That’s my point: fusion is just another heat source for making steam, and with these experimental reactors, they can’t be sure how much or for how long they will generate heat. Probably not even sure what a good geometry for transferring energy from the reaction mass to the water. You can’t build a turbine for a system that’s only going to run 20 minutes every three years, and you can’t replace that turbine just because the next test will have ten times the output.

I mean, you could, but it would be stupid.

If you’re not sure how the fire works, it seems kind of stupid to build a turbine for it.

I’ve always understood 2 as 2 physically different media - i.e., copies in different folders or partitions of the same disk is not enough to protect against failure of that disk, but a copy on a different disk does. Ideally 2 physically different systems, so failure/fire in the primary system won’t corrupt/damage the backup.

Used to be that HDDs were expensive and using them as backup media would have been economically crazy, so most systems evolved backup media to be slower and cheaper. The main thing is that having /home/user/critical, /home/user/critical-backup, and /home/user/critical-backup2 satisfies 3 copies, but not 2 media.

3: RAID-1 pair + manual periodic sync to an external HD, roughly monthly. Databases synced to cloud.

2: external HD is unplugged when not syncing

1: External HD is a rotating pair, swapped in a bank box, roughly quarterly. Bank box costs $45/year.

If the RAID crashes, I lose at most a month. If the house burns down, I lose at most 3 months. Ransomware, unless it’s really stealthy, I lose 3 months. If I had ongoing development projects, a month (or 3) would be a lot to lose, and I’d probably switch to weekly syncs and monthly swaps, but for what I actually do - media files, financial and smart-home data, 3 months would not be impossible to recreate.

All of this works because my system is small enough to fit on one HDD. A 3-2-1 system for tens of TB starts to look a lot like an enterprise system.

Proton is only encrypted between proton users. Proton mail to/from gmail or outlook is plain text, unless the recipient sets up PGP, and you can do E2EE with PGP over any host.

I have 8 Z-wave devices now, including a couple “long range” devices. With the first couple, I would sometimes have trouble with the farthest, battery-powered device dropping out of the network occasionally, but that hasn’t happened as I’ve added more devices. I fought with pairing the initial devices - clicking the right series of buttons at the same time as telling HA to look for devices to join - but all the recent devices have just has a QR code - scan it into HA, and the device just shows up when I turn it on. I don’t know how much of this difference between new and old is my learning curve vs better product support, but I am really happy with my Z-waves now.

Z-wave rather than wifi so I know they aren’t phoning home.

Just want to me-too Ruaidbrigh’s reco’s and to point out, as a long-time homeowner, that you don’t have to do all the renovations at one time. For me, at least, there’s a big difference between spending $1000 to replace all the switches in the house and spending $100 to replace a couple switches every month or so. Big difference between spending the whole weekend re-wiring switches and a quick after-coffee task.