Actually, it is California that is America's second silicon valley. Up to the 1950s, most of America's electronic industry were centered around the New Jersey-New York metropolitan area. Edison's Menlo Park, Bell labs and GE's Research lab were all based in the area. It wasn't until Shockley moved to northern California in 1956 to start Shockley Semiconductors that northern California began displacing the NY-NJ metropolitan area as a tech sector hub in the U.S. So in essence this is just a return to tech's roots.

Basic income is to benefits payment what flat tax proposals are to taxation. Both are doomed to failure because the reality of replacing a progressive taxation system with a flat taxation, or a progressive benefits system with a flat rate benefit (basic income) is that a large number of people who benefited under the previous system will lose substantial amounts of money.

In both flat tax and basic income schemes, the people who lose out the most will be the most disadvantaged. In the case of basic income, those who currently claim multiple benefits - e.g. children with disabilities who may eligible for both childcare support and disability assistance; seniors on a pension who may be getting medicare assistance - would likely see a reduction in benefits under a basic income scheme. On top of it, a universal basic income scheme means everyone would be getting the same amount, so any goverment implementing it now has to explain why they are cutting back benefits from a poor family with special needs children while Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos are now getting $1,000 a month checks that they don't need.

The current supporters of basic income appear to sidestep the issue by framing it as an additional payment on top of existing benefits, but this not only goes against the premise of basic income, but is financially unscallable at a national level. Alternative, one could implement a basic income where the payment is distributed according to income and to need, but this would eventually lead back to a re-implementation of current welfare benefit systems.

You have obviously never been to Japan. Japanese convenience stores have very little in common with American convenience stores. As this article explains it better than I could. It's a whole different cultural experience - they stock a lot more variety and better choices than American 7-11s, with bento boxes, noodles and pancakes among the offerings. You won't find slurpies in a Japanese 7-11.

For the individual companies affected, paying a ransom may make financial sense because it costs less than the damage impacted by the ransomware. And the hacker is unlikely to target the same individual twice.

However, by paying the ransom one is providing financial resources to a criminal organization and encourage them to carry out more ransomware attacks. The cost of paying the ramson may be far smaller than the potential damage for an individual, but for society as a whole, the damage inflicted by paying the ramson far outweighs the benefits. This is why in most countries paying ransoms for kidnappings is outlawed.

Those paying ransoms should be prosecuted for sending money to criminal - and potentially terrorist - organizations.

The city council who voted to pay the ransom should be prosecuted for sending money to a criminal organization, which could possibly have terrorism connections.

In most countries paying a ransom is illegal for a good reason. For the person paying the ransom, the cost of the ransom will be minor compared to the consequences of not paying. However, by rewarding the criminals you're encouraging further ramson demands in the form of extortion, kidnappings or ransomware. It is unlikely that the criminals would return to the same victim, but it is society as a whole that will feel the consequences. Make ransom payment illegal and you eliminate the profit motive for these cyber-criminals

An electrical fire onboard would have explained much of the aircraft's behaviour, perhaps an electrical short disabled the transponder. The pilots, seeing the problem, attempt to turnaround for an emergency landing but before they do are incapacitated by smoke in the cockpit or loss of cabin pressure brought on by the system failure. With pilots incapacitated, the aircraft is left flying towards its last heading.

Pilot suicide has never been a convincing theory in my opinion when other explanations can account for the plane's behaviour. That the captain had a sophisticated flight simulator is not unusual; pilot are often enthusiastic aviation geeks, and at least every pilot I've met has had Microsoft Flight Simulator installed in their computer.

Bringing charges against people may feel like justice, but it goes counter to a good safety culture. A good safety culture in a company requires open communication, and a frank discussion of deficiencies and problems so they can be identified and corrected. Creating a culture of recrimination with immediate reprisal for errors only leads to the situation in the Russian segment of the International Space Station where a contractor tried to cover a mistaken drill hole rather than reporting the incident.

Charging the engineers responsible will not bring a single life back. It only make accidents more likely to happen as people become afraid to report incidents

And to further add to this, the relevant pilot procedure to recovering from severe mistrim condition, as provided by Centaurus on pprune.org. Note that the procedure below is not included in the newer 737-MAX flight manuals.

Extract from the Boeing 737-200 Pilot Training Manual February 1982 page 04.80.31. Edited for brevity

Runaway and Manual Stabiliser - Recovery from Severe Out-of-Trim

"In an extreme nose-up out-of-trim condition, requiring almost full forward control column, decelerate, extend the flaps and/or reduce thrust to a minimum practical setting consistent with flight conditions until elevator control is established. Do not decrease airspeed below the minimum maneuvering speed for the flap configuration. A bank of 30 degrees or more will relieve some force on the control column. This, combined with flap extension and reduced speed should permit easier manual trimming.

If other methods fail to relieve the elevator load and control column force, use the "roller coaster" technique. If nose-up trim is required, raise the nose well above the horizon with elevator control. Then slowly relax the control column pressure and manually trim nose-up. Allow the nose to drop below the horizon while trimming. Repeat this sequence until the airplane is trim.

It is unclear if the Ethiopian pilots were aware of this procedure, but given that they were close to the ground and at too high of a speed to deploy flaps, the yo-yo maneuver would not have been feasible.

This is a good explanation of the difficulty in trimming the aircraft in a mistrim condition by a former senior Boeing engineer. The short of it is that in the mistrim condition encountered by ET302, with stab nose down and the pilots pulling elevator nose up, the combined tail loads would've produced high jackscrew load opposing nose stab up trim that would be impossible to overcome with manual trim.

Boeing did publish guidance for older 737 models on recovering on a severe nose out-of-trim condition, which would have required taking the aircraft into a roller-coaster maneuver to relieve the horizontal stabilizer loads. But given that they were already close to the ground, this was not an option. The other suggestion was to extend flaps, but given that the aircraft was above the minimum flap speeds, this was also not possible.

In short, it looks like the fix to the problem was as much to blame as the problem itself

The autopilot wouldn't be using the vane angle-of-attack sensor, they would be using air data and the inertial reference system. The only system that I would expect to be using the vane angle-of-attack reading in aircraft that is not fly-by-wire is the stall protection system. The stall protection system normally takes either of the angle-of-attack readings to flag a stall, whichever of the two systems is giving a higher reading. It uses an either-or logic because an aircraft in a banked turn may have differing angle-of-attack readings between the two vanes. An incorrect reading might trigger a premature stick shaker/pusher activation, but as this can be overriden by the pilot it wouldn't be considered safety critical, hence only 2 vane angle-of-attack sensors are needed.

Airbus aircraft, which have fly-by-wire, calculate angle-of-attack independently using the pressure readings from cross-coupled smart pitot tube sensors, which can then be verified against the vane angle-of-attack.

The two features that were mentioned in the article was an angle-of-attack disagree indicator and an angle-of-attack display in the cockpit. The disagree light should've been standard, given the severity of this failure mode. The angle-of-attack cockpit display? No other current commercial airplane has it - though from what I hear from pilots the old MD-11 had them in the cockpit as standard. It has been discussed in the wake of the AF447 accident and the Colgan Air 3407 accidents, but it's never been mandated by the FAA and there's no consensus in the aviation community on whether it would help, so I can't really fault Boeing for that one.

One of the bigger long-term consequences of these MAX-8 incidents will be the impact on the FAA's influence in the civil aviation world. One little commented fact is that when the MAX-8s were grounded it was the Chinese civil aviation authorities who led the world in grounding the 737 MAX. This was unprecedented, as most civil aviation authorities have tended to follow the lead certification authority of the manufacturer, the FAA in this case, before issuing a grounding. This was the case in previous grounding - the 787 dreamliner in 2013 and DC-10 groundings in 1979 were both led by the FAA.

Additionally, it now appears both Transport Canada and EASA are no longer willing to accept FAA certification. Other aviation authorities have in the past accepted FAA certification without challenge. if other authorities no longer trust the FAA to do its oversight properly Boeing will be forced to carry out multiple certification assessments for each civil aviation authority, and that will carry with it a considerable delay and financial burden.