Fortune a Day - Recap - Week 4

Here’s my week 4 recap of my Fortune A Day project!

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The Future: Made In China

Another large fusion breakthrough rose in the EAST on Monday, January 20th - maintaining a steady-state high-confinement plasma operation for a world record breaking 1,066 seconds. Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) - which is also known as China’s “artificial sun” - achieved this feat; and by the way - the world record they beat was their own from 2023 of 403 seconds.

While we are quite a ways away from the promise of fusion energy - unlimited, clean energy - it is aggressively clear that China is ahead.

Energy and Growth

Graph showing the relationship between many countries’ GDP per person and their energy use per person, with some countries highlighted. While it’s not a direct causal relationship, it demonstrates that energy is a key necessity for economic growth.

Making the cost of energy effectively zero, and having it be clean, enables economic growth we can not even conceive of. Even as the innovations we are working on become more real - like superintelligent AI - they are likely going to always be constrained by energy.

Dominating Energy All Around

Like I mentioned before, usable fusion is still far away. But this isn’t stopping China from another massive energy innovation project which seems to be a large solar power plant in space. This is another massive project beyond the scale of anything the USA has done since the moon landing. This project is still in developmental phase - and execution matters more than talk — but America isn’t talkin’ or executin’.

As a third small point - China is currently building 27 nuclear power plants vs 0 (!!!!!!!!!!) in construction in the USA - and will generate more nuclear power than the USA by 2030 (5 years from now!!). (Source)

I won’t go into the other advantages China has in terms of energy innovation - I will leave that as an exercise for the reader to research.

The Fusion Fix?

I made a lot of the same points, that I will make here about fusion power, about AI in Nationalize AI - Part 5 - Superiority - but it seems like it makes little sense to have so many American firms competing to make fusion work by themselves.

Nationalization, and making the project a moonshot (think The Manhattan Project, the moon landing, etc) seems like the most appropriate move. Not only would this ensure that we could equitably distribute the benefit of fusion, but importantly the combined labor and resources. America has a proven ability to achieve groundbreaking results when it commits unified resources and effort.

Read more:

• https://phys.org/news/2025-01-chinese-artificial-sun-fusion-power.html
• https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/19/climate/nuclear-fusion-clean-energy-china-us/index.html
• https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/nuclear-energy/chinas-artificial-sun-shatters-nuclear-fusion-record-by-generating-steady-loop-of-plasma-for-1-000-seconds

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Some of my favorite quotes from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., including the one above:

“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

“We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

“If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty and make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, she too will go to hell.”

“I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits”.

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of convenience and comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”

“And one day we must ask the question, ‘Why are there forty million poor people in America?’ And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society…”

So much to learn, so much to utilize in these unprecedented times.

Great TV Shows

Some of my favorite TV shows. I am picking out the (amazing) selection on Apple TV+ for now. There’s so much quality on Apple TV+ and it is very underrated.

Mythic Quest

Meet the team behind the biggest multiplayer video game of all time. But in a workplace focused on building worlds, molding heroes, and creating legends, the most hard-fought battles don’t occur in the game-they happen in the office.

Presumed Innocent

A horrific murder upends the Chicago Prosecuting Attorney’s Office when one of its own is suspected of the crime-leaving the accused (Jake Gyllenhaal) fighting to keep his family together.

For All Mankind

Imagine a world where the global space race never ended. This thrilling “what if” take on history from Ronald D. Moore (Outlander, Battlestar Galactica) spotlights the high-stakes lives of NASA astronauts and their families.

Some lists of great movies that I’ve posted already:

Movies That Make You Think

Movies That Make You Think - Part 2