As your dumb ass was typing that, The big orange Nazi (R) is having his DOJ sue in federal court to have this Minnesota state law overturned.

Beyond that, this isn't even a partisan issue. This is about "tribes." Reservation casinos. You see, moron, Minnesota tribes don't want competition for wager money in the People's Republic of Minnesota. They oppose any attempt to introduce additional gambling beyond what was already established before their rise in influence: sports betting, prediction markets, whatever. Being a cultural pressure group, their casino money pays for lots of (D)s in the state legislature. And those (D)s do their job, outlawing what they're told and mouthing stuff about "safety" or whatever, providing a plausible narrative.

So congratulations. You're officially a Useful Idiot.

Someone failed to equip you with adequate cynicism. Upbringing issues.

It's an electric rocket system. They've aggressively eliminated all possible hydraulics. Gimbling rocket engines and flap articulation is all electric in Starship V3 and booster stage. So is cryogenic recirc. All that stuff has to react rapidly to achieve the agility necessary for the insane flight profile they have; slow gear trains won't cut it; so they have dozens of the most powerful direct drive actuators our species has yet devised.

Also, 9 MW isn't all that much. It's about 12,000 HP, or what you get from a modest gas turbine, or a few diesel locomotives. Naval vessels use gas turbines of that size for on-board power generation.

It's Expressif, and they can at least legitimately claim to have actual novel silicon that targets "edge" AI, including speech and imaging processing, and integrated vector instructions for AI.

Cynicism approved.

I have the good fortune to be a mosquito repellent, for whatever reason. Not that I don't get bit, but everyone else seems to get a lot more attention.

Gloria lives in a bubble, and made the mistake of thinking her extremely comfortable, highly secure bubble was the whole world. That's not surprising. Gloria only moves among other bubble people, from one gated bubble pad to the next, in her bubble transport system, where they don't talk about the turbo-fans and ICE V8's that power it all, or the staggering quantity of power it takes to climate control everything in her bubble world.

That's not new. We're ruled by such bubble folk, indulging their bubble concerns, pursing their moral panics, signaling their virtues, and carefully ignoring all else beyond the bubble.

What's new here is this: the consequences of this have reached the privileged students of our prestigious academic system. Suddenly it's not just the hoi polloi on the shit end of the stick. Johnny Winston-Blake IV is also having his future deleted by the bubble people. And he's mad about it.

..."Okay. We've got a bipolar topic here I see"
No. There is no bi-polarity. And the people booing you are not mentally ill.
The students hate that you think it's the greatest new thing.
And they love the time it did not exist.

To use a much overused term where it's actually appropriate:
When you try to convince people their view is invalid and they are mentally ill (bipolar), you are not merely disagreeing with them; you are gaslighting them.

people. Just spray a little Ubik on it and it'll be all better.

"Hey, what's the big deal? We used to append 'P.S. I love you. Get your free email at Hotmail' to every outgoing email way back in the day, and no one ever had a problem with that..."

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That's pretty crazy. 100% US Grade A clown-world right there.

It's all easy wins. Winning a war is hard. This is just chips, software and data.

The 120kW figure is indeed input power. Thrust is typically quoted in Newtons, not Watts. The input power is useful because it's a proxy for thrust and vastly easier to measure. Ultimately, none of that really matters, however: the real figure of merit for ion engines (all rockets, really) is Specific Impulse. When NASA claims these use 90% less mass for the same total impulse, they're saying it's about one order of magnitude more propellant-efficient than a chemical rocket.