Well, we're about to elect Hillary Clinton. She's not stupid. She thinks everyone else is stupid, and she's got enough supporters who don't care whether or why she's being feloniously coy about things like her email use (her lawyer just this evening explained that Clinton has destroyed all of her email that wasn't printed out to lamely respond to demands for her records from her tenure at State).

When she's president, don't ask why we elected a stupid person. As why we stupidly elected her. We'll have eight years to think it through. Yay.

What ARE you talking about? The problem you describe is the state being required to be more thorough in investigating matters like the case in question (the lady with the car, Twitter, etc). The solution to that isn't lowering the threshold by which we describe airlines pilots as too unstable to do that particularly stressful, demanding, and highly responsible (for other people's lives) work.

1/3 of people aren't airline pilots.

And more to the point, 1/3 of people don't take out their depression on a hundred or so other families by slaughtering a plane load of people.

Everybody goes through "rough patches," but very few of them kill themselves over it, let alone decide to kill a hundred other people just to add some more drama to it. The whole point here is that you can't have someone in a position of responsibility like that, and have them be one of those much more fragile people who become suicidal/murderous over a "rough patch."

If it takes something bad happening in their life to make it clear they can't keep a level head and maintain their professionalism, then they are not in the right line of work.

"Many people" are not commercial airline pilots.

This isn't an argument you will win. If we can't accept the past few centuries of history because it is less than a few thousand years, then we can't accept those few thousand years, because they're less than the few tens of thousands of years of cro-magnon man and so on. It's no longer the age of spear chucking empires. Something has changed.

That's the oddest way to state such things. Those mean, ole Koch brothers are getting away with spending one or two orders of magnitude less than their opposition because they're rich. We're also ignoring that a lot of their money goings into weird games which just don't get them anywhere. There's a better way to put this. Their money is spent just as terribly as their oppositions' money, but the ideas that they frequently back, such as liberty, personal responsibility, and less government meddling resonate with a lot of people these days.

I don't consider you capable of deciding who is rich. And why shouldn't the rich or anyone else for that matter not want more. Your sane "standards" aren't feeding anyone.

Well, they can't possibly have more than three times their fair share just due to the size of the wedge.

Well, what about them?

The socio-economic development happened. Technology development appears to be one of the drivers of that.

The developed world had the exact, same problems. It got better in the same way that these societies are improving now.

Except you corrected a reply of mine to jythie.

If we're going to play that game, how about the several billions years before empires? Or most of the age of the universe when there wasn't even an Earth or Sun? Norms change.

And that ignores that empires aren't necessarily worse off for their inhabitants either. Since neither you or I have any "expectations", I really don't see any point to continuing an argument that doesn't make sense in the first place.

That the thing about dark matter... it has a perfectly reasonable explanation (WIMPs). It's not that weird of a "thing".

Dark energy on the other hand, that's just WEIRD ;) It doesn't act like any "energy" as we know it, even though everything is clearly moving into a higher energy state. A question I've had for a while... if space itself is being inflated (or any sort of mathematically equivalent scenario) - everything inflating in all directions at all scales - wouldn't there be some sort of weak radiation signal from electrons expanding into a higher energy state due to dark energy and then collapsing back down? But I have trouble picturing how to reconcile an absolute, varying distance at the atomic scale with quantization of energy states, positions, etc...

Some of us are doomed even if most women don't know this secret.

Isn't this what one would expect if dark matter is WIMPs?

Sure there is: add this to the CPDLC standard and make all of the hardware modifications needed to support it:

----
Message type: Revert flight plan and lock
Message arguments: TIME: the time of the flight plan to use
Message description: Revert to the flight plan that was active at TIME that had been approved by both ground control and the pilot; engage autopilot; and disable all pilot / copilot access to all systems. If there is no approved flight plan then the flight plan is to return to the nearest suitable airport in the most direct route possible.
----

Additional modifications: Make sure that the pilot can never disable datalink communications with ground by any means that ground wouldn't have time to respond to.

Result: Nobody is ever "remote controlling" the plane from the ground. A murderous / terrorist ground controller can't crash the plane, only make it autopilot itself on a previously approved or otherwise reasonable flight plan. A pilot behaving suspiciously can't crash the plane, as ground control will just engage the autopilot and lock them out. To abuse the system both ground and the pilot would have to agree on a suicidal flight plan.