Federal money goes into the pockets of US corporations, spare weapons using the same tech "mysteriously" show up around the world in the hands of extremist groups the US openly condemns, and everyone involved gets to pat themselves on the backs for "supporting the Jewish people" as their stock portfolios climb.
No, all the danger to children comes from satanic pedophiles cold-messaging strangers from trailer parks in hell. Billionaires can always be trusted with sensitive data and photos of children. Parents also notoriously never do anything bad to their children.
9 months is a typical direct transfer, using a traditional rocket engine whose thrust is so high you can basically treat it as infinite: accelerate up to your transfer speed in a few minutes and coast until you need to slow down in a similarly negligible amount of time. You need to set a lot of gas on fire in those few minutes, though. Electric propulsion is so low thrust that it can't put you on that kind of direct trajectory in one go, so the trip is more of a slow spiral around the sun with continuous thrust the whole way. The tradeoff for everything taking forever is unbelievable fuel savings, which is a surprisingly common occurrence in space travel.
The playful and wise goblinbot....
Time tends to sand off the rough edges of any organization that wants to keep pulling in new members and that doesn't need a framework of total control to protect itself from fizzling out early. It's an evolutionary process, not just historical whitewashing. Though it's also historical whitewashing.
Not even two spines, there's some almost impressive Escheresque fuckery going on with how the page of the book he's writing in is actually the cover of another? Good to know people "care" about children with disabilities enough to spend extra money on worse textbooks just for them, but not enough to actually read them, I guess.
He was all over TV the other day, joining the crowds to attend the ridiculous Nakba day propaganda ceremony. I have no doubts he's been in just fine health lately, and if anything he's been playing up how unwell he is to get out of court dates over and over again for months. The other big reason for his recent disappearance from public view is the likelihood of his beach house getting another knock on the door from a Shahed, maybe luckier this time.
Most of the energy from the rocket that launched the satellite went into pushing it fast sideways. If you wanted to slow it down enough to drop straight down, you'd just about need a second rocket to stop it.
Yeah, it's upsetting how much I've ended up thinking back to the crap arms race for how casual a plot detail it is, and how much more apt that descriptor is for LLMs than most other sci-fi conceptualizations of AI.
At this point, especially with Fall, I think he just has a tendency to pick up and run with whatever cool idea techbros are into at the moment without any real regard for how seriously people take it as a belief, resulting in a bunch of conveniently packaged, reader-gratifying ideological vignettes for said techbros to latch onto as a coherent vision and complete the cycle. I don't think he ever meant to genuinely promote the metaverse or digital money laundering or acausal brain hell or space eugenics, but he seems chronically incapable of mounting a systemic critique of any of his subjects in a style that demands a good guy crypto billionaire, likably clueless cultist, or badass geneticist to outsmart the Islamic terrorists, alien special forces, and conniving cosmonauts and save the day.
I do still find it somewhat concerning how many of his plots come down to "80% of everyone are mindless sheeple enthralled by a higher power," though.
I continue to be endlessly fascinated by Anathem, by virtue of enjoying it as a kid for the wacky speculative metaphysics, enjoying it as an adult for the case study it presents in how Neal Stephenson can get you nodding along to a set of faux-lectures strung together by road tripping until he gets you to an obviously false conclusion, and now the fact that The Wick is apparently what rationalists actually believe in, just substituting simulations and reality-hacking for quantum woo and nukes? The ~~Incanter~~ Basilisk can entrap your consciousness by manipulating which ~~timelines your brain is quantum-entangled with~~ coexisting copies of your psyche exist in the multimetaverse and selecting among them to ~~give you quantum immortality~~ 51% attack you into the Matrix, I guess.
Ask the average Mizrahi restaurant worker living in a moldy studio sublet in Rehovoth what good that weapon money is doing them. The upper classes of both countries make out just fine, everyone else suffers.