What I take away from this is yet again, scientific proof that cannabinoid's are good for us. These helpful substances however are banned from our consumption. Thanks, government racist morons!
Now will people believe me when I say Right to Repair won't accomplish what they think it will? It'll just end up pushing manufacturers to create unrepairable products, to force you to buy a new one when it breaks.
Not if the law is written sensibly, requiring that parts be made available for a period of time and that products be designed in such a way that consumable parts, such as batteries, are easily replaceable.
Instead, treat it like a lease - force manufacturers to extend the warranty to cover whatever period they won't allow you to repair it. With control comes responsibility. They want to exert control over something after they "sell" it to you, then they're also responsible for fixing it until they cede that control. If they make it unfixable, then the warranty should default to some upper threshold like 5 or 7 years. If an unfixable product breaks within 5 or 7 years, the manufacturer has to replace it at no cost to you.
I kind of think that if a product fails without abuse within ten years, it ought to be replaced. If a product lasts ten years, it will probably last forty. If you let companies build things that last three, they will last three. That said, I'm fine with consumables not being covered under such a long warranty, so long as they are designed to be readily replaceable.
Just put it in a box and fill the whole thing with epoxy. Use a big enough heat sink that the tips of the fins are exposed. Then mount it upside down so that if it gets wet, the water runs down the fins.:-)
I agree in principle that we should not needlessly waste oil or produce trash. But an outright ban has a habit of giving you unforeseen consequences in corner cases.
I'd be happy if they would just write laws in ways that avoid the easily foreseen consequences. Sometimes, I think the average politician lacks the foresight of a goat. Other times, I'm sure of it.
I'm honestly not sure whether BGAs are used in aerospace tech. For sure, some companies have been testing them for aerospace use for many years. It probably depends on whether a non-BGA version exists for whatever chip they need, and whether the alternative is worse (e.g. LGA).
Of course, the same problems can happen just as easily with any other surface-mount parts; it's just somewhat less common because it's easy to inspect and verify the soldering work when it isn't under a chip. I guess I probably should have said SMT rather than going for the worst-case package. Either way, the point still mostly applies.:-)
The requirements, AFAIK, don't apply to aerospace, but that's not the same thing as guaranteeing that no electronic component contains lead-free solder internally; the same parts can be used for multiple things.
You really don't think that Boeing has thought to do accelerated life testing on lead-free solder connections?
If you had asked me a month ago whether Boeing would build hardware that could command huge amounts of trim using only a single AoA sensor, I'd have said no. So if you're seriously asking whether I think that a design team who would sign off on MCAS might also have underestimated the impact of using a different epoxy in some BGA part, not realizing that it would overstress some solder ball because of its composition, then yeah, I'd say that's entirely possible. And if you don't think so, I hope you're not involved in the certification process.:-)
And it's not just thermal stress. Lead-free solder is subject to random formation of tin whiskers that can short things out. If two solder pads just happen to be slightly closer to one another than other similar pads, the odds of catastrophic whisker formation occurring between those pads would be much higher than between the other similar pads, which could easily cause a much higher failure rate of a specific bit on some parallel bus or similar.
Not every bad thing that happens to electronics is because of the world-wide conspiracy to take lead out of solder.
No, but a lot of them are, including some that you might not be aware of. For example, many cases of Toyota's unexpected acceleration were likely caused by tin whiskers resulting from certain lead-free solder formulations (NESC Assessment #TI-10-00618).
What really rules the h/w angle out is the similar fault on (at least) two unrelated flights.
It only rules out hardware if you assume that the failure is a random fluke. If it is the result of a mechanical design flaw or an under-specified simple component like a resistor, capacitor, or transistor, hardware failing in the same way isn't particularly rare. For example:
GPU thermal failures often result in a small number of different sets of identical symptoms; the same solder balls break more frequently because of their location and the way that the chip expands.
At one point, I was involved in a group buy of some preamplifier hardware from a manufacturer in China. There was something like a 40% failure rate, and it was caused by a single transistor being substituted with a lower-quality part that became unstable in the presence of too little capacitance. And they all failed with the exact same symptom, en masse.
And a particular age range of certain models of TV failed en masse because of capacitor plague. In every case, the symptom was that they wouldn't turn on.
Or consider the T-Con board that drives various LCD panels in TVs. They fail with alarming regularity, to such a degree that there's actually a third-party company manufacturing new replacement boards for old TVs. There are only a few different failure modes, usually involving one color channel stuck off or on, and statistically if you buy a used board, nearly 100% of the time you'll get a bad one, because it's the #1 cause of replacing TVs that contain certain models of T-Con board.
And I can also recall a hard drive connector built by a major manufacturer that was attached by a screw on only one end, and repeatedly would work its way lose, requiring a complete redesign of the hardware in the next generation.
It might not be the physical sensor. Data from both the LION and Ethiopian flights shows an offset between the two AoA sensors of 22 degrees. Neither appear to be stuck, as they both track airplane movements. But with this offset. Same physical fault causing the exact same offset? Doubtful.
One theory is that the 22 degree figure is pretty close to the value of one bit in the ARINC 429 word for AoA (22.5 degrees). So, software might be flipping a bit. This might be a tough bug to run down.
It seems unlikely that software would suddenly start flipping a bit repeatedly. That usually implies faulty hardware. The real question is how two pieces of hardware could experience the exact same fault on exactly the same bit.
My money is on thermal expansion of a BGA fastened with lead-free solder.
No one energy saving solution is going to fix the problem.
Our power consumption is continuously growing despite conservation efforts. Therefore, I would argue that a nearly infinite number of energy-saving solutions still won't fix the problem. The problem is that you and I don't agree on what the problem is.
In my view, the problem is that we rely on dirty energy sources for too much of our power. We rely on them because they are cheaper than the alternative. No amount of conservation will ever change that. It will just slow growth of cleaner energy solutions to the newer, slower rate of power consumption growth.
That doesn't mean that saving energy usage is a waste.
For people who are concerned with how much money they're spending on electricity, conserving power can be quite valuable to them as individuals. And I'm certainly not intending to suggest that this isn't valuable in its own right, if only because it increases the happiness of people who are struggling to get by. But to society as a whole, it is still mostly a waste, because:
It will not actually help the environment. The power savings will be completely overshadowed by the multiple-orders-of-magnitude-greater power consumption increases caused by moving us towards electric cars. In fact, they will probably be completely overshadowed by power consumption increases caused by population growth alone. Therefore, the most likely impact is slowing green power growth, not reducing unclean power production.
The small marginal increase in the money that those folks have to spend on other things is unlikely to have a meaningful impact on the market for any other good or service.
So the question becomes this: Why is it useful to create policies that negatively impact everyone in an effort to force the working poor to do something that is beneficial to them? That just doesn't sound like good public policy to me.
Dude, read a book about Kaizen or something. Convincing people to turn lights off when nobody is in the room, turn the faucet off while brushing teeth, etc. seem like wasted efforts to you, but they are easily achievable goals, and help wire people's minds for bigger changes. Conservation does matter, it's the first step in a long journey.
The problem is that they're doing the step in entirely the wrong order. The correct order is:
Phase out dirty power production
Power costs go up
Consumers scream that their power costs are too expensive
Businesses respond by finding ways to reduce the power consumption of electronic devices, light bulbs, etc.
By doing it in the wrong order, people who have no reason to be concerned about their power costs are still forced to use grossly inferior lighting technology for the purposes of conservation that seems entirely artificial and unnecessary to them, which mostly just makes people mad and actually discourages the behavior you're trying to encourage (conservation). And even people who do need to be concerned about power costs are grumpy about feeling like they are being forced to spend more money for light bulbs, even if they do end up saving money in the long run.
By making it be demand-driven, improvements tend to occur in areas where small changes have a big impact, rather than sweating the small stuff, people feel like they actually benefit from the conservation. And that means they're more likely to take additional conservation steps in the future, are more receptive to paying more money for light bulbs knowing that it will save them money in the long run, etc.
So it is not only easier to control the cleanliness of power production, it is also more effective at achieving the stated goal (cleaner air) AND more effective at the stretch goal (encouraging conservation). It's too bad that most of our nation's politicians aren't nearly foresighted enough to make good decisions. We can do better. We *must* do better.
However, it can help to force new standards. Even by your numbers (which again, need more detail as to when they are referring to) it lowers the total electricity usage in the US by 5%. That doesn't linearly mean that we produce 5% less pollution. It means that some coal burning plants might get shut down. And that makes a difference. Because, ultimately, plants don't tend to be turned off and on willy-nilly, because turning them on is hugely expensive. So saving energy can have outsized effects.
Except that incandescent lighting bans don't have much of an effect on daytime power use, because that tends to be mostly commercial, not residential, so you aren't going to affect base load at all. During the late afternoon/early evening period when residential and commercial power overlap, you would mostly be cutting production from natural gas peaker plants, because that's during the period when energy output is highest. After that, maybe you'd be cutting coal.
Either way, the point remains that demanding the replacement of coal-based plants with other forms of power production would have the same effect, but unlike light bulb market manipulation, would be guaranteed to have the desired effect. It doesn't make a lot of sense to force conservation and hope that the best-base outcome (reduction in coal use) occurs, rather than the worst-case outcome (reduction of more expensive nuclear base load). If you want to do market manipulation, you would get orders of magnitude better results by taxing coal to make other energy sources more economically attractive by comparison.
Because LED lightbulbs would not have become a thing unless the government started forcing efficiency rules. The efficiency rules first caused corporations to create CFLs, which sucked; then LED bulbs, which didn't.
Not even close. CFLs first became available way back in 1980, and designs date back as far back as the mid-1970s. That's long before any government light bulb efficiency standards. In fact, they predate the entire Energy Star program by more than a decade.
The main driver of LED lighting was not residential lighting or government mandates, but rather the need for more power-efficient backlighting for mobile electronics, where battery life matters a great deal. By the time the U.S. government got around to passing laws, all the essential elements were in place for LED lighting. And some government-backed contests spurred progress in that field, too, at about the same time as the incandescent ban law.
So maybe the government standards pushed LED lighting to happen slightly sooner than it otherwise would have, but I'm not convinced for a minute that LED lighting wouldn't have happened without those standards. After all, LED Christmas lights predate those standards by more than a decade. Clearly, consumers were interested in saving power and in higher-reliability lighting even without the government forcing them to do so, and demand was adequate to make LED-based products happen, which almost certainly means that more general LED lighting would eventually have happened anyway, even without the government's "help".
And a lot of that power is spent pumping out the heat from the lights. So if the lights result in less heat, the HVAC runs less and also uses less power. Win-win.
Only in the summer. In the winter, the reverse is true. I'm not saying it balances out, because resistance heat is nowhere near as efficient as a heat pump, but the total difference over the course of the year isn't nearly as much as you think it is, particularly if, like me, you find that you need several times the supposed "equivalent wattage" because LED lighting really doesn't look as bright as is claimed.
You are not wrong. The market is taking care of the "specialty" bulbs just fine. I can walk into any store now and find LED versions for almost all those bulbs. It look the invention of the "LED Filament" type bulbs, and wham- the floodgates opened. Clear bulbs with small bases and real filaments that project light in all the right places. It was a MAJOR breakthrough.
They sort of work for some use cases. They are not remotely a good replacement, though, for a whole host of reasons, from spectrum differences to brightness differences to not existing in the same sorts of globe styles. But you're right that they're better than they were.
Any regulation is now just mostly a waste. Most consumers are not stupid, they understand LED, they are learning what lumens are, color temperature, and actual wattage. They are making informed and better decisions every year. Change takes time- both for development and education. And there ARE some cases where incandescent are still better and appropriate. Making them "illegal" doesn't make sense.
Any regulation of residential lighting was always a waste. It's not about helping the environment. It's about virtue signaling, proving by forcing people to give up their incandescent bulbs that they're serious about the environment. Why do I say this? Three reasons:
The amount of power that can be saved is pure noise. Commercial lighting hasn't used incandescent bulbs in decades for power cost reasons. And residential lighting, as a percentage of power consumption, is barely even relevant. Only 6% of U.S. power consumption goes to residential lighting. Thus, even very large reductions in residential power use result in very small changes to total power use.
The greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. residential lighting are pure noise. The U.S. produces only 15% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, with only 28% of that coming from electricity. Even if you could somehow eliminate all U.S. residential lighting consumption (to zero), you would still only be reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 6% of 28% of 15%, or two hundredths of one percent. By contrast, if we could shift all of our automobiles to electric, assuming that new power comes from green sources, we would cut 28% of our greenhouse gas emissions, or more than 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Conservation only matters because our power production is dirty. The greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. power production get lower every year. Currently, about 63.5% of power comes from fossil fuels, down from more than 92% in the 1950s. The single best way to improve the environment is to accelerate that trend and to pressure countries that manufacture goods for sale in the U.S. (e.g. China) to do the same.
Trying to solve global warming by reducing residential lighting electrical usage is like trying to stop crime by finding a criminal and driving at 5 MPH in front of him or her with your car for a block. It is patently absurd, and anybody who says otherwise hasn't seriously thought about the numbers. We can't conserve our way out of this problem. We have to change the means of energy production, replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy or nuclear power. That's the *only* approach that can *possibly* have an effect that is big enough to be worth the effort.
Well, they do break once in a while, but they also cost $10 instead of $160. If the Airpods only reliably last two years before you start having battery issues, you could shred a pair of $10 earbuds once every 6 weeks and still come out ahead.:-)
Besides, the only wired headphones I've ever had go bad have been name brand stuff from companies like Sony and Koss. The $10 Noot earbuds (who?) that I bought in bulk from Amazon still randomly disappear every few months, but I haven't had a single failure yet in 2.5 years, despite finding them loose in the washing machine and/or clothes dryer on more than one occasion.
See my original comment. At least in the U.S., the airlines err on the side of the caution to the point that planes with passengers sit around for hours while indisputably minor and non-hazardous issues get repaired. Maybe that's why the U.S. hasn't had any issues with this plane.
Laughably so. I'm pretty sure the only reason the in-flight entertainment systems ever work is because they're physically located in the cockpit, so you can only fly so many flights with them non-functional.:-/
There's probably a happy medium in there somewhere. I'm just not sure what it is or which side of it Lion Air was on at the time.
If round up increased one's risk of cancer by 50%, it'd still be nearly impossible to prove with a preponderance of the evidence that any given case of cancer was caused by it (in fact, even if it was responsible for 30% of all cancer, it most likely wouldn't be responsible for any given case).
Good thing that a 50% increase would make it responsible for 33.333% of all cancer, then.:-D
"Airplane won't stop severely overriding my trim settings" should have grounded that airplane until someone figured out why. That's a great way to get dead really fast, as the crew the next day proved.
Well, yeah, but assuming the problem was caused by bad AoA sensor readings, if the repair resulted in correct readings, how could they possibly have guessed that it would suddenly stop working again the next day? I mean, that's why repair manuals tell how to diagnose specific misbehavior and correct it. If those repair manuals are wrong, that's really still on Boeing, not on the people who followed their instructions.
Yes, it is obvious in hindsight that they should have taken the plane for a test flight afterwards to verify that things were working correctly, but if you did that for every failure, it would add up pretty quickly, and the overwhelming majority of those failures won't bring down a plane.:-)
Bear in mind that it was the first crash caused by this system that we're talking about, not the second. At that point, nobody knew that there was a design flaw in that system, and the problem had been mitigated before it became actively dangerous, so there was no reason to assume that a future failure would result in loss of the aircraft. Also, the failure was reported, and servicing was performed after that failure.
The only thing that wasn't reported was that the presence of a third pilot was what made the difference. No doubt Lion Air did not report that out of fear that it would look like a pilot training problem, when they believed otherwise. This came out only after another crash on a different airline made that concern largely moot.
It is unlikely that full disclosure would have prevented the next accident. If anything, it might have caused all blame to be placed on the pilots, in which case Boeing might not have bothered to even start working on a workaround for the MCAS problems.
I am a pilot although not type rated in 737. This is a pilot training issue primarily. Secondary there appears to be a failure to fully explain the behavior of the new MCAS trim mode so it can be differentiated from runaway trim. The response to the problem would be the same as runaway trim, turn off trim power, re-trim the aircraft manually. Indication of this new MCAS trim problem is almost identical to runaway trim. The difference is MCAS runs briefly and will repeat until it reaches its limit, whereas runaway trim will run continuously until it hits the stops. Turning off trim and manually re-trimming restores normal flight control in both cases.
On the other hand, out of single-digit cases of this failure happening, nearly all of them resulted in loss of AF. If the extra training after the previous crash had resulted in this problem being successfully mitigated by pilots with that extra training several times before the next loss, then maybe I could see this as a training problem, but it seems like the only successful mitigation was in the one rare case where there happened to be a third pilot on board who was able to assess the problem without the burden of having to fly the plane at the same time.
This suggests to me that there's a good chance that no amount of additional training would be enough to recognize and fix this failure in the heat of battle for some reason — possibly because of how far off-center the system in question is able to push the trim coupled with the fact that this tends to fail at takeoff, while flying at low altitude.
Of course, additional training might actually solve the problem; these crashes might just be a fluke involving multiple pilots whose training was subpar, coupled with higher-quality or better-maintained AoA sensors used by companies that don't cut costs on pilot training. It's hard to say for sure without more data (i.e. without this failure occurring more often). In the interest of safety, though, we have to assume at this point that pilot training won't fix the problem, because if we assume in the other direction and a third Max aircraft goes down before a few hundred successful pilot mitigations are logged, that would pretty much be the end of Boeing, not to mention the FAA for certifying it.
I would also argue that airline cost-cutting is at least partially to blame. In Lion Air, the difference between having two people actively involved in flying the plane while trying to diagnose a problem and having a third person whose sole responsibility was to watch and diagnose the failure made the difference between a plane landing safely and crashing with all hands lost. One of the reasons that aircraft historically had a third pilot (or otherwise trained flight engineer) in the cockpit was precisely so that there would be an extra set of eyes who wasn't actively flying the plane in any way.
These days, flights routinely fly with only two people, and Boeing is trying to push that number down to only one. If this failure had occurred on a plane with only a single pilot, the odds of survival would be poor, at best, unless the pilot immediately recognized that the trimming was wrong, knew the cause, and disabled the system. However, if pilots aggressively do that, then I suspect that they will disable it unnecessarily often enough for that to be a problem in its own right (because, after all, it is not certified to fly in that configuration).
So I would argue that this is a design issue first, personnel cost-cutting second, and a pilot training issue only tertiarily. But even if I'm wrong, we have to assume that I'm right, because the alternative could be very, very bad.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
What I take away from this is yet again, scientific proof that cannabinoid's are good for us. These helpful substances however are banned from our consumption. Thanks, government racist morons!
That's FAAH-OUT, man.
Not if the law is written sensibly, requiring that parts be made available for a period of time and that products be designed in such a way that consumable parts, such as batteries, are easily replaceable.
I kind of think that if a product fails without abuse within ten years, it ought to be replaced. If a product lasts ten years, it will probably last forty. If you let companies build things that last three, they will last three. That said, I'm fine with consumables not being covered under such a long warranty, so long as they are designed to be readily replaceable.
I would argue that the Newton was pretty innovative.
The box protects against the force of the water. The epoxy protects against the moisture. :-)
I'm not saying it will work, but if it does, it's the simplest approach.
Just put it in a box and fill the whole thing with epoxy. Use a big enough heat sink that the tips of the fins are exposed. Then mount it upside down so that if it gets wet, the water runs down the fins. :-)
I agree in principle that we should not needlessly waste oil or produce trash. But an outright ban has a habit of giving you unforeseen consequences in corner cases.
I'd be happy if they would just write laws in ways that avoid the easily foreseen consequences. Sometimes, I think the average politician lacks the foresight of a goat. Other times, I'm sure of it.
I'm honestly not sure whether BGAs are used in aerospace tech. For sure, some companies have been testing them for aerospace use for many years. It probably depends on whether a non-BGA version exists for whatever chip they need, and whether the alternative is worse (e.g. LGA).
Of course, the same problems can happen just as easily with any other surface-mount parts; it's just somewhat less common because it's easy to inspect and verify the soldering work when it isn't under a chip. I guess I probably should have said SMT rather than going for the worst-case package. Either way, the point still mostly applies. :-)
The requirements, AFAIK, don't apply to aerospace, but that's not the same thing as guaranteeing that no electronic component contains lead-free solder internally; the same parts can be used for multiple things.
If you had asked me a month ago whether Boeing would build hardware that could command huge amounts of trim using only a single AoA sensor, I'd have said no. So if you're seriously asking whether I think that a design team who would sign off on MCAS might also have underestimated the impact of using a different epoxy in some BGA part, not realizing that it would overstress some solder ball because of its composition, then yeah, I'd say that's entirely possible. And if you don't think so, I hope you're not involved in the certification process. :-)
And it's not just thermal stress. Lead-free solder is subject to random formation of tin whiskers that can short things out. If two solder pads just happen to be slightly closer to one another than other similar pads, the odds of catastrophic whisker formation occurring between those pads would be much higher than between the other similar pads, which could easily cause a much higher failure rate of a specific bit on some parallel bus or similar.
No, but a lot of them are, including some that you might not be aware of. For example, many cases of Toyota's unexpected acceleration were likely caused by tin whiskers resulting from certain lead-free solder formulations (NESC Assessment #TI-10-00618).
It only rules out hardware if you assume that the failure is a random fluke. If it is the result of a mechanical design flaw or an under-specified simple component like a resistor, capacitor, or transistor, hardware failing in the same way isn't particularly rare. For example:
GPU thermal failures often result in a small number of different sets of identical symptoms; the same solder balls break more frequently because of their location and the way that the chip expands.
At one point, I was involved in a group buy of some preamplifier hardware from a manufacturer in China. There was something like a 40% failure rate, and it was caused by a single transistor being substituted with a lower-quality part that became unstable in the presence of too little capacitance. And they all failed with the exact same symptom, en masse.
And a particular age range of certain models of TV failed en masse because of capacitor plague. In every case, the symptom was that they wouldn't turn on.
Or consider the T-Con board that drives various LCD panels in TVs. They fail with alarming regularity, to such a degree that there's actually a third-party company manufacturing new replacement boards for old TVs. There are only a few different failure modes, usually involving one color channel stuck off or on, and statistically if you buy a used board, nearly 100% of the time you'll get a bad one, because it's the #1 cause of replacing TVs that contain certain models of T-Con board.
And I can also recall a hard drive connector built by a major manufacturer that was attached by a screw on only one end, and repeatedly would work its way lose, requiring a complete redesign of the hardware in the next generation.
You get the idea.
It might not be the physical sensor. Data from both the LION and Ethiopian flights shows an offset between the two AoA sensors of 22 degrees. Neither appear to be stuck, as they both track airplane movements. But with this offset. Same physical fault causing the exact same offset? Doubtful.
One theory is that the 22 degree figure is pretty close to the value of one bit in the ARINC 429 word for AoA (22.5 degrees). So, software might be flipping a bit. This might be a tough bug to run down.
It seems unlikely that software would suddenly start flipping a bit repeatedly. That usually implies faulty hardware. The real question is how two pieces of hardware could experience the exact same fault on exactly the same bit.
My money is on thermal expansion of a BGA fastened with lead-free solder.
Our power consumption is continuously growing despite conservation efforts. Therefore, I would argue that a nearly infinite number of energy-saving solutions still won't fix the problem. The problem is that you and I don't agree on what the problem is.
In my view, the problem is that we rely on dirty energy sources for too much of our power. We rely on them because they are cheaper than the alternative. No amount of conservation will ever change that. It will just slow growth of cleaner energy solutions to the newer, slower rate of power consumption growth.
For people who are concerned with how much money they're spending on electricity, conserving power can be quite valuable to them as individuals. And I'm certainly not intending to suggest that this isn't valuable in its own right, if only because it increases the happiness of people who are struggling to get by. But to society as a whole, it is still mostly a waste, because:
So the question becomes this: Why is it useful to create policies that negatively impact everyone in an effort to force the working poor to do something that is beneficial to them? That just doesn't sound like good public policy to me.
The problem is that they're doing the step in entirely the wrong order. The correct order is:
By doing it in the wrong order, people who have no reason to be concerned about their power costs are still forced to use grossly inferior lighting technology for the purposes of conservation that seems entirely artificial and unnecessary to them, which mostly just makes people mad and actually discourages the behavior you're trying to encourage (conservation). And even people who do need to be concerned about power costs are grumpy about feeling like they are being forced to spend more money for light bulbs, even if they do end up saving money in the long run.
By making it be demand-driven, improvements tend to occur in areas where small changes have a big impact, rather than sweating the small stuff, people feel like they actually benefit from the conservation. And that means they're more likely to take additional conservation steps in the future, are more receptive to paying more money for light bulbs knowing that it will save them money in the long run, etc.
So it is not only easier to control the cleanliness of power production, it is also more effective at achieving the stated goal (cleaner air) AND more effective at the stretch goal (encouraging conservation). It's too bad that most of our nation's politicians aren't nearly foresighted enough to make good decisions. We can do better. We *must* do better.
Except that incandescent lighting bans don't have much of an effect on daytime power use, because that tends to be mostly commercial, not residential, so you aren't going to affect base load at all. During the late afternoon/early evening period when residential and commercial power overlap, you would mostly be cutting production from natural gas peaker plants, because that's during the period when energy output is highest. After that, maybe you'd be cutting coal.
Either way, the point remains that demanding the replacement of coal-based plants with other forms of power production would have the same effect, but unlike light bulb market manipulation, would be guaranteed to have the desired effect. It doesn't make a lot of sense to force conservation and hope that the best-base outcome (reduction in coal use) occurs, rather than the worst-case outcome (reduction of more expensive nuclear base load). If you want to do market manipulation, you would get orders of magnitude better results by taxing coal to make other energy sources more economically attractive by comparison.
Because LED lightbulbs would not have become a thing unless the government started forcing efficiency rules. The efficiency rules first caused corporations to create CFLs, which sucked; then LED bulbs, which didn't.
Not even close. CFLs first became available way back in 1980, and designs date back as far back as the mid-1970s. That's long before any government light bulb efficiency standards. In fact, they predate the entire Energy Star program by more than a decade.
The main driver of LED lighting was not residential lighting or government mandates, but rather the need for more power-efficient backlighting for mobile electronics, where battery life matters a great deal. By the time the U.S. government got around to passing laws, all the essential elements were in place for LED lighting. And some government-backed contests spurred progress in that field, too, at about the same time as the incandescent ban law.
So maybe the government standards pushed LED lighting to happen slightly sooner than it otherwise would have, but I'm not convinced for a minute that LED lighting wouldn't have happened without those standards. After all, LED Christmas lights predate those standards by more than a decade. Clearly, consumers were interested in saving power and in higher-reliability lighting even without the government forcing them to do so, and demand was adequate to make LED-based products happen, which almost certainly means that more general LED lighting would eventually have happened anyway, even without the government's "help".
Only in the summer. In the winter, the reverse is true. I'm not saying it balances out, because resistance heat is nowhere near as efficient as a heat pump, but the total difference over the course of the year isn't nearly as much as you think it is, particularly if, like me, you find that you need several times the supposed "equivalent wattage" because LED lighting really doesn't look as bright as is claimed.
They sort of work for some use cases. They are not remotely a good replacement, though, for a whole host of reasons, from spectrum differences to brightness differences to not existing in the same sorts of globe styles. But you're right that they're better than they were.
Any regulation of residential lighting was always a waste. It's not about helping the environment. It's about virtue signaling, proving by forcing people to give up their incandescent bulbs that they're serious about the environment. Why do I say this? Three reasons:
Trying to solve global warming by reducing residential lighting electrical usage is like trying to stop crime by finding a criminal and driving at 5 MPH in front of him or her with your car for a block. It is patently absurd, and anybody who says otherwise hasn't seriously thought about the numbers. We can't conserve our way out of this problem. We have to change the means of energy production, replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy or nuclear power. That's the *only* approach that can *possibly* have an effect that is big enough to be worth the effort.
Well, they do break once in a while, but they also cost $10 instead of $160. If the Airpods only reliably last two years before you start having battery issues, you could shred a pair of $10 earbuds once every 6 weeks and still come out ahead. :-)
Besides, the only wired headphones I've ever had go bad have been name brand stuff from companies like Sony and Koss. The $10 Noot earbuds (who?) that I bought in bulk from Amazon still randomly disappear every few months, but I haven't had a single failure yet in 2.5 years, despite finding them loose in the washing machine and/or clothes dryer on more than one occasion.
Laughably so. I'm pretty sure the only reason the in-flight entertainment systems ever work is because they're physically located in the cockpit, so you can only fly so many flights with them non-functional. :-/
There's probably a happy medium in there somewhere. I'm just not sure what it is or which side of it Lion Air was on at the time.
You are, of course, absolutely right; I just couldn't resist being snarky. :-)
Good thing that a 50% increase would make it responsible for 33.333% of all cancer, then. :-D
Well, yeah, but assuming the problem was caused by bad AoA sensor readings, if the repair resulted in correct readings, how could they possibly have guessed that it would suddenly stop working again the next day? I mean, that's why repair manuals tell how to diagnose specific misbehavior and correct it. If those repair manuals are wrong, that's really still on Boeing, not on the people who followed their instructions.
Yes, it is obvious in hindsight that they should have taken the plane for a test flight afterwards to verify that things were working correctly, but if you did that for every failure, it would add up pretty quickly, and the overwhelming majority of those failures won't bring down a plane. :-)
Sorry, let me clarify that. At that point, no pilots knew that there was a design flaw in the system. :-)
Bear in mind that it was the first crash caused by this system that we're talking about, not the second. At that point, nobody knew that there was a design flaw in that system, and the problem had been mitigated before it became actively dangerous, so there was no reason to assume that a future failure would result in loss of the aircraft. Also, the failure was reported, and servicing was performed after that failure.
The only thing that wasn't reported was that the presence of a third pilot was what made the difference. No doubt Lion Air did not report that out of fear that it would look like a pilot training problem, when they believed otherwise. This came out only after another crash on a different airline made that concern largely moot.
It is unlikely that full disclosure would have prevented the next accident. If anything, it might have caused all blame to be placed on the pilots, in which case Boeing might not have bothered to even start working on a workaround for the MCAS problems.
I am a pilot although not type rated in 737. This is a pilot training issue primarily. Secondary there appears to be a failure to fully explain the behavior of the new MCAS trim mode so it can be differentiated from runaway trim. The response to the problem would be the same as runaway trim, turn off trim power, re-trim the aircraft manually. Indication of this new MCAS trim problem is almost identical to runaway trim. The difference is MCAS runs briefly and will repeat until it reaches its limit, whereas runaway trim will run continuously until it hits the stops. Turning off trim and manually re-trimming restores normal flight control in both cases.
On the other hand, out of single-digit cases of this failure happening, nearly all of them resulted in loss of AF. If the extra training after the previous crash had resulted in this problem being successfully mitigated by pilots with that extra training several times before the next loss, then maybe I could see this as a training problem, but it seems like the only successful mitigation was in the one rare case where there happened to be a third pilot on board who was able to assess the problem without the burden of having to fly the plane at the same time.
This suggests to me that there's a good chance that no amount of additional training would be enough to recognize and fix this failure in the heat of battle for some reason — possibly because of how far off-center the system in question is able to push the trim coupled with the fact that this tends to fail at takeoff, while flying at low altitude.
Of course, additional training might actually solve the problem; these crashes might just be a fluke involving multiple pilots whose training was subpar, coupled with higher-quality or better-maintained AoA sensors used by companies that don't cut costs on pilot training. It's hard to say for sure without more data (i.e. without this failure occurring more often). In the interest of safety, though, we have to assume at this point that pilot training won't fix the problem, because if we assume in the other direction and a third Max aircraft goes down before a few hundred successful pilot mitigations are logged, that would pretty much be the end of Boeing, not to mention the FAA for certifying it.
I would also argue that airline cost-cutting is at least partially to blame. In Lion Air, the difference between having two people actively involved in flying the plane while trying to diagnose a problem and having a third person whose sole responsibility was to watch and diagnose the failure made the difference between a plane landing safely and crashing with all hands lost. One of the reasons that aircraft historically had a third pilot (or otherwise trained flight engineer) in the cockpit was precisely so that there would be an extra set of eyes who wasn't actively flying the plane in any way.
These days, flights routinely fly with only two people, and Boeing is trying to push that number down to only one. If this failure had occurred on a plane with only a single pilot, the odds of survival would be poor, at best, unless the pilot immediately recognized that the trimming was wrong, knew the cause, and disabled the system. However, if pilots aggressively do that, then I suspect that they will disable it unnecessarily often enough for that to be a problem in its own right (because, after all, it is not certified to fly in that configuration).
So I would argue that this is a design issue first, personnel cost-cutting second, and a pilot training issue only tertiarily. But even if I'm wrong, we have to assume that I'm right, because the alternative could be very, very bad. :-)