Neither is flight time and that's the main reason to start with the moon. We've already proven we can get to the moon and back in a few days. The issue isn't delta-v; it's life support and consumables for the fleshy humans. A Mars mission would take at minimum months to get to the red planet and months to get back. If anything goes wrong along the way that can't be fixed or compensated for, everybody dies. Shorter voyages mean less probable risk and easier recovery from incidents should they occur.
Now if people will ever get their heads out of their asses about the use of nuclear propulsion -- in any form -- then the flight time to Mars becomes much more manageable. Unfortunately too many people are too ignorant to understand this concept and recoil in horror when you use the word "nuclear" in anything.
Quick, somebody spend an absurd amount of taxpayer dollars to answer a question that nobody cares about! And the answer will very constantly because the coastline is always changing due to erosion, deposition, etc.
But hey! I'm sure somebody somewhere will get a billion-dollar grant to study this "problem" and provide a 6,000-page report to Congress that will never be read by anyone.
Seriously, this guy has been smoking the SoCal stuff a bit too much. He does realize 2030 is just 12 years away, right? And that such a major global economic shift in such a short period of time over so many different types of economies and governments is unlikely to the point of ridiculous?
Ray, get out of your bubble and go visit the Real World. I'm sure UBI looks fantastic to liberals in SoCal. To pretty much everyone else it looks either stupid, impractical, unsustainable, or a combo of all three.
Once the blade detached from the rotor hub it would cease to provide any forward thrust beyond whatever it could provide kinectically. The aerodynamics would work against the idea of the blade flying forward. It would instead be flung outward into the engine casing almost immediately, a casing designed to contain such a catastrophic failure.
So either the casing failed and allowed the debris to impact the fuselage or some event happened behind the fan blade that was energetic enough to blow the blade forward into an oncoming 500mph airstream.
A criminal commits a crime. Does a cop make it better by killing?
If it stops the criminal from committing more crimes, yes. If it deters other would-be criminals, also yes.
If a vigilante kills the cop, is justice served then?
Why would it? Did the cop commit a crime? No. Police officers may legally use deadly force to protect their lives and the lives of others.
How much mob anger is it worth?
Mob anger is worth precisely zilch. Your equating mob anger, vigilantism, and the legal use of deadly force is a false equivalence.
In the military realm, how much of ISIS/Al Queda/Taliban is result of our violence towards the Mid East?
None. And even if it was, you're justifying the very "mob anger" and vigilantism you just decried.
Where does the tit-for-tat stop?
Gee, I dunno...perhaps when ISIS/Al Queda/Taliban stops promulgating genocide for other humans simply because they worship differently? It's not like Jews and Christians are calling for the killing of Muslims because they worship differently. We'd just kindly like it if they'd stop trying to kill the rest of us so we can all live in a 9th-century caliphate. You seem to be a "live and let live" kind of fellow. Go preach that to ISIS and see how far you get before you're beheaded, drowned, burned alive, or blown to bits with detcord tied around your neck, all while they chant "God is great!"
And how many drone strikes on wedding parties are acceptable?
None are "acceptable" but if you're suggesting it's possible to have an armed conflict without occasional collateral damage you're living in a fantasy.
I have been in places where my life was at risk. I have felt the temptation of wanting a gun. I didn't have one. I was able to talk my way through it. As tech advances, the options for non-lethal force increase. I think it is a viable path. I wish more people would consider it an option.
And if you hadn't been able to "talk your way through it" then you wouldn't be here advocating your position. You'd be dead or seriously injured. Like you I wish more people would consider non-violence as an option but you need to understand one basic concept: you have no control over what the other party will consider. So long as the other party is willing and able to use deadly force against you, your last line of defense is to exercise that same force to defend yourself. If you're unwilling to consider that option then your opponent will always win, you and your kind will eventually be removed from the gene pool, and such high-minded concepts as what you're proposing will be regarded as foolish naivete.
The proper way to describe her actions -- and Sullenberger for that matter -- would be "calm and professional". Brave and heroic? I have difficultly understanding how one can be "brave" in a situation where there is no alternative but to take the action that was taken.
The opposite of brave is "cowardly". Could she have "cowardly" refused to land the plane? Nope. Gravity kinda has a say in this equation. Pilots have a saying: takeoffs are optional but landings are mandatory. Sure, pilots can always panic and perform their jobs poorly but the opposite of this is not bravery; it is professionalism and competence, but not bravery. Bravery would be something like what Graham Pearson did in the Kegworth crash of 1989, choosing to go into a life-threatening situation to save crash survivors.
it appears to have moved forward clear of the housing, and out through the engine cowling. Presumably from there it exited into the fuselage, or other bits of the cowling/ancillaries took out the window.
Perhaps a monstrous case of engine surge? Admittedly I've never heard of a surge so huge that it could both break a fan blade *and* impart enough energy to propel it forward into a 500mph airstream beyond the intake. If a blade merely broke off I can't see how it could move forward without something big happening behind it to give it forward momentum.
I do believe that the more I error toward "I will not kill," the better the world will be, especially if I can encourage that belief in others.
Speaking as a former Marine and having served in war, none of us want to kill anyone. We'd always prefer to preserve life if that is an option. Unfortunately we don't always get to pick that option because the "other guy" does want to kill. Therefore, it would serve you much better if you modified your saying to "I will not kill unless it is necessary, and if it becomes necessary, I will not hesitate to do so in defense of life, liberty, or property."
Citing MLK Jr. is not a good comparison. For every one martyr like him there are tens of thousands -- perhaps millions -- who have died facelessly, pointlessly, and horribly. Most died because they wouldn't or couldn't defend themselves, because they gave up too much of their own power of defense (giving up their firearms, for example) in the name of peace or appeasement. History is paved with their corpses, all of them thinking "I won't kill because I don't want to" right up to the point where they were marched into the gas chambers by Nazi's, or shot in the back of the head by Stalinists, or burned alive by Islamic fanatics. You'd be wise to not follow their example.
Isn't improved targeting a good thing? Like, kill the bad guys not civilians?
You forget a fundamental SJW concept: there is no such thing as a "bad" person. They're just "misunderstood" or "underprivileged" or "oppressed" and everyone could live in harmony if we'd only give them everything they ever want. Nevermind that what they want -- say, the genocide of all Jews -- is in direct opposition to the idea those people want to stay alive. That requires deep thinking and SJW's don't want to engage in such things.
Non-violence works right up until the point where you run up against an opposing party that has no such compunction and no political/economic/military downside to exercising said violence. Then you die, or get enslaved, or any number of other unsavory, life-shortening things happen to you. And your precious moralizing, while noble and well-meaning, is removed from the gene pool. Permanently.
If you're so committed to your viewpoint that you eschew violence, why not just unlock your doors and windows, proudly post signs in your windows and yard stating you are unarmed and will offer no resistance to anyone who wishes to take your stuff, rape your wife, or kill you for fun. You won't call the police because you abhor the idea of someone else using violence to the point where you actively refuse to participate in any activity that might allow anyone to more effectively defend you and your family. See how that works out.
Humans as a whole are mostly decent but there's a significant number who have no morals, no restraint, and no empathy for you. No matter how many "good" people there are out there, the "bad" ones outnumber you and always will. If you will not take steps to defend yourself and retch at the idea of assisting others who voluntarily choose to do so then you become one and only one thing: a victim.
Sure, people will continue to kill each other, but they can do it without my help.
And when one of those people tries to kill you for no reason other than you're not like them, don't subscribe to their theology or ideology or racial purity or are on the wrong side of a dotted line on a map, you'll depend on other people to defend you. Those people who are putting their lives on the line for your ass deserve to have the best available technology and training so they can do it with minimal risk to their own lives.
I'm a former Marine. in general I strongly dislike people who espouse viewpoints such as yours. That said, I have put my life on the line to defend people like you. It would be nice if you'd quit opposing efforts to make our jobs a little less life threatening.
And if you wish to espouse the age-old isolationist viewpoint of "if we just sat back and left everyone alone nothing bad would ever happen to us" then you should revisit early 20th century history. It's been tried. Many times. It always fails because somebody somewhere wants to control this little blue speck in the universe for one reason or another. Nature abhors a vacuum. If a superpower doesn't actively look out for its own interests -- including actively intervening abroad in a small scale to avoid having to intervene later on a much broader scale -- it becomes subjugated to those who have no such restrictions.
Why give IT department a pass? Doesn't matter if your bosses are inept, that should not stop someone from doing their job.
There's this thing called "budget" you would know about if you'd ever been in a management position. It puts together a budget to pay for all the things it says it needs like hardware, software, services, and headcount. We're not talking about some operation in your basement; Atlanta has thousands and thousands of computers and users, a huge network, and all the complexity that goes along with it. Managing something like that requires either very expensive tools or a lot of very competent people (the latter which may be more expensive than the tools).
If the CFO won't approve everything in the budget, something has to be left out. You can make all the arguments in the world about "security needs to be at the top of the list" but the sad fact is many organizations prioritize availability over security. A secure system that crumbles under load because it isn't sized for what it's doing is effectively useless, for example. So if you're the poor schmuck who's told "you can have good, fast, or secure; pick any two" you'd better pick "good" and "fast" and pray you can find a way to secure it because if it isn't "good" or "fast" enough you're going to be fired. It doesn't matter to the higher-ups that you were put in an impossible situation. They don't understand and don't want to understand. They think tiny elves toil away inside these magical boxes we call "servers" and can't understand why we need so much money. I've been in this business for 25 years. Trust me, I'm speaking from bitter experience.
Anecdote: I used to be the IT Director for an Atlanta-based airline (not naming names). Before I was on staff I was an independent contractor for the same airline. I noted one day the server (a Compaq Proliant running Novell back in those days) that filed all the flight plans with the FAA every day was not in good shape and had no failover capacity. I recommended two new servers, one to replace the old one and one to act as a backup to the new one. Total cost: about $10,000. Management said no, that was too expensive. About a month later, that server died in the middle of the night and could not be revived. All flights for the following day had to be cancelled, all tickets refunded, alternate arrangements made, massive PR backlash, all because no flight plans could be filed with the FAA. The crews had to be paid, the planes were fueled, but nothing can take off without FAA flight plans. The airline lost millions of dollars in that one day because they were too stupid to spend $10k when it would've mattered. I got hired about two weeks later and started putting things in order and it never happened again on my watch.
As a longtime resident of Atlanta (almost 30 years), I can say the incompetence and corruption of the Atlanta city government is well known around here. The higher up people are mostly political cronies who have no idea what they're doing.
Not to impugn the character of the rank-and-file IT workers. No doubt they're doing the best they can with what little the city gives them to work with. If an investigation were launched -- and it never will be -- I have little doubt it would find IT has been screaming for funds to get proper security and backups implemented and those screams have been ignored. Why spend money on IT security when you can spend it on a worthless streetcar system nobody uses? Or perhaps an entertainment venue in the middle of a crime-ridden area nobody wanted to go to? Or how about a mini-golf "fun park" nobody wanted to visit in downtown Atlanta?
All these fiascos were paid for in whole or in part by Atlanta taxpayers and always seemed to get built and run by people really friendly with Atlanta politicians. Nah, no corruption to see here folks. Move along and keep electing the same morons every time the elections come along.
Remember that most journeys are less than 15 miles (30 miles round trip), so that most use of any electric vehicle allows overnight charging.
That may be true for maybe 80% of journeys by car, but what about the remaining 20%? What do you do then? Buy and maintain a separate car just for those excursions? Not likely, especially given the cost of current EV's.
No, the likely "solution" will be consumers -- outside of a small niche -- opting to purchase internal-combustion-powered vehicles for the foreseeable future because they can't afford to have two vehicles sitting the garage.
Keep in mind I'm all for EV's. I'd love to have one myself. But this isn't one of those problems where the 80% solution is good enough. EV's need range comparable to IC vehicles (which is mostly true already) and charging times a helluva lot closer to filling up at a gas station (which isn't even close to being true) before you'll see a consumer mass migration.
Fortunately those developing nations seem to care more about doing it right than we did coming up.
That's the benefit of hindsight and piggybacking on all we learned along the way. That and the small fact that much of these "developing nations" were, until recently, pretty much third-world countries. It's easy to build shiny new infrastructure when you don't have anything currently in place with sunk costs to overcome.
They hit peak coal a 4 years ago, something many developed nations can't claim. India is making a big effort too.
China is nowhere near peak coal as several others have commented. As for India's "big effort", it still boasts some of the most toxic environments on the planet. Just like China.
80% of new bus sales in China are pure electric, for example, and they are all built on domestic technology and domestic parts.
If by "domestic technology" you mean "technology China illegally appropriated from the West without paying much -- if any -- in the way of royalties" then you're right. China's utter disregard for international intellectual property rights is well known and documented.
Which contradicts what is said in the summary and TFA. In fact it seems like the author of TFA is illiterate and can't understand clear, simple English statements.
You're giving them too much credit. The point of TFA was to promulgate the idea the US could go 100% renewable and the only reason we aren't is because evil, greedy, nasty, awful, despicable, immoral people are stopping it. And those same people happen to be the ones TFA's author hates and despises because they conflict with his pre-established worldview. Hence, the abstract and TFA don't...quite...match.
Good on you for picking up on it and pointing it out, not that any of this crowd will listen to inconvenient things like "facts" and "reality."
Your post contains such a shocking degree of ignorance I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you just typed without thinking. Otherwise this would be embarrassing for you.
You can't just put up a dam anywhere and start producing electricity, you know. Dams require big rivers and specific geography to make them practical. Not only that, those same dams must be situated relatively near where the electricity will be consumed, otherwise it's inefficient due to power transmission losses. Then there's the environmental impact which you seem ignorant of, namely the disruption of fishing, shipping, flood control, irrigation, tourism, and municipal water supplies to name but a few.
Suffice to say all the rivers which are economically and ecologically practical to dam have been dammed. All the low-hanging fruit is taken and has been for a while. If it isn't already dammed and making electricity, it's because it isn't feasible to do so.
Once more EVs are sold and charged at home, they can become part of the grid backup plan.
Which won't happen until the price of EV's comes down to where it makes sense for a family of four to purchase one of them. And the grid gets restructured to handle -- and properly bill/credit -- this inverted power flow idea. Those aren't small obstacles, you know. They're actually rather huge.'
Meanwhile, who's going to supply all the lithium required to build all these magical EV's? Where's that stuff come from? Magic trees? Ohhhh...that's right...you have to dig it up with messy, environmentally-unfriendly mining operations which happen to be situated in politically-unfriendly portions of the world with lax environmental regulations, rampant corruption, and nuclear weapons. Sounds like a grand idea!
And to cap it all off, what are you going to do with all the old fossil-fueled vehicles which would have to be scrapped to make way for the EV juggernaut?
It's a nice idea. Not practical. Not even remotely affordable. But nice.
Now both sides on every single debate in politics see those who disagree with them as morally deficient and evil.:(
I think it's a bit of an overstatement to blame both sides equally for this trend. You don't see conservatives screaming themselves into a frothing rage when a liberal speaker is invited to a college campus. You didn't see conservatives whimpering and crying when Obama got elected -- twice. Most conservatives and right-of-center people I know of or can research online seem to welcome open debate on sensitive topics and are happy to engage in a spirited dialog about such issues.
It's primarily a leftist phenomena where you find "tolerance" like boycotting, "hate speech codes", selective moral outrage, doublethink, doublespeak, threats if you dare challenge the orthodoxy, open calls for violence against those who think differently, and in some cases actual violence.
The model does not include the cost of nuke plants that melt down, even though we know they do that periodically.
The US has had exactly one reactor undergo partial meltdown since nuclear power became a thing roughly fifty years ago. To say you "know" nuclear plants experience meltdown "periodically" is utter nonsense and unsupported by any facts you can cite.
Or perhaps you want to cite Chernobyl? Gee, what happens when you turn off all the safeties and try to run a reactor with a positive void coefficient in a haphazard manner? Never mind that no reactor currently in operation in the US has such a design. Never mind Chernobyl operators purposefully disregarded every rule in the book. Nah, let's blame new-kew-lar powar for it!
Or perhaps you want to cite Fukushima? Yeah, the reactor built last century that survived an earthquake and tsunami that killed tens of thousands of people around it and was put in situations it was never designed to withstand in the first place. Yeah, let's use that as an example of how unsafe them nukes are! That'll show 'em your mastery of statistical analysis!
And while you're at it, completely ignore the fact that Fukushima has not one single fatality attributable to any radioactive release from the plant despite what happened to it. Just kinda sweep that under the rug the same way you ignore the 15,894 people who were killed, the 6,156 injured, and the 2,546 people missing due to the quake and tsunami...none of which had anything to do with a meltdown.
And will do it more often as they age.
Again, a supposition unsupported by any facts. Reactors are routinely inspected and have licensed lifetimes. Their license to operate can and will be revoked if they're run haphazardly. They must renew the license periodically and have set lifetimes that can only be extended if safety checks show it to be safe to do so.
But sure, let's just go with your idea and say they're gonna kill us all anyway. Probably spawn a wave of incredible hulks while they're at it. Or Godzilla.
The model does not include the cost of the damage done by global warming.
Perhaps because such quantification is impossible given the ridiculous number of variables involved. Nah, never mind that! That's just crazy talk!
Or rather, it assigns that cost to renewables by failing to credit them for saving the Earth.
"saving the Earth"??? Hyperbole much?
The model does not consider the effect that radical energy use reductions would have on the overall cost.
Nor does your pie-in-the-sky "idea" consider the radical effects on society and economies that "radical energy use reductions" would impose. Nah, let's forget even thinking about the consequences of what you propose. Just gloss right over that. Nothing to see here.
If you are a factory owner, and you are installing machinery that can double the production of each worker, and double your profits from each worker, would you fire half of them, or hire more?
While I agree with the rest of your premise, this one deserves more scrutiny. For example, if GM could double production capacity of all its plants would that equate to a doubling of demand for its products and/or services? This assumes pricing remains constant, of course. A decrease in pricing might stimulate demand, but pricing could only be decreased if labor costs were decreased due to automation or wage cuts, both of which negatively impact the wage earner. Without a decrease in pricing, doubling of capacity is only feasible if there is pent-up demand. In the case of GM, that's not true; there's lots of unsold inventory. One can assume similar production/demand relationships exist in other industries. I mean, would Apple sell more iPhones if it could double capacity? Doubtful. In most (profitable) industries production/demand is fairly balanced. An unbalanced production/demand relationship either drives prices up due to shortages -- which naturally tamps demand down to equalize with production -- or an overproduction produces lower prices and/or unsold inventory which naturally bankrupts companies that persist in doing it.
It also assumes the raw materials for such production can supply what's needed for the doubling without increasing prices itself, something dependent upon it's ability to be automated. Can steel mills use automation to double their supply to GM? Can iron ore mines use automation to double their output to supply the mills? Can the transport industries use automation to double their transport capacities to carry all this extra stuff to and fro? There are a lot of moving parts to consider here if the whole "double production and don't lay anyone off" argument is to be used. Which, I think, makes it the weaker argument. Automation will instead be used to reduce "common" human labor which means layoffs and/or wage cuts.
The thing to fixate on here is the worker displaced by automation and new workers entering the workforce. The former needs to adapt to the new labor market and focus on skills associated with designing, building, installing, and maintaining the automation. The latter needs to anticipate the new skills dynamic and get an education that focuses on the same thing. This is the only solution to the situation. Progress cannot be stopped. It's been tried before during the Industrial Revolution and look how successful stopping that progress was. Not adapting or anticipating is equivalent to stopping economic evolution, a sure-fire recipe for a stagnant or regressive economy, unemployment, and lower standards of living.
We're moving towards an economy where brainpower is going to be much more valuable than muscle power. I'm reminded of a passage from Isaac Asimov's Robot novels where one of the characters states that the lowest position a human can actually hold anymore is "supervisor" since robots do all the actual labor. For people who lack supervisory skills and are unwilling to develop them, they're digging their own economic graves.
"We can't take any more cuts and still do the job" is the dependable whine and moan of every labor union that ever came into existence. Then the cuts happen anyway and somehow the job still gets done.
This isn't about the USA falling into the weather forecasting dark ages; it's about union dues and union membership, both of which have been dropping like flies for a while now.
Seriously, there's a labor union for weather forecasters??? Why? At what point have they been exploited as laborers for crying out loud? It's not like they're in a sweatshop somewhere. Sheesh.
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Aerobraking is not small part of equation.
Neither is flight time and that's the main reason to start with the moon. We've already proven we can get to the moon and back in a few days. The issue isn't delta-v; it's life support and consumables for the fleshy humans. A Mars mission would take at minimum months to get to the red planet and months to get back. If anything goes wrong along the way that can't be fixed or compensated for, everybody dies. Shorter voyages mean less probable risk and easier recovery from incidents should they occur.
Now if people will ever get their heads out of their asses about the use of nuclear propulsion -- in any form -- then the flight time to Mars becomes much more manageable. Unfortunately too many people are too ignorant to understand this concept and recoil in horror when you use the word "nuclear" in anything.
Quick, somebody spend an absurd amount of taxpayer dollars to answer a question that nobody cares about! And the answer will very constantly because the coastline is always changing due to erosion, deposition, etc.
But hey! I'm sure somebody somewhere will get a billion-dollar grant to study this "problem" and provide a 6,000-page report to Congress that will never be read by anyone.
Seriously, this guy has been smoking the SoCal stuff a bit too much. He does realize 2030 is just 12 years away, right? And that such a major global economic shift in such a short period of time over so many different types of economies and governments is unlikely to the point of ridiculous?
Ray, get out of your bubble and go visit the Real World. I'm sure UBI looks fantastic to liberals in SoCal. To pretty much everyone else it looks either stupid, impractical, unsustainable, or a combo of all three.
Once the blade detached from the rotor hub it would cease to provide any forward thrust beyond whatever it could provide kinectically. The aerodynamics would work against the idea of the blade flying forward. It would instead be flung outward into the engine casing almost immediately, a casing designed to contain such a catastrophic failure.
So either the casing failed and allowed the debris to impact the fuselage or some event happened behind the fan blade that was energetic enough to blow the blade forward into an oncoming 500mph airstream.
Well in Sullenberger's case, he did bravely stay in the airplane until everyone else was out, including walking through it at least twice.
That was his choice, and that is the defining characteristic of bravery.
A criminal commits a crime. Does a cop make it better by killing?
If it stops the criminal from committing more crimes, yes. If it deters other would-be criminals, also yes.
If a vigilante kills the cop, is justice served then?
Why would it? Did the cop commit a crime? No. Police officers may legally use deadly force to protect their lives and the lives of others.
How much mob anger is it worth?
Mob anger is worth precisely zilch. Your equating mob anger, vigilantism, and the legal use of deadly force is a false equivalence.
In the military realm, how much of ISIS/Al Queda/Taliban is result of our violence towards the Mid East?
None. And even if it was, you're justifying the very "mob anger" and vigilantism you just decried.
Where does the tit-for-tat stop?
Gee, I dunno...perhaps when ISIS/Al Queda/Taliban stops promulgating genocide for other humans simply because they worship differently? It's not like Jews and Christians are calling for the killing of Muslims because they worship differently. We'd just kindly like it if they'd stop trying to kill the rest of us so we can all live in a 9th-century caliphate. You seem to be a "live and let live" kind of fellow. Go preach that to ISIS and see how far you get before you're beheaded, drowned, burned alive, or blown to bits with detcord tied around your neck, all while they chant "God is great!"
And how many drone strikes on wedding parties are acceptable?
None are "acceptable" but if you're suggesting it's possible to have an armed conflict without occasional collateral damage you're living in a fantasy.
I have been in places where my life was at risk. I have felt the temptation of wanting a gun. I didn't have one. I was able to talk my way through it. As tech advances, the options for non-lethal force increase. I think it is a viable path. I wish more people would consider it an option.
And if you hadn't been able to "talk your way through it" then you wouldn't be here advocating your position. You'd be dead or seriously injured. Like you I wish more people would consider non-violence as an option but you need to understand one basic concept: you have no control over what the other party will consider. So long as the other party is willing and able to use deadly force against you, your last line of defense is to exercise that same force to defend yourself. If you're unwilling to consider that option then your opponent will always win, you and your kind will eventually be removed from the gene pool, and such high-minded concepts as what you're proposing will be regarded as foolish naivete.
The proper way to describe her actions -- and Sullenberger for that matter -- would be "calm and professional". Brave and heroic? I have difficultly understanding how one can be "brave" in a situation where there is no alternative but to take the action that was taken.
The opposite of brave is "cowardly". Could she have "cowardly" refused to land the plane? Nope. Gravity kinda has a say in this equation. Pilots have a saying: takeoffs are optional but landings are mandatory. Sure, pilots can always panic and perform their jobs poorly but the opposite of this is not bravery; it is professionalism and competence, but not bravery. Bravery would be something like what Graham Pearson did in the Kegworth crash of 1989, choosing to go into a life-threatening situation to save crash survivors.
it appears to have moved forward clear of the housing, and out through the engine cowling. Presumably from there it exited into the fuselage, or other bits of the cowling/ancillaries took out the window.
Perhaps a monstrous case of engine surge? Admittedly I've never heard of a surge so huge that it could both break a fan blade *and* impart enough energy to propel it forward into a 500mph airstream beyond the intake. If a blade merely broke off I can't see how it could move forward without something big happening behind it to give it forward momentum.
I do believe that the more I error toward "I will not kill," the better the world will be, especially if I can encourage that belief in others.
Speaking as a former Marine and having served in war, none of us want to kill anyone. We'd always prefer to preserve life if that is an option. Unfortunately we don't always get to pick that option because the "other guy" does want to kill. Therefore, it would serve you much better if you modified your saying to "I will not kill unless it is necessary, and if it becomes necessary, I will not hesitate to do so in defense of life, liberty, or property."
Citing MLK Jr. is not a good comparison. For every one martyr like him there are tens of thousands -- perhaps millions -- who have died facelessly, pointlessly, and horribly. Most died because they wouldn't or couldn't defend themselves, because they gave up too much of their own power of defense (giving up their firearms, for example) in the name of peace or appeasement. History is paved with their corpses, all of them thinking "I won't kill because I don't want to" right up to the point where they were marched into the gas chambers by Nazi's, or shot in the back of the head by Stalinists, or burned alive by Islamic fanatics. You'd be wise to not follow their example.
Isn't improved targeting a good thing? Like, kill the bad guys not civilians?
You forget a fundamental SJW concept: there is no such thing as a "bad" person. They're just "misunderstood" or "underprivileged" or "oppressed" and everyone could live in harmony if we'd only give them everything they ever want. Nevermind that what they want -- say, the genocide of all Jews -- is in direct opposition to the idea those people want to stay alive. That requires deep thinking and SJW's don't want to engage in such things.
Non-violence works right up until the point where you run up against an opposing party that has no such compunction and no political/economic/military downside to exercising said violence. Then you die, or get enslaved, or any number of other unsavory, life-shortening things happen to you. And your precious moralizing, while noble and well-meaning, is removed from the gene pool. Permanently.
If you're so committed to your viewpoint that you eschew violence, why not just unlock your doors and windows, proudly post signs in your windows and yard stating you are unarmed and will offer no resistance to anyone who wishes to take your stuff, rape your wife, or kill you for fun. You won't call the police because you abhor the idea of someone else using violence to the point where you actively refuse to participate in any activity that might allow anyone to more effectively defend you and your family. See how that works out.
Humans as a whole are mostly decent but there's a significant number who have no morals, no restraint, and no empathy for you. No matter how many "good" people there are out there, the "bad" ones outnumber you and always will. If you will not take steps to defend yourself and retch at the idea of assisting others who voluntarily choose to do so then you become one and only one thing: a victim.
Sure, people will continue to kill each other, but they can do it without my help.
And when one of those people tries to kill you for no reason other than you're not like them, don't subscribe to their theology or ideology or racial purity or are on the wrong side of a dotted line on a map, you'll depend on other people to defend you. Those people who are putting their lives on the line for your ass deserve to have the best available technology and training so they can do it with minimal risk to their own lives.
I'm a former Marine. in general I strongly dislike people who espouse viewpoints such as yours. That said, I have put my life on the line to defend people like you. It would be nice if you'd quit opposing efforts to make our jobs a little less life threatening.
And if you wish to espouse the age-old isolationist viewpoint of "if we just sat back and left everyone alone nothing bad would ever happen to us" then you should revisit early 20th century history. It's been tried. Many times. It always fails because somebody somewhere wants to control this little blue speck in the universe for one reason or another. Nature abhors a vacuum. If a superpower doesn't actively look out for its own interests -- including actively intervening abroad in a small scale to avoid having to intervene later on a much broader scale -- it becomes subjugated to those who have no such restrictions.
Why give IT department a pass? Doesn't matter if your bosses are inept, that should not stop someone from doing their job.
There's this thing called "budget" you would know about if you'd ever been in a management position. It puts together a budget to pay for all the things it says it needs like hardware, software, services, and headcount. We're not talking about some operation in your basement; Atlanta has thousands and thousands of computers and users, a huge network, and all the complexity that goes along with it. Managing something like that requires either very expensive tools or a lot of very competent people (the latter which may be more expensive than the tools).
If the CFO won't approve everything in the budget, something has to be left out. You can make all the arguments in the world about "security needs to be at the top of the list" but the sad fact is many organizations prioritize availability over security. A secure system that crumbles under load because it isn't sized for what it's doing is effectively useless, for example. So if you're the poor schmuck who's told "you can have good, fast, or secure; pick any two" you'd better pick "good" and "fast" and pray you can find a way to secure it because if it isn't "good" or "fast" enough you're going to be fired. It doesn't matter to the higher-ups that you were put in an impossible situation. They don't understand and don't want to understand. They think tiny elves toil away inside these magical boxes we call "servers" and can't understand why we need so much money. I've been in this business for 25 years. Trust me, I'm speaking from bitter experience.
Anecdote: I used to be the IT Director for an Atlanta-based airline (not naming names). Before I was on staff I was an independent contractor for the same airline. I noted one day the server (a Compaq Proliant running Novell back in those days) that filed all the flight plans with the FAA every day was not in good shape and had no failover capacity. I recommended two new servers, one to replace the old one and one to act as a backup to the new one. Total cost: about $10,000. Management said no, that was too expensive. About a month later, that server died in the middle of the night and could not be revived. All flights for the following day had to be cancelled, all tickets refunded, alternate arrangements made, massive PR backlash, all because no flight plans could be filed with the FAA. The crews had to be paid, the planes were fueled, but nothing can take off without FAA flight plans. The airline lost millions of dollars in that one day because they were too stupid to spend $10k when it would've mattered. I got hired about two weeks later and started putting things in order and it never happened again on my watch.
As a longtime resident of Atlanta (almost 30 years), I can say the incompetence and corruption of the Atlanta city government is well known around here. The higher up people are mostly political cronies who have no idea what they're doing.
Not to impugn the character of the rank-and-file IT workers. No doubt they're doing the best they can with what little the city gives them to work with. If an investigation were launched -- and it never will be -- I have little doubt it would find IT has been screaming for funds to get proper security and backups implemented and those screams have been ignored. Why spend money on IT security when you can spend it on a worthless streetcar system nobody uses? Or perhaps an entertainment venue in the middle of a crime-ridden area nobody wanted to go to? Or how about a mini-golf "fun park" nobody wanted to visit in downtown Atlanta?
All these fiascos were paid for in whole or in part by Atlanta taxpayers and always seemed to get built and run by people really friendly with Atlanta politicians. Nah, no corruption to see here folks. Move along and keep electing the same morons every time the elections come along.
The last nuclear plant built in the U.S. was the River Bend plant in LA, which was started in 1977 . You're off by thirty years.
No, you're off by more than thirty years. Might want to read up a bit. Or read up at all.
Remember that most journeys are less than 15 miles (30 miles round trip), so that most use of any electric vehicle allows overnight charging.
That may be true for maybe 80% of journeys by car, but what about the remaining 20%? What do you do then? Buy and maintain a separate car just for those excursions? Not likely, especially given the cost of current EV's.
No, the likely "solution" will be consumers -- outside of a small niche -- opting to purchase internal-combustion-powered vehicles for the foreseeable future because they can't afford to have two vehicles sitting the garage.
Keep in mind I'm all for EV's. I'd love to have one myself. But this isn't one of those problems where the 80% solution is good enough. EV's need range comparable to IC vehicles (which is mostly true already) and charging times a helluva lot closer to filling up at a gas station (which isn't even close to being true) before you'll see a consumer mass migration.
in fact the grid is already ready to handle electric vehicles, charged mostly at night
Not with solar power cells, they're not. Small inconvenience caused by things called "sunset" and "darkness."
Fortunately those developing nations seem to care more about doing it right than we did coming up.
That's the benefit of hindsight and piggybacking on all we learned along the way. That and the small fact that much of these "developing nations" were, until recently, pretty much third-world countries. It's easy to build shiny new infrastructure when you don't have anything currently in place with sunk costs to overcome.
They hit peak coal a 4 years ago, something many developed nations can't claim. India is making a big effort too.
China is nowhere near peak coal as several others have commented. As for India's "big effort", it still boasts some of the most toxic environments on the planet. Just like China.
80% of new bus sales in China are pure electric, for example, and they are all built on domestic technology and domestic parts.
If by "domestic technology" you mean "technology China illegally appropriated from the West without paying much -- if any -- in the way of royalties" then you're right. China's utter disregard for international intellectual property rights is well known and documented.
Which contradicts what is said in the summary and TFA. In fact it seems like the author of TFA is illiterate and can't understand clear, simple English statements.
You're giving them too much credit. The point of TFA was to promulgate the idea the US could go 100% renewable and the only reason we aren't is because evil, greedy, nasty, awful, despicable, immoral people are stopping it. And those same people happen to be the ones TFA's author hates and despises because they conflict with his pre-established worldview. Hence, the abstract and TFA don't...quite...match.
Good on you for picking up on it and pointing it out, not that any of this crowd will listen to inconvenient things like "facts" and "reality."
Every major river has a dam.
Your post contains such a shocking degree of ignorance I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you just typed without thinking. Otherwise this would be embarrassing for you.
You can't just put up a dam anywhere and start producing electricity, you know. Dams require big rivers and specific geography to make them practical. Not only that, those same dams must be situated relatively near where the electricity will be consumed, otherwise it's inefficient due to power transmission losses. Then there's the environmental impact which you seem ignorant of, namely the disruption of fishing, shipping, flood control, irrigation, tourism, and municipal water supplies to name but a few.
Suffice to say all the rivers which are economically and ecologically practical to dam have been dammed. All the low-hanging fruit is taken and has been for a while. If it isn't already dammed and making electricity, it's because it isn't feasible to do so.
Once more EVs are sold and charged at home, they can become part of the grid backup plan.
Which won't happen until the price of EV's comes down to where it makes sense for a family of four to purchase one of them. And the grid gets restructured to handle -- and properly bill/credit -- this inverted power flow idea. Those aren't small obstacles, you know. They're actually rather huge.'
Meanwhile, who's going to supply all the lithium required to build all these magical EV's? Where's that stuff come from? Magic trees? Ohhhh...that's right...you have to dig it up with messy, environmentally-unfriendly mining operations which happen to be situated in politically-unfriendly portions of the world with lax environmental regulations, rampant corruption, and nuclear weapons. Sounds like a grand idea!
And to cap it all off, what are you going to do with all the old fossil-fueled vehicles which would have to be scrapped to make way for the EV juggernaut?
It's a nice idea. Not practical. Not even remotely affordable. But nice.
Now both sides on every single debate in politics see those who disagree with them as morally deficient and evil. :(
I think it's a bit of an overstatement to blame both sides equally for this trend. You don't see conservatives screaming themselves into a frothing rage when a liberal speaker is invited to a college campus. You didn't see conservatives whimpering and crying when Obama got elected -- twice. Most conservatives and right-of-center people I know of or can research online seem to welcome open debate on sensitive topics and are happy to engage in a spirited dialog about such issues.
It's primarily a leftist phenomena where you find "tolerance" like boycotting, "hate speech codes", selective moral outrage, doublethink, doublespeak, threats if you dare challenge the orthodoxy, open calls for violence against those who think differently, and in some cases actual violence.
The model does not include the cost of nuke plants that melt down, even though we know they do that periodically.
The US has had exactly one reactor undergo partial meltdown since nuclear power became a thing roughly fifty years ago. To say you "know" nuclear plants experience meltdown "periodically" is utter nonsense and unsupported by any facts you can cite.
Or perhaps you want to cite Chernobyl? Gee, what happens when you turn off all the safeties and try to run a reactor with a positive void coefficient in a haphazard manner? Never mind that no reactor currently in operation in the US has such a design. Never mind Chernobyl operators purposefully disregarded every rule in the book. Nah, let's blame new-kew-lar powar for it!
Or perhaps you want to cite Fukushima? Yeah, the reactor built last century that survived an earthquake and tsunami that killed tens of thousands of people around it and was put in situations it was never designed to withstand in the first place. Yeah, let's use that as an example of how unsafe them nukes are! That'll show 'em your mastery of statistical analysis!
And while you're at it, completely ignore the fact that Fukushima has not one single fatality attributable to any radioactive release from the plant despite what happened to it. Just kinda sweep that under the rug the same way you ignore the 15,894 people who were killed, the 6,156 injured, and the 2,546 people missing due to the quake and tsunami...none of which had anything to do with a meltdown.
And will do it more often as they age.
Again, a supposition unsupported by any facts. Reactors are routinely inspected and have licensed lifetimes. Their license to operate can and will be revoked if they're run haphazardly. They must renew the license periodically and have set lifetimes that can only be extended if safety checks show it to be safe to do so.
But sure, let's just go with your idea and say they're gonna kill us all anyway. Probably spawn a wave of incredible hulks while they're at it. Or Godzilla.
The model does not include the cost of the damage done by global warming.
Perhaps because such quantification is impossible given the ridiculous number of variables involved. Nah, never mind that! That's just crazy talk!
Or rather, it assigns that cost to renewables by failing to credit them for saving the Earth.
"saving the Earth"??? Hyperbole much?
The model does not consider the effect that radical energy use reductions would have on the overall cost.
Nor does your pie-in-the-sky "idea" consider the radical effects on society and economies that "radical energy use reductions" would impose. Nah, let's forget even thinking about the consequences of what you propose. Just gloss right over that. Nothing to see here.
If you are a factory owner, and you are installing machinery that can double the production of each worker, and double your profits from each worker, would you fire half of them, or hire more?
While I agree with the rest of your premise, this one deserves more scrutiny. For example, if GM could double production capacity of all its plants would that equate to a doubling of demand for its products and/or services? This assumes pricing remains constant, of course. A decrease in pricing might stimulate demand, but pricing could only be decreased if labor costs were decreased due to automation or wage cuts, both of which negatively impact the wage earner. Without a decrease in pricing, doubling of capacity is only feasible if there is pent-up demand. In the case of GM, that's not true; there's lots of unsold inventory. One can assume similar production/demand relationships exist in other industries. I mean, would Apple sell more iPhones if it could double capacity? Doubtful. In most (profitable) industries production/demand is fairly balanced. An unbalanced production/demand relationship either drives prices up due to shortages -- which naturally tamps demand down to equalize with production -- or an overproduction produces lower prices and/or unsold inventory which naturally bankrupts companies that persist in doing it.
It also assumes the raw materials for such production can supply what's needed for the doubling without increasing prices itself, something dependent upon it's ability to be automated. Can steel mills use automation to double their supply to GM? Can iron ore mines use automation to double their output to supply the mills? Can the transport industries use automation to double their transport capacities to carry all this extra stuff to and fro? There are a lot of moving parts to consider here if the whole "double production and don't lay anyone off" argument is to be used. Which, I think, makes it the weaker argument. Automation will instead be used to reduce "common" human labor which means layoffs and/or wage cuts.
The thing to fixate on here is the worker displaced by automation and new workers entering the workforce. The former needs to adapt to the new labor market and focus on skills associated with designing, building, installing, and maintaining the automation. The latter needs to anticipate the new skills dynamic and get an education that focuses on the same thing. This is the only solution to the situation. Progress cannot be stopped. It's been tried before during the Industrial Revolution and look how successful stopping that progress was. Not adapting or anticipating is equivalent to stopping economic evolution, a sure-fire recipe for a stagnant or regressive economy, unemployment, and lower standards of living.
We're moving towards an economy where brainpower is going to be much more valuable than muscle power. I'm reminded of a passage from Isaac Asimov's Robot novels where one of the characters states that the lowest position a human can actually hold anymore is "supervisor" since robots do all the actual labor. For people who lack supervisory skills and are unwilling to develop them, they're digging their own economic graves.
"We can't take any more cuts and still do the job" is the dependable whine and moan of every labor union that ever came into existence. Then the cuts happen anyway and somehow the job still gets done.
This isn't about the USA falling into the weather forecasting dark ages; it's about union dues and union membership, both of which have been dropping like flies for a while now.
Seriously, there's a labor union for weather forecasters??? Why? At what point have they been exploited as laborers for crying out loud? It's not like they're in a sweatshop somewhere. Sheesh.