I think you're missing the fundamental economic issue that drives all of this. It's the provision of essentially infinite amounts of credit. This is done by government, not banks. Essentially all home loans come from Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, banks and finance companies are really just front-ends for them and sell their loans to the government once financed.

Given infinite credit, any scarce but necessary resource is going to be bid to absurd values.

It is by no means being a hippie to assert that government should not distort the market for credit, and to expect that urban and suburban land values would return to more realistic rates once the distortion was removed. Too bad that lots of people have already invested in unrealistic land values. They would have to lose.

Superconductors just exclude magnetic flux. I am not getting how it matters what produces the magnetic flux - be it ferromagnetic or electromagnetic. My only Meissner effect demo used a permanent magnet.

We have nVidia helping but not making their own Open Source driver. Intel, after a long period of Open Drivers, said it would require BLOBs for future graphical interfaces. AMD helps with Open Drivers more than nVidia so far but doesn't support them.

Maybe you need a Slashdot License. They come from the Ministry of Housinge.

There is no theoretical reason that a room-temperature superconductor cannot exist.

Room-temperature superconductors would be really cool. It's not clear that electromagnetic propulsion gets you to orbit, though. Once there, sure it works.

Multiple-Tesla fields that are changing their orientation rapidly in time aren't particularly healthy to be around. Induced currents in your nerves, heating, etc. That MRI field is acceptable because it's DC. That is, if you don't have any ferromagnetic objects on you.

No, the superconductors are not simple magnets.

What's on the tele then?

Rockets being the only solution does not automatically mean rockets are a viable solution. Please quit ignoring the real challenges presented.

Unfortunately, this can't be approached as an engineering problem and get the result you would like. It needs to be approached as a problem in fundamental research of the physics underlying our world.

There were lots of efforts to miniaturize the vacuum tube. They only resulted in smaller tubes. It took new insights in fundamental physics before people could understand how to make a transistor. There were many experiments with germanium (a natural semiconductor) that could have led to the transistor before 1947 if anyone had understood what was happening.

Some steel. Not all of them. That's why the refrigerator magnet doesn't stick to that silver door.

A field strong enough to work on water would kill you first.

Look at the amount of money made on oscillococcinum, and you might agree it's a successful hack to make money from the stupidity of others.

This would be cool if it was more than a stage trick. The superconductor needed to do this used to be mail-ordered from Edmund Scientific. So lots of hackers were doing levitation demonstrations in the 90's. People think it's cool because they've not lived through that, or have forgotten it.

It works on the principle of superconductors excluding a magnetic field. When they are cooled to liquid nitrogen temperatures. Steel is low in ferromagnetism and isn't as good a conductor as copper so it's not as good for making electromagnets.

Well, I did that once with a bottle of liquid nitrogen from Airco and a superconductor I bought from Edmund Scientific. This was before there was a Slashdot. So, no, not impressive.

Before someone makes a working hoverboard, we will first hear about the principle that makes it possible. Because one that's practical is almost guaranteed to get someone a Nobel Prize. And certainly Lexus would go for that if they could.

No new principles lately. There is an existing principle of magnetic repulsion that would work only in an extreme condition. One requiring really special stuff buried in the street, and probably including liquid nitrogen to keep it working for even a short time and a few feet.

So, it's a gimmick.

Kerbal space program says you need a REALLY big rocket

The article itself mentions they are working on the BFR (nod to Doom, Big Fucking Rocket).

Presumably the actual rocket engineers at SpaceX can also run Kerbal...