Who is the supreme arbiter of what is fact and not?

Moderators, who value civility over truth. Who tolerate trolls and punish those who call them trolls because name calling is "uncivil." Who, as MLK said, are "more devoted to 'order' than to justice."

They try to claim they aren't the arbiters of what is fact and what is not but their moderation powers prove otherwise. They try to claim neutrality, but that's a delusion:

"Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject." --John Stuart Mill, 1867 inaugural address at the University of St. Andrews

... Are the modern equivalent of medieval indulgences "pay me money and you can go ahead and keep sinning".

And just as likely to be effective in a) stopping sinning an/or b) making you innocent.

Haven't you complained repeatedly about shit-wage jobs and Amazon as a soulless employer?

What do you think will compel them to meaningfully pay more and treat workers better than throttling away their legions of low wage no-questions-really-asked workers?

Maybe Amazon (and their ancestors in big box retail) will even start costing more and spur a renaissance in local retail? Yeah I know that's getting into fantasy...

I'm an ICE user, who just bought a new car and after carefully considering an ev or hybrid, chose ICE again because of a long litany of EV shortcomings for my context.
Nevertheless this range accomplishment is great news. I think that's really great.

Is it constructive to immediately assume anyone who disagrees with you is a zealot? Do you think that's convincing anyone to be more open minded?

Did anyone say that?

That document is about a defective or incorrectly-installed part. Sure, if that's a problem then they should be repaired. It's not clear whether that's related to this crash at all.

You're moving the goalposts from your original suggestion that they shouldn't have a way to shut down the engines in flight at all.

That configuration - a switch placed immediately behind each engine's throttle lever - is almost universal in every jet designed since they eliminated the Flight Engineer position.

A320 (basically every Airbus looks similar). 737-300. 747-400. Embraer is weird: they put the start/stop controls immediately in front of the throttles.

I could go on, but the point is: this isn't some poorly-considered design fluke in the 787. This is how it is done, and for a good reason: there are many situations where it's necessary to shut down the engines for safety reasons. Having these controls readily accessible saves lives.

Maybe you should take your own advice.

To prevent or stop a fire. That needs to be a fast and uncomplicated procedure.

You could add interlock logic: If the aircraft is below $altitude, inhibit the switch. But that ignores use cases like "we're going down and about to crash in a field, let's cut off the engines to reduce the risk of fire."

It's tempting to keep making the logic more complicated: If the aircraft has been airborne for less than $duration and the we're below $altitude, delay shutdown for $x seconds while blaring an alarm, except if this temperature sensor reads high suggesting there's a fire, or excessive fuel flow indicates a leak. This introduces new problems: more bugs due to ever-increasing edge cases; more systemic failures due to a broken sensor; etc. This also means the pilots' mental model is more complicated: you don't want them to flip a switch and then wonder "wait, why didn't that work?", and waste time trying to remember some flowchart from their training.

So the current best-practice solution, used wherever possible, is KISS: Each control does exactly one thing, and it does it in the most immediate and direct way possible. You don't find out about your mistake only after some additional set of conditions are met. It does what the label says, and if you don't like the result, you flip the switch back. It should only be more complicated to prevent a recurring problem.

For the most part, that turns out to be the most safe and reliable design.

Yes because the disaster response by the feds pre Trump was brilliant. Just ask North Carolina, or the folks in Florida who were BY POLICY ignored because they had a Trump sign in their yard?

Since hair splitting is clearly your thing, the 1938 introduction of Superman has Clark Kent at age about 34.

That would put his adoption around 1902 or earlier, when the extant rules would clearly have made his adoption fully legal and him a citizen.

YDC.

I get it. The problem is they didn't put much thought into objective criteria for non-weather categories when they rolled out the system.

I think they should just roll Silver and AMBER together into "missing persons" and it would solve 90% of the problem.

1000% agree. I don't know if you expected I'd disagree, but absolutely: the idea of a $100 million plane (and what they don't tell you is that the quote to allies is +$400 million in life costs for the plane's operational span - this is a $half BILLION plane).

You could FILL THE SKY with crazy awesome drones and deploy a "can't miss" directed-energy weapon AA defense system for the cost of 1 stupid F35.

DoD exactly like NASA: the government needs to aggressively prune these programs.
We are $37 BILLION in debt.

Unfortunately, they don't have a separate category for "Silver Alerts". Around here they keep sending them as "Extreme Alerts", which ought to be reserved for flash flooding and other things which put large numbers of people in danger, not just one Alzheimer's case.

There will be a wave of posts about how these Brave Senators are fighting the Nasty Orange Fascist Tyrant and his anti-Science agenda(tm).

When in fact, let's be clear:
- SLS is an hilariously borderline disaster. Behind by years, $billions beyond budget, tests constantly fail. And it basically doesn't work.
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress...
- Should we talk about how their original mandate was more or less just to REbuild the Saturn V/Apollo a little bigger with modern materials? You know, that system that had 17 launches with only one launch system (sort of) failure (Apollo 13) MORE THAN 50 years ago? The system that was largely designed by engineers, whose "computers" were 6-7 orders of magnitude less capable than the smartphone in your pocket? Does it help the argument to point out that NASA is basically trying to rebuild something their fathers built, this time with astonishing developments in CAD/CAM, design, and almost-magical accomplishments in material science...and we still haven't even gotten a working fucking SPACESUIT yet?
- Destin @ SmarterEveryDay is about as proNASA as they can be, it's in his blood, and he *tried* in the most polite way possible to tell them "look, we all know this is a mess, nobody's even done the basic math on some CRITICAL program items for Artemis and...nobody's talking about it" It's a good video, and a good talk from someone who is genuinely sympathetic to the engineers in that room.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... ...(crickets)
- Yes, some of these senators (mostly the Democrats, but there are neverTrumper GOPs that will pretend righteousness) will themselves claim this as a Pro Science Crusade. Maybe it is, sure, whatever. But what these senators are MOSTLY fighting for is their piece of the $50 BILLION spent in their states that's been spent so far with no real sign of completion. That's serious gravy-train money even in Senatorial scales.

NASA (& JPL) is an amazing organization. It really IS rocket science. They have made some astonishing accomplishments, even in recent years, such as JWST and Martian probes that run nearly forever. They are, bar none, the pre-eminent space exploration organization on earth.
To be clear, I'm not peddling an alternative - there is no easy answer now.
I'm fine with Musk constantly blowing up spaceships, it's his $, but NASA is supposed to be good at this. Frankly, I'd rather we have a government space program *AND* private-industry space programs, both!

Nevertheless, at some point *someone* in charge has to have the nuts to confront NASA when a program is a mess and DEMAND they either fix it or kill it. It can't just go on hemorrhaging money for nothing in return.

This is statism, writ large.

You get paid for work you PERFORM, but not work you RECORD. Copyright is anti-individual rights and liberties.

I'll be glad when Ai truly replaces all of these artists.