The point is not so much that the second crash was avoidable, the real point is that the first crash was entirely avoidable. If Boeing had connected two AoA sensors to the MCAS system so it could figure out when one of the AoA sensors broke down and issue a warning or react in some other way (Airbus uses triple redundancy) those pilots wouldn't have had to master yet another 'simple remedy' for something that greedy and incompetent executives at Boeing screwed up. On top of that the AoA Disagree message was 'unintentionally disabled' and the AoA DISAGREE display on the pilots displays that the (defective) MCAS software relied on was a 'paid optional extra' which quite a lot of airlines did not pick up on because including one was considered a no brainer. They can blame the pilots as much as they want. After all, the pilots are not here to defend themselves so they are easy targets and I suppose blaming them is good business strategy, but in the end it was still Boeing management that made the conscious choice have the MCAS built with a single point of failure by an inexperienced contractor purely out of geed. In an industry where redundancy in everything is a basic requirement, quality is king and you stand and fall with your safety reputation, all of Boeings fuckups in this sorry story are basically unforgivable.

From what you hear, people are saying, there are those who would say, it has been suggested, ... stop pretending to be Fox News and pony up some hard data. Not that it will do you much good. You could make the same claim about any luxury brand or product having this same kind of 'effect'. That 'effect' is why people buy luxury anything. A luxury car/truck isn't really a car/truck, it's an insult that you can drive.

Nope, for the most part, hardly anybody in Europe gives a crap about what kind of phone you've got your nose buried in. Most Europeans will be annoyed at you for having your nose buried in a phone, any phone at all, instead of paying attention to what you are doing, ... like driving. Nobody much cares about the brand. I expect I's much the same is true in the USA and Asia.

This is true.

As I already stated, money is on some state owned or private but state controlled corporation in China (with generous subsidies form the Chinese taxpayer) eating Space X's lunch just like BYD and a bunch of other Chinese EV manufacturers (with generous subsidies form the Chinese taxpayer) are about to eat Tesla's lunch. I know you think Elon is some kind of super genius real world Tony Stark but there is no way Space X is going to compete with Nation States in the long term, especially China.

For one thing, Falcon 9 is only partially reusable, even if the Space X fan-club members like to skip over the 'partially' bit. Secondly, Ariane won't be dissolved or privatised for the same reason that military and police usually aren't privatised, even in the USA. These are capabilities governments hugely value and a self sufficiency in satellite launches is too so the EU governments will be more than happy to continue subsidising Ariane. Furthermore, Ariane and a bunch of others are working on partially reusable launch vehicles so Space X's advantage is temporary. Unless Elon retreats to his genus lab and successfully solves fully reusable single stage to orbit, Space X will be getting some competition sooner rather than later and if it isn't Ariane it will be somebody else. My money is on some state owned or private but state controlled corporation in China (with generous subsidies form the Chinese taxpayer) eating Space X's lunch just like BYD and a bunch of other Chinese EV manufacturers (with generous subsidies form the Chinese taxpayer) are about to eat Tesla's lunch.

I knew a lot of employers are lying sociopathic shit-stains, but now we have an exact figure ... 40% of them. I bet a whole bunch of these assholes are bringing in people for fake interviews and making them pay the travel costs. If somebody wants you to pay the costs of travelling to an interview, tell them (very politely) to go fuck themselves unless your costs are a small to small-ish sum and you don't mind burning some time on what seems to be an almost 50-50 chance to be a fake interview as it is a real one.

In that case maybe these venture capitalist genius princes of the universe should pour there money into something with better profitability prospects than Uber, Lyft and the rest of that ilk until Elon Musk perfects the fully autonomous vehicle technology he promised us back in 2016.

What I find funny is that rich people rage against 'affirmative action' to provide opportunities for minorities and the poor but when they finally succeed in abolishing affirmative action for these groups they were surprised to find out that legacy admissions is itself a form of affirmative action for a minority i.e. their own idiot kids. If you want to call yourself a winner of the greatest meritocracy in human history, having your rich daddy pull strings and bribe your way ahead of more able and intelligent applicants does not count as 'winning the meritocracy'.

It's easy to outcompete everybody else when you have a global monopoly (also sometimes known as a 92% global market share) on web searches and enough money to either make anybody who looks like they may become a threat an offer they can't refuse or just squash them under foot if they are disinclined to accept your offer. There is a big difference between healthy constructive competition and what Google does.

No.

That sounds like something somebody would say who started the process of obtaining knowledge, dropped out and now wants to get all the benefits of having finished what he started without ever actually doing so. You don't get a medal for dropping out of the marathon and never crossing the finish line. If a degree is proof of anything, at the very least it proves that you have the persistence, character and ability to start a very difficult process and finish it. For an employer that has to be just about the most important single skill any perspective employee must have regardless of the job description.

The entire US national debate about Covid, whether vaccines are supposedly useless and dangerous, whether basic common sense measures to spread infectious disease are an assault on the constitutional rights of US citizens, etc, etc, ad nauseam, ... that has dominated US public discourse and news cycles for years can now be summed up like this:

  - Florida has a population of 21,78 million people they are now counting 94,037 Covid deaths.

  - Japan has a population of 125,7 million people they are now counting 74,694 Covid deaths.

If Florida's government had displayed the same level of basic common sense and competence when dealing with the Covid pandemic as Japan's government did then Florida's Covid death toll would be just under 13,000 and this is just one US state we're talking about here that has a higher death toll than a country six times it's size. These numbers say all that needs to be said.

I can hit you with the 'digital cameras will never displace film cameras comparison' if the horse and buggy comparisons hurts your feelings but nothing will change the fact that the ICE is on it's way to the dustbin of history and neither the romance of the ICE motor noise nor the iconic stink of burned gasoline will change that.

Of course, who doesn't use one of those? A classmates of mine at Hogwarts once cast a 'Explodeyouranus'' by mistake during duelling practice but the spell checker kicked in and corrected it to 'Expelliarmus''. I'll leave you to imagine the consequences if he hadn't been using a spell checker.

Just about the only thing that European car enthusiasts and anti-car urbanists can agree on is that they both hate SUVs with a passion and SUV here means the original American sense of that acronym i.e. big and heavy off-road/passenger vehicle hybrids, not the recent crop of Tesla Model Y class sedans on chunky tyres that term SUV has been redefined to include. If the turnout had been 57%, and given the way SUVs and the people who drive them are generally loathed in Europe, it's likely that the measure would have been passed by an epic landslide. Rounding up every SUV driver combined with a ludicrously low turnout is just about the only hope Parisian SUV drivers ever had to outvote the rest of Paris' citizenry.

I'd be happy to charge (European) SUV owners extra (I don't really give a shit about the US ones, I don't live there) because in European cities SUV owners practically always park in one and a half parkings spaces simply because these damn things are usually too big for a regular parking space. On top of that they also often require somewhere between one and a quarter to one and one and a half lanes to get anywhere in cities around here forcing anybody on a two lane street coming the opposite way to park their car somewhere to allow one those monstrosities to pass. Muppets who want to tear up the road network far more than necessary with a 3-5 metric ton SUV, pollute far more than they have to and generally make a bloody nuisance of themselves with expensive fuel guzzling SUVs can surely also easily afford pay an extremely generous premium for that privilege.