danjayh

You're ignoring one of the biggest things in the divide between the 'haves' and the 'broke': many of Gen-Z are deciding not to have kids, despite the negative effects that this profoundly selfish act has on society. Much easier to live a luxury lifestyle if you're not spending $50k/year on childcare, buying an extra 500-900sqft of housing, buying food for an extra 2-3 people, buying a car with a third row, and buying a never-ending stream of car seats, clothes, toys, diapers, shoes, books, gadgets, etc.

These same selfish people will be angry when any break at all is given to a colleague do to family circumstances (daycare closed for the day? kids have the flu?), but will expect to be taken care of just like the rest of us when they get old, despite the fact that they didn't contribute any children into the labor pool to provide for that care.

Wealthy? No. Flush with rapidly devaluing cash? Yes. A family of 5 with with 2 parents and 3 kids under 6 years old got a total of $19,300 (counting the monthly child credit payments), provided they didn't go over any of the arbitrary income thresholds.

Very true. A family of 5 with 3 toddlers making $50k/yr got $19,300 in stimulus and expanded child tax credit, whereas that same family would have gotten considerably less if they had a $200k/yr income. It would seem that the benefit of the economic stimulus was rather intentionally concentrated at the bottom and middle of the income curve, obviating the need for private charitable contributions. Let's also not forget that those in the top 20% already pay nearly 80% of the taxes, kinda seems like they're already doing more than their share.

Not sure where you live, but a family of two adults and 3 kids got $13,900 in stimulus checks so far in the USA, not counting the expanded child tax credits (which would be another $5400 if the kids are young, dispersed in $900 monthly payments for the last 6 months of the year).

Even a single adult with no kids would have gotten $3,200 so far.

I mean, damn, how much is rent in your city?

https://www.pgpf.org/blog/2021/03/what-to-know-about-all-thr...

Not on the desktop...

It's different. Earth already has intelligent life. Mars and the moon do not.

If you look at the blacklists they're using, they're going to hit basically all news that even touches on politics. That's bad, because it'll prevent news companies from informing voters. When blacklists begin including words like "Brexit", "Trump", "Crash", "Accident", etc. it begins to have a real impact on outlets that are reporting on current events. This leads to crap like "The 10 retirement mistakes that Millenials are making!"

It was a problem with the engine, not the airframe. The 787 ships with Rolls-Royce and GE engines - the GE equipped ones are fine. Boeing manufactures the planes, and then works with engine manufacturers to offer various options for powering them. The airlines choose which engines they'd like to install on their aircraft.

GE, for all of its faults as a corporation (the stock price is what, $9-something now?), makes very good jet engines.

You don't need to. You just need to know that the module as a whole has a fault. Reboot the module and let the hot spare take over (all critical functions have a hot spare).

Curious - what do the people making > 300k/year do? According to GlassDoor, even in San Francisco you have to be a director or VP to get that. Even Software Architects seem to be in the $150-$250k range, and that tends to be a high-paying post on the technical side.

Aren't these salaries for new grads? I wonder if the gap between the high earners and the low earners narrows with experience.

And this is why I like Boeing's new manned capsule better than the one from SpaceX:

Boeing: https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2018/08/boeing-starliner-cre...

SpaceX: https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/atk7lokher... (I despise Gizmodo, so it's a deep link for this one)

Airbus jets carry passengers and have been fly-by-wire for decades. Cables and hydraulics have been replaced with software and computers. Like it or not, the software and hardware that make up the flight computer are an integral part of the airframe on most newly produced passenger jets, regardless of who makes them.

"The fault occurs when bits inside the microprocessor are randomly flipped from 0 to 1 or vice versa. This is a known phenomenon that can happen due to cosmic rays striking the circuitry."

This is called Single Event Upset. For all those of you that aren't in the industry, essentially the problem is that any bit inside the flight computer (RAM, cache, NVM, registers - ANY bit) can change state randomly at ANY time. It's rare, but when you get into millions of flight hours, it WILL happen. The software and hardware have to be designed to mitigate problems caused by this behavior.

Airbus does it too. They have several control laws that are used to provide flight envelope protection. It was the pilot's failure to understand his plane's software that caused AF447 to crash. Essentially he didn't realize that the flight control software had changed modes, that it wasn't providing the normal handling augmentations, and that his inputs were putting the aircraft into a stall, which caused the crash.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447

https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/62338/why-did-a...

You clearly have absolutely no background in aerospace engineering. The 737 airframe is actually relatively stable compared to many other things that fly ... for instance, many high-performance jets will literally begin to oscillate and tear themselves apart without help from their flight computers. The flight computer is a part of the airframe, and it is perfectly valid for the flight computer to contribute to the airframe's handling characteristics. Boeing's mistake was in underestimating the burden placed on the pilots in a runaway trim situation, and assuming that pilots could execute a recovery procedure correctly that remained unchanged from prior iterations but that had also been rarely needed on prior iterations (vs. the MAX, where MCAS failures were common enough that an average pilot might actually need to execute the procedure).

For those who are outside of the industry, the article is probably not completely accurate. I don't know specifically about the 737 MAX, but for many of their other newer airframes (787, upcoming 777x), Boeing relies on a concept called 'high integrity at the source'. Essentially, two complete copies of the flight computer hardware are put on a single card and they cross-compare their results. If you're looking for a bit of dense reading material on the subject, you might find a related patent application interesting: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9170907

People should also understand that a 'good investment' and a 'wealth building tool' are not necessarily the same thing. Consider a world in which housing only keeps up with inflation, and few people ever raid their home equity to buy stuff (the way it was traditionally). The house then truly is a good wealth-building tool - a savings account that most people never touch, that pays interest in the form of rent savings, and that can be liquidated in old age to use the funds. This view of things is not at odds with affordable housing, and I think is more in line with the traditional view of housing as a wealth building tool. Traditionally people didn't expect to strike it rich by buying a house.

The solution here is going to be to have MCAS automatically disengage when the two sensors disagree, which will change the stall behavior automatically. Airbus has the same problem, and so will any manufacturer that introduces computer augmented flight characteristics in their aircraft. If a component of the computerized flight control system fails, the flight characteristics of the aircraft will change. In fact, Airbus has had a similar crash: in that instance, a pilot was pulling full back on the stick thinking that the aircraft was unstallable, but one of the sensors (airspeed, maybe? can't remember) was disabled (by icing, if I remember) and the aircraft had changed to a different flight control law that didn't have the anti-stall function. Splash.

Eh, I googled it for you people. It was air france 447: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447

The article implies that the test stand was running at a fixed frequency. This makes me suspect that this has to be designed to interfere with transmission of sound at a specific frequency, and perhaps isn't capable of eliminating more complex sounds like voices or music.

Also, they plan to tax ride sharing (which people have shown demand for) and use the money to improve public transit infrastructure (which people have shown distaste for). Why, why, aren't taxes like this directed to improve the infrastructure for the services that are being taxed? Elon Musk is on the right track - build out more roads, under the city, to improve capacity and reduce congestion. Don't burn the money on a service with ridership numbers that are in freefall.

Imagine if a private company substantially raised the price of its premier product (streaming movies, for example) to build tons of infrastructure for the product that nobody wants (DVD distribution hubs, for example) and neglected to build out the infrastructure required for the product in demand. It'd be gone overnight. This is absolute insanity.

The real solution:

- Tax all road users - most easily accomplished through license/registration taxes (IE, you pay an annual fee for a sticker that gives you permission to drive your car/bus/truck in the taxed area) and fuel taxes - By statute, require the money to be spent to improve/expand the road infrastructure - Where pollution is a problem, (optionally) spend a portion of the tax to build out EV infrastructure, and encourage EV use by charging reduced fees to EV users - Subsidize use of ride-sharing type services for people who would normally use public transit services

This would provide efficient, clean, point-to-point transit services for ALL users. Economically disadvantaged folks could finally stop paying the hidden 'poor people transit tax' (increased transit times).

And based on my brief research on this specific pipeline (which appears to have been scrapped), the gas was to be used for power generation. There was also a proposal for a 320KV transmission line to import power instead, which appears to be going ahead. Personally, I would 1000x rather have a gas pipeline transit my land than a 320kv transmission line. Residential proximity to HV transmission lines increases risk of leukaemia ... at least gas lines can be monitored for leaks & repaired. The people who scuttled this seem to ignore that the dense urban development that they love requires importation of energy in some form from far-flung places.

You are correct. In fact, one cruise line did attempt to build a ship in the USA during the early 2000s for the purpose of running cruises in Hawaii. The project was a disaster. Norwegian Cruise Lines bought the ship's carcass, towed it to Germany, and had it turned into an actual passenger vessel. They were given special dispensation to run the cruises anyway when it was finished.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_of_America

This is why you also (annoyingly) can't go on a cruise between solely American ports (IE, Hawaii island tour; California->Hawaii; Washington->Alaska; eastern/southern/western seaboard tour) without stopping someplace else. Typically, they use Canada for western/eastern cruises.

> there has to be a better way than to put protected national land at risk.

Please explain where the high risk is ... explosions in the middle of nowhere aren't going to hurt much, and if their are leaks, the gas will simply vent into the atmosphere rather than cause the kind of damage that oil spills do.

Seems like firing up coal plants in heavily populated regions (the current alternative) is worse. In terms of heat and power generation in cloudy regions, natural gas is vastly superior to everything except nuclear for cleanliness and co2/gigawatt-hour... and if cost is considered, it beats out nuclear too.

How so? Seems like they should be able to move to a smaller city and live in an area that doesn't have capacity roadway capacity problems as well...

Can one of the people downvoting this into oblivion please explain? If a midsized city with little congestion could provide subsidized point-to-point transit for those who need it at a comparable cost to operating a bus system, what is the possible downside? This would be hugely beneficial to the people actually using the service, since they get all the time back that would have otherwise been spent waiting on transit services.

Agreed. I have used scooters in stores on days when my knees are unbearably bad. You'd be amazed how many people will give an otherwise healthly looking, reasonably fit/thin 37 year old guy dirty looks for what they assume is a joy ride.

Mobility scooters don't work so well in 3 inches of slushy snow (unless they make them with wheelchair sized wheels?) In any case, my area swings from -5f and lower on the cold winter days to 105f+ on the hot summer days, so anything that's not climate controlled is fairly unpleasant. We just hired in some contractors from the west cost, and we're predicted to have 12" of snow on Monday, a full day of sub-0f on Wednesday, and a -10f night the weekend after. They're quickly learning a lot about West Michigan weather :).

Fair enough. In those jurisdictions that still have problems, perhaps regulations requiring hybrid and/or plug-in hybrid vehicles make sense. This can't be done at a national level because the benefit of these vehicles falls off dramatically in areas that experience temperature extremes, making them hardly any better than traditional cars.

I drive a PHEV in Michigan, and for around 6-8 months a year, its mileage isn't any better than a standard 4 cylinder due to poor hybrid performance in extremely cold or hot temperatures. You get into the car, the BMS determines that the battery is either baking or freezing, and scales regen/assistance back to minimal levels. You essentially end up with a gas vehicle with an expensive start/stop system (and below about 10-12f, they actually often idle even when stopped to maintain engine temperature).