stackghost

An airliner weighs a certain amount. In cruising flight, the lift on the aircraft is exactly equal to the weight (because it's neither climbing nor descending). Aerodynamic drag falls into 3 buckets: parasitic drag, wave drag, and lift-induced drag. Lift-induced drag is drag created by the wings producing lift.

Longer, thinner wings (higher aspect ratios) create less lift-induced drag for a given wing area, so ideally you want a super duper long and skinny wing, which will create less drag for a given amount of lift, and thus improve your fuel efficiency. Fuel is a massive portion of the total cost of operating an airliner, so there is a large financial incentive from the airlines to reduce fuel costs.

Unfortunately really long wings make airliners too wide to park at most airport gates, and in some cases too wide to taxi safely around obstacles, so they're experimenting with ways to make the wings fold and get a "best of both worlds" situation.

The term "powerpoint" has been genericized in the common vernacular to mean any electronic slide show, like kleenex for tissues and sellotape/scotch tape for transparent adhesive tape.

It might not have reached legal generic status but just about any working professional will understand what you mean if you refer to "making a powerpoint deck" even if you don't use the actual Microslop product.

There's no install or cloud login, everything works offline. The default deck is around 560 KB and it doesn't need to fetch anything once you got it.

This is the best feature.

Rizon, hackint, and Libera, among others

Unskippable? I turned the station at the first sign of commercial, and still do. If one of those "radio-wide commercial minutes" per hour, I'd try the public station, or made a selection from the ten-disc changer. ;-)

Yes, that's an accurate description of the hassle of trying to avoid unskippable ads.

Marketing and advertising are two related but distinct functions.

US regulators don't order ISPs to block websites.

Of course they do, mostly for intellectual property reasons.

Most "state-level" adversaries are just high school dropouts working border jobs told to "investigate suspicious things".

Even dumb cops know how to use a Cellebrite machine.

I signed off the air for the last time in 1994 [...] radio has changed drastically, and it just wouldn’t be any fun for me today.

I don't agree with this premise. FM Radio is definitely more corporate today, but I grew up in the 90s and my memories of FM radio are not fond.

For my whole life it has always been materially the same, shitty, experience: occasional good songs interleaved with mediocre ones and a hefty dose of annoying unskippable ads.

The difference is that when I was a kid we didn't have streaming or even mp3 players so we just had to put up with the ads. Today I can just play songs locally off my phone via Bluetooth. No ads, no DJs, just the music I enjoy.

I know perfectly well what I said in this thread and don't need to re-read it. It wasn't long.

Then you should realize your replies have been obnoxious, and that's why you're getting the responses you're getting. Have a fantastic day.

What if the surveillance state is also run by idiots?

Go back and reread yourself in this thread.

1. Someone says they don't like rationalism

2. You say there's no such thing

3. Someone else suggests your defense of rationalism is materially similar to how scientologists defend their cult

4. You say "nuh-uh because Bayes' theorem is true"???

That's such a weird non-sequitur. Nothing before had anything to do with Bayes. That is just a straw man you constructed to argue with.

So you want the government to fail at the things you want it to fail at, yet you're trying to project that onto conservatives?

There's an important distinction between wanting the government to fail, and wanting the government to cease violating civil liberties en masse.

There is a false dichotomy being manufactured/astroturfed by Republicans that the only choice is between the current Star-spangled Gestapo and unrestricted, mass illegal immigration.

In actual fact there is a broad spectrum of approaches between those two.

Textbooks, especially in the early years, are a minor part of education.

I want them to have an actual human teacher.

Trump is the result in that breakdown of trust, not the cause.

I agree, and my comment should not be construed to imply otherwise. It's Americans themselves that are the problem, which is why the decay of America will long outlive Trump.

In going to choose to take this as a compliment :)

Every school kid in the USA, you mean? Because I think other countries would rightly perceive the world you described as a dystopia.

I don't want my kids' education to be surrendered to the whims of Big Tech douchebags any more than I want AI decisions in legal cases or an AI replacement for a family doctor.

Some systems are better left mostly analog. Education is one of them.

If rights can be capriciously and arbitrarily curtailed by armed agents of the state while effete judges yeet sternly-worded letters into the void, then those "rights" are worth about as much as the USA's signature on an international treaty. Which is to say, nothing.

Sadly, this Soviet attitude of complete cynicism and disbelief of any and all official sources due to corruption and incompetence is going to become more widespread and mainstream.

The USA is speed running a destruction of trust in public institutions, supported by two thirds of the electorate and a majority of large American tech firms.

Somehow, inexplicably, people seem to think this will all go back to normal when Trump leaves office.

Sure. But I think the "near future" to which you're referring is going to be a longer tail than many EV maximalists expect.

I would be shocked if IC-engined vehicles were no longer being produced in 2050.

No you're confusing where agency lies.

I assure you I am not.

The Nasdaq 100 is just a fund. Its existence doesn't force you or anyone else to do anything. People can choose to buy stocks, and people can choose to buy the Nasdaq 100. Or not. Nobody is making you.

This is irrelevant. QQQ is the one that's forced to buy all the constituents of the index, including SpaceX. This has been pointed out to you several times, but you seem unwilling to accept that fact.

The suburban people buying Ram 9001 Warlord Editions are not the target market for this truck.

I say this as someone who will be buying an EV as his next vehicle:

EV proponents have a strong propensity to gloss over the very real drawbacks of battery-only vehicles:

- Towing anything outside of charging infrastructure/away from the highway rest stops is not feasible because of the range reduction, which in USA/Canada is a major reason to buy an SUV/pickup. Why buy an electric vehicle that can't tow your boat to the lake where there's no charger?

- Mileage goes down in the summer and way down in the winter, because the battery packs need to be cooled/warmed.

- Mileage evaporates slowly, even when the vehicle is "off", making these vehicles fundamentally unsuitable for, again, going pretty much anywhere you can't plug it in. When I was a teen we used to take week-long canoe trips into Algonquin Park. Imagine trying to get the kids home from camping on Sunday afternoon, you're an hour's drive away from the nearest city but oops the battery pack is dead because it's been self-discharging and cooling itself the whole time you've been camping. No thanks.

- Venturing far away from the charging infrastructure (camping, rural road tripping, jobsites/camp) is risky. If you run out of gas in the middle of nowhere, you can get a ride into town, fill up a jerrycan with gas, and then extricate your vehicle. If your battery-only EV runs out of charge in the middle of nowhere, you are completely fucked.

EVs are great, and when my 2013 TDI finally quits I will likely purchase an EV, but they're just fundamentally unsuitable for some use cases.

I’d love to find a corner of the world where this hasn’t happened yet [...]

Start one?

There's definitely a market for software that doesn't give off the corporate, mass-produced, one-size-fits-all energy. 37signals famously made quite a business out of it.

So what was the point of suspending Boeing's authority to do those inspections?

Disclaimer: I used to work in airworthiness certification as well as maintenance and design modification engineering for the C-130, but not for any of the Boeing products.

You're generally correct. In layperson's terms, the Type Certificate is like the blueprint or the spec, and the individual airworthiness certificates are a certification that each aircraft coming off the assembly line is in conformance with the approved type design.

When the MCAS debacle happened, the FAA mandated a change to the type design, and further mandated embodiment of that design change through an Airworthiness Directive. This is the part that addressed the MCAS hazard condition. When they withheld Boeing's authority to issue certificates what that really gave them was, at the airframe serial number level, the ability to ensure that the modifications had been embodied correctly.

You're right that that final certification has little to do with correcting the underlying MCAS design flaw on the 737, but there were also quality issues with the 787, and because Boeing's in-house ODA issues those certificates acting as the FAA itself, and those certifications are essentially the last hurdle before delivery of the aircraft (and thus the last hurdle before revenue coming into Boeing's coffers), the FAA withheld that authority so that Boeing employees could not be unduly pressured by management's perverse incentives. Somebody elsewhere in these comments posted the OIG report that briefly touches on this pressure.

In fewer words, it was about ensuring independence in final airworthiness release, and ensuring Boeing's ODA could not be pressured by management who subscribe to the Jack Welch school of ethics.

------

Edited to add:

There is a valid argument to be made that the FAA didn't handle this situation correctly/adequately. For context, in aerospace when we identify that a hazard condition exists we classify both the severity and the likelihood of occurrence. So for example depending on the organization's risk acceptance matrix, one might have a hazard with high severity but extremely low chance of occurrence, and that might be considered acceptably safe (or not!).

The FAA now says that the back-and-forth they have been doing over the last however many months produced comparable production-quality findings regardless of which organization issued the certificates (Boeing's ODA or the FAA itself).

As best I could tell at the time this issue was a hot topic, when it withheld Boeing's issuance authority the FAA never clearly articulated:

- Which risks it was controlling,

- How much risk reduction it expected,

- What data would demonstrate effectiveness, and

- What objective conditions would permit termination of the withholding

So again, there's an argument that the FAA just sort of decided that they now have that Warm Fuzzy and everything is fine.

no need to treat them like assholes just for that.

Hmm, I wasn't trying to imply anyone is an asshole for enjoying things. Is that how it came off?

That's actually a great question. Valuation of public companies is part science, part art, and part total bullshit. You can go way down the rabbit hole on this sort of thing.

In days of yore you'd look at the fundamentals like:

- ability of the firm to service its debt

- profitability ratios

- revenue growth

- total addressable market

- competition

- market dynamics

etc.

You'd also pore over their quarterly and annual regulatory findings and see what's in the MD&A sections, assess the competency of senior leadership, look at how they view themselves, etc.

Then you'd look at comparable firms, i.e. companies doing the same or materially-similar things. Some of those are "pure plays", i.e. companies selling exactly the same product/service (e.g. TSMC, UMC, GFS) and some are not pure (e.g. red bull sells energy drinks but it also has a bunch of other stuff like a formula 1 team).

You compare your target company's fundamentals to those of its comparables, see what prices those comps are trading at, look at discounted cash flows, and then you pull a semi-informed number more or less out of your ass for the target as a forecast, based on your analysis.

These days, though, valuations are more or less completely disconnected from fundamentals. This is why Warren Buffett-style value investing is commonly said to be dead in today's market.

others just want to live life as a passenger, not think, and have AI do all the work.

Fuck, doesn't everyone? The future we were promised is one where machines did all the work leaving humans free to pursue a richer existence, whether that's creative pastimes or just laying on a beach.

Instead of democratizing the future, essentially every technological advance since the printing press has served only to increase the concentration of wealth and power at the top.

I can't imagine actually wanting to work if you didn't have to.

We're nowhere near the "it's meaningless to talk about why you don't like it" threshold.

We crossed that threshold at least a year ago.

This is such a weird response because nothing about index fund inclusion rules has anything to do with whether or not a fund is a person.

Complete non sequitur. Can you explain what you mean? Did you accidentally reply to the wrong comment?