daveoflynn

Boeing is already a public/private enterprise. The down years in commercial aircraft are propped up by US Gov defence orders, lots of primary research is funded by the US taxpayer, the US Gov works very hard to help Boeing sell airplanes, and there’s heaps of tax breaks available at the State level.

Many of the trade offs that Boeing has made - outsourcing, devaluing internal expertise, focusing on shareholder returns over risky long-term bets, and aggressively fighting unions - mirror US culture more generally. There’s little evidence that nationalising Boeing would change this - as an example related to this news story, the DoD is outsourcing more and more of its training and aggressor flying to private corporations.

It is worth pointing out that many of the points about Boeing being a public/private enterprise also apply to Airbus.

I don’t want to argue that the keyboards and mice are perfect, but we have two magic keyboards, two mice, and one gen1 trackpad that have all been extremely reliable. All are +/- 10 years old.

Well, one mouse and one trackpad didn’t survive a recent toddler/tile floor situation. But that’s not Apple’s fault ;)

It’s not “for the sake of a wink and a nod” or “dogwhistling.” The ACLU is actively campaigning against the way the US Government and ICE in particular treats immigrants and people around the borders.

Have a look at the ACLU website... their position is quite clear.

BACS is generally cheaper at volume. In addition, BACS Bureau allows a payroll company to transfer money directly from your employer's account to yours without the money ever reaching their account.

All fixable, but payroll companies are generally chosen on price, not innovation.

It took about 30s to ‘solve’ the captcha on my iPhone XR, with minimal feedback as to why it was taking so long.

That was pretty annoying. If I hadn’t been on a site demoing captchas, I would have assumed the site broken and moved on...

There’s a joke in skydiving: “What happens if your backup parachute fails? You aim for the car of the person who packed it”

Hard to say definitively - double malfunctions are relatively rare, so the sample size isn’t enormous.

More time can increase the likelihood that you can get some piece of parachute fabric above your head. And if you can do that, the odds go way up. There’s a saying I was taught on the first jump: “keep fighting until your goggles fill with blood.”

But if you cannot get a parachute out for some reason, a longer freefall will only give you more time to contemplate your fate.

The primary things that's changed has been the availability of small powerful gas-turbine engines. That's what's made the folks you've mentioned, plus the Jetman project, possible.

To the best of my knowledge, this class of engines were originally developed for model aircraft.

That analogy doesn’t hold up. All Airbus and most Boeing aircraft have systems to push the nose down in event of a stall.

The problem here is: in the transition from the -NG to the -MAX, Boeing added this protection and didn’t tell anyone.

Imagine someone added Adaptive Cruise Control to your existing car without telling you - the first time the car braked on its own, you’d freak out. The car is suddenly behaving in a way it should be able to.

If you know the system exists, you can recognise what’s happening and deal with it. If you don’t know it exists, the behaviour is going to be absolutely baffling, and no in-flight diagnostic procedure has a step for “did the manufacturer add an important safety device and not tell me?”