Shivatron

> Saying things is not a war crime.

On the contrary, there appear to be good legal arguments that Hegseth merely saying "no quarter" is, on its own, a war crime:

https://www.justsecurity.org/133970/legal-advice-hegseth-no-...

It seems extremely relevant. Your argument suggests the president need only appoint a subordinate who will themselves give the desired illegal order without the president's public command. In the unlikely event the subordinate is called to account, the president can simply pardon them.

This is certainly not a hypothetical "parade of horribles", since Trump has already pardoned military officers convicted of war crimes.[1]

1. https://apnews.com/article/257e4b17a3c7476ea3007c0861fa97e8

> A lot of these important projects have a single point of failure - who is the president every four years. I wonder how we build institutions and resources resilient to that?

We already did. The legislative branch allocates funds for stuff that the people deem worthy. That budget becomes law. The Constitution says the "President shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." There's even a specific law that prevents the President from withholding Congressionally-approved funds.

What you are seeing here is not a lack of designed resilience, it's the wilful removal of that system.

I took 3t208—thank you!

You probably know this, but for the GP:

It's not clear whether the 1500 hour rule directly improved safety. Both the Colgan captain and the FO had more than 1500 hours at the time of the accident. What the rule did unambiguously is severely restrict the supply of new pilots to regional airlines. This significantly improved quality of life for regional pilots, who prior to Colgan were effectively making minimum wage or worse. (That may have indirectly improved safety, by making pilots more well-rested and fed...)

Another point of comparison is Europe, which has a not-dissimilar safety record, but still allows FOs to have 250 hours. That said, from what I understand, they have a very different training culture where students start in a multi-crew environment very early.

A two-wheel drive vehicle with an open differential is limited in acceleration by only one wheel (the drive wheel with the least traction). However, braking is always the combined effect of all wheels.

> The steer is basically not higher than the frame. Very bad for back, shoulders and wrists. ... That position is not maintainable for a longer time, especially if you're a desk worker.

A slight forward lean is desirable. Sitting bolt upright on a bike makes it very hard to engage your biggest, most efficient muscles: your glutes and hamstrings. This is also why the "athletic position" is universal to just about every physical activity; the slight crouch is similar to the natural position on a bike. Those larger muscles help stabilize your pelvis, reducing the force on your shoulders, arms, and wrists. https://www.pedalpt.com/upright-bicycling/

(There are other benefits too—the bike's handling improves as weight is balanced between the front and rear wheels and the center of gravity is lowered—but I'll assume we're talking about purely recreational/daily needs riding where such concerns are secondary.)

Critics of the Taycan Turbo badging usually make some argument about "Turbo" meaning the-model-that-has-turbocharger(s), but Porsche hasn't been consistent about that for some time. The iconic 911 Turbo is turbocharged, but since 2015 the regular non-Turbo 911 is as well.

(Next we can discuss whether a "Mustang" is a kind of horse, a two-door sports car, a four-door electric crossover, or...)

> ... it could be a fantastic tool for an affordable, fast commute.

I understand the attraction to owning your own plane and buzzing merrily above the wheel-bound masses below on the daily, but I have to think it's a bad idea (avgas or electric). I think of all the times I've overslept, needed to be at the office unexpectedly, forgot to put some air in the car tires, should get that warning light looked at, etc... phrases that are usually at the start of an NTSB report.

The beauty of airlines and charters is that you're paying them, at least in part, to tell you "no, we're not flying right now." Turns out it can be hard to do for yourself when your job depends on it.

Wanted to plug this; no connection other than being a subscriber. It's well-written, not spammy in the slightest, and a good overview of what's interesting in commercial spaceflight—especially for someone like me (physics background but no industry connection).

Probably not. First of all, "bravo tree uppercase delta mike uppercase quebec" isn't as memorable as "mouse hat door". Further, the NATO alphabet works because both the speaker and the listener understand what's coming. If the listener isn't familiar, then the speaker often needs to revert to "s as in sierra, k as in kilo, y as in yankee"—which tends to cause even more confusion as the listener then needs to parse the (intentionally) unusual set of words.

As others have said, this is incorrect. Quickly planning a flight in ForeFlight from LAX direct JFK for a Citation X (a midsize, 12-passenger business jet) at Mach 0.8/FL510 gives a fuel burn of 6700 lbs. The same flight in a 737-900ER (~180 seats in three class configuration) at Mach 0.8/FL390 gives 22500 lbs. Even assuming the Citation has only 6 souls aboard, that's ~1000 lbs/pax for the private jet and ~125 lbs/pax for the 739—"only" 8x worse.

Edit: I neglected to convert for the average American's carbon footprint (about 16500 kg CO2/yr as stated elsewhere in the thread). Each of the 6 Citation pax emits (21 lbs CO2/gal * 1000 lbs / 6.7 lbs/gal) = ~3.1k lbs CO2, or ~1400 kg CO2 during the flight—about 1/10 of the average yearly footprint.

As an instrument-rated pilot, I reject your brazen assertion that radio work is "by far the hardest part of flying a plane." Are you speaking from personal experience, or do you have some data to back up this claim?

From an instrument proficiency point of view, I'm much more worried about efficiently understanding the information on the approach plate, maintaining situational awareness with respect to the approach path, adhering to minimums, and so on. Missed something that a controller said? "Say again." There's a reason it's aviate, navigate, and communicate--in that order.

Some additional observations on Mattermost (currently on 4.0.0.43 of the OS X desktop client)

1. The contact list interface lacks in a couple obvious ways. At the top there is an "Unreads" list, except there is a different unread list depending on which Team you're in. Except maybe it's not different, because unread Direct Messages will always appear in Unread, but unread Channels will only appear in their Team. There's also no option to sort anything contact-related: you have to have your Channels at the top (Public, Private), then your Direct Messages, subsorted alphabetically. (In particular, you can't sort by "most recent", so if you're chatting with 5 people during the day and you have 40 people in your DM list up, good luck finding them after they're marked as read.)

2. There is a keyboard shortcut for "Switch Channels" (Command-K), which you can use to send a DM to someone—but you can't use it to send a DM to two people at once (ie. typing Command-K+"alice" sends a DM to Alice, but typing Command-K+ "alice, bob" does nothing).

3. It's incredible that the native client will mark you as "Away" when you're working on your computer if the Mattermost app is not in focus.

4. I guess this is hard to get around given that there are slash-commands, but if I had a dime for every time I tried to paste a path and Mattermost said "Command with a trigger of '/home/shivatron/foo' not found...", I'd be a rich man.

5. Speaking of paste, I'm glad the message character limit got increased from 4000 to ~16k in 5.0. Does it offer to automagically truncate like Slack, or do I still have to delete some characters and try again in a loop until the message sends?

I read an awesome comment on HN the other day that I think applies here: something to the effect of, “some seem to think that the law is a simple robot that is easily bamboozled by specious arguments.”

In other words, it’s probably unwise to think that going 100kts in a part 103 certified ultralight will meet with regulatory approval because the VSI reads +1 fpm.

There are two packs, one forward and one aft, each 53 kg (~117 lbs) for a total of 106 kg (~234 lbs).

For comparison, the same weight of avgas (39 gal) will fly a Cessna 172 for just under 4 hours with reserves (assuming 9 gph), compared to the the Alpha’s 60 minutes.

Somewhat famously, Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson is an Airline Transport Pilot with a type rating in the 747, enabling him to fly his band's own plane.

> why on earth do you build chemicals plant that have a risk to explode near habitations ?!!

At least part of the answer -- at least, here in Texas -- is "because you can." Lax or nonexistent zoning laws have long exacerbated damage caused by industrial accidents, a posture state lawmakers continue to defend because it is seen as "pro-business." [1]

It seems to me this is simply socializing the externalities of running, say, a fertilizer or organic peroxide plant, but that seems to be an unpopular view statewide.

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/10/us/after-plant-explosion-t...

As an aside, I like reading Jane Street's blog. They're one of the few companies in our space (I'm also in "automated trading") that discusses even non-proprietary stuff openly. When you work in an information vacuum, it's comforting to know that presumably similar people face the same challenges.

When the author wrote "a particular production bash script (if that doesn't sound horrifying, hopefully it will by the end of this post)," I couldn't help but smile...

> Go to your local flight school and 99% of the time you'll just see a row of 1970s Cessnas/Pipers.

This neatly illustrates why: http://i.imgur.com/Un22IYK.png

It's not just certification, either. Product liability accounts for a large part of this increase: "Average cost of manufacturer's liability insurance for each airplane manufactured in the U.S. had risen from approximately $50 per plane in 1962 to $100,000 per plane in 1988." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Aviation_Revitalizatio...)

I assume you have the luxury of an unambiguous birthday (eg. 01-13). I imagine if I wrote 11-12 on a form without regard to what the specific spaces say, it would be regularly misinterpreted in the US.

You make reasonable and just points. However, while I agree with everything you have to say, surely the solution is not to legislate the existence of your notional worker's factory -- as the subject proposal would likely do for the coal power industry.

One would hope that the public would demand reasonable severance, assistance for relocation and retraining, et cetera, so that change becomes less dauntless. To reiterate the second point in this thread, history has shown that "digging in" is usually the exact opposite of what should be done.

As a Canadian expat, my experience was nearly identical to FireBeyond's upon moving to the US. As you suggest, I was able to get a store credit card, then it was over a year (during which I never used the store card at all) before I was even considered for a regular credit card. If that's not symptomatic of a broken process, I'm not sure what is...

> Getting into a routine is a big thing (and a thing I struggle with sometimes) with improving health and well-being (imo).

I will also add -- at the risk of stating the obvious -- having a community (real or virtual) of people who share like priorities helps as well. It's a lot harder to skip your daily bike ride if you're riding with other people, et cetera.

(An anecdote from my personal life: I have a "race car" and I also race bicycles. The apparent health of the two communities diverges dramatically with age -- so much so that as a relatively young person, I remind myself that I should work extra hard to remain a part of one community, even if it's at the expense of the other...)

Grandparent was suggesting that 80-bit, not 80-character, passwords were sufficient -- though I agree as a rule that more characters is generally better.

"Bankers" is obviously a broad term, but I'd point out that just about everyone employed in the financial industry in a role where they are giving advice or soliciting/executing transactions have very strict licensing and continuing education requirements. Just look at the list of FINRA licensing exams: http://www.finra.org/industry/qualification-exams

(Of course, even licensed persons may choose to make poor choices. That said, I've taken a few of those exams, and they are no joke.)

This is absolutely the right answer. Too often, internet arguments about the merits of various formats devolve to more film/sensor == more resolution, when nothing could be further from the truth.

Case in point: I once mounted a 150mm large format lens into a cardboard box and taped some Provia 100 inside the box opposite the lens. The resulting image takes up a huge amount of film (roughly 6cm x 17cm), but despite having a decent lens, the resulting image isn't all that great... of course, a cardboard box can't keep the lens square to the box, sucks at keeping the film flat, and even if you managed to get a perfect exposure it's very hard to keep a large negative (positive in this case) flat enough to get a decent dry scan.

(Here's the image, BTW: https://www.flickr.com/photos/shivatron/2384597928 .)

While I can tell the difference (6/6 in this test), in practice, it doesn't actually matter to me personally. I'm usually listening to music while there are a cacophony of other noises going on (talking/cooking/driving), so the slight difference in the way cymbals are rendered or the loss of nuance in a large bass hit are far from the primary degradations to my listening experience...

The typos are in the OP's screenshot; the grandparent reflects the corrected titles.

The idea that Donald Marron (who argues "we ought to allocate the initial property right to the person likely to care most about reclining... the person sitting behind") is wrong simply because the author has never had anyone attempt to negotiate with him is specious. If I spread out across two seats on a busy subway, I would probably also say I "rarely had anyone complain... and nobody has ever offered me money."

(I also find the whole tall-privilege angle interesting, especially given the vitriolic way he framed the debate on Twitter -- "The world favors the tall, yet they have the gall to whine about the one place (airplanes) where height costs them" -- but being 6'6" I'll leave that aside lest I be accused of advancing some sort of tall agenda.)