Sure, if you got time to "fuel up" that battery on that long road trip, no trouble at all. IF you are driving long distances or carrying freight, fossil fuels got EV's beat for time efficiency.

You are totally correct, the "Hydrogen Economy" is pretty much a myth. I consider it the same thing as "Linux for the Desktop" which is a nice sounding idea that will NEVER happen because it is totally impractical.

BTW.. "W" contribution to this myth was a blatant attempt to pander to the environmental wacko lobby and an attempt to cozy up to the EU where such nonsense tends to find more traction. I don't think he was serious. $750 Million is but a drop in the alternate fuel bucket.

This stealing of scrap metal needs to stop... Check the local scrap yards, I'll bet you find it.

Great Scott!

Unless this guy is really a night owl, it sure looks like he was on the East Coast or Central TZ in the USA to me.

I know the normal hacker hours are centered on the dead of night, but the plots would put that habit in the middle of the Atlantic ocean.

IMHO - Somebody working "normal" hours, even shifted to afternoon evening, sure looks like East Coast or Central Time Zones to me.

Actually.. The whole discussion before was about the NEXT count, for which there are no ballots cast yet. You need to F'n learn to read.

The whole process needs to be tightened up a bit for the next election so we don't go through this mess again. Like what happened in FL after Bush squeaked by Gore and the hanging chad thing. They tossed those old punch card system pretty fast after that.

Wow, how do you get that from the 2nd amendment? Specifically the "shall not be infringed" part.

Now the courts HAVE held that you can have "reasonable regulations" over the ownership, carrying and use of fire arms, but the test of what's reasonable and what's not is a pretty big lift for most rules. I believe this requires meeting the "Strict Test", which basically means the regulation must have an absolutely clear purpose that can be accomplished by no other means.

So it's hard to argue that preventing "concealed carry" without a license, where the license is not required to be issued to qualified persons (i.e. has a "Shall issue" basis in law) unless there is a given legal issue to deny a license (like you are a felon, mental patient etc.) is constitutional.

So I disagree with you. The 2nd amendment generally is interpreted to give one the right to carry (concealed or not) and local governments have infringed on that right with their conceal carry regulations which are subject to some pretty strict justification conditions because they are infringing on the 2nd amendment. IMHO - I think many firearm rules and local regulations have over-stepped their justifications. The courts have been striking down many of the conceal carry laws where local regulations totally prohibit it. See Heller V DC - and McDonald V Chicago for what I mean.

I am no "Boeing Apologist" here. I am a realist.

I don't defend Boeing's mistakes, and they made mistakes here, no question. They face civil liability for their actions and mistakes, which is how it should be. What I am saying is that it wasn't intentional or foreseeable. Boeing wasn't cutting corners or being negligent in this issue, but a system problem cropped up anyway. This whole episode is a classic "normal accident" which becomes more and more likely as the complexity of the system increases. ,

This is not the first such issue with the 737 you know. They had a serious problem with rudder controls back in the day and lost a couple of planeloads of passengers before they figured it out. That too was an unforeseen design problem too that had to do with varying temperatures of hydraulic fluid at different phases of flight, causing an uncommanded full deflection of the rudder. It killed two or three planeloads before they figured out what was going on and fixed it.

"Normal accidents" happen, despite your best efforts to avoid them. Apollo 13 and the two Shuttle accidents were examples of this, so was the financial crash of 2000, where the system got too complex for people to properly gauge risk and stupid decisions got made that unknowingly caused grave damage.

Complexity also leads to problems and costs. Just because a system is built "fool proof" doesn't mean the world won't produce a better fool.

One of the unfortunate truism of the world is that the more complex you make something, the more unforeseen issues that can lurk in your design.

In aircraft automation, human factors engineers have to understand that Automation lowers pilot workload, until something goes wrong, then automation greatly increases it. So automation helps when things are going great, but when things start going wrong, Automation hinders.

It's called the "Swiss Cheese model" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Put as many layers of checks as you can between your assembly and disaster, because, stuff happens.

I should think the reason they don't do that to be obvious. Thursters often use some pretty dangerous propellants and for the safety of the ground crew you don't want to have this stuff just blowing around.

However, you are on the right track. Somebody needs to VERIFY the assembly is correct and functional after it's assembled. Where I don't think you can do a full functional test, you should be able to verify the wiring at least.

That may fix the final assembly errors, but it doesn't eliminate the human error problem.

What you *really* need is VERIFICATION. When there is a possible human error involved, such actions need to be verified correct by another independent process. Where was that? Where was the - "it's hooked up, now verify that it works as expected" step?

This is a process problem, not a design issue. Just changing connectors won't help if you don't verify the correct wires get connected to the different connectors somehow. You have to have to verify all mission critical things being assembled.

File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match..

That's your *opinion* not fact.

Granted, my position is *opinion* too, but that's just because neither you nor I are working for Boing on the Max or for the FAA overseeing Boing's processes.

This episode has all the hallmarks of a "system accident" or "normal accident" if you prefer. This isn't malfeasance on anybody's part, it is the nature of the human condition where we have limited capacity to know all the details and consider all the possible interactions. System Accidents look so preventable in hindsight, "well gee, any fool can see that would be an issue" is a common description of such events. But the truth is that it's far from obvious at the time.

I urge you to reconsider, the folks at Boeing and the FAA are NOT generally bad people or negligent in the performance of their duties. It is unfair of you to judge them harshly in this unless you can point to specific people and their actions. Otherwise, you are just bashing the faceless and nameless because it makes you feel better and that doesn't fix anything.

I didn't say "pilot error" at all, I said the pilots were not trained properly. There is a difference. Pilot error is when the pilot goes off script or does something they've been trained not to do or is inconsistent with proper flying techniques. When there is a pilot training issue, the pilots have never been told what to do, haven't practiced or been tested on the correct procedure. When they've not been trained on the proper response, it's a training issue.

In this case, it clearly was a training issue. Pilots were not told about or trained on the MCAS or how to recover from its possible misbehavior. When you have a training issue, you get inconsistent pilot performance, as we have here, where 2/3rds of the crews couldn't deal with the problem. This is a classic symptom of a training issue, where some crews can and others cannot deal with a problem.

Boeing has fixed this oversight. The training for the 737 now includes a discussion of the MCAS, new memory items for dealing with stab trim issues, and a demonstration of these new procedures in the simulator.