This deal brings into focus whether the shovels are data or GPUs. Advantage to data comes, surprisingly, in perishability: a GPU fleet remains cutting edge for only one product cycle.
No need to tip, or even think about whether one should tip. The ride won’t cancel on me, which makes it more reliable. (Waymos are also more consistently clean.) I can take phone calls without worrying about my rider rating. And yeah, they’re more fun because they're novel.
Yeah, I’d happily pay a bit extra just to take tipping out of the equation entirely. Not having to worry about it is enough of a draw on its own. (I’m not a fan of tipping culture to begin with — especially with apps like Uber, where you’re also being rated, which adds even more pressure.)
I do. Sometimes almost 50%. I also do dumb things like order an Uber Black because I wanted a nicer ride or an XL because I don’t want to be shoved in the back of a model 3 even with just 2 people.
Very safe. They obey most traffic rules and don’t do stupid things. I have friends who commute in bike and say they feel safer with Waymo’s on the street. As a pedestrian, I appreciate them since I don’t worry it might run me over when I’m crossing the street.
The “consistently clean” part won’t last, that’s just because they’re new. In 2010 “they’re consistently clean” was an advantage of Ubers over yellow cabs, which of course is gone now. But I agree with the rest of this.
> The “consistently clean” part won’t last, that’s just because they’re new.
A fair bit of the unclean part of Ubers/Lyfts comes from the drivers: cigarettes, marijuana, food, perfume, air "fresheners", body odor.
Waymo's have internal cameras that can detect visible uncleanliness.
Easy to report and have accountability (to the previous rider) if there's a significant cleanliness problem (spilled food, vomit).
Next generation Zeekr vehicles (limited by tariffs right now) might be better designed for cleaning: better materials, fewer nooks and crannies, larger door openings.
My only experience with a dirty Waymo was smell. I reported it in app and got a message they recalled it to be cleaned.
I think the fact they can just take a car out of rotation and to the hub which probably has dedicated cleaning staff is a big reason it will last.
Your average uber driver is desperate to work. I’ve seen a driver open his trunk and clean up urine from a drunk female passenger he just dropped off in front of me and then just carry on with our ride like it was no big deal.
Even today YouTubers and TikTokers go out of their way not to use certain words that lead to being demonetised or having their reach limited. They use euphemisms like unalive or grape instead of suicide and rape. These are terrible things which we'd like to see less of, but we can't discuss how to make things better without discussing them at all.
If we force videos to avoid mentioning that could offend anyone anywhere, we're not going to be able to discuss very much at all.
> YouTubers and TikTokers go out of their way not to use certain words that lead to being demonetised or having their reach limited. They use euphemisms like unalive or grape instead of suicide and rape.
I'm with you on finding this personally annoying. But the question is whether a dedicated forum for discussing suicide or rape, one where the incentives of an unqualified influencer paid by views and product endorsements are better considered, is superior for these matters.
We don't, by analogy, randomly launch into suicide and rape in the middle of a cocktail party. Instead, we naturally seclude ourselves with the people we want to discuss it with, people we tend to have chosen thoughtfully, and usually with some warning that what we want to discuss is weighty. Not doing any of that online strikes me as, if not a problem, a legitimate concern.
Who is going to join a forum dedicated to discussing rape? Absolute weirdos, that's who. But you're not going to enact any kind of broad societal change by talking only to those weirdos. You need to reach a broad audience and convince them this is a problem worth tackling.
> Who is going to join a forum dedicated to discussing rape? Absolute weirdos
The folks who go to these [1] and these [2].
We are way into that at least I am not knowledgeable about. I’d be curious about an expert’s take on the value of unmoderated YouTube and TikTok content on this issue.
These guys are fine, but they can’t drive broader societal change if the words “sexual assault” or “rape” is scrubbed from mainstream discourse. Imagine if HN autodeleted any comment with these words, we couldn’t even have this conversation.
> real coup was perpetrated by the supreme court itself
The side that storms the capital sort of gives up its ability to call the other illegitimate in a democracy.
That doesn't mean they're right. Just that the situtation in Brazil clearly escalated to the point that suspending the status quo is if not merited, highly historically precedented.
Occupying the government buildings is essentially the standard brazilian protest. It's happened many times before and will happen again. This "storming" amounted to little more than a protest.
If only that had been enough to fix things. I watched those judges censor political speech as "fake news" throughout the entire 2022 election. Then they showboated in public about how they had been personally responsible for the former president's defeat.
> Occupying the government buildings is essentially the standard brazilian protest. It's happened many times before and will happen again
Brazil also has a history of military coups, something that mob explicitly sought to provoke [1]. It makes sense for the system to learn from past failings.
I feel like coups are more likely in developing or socialist countries. An American coup at this point seems very unlikely to work thanks to “learning from past failings” and stuff like advanced weapons systems. I mean heck, we can’t even escape the two party system, imagine overthrowing them and the federal government in one swoop, and doing that by means of citizen protestors occupying a building. Seems crazy to worry about that so much for years and years.
A straight-up military coup is unlikely but not by much. In fact, former President Bolsonaro and most of his closest allies in government are on trial for planning exactly that.
In any case, other, "softer", coups have been happening with alarming frequency in South America, Brazil included.
> coups are more likely in developing or socialist countries
Developing, yes. (Socialist, I don’t know.)
> we can’t even escape the two party system, imagine overthrowing them and the federal government in one swoop, and doing that by means of citizen protestors occupying a building
Protests are pretext.
The Brazilian protests didn’t anticipate overthrowing the government themselves. They wanted the military to depose the elected government. In America, a protest would be used either as an excuse to impose ersatz martial law or a sign that the people don’t agree with the election (or whatever). The actual killing moves are rendered by those who can command guns.
Not a problem. They wanted to be ruled by the military. That's a valid political stance which should not be censored.
A military coup is attempted when armed forces actually show up to overthrow you. When the heroic brazilian military showed up, it was to arrest the protesters.
> Not a problem. They wanted to be ruled by the military. That's a valid political stance which should not be censored.
Wat.
(EDIT: Sure? In a country with a history of not managing this well, however, it’s also dangerous. When manifested as a riot, that danger becomes clear and present.)
> it was to arrest the protesters who were begging the military on their knees to save them
Rioters who broke into the federal buildings housing each branch of the Brazilian state…
I appreciate your directness. But respectfully, I don’t think there is anything this Supreme Court could do that would meet your approval, or vice versa, those “protesters” which would find your judgement.
Plenty of people out there who enjoyed the military dictatorship.
Did you know the Lua programming language was born in it? The military wanted to replace technology imports with native products. That gave rise to industry and technology. We even tried making our own computers once. That bit of history has been posted to HN at least once.
I can totally see why they'd prefer that to the current Brazil which is essentially the world's soy farm, to say nothing of the endless corruption scandals and crushing taxation.
> Rioters who broke into the federal buildings housing each branch of the Brazilian state
Protesters from the current ruling party have set fire to those buildings before. It's nothing new.
> I don’t think there is anything this Supreme Court could do that would meet your approval
> Plenty of people out there who enjoyed the military dictatorship
Fair enough. I imagine the military dictatorship wouldn’t be too happy with folks trying to overthrow it. Part of designing a stable state is maneouvering against such volatility.
This state is anything but stable. The supreme court has become the de facto rulers of this country. For some reason they didn't maneuver against that.
It's not. They are both unelected authoritarian dictatorships. If I must live under a dictatorship, I want it to be a regime that somewhat aligns with my values and interests at the very least.
The people in power right now are communists and socialists. It's not even an understatement. Nazis go straight to jail but these socialists walk our soil completely unpunished even though they are far more damaging.
> continuing to argue with the fascist won't be a productive use of your time
They’re informed, coherent and seem to honestly hold their views. I’m genuinely curious about what they have to say, even if I wouldn’t want their policy prescription for my own country.
It's frustrating for me to see this discussion thread being taken over by dozens of comments filled with fascist lies, and being reminded that there are still nutjobs out there actively plotting to overthrow our democracy. If you really do want to learn more about the Brazilian far-right, there are probably better sources out there than drinking straight out of the fake-news hose.
Brazil is not a democracy. Not a single brazilian citizen voted for the judge-kings who are now running the country. It's as much a democracy as North Korea. Plus, there's censorship, and censorship equals dictatorship. It's that simple.
It's equally frustrating for me when I see the exact same talking points every single thread. It's fine if you don't want to debate the issue. Nobody's forcing you to reply. Do refrain from calling me names though.
Exactly! You, just like the people that was there and now are in jail, wanted that to "fix things", or calling it for the right name, a coup. It didn't work well.
That's not true. At the very least, they need to be Law Bachelors. Furthermore, after being nominated by the President they need to get approval from the Senate.
By "tests" I meant concurso público. There isn't a good English term for that.
Every other judge is a law professional who studied hard to pass the test. They compete for the judge positions with thousands and thousands of other professionals. The supreme court judges did not necessarily pass such a trial. Therefore, it is entirely possible and even likely for the judges of lesser courts to be more knowledgeable about law than the supreme court.
Just yet another example of how backwards this country is.
> By "tests" I meant concurso público. There isn't a good English term for that.
Those are essentially admission tests. They're not meant to test the knowledge or ability of the candidates, but rather as a way to filter out the excess because there's higher demand than offer of those jobs.
The Supreme Court justices don't have to do that because they are selected by the President instead.
> Every other judge is a law professional who studied hard to pass the test.
Some of the supreme court justices might have not passed admission tests for jobs they were not interested in but that says exactly nothing about their intelligence or knowledge of the law.
> Therefore, it is entirely possible and even likely for the judges of lesser courts to be more knowledgeable about law than the supreme court.
No doubt it's possible but I find some of the foundational premises of your chain of causation to be misguided at best.
If these tests were actually that good in filtering the cream of the crop, how do we end up with people like Sérgio Moro who can't follow simple logic and has repeatedly demonstrated a profound ignorance of how the Brazilian Civil Law system differs from his FBI training on Common Law concepts and strategies?
One of the largest corruption scandals in the history of the country ended up mostly annulled because it was so full of vices that Cracolândia junkies seem productive and well adjusted in comparison.
Furthermore, you have complained in other comments that the justices are not elected. Leaving out any arguments around why that's the case, and why this is a desired feature of the system, how is that compatible with the lack of admission tests? There are so many goalposts in your messages that it's very difficult to understand what you actually think could be any better than what's currently in place.
> that says exactly nothing about their intelligence or knowledge of the law
I disagree. I have far more confidence in judges who competed vigorously for their positions than in judges who were merely appointed by presidents.
> If these tests were actually that good in filtering the cream of the crop, how do we end up with people like Sérgio Moro
Every test has the potential for false positives and false negatives. We want to select good judges and reject bad judges. There is an inherent risk of selecting bad judges and rejecting good judges.
Of course, the exact statistics have never been determined. It's reasonable to assume that the tests optimize for low false positive rate. Rejecting good judges is not as bad as accepting a bad judge.
By reading court cases, I formed a very positive opinion of concursado judges. I've always found their argumentation to be lucid and persuasive, even when I didn't agree with their rulings. I simply can't say the same of the supreme court.
> One of the largest corruption scandals in the history of the country ended up mostly annulled
That fact deeply disgusts me. It really does. I wish things had worked out differently.
> how is that compatible with the lack of admission tests?
It's not. I believe supreme court judges should also have to pass admission tests. That should be the one and only way to become a supreme court judge.
I claim the supreme court has amassed so much power it is now openly legislating. It's effectively running the country. These people are not elected representatives. Therefore, it follows that Brazil is not actually a democracy. That is the point I sought to make in this thread.
I don't actually want judges to be elected. I just think that's a requirement for Brazil to be called a democracy at this point in time. If we're a democracy, and judges hold all the power, then we should be able to vote for them.
The only reason I go out of my way to point out that these are unelected judges is to highlight the fact that Brazil is a democracy in name only.
They gotta follow the constitution. And judge criminals. Exactly that is what they are doing. For that to be happening at the same time as the US devolve into a dictatorship is quite didactic
No, they don't. They can do whatever they want and nobody can do a thing about it. Whatever they write on a paper becomes law, simply because police enforces it.
The fact they weren't and aren't following the constitution was a major cause of January 8th. Censorship is unconstitutional in Brazil, especially that of a political nature. And political censorship is exactly what they engaged in. They just happened to use euphemisms like "fake news". I remember one case where they censordd a documentary before it was even published. A priori censorship, something not seen in these lands since the military dictatorship.
> And judge criminals.
Supreme court's purpose is to judge politicians with immunity and assorted privilges. Not common citizens.
I'm glad the people that think like you are a tiny minority that is being persecuted and answering for the crimes. The supreme court never worked better.
I realize you abide the court's abuses because it's convenient for you and your ideology. I'm trying to warn you that one day it will be your turn to be persecuted, as it often happens.
I do hope I'm still around to post about it when it does. I wouldn't wish such a fate on anyone. Even you, someone who thinks I should be imprisoned for my thoughts, should not be censored and persecuted for it.
> I realize you abide the court's abuses because it's convenient for you and your ideology.
pretty much the opposite: when the same STF changed laws to put Lula in jail, I did not supported people that wanted to overthrow the rule of law. You do. Now. But at the time you were in favor of the same supreme court change the law in favor of your ideology, which removed Lula from the election that he was leading.
> I do hope I'm still around to post about it when it does. I wouldn't wish such a fate on anyone.
Do you think you have it hard? That this is some kind of torture? The same people that worship coronel Ustra?
> Even you, someone who thinks I should be imprisoned for my thoughts, should not be censored and persecuted for it.
You should not be imprisoned for your thoughts. But corrupt politicians and criminals should not be protected by unrestricted free speech.
I only started keeping up with politics after Bolsonaro became president. So I'm afraid I don't remember which abuses, if any, were committed by courts at the time of Lula's imprisonment.
I don't doubt you. Feel free to elaborate on the matter if you'd like, in good faith.
I don't support "judicial activism" at all. Judges should be machines that implement the law exactly as written to each individual case, no more and no less. Any deviation from that is a power grab. In other words: judges must not legislate, that is the job of our elected representatives.
Any attempt from a judge to legislate is a small coup against the people. Actual lawyers have told me: "instead of applying the law, the surpreme court decided to legislate". This is normal in Brazil and it shouldn't be.
> Judges should be machines that implement the law exactly as written, no more and no less.
Law is not that simple and is full of tricky edge cases and outright vague ambiguity.
Lower Courts can easily rule to a clear letter of law as stated in a great many cases.
eg: Does evidence exist to prove a defendant broke into locked premises or not? Does a jury all agree that multiple pieces of submitted evidence are sufficient to establish a conclusion on balance despite all pieces of evidence having some issue?
High Courts and Supreme Courts exist to ponder whether lower courts have correctly applied the laws.
This would not be required if it were at all possible to have machines that implement the law exactly as written, no more and no less.
There is a legitimate argument social media can for being treated differently given their content is user generated. But that argument falls to pieces given algorithmic boosting, which is clearly an editorial slant.
"Algorithmic boosting" is not (always?) the same as an editorial slant. Promoting the post with the longest title would be an "algorithmic boost", but clearly not editorial in any way. The most common forms of algorithms are just a function of the number of times people viewed it weighted against the age of the post; there is still no editorial slant there. Even recommendations algorithms like YouTube are mostly the same, with an additional weight based on how likely others who watched the same things as you were to view that video.
> "Algorithmic boosting" is not (always?) the same as an editorial slant
I'd argue any algorithmic prioritisation whose rules are not made public, or where discretion is applied, constittues editorial slant. It's why I'd argue HN up/down voting (even flagging) is not editorial slant, while e.g. @dang removing a post is.
Think about how this would apply to hacker news? Not all algorithmic bias is evil. If you want to avoid an echo chamber, design an algorithm to boost interesting content that missed the front page. That shouldn't render you vulnerable to legislation.
And would this allow Brazil to prosecute hacker news for cyber security violations if a user posts content regarding Flipper Zero or Japanese IC cards, or data breaches of Brazilian companies...
I think the line should be drawn at ads... and maybe even all profit centers of social media companies.
HN features group-based passive moderation based on well-communicated rules. And active moderation based on a fuzzier standard. The latter is absolutely an editorial standard.
> would this allow Brazil to prosecute hacker news for cyber security violations if a user posts content regarding Flipper Zero or Japanese IC cards, or data breaches of Brazilian companies
If it were posted here, moderators were notified and they chose not to flag (or geoblock) it, yes, I think that’s not totally unfair.
Where this current ruling is ambiguous is in being totally non-specific about how it should be complied with.
It is the editorial standard of the community not the company. It seems that this law would pit the company against the community at the behest of the local state.
Whereas I suggest removing bias introduced by and benefiting the company (ads). This legislation forces the company to introduce additional bias which, though not financial, benefits the company legally.
> If it were posted here, moderators were notified and they chose not to flag (or geoblock) it, yes, I think that’s not totally unfair.
To clarify, it would be fair for hackernews to be sued for failing to remove or geoblock such content? Doesn't this in essence balkanize international communities and defeat the spirit of the Internet? The cesspit of social media is due to forced bias and the solution is to introduce more bias?
> It is the editorial standard of the community not the company
Passive moderation, i.e. upvoting and downvoting, is a standard of the community's. Active moderation, e.g. @dang removing a comment, is a standard of the company.
> Doesn't this in essence balkanize international communities and defeat the spirit of the Internet?
Depends on what you mean by "algorithmic boosting".
If you mean, "this user viewed A, B, and C. Other users who viewed them also viewed D; let's show D to this user", then no, that's not an editorial slant or an editorial choice. That's an unbiased algorithm driven by users' choices.
If you mean, "Let's identify posts that are related to position Y on subject Z, and boost them extra", then yes, I agree that is an editorial slant.
My impression is that, when people talk about "editorial control", they usually include the first kind, not just the second.
So: How much of the second kind is going on? More than none, I agree, but how much? Does anyone have data? If not, then we're left with impressions, and my impression is that it's fairly small. (Rather, that it's a quite small number of topics, but since it's probably fairly popular topics it may still amount to a fair number of user impressions.)
Content on TV stations is also mostly third party generated. Channel 5 didn't make The Punisher, they bought the rights to play it on air. Radio 2 didn't make In da Club, but 50 Cent did, they're just playing it on air. Newspapers also publish letters and content from readers, yet unlike social media they're the ones responsible for that content.
Because in many countries, content is age restricted per times of day, so the TV and radio statins need to edit the songs and movies they play to cut out various swear words, violence and sex scenes if they want to air to to general audiences, otherwise they get fined.
So why are social media companies allowed to wreak havok?
That's highlighting the difference, TV stations actively chose what to show, defaulting to rejecting. Social media is the opposite, kind of makes sense to have different rules.
Disagree here, all social media platforms have "the algorithm" which chooses what to show and to who, in order o maximize engagement and ad revenue.
If they don't want to be responsible for what they show to users, maybe they should leave all that ad money on the table, but it seems like they have no moral issues cashing those cheques while outsourcing their externalities to society. It's not like Meta is scrambling for change between the couch cushions and can't invest in better human plus bot moderation and curation. But then Zuck will only be able to afford a gold trim on his yacht instead of the platinum one, and a smaller island. Oh no, how sad, how terrible.
So tell me again, why do we have double standards for super wealthy social media oligopolies compared to traditional mediums?
> Disagree here, all social media platforms have "the algorithm" which chooses what to show and to who, in order o maximize engagement and ad revenue.
That's not true, Bluesky has "chose your own algorithm" and Mastodon even less, it's just in chronological order (or "chose your own client"), and lots of other social media sites that don't have algorithms that decide what you're seeing. Classic web forums (which I'd call social media too) also typically show content in chronological order.
With LLMs, the solution seems simple: the utility provides your device with a fire hose. And your agent, the author of which has some liability for what it shows you, curates it.
If the company providing the fire hose also wants to supply the agent, or even lock its users into its own agent, that sums up who’s responsible.
Gentle tip from a lifelong aviation enthusiast: wait one week before reading on causation.
Exposing yourself to first-week speculation isn’t just unproductive, it’s often counterproductive since the actual findings can rhyme with the false speculation closely enough that you wind up muddling the two in your mind.
Pro tip from a lifelong life enthusiast: if its breaking news, wait one week - first-week speculation isn’t just unproductive, it’s often counterproductive.
Flick through last weeks newspaper if you need reassurance.
Then you're only getting things important to viewership. Nobody's putting an economically critical trade deal on all the channels, or a genocide in Yemen. But Princess Diana dying, that's gonna get coverage.
> Especially as she's supposed to have died 28 years ago
If you don’t watch television news, flipping through the channels can be genuinely surprising. Because if it’s Princess Diana’s birthday, I almost guarantee one of them will be running a retrospective segment.
I really like the Economist as a source of weekly news.
Somehow I’ve ended up primarily reading their daily recap in the app. They already have a full article on this crash. That usually means it’ll be in the magazine next week.
They've always been upfront about their bias, in no way are they trying to hide it.
Way back when I was in college 20 years ago they ran a very funny article poking fun at all the PhD's doing "deconstruction" on The Economist. Like super post-modernist fluff. I could tell the writer had a great time responding to it.
Their punchline: "so there you have it - a newspaper to make you feel good about tomorrow by promoting capitalism today!"
I have gave up on E. once they supported GWB over Gore. I can barely understand over the top devotion to neoliberalism and deregulation. But the shortcomings of GWB were sticking out in the campaign, so closing the eyes and singing "la la liberalism" was way too much for me.
I had been a Economist subscriber for almost 20 years. But then gradually I realized that their reporting on some issues are extremely biased and they conveniently skip reporting some facts to match their intended narrative and lead the reader to distorted conclusions. So I would assume they would be doing the same with other topics as well. I did not renew my subscription.
What do you read? I’m an economist reader too for weekly news.
Would love other sources, but it’s hard to find anything with similar depth and a similar lack of sensational-ization found in most news.
Edit: Oh, and global reach. The economist covers earth in almost equal detail for every region. Not quite equal of course, but darn close compared to most outlets.
I think WSJ is a good complement to the Economist. They have good, unsensationalized coverage of the facts. I ignore their opinion columns as they don't seem very serious.
WSJ is nearly tabloid quality. If you have self respect, read the FT; if you just want weekend reading, read the FT Weekend (it comes with the FT Weekend too, which is excellent long form journalism but not “news” per se).
That's just another Murdoch rag, I wouldn't wipe my arse with it. Better no news than his news. You aren't getting any sort of counterpoint you are getting whatever supports his world view.
You think the opinion pages are the only place he pushes his agenda? The very stories they report are selected to further the narrative he wants. That's why apologies and retractions are always tiny.
In my experience, WSJ just reports what happened and who said what in a very dry way.
My impression is that their news section provides a very anti Republican party view. Note that this is my impression, not the paper's stance. They don't really take any, apart from the opinion section, which I ignore. The opinion section has a massive pro republican bent.
> Lying by omission
I'll admit, I might have a blind spot here because I'm only reading 2 newspapers. That being said, I'm not sure of any stories reported by the other news outlets which were ignored/downplayed by WSJ.
> apologies and retractions
Happen when they happen. I remember a few per month. But since they're so dry, there's very little scope for major corrections. If they say, "this guy said that", there's very little to correct there. Occasionally, they mis-paraphrase someone and have to correct their report. Most sound like honest mistakes to me.
EDIT:
> You aren't getting any sort of counterpoint you are getting whatever supports his world view.
Fair enough, but you mostly don't get any points to counter in the first place. Only plain dry facts. I go to the Economist for opinions and counter opinions. (*side note, the Economist should publish more counter opinions IMO)
https://newlinesmag.com/ has been a favorite of mine lately if you wanna give that a try, it's got global coverage and there's always something interesting to read
I also read the Economist.
Other than that, Wall Street Journal is quite good at purely factual, unopinionated coverage. Note that their Opinion section is heavily biased towards the American right, but I mostly ignore it. It's clearly labeled as Opinion.
Between the Economist and WSJ, I get a good overview of opinions and facts.
I really enjoy the Monocle "Globalist" podcast which is well-produced, of global range, and a welcome departure from the npr/kqed bubble I was immersed in.
> Form your own opinion, based on multiple source plus your own judgement
I think the essence of these statements is less that you should literally listen to whatever distilled amount of world news your coworkers are talking about and take it as fact, but that if it's remotely necessary for you to even be aware of, let alone have an opinion about, it'll present itself somehow in real life. After that, if it qualifies as relevant to your life, then go about searching for more info, but a vast majority of anything you could hear or read about or watch probably doesn't qualify.
Government policy, sure, if you need to respond to or act on it somehow. Conflict in the middle east? Sure, if you or someone you know has ties there. But again you'll probably just hear about it because it's directly impactful, or you can monitor specifically for those updates using narrow channels.
The problem is, they often assume you already read the news and don’t say what happen just provide the analysis without context.
Heck, Spiegel does that with news on the same day. You get some background article without starting with the facts of what happened, as if everybody reads the news every two hours.
Unfortunately for everyone's brains, this turned out to basically not be true with COVID- only real news fans (or people with expertise in the relevant science, but there are way less of those) were remotely aware that offices probably weren't going to be closed for only two weeks[0]. If you followed the news closely you stocked up on toilet paper when there were runs on it in Hong Kong, before there were runs on it where you were, etc. But if you only got news from the office water-cooler you'd have been none the wiser.
This is one of those exceptions that prove the rule though, I think.
[0] I had this conversation with people multiple times so it must have been common
If nobody followed the news or social media, there wouldn’t have been runs on toilet paper to begin with, as there never was a shortage to begin with and it was all just mass hysteria.
It was never clear to me, but at least part of it was supposedly due to everyone pooping at home using consumer TP instead of at the office, using commercially packaged TP (two-ply, giant rolls for big dispensers). And that sudden shift started to empty shelves. If people had stocked up over a period of time, the empty-shelves situation that produced the fear probably wouldn't have happened.
Of course in practice there really was plenty of it to go around, dollar stores seemed to be the most flexible at navigating the supply chain derangement and if you didn't mind buying it by the roll, it was never really hard to find.
Also- you don't need to follow the news for there to be a panic, empty shelves will do that all on their own. Everyone deciding to stock up a little on everything was enough to deplete shelves, people walking in after saw empty shelves and stocked up more, etc. I don't think most people were following the "omg supply chain" news, they just saw depleted shelves.
I never really understood the importance of it anyway. People were locked in their home so they could just use the shower head if it came to it. Of course a real bidet would be better and cleaner but I don't think they exist in northern America or Northern Europe.
It's also common in Asia (at least South East) they can survive without toilet paper :) The Japanese even have entire water jet massage toilets, they do it like a king.
Or if you don't want to use water, you could use serviettes, tissues. Even newspaper.
That's why I didn't understand the fuss about it. Sure it's annoying if you run out but not the end of the world especially when you're at home where there's always a shower to hand. I don't understand that people were so obsessed with toilet paper.
What would be much more important is food, water (in my city the tap water is terrible so I don't drink it), medication etc.
I would put it at 1% here. They are extremely rare. Bidet attachments have become relatively popular here over the past decade though. It's been life changing (or maybe butt changing). It's amazing how pretentious Americans can be while having such a gross habit.
Yeah, the deep irony of the GP comment is that, had all of these supposedly knowledgable people just read the original report from the WHO (~early 2020), they'd have realized many things about the virus (such as the extremely skewed age distribution of the seriously ill) that would have greatly mitigated the overall panic. It literally took years for the chattering class in medicine to understand basic information that was available at the beginning of the pandemic.
COVID was a perfect case study of mass hysteria, and how you can't even trust "the experts" in these situations, because the "experts" you hear from early on are also generally the ones who are the most willing to spout pure speculation for attention. Humans are gonna human, and a background in science doesn't change that fact.
A million Americans did die of it, the lost QALYs was... a lot. A lot of people died who had more than a decade, actuarially. That's a big deal.
But it doesn't matter for what I'm saying: paying too much attention to the news about a weird new virus from China would have clued a person in that something big might be coming, on whatever dimension you care to measure it.
But would that have been actionable information for the average person? What would you have done differently on the first day, given perfect information?
The Covid pandemic lasted much longer than would have been reasonable to prepare for via hoarding of supplies etc.
In my view, that was the entire problem: Much of the world overreacted in the short term (hard lockdowns including fining people going for a walk by themselves etc.) and underreacted in the long term (limiting avoidable large indoor gatherings such as most office work, air filters etc.)
Many governments did as much as people would tolerate for as long as they could (which meant, for some, doing nothing at all), rather than focusing on doing effective things they could actually keep up as long as required.
Hindsight is of course 20/20, but I really hope that’s a lesson many learned from it.
That was pure panic. I live in the gulf coast. Anytime there is a minor chance we are getting hit by a hurricane people panic buy and suddenly there isn't any water on the shelves anymore. You'll see average folks with 20 cases of water being shoved in their massive SUVs for a family of 3.
Sure. However, I bought a large pack of toilet paper when I saw headlines about hoarding in HK, before the shelves began to dwindle here, and thus dodged the whole thing. That it was basically panic is neither here nor there: paying too close attention to far-off news did actually pay off in a tiny way.
TP shortages in Hong Kong were rational, based on an expectation of bulk shipping issues. Stocking up in North America based on shortages in Hong Kong was idiotic. If there are shortages of TP in Hong Kong that means there would be a surplus of TP in North America, since North America is where the pulp for most TP is made.
Sure, probably. It still helped me dodge the panic that set in a couple weeks later though. Sometimes midwit thought works. I wasn't stocking a Scrooge McDuck room full of the stuff. I think it was when I saw stories of hoarding spread to Australia that I realized that maybe this it was going to have legs, rationally or not.
Like so many addictive habits, while you’re in it day to day, it feels so… important… and when you’re out… it doesn’t even make sense that complete truth could be fully knowable in the moment.
Most consequential decisions are made, or built up to, over a long time. Sure, somebody has to call moment-to-moment balls and strikes, but if that’s not literally you, your weight in the world might be better applied in slower, quieter, subtler places.
Am I morbidly curious about a plane crash? How could I not be? But the NTSB didn’t earn the credibility they have by parachuting in day-of and shooting from the hip. If anything, their processes provide discipline against first impressions blinding them to true causes.
To the contrary, I find analysis very helpful when it's of the "is this important; is this unusual; how does it fit in with previous expectations" variety. Raw headlines and factual day-to-day reporting are often kind of bad at that.
Same. I have never really followed the news. Everyone always seems to be upset by something in the news. Meanwhile I'm happy as a clam all the time and just have all my time to focus on myself and doing what I want and like.
You could spend the time you'd have spent reading the news instead reading actual books on history, poli sci and political philosophy, ethics, economics, et c., and then figure out who the right person to vote for is and what the right votes on various issues are in like 30 minutes of search-n-skim per election.
This pattern would result in a far better-informed voter than one who diligently follows the news all the time but doesn't read many books. The amount of news you need to read to make informed decisions at the ballot box is usually tiny, if you have the background to understand the news—and if you don't, consuming more news won't help much with that. Meanwhile, it takes a ton of close book-reading before you start to see diminishing returns on that front.
I have a BA in history and a MPA in public administration. I have already done a ton of that work: research, academic analysis/writing, and understanding. I agree these things are INCREDIBLY important to have a great foundational understanding of how the world works/worked; however, understanding current events is JUST AS IMPORTANT.
But; I'm done arguing w/you as it's clear your opinion will remain unchanged regardless of any evidence or opinion to the contrary.
Even if news reading informs an electorate, there's no need to be informed constantly when I only have limited opportunities to vote.
When an election happens, I can do a search of news on the candidates, and for discussions of the other issues put to the voters. In the meantime, by avoiding news, I can save a lot of distress about news that I can't change and doesn't have an immediate effect on me. (Nobody in this thread, including me, is great at avoiding news, me included... really important events tend to bubble up anyway, and all of us clicked into a discussion of an event that's probably not personally relevant)
It'd be different if a cat delivered tomorrow's paper to my door; I might not like it, but I'd have a duty to read that paper and try to make right what once went wrong.
My girlfriend says she doesn't trust the media, but she has to follow it to know what they're lying to us about. I've pointed out that the problem goes deeper than just whether they tell truth or lies. They don't just tell you what to think; they tell you what you're even supposed to be thinking about, and by omission what you shouldn't be thinking about. You can take the opposite position on every issue to the one they're pushing, but you're still letting them frame the window of what you are and aren't thinking and forming opinions about.
The only way to take that control away from them is to cut the primary "news" sources out of your life entirely. I still hear about important events from people around me, and I can see what people are hyperventilating about at forums like this, which is more than enough to know what the media is hyping each day and why.
That's the funny thing, I'm not out of the loop. When friends bring up current issues that matter, I'm generally better informed than they are, but I'm clueless if they bring up the latest controversial TV show or whatever is today's outrage narrative that will be replaced by the next outrage narrative tomorrow.
It turns out that by letting the people around me sort of curate the "news," and reading thinkers who write about bigger topics rather than what's in the headlines, I wind up with a pretty good filtered news feed.
> How do you decide to vote if you completey go out of the loop?
I tend to stay pretty well informed without watching cable news or constantly reading political gossip on social media. When I hear things like "the Supreme Court issued an opinion today..." I go read the opinion. When I hear "Trump signed an executive order saying..." I go read the executive order. When I'm talking with people about inflation, I go look up the BLS data among other things. If people are talking about what's actually happening on the ground some place, I will end up having to find some reports reporting things and ultimately have to weigh the fact they're choosing where to point their cameras to my understanding of what is actually true.
Some of these things are hard, like the "big beautiful bill" is 1,116 pages long. I'll jump to the things people around me are talking about, like work requirements for Medicaid and SNAP, and read those sections. I might go look up some direct commentary from trusted sources about it for deeper analysis, and probably try and find some real statistics to compare.
We have so much actual real data and original sources to go read, I don't need someone else to tell me what they think of it for me to have an opinion.
Not to be rude, but why should we care what you believe?
If there were a problem with holes being dug in the city people are not exacerbating the problem if they choose to just not dig holes.
Not everyone needs to be informed an act on whatever it is that others think is important. This belief really forms the backbone of the current, "if you're not with us, you're against us" mentality.
Whatever the cause is, it's entirely possible to just treat people decently without caring about who or what they are. That's where we should be encouraging people to get to, not demanding they jump into action.
I totally get that, and agree to a degree. For me personally though, the news industry has become entertainment - TV news is hyperbolic, 24 hour breaking news for every story, newspapers (at least here in the UK) are little more than a propaganda outlet for the views of the billionaire owner where every story is designed to make people angry and point the blame at someone, usually immigrants. For years I listened to BBC Radio 4's Today Programme every single morning, until I realised that none of what they were telling me was actually news. You'd be amazed at how many stories started with the words "Ministers are today expected to announce..." - this isn't news, it hasn't happened yet. This is government PR. If you haven't read it already, I highly recommend Flat Earth News by Nick Davies [0] - it's incredibly eye opening. Reading it now, 11 years later, is even more eye opening - everything he writes about in there is now magnified ten fold.
Going cold turkey from the "news" doesn't make me any less informed about what is happening in the world, if anything it has made me more informed as I'm no longer just a vessel filling my brain with whatever some billionaire wants me to believe.
That "BREAKING NEWS" fuss is kinda a US specific thing though.
In Holland we just watch the news at 6 or 8pm (at least for those who still do that) which is very factual. Or we read nu.nl or nos.nl which don't really have screaming clickbaity headlines unless some shit really hit a fan. Which is really rare. I prefer nos.nl because nu.nl has too much celebrity news for me.
But we don't have any of that weird "Watch this NOW or get left behind!!" FOMO bait I see when I tune up CNN.
It probably helps that NOS is publicly funded so they have no incentive to maximise "engagement". Their job is just to report the news in a clean way.
I'm in the UK and while nowhere near as mad as US news channels, it's definitely been heading in that direction for a while. Even the BBC, our publicly funded station is like it now thanks to several years of the far right campaigning to get the BBC's funding taken away. Tune in to BBC news now and you're highly likely to see stories on "issues" that 90% of the population has no interest or opinion on, but some swivel-eyed, right wing fringe nutjobs have managed to push into mainstream news.
I wonder what you mean by that. What is so bad that happens if you don't watch the news for a day or a few days? A colleague might mention something you didn't know yet? I'm sure they'd be happy to fill you in.
Most of the news we see has no actual effect on our lives anyway. Like this crash. It's terrible but other than feeling bad for them (which doesn't help them) it doesn't affect my life in any way. If I find out about it at a later time that's fine. Probably when admiral cloudberg makes one of her masterpieces about it. I read the news anyway as a matter of interest and "nothing better to do" but to me it's mostly a time sink. I only read about 1% of the articles in the main feed.
I often go on retreats with friends and I hardly use my phone and the TV never goes on for even a second :) It's really nice to unplug. I can recommend having an unplug day once in a while for starters.
Your attempt at an irritated jab is just the doomscroll addiction talking.
Even for people that read news out of necessity, it can be curtailed down to only the relevant topics and the dryer outlets. I am one of those people, and the need to stay up to date doesn't justify the junkfood.
years ago i wanted to make a site where you could log promises/predictions made in news media and then get a reminder to come back and check if it actually happened. This would be useful for all the doom and gloom headlines and predictions, especially economic ones.
I stopped reading/watching/listening to the news about 2 years ago and I am blissfully unaware of what is going on in the world. I read hacker news every once in a while and even comment on some of the stories shown here but I select very strictly the topics I interact with.
News organizations these days are all pushing an agenda. Whether it is pro [insert-topic-of-choice-here] or against [insert-topic-of-choice-here] and that irks me when they represent themselves as impartial and unbiased.
If I want to read some propaganda, I know where to find it.
I understand but in the past you probably did not have much of a choice. You read the newspaper your parents read or you listened to the same radio programs and watch the same TV channels so the bias was not necessarily apparent.
Nowadays, we know exactly which outlets are leaning right or left, there is clearly no doubt about.
Furthermore, I would argue that the news outlets squandered the last bit of credibility they had during the COVID period when they silenced views that were not deemed acceptable at the time.
Finally a lot of news outlets are in some parts funded by the very same governments that they are supposed to be reporting on and keep in check. How can you do your job properly without any bias if the person you are about to write about/criticize is the one who signs your paycheck?
Regarding the original sentiment though, uninformed vs misinformed...
Isn't this basically just good old signal processing? We either don't have enough signal, or we're saturated with noise. Economic feedback loops keep the news noise at a saturated level; we don't seem to be able to collectively agree or incentivize having a spot of information spectrum that has a decent discernible signal.
The "free" press is no more free than it was 300 years ago. Then it was owned by despotic interests. Today, it is owned by need to make money.
And I've just seen that you CAN get The Guardian Weekly digital subscription here, free if you've got a print subscription? Though obviously I'm wondering why the Guardian don't advertise this?
Yeah that's weird. The Guardian has a global catchment area. It's no longer a Manchester or UK paper. A lot of foreign readers wouldn't subscribe to a print sub because it's not worth the hassle.
I'd also feel bad getting some dead trees filled with chemicals and flown across the pond then someone driving it out to me, all that environmental impact when I could just download it.
Considering the amount of cash and/or subsidies that Le Monde has received in the last 30 years from the French government, you may as well read the Pravda. Nobody bites the hand that feeds them.
Basically the French new outlets are some of the most subsidized on the planet.
Just to give you some quick figures, in 2010, the French government gave news outlets 1.8B euros in subsidies and in 2012 another 1.2B euros. There is no mention of the subsidies in the years after that but there is no reason to think that these would have shrunk significantly.
That's not even mentioning the special tax breaks that journalists get and the fact that most news outlets are staffed by union members.
Knowing that most unions are leaning left politically, it is fair to say that the coverage of the news by these outlets will be tainted by their political ideology. It's just human nature.
All of this to say that in light of all this, it is best to treat any French news outlet as basically an arm of the government that will never go against the interests of the their real owners, the politicians, unions and the billionaires.
Le Monde is but one of these outlets but nevertheless they take the money just like the other ones.
Not necessarily. In Holland our NOS is publicly funded which is just defined by law. A minister can't just change that.
If anything they get complaints of being left leaning sometimes. While our government is (well, was, it just collapsed) a hard-line radical right wing one similar to Trump.
Reading one source of news only, especially one with such marked bias, is bound to leave you with a limited worldview. Consult instead a variety of sources.
I used to do that too, but the Rittenhouse incident was the final straw for me. I remember reading in the magazine that he "shot into the crowd", but by that point I had already watched the video analysis on the New York Times's YouTube channel which showed that he only shot at people who attacked him. That was what the jury agreed with as well.
In the end, I think the most accurate place to get your news from is a history book.
I don't know if that's meant to be a joke or serious, but I would disagree.
Most daily news is quite factual, assuming a reputable source. It doesn't require detective work the way plane crashes do.
And when it is incorrect or misleading, a week usually won't make a difference. It takes months or years or decades for the truth to come out, often in a book by a journalist or historian who frames it as a "tell-all", or a Pulitzer Prize-nominated series of newspapers articles, etc.
Is there an online version of “last week’s newspaper”? More specifically, that primarily contains reporting about somewhat “matured” topics, as opposed to still developing news.
It’s not online, but Delayed Gratification is a quarterly news magazine that reports on the news of the _previous_ quarter with an up-to-date perspective. It’s British but covers world news.
I agree with that wholeheartedly. The problem is that people want to discuss today's news now. Explaining them this and not being able to engage in the conversation isn't a great way to connect with people unfortunately.
I suppose one way (now that you've brought this up, which is totally valid), is to openly state that this is what we know right now, and that often changes in a week.
And that could itself be a tangent in the conversation, alternate theories. (Or might be a frustrating one if nobody is receptive)
Mine has been crazy - sunny, then rained, now overcast and all while being unseasonably humid. I should have mowed the lawn while it was sunny earlier but missed the window to get it done.
blancolirio on YT gives more timely but objective (i.e., tries to stick to the latest facts) takes on aviation incidents. There will be a fair bit of speculation still...
He made a quick video on this one, but just listing questions we don't have answers to yet, and warning that there will be plenty of speculation. I expect he will have several follow ups as more facts come up.
9/11 showed us the damages of a plane crash with a full load of fuel can do and goes to show why dumping fuel is part of the procedures when planes are coming inf for a landing under "strained" conditions.
Fuel dumping is overwhelmingly to prevent or minimize an overweight landing and subsequent brake/tire overheating and inspections. It’s got not much to do with minimizing fuel-fed fire after impact.
Yes. Unfortunately this year alone will give him quite a backlog. Every month there's been a couple of disasters or near disasters and there's no apparent connection between any of them.
I can mostly only speak for my own industry (software engineering), but subjectively, it seems like we lost a lot of institutional knowledge as well as organizational structures through Covid that will take a while to rebuild.
Between people going into early retirement (I heard aviation was hit particularly hard by this), people changing careers and their replacements not having much in-office spin up time etc., and some industries/markets never returning to in-person work at all when it used to be common before, I have some theories on where we lost both.
I haven't by any means been keeping count but it does feel like there have been a lot more incidents that usual this year, and certainly a lot more fatalities.
What I can't work out whether that's recency bias, or because I've been watching a lot of MentourPilot with our daughters so I'm simply more attuned to this kind of news, or if there really are more of them.
I certainly don't know if the rate of incidents per passenger mile flown is higher than usual.
No, it's not worse. If you look through the list of deadly plane accidents, the last year has been average (4 vs. 3 avg).
Since the deadly DCA collision in January, there are things making the news now that would never have in the past, so it seems like it's worse. Especially if the plane has "Boeing" written on the side. For example, hitting animals, tire blowouts, or ground equipment bumping into planes, which grounds them for inspection. When I worked for a major airline, those things are all actually pretty common and happen everywhere, all the time.
It's just a method used to stoke fear and feed clicks.
People find the most minute thing to complain about. Recently, there was an article about the antiquated FAA system using floppies. While the system is old and showing it's cracks, saying it uses floppies just makes it sound worse then it is. As of 2020, our mx crew were still plugging a Windows 98 laptop with DOS into Embraers and Bombardier Dash8s, and used floppies in Boeings (no Airbus or ATRs in our fleet for comparison).
There is a media difference though since the DCA crash. Military and small planes (<10 PAX) crash all the time. We just never heard about it until after January. My point is the same, media sees crash, tries to drive clickage.
On a personal level, I know three people that have died in small plane crashes in the Alaska wilderness in the last 15 years, which is so common that it didn't even get on local news. I have acquaintances that were in involved in two others elsewhere over the last few years. Small planes are unbelievably dangerous. Commercial jets, not so much.
Small planes are about twice as safe per mile as motorcycles, all-cause to all-cause.
Now, there’s planes running out of fuel and drunk driving on cycles that some operators might choose to exclude from their own risk calculations, but it’s a little over one order of magnitude riskier than cars.
Whether that’s unbelievably dangerous is up to personal judgment.
> Military and small planes (<10 PAX) crash all the time. We just never heard about it until after January.
We don't hear about military jet crashes unless they're F-35s. The controversial jet gets coverage because it gets eyeballs from people satisfying their confirmation bias. These are never put into context of course.
> The F-16 has been involved in over 670 hull-loss accidents as of January 2020.[312][313]
Fighter jets are simply dangerous, period. They're meant to be flown right at the bleeding edge, accidents are inevitable. But every time an F-35 crashes, the media makes a big deal out of it and idiots see that as confirmation of their belief that the F-35 is bad. Even if the F-35 is bad, it crashing sometimes wouldn't be evidence of that. Occasional crashes are just what happens when fighter jets get flown a lot. It's going to happen whether the jet is good or bad.
Having flown tactical jets off an aircraft carrier into Afghanistan . . . you seem to be conflating "dangerous" with "inherently unforgiving." Flying jets in combat against a peer foe is dangerous. Flying them in peacetime is inherently unforgiving. "Dangerous" occurs when I as an aviator can be taken out by something not under my control or that of my pilot or fellow aircrew.
The reason verbiage matters is because many people fear flying because they look at it as some kind of gamble as opposed to something where risks can be mitigated down quite a bit by the act of being safety-conscious. Even flying multi-plane low-levels or opposed large force exercises are not "dangerous" per se, so long as everyone plays by the rules and takes it seriously. Civil aviation is so safe because of a culture of making it safe.
He is actually really good. By far the best on YouTube. The quality is so high (because it's based on technical reports), you can learn something from it as a professional engineer.
MentourPilot is not exactly the only YouTuber going off of actual technical reports, and I did not question his accuracy — I said I find him "grating". I'd rather watch old Mayday episodes than MentourPilot — Greg Feith, for one, is a great communicator. John Cox, too.
I find his content over-produced. As in, he puts too much effort into the production instead of just dispensing the information. I like Kelsey from 74-Gear and Juan Browne for their down to earth delivery. But that's what makes YouTube great having so many choices.
I hope he makes $20k. Or more. I enjoy his content and the insight he brings.
Also many people make money from the tragedy of others. Morticians, coffin builders, clean up crews, construction workers, concrete companies…I could probably come up with 100 more examples.
Just because their work is from the result of something tragic doesn’t mean it is any less important.
Being completely frank he does a very good thing. He's got through to our eldest about how important it is to do things correctly, and be systematic and detail oriented, in a way that her mum and I have really struggled to.
The irony of it is that a couple of months back I was sat in the living room watching MentourPilot, she came in and asked what I was watching, said "Ugh, boring!" Then she sat down and started playing on our Switch... and then she just got sucked in to the episode, and is now completely obsessed with watching MentourPilot. She often knows what's gone wrong and what the pilots should have done instead before he even explains it.
So the guy's all right with me and absolutely welcome to make as much money as he can: he's a great educator.
Most of his videos are on crashes. He has said he won't speculate on active investigations, but has already done videos on what is known, and preliminary reports.
You're either misremembering or misunderstood something, or I'm not understanding what you mean, because Mentour Pilot literally has a channel with nothing but air crash investigation videos: https://youtube.com/@mentourpilot
He has one of the best air crash investigation journalists, Kyra Dempsey (aka Admiral Cloudberg) as one of the writers on the channel.
They already have a YouTube Short listing the facts of the crash, and also have a longer video about the Jeju one. Only the facts, no speculation - they're waiting for the preliminary or even final report to make a full in depth video on it.
You're upset that he's benefiting by providing an expert perspective on a topic you're interested in?
Boy, you must be upset about pretty much everything on the internet. Except for hn. Paul Graham just runs this site out of his own benevolence, nothing else.
Of unknown provenance, with unknown visual artefacts, et cetera. Even if completely legit, with context and thus chain of causation obscured to the point that discerning ultimate and proximate causes is impossible.
Agreed, but it doesn't look like AI. Video(s) look real to my untrained eyes. Everyone is going to speculate regardless of the top level disclaimer. I rather just at least present what data is available as of now.
The city the incident took place in has a subreddit. Feel free to go take a look and judge for yourself. It's a bit NSFW at the moment.
It’s not. It’s one video of unknown quality and relevance, picked somewhat randomly out of all the other available videos and data, the most relevant of which aren’t publicly available.
> Feel free to go take a look and judge for yourself
It’s the usual emotional coping through baseless speculation. There are healthier ways to deal with uncertainty amidst tragedy.
They have a RAT (ram air turbine) that deploys automatically under specific conditions. It’s basically a turbine providing electric and hydraulic power. It was almost certainly deployed on the accident flight. It will only power the most critical equipment, though. Possibly, that does not include the ADS-B transmitter (which broadcasts position and related data).
Yes and many pilots being walkie talkies in GA as backup. Not sure if airline pilots do this though. And its kinda hard to root around for it and fiddle with it while trying to keep an unpowered jetliner in the air. They're more for emergencies where the radio is the only problem.
By the way, the age old rule is "Aviate, Navigate, Communicate" in that order of priority. So it could be they just had their hands full with the Aviate part.
Well, loss of engine power and gliding to a stop is not that a far fetched case. Why is there not a fuel dump button to prevent a whole trips worth of fuel going up in flames?
Yes and smaller airliners don't have it. As I understand it, it's for the widebodies because they often have a higher maximum takeoff weight than maximum landing weight. Meaning that if they just took off and need to return right away they have a big problem. Because they're too heavy to land.
Most airplanes can dump fuel, but it's not an immediate thing, so not really applicable here (and obviously doing it over a city is to be avoided as well).
It's primarily needed for weight management in planes that can take off heavier than they can safely land. I.e. if the plane had enough control to abort the flight and return to the airport, then it might have been appropriate.
No. Most airliners CANNOT dump fuel. This capability is limited to long range wide bodies, like this 787. Neither the 737 nor the A320, which constitute the majority of commercial air traffic, can dump fuel. Fuel dumping is normally performed at an altitude where it should be able to evaporate before hitting the ground, and it takes a long time, maybe 15 minutes to get from full fuel to maximum landing weight. Using it would have made no difference to the outcome of the flight other than making a larger fire on the ground.
No. I said a larger fire, and I meant it. The fuel on the aircraft is not the only thing feeding the post-crash fire. Dousing the entire flight path with an accelerant would have resulted in many many buildings being on fire, instead of just a few of them.
They were only 600ft in the air, barely anything would have got out before they hit the ground and you'd have just set non-zero amount of innocent people on fire in all likelihood when the crash ignited the trail they'd left.
There is a dump fuel button if you're not in the middle of a populated city and you're far enough in the sky you've got a few minutes.
because painting an entire neighborhood in flammable fluid isn't safe... if it doesn't catch fire it'll corrode everything it touches.
most planes can't dump fuel anymore. if it's a serious enough emergency you land overweight. If it's not then you fly long enough to burn it off and land below max landing weight.
That makes no sense, and is not consistent with video evidence. Max flaps (40 degrees or so) are typically used only for landing. That is very obvious when you see it! Usual flap setting for takeoff is on the order of 5–15 degrees.
A 787 can still climb with flaps up and two healthy engines. In the video that was posted everywhere, you can CLEARLY hear the RAT spin, which gets deployed automatically when both engines go out.
It depends. It also gives the spin doctors time to do their thing, remove tracks etc.
For example, when MH17 was shot down by the Russian-backed rebels, they posted celebratory posts to twitter (they thought it was a Ukrainian military transport). Also, pictures of the actual SAM battery were taken as it was rushed back to Russia in the coverup. A few hours later all that got deleted and the spin machine started. "No, there were no Russian SAMs there", "it was a Ukraine fighter jet that shot it down", etc. They even fabricated fake radar tracks. People saying it was a SAM were denounced as conspiracy theorists, stuff like that. Only a year or so later when the official investigation started finishing up, the truth was confirmed.
In that case (as the investigation later proved) the earliest information was the most accurate. This is especially the case when there are powerful interests that don't want the truth to come out. Even Boeing covered up the first 737MAX crash.
That's why I think it's not a bad idea to read all the speculation. But keeping in mind that there is no definitive answer until the official accident report comes out. Any of the speculation could be true. Or even none of it.
And really, getting it 100% accurate in my mind is not something that matters. I just read it as an aviation enthusiast (and ex-pilot). What matters is that the experts writing the report are accurate. And later admiral cloudberg who expertly translates all that into normal-people language :) Whether I have an accurate view of what exactly happened really does not matter in this world.
Also, in many cases it is already clear what happened, like that ATR recently that was in a flat spin. The part that isn't clear is how it got into that situation. But the "what happened" is also important and that is one of the things you can often read about early.
I mentally earmark a month and wait for something "official" or at least some expert analysis which can be confirmed. I'm not sure what the experts could discern from any video that's out there, but sometimes it's a lot.
I'm reminded of the crane collapse in Seattle that had pictures afterward and the pins were no longer in it. The expert analysis I had seen discussing it had said the pins don't just come out in a crane collapse, and where the join the sections the crane would be at its strongest. He was, of course, lit up by those with possible agendas saying "you can't speculate". He was right in the end.
So with the crane collapse it was interesting to see it all play out, but it's a matter of keeping perspective. There were literal pictures of the pins not being in place. Explanation that those pins should not be removed until later in the disassembly of the crane. Then there was the other "side" hurling accusations at him. Finally the official report.
Keeping perspective to me is that yes, I want to know what caused it. But I'm also interested along the way that some people/companies/govts seem to have a vested interest in shaping the story. So I don't run with any of it, but I try to remember who said what, even though nobody ever seems to be responsible for being batshit crazy.
I hate so much how whenever something bad happens there's a huge rush to come up with theories that place the blame on some group or ideology you already hated for unrelated reasons. I've stopped paying attention to the news in part because I don't like how disingenuously giddy people get whenever there's a mass-casualty event. I don't even mind morbid curiosity about death and suffering but nobody should ever see it as a benefit to their chosen group-identity.
The game theory problem is probably that if everyone does it you have to do it too.
Like I strongly support equals chances, but if I e.g. get discriminated against for being a white heterosexual male -> it kinda forces me to vote against it
But jumping to conclusions serves a variety of human emotional needs. And in an attention economy, that means it also serves a large industry's economic needs.
This is why I despise Trump-bashing. Not that I think he's a particularly great person or leader, but when everything going wrong in the world gets tied back to him, I know it's ideologically driven.
> Wait until the damn official report comes out. That's how long you should wait
For public discourse, one week is fine. At that point you usually have ground facts established. A common official understanding of the known knowns and unknowns is available, together with a good profile of the leading conspiracy theories that one can filter out.
I'm fairly sure a fraction of the "techbro" community has already decided its due to Indian programmers at Boeing, or Indian managers at AI, or some other Indian voodoo in India.
I was just watching something the other day about how jet engines have gotten more efficient and powerful over the last 50 years where commercial airliners really only need 2 engines. All 2 engine aircraft also have to be able to operate on 1 engine as well if there is a failure.
One has to wonder if this was a bird strike incident on both engines that maybe having 4 engines would have allowed the plane to circle back around.
Why would a flock of birds large enough to be ingested by both engines of a two-engined plane not also be large enough to be ingested by all four engines of a four-engined plane?
Like the b 52 bomber. I always liked them. We could convert them for passenger flights. Airlines could develop luggage pods that hang from the wings and the planes support mid air refuelling so that could help with turnarounds. They also have tail guns for even more safety. Also huge bay doors which will make getting on and off the plane much faster.
They also do if you go around the car with a knife and you stab them.
But it is somehow implied that the context of the comment is normal driving conditions.
Perhaps that comment could be reworded like:
>When driving on a highway, while not being pursued by the police, on planet Earth, with a road temperature below 200C, and not driving behind a van transporting nails with an open door that's dropping them on the road, why don’t all four tires on a car blow out at the same time?
That way people could get a better sense of what it is about.
In the 1980s a British Airways 747 flew through volcanic ash and lost all four engines. So just having more engines may not always be the solution, as in suitably unlikely circumstances you can still lose all of them.
(In that case they were at cruising altitude, so had time to handle the situation and relight the engines).
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress."
It depends on what is causing the failure and how situation evolves. Let us take British Airways Flight 009 as example, the wiki says that all engines failed, all engines were restarted and engine number 2 surged again and was finally shut down. So even this awkward situation was relaxed a bit by the additional safety margin.
Most airlines avoid nowadays the invest into maintenance of four engines airliners. Others have prefer the additional transport capacity and margins. Lufthansa has it's own maintenance branch "Lufthansa Technik" and doesn't need to handle extra costs. Emirates needs the huge capacities of the A380.
PS: The 747 can and does - if necessary - ferry flights without passengers and only three engines. Not possible with twin engine planes.
I think it's more that they needed the prestige of having the biggest planes, offering a whole bedroom with shower etc. It goes well with their ultra luxury image.
If it's just about seats that can fly smaller ones with the benefit that they can operate more frequently and thus attract more transit passengers looking for a good connection. That's their main market.
An A380 is quite a hassle because most airports can't even handle one.
But does that rule apply during liftoff or only when it's in-flight? Based on the map it probably never got that much altitude, as it barely traveled 2*length_of_runway, and that's including the runway itself.
> does that rule apply during liftoff or only when it's in-flight?
Any time after it’s too late to abort takeoff.
Pilots should be able to “regain full control of the aeroplane without attaining a dangerous flight condition in the event of a sudden and complete failure of the critical engine…at each take-off flap setting at the lowest speed recommended for initial steady climb with all engines operating after takeoff…” [1].
A multiple engine aircraft maintaining flight on a single engine is vastly different to the same craft being able to complete a take off when an engine fails mid process.
Aircraft can land (in right circumstances) by gliding in sans power .. the same cannot be said for take offs.
If during your takeoff roll you lose one engine on a twin engine jet below speed V1[0], you reject the take-off. V1 is calculated for the aircraft such that above that speed you are able to safely take off and execute a go-around in order to land again on just that single engine.
Aborting above V1 is heavily discouraged because usually there's a strong risk of running off the end of the runway. Of course, if you lose both engines above V1, you're really in trouble and left without much choice.
But we don't know what happened with this flight so nothing I've said here should be taken as indicative of whatever went wrong in this case. It's purely information.
[0] Which depends on many factors including the type of aircraft, loading, weather conditions, state of the runway surface - for example, wet, or iced - etc., and needs to be calculated afresh for every take off.
Yeah in some cases rejecting after V1 is a better choice. If you're going to impact something anyway you'll be doing it with a slower speed and no vertical component in that case.
An airliner in the US did it and the pilot was praised for making that hard decision. Everyone walked I think. I forget which flight.
I've spent a few million line kilometres in a variety of airframes and understand that "designed to operate" through an event is not the same as "actually survives" that event.
There are many factors at play and things are complicated by unexpected failures.
Thank you for the video that demonstrates a pilot aware in advance of planned "engine failure" can cope with such an event in scheduled test conditions.
Pilots, aircraft engineers, and safety regulators also sit in aircraft.
The phrase "line kilometres" might indicate a smidgeon of aviation industry adjacency to some.
EDIT: Above and below comments appear to be low grade random sniping in bad faith.
There's a failure to address content and specifics and a straw assertion about "more insight than the pilots, engineers and safety regulators", a claim that was never made.
At best I have the same insights as anyone that worked with 20 airframes for a few decades and staged them about the globe in that time.
EDIT2: Symbiote has deleted their problematic reply below that the first edit was made in response to. The michaelt reply came after the reply by Symbiote and is moot, all my statements are here, undeleted and unredacted.
I can reinstate the reply if you like, but michaelt made the same point moments after I did, and I preferred his "jargon" rather than my "fancy vocabulary".
I'd prefer if you addressed the content of my two comments above your https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44257232 and explain which part caused you to imply I believe myself to have "more insight than the pilots, engineers and safety regulators".
At no point did I claim that multiple engine aircraft cannot complete a take off on a single engine.
The statement I made:
> Aircraft can land (in right circumstances) by gliding in sans power .. the same cannot be said for take offs.
is about having _no_ thrust power during take off.
The other statement I made acknowledged that test pilots in planned and scheduled clear weather conditions often test aircraft with mock engine failures, then pointed out that this is very different to an unexpected failure during non test flights.
Yes, sometimes these things work out alright (as per your example), other times not so much.
Landing sans power is landing with no thrust (no functioning engine).
Completing a take off with no thrust isn't possible unless the craft is a glider, a hot balloon, or a ballistic launch .. taking off with a single engine is not "taking off sans power".
Maybe I'm overly strictly pattern-matching on the type of people that tend to use the phrase "one has to wonder"; but I don't think that's usually uttered from place of learning and exploration.
The last nine comments in this thread have had nothing to do with a plane crash; and entirely about a meta-discussion about a comment someone else made.
That is entirely where I'm coming from - plane designs from the past had longer wingspans and supported 4 engines. Engines have gotten more efficient and powerful so cross-ocean routes don't need 4 engines anymore.
So I was wondering what if current plane designs had 4 smaller but equally as efficient engines instead of 2. The vast majority of airplane accidents happen at takeoff or landings, if some of those can be avoided by having 4 engines for commercial aircraft, its a worthwhile idea to explore.
Also I would venture that 99% of comments on public forums like this are from people without expertise. My expertise in this space is a curiosity about planes for a few decades, taking some actual flying lessons, and being generally interested in aviation to go to airshows, watch youtube content from pilots, etc. I probably have about the same aviation knowledge as an average HN person.
> was wondering what if current plane designs had 4 smaller but equally as efficient engines instead of 2
Impossible to answer until we know the cause. If it was independent powerplant failures, then yes. If it was e.g. fuel contamination, pilots improperly shutting down the engine, some other crap failing, then no.
Speaking as someone with aerospace engineering and GA pilot experience.
Current speculation around the raising of flaps suggests that independent engine failures weren't the cause. Proper investigation with access to better data than grainy video will tell us if that is the case and why.
"4 smaller but equally efficient engines" feels like a unicorn though (we'll probably get to the point in future where four large engines are superior in efficiency to two of today's engines, but two large engines to that latest design will still be more efficient than four smaller ones...)
> "4 smaller but equally efficient engines" feels like a unicorn
With turbines, yes, for fundamental reasons. With electric motors, on the other hand, perhaps not, though not particularly relevant to a long-haul route like AMD-LON.
True. Also the electric/turboprop propulsion compromises like Heart Aerospace's that trade off the limitations of the respective powerplants by fitting pairs of both. But that's a different use case...
(I get to write about arrayed space thrusters in the day job too, but again, fundamentally different physics and goals...)
It's not only that engines have gotten more efficient and powerful, its that they have also increased the reliability.
The other issue is that 4 engines share almost all of the failure modes that 2 engines do. If you have 2 engines that fail that are on opposite sides of the aircraft, having 2 others isn't going to help as its likely a system failure in the aircraft or a fault in that particular model of the engine that could affect all of them.
For example, if you run of fuel or have a failure in the fuel delivery system, it's not going to matter if you have 2, 4 or more engines. The mistake is thinking the probability of a 4 engine failure is significantly less than 2 engine failure for all types of failures.
Larger jet engines are more fuel efficient than smaller ones, because larger diameters allow for more bypass air and therefore more fuel efficiency [1]. It is a function of size and a lot of the engineering goes into materials and designs to be able to increase size and maintain strength. So you simply can't make 4 engines that are as efficient as 2 large ones, and that is compounded by the significant additional weight (and drag) of the duplicated engine parts and mounting structures.
>if some of those can be avoided by having 4 engines for commercial aircraft, its a worthwhile idea to explore
Everything comes with tradeoffs. Adding more engines mean more complexity, more maintenance, more chance of single engine failures, etc. You don't want to introduce more failure modes than what you are trying to fix. The move to two engines for large aircraft and the evolution of ETOPS (Extended Twin-engine Operational Performance Standards) involved a lot of people considering a lot of scenarios. I can guarantee the "why not 4 engines" question has been studied extensively.
I am happy to acknowledge I had a completely wrong knee-jerk reaction to your phrasing, and incorrectly assumed your "One has to wonder..." was meant as a suggestion of a solution, instead of instance of thinking out loud!
> So I was wondering what if current plane designs had 4 smaller but equally as efficient engines instead of 2.
Smaller turbofan engines are less efficient than larger ones. This is because they have a lower bypass ratio - thrust generated by turning the big fan over the thrust generated by combustion.
I don't think there's ever been a double-bird-strike incident, though. And what dual engine failures I can think of are due to failure of a shared system (e.g. fuel exhaustion, c.f. Gimli Glider).
[Edit: yeah, yeah, forgot the Tom Hanks movie, sue me. I do wish folks would respond to the much more important point below, which isn't invalidated by a single data point though.]
Constructing solutions for multiple-mode failures like this is a bad engineering smell. Almost always the solution isn't actually helping anything, and often makes things worse in whatever metric you're looking at. In the example here, having four engines makes the chances of total thrust loss lower, but it doubles the chance of a single engine failure. And the literature is filled with incidents of theoretically-survivable single engine failures that led to hull loss as a proximate cause (generally by confusing or panicking the crew).
>Constructing solutions for multiple-mode failures like this is a bad engineering smell. Almost always the solution isn't actually helping anything
Selection bias
The lower the barrier to entry of the subject matter the lower quality the people discussing it. This crap is like the Kardashians for white nerds with stem degrees.
The people with the requisite dozen brain cells to common sense realize these problems are complex and keep their mouths shut.
But in the video of the plane taking off and crashing, there's no clear, obvious, or tell-tale "poof" of bird turning into exhaust as there often is in bird strikes.
> I don't think there's ever been a double-bird-strike incident, though.
What? It happens multiple times a year. They made a movie about a famous incident (US Airways Flight 1549). There's even events with four engine strike (Eastern Air Lines Flight 375).
This deal brings into focus whether the shovels are data or GPUs. Advantage to data comes, surprisingly, in perishability: a GPU fleet remains cutting edge for only one product cycle.
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