And to further add to this, the relevant pilot procedure to recovering from severe mistrim condition, as provided by Centaurus on pprune.org. Note that the procedure below is not included in the newer 737-MAX flight manuals.
Extract from the Boeing 737-200 Pilot Training Manual February 1982 page 04.80.31. Edited for brevity
Runaway and Manual Stabiliser - Recovery from Severe Out-of-Trim
"In an extreme nose-up out-of-trim condition, requiring almost full forward control column, decelerate, extend the flaps and/or reduce thrust to a minimum practical setting consistent with flight conditions until elevator control is established. Do not decrease airspeed below the minimum maneuvering speed for the flap configuration. A bank of 30 degrees or more will relieve some force on the control column. This, combined with flap extension and reduced speed should permit easier manual trimming.
If other methods fail to relieve the elevator load and control column force, use the "roller coaster" technique. If nose-up trim is required, raise the nose well above the horizon with elevator control. Then slowly relax the control column pressure and manually trim nose-up. Allow the nose to drop below the horizon while trimming. Repeat this sequence until the airplane is trim.
It is unclear if the Ethiopian pilots were aware of this procedure, but given that they were close to the ground and at too high of a speed to deploy flaps, the yo-yo maneuver would not have been feasible.
The AD which went out after the Lion Air Crash said disable the MCAS using cutoff switches. What it did not consider is that if the plane is already nose down then the aerodynamic forces are too strong to use the manual wheels to make it nose up. The AD should have specified use your electric trim yoke switches to make the trim up and then cut out the electric trim so MCAS cannot make it nose down again..
This is a good explanation of the difficulty in trimming the aircraft in a mistrim condition by a former senior Boeing engineer. The short of it is that in the mistrim condition encountered by ET302, with stab nose down and the pilots pulling elevator nose up, the combined tail loads would've produced high jackscrew load opposing nose stab up trim that would be impossible to overcome with manual trim.
Boeing did publish guidance for older 737 models on recovering on a severe nose out-of-trim condition, which would have required taking the aircraft into a roller-coaster maneuver to relieve the horizontal stabilizer loads. But given that they were already close to the ground, this was not an option. The other suggestion was to extend flaps, but given that the aircraft was above the minimum flap speeds, this was also not possible.
In short, it looks like the fix to the problem was as much to blame as the problem itself
The autopilot wouldn't be using the vane angle-of-attack sensor, they would be using air data and the inertial reference system. The only system that I would expect to be using the vane angle-of-attack reading in aircraft that is not fly-by-wire is the stall protection system. The stall protection system normally takes either of the angle-of-attack readings to flag a stall, whichever of the two systems is giving a higher reading. It uses an either-or logic because an aircraft in a banked turn may have differing angle-of-attack readings between the two vanes. An incorrect reading might trigger a premature stick shaker/pusher activation, but as this can be overriden by the pilot it wouldn't be considered safety critical, hence only 2 vane angle-of-attack sensors are needed.
Airbus aircraft, which have fly-by-wire, calculate angle-of-attack independently using the pressure readings from cross-coupled smart pitot tube sensors, which can then be verified against the vane angle-of-attack.
The two features that were mentioned in the article was an angle-of-attack disagree indicator and an angle-of-attack display in the cockpit. The disagree light should've been standard, given the severity of this failure mode. The angle-of-attack cockpit display? No other current commercial airplane has it - though from what I hear from pilots the old MD-11 had them in the cockpit as standard. It has been discussed in the wake of the AF447 accident and the Colgan Air 3407 accidents, but it's never been mandated by the FAA and there's no consensus in the aviation community on whether it would help, so I can't really fault Boeing for that one.
One of the bigger long-term consequences of these MAX-8 incidents will be the impact on the FAA's influence in the civil aviation world. One little commented fact is that when the MAX-8s were grounded it was the Chinese civil aviation authorities who led the world in grounding the 737 MAX. This was unprecedented, as most civil aviation authorities have tended to follow the lead certification authority of the manufacturer, the FAA in this case, before issuing a grounding. This was the case in previous grounding - the 787 dreamliner in 2013 and DC-10 groundings in 1979 were both led by the FAA.
Additionally, it now appears both Transport Canada and EASA are no longer willing to accept FAA certification. Other aviation authorities have in the past accepted FAA certification without challenge. if other authorities no longer trust the FAA to do its oversight properly Boeing will be forced to carry out multiple certification assessments for each civil aviation authority, and that will carry with it a considerable delay and financial burden.
The statement of using only one sensor is scary especially for something that automatically adjust the flight path, but even having two is scary. With 2 sensors how does the software know which is right when they disagree ? For true fault tolerance you need a minimum of 3 sensors
I assume that the MCAS system design is designed similar to the Stall Protection System (SPS) in most aircraft. The SPS uses both angle-of-attack vane sensor inputs but triggers a stall alert if either of the sensors exceed a limit. So yes, one wrong sensor input would cause an issue but the system is looking at both. Because they are necessarily located on the side of the aircraft, an aircraft in roll will have differing angle-of-attack sensor inputs. Given that a rolling stall was one of the scenarios they were trying to protect against, a miscompare between the two angle-of-attack vane sensors would be expected, especially considering that the system can have tolerances of up to 1.5degrees during the takeoff phase
It appears that they are looking at using the airspeed and inertial sensors to cross-verify, but given that no other sensor is directly measuring angle-of-attack any other method will be limited, as the computed angle-of-attack will be an estimate.
So while I agree that there were issues with design, it is not as simple a fix as cross-comparing both vane sensors in this case
Where I live in Montreal there is no driveway parking in my neighbourhood, and EV owners are dependent on public electric charging terminals. There are simply not enough terminals for the current number of EVs, and if drivers were to all switch to EVs it would be impossible for the city to install one terminal for every parked car for overnight charging, or even one charge terminal for every other car.
Electric vehicles are simply not feasible without having a driveway. And street parking is the norm for residents in in the city center of many major cities, unless you're well off enough to afford an expensive parking space. This is certainly the case in New York, London and Paris, for example. The only people I know who have EV's are suburbanites who have driveways. Hybrid vehicles are the only option for most of us urbanites, unless the dependency of driveway charging is solved.
2) Implement an a system to persistently add control inputs during critical phases of flight.
The Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) adding control inputs during flights is not an issue per se. Most commercial aircraft flying today have some form of automated control inputs on the primary control surfaces for stability augmentation. Yaw dampers in the rudder for lateral stability are present in even the smallest regional jets.
A bigger issue is that a single-point of failure in the MCAS can lead to a catastrophic condition, given that the MCAS is dependent on air speed data for its inputs. The pitot tubes that feed airspeed information can be prone to blockages and icing, as happened on the AF447 flight. Any safety-critical system cannot have a single point of failure lead to a catastrophic condition.
The A320 series had the ground clearance necessary to accomodate the new engines without needing to reposition them, hence no stability issues due to the engine placement that might have required an equivalent MCAS system.
The MCAS system was implemented because the 737-MAX engines are placed more forward of the wing which will tend to induce a nose up pitching moment particularly at high angles of attack near stall. This would've probably been a certification issue.
Now the 737 MAX had the engines placed so far forward to enable enough ground clearance. The original 50-year old 737 had low bypass engines which much smaller and could be placed directly under the wings. The newer models already ran into ground clearance issues, and this was initially solved by putting the engine systems to the side of the engine creating a distinct ovoid nacelle shape. With the new GE Leap engines, this fix was no longer sufficient due to larger engine diameter, hence the repositioning forward.
Newer aircraft like the airbus a300 series and the airbus a220 (bombardier cseries) never had this issue because they were designed to accomodate large diameter newer generation engines. The basic design of the 737 has always suffered from this flaw and really Boeing should have invested in a new aircraft design rather than try to re-engine an aircraft that was never designed for it. This was like fitting a V-12 engine into a model T.
for preserving a slice of software history. Not only has he collected a rich historical collection preserving the evolution of spreadsheet software, but from the article he's also interviewed and corresponded with the software pioneers from the field, most of whom are in their 80s and 90s now, preserving their historical testimony. Without him an important part of software history might otherwise have been forgotten. I suspect his collection, and his research into the field, will be an invaluable archive for those interested in computing history. It's a shame that his interest in preserving software history is being met with more mockery than support by the slashdot community.
According to Waymo's latest disengagement report for 2017, their disengagement rate is 1 once per 5600 miles. Considering the average american drives around 13000 miles per year based on DOT statistics, this equates to a disengagement incident every 5 months per vehicle. If the car is fully autonomous without a monitoring driver, each of those disengament incidents would translate into an accident. Any human that had an accident every 5 months would find themselves uninsurable in short order.
I don't think they should be rolling out these vehicles on the road until they can prove that it is not expected to disengage more than once over their lifetime, or once per 200,000 miles. At the current rates, it would be irresponsible to have the vehicles on public roads
As other stories point out, she is an American citizen. And as an American citizen, she cannot be denied entry to the United States. Border patrol's role in searching a citizen when crossing the border is only to determine if you are carrying contraband or illegal goods. As a citizen you have an inherent right to enter the country. Given that the iPhone seized is legally sold in the US, the only reason to seize it is if they had reason to suspect that the data in it was illegal in some form, and for that they should need a warrant.
While some were describing his flight as possessing acrobatic skill, I'd describe it as unstable and erratic flying from the very beginning of the flight. The plane was described by witnesses as taking off with the wheels smoking and with the wings not level during the takeoff roll. The conversation with air traffic control was characterized by ignorance of basic flight operations. And he did not perform the most difficult part of flying, which is the landing.
If anything, I'd say what this showed is how poorly a flight simulator prepared him for real life flying.
Second, the difference was not that big, 0,5% less on the outcome of both cases, mortality and readmission, (or about 4% in relative terms) when treated by a woman, when the biggest difference in outcome, according the numbers by SciAm, was the gender itself, 26% of women will die within a year of a heart attack compared with 19% of men.
This. The difference is very small. If you're in the ER for a heart attack, you should be seen by a doctor - male or female - immediately. Time is of the essence. The sensationalist tone I've seen this reported in the media may lead some women to seek a female doctor over a male one in the ER, and the delay in finding a doctor of the proper gender will lead to a far higher mortality rate than the male-female difference.
It's more than that. By looking at users whose location corresponded to CIA HQ in Langley during the day, for example, they could determine those individuals who worked in the CIA. And by backtracking the location of those individuals to where they were early in the morning, their home address could be determined. When cross-referenced against public databases, this allowed them to determine the identities of any CIA agent working at Langley using the app, along with their home addresses and daily routine. The location of CIA HQ may be public knowledge, but the identity of their agents is not, and exposing those identities is a federal crime.
When you consider the large crowds in the public spaces where this system is likely to be deployed, a 5% false positive rate would result in unmanageable numbers to verify. -E.g. Times Square sees 300,000 people a day movement, resulting in 15,000 false positives a day. Even a 1% false positive rate would be too high, especially considering the cost in civil liberties involved to those falsely flagged.
Cardiff airport also has a large BA servicing facility.
And this seems to be the real reason for these flights. BA is moving the aircraft overnight to their hangars and service facility at Cardiff, and carrying out a positioning flight in the morning so that they are in position for the next day's timetable. Positioning flights like this are common even at airports that aren't slot restricted.
You can probably guess the age of those cities by those graphs- at least how long they've been a major population centre. The ones under 250 years of age (most of the American ones) are very N-S E-W. Older ones like Rome show the roads go in every direction.
Actually Roman cities followed a strict grid pattern laid out in a N-S-E-W axis, with the streets of uniform width and the two main N-S and E-W streets (the Cardo Maximus and the Decumanus Maximus intersecting at the heart of the city. Some older Roman-descended European cities still have their main streets running along the Cardo and Decumanus Maximus - in Cologne, Germany, for example, they are the present day and Hohe Strasse and Schildergasse streets.
The organic growth came later during medieval times. For most European cities, if you were to graph them at the same elapsed time after city foundation as the American cities, I suspect you'd see very similar patterns
And this is the problem with remote working. Any job that can be done remotely at home can just as easily be done remotely anywhere. Which means the job can be easily outsourced to India or any other low cost country. A remote working job means you're competing with workers around the work, and that is never good for job security.
I mean seriously. how many people coming to these conferences are in the handful of countries on the travel ban? I cant imagine its that many.
The problem is that even in conferences where the attendees from those banned may be a mere handful of people, it creates a dillema for the organizers in that holding it in the United States would be limiting the participation and viewpoints from people from those country. For scientific conferences in particular, which try to stay above politics and promote dialogue in their field, limiting dialogue by denying entry even to a single person would be a betrayal of their principles to promote scientific understanding.
And I think we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg. Conferences take years ahead of time to organize so the effect hasn't been fully felt yet.
Here in Canada, ambulance fees varies by province, but they are subsided to a low rate - in Ontario it's $45, and in BC $40, for example. While it's true that we are ultimately paying the true cost of the service through taxes, ultimately it saves society as a whole money, precisely because people are a lot less reluctant to call an ambulance. With a subsidized ambulance service, people are more likely to call emergency services at the first sign of a medical issue, when the patient may be stabilized, and the cost to treat the patient is lower, instead of waiting for the situation to worsen to a point where costly critical intervention is needed.
One of the main reasons we subsidize ambulance costs in Canada is because it saves money in the medical system in the long term.
The issue is hardly unique to French. Most languages have a language regulator defining official usage of the language, with English being a notable exception. Language academies worldwide have tended to try to fight back to tide of anglicism in their languages by providing similar lists of local linguistic equivalent words. I've seen similar lists for Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and even Latin.
Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and other languages also have suggested equivalent words to "smartphone" but you'd be hard pressed to find a native speaker who is aware of the equivalent and uses it in day to day conversation. And while the French Academy may try to suggest alternative words, you'll find that most people in France except for die-hard linguistic nationalists will ignore their suggestions
Lists of local language alternative to anglicisms like these are periodically produced by every language academy around the world and ignored by said speakers of those languages. This is hardly news.
1. The IT infrastructure isn't there yet. I regularly deal with large files. Transferring those from home to the work server can take an hour. At work the same file transfer is a question of minutes. And I live in a major city in north america, for those who live in rural locations with limited broadband working at home is not a feasible option.
2. Office politics. My wife tried working from home full time after her maternity leave. Then she got passed for a promotion by a coworker who was at the office and developed a better relationship with the senior managers. Personal relationships matter in the workplace, and for that you need face-to-face interaction.
3. Not all work is done on a computer screen. Most of my work is done on a computer, but as an engineer I often deal with testing of mechanical system components which need to be done on-site. And I imagine for those working in the service sector, which are the majority of jobs in North America, there is no choice. You can't be a waiter from home, for example.
Given that Jeff Bezos owns the biggest house in Washington, as well as the biggest newspaper in DC, clearly the CEO of Amazon wants to be in Washington, DC. And his personal preference may well be the most important opinion in the relocation committee.
Slashdot Mirror
It is unclear if the Ethiopian pilots were aware of this procedure, but given that they were close to the ground and at too high of a speed to deploy flaps, the yo-yo maneuver would not have been feasible.
The AD which went out after the Lion Air Crash said disable the MCAS using cutoff switches. What it did not consider is that if the plane is already nose down then the aerodynamic forces are too strong to use the manual wheels to make it nose up. The AD should have specified use your electric trim yoke switches to make the trim up and then cut out the electric trim so MCAS cannot make it nose down again..
This is a good explanation of the difficulty in trimming the aircraft in a mistrim condition by a former senior Boeing engineer. The short of it is that in the mistrim condition encountered by ET302, with stab nose down and the pilots pulling elevator nose up, the combined tail loads would've produced high jackscrew load opposing nose stab up trim that would be impossible to overcome with manual trim.
Boeing did publish guidance for older 737 models on recovering on a severe nose out-of-trim condition, which would have required taking the aircraft into a roller-coaster maneuver to relieve the horizontal stabilizer loads. But given that they were already close to the ground, this was not an option. The other suggestion was to extend flaps, but given that the aircraft was above the minimum flap speeds, this was also not possible.
In short, it looks like the fix to the problem was as much to blame as the problem itself
The autopilot wouldn't be using the vane angle-of-attack sensor, they would be using air data and the inertial reference system. The only system that I would expect to be using the vane angle-of-attack reading in aircraft that is not fly-by-wire is the stall protection system. The stall protection system normally takes either of the angle-of-attack readings to flag a stall, whichever of the two systems is giving a higher reading. It uses an either-or logic because an aircraft in a banked turn may have differing angle-of-attack readings between the two vanes. An incorrect reading might trigger a premature stick shaker/pusher activation, but as this can be overriden by the pilot it wouldn't be considered safety critical, hence only 2 vane angle-of-attack sensors are needed.
Airbus aircraft, which have fly-by-wire, calculate angle-of-attack independently using the pressure readings from cross-coupled smart pitot tube sensors, which can then be verified against the vane angle-of-attack.
The two features that were mentioned in the article was an angle-of-attack disagree indicator and an angle-of-attack display in the cockpit. The disagree light should've been standard, given the severity of this failure mode. The angle-of-attack cockpit display? No other current commercial airplane has it - though from what I hear from pilots the old MD-11 had them in the cockpit as standard. It has been discussed in the wake of the AF447 accident and the Colgan Air 3407 accidents, but it's never been mandated by the FAA and there's no consensus in the aviation community on whether it would help, so I can't really fault Boeing for that one.
One of the bigger long-term consequences of these MAX-8 incidents will be the impact on the FAA's influence in the civil aviation world. One little commented fact is that when the MAX-8s were grounded it was the Chinese civil aviation authorities who led the world in grounding the 737 MAX. This was unprecedented, as most civil aviation authorities have tended to follow the lead certification authority of the manufacturer, the FAA in this case, before issuing a grounding. This was the case in previous grounding - the 787 dreamliner in 2013 and DC-10 groundings in 1979 were both led by the FAA.
Additionally, it now appears both Transport Canada and EASA are no longer willing to accept FAA certification. Other aviation authorities have in the past accepted FAA certification without challenge. if other authorities no longer trust the FAA to do its oversight properly Boeing will be forced to carry out multiple certification assessments for each civil aviation authority, and that will carry with it a considerable delay and financial burden.
The statement of using only one sensor is scary especially for something that automatically adjust the flight path, but even having two is scary. With 2 sensors how does the software know which is right when they disagree ? For true fault tolerance you need a minimum of 3 sensors
I assume that the MCAS system design is designed similar to the Stall Protection System (SPS) in most aircraft. The SPS uses both angle-of-attack vane sensor inputs but triggers a stall alert if either of the sensors exceed a limit. So yes, one wrong sensor input would cause an issue but the system is looking at both. Because they are necessarily located on the side of the aircraft, an aircraft in roll will have differing angle-of-attack sensor inputs. Given that a rolling stall was one of the scenarios they were trying to protect against, a miscompare between the two angle-of-attack vane sensors would be expected, especially considering that the system can have tolerances of up to 1.5degrees during the takeoff phase
It appears that they are looking at using the airspeed and inertial sensors to cross-verify, but given that no other sensor is directly measuring angle-of-attack any other method will be limited, as the computed angle-of-attack will be an estimate.
So while I agree that there were issues with design, it is not as simple a fix as cross-comparing both vane sensors in this case
Where I live in Montreal there is no driveway parking in my neighbourhood, and EV owners are dependent on public electric charging terminals. There are simply not enough terminals for the current number of EVs, and if drivers were to all switch to EVs it would be impossible for the city to install one terminal for every parked car for overnight charging, or even one charge terminal for every other car.
Electric vehicles are simply not feasible without having a driveway. And street parking is the norm for residents in in the city center of many major cities, unless you're well off enough to afford an expensive parking space. This is certainly the case in New York, London and Paris, for example. The only people I know who have EV's are suburbanites who have driveways. Hybrid vehicles are the only option for most of us urbanites, unless the dependency of driveway charging is solved.
2) Implement an a system to persistently add control inputs during critical phases of flight .
The Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) adding control inputs during flights is not an issue per se. Most commercial aircraft flying today have some form of automated control inputs on the primary control surfaces for stability augmentation. Yaw dampers in the rudder for lateral stability are present in even the smallest regional jets.
A bigger issue is that a single-point of failure in the MCAS can lead to a catastrophic condition, given that the MCAS is dependent on air speed data for its inputs. The pitot tubes that feed airspeed information can be prone to blockages and icing, as happened on the AF447 flight. Any safety-critical system cannot have a single point of failure lead to a catastrophic condition.
The A320 series had the ground clearance necessary to accomodate the new engines without needing to reposition them, hence no stability issues due to the engine placement that might have required an equivalent MCAS system.
The MCAS system was implemented because the 737-MAX engines are placed more forward of the wing which will tend to induce a nose up pitching moment particularly at high angles of attack near stall. This would've probably been a certification issue.
Now the 737 MAX had the engines placed so far forward to enable enough ground clearance. The original 50-year old 737 had low bypass engines which much smaller and could be placed directly under the wings. The newer models already ran into ground clearance issues, and this was initially solved by putting the engine systems to the side of the engine creating a distinct ovoid nacelle shape. With the new GE Leap engines, this fix was no longer sufficient due to larger engine diameter, hence the repositioning forward.
Newer aircraft like the airbus a300 series and the airbus a220 (bombardier cseries) never had this issue because they were designed to accomodate large diameter newer generation engines. The basic design of the 737 has always suffered from this flaw and really Boeing should have invested in a new aircraft design rather than try to re-engine an aircraft that was never designed for it. This was like fitting a V-12 engine into a model T.
for preserving a slice of software history. Not only has he collected a rich historical collection preserving the evolution of spreadsheet software, but from the article he's also interviewed and corresponded with the software pioneers from the field, most of whom are in their 80s and 90s now, preserving their historical testimony. Without him an important part of software history might otherwise have been forgotten. I suspect his collection, and his research into the field, will be an invaluable archive for those interested in computing history. It's a shame that his interest in preserving software history is being met with more mockery than support by the slashdot community.
According to Waymo's latest disengagement report for 2017, their disengagement rate is 1 once per 5600 miles. Considering the average american drives around 13000 miles per year based on DOT statistics, this equates to a disengagement incident every 5 months per vehicle. If the car is fully autonomous without a monitoring driver, each of those disengament incidents would translate into an accident. Any human that had an accident every 5 months would find themselves uninsurable in short order.
I don't think they should be rolling out these vehicles on the road until they can prove that it is not expected to disengage more than once over their lifetime, or once per 200,000 miles. At the current rates, it would be irresponsible to have the vehicles on public roads
As other stories point out, she is an American citizen. And as an American citizen, she cannot be denied entry to the United States. Border patrol's role in searching a citizen when crossing the border is only to determine if you are carrying contraband or illegal goods. As a citizen you have an inherent right to enter the country. Given that the iPhone seized is legally sold in the US, the only reason to seize it is if they had reason to suspect that the data in it was illegal in some form, and for that they should need a warrant.
While some were describing his flight as possessing acrobatic skill, I'd describe it as unstable and erratic flying from the very beginning of the flight. The plane was described by witnesses as taking off with the wheels smoking and with the wings not level during the takeoff roll. The conversation with air traffic control was characterized by ignorance of basic flight operations. And he did not perform the most difficult part of flying, which is the landing.
If anything, I'd say what this showed is how poorly a flight simulator prepared him for real life flying.
This. The difference is very small. If you're in the ER for a heart attack, you should be seen by a doctor - male or female - immediately. Time is of the essence. The sensationalist tone I've seen this reported in the media may lead some women to seek a female doctor over a male one in the ER, and the delay in finding a doctor of the proper gender will lead to a far higher mortality rate than the male-female difference.
It's more than that. By looking at users whose location corresponded to CIA HQ in Langley during the day, for example, they could determine those individuals who worked in the CIA. And by backtracking the location of those individuals to where they were early in the morning, their home address could be determined. When cross-referenced against public databases, this allowed them to determine the identities of any CIA agent working at Langley using the app, along with their home addresses and daily routine. The location of CIA HQ may be public knowledge, but the identity of their agents is not, and exposing those identities is a federal crime.
When you consider the large crowds in the public spaces where this system is likely to be deployed, a 5% false positive rate would result in unmanageable numbers to verify. -E.g. Times Square sees 300,000 people a day movement, resulting in 15,000 false positives a day. Even a 1% false positive rate would be too high, especially considering the cost in civil liberties involved to those falsely flagged.
Cardiff airport also has a large BA servicing facility.
And this seems to be the real reason for these flights. BA is moving the aircraft overnight to their hangars and service facility at Cardiff, and carrying out a positioning flight in the morning so that they are in position for the next day's timetable. Positioning flights like this are common even at airports that aren't slot restricted.
You can probably guess the age of those cities by those graphs- at least how long they've been a major population centre. The ones under 250 years of age (most of the American ones) are very N-S E-W. Older ones like Rome show the roads go in every direction.
Actually Roman cities followed a strict grid pattern laid out in a N-S-E-W axis, with the streets of uniform width and the two main N-S and E-W streets (the Cardo Maximus and the Decumanus Maximus intersecting at the heart of the city. Some older Roman-descended European cities still have their main streets running along the Cardo and Decumanus Maximus - in Cologne, Germany, for example, they are the present day and Hohe Strasse and Schildergasse streets.
The organic growth came later during medieval times. For most European cities, if you were to graph them at the same elapsed time after city foundation as the American cities, I suspect you'd see very similar patterns
And this is the problem with remote working. Any job that can be done remotely at home can just as easily be done remotely anywhere. Which means the job can be easily outsourced to India or any other low cost country. A remote working job means you're competing with workers around the work, and that is never good for job security.
I mean seriously. how many people coming to these conferences are in the handful of countries on the travel ban? I cant imagine its that many.
The problem is that even in conferences where the attendees from those banned may be a mere handful of people, it creates a dillema for the organizers in that holding it in the United States would be limiting the participation and viewpoints from people from those country. For scientific conferences in particular, which try to stay above politics and promote dialogue in their field, limiting dialogue by denying entry even to a single person would be a betrayal of their principles to promote scientific understanding.
And I think we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg. Conferences take years ahead of time to organize so the effect hasn't been fully felt yet.
Here in Canada, ambulance fees varies by province, but they are subsided to a low rate - in Ontario it's $45, and in BC $40, for example. While it's true that we are ultimately paying the true cost of the service through taxes, ultimately it saves society as a whole money, precisely because people are a lot less reluctant to call an ambulance. With a subsidized ambulance service, people are more likely to call emergency services at the first sign of a medical issue, when the patient may be stabilized, and the cost to treat the patient is lower, instead of waiting for the situation to worsen to a point where costly critical intervention is needed.
One of the main reasons we subsidize ambulance costs in Canada is because it saves money in the medical system in the long term.
The issue is hardly unique to French. Most languages have a language regulator defining official usage of the language, with English being a notable exception. Language academies worldwide have tended to try to fight back to tide of anglicism in their languages by providing similar lists of local linguistic equivalent words. I've seen similar lists for Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and even Latin.
Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and other languages also have suggested equivalent words to "smartphone" but you'd be hard pressed to find a native speaker who is aware of the equivalent and uses it in day to day conversation. And while the French Academy may try to suggest alternative words, you'll find that most people in France except for die-hard linguistic nationalists will ignore their suggestions
Lists of local language alternative to anglicisms like these are periodically produced by every language academy around the world and ignored by said speakers of those languages. This is hardly news.
At least in my experience:
1. The IT infrastructure isn't there yet. I regularly deal with large files. Transferring those from home to the work server can take an hour. At work the same file transfer is a question of minutes. And I live in a major city in north america, for those who live in rural locations with limited broadband working at home is not a feasible option.
2. Office politics. My wife tried working from home full time after her maternity leave. Then she got passed for a promotion by a coworker who was at the office and developed a better relationship with the senior managers. Personal relationships matter in the workplace, and for that you need face-to-face interaction.
3. Not all work is done on a computer screen. Most of my work is done on a computer, but as an engineer I often deal with testing of mechanical system components which need to be done on-site. And I imagine for those working in the service sector, which are the majority of jobs in North America, there is no choice. You can't be a waiter from home, for example.
Given that Jeff Bezos owns the biggest house in Washington, as well as the biggest newspaper in DC, clearly the CEO of Amazon wants to be in Washington, DC. And his personal preference may well be the most important opinion in the relocation committee.