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Comment by hcurtiss | Hacker News Reader

Not sure why you're being downvoted. The most likely use of a new abundant energy source will be force projection.

having nuclear fusion available will be good in the long term because it's a clean source of energy, it won't magically give China superpowers. We already have very simple means to give anyone access to abundant energy, ordinary coal and gas plants work just fine in that regard.

Because it hasn't historically worked that way.

This isn't a first to market huge advantage. Developing the plants is slow (many years) and the lag between super powers in cracking tech is generally only a couple of years (see space programs/nuclear energy programs)

It's playing into divisive tribal thinking, when this is literally objectively good for everyone on the planet.

This is a nation that is currently conducting a second holocaust, I don't think there's anything 'tribal' about not wanting them to have power.

We've asked you repeatedly to stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News. If you can't or won't stop, we're going to have to ban you.

(No, that isn't a political position, it's a site guidelines position. Please follow them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.)

If genocide is unsubstantiated, can he just bring up the organ harvesting?

Bringing that up in a thread about tokamak reactors would almost certainly break the site guideline against going on flamewar tangents.

I know that can seem arbitrary to people who have strong feelings on the topic, but it follows from HN's first principle: intellectual curiosity. We have had hundreds of generic flamewars about China. Will yet another one gratify anybody's intellectual curiosity? Of course not, because nothing new can be said about any of it. Everyone who cares about these arguments has already heard all of the lines and probably recited half of them. The only thing left to do is invent even nastier variations of the same thing. That's why flamewars get hotter as they become more predictable.

The root phenomenon is: we can have intellectual curiosity or indignation but not both. On HN, we choose curiosity. That means indignation needs to be actively contained, for the same reason that fire does.

If you want to see previous explanations about this, there are tons:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

True, but a lot of the time it appears to people that the "site guidelines" are not applied in a blanket fashion.

They definitely aren't, because we don't read everything that gets posted here, or even close to everything. There's far too much.

If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.

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