How does the local government of PR bear no culpability? Yes, Congress has some share, but the reality is they are (mostly) letting PR run itself... into the ground.
Except they aren't. The Jones Act means that PR can't usefully import from other countries without going through U.S. importers, which usually means significantly higher costs than they would otherwise pay if they could do direct importing from random countries using whatever shipper happened to be going the right direction.
IMO, the only real alternatives are either statehood (which the people keep voting against) or secession (which worked out SO well the last time anybody tried it).
No, no, you spin off the assets into a new company and the debts into another new company. Then, the second one files for bankruptcy. It's the American way.
PREPA - Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority [aeepr.com] is a public corporation, not private. One of the benefits of socialized utilities is that they can spend other people's money forever.
Socialized utilities work pretty well in other parts of the United States (e.g. TVA). So what's different about Puerto Rico? Oh, yeah. That's right. It's dirt poor in large part because of bad U.S. trade policies that actual states don't have to deal with (the Jones Act in particular). They wouldn't be in this mess if the Puerto Rico statehood referendum had passed back in 1998. This has jack to do with socialized utilities and everything to do with Congress treating Puerto Rico like America's bastard child.
True. It is possible that these two just happened to be flukes that failed earlier than usual, and the rest will fail over a longer time and at a slower rate. Of course, it's also possible that the many years with few failures for this engine were luck, and that these two failures are entropy's way of making up for lost time. That's the problem with randomness. It's hard to predict.:-)
Yeah. The fictional technology I'm suggesting involves a thin film LCD layer in the windshield glass, coupled with an eye tracking/head tracking camera inside the car and a sun-tracking camera outside the car.
The FAA already issued an airworthiness directive (essentially the aircraft version of a mandatory recall) for these engines because of this type of failure. So either the airline didn't comply with the requirement, it wasn't sufficient to address this known defect, or the FAA gave too much leniency in the timeline (sometimes these are phased in over time to avoid grounding too many planes at once).
The engine failure looks like it was contained, but the cowling was damaged, departed the aircraft due to air flow and caused the damage further aft.
The blades aren't supposed to hit the cowling. That part isn't designed to contain fan blades flying at full speed. But in two consecutive engine failures for this exact model of engine (plus multiple failures of previous generations of this engine), it has apparently been forced to try to do so and failed.
I would speculate that they will find two design problems here: a containment ring that doesn't extend far enough forwards to protect the cowling from failed blades and a cowling that breaks apart catastrophically once damaged. Given that both accidents have involved planes sold to the same airline, it makes me wonder if Southwest specified carbon fiber for the cowling instead of the aluminum that is typically used, but that's pure speculation.
My understanding of "contained" means that any ejected engine pieces go through the tailpipe (under the wing) where they are unlikely to do much damage. I would argue that if parts of the engine ahead of the wing were ejected upwards and/or forwards with so much force that they made it over the leading edge of the wing, it was an uncontained failure even if the part that hit the fuselage was part of the cowling severed by the fan blade, rather than the fan blade itself.
More to the point, if that's not the way it is defined, then IMO the definition is dangerously wrong. Those upwards-flying bits of cowling could just as easily have hit the leading edge of the wing and damaged various control surfaces or punctured the fuel tank, in which case we very well might have hundreds of fatalities instead of just one.
Often is right. That makes two fan blade detachments on this model of engine in less than two years. And it is also the second such uncontained engine failure to puncture the body of the plane while failing, though the bits didn't make it all the way into the cabin the first time. IMO, that really should not happen, much less twice.
Call me cynical, but the more news stories I see remarking about the engine's safety record, the more concerned I become. Subjectively, it feels like we're seeing a lot more catastrophic loss of cowling lately than we used to. Maybe that's just the 24-hour news cycle skewing my perception, but I think it would be interesting to see if the materials involved have changed significantly over the last decade or two, and if that might be a contributing factor.
They told us it would be $4,000 if it was purchased later. Only a $1,000 difference.
The difference is that folks who pay the $3,000 have a locked-in price (unless Tesla goes bankrupt), whereas the people waiting to spend the $4,000 might find that in a few years, that price has gone up considerably. There's nothing contractually obligating Tesla to maintain the $4,000 price forever, as far as I can tell.
It appears there is no other way possible for any of the people living in those homes to EVER be able get on the internet.
From a purely technical perspective, sure, they can put outdoor antennas on their homes and set up a cellular router. The problem is, a significant percentage of the folks who are unserved by wired broadband are also poor. That's usually the real reason those areas are unserved. So the high cost per gigabyte of cellular connections makes that out of reach.
Of course, that's assuming you could convince folks to replace two batteries with one battery and a dummy, and assuming that people could do so without screwing it up in an unsafe way. There's probably some way to put a chip in the two batteries so they can communicate with each other and ensure that you can't use them with an odd number of batteries, but that would significantly increase the cost and complexity. And without that, it would probably be a non-starter from a product safety perspective, unfortunately.
A better approach, IMO, is what I call the parallel express, or zipper express (because it resembles a giant zipper). You have an express line that makes every fourth stop or so, and then you have parallel lines with a larger number of slower trains on parallel lines timed to depart and arrive at the same time as the express trains do, so that passengers on one can switch quickly to the other and vice versa. Depending on which train you're on, you either get off at the stop before or after your desired stop and hop on the local.
This approach has two advantages. First, the majority of each passenger's travel can be at a higher speed because of fewer stops. Second, it still allows all passengers to go from any stop to any other stop.
Even better, if you make it every fourth station, and assuming that the train goes about twice as fast, barring mechanical failures, you can actually get by with only three tracks — two for the express lines, and one for the hopper:
At the express endpoints, the track is split in such a way that two trains stop almost nose to nose in the same station (with appropriate bumpers in between, of course). One goes one way, one goes the other.
At the midpoint station between express endpoints, the hopper track briefly splits into two parallel tracks so that the two simultaneous hopper trains can pass one another.
For each endpoint, the express train either arrives concurrent with the hopper or arrives when the hopper is at the midpoint station.
If it arrives at one endpoint while the hopper is at the midpoint station, it will arrive at the other endpoint as the hopper reaches that endpoint, and vice versa.
As an added advantage, because the trains arrive at the same time, if you are traveling a short distance, you can just go from one hopper to the next adjacent hopper, and it would not be that much slower than if you just took a true local train.
The theoretical worst case is the equivalent of going five extra local stops at each end (going one extra express stop, which is equal to two local stops, then going back three stops). However, in practice, you could also wait the equivalent of two stops' time at the previous stop, and then go one hop, so the worst case is actually the equivalent of only three local stops at each end. Or you can start your trip half a cycle earlier, and it then becomes only one. The average speed is two local stops on each end, plus 2x speed for everything in between.
For added fun, if you split the tracks at every midpoint station, you can have two going in each direction. The worst-case is still three local stops at each end, but you have two possible stations where you can change with no wait instead of one, so if you miss your stop, you've only added a two-station time penalty in the worst case. And also, the only people who would hit the worst-case are the ones going one stop shy of the next stop, whereas with the single-train-per-direction approach, half of the people going only one stop beyond the next stop would also hit the worst case. So that's probably worth doing. The average speed, then, becomes 1.5 local stops on each end, plus 2x speed for everything in between, assuming I'm counting correctly.
I have. I somehow accidentally ended up in the wrong lane and failed to stay on... 95, IIRC. It reminded me of driving in San Francisco, but with more pedestrians, slower traffic lights, and fewer "oh, sorry, you had to be in the left lane five blocks and three turns ago if you wanted to turn right on that street" events. And an MTA bus cut me off and nearly caused a wreck, so I guess it wasn't all that different from San Francisco in the grand scheme of driving atrocities. The random piece of furniture in the middle of the 95 was a welcome change, though.
Want to know what city I absolutely refuse to drive in (besides San Francisco on any weekday)? Boston, whose motto appears to be, "You can't get there from here." At least New York doesn't shut down critical roads for all of the fourth of July weekend, AFAIK (except roads near Times Square, perhaps).
Anyway, folks generally fall into one of two camps: people who think that dense, city living is a good thing, and consequently think that mass transit is great (or at least a necessary evil), and people who think that living in a cramped, overpriced, one-room apartment that costs more each month than most people's cars cost in a year is a bad idea, and consequently think that mass transit sucks and individual cars are far better. You can probably guess which camp I'm in.
Or are you recommending putting in electronics to drop the 3.6 volt output of LiON to 1.5 volts? Fitting all that in a AAA form factor, not going to say it's impossible, but it'll be a tight squeeze.
Since 99% of electronics use two batteries, you could ostensibly come up with a configuration in which every second cell is some sort of current-sensitive variable resistor circuit or something, along with warnings about not using them in devices that require an odd number of cells, but in this day and age, you'd probably end up getting sued if you did.
That said, I don't know why it would be that hard to fit a SMT switched-mode regulator along with a small Lithium ion cell into a AAA form factor. It's not like they have to provide that much current.
On the other hand, the dumb criminals typically leave myriad other clues that can be followed just as easily. The ones that you're going to have a hard time catching are the smart ones, and they're smart enough to use something more secure than the default. They're also the ones whose schemes are likely to cause the most damage.
Not really. Figure that 15 to 30 percent of Internet traffic is porn. That's a lot of images and movies into which data can be injected steganographically. Do you really want to look through all that porn and determine whether it contains hidden messages?
Go read the Constitution. Every state is guaranteed one representative, no mater how small the population. The average population per representative, based upon the 2010 census, is about700,000. CA had about 37,254,000 people in 2010, 53 representatives, or about 702,000 for each. This process, as detailed in the Constitution, is what makes a republic.
Actually, the Constitution is pretty vague about the details, but the intent, at least as best I understand it, was to get as close as possible to proportional representation in the House. That scheme broke in 1929, when they set a permanent maximum number of Reps. Ever since then, it has become progressively more impossible to get anywhere close to proportionate representation, because there aren't enough seats to accommodate the larger states. As a result, those states are less represented than they rightfully should be.
Sounds like you're just butthurt your candidate lost. The fact she lost to donald trump of all people suggests just how little america actually thought of her outside the progressive echo chamber that is california and other coastal states.
ROFL. You think I voted for Clinton. That's about the funniest thing I've heard all year.
Hmmmm... Tens of thousands of brilliant leaders over centuries,
If you're talking about the current disproportionate makeup of the House, that got screwed up in 1929. Centuries, my a**. It hasn't even been ONE century.
We'll stick with the Constitution, thanks. You can get fucked.
Try following it, then. The House of Representatives, and thus the overwhelming majority of electors, are supposed to be proportional to the population of the states, according to the Constitution. Right now, that isn't true. You're entitled to stick to the constitution. You're not entitled to claim the moral high ground if you're only pretending to stick to it.
No, it really wouldn't. Right now, the balance is tilted severely in favor of the lowest-population states, and there's only a single way of measuring representation for electing the President and Vice President. What I proposed would create a balance that is entirely missing in the executive branch, and would also correct a severe distortion in what was supposed to be (but no longer is) proportional representation in the House of Representatives.
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I believe the GP meant selective service (registering for the draft). And yes, it is required by law for all males under 35.
Now that's just not true at all. Puerto Rico actually pays all federal taxes except for personal income tax and SSI (disability). So they pay:
And probably others.
Except they aren't. The Jones Act means that PR can't usefully import from other countries without going through U.S. importers, which usually means significantly higher costs than they would otherwise pay if they could do direct importing from random countries using whatever shipper happened to be going the right direction.
IMO, the only real alternatives are either statehood (which the people keep voting against) or secession (which worked out SO well the last time anybody tried it).
No, no, you spin off the assets into a new company and the debts into another new company. Then, the second one files for bankruptcy. It's the American way.
Socialized utilities work pretty well in other parts of the United States (e.g. TVA). So what's different about Puerto Rico? Oh, yeah. That's right. It's dirt poor in large part because of bad U.S. trade policies that actual states don't have to deal with (the Jones Act in particular). They wouldn't be in this mess if the Puerto Rico statehood referendum had passed back in 1998. This has jack to do with socialized utilities and everything to do with Congress treating Puerto Rico like America's bastard child.
True. It is possible that these two just happened to be flukes that failed earlier than usual, and the rest will fail over a longer time and at a slower rate. Of course, it's also possible that the many years with few failures for this engine were luck, and that these two failures are entropy's way of making up for lost time. That's the problem with randomness. It's hard to predict. :-)
Yeah. The fictional technology I'm suggesting involves a thin film LCD layer in the windshield glass, coupled with an eye tracking/head tracking camera inside the car and a sun-tracking camera outside the car.
Unless the FAA hasn't kept their website up-to-date, that airworthiness directive hasn't gone into effect yet. They proposed it back in late August.
So yes, this is, at least to some degree, a regulatory failure.
The blades aren't supposed to hit the cowling. That part isn't designed to contain fan blades flying at full speed. But in two consecutive engine failures for this exact model of engine (plus multiple failures of previous generations of this engine), it has apparently been forced to try to do so and failed.
I would speculate that they will find two design problems here: a containment ring that doesn't extend far enough forwards to protect the cowling from failed blades and a cowling that breaks apart catastrophically once damaged. Given that both accidents have involved planes sold to the same airline, it makes me wonder if Southwest specified carbon fiber for the cowling instead of the aluminum that is typically used, but that's pure speculation.
My understanding of "contained" means that any ejected engine pieces go through the tailpipe (under the wing) where they are unlikely to do much damage. I would argue that if parts of the engine ahead of the wing were ejected upwards and/or forwards with so much force that they made it over the leading edge of the wing, it was an uncontained failure even if the part that hit the fuselage was part of the cowling severed by the fan blade, rather than the fan blade itself.
More to the point, if that's not the way it is defined, then IMO the definition is dangerously wrong. Those upwards-flying bits of cowling could just as easily have hit the leading edge of the wing and damaged various control surfaces or punctured the fuel tank, in which case we very well might have hundreds of fatalities instead of just one.
Often is right. That makes two fan blade detachments on this model of engine in less than two years. And it is also the second such uncontained engine failure to puncture the body of the plane while failing, though the bits didn't make it all the way into the cabin the first time. IMO, that really should not happen, much less twice.
Call me cynical, but the more news stories I see remarking about the engine's safety record, the more concerned I become. Subjectively, it feels like we're seeing a lot more catastrophic loss of cowling lately than we used to. Maybe that's just the 24-hour news cycle skewing my perception, but I think it would be interesting to see if the materials involved have changed significantly over the last decade or two, and if that might be a contributing factor.
I've been saying for a couple of decades that I want to see car windshields do that. And it would be really easy to do on that scale.
The difference is that folks who pay the $3,000 have a locked-in price (unless Tesla goes bankrupt), whereas the people waiting to spend the $4,000 might find that in a few years, that price has gone up considerably. There's nothing contractually obligating Tesla to maintain the $4,000 price forever, as far as I can tell.
From a purely technical perspective, sure, they can put outdoor antennas on their homes and set up a cellular router. The problem is, a significant percentage of the folks who are unserved by wired broadband are also poor. That's usually the real reason those areas are unserved. So the high cost per gigabyte of cellular connections makes that out of reach.
I seem to recall being unable to find a train to Normandy at anywhere close to the right time. That's why I drove there. YMMV.
Of course, that's assuming you could convince folks to replace two batteries with one battery and a dummy, and assuming that people could do so without screwing it up in an unsafe way. There's probably some way to put a chip in the two batteries so they can communicate with each other and ensure that you can't use them with an odd number of batteries, but that would significantly increase the cost and complexity. And without that, it would probably be a non-starter from a product safety perspective, unfortunately.
A better approach, IMO, is what I call the parallel express, or zipper express (because it resembles a giant zipper). You have an express line that makes every fourth stop or so, and then you have parallel lines with a larger number of slower trains on parallel lines timed to depart and arrive at the same time as the express trains do, so that passengers on one can switch quickly to the other and vice versa. Depending on which train you're on, you either get off at the stop before or after your desired stop and hop on the local.
This approach has two advantages. First, the majority of each passenger's travel can be at a higher speed because of fewer stops. Second, it still allows all passengers to go from any stop to any other stop.
Even better, if you make it every fourth station, and assuming that the train goes about twice as fast, barring mechanical failures, you can actually get by with only three tracks — two for the express lines, and one for the hopper:
As an added advantage, because the trains arrive at the same time, if you are traveling a short distance, you can just go from one hopper to the next adjacent hopper, and it would not be that much slower than if you just took a true local train.
The theoretical worst case is the equivalent of going five extra local stops at each end (going one extra express stop, which is equal to two local stops, then going back three stops). However, in practice, you could also wait the equivalent of two stops' time at the previous stop, and then go one hop, so the worst case is actually the equivalent of only three local stops at each end. Or you can start your trip half a cycle earlier, and it then becomes only one. The average speed is two local stops on each end, plus 2x speed for everything in between.
For added fun, if you split the tracks at every midpoint station, you can have two going in each direction. The worst-case is still three local stops at each end, but you have two possible stations where you can change with no wait instead of one, so if you miss your stop, you've only added a two-station time penalty in the worst case. And also, the only people who would hit the worst-case are the ones going one stop shy of the next stop, whereas with the single-train-per-direction approach, half of the people going only one stop beyond the next stop would also hit the worst case. So that's probably worth doing. The average speed, then, becomes 1.5 local stops on each end, plus 2x speed for everything in between, assuming I'm counting correctly.
I have. I somehow accidentally ended up in the wrong lane and failed to stay on... 95, IIRC. It reminded me of driving in San Francisco, but with more pedestrians, slower traffic lights, and fewer "oh, sorry, you had to be in the left lane five blocks and three turns ago if you wanted to turn right on that street" events. And an MTA bus cut me off and nearly caused a wreck, so I guess it wasn't all that different from San Francisco in the grand scheme of driving atrocities. The random piece of furniture in the middle of the 95 was a welcome change, though.
Want to know what city I absolutely refuse to drive in (besides San Francisco on any weekday)? Boston, whose motto appears to be, "You can't get there from here." At least New York doesn't shut down critical roads for all of the fourth of July weekend, AFAIK (except roads near Times Square, perhaps).
Anyway, folks generally fall into one of two camps: people who think that dense, city living is a good thing, and consequently think that mass transit is great (or at least a necessary evil), and people who think that living in a cramped, overpriced, one-room apartment that costs more each month than most people's cars cost in a year is a bad idea, and consequently think that mass transit sucks and individual cars are far better. You can probably guess which camp I'm in.
Since 99% of electronics use two batteries, you could ostensibly come up with a configuration in which every second cell is some sort of current-sensitive variable resistor circuit or something, along with warnings about not using them in devices that require an odd number of cells, but in this day and age, you'd probably end up getting sued if you did.
That said, I don't know why it would be that hard to fit a SMT switched-mode regulator along with a small Lithium ion cell into a AAA form factor. It's not like they have to provide that much current.
No, I believe it has two.
On the other hand, the dumb criminals typically leave myriad other clues that can be followed just as easily. The ones that you're going to have a hard time catching are the smart ones, and they're smart enough to use something more secure than the default. They're also the ones whose schemes are likely to cause the most damage.
Not really. Figure that 15 to 30 percent of Internet traffic is porn. That's a lot of images and movies into which data can be injected steganographically. Do you really want to look through all that porn and determine whether it contains hidden messages?
No, wait....
Actually, the Constitution is pretty vague about the details, but the intent, at least as best I understand it, was to get as close as possible to proportional representation in the House. That scheme broke in 1929, when they set a permanent maximum number of Reps. Ever since then, it has become progressively more impossible to get anywhere close to proportionate representation, because there aren't enough seats to accommodate the larger states. As a result, those states are less represented than they rightfully should be.
ROFL. You think I voted for Clinton. That's about the funniest thing I've heard all year.
If you're talking about the current disproportionate makeup of the House, that got screwed up in 1929. Centuries, my a**. It hasn't even been ONE century.
Try following it, then. The House of Representatives, and thus the overwhelming majority of electors, are supposed to be proportional to the population of the states, according to the Constitution. Right now, that isn't true. You're entitled to stick to the constitution. You're not entitled to claim the moral high ground if you're only pretending to stick to it.
No, it really wouldn't. Right now, the balance is tilted severely in favor of the lowest-population states, and there's only a single way of measuring representation for electing the President and Vice President. What I proposed would create a balance that is entirely missing in the executive branch, and would also correct a severe distortion in what was supposed to be (but no longer is) proportional representation in the House of Representatives.