"A citizen is going to have his head cut off over tweets on an anonymous account with less than 10 followers," one rights group said.

Saudi Arabia has sentenced to death a government critic who denounced alleged corruption and human rights abuses on social media, his brother and others familiar with the case told AFP on Monday.

The judgement was handed down against Mohammed al-Ghamdi in July by the Specialized Criminal Court, a secretive institution established in 2008 to try terrorism cases that has a history of unfair trials resulting in death sentences.

The charges against al-Ghamdi include conspiracy against the Saudi leadership, undermining state institutions and supporting terrorist ideology, sources briefed on the details of the case told AFP.

  • @IntralexicalEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    We spent more on the Manhattan project than the disorganized fusion projects have spent in a decade, and will spend in the next decade as well.

    That cost was overwhelmingly slanted towards implementation though, not research. The theory for fission was very simple compared to nuclear fusion: Gather enough fissile material in one place rapidly, and it explodes. Once the basic parameters and theory were proven, the actual project cost went overwhelmingly to just enriching enough nuclear material and then, separately, getting the Silverplate Superfortresses ready. They were so sure of the science that they didn’t even bother to test the bomb they dropped on Hiroshima. It wasn’t like fusion research at all, where for over half a century every new device that’s supposed to produce power instead just discovers new plasma instabilities which mean it simply doesn’t work.

    Also, the cost comparison you’ve made is simply false. The Manhattan project cost no more than $20-30 billion, inflation-adjusted. ITER’s cost (from 2008 through to ~2025) is going to be at least €22 billion, and apparently $65 billion if the US is to be believed. That’s of course not even counting the various other “disorganized fusion projects”, like the ongoing operating costs for W7X, the NIF, JET, and whatever the Z machine, Shiva star, etc., and assorted Chalk Los Sandia Livermore national laboratories are doing for fusion research. Still worth it, probably— Hell, if it cost $10 trillion, it would probably still be worth it, as long as it actually works— But let’s not pretend it’s cheap or free or a safe bet or easy solution.

    Thorium is a safe bet, but it also needs significant research.

    On the other hand, why not both?

    That would be far too much foresight, obviously.

    …But there’s also never enough resources to go around, and you don’t want to be the country that sank all its money into a technology that didn’t pan out.