The degree isn't about "getting a high-paid job", it's about knowing what the hell you're doing once you get a job. Although, fair enough, it's quite plausible that not many degrees would meet that standard either.

There is a possibility of a short-circuit causing an engine shutdown. Apparently, there is a known fault whereby a short can result in the FADEC "fail-safing" to engine shutdown, and this is one of the competing theories as the wiring apparently runs near a number of points in the aircraft with water (which is a really odd design choice).

Now, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that (a) the wiring actually runs there (the wiring block diagrams are easy to find, but block diagrams don't show actual wiring paths), (b) that there is anything to indicate that water could reach such wiring in a way that could cause a short, or (c) that it actually did so. I don't have that kind of information.

All I can tell you, at this point, is that aviation experts are saying that a short at such a location would cause an engine shutdown and that Boeing was aware of this risk.

I will leave it to the experts to debate why they're using electrical signalling (it's slower than fibre, heavier than fibre, can corrode, and can short) and whether the FADEC fail-safes are all that safe or just plain stupid. For a start, they get paid to shout at each other, and they actually know what specifics to shout at each other about.

But, if the claims are remotely accurate, then there were a number of well-known flaws in the design and I'm sure Boeing will just love to answer questions on why these weren't addressed. The problem being, of course, is that none of us know which of said claims are indeed remotely accurate, and that makes it easy for air crash investigators to go easy on manufacturers.

So the 'hyperloop' people have a cool website; while the 'train' people are just plain getting on with building stuff; whether conventional or the now-quarter-century-ish old maglev option.

Looks like someone signed up for another round of 'faff with apps vs. offshoring our entire high tech supply chain' and hoped it would work better this time.

And some dumbass 'managing director' is telling us that a gigantic safety-critical vacuum system is 'not effected by strikes'; more or less because he has no idea what the maintenance and operations would involve? Truly a joke telling itself.

I recall very early in the conversation, the transcription included a "why did you turn those off?"

Are you saying nobody said that?

I agree with you in principle: the open Internet, distributed expertise, and solid investigative journalism CAN reveal the true story when official sources are covering it up due to an agenda.
OTOH, the internet is *also* a being ground for paranoid conspiracy theories, tinfoil hatters, and cranks cherry picking data to drive their pet theories.

How does an amateur tell the difference?

So you're suggesting that circumstances could intersect resulting in large scale drought and climate change without an industrial civilization?

Without cars?

Without capitalism?

Without America, specifically Republicans?

Jesus, next thing you are going to be saying is that the current climate panic might not be entirely man made? That's crazy talk.

Trump Delusion Syndrome has been the greatest thing for the Chinese ever.

If Trump says 2 + 2 = 4, Western Europe and half of the US would demand that we abandon basic math.

Thankfully, the only people believing the climate grift are the zealots anymore.
The world is healing.

It's far from indisputable. Indeed, it's hotly disputed within the aviation industry. That does NOT mean that it was a short-circuit (although that is a theory that is under investigation), it merely means that "indisputable" is not the correct term to use here. You can argue probabilities or reasonableness, but you CANNOT argue "indisputable" when specialists in the field in question say that it is, in fact, disputed.

If you were to argue that the most probable cause was manual, then I think I could accept that. If you were to argue that Occam's Razor required that this be considered H0 and therefore a theory that must be falsified before others are considered, I'd not be quite so comfortable but would accept that you've got to have some sort of rigorous methodology and that's probably the sensible one.

But "indisputable"? No, we are not at that stage yet. We might reach that stage, but we're not there yet.

The inability of people to clear student loans with bankruptcy generally, was a fantastic gift by legislators to universities and lenders who otherwise needed to actually evaluate loan risk.

US Federal Debt in 1995 was about 65% of the GDP. Plus, the US was looking at a booming (fake) dot.com economy and expecting to reap the benefits of significantly reduced defense spending due to the end of the cold war.
Yes, when you're flush with cash (and helps being a Democrat) it's easy to promise $ for anything and everything.

In 2020 it's 132%.
1/4-1/5 of the US budget ANNUALLY is borrowed.
We *can't fucking afford to buy everyone lunch any more*.
https://www.investopedia.com/u...

It's ironic that Biden's comment "lines up to Ukraine" as oyu say, when largely the problem today is his Boss's/Clinton's meddling in Ukraine (ie about as critical a Russian sphere of influence as it gets), toppling Putin's puppet, and then doing FUCK ALL in 2014 when Putin boldly invaded Crimea (because Mr Obama was desperate to have RU support for his pointless, unenforceable treaty with Iran as a way to ensure Mr Obama's historical "legacy").

Just to maybe jog your memory a bit: Mr OBAMA was the first that told the lazy ass free riding Euros that they need to start paying their way. Not Mr Trump.

https://www.france24.com/en/20...

Mr Trump was merely "classless" enough to HOLD EU economies to their promises of years before. HOW GAUCHE!

Thought you might have forgotten that bit.

They do. Some people don't use them; and (if disciplined) use one or more worksheets to store data and refer to it purely internally and (otherwise) just sort of ad-hoc mix data and formulas.

In some cases a database connection is where the data comes from; but the number of cells grows because it's conceptually easier(and in practice often less opaque, given the ugliness of displaying very large cell contents) to munge on the data step by step rather than trying to ram everything into one transformation.

Coming from the IT side; and having to field questions from the perpetrators of some absolutely hideous excel sheets from time to time(no, I didn't even know that there was a way of creating a type of embedded image that actually quietly triggers the print spooler subsystem to do something that generates a new image based on the contents of another region of the spreadsheet, still don't know how they did that; but it's objectively depraved) I understand the hate; but I do have to admit that spreadsheets are pretty good for napkin-math thinking-it-through type processes.

Like when you work it out on paper; you've got your input, then you have a cell with the contents of the first transformation you wanted to make, then the second, then the third, and so on, and at each step you can think "does this value make sense?"

It rapidly gets out of hand in quantity; but as a rapid sketchpad for thinking something through you could do a whole lot worse. It's also tempting(again, tempting down the path of darkness in quantity) for dealing with jobs that need both a bit of string munging and a pretty-printed output.

You send the intern down to storage with a barcode scanner and have them start snagging SNs and MACs and stuff from the shipment of new gear. Turns out various vendors use different prefixes on different barcode values to inform their own ERP/inventory system/warehouse people which of the 5 closely spaced barcodes their scanner hit. And each vendor uses a different set of conventions, and while obvious enough they aren't documented. Ok, no problem; intern comes back with raw list; all the Lenovo SNs get a 'last x characters' substring; all the Cisco MACs get another transform, whatever.

Obviously if it were your inventory/warehouse system you wouldn't be treating the barcode scanner as a raw HID device and doing ad-hoc transformations, there would be a program that automatically uses the prefixes to populate the correct parts of the form; but you want to stick your head into ERP project hell rather than come up with maybe a dozen lightweight string manipulations? Obviously, you could also do it in your choice of scripting language and iterate through one CSV to create another; but that mostly just conceals what you did from anyone who doesn't use that scripting language; while you can walk basically anyone employable through the logic of the spreadsheet prettifying.

I suspect that it's more symptom than cause, and probably not at the top of the list of causes; but I cannot overstate how much I loathe the hyperbolic use of the term 'unthinkable' in these sorts of situations. Both because it's false; and because it often acquires a sort of implicitly exculpatory implication that is entirely undeserved.

Not only is it 'thinkable'; having something awful happen when you perform a procedure that requires longterm hardcore immunosuppression and then let them follow through the cracks is trivially predictable. It's the expected behavior. Successfully reconnecting a whole ton of little blood vessels and nerves is fairly exotic medicine; predicting that thing will go poorly without substantial follow-up is trivial even by washout premed standards.

This isn't to say that it isn't ghastly, or that I could imagine being in that position; but 'unthinkable' is closer to being a claim of unpredictability or unknowability; which is wholly unwarranted. None of this was unthinkable; but nobody really cared to check or wanted to know all that much.

Right now the drive to diversify is entirely political.
Ok great you hate Trump, congrats.
The FACT is that there is no serious alternative to the USD as a reserve currency.
The currencies mentioned (euro, yuan) are indeed probably the closest in a basically empty field.
The yuan is controlled by a deeply dishonest tyrannical government that hasn't authentically reported financial information for decades. The EU is an anti democratic talking shop that can't manage to stand up a coast guard, much less manage a monetary policy.

Don't get me wrong, there are major, major issues with how the US handles economics. Inter party vacillations every 4 years. Dishonesty about inflation or economic data when it's politically inconvenient. But to the point of real-world contexts critical to underpin faith in a currency, the US remains economically dominant, more militarily secure than all others, and well supplied with food, water, oil, and raw materials.