the 2015 value, or 1,460,000 TWh per year.
(I'm assuming that population does not grow more than currently anticipated. I think this is fair because I later compare the number to our current Helium production which probably would scale up as well if the population were to significantly increase.)
The proton-proton chain reaction, the process that creates Helium-4 by fusing hydrogen plasma, releases 26.73 MeV of energy when creating a single helium atom out of 4 hydrogen atoms. [2] The molar mass of helium-4 is 4.002602 g/mol [3]. With this, we can do a quick trip to our favorite unit-aware calculator, units(1), to find how much Helium would be produced if our hypothetical future civilization used hydrogen fusion for all its energy needs:
(1460000 TWh / year) / 26.73 MeV / avogadro * 4.002602 g/mol
= 8157132.36 kg / year
Since Helium is a gas, it is more commonly measured in volume, so let's multiply that with its density at STP of 0.1786 g/L [4]:
Most Helium is produced by the United States (78% market share as of 2008 [4]), so let's just use their current production numbers as a comparison.
> Helium production in the United States totaled 73 million cubic meters in 2014. [5]
That's 60% more than what would be produced by the future fusion reactors in my scenario. While it's true that I made a generous assumption by inflating the energy usage 10-fold, it appears that covering our Helium needs with fusion reactors is way more attainable than I imagined. We just need to cut back on wasting Helium a bit. The biggest "if" is, of course, if and when fusion reactors become economically viable.
A few things:
I believe your energy per year numbers are electric grid consumption. Steam cycle power plants make roughly 3x more thermal energy than their electrical output. Typically a "1 GW power plant" can produce up to 3 GW thermal power.
Also current target fusion reactions are not based on the p-p chain. That is a much more difficult reaction to achieve. We're currently targeting D+T for first generation reactors. D+D is also very attractive because it is aneutronic and perhaps clever reactor design would allow for direct conversion of electricity. Energy in aneutronic fusion reactions is released as an acceleration of charged particles: a current. This current can be harvested through magnetic fields and thermal to electric efficiency can go up to 50% (maybe higher?). The actual details of this seem rather tricky since magnetic confinement devices are already tightly controlling the magnetic fields inside the reactor. It will be fun science and engineering for sure.
There are a few other commonly examined reactions, such as p+B11, but they're likely not going to be made viable reactions for energy production before D+T. These other reactions are all easier to achieve (in terms of Lawson criterion) than the stellar proton fusion chain.
I'll reuse your math with D+T=He-4+n and 3x energy production.
1. as you acknowledged, the assumption that energy production would increase by tenfold
2. that all electrical energy produced would be made by fusion reactors
By the time we get to a state where a serious percentage of energy production was from fusion power we would likely be looking into more aggressively into other reactions and designs.
Even if we just said 30% of all energy used today was made from D+T fusion that would still be generating 10% of our current helium usage. That's a significant amount and a lot more than the 4 orders of magnitude that is oft cited online (https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/12r2s7/helium_i...). At a glance, it appears that the posts in this thread miscalculate how much fuel is necessary for a certain amount of energy. They glaze over that part of their calculations. I much prefer your dimensional analysis approach.
Oh I see. My reference for energy consumption is wikipedia. When I was trying to dig for the primary source yesterday I found the link was dead and the equivalent live location of it (IEA key world energy statistics) was behind a paywall. I didn't expect such a large discrepancy between the wikipedia reference and other sources.
Honestly as someone who has delivered food, goods, etc finding someone's address can be difficult and sometimes down right annoying. Also consider that delivery drivers may not have full command English.
For example those nice looking cursive addresses instead of simple to read numerals are annoying.
Then there's missing numbers, or bad choices in color, or it's black and they don't have a light for it at night.
I don't think for it to be useful it needs to completely power the car. Consider an average user using it to commute to work 5 times a week, where outside of commuting, the car is driven maybe a little over the weekend.
Reality is that most of the time the car isn't doing anything. So if solar can give your car a few extra miles everyday you commute, it seems potentially worth it then.
That actually was about as close to free as it gets. At least it was for the similar money (same program) that Wisconsin turned down.
In Wisconsin’s case it was about $800MM with no local match needed and the catch was committing to running the service for 20 years.
Even as someone who wasn’t a big fan of the project I’m still annoyed because we’ve now spent significantly more than 20 years of operating costs for work that would have been paid for if we took the money.
The last couple of days I've been learning a little more about China's emerging surveillance state and while terrifying to think about and worse sad knowing they're building essentially concentration camps, I am wondering how effective are China's policies.
i.e. does China's investment and push towards a controlled society actually come out ahead compared to if they didn't?
Without looking at any figures, surely policing the internet, building large re-education camps, and employing a whole lot of social police gobbles up a lot of resources. The people employed could be doing something else productive right?
So would the safety gained from their extreme surveillance state increase over all productivity due to less violence or lower productivity because the net gain from a safer society is less than what would be gained if the resources were distributed to other societal needs like healthcare and infrastructure?
I think it's less about building a productive China, and more about maintaining power for those in charge, but they could also honestly believe that the masses need to be controlled in order to have a productive China.
IMHO, the US also has an overreaching surveillance state, and it also exists to maintain power at the cost of overall productivity and quality of life, but it's to a lesser extent than China.
>So would the safety gained from their extreme surveillance state increase over all productivity ....
Most folks that have any opinion on humanitarian or privacy social issues would probably be unwilling to entertain the idea of cost/benefit analysis with regards to whether or not concentration camps (no, not 're-education' camps) provide a societal good.
> i.e. does China's investment and push towards a controlled society actually come out ahead compared to if they didn't?
The same question people used to ask about USSR. USSR had it all - mass prison camps, massive industrialization programs, surveillance and terror state (of course, at different technology level), massive successes in some areas - like space technologies, unconditional love of all well-meaning people in the West, especially in academy and significant part of Hollywood - everything was there. Until USSR crumbled into dust. Turns out enslaving and oppressing people under the slogans of "most free society on the planet" is, after all, not sustainable, and free economy (even the semi-free one we're witnessing now) outperforms the socialist planned one. I don't think China would fare much better - though it may take a long time to see it, and sometimes it would seem like they have won - as was proclaimed many times by USSR fans over the course of 20th century.
While many people have stopped believing this, it really is true that free economies outperform planned ones, and when the planned ones explode, they tend to explode spectacularly. The only mitigating counterpoint is that it's not clear how free the US and EU economies really are these days, as they've increasingly become dominated by large companies via market power, lobbying and regulatory capture.
Headline like this won't get me to read the article. There's plenty of reason to cross the country by train. You could be afraid of planes. You could just really like trains. You could like to see the country from the ground.
Maybe it's a romantic experience or journey. Who knows, but there are certainly really good reasons travel across the country the way you want to.
