For most people some of the time, and for just about everyone some of the time, modern automatic transmissions will perform better than they would with an ICE vehicle. But no matter how good any automatic transmission is, the one thing it will never be able to do is read your mind about what you *intend* to do next. So there will always be situations with an ICE vehicle where you'd rather have a manual or semi-automatic than an automatic.

That doesn't apply to electric motors, which produce nearly peak torque at 0 RPM and then over a wide range of RPMs; so you never have to match the motor's RPMs to what you want to do next. There are corner cases, like towing an extremely heavy load or traveling at extremely high speeds outside the motor's very wide power band, where you'd want to have different gear ratios. There are various ways for engineers to address these cases, but if they chose to give a vehicle a shiftable transmission, there's no reason that a computer couldn't do the shifting; there's no need for it to "read your mind".

As for on snow, regenerative braking can feel a lot like engine braking depending on your driving settings. In a vehicle's maximum efficiency mode the motor will very noticeably begin to absorb energy from the wheels when you let up on the "gas".

A chainsaw is a great tool. Some fool chopping his leg off with one doesn't change that.

That's just getting old. When you're middle-aged you're too busy for things that used to give you joy, but you spend years lugging them around with the vague idea you'll get back to them someday. That includes people too; in middle age you don't priortize the people who make you happy, you prioritize the ones you need to get through your busy days. Then if you're old enough, you'll find yourself with an addressbook somewhere with dozens of numbers of people you'd like to call but with numbers that probably haven't worked in years.

Losing touch with something or someone doesn't necessarily mean that thing or person wasn't worthwhile. Sure, if you're 70 you should probably get rid of that ice-axe or scuba gear you haven't used in forty years. But there's probably things you threw out that you wish you still had.

I'm not saying it *can't* be someone who is enthusiastic about aviation, but there's the danger of what psychologists call "motivated thinking" -- you or I would call it "wishful thinking" or "denial". If someone really loves the product, you need him to be able to believe something he wish was not true.

That's actually a rare quality. If a close call by a referee goes against your team, I'd say at least 90% of people would automatically believe it was a bad call and could not be convinced otherwise.

No, you don't want someone who *romanticizes* aviation. You want a hard-nosed realist who can think critically and has got his priorities straight.

In a crisis of trust, what you need is a leader with *character*. You need someone who understands the responsibility of building a product that people trust, but which can kill them. You need someone who can speak with discretion while at the same time being scrupulously honest about things people have a right to know.

Above all, you need a realist who is going focus on things that make an actual difference rather than just managing perceptions and evading blame. Saying the right thing has never been Boeing's management's problem, they always said exactly what needed to be said. They just never did what needed to be done.

I think the need for a leader with outstanding character is why people would like to see an engineer in charge. People trust engineers, otherwise they'd never get in a car or a plane. But we're not all ideal engineers, are we? Look at the CEO of OceanGate; he was an aeronautical engineer, but you sure as hell wouldn't want someone like him in charge of Boeing. A lack of enthusiasm for his vehicle wasn't what caused it to implode; it was a lack of sober and critical thinking.

That's really the only thing I miss about vinyl -- Thos great big album covers. Especially the two disc sets, which had covers that opened like books, or even were books.

Anyone who doesn't remember this can get an idea of what it was like here.

Large corporations aren't *national*, and calling them "multi-national" doesn't really capture their nature which isn't isn't subordinate to any nation, much less multiple ones. They stand outside the framework of nations, acting as power and interest centers entirely in their own right.

The only way to get a large corporation to respect the interests of a nation-state is for that nation-state to compel that by force -- through laws, regulations, and in authoritarian states extrajudicial punishments. The only reason for Americans to be *particularly* concerned about TikTok is that it particularly convenient for the Chinese government to enforce its will on them. In fact if you look at ByteDance's response -- offering to move information centers outside of China, you will see an example of a corporation not identifiying with its host country's interests and trying to circumvent state control.

Now vis-a-vis China, the Xi regime is attempting to exert more control over businesses operating in their countries *which is deterimental to the interests of multi-national corporations operating there*. And in any case foreign social media sites aren't allowed to operate in the country. So we don't have to worry about, say, Meta getting too cozy with Xi; The Xi regime is Meta's *enemy*. But you can bet Meta would sell you to the Chinese government if the regime were more friendly, and even to respond positively to friendly overtures.

Chinese people aren't identical, ideological robots, whether you believe that to be the product of race, culture, or authoritarian training. Sure, culture and indoctrination at least may predispose *more* people there to take a Maoist or nationalist viewpoint, but I guarantee you that among 1.4 billion people there are plenty dissidents and freethinkers and people who question the party line. Xi is really reimposing elements of Maoism after a decades long turn away from that, which means he has to purge *even the CCP party ranks* of diversity.

If you couldn't expect any diversity of viewpoint in China, the the CCP would not be so keen on cracking down on dissent. They wouldn't be banging the "Xi Xinping Thought" drum so loudly if there weren't other viewpoints out there that needed to be drowned out.

The idea that Mao "won" because he had some kind of mystically infallible and exclusive insight into the character of Chinese people is a "just so" story -- reasoning that becaue he won he *must* have had some special understanding of China. Not to unduly minimize his perspicacity as a politician, he won beause this opposition -- the KMT -- was really, really bad. Mao was not harnessing some kind of reactionary Chinese impulse to resist an attempt to impose western economic and political liberalism; communism was a modern alternative to a reacdtionary and nationalistic regime whose corruption and incompetence had led the nation to high unemployment rates and hyperinflation.

As the Italians say, "traduttore traditore." I'd translate what that means into Engish but it loses something.

Even aside from the issue of accurate validation,, Trumpâ(TM)s properties are likely already mortgaged to the hilt. Thatâ(TM)s not particular to Trump, itâ(TM)s sensible business practice. Property gives you access to credit, so you take advantage of that credit to obtain money to grow your business. Mortgaging your property is the ordinary profit maximizing thing to do.

But what you canâ(TM)t do is leverage your property *twice*. So even bonafide real estate billionaires donâ(TM)t have access to limitless instant cash. Independent estimates of Trumpâ(TM)s wealth puts it at a little over 2.5 billion. Thereâ(TM)s probably not a billionaire in the world who could scare up almost 20% of his net worth in cash overnight.

Assuming his properties are mortgaged to the max, such a big cash demand could trigger a catastrophic chain reaction where he sells one property, lenders whose loans are secured with that property demand their money back immediately, forcing him to sell another property and so on.

If Trump can somehow turn this IPO into a fair amount of ready cash, that could spell the difference between financial survival and ruin for him . Heâ(TM)s just got to sell his believers in buying in.

Common denominators... common... *communist*!

This kind of math is un-American.

It's also *smart*, which acting classy often turns out to be. What people want from the leader of a company in an industry that is having these kinds of problems is maturity, perspective, and thoughtfulness. Naked opportunism and unbridled competitiveness at any cost isn't a good look when people need reassurance.

For that reason, not twisting the knife is the most effective way to twist the knife, especially when you can pretty much count on your competitor to do the twisting for you. Also, if a quality error happened to be discovered in an Airbus product shortly after the CEO was gloating about Boeing, that would be catastrophically bad.

This *is* real science. It's just not by itself a sufficient basis for making any kind of evidence-based decision. Nor *could it possibly be*.

I had a friend in collge who participated in a nutrition randomized control trial . For months he had to carry around a gym bag; not only did everything he eat and drink come out of that bag, all his urine and feces went into containers in that bag so they could be weighed and analyzed to ensure he was complying with the research protocol. If he snuck a candy bar or a soda the researchers would know, and he'd lose his "job" plus the bonus for completing the study. While I'm sure that study got high quality data given the immense care it took, it surely tracked only *markers* (like blood lipids) rather than *outcomes* (like heart disease). That's because the outcomes we're interested in usually take decades to develop. It's hard enough finding people to live out of and poop into a bag they carry everywhere for *six months*. You'll never find anyone to do that for *ten years*.

So in nutrition, even an RCT can't be treated as some kind of gold standard for evidence-based decision making. If an RCT proves A causes B, B will never be C, the thing we're actually interested in. B will at best be *correlated* with C. So whether we're talking RCT or cross sectional studies, we are just making a case for some kind of correlation. You need *multiple kinds of evidence*, repeated by multiple researchers multiple times. With that volume and variety of evidence, you eventually develop a picture which connects the dots between A and C in a way that is unlikely to be false in any of its particulars. Useful results are *always* big picture results.

So what should be the gold standard for evidence-based decisions is a systematic review paper published by a scientist current working in the field, and in a well-known journal. This is the *minimal* level of evidence that people outside a field should pay any attention to, at least for the purposes of guiding decision making.

Rural and urban kids are, I think, still more independent than suburban kids. It's in well-heeled suburbs like the one I brought my kids up in that the norm of micromanaging kids' time is strongest. Parents can afford to put their kids in after school programs and summer day camps where their time is programmed. Those parents were early adopters of the cell phone as tether.

It's a bit of dilemma is that those well-heeled suburbs where parents hover over their kids shoulders are where the good schools are, and that in itself takes a lot away from the kids because those schools are assigning a shocking amount of homeowork, even over summer vacation. I had a lot of conflicts with teachers because as early as the third grade they were sending home multiple hours of homework when their own guidelines said there should be no more than thirty minutes.

Sure these test *results* are garbage. But it doesn't mean the testing *protocol* is garbage, since that testing protocol was designed to work on a different kind of sample.

In other words, think of any test result as being a statement of Bayesian probability: "Given that the sample is from a domestic dog, we can say with reasonable confidence that it is around 40% malamute." You could easily modify your test procedures to exclude human DNA samples, but why would you do that?