The regulations were so bad that they came up with a (lawful) workaround (changing the mounting position of the engines) to avoid triggering some of the worst of them, and then when that workaround changed things enough that too much regulation would be triggered, they came up with another lawful workaround, MCAS. And that caused the trouble. They couldn't do make anything new because the regulatory burden for new things was too great, so instead they piled workaround after workaround on the old thing.

And you can scoff at "cheapest" all you want, but if the result of Boeing doing something else is their customers have to retrain their pilots, then as someone else put it "they might as well go to Airbus".

If you think you need a Harvard degree, let alone a Harvard MBA to work for Google, your view of the world is quite off.

It's pretty complicated because if you regulate too few, you end up with lead in the food, but if you regulate too much, you end up passing a law where only bayer or monsanto is allowed to deliver products because you need a multi-billion dollar equipment they hold a patent of.

Right. But those who wish to regulate don't have a specific amount of regulation in mind. They have either a goal of 100% safety, or a direction of "more regulation". This means you have regulatory bodies who spend all their time dreaming up new possible hazards and regulations to prevent them them, and any time some failure does happen there's a bunch of new regulations written to prevent it (they will tell you "Every safety rule and regulation is written in blood" and therefore cannot be relaxed). So the barriers to entry and costs become insurmountable for new entrants (or even established players which haven't ossified enough to not even try anything new) and the field becomes moribund.

To see why we have "budensome" regulations, look at Boeing jets.

The reason we have the Boeing jets we do -- specifically, the 737-MAX -- is those burdensome regulations. To put modern engines on something the regulators would consider a modification of the existing 737s rather than a new design (which would require a much more burdensome process, not just for the aircraft itself but triggering a requirement to retrain all the pilots -- pilots have to be certified specifically for every aircraft type they fly), the engines were mounted in such a way that they tended to push the nose up during takeoff. In order to avoid this resulting in that regulatory requirement to re-train pilots, the MCAS system that caused all that trouble was invented. And so, while regulation usually trades safety for development time, cost, comfort, and utility, in this particular case, the safety wasn't achieved either.

"There is a need for stronger oversight and clear options for operators who are exploring new concepts outside of the existing regulatory framework," Jason Neubauer, the chair of the Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation for the Titan submersible, said in a statement.

If something is outside the existing regulatory framework, it is forbidden by that framework. The "options" are to violate the regulations or not to explore the new concepts; that's an unavoidable consequence of having a comprehensive regulatory framework. Those moralizing about people doing new stuff not following the regs should at least admit that what they want is for nothing fundamentally new to be created.

Plastics are almost all artificial hydrocarbons made from fossil fuels. They are basically strange newly invented and artificial 'organic' molecules. They are not composed of They should easily be edible to life, but being new, creatures have mostly not evolved to eat them.

Yet.

You see, this is changing. Now that we have filled the world with plastics, new creatures are appearing that can safely eat it, turning into normal hydrocarbons, which should get fed into the food chain.

Last time a ubiquitous new durable polymer material (lignin) was introduced into the environment, it took 60 million years for things to evolve enough to break down any significant amount of it; this was the Carboniferous Era. So while you might count on life finding a way, you can't count on it doing so in a timely manner.

This is slashdot. The only thing we do with Nikon anything is argue about how to pronounce "Nikon".

What makes you think the tariffs will disappear? The Republicans support them and the Democrats are fine with them.

On July 19, a massive new Wolbito factory opened about 80 miles from here in Curitiba. Its goal is to produce some 5 billion mosquitoes in the first year.

So if you want to not be detected as underaged, search for and watch adult content.

This might not work out as they planned.

New Jersey has Camden, whose unofficial motto is "Worse than Detroit", but it's so depopulated it's not considered in many surveys.

Anyway, I suspect this "manufacturing academy" will run a year or two or three, not do much of anything, then be shut down with Apple writing off the loss as well worth it for the goodwill with the government.

It's worse than that. When anyone talks "productivity growth" they are literally talking output per capita.

No, labor productivity is output per person-hour worked.

Fortunately low clouds have been measured to have a net cooling effect.