A design in this vein might want to keep moving control surfaces locked down in all but extraordinary circumstances: spin recovery or flameout. Maximum g turns? For that matter, it's not crazy to think that they'd want to keep the moving control surfaces available for takeoff and landing.
I went through this idea in my head reading the sibling speculations about civilian use and discarded the idea: when you have the control surfaces, there's no cost in using them. In terms of aerodynamic inefficiency I'd expect it to be a tie at best, both are disturbances that make the flow worse to achieve an effect.
If they do discover a way to improve aerodynamic qualities with compressed air, chances are civilian aircraft would just switch it on whenever it helps and keep control going through conventional control surfaces just like before.
This urban/rural divide happens all the time. Someone else in this thread mentioned gun laws as one example. My personal example is in Pennsylvania, the state legislature passed a bill[1] appointing an unelected special prosecutor to handle public transit crime. It affects most of the city of Philadelphia (and nowhere else in PA) and overrides the democratically elected DA that state Republicans don't like (and who they unsuccessfully tried to impeach). The yes vote? Mostly rural lawmakers imposing their will on urban voters who have no ability to have a say in who this special prosecutor will be.
Google discworld reading order, pick a storyline that is similar to genres you like (the guard books are copper fiction, the Lipwig books are inverted heist novels, the Rincewind books are classic fantasy by way of Oxford University culture, etc.)
Heinlein's law:
Arguing that a given scifi author's view of future society makes sense will always essentially reduce to arguing that the author's politics are correct.
I don't think that's _really_ what the article's doing, but in any case such arguments are generally about whether the author's view is _internally consistent_, rather than a historical inevitability.
I disagree. I think one can see plausibility in multiple interpretations of the future. The Culture "makes sense" to me in the same way that The Expanse's view of intra-system colonization efforts. I find the capitalist nature of the world in Pandora's Star "makes sense" same as the Culture. To me it's about seeing the possibility of a future built on a recognizable seed of plausibility for "what could be."
Reminds me somewhat of roman concrete; archeologists were under the impression that roman concrete was poorly mixed due to various hydroreactive additives, that were thought to have been accidentally added during the mixing process.
It turned out these additives grant self healing properties to the structure, as when cracks appear revealing the additives, they expand to fill the crack.
