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Communicating to a controller that they are close to a fuel emergency is not a threat, it is good practice. People have died because their pilots did not communicate their fuel situation sufficiently to their controllers [1].

This was communicated in this instance, and the controller maintained that to land at SFO, they would have to risk running out of fuel, since the controller refused to give a time-window for landing, or to declare an emergency.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avianca_Flight_052

> Pilot: If we are not set up for base soon, we will have to declare a fuel emergency and that would really fuck up your sequence.

> Controller: What is your divert field?

> Pilot: Oakland

> Controller: Ok you need vectors to Oakland?

> Pilot: No, my company forbids visual separation at night, what is the problem here?

> Controller: I can't have this conversation with you. You either divert to Oakland or you can continue to hold. It's up to you sir.

> Pilot: Ok you promised me 10 minutes, that ran out 4 minutes ago, so how many more minutes?

> Controller: This conversation is over.

So this controller, knowing the plane was near a fuel emergency, gave the pilots the option to either crash their plane with 240 people on board, or to divert to Oakland. This is tough for me to wrap my head around.

I don't want to blame this one controller for what is obviously a pattern of systematic failures at SFO, but I'm going to seriously consider flying into Oakland or San Jose next time if this is the attitude of the controllers there.

Classic access journalism dynamics. Versions of this are at play in every industry, as reviewers and journalists have enormous incentives to please the entities they cover and have equal disincentives not to rock the boat.

You might think this is an outlier, but what authority is going to hold the airline to account? How are you going to convince any YouTuber to give an Ho eat review of the airline ever again?

Sure, it was not my point to suggest it wasn’t legal, just that it was a bold action which has gone completely unexplained.

I am still so confused by this whole saga. No one has explained how or why the entire board decided to do a coup, and then simply changed their minds a few days later.

I have to assume that the individuals involved are under a mix of social and legal pressure to not talk about the circumstances.

I'm pretty sure the plane is "living life vaccinated" and the car is "living life unvaccinated". They both have risks but one is riskier than the other per unit time/distance.

Wow. This looks like a very significant discovery. Humans in New Mexico in 25,000 BCE, incredible.

Spirited Away 2: Rise of the Bathhouse

How would this theory have worked in e.g. the 1960s civil rights movement.

Buried lede. The RTO requirement was in response to the staff attempting to unionize. Either retaliation or a clever method to clear out the workers who were most in favour of the union without breaking labour laws.

Obviously, not all transfers of money are loans, like your dividend payments, or normal transactional commerce. The statement is that when a bank creates a loan, it creates money. The money they give to the lendee is new money. This is the primary mechanism of money creation in our system.

100%. Money is debt.

To me this illustrates something different than “all Silicon Valley people think they are the good guys”. Eg. Elon Musk is famously not very nice, doesn’t pretend to be nice, and many people have had bad experiences with him directly. But there is a different set of SV people who no one has ever said a mean word about personally, but whose influence on the world is deeply harmful, sometimes bordering on evil, like Campbell’s case here.

I think many people can’t tell the difference between a nice person and a good person.

It's interesting to think about the harm done by Intuit and other companies' lobbying on this file, and compare it to the language that people like Ben Horowitz have used to describe Bill Campbell, Intuit's chairman in this period.

To hear it from people like Horowitz (in his book), Campbell is one of the best people he's ever met; one step removed from a saint. But the man's actions in stopping free online filing to become a reality in the US have caused incredible harm.

It's easy to confuse a nice person with a good person.

This fact is interesting because many people grew up with an idea of mathematics as having discovered fundamental truth, and some of us, when we get deep into the field, realize that Math is made up of human ideas, exactly the same as a very complex boardgame we play in our heads, and that the belief that these boardgames represent something fundamental about reality is it's own leap of faith.

By late-undergrad, it was intuitive to me that "proof" means "all mathematicians who reads this agrees with it". Mathematics is unique in that, mostly, the field can achieve consensus on results, which we then call "proofs".

But similarly, it makes sense that, even if a result is is "true" in a universal, objective sense, if the mathematician cannot communicate this in a convincing fashion to the rest of the mathematics world, I don't think we can call that result "proved".

You're correct, we don't have evidence that SpaceX is pricing below cost, because we have no idea what Falcon 9 launches actually cost, because SpaceX refuses to tell us.

Cost is more important than price in the long run because it tells us whether SpaceX has made genuine efficiency and technology developments that allow their prices to be long-term viable. Any one can sell a service at a loss, but you eventually run out of VC or saudi bucks to make up the difference, and then you have to jack your prices up again.

SpaceX's detailed financials are secret. This is a simple fact. As a privately held corp they have few disclosure obligations. What they do disclose is usually what they want to disclose. There is no comparison between the detailed, auditable financials that we have for a project like SLS, and the one or two headline numbers that SpaceX has told us about something like Falcon 9.

I suspect that SpaceX is booking Starlink launches as revenue. My basis for this is that their launch revenue is growing much faster than their non-starlink launch schedule.

We can't prove or disprove this though, since their financials are secret.

They have fundamentally different purposes, and so soundbite comparisons between them are meaningless.

It is not possible to do a fair comparison of launch costs between Falcon 9 and other platforms without knowing the true cost of Falcon 9 launches.

Isn't most of this Starlink, which is basically SpaceX self-dealing? Can someone point me to a breakdown of launches and customers?

You can't compare falcon to SLS because Falcon cannot do what SLS does.

You can't compare SpaceX's figures to NASA because NASA has many, many more reporting obligations than SpaceX.

Every report on Falcon 9 costs has made this mistake forever. SpaceX does not release their full costs. What numbers we have for them are PR releases. Meanwhile, NASA's budgets are public and comprehensive, and they have legal parameters on what they have to include in their statements about costs that SpaceX does not have.

Dementia is also highly correlated with hearing loss. It's intuitive to me that the mind could deteriorate when it loses touch with the outside world. It seems possible that dementia is much less a material deterioration in the brain than a condition that takes place when the brain loses its normal sensory stimuli.

Hard to believe legacy admissions are legal anywhere. An obvious injustice--and efficiency drain--on society.

That's a nice conjecture, we will see in the coming years if it plays out.

That is a conjecture which does not represent the current state of the technology.

You need AGI for good self-driving because driving requires predicting the actions of other human drivers at an extremely high level. This is second-nature for humans so we barely notice that we are doing it, but it is extraordinarily difficult for non-humans.

I quit crypto in 2018 after 5 years. It had become clear to me that there were no safeguards in the industry to prevent scams like Celsius, and that the scams would quickly out-compete the quality companies. There's just no way to compete with someone who can make up fake returns to raise billions of dollars, if you're not willing to do the same.

It did occur to me to just play that game and make off with some cash at least. After all, I might not have another opportunity like that in my lifetime. But I don't think it would have worked. I'm just not that good a liar.