In 1982, I read Herman Kahn&#x27;s <i>The Next 200 Years</i> and got pumped about power from nuclear fusion. The tokamak was hot and the wisdom at the time was that it was 20 years away. I talked with my Dad, he said fusion power had been 20 years away since he was also 17. It&#x27;s still looks like it&#x27;s 20 years away.<p>My point isn&#x27;t that practical fusion power is a scam. But <i>to me</i> it doesn&#x27;t look appreciably closer to practicality than cold fusion and a whole lot more money has been spent on it [which as a metric of grift is probably among the better ones]. Which is to say that my point is that what constitutes a scam is in the eye of the beholder. We celebrate Charles Babbage.