Right. An aircraft of the state flag carrier or France, operating the product of a state subsidized aircraft manufacturer, crashed because capitalism.

Also, commie airplanes never crash.

This incident required the combination of an incompetent crew and a faulty design. Without both, that particular flight would have ended without incident.

So the fault is shared, and the real criminals are in the boardrooms.

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.

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.

Who cares. This stuff is still in its infancy, and new algorithms and new hardware is going to collapse all of this to commodity level value anyhow. A few years from now you'll buy a GTP-5.x/Mythos equivalent in a box for gaming console money.

Stop huffing trumps farts. If you want to know what bad policy looks like, it's the current administration. It's objectively awful. Project 2025 was awful before the election, and it still is awful, and it's what trump is doing. Runaway inflation? You mean like what we have now? And war? You're a fucking dipshit to even attempt to bring any of this up as if somehow Democrats are bad. What is happening how is the "this is fine" meme come to life, and you're the dog in that picture.

Why do you think I support anything this administration is doing? Why do you even assume I'm a Republican? I can assure you what Trump is doing is absolutely worse than what Biden did. I can also assure you that you didn't lose because your candidate had a vagina. Believe it or not, both can be true.

They lost their fucking minds because Democrats put up a woman to vote for (twice), and apparently America is very misogynistic.

Ah yes, this old chestnut. Any excuse to not accept any bad policy responsibility. That election result was stupid obvious. Biden was an unpopular president due to a number of bad policies (the most glaringly obvious being a failed border policy) + runaway inflation. Republicans jumped on it and Harris did nothing to distance herself from Biden, even when asked point blank what her policy differences were. Stop kidding yourself -- gender didn't matter at all, and you continue to keep thinking in these terms, you're going to lose again when you run another shitty candidate "of the correct gender" and wonder why you lost again.