After Finland joined NATO, Russia moved their military equipment away from the Finnish border. Why? Because Russia knows NATO is a defensive alliance and is never going to attack them first.
Nuclear is terrible for peak loads of course but absolutely perfect for base loads. We should be producing something like 60% of the base load with stable and emission free nuclear, then all kinds of renewables can provide the rest. When there is excess power we charge batteries, pump hydro or make green hydrogen for use in peaks.
Boeing will never fail financially or fall out of use because of their importance for US geopolitical status. I don’t think the USA cares much about the issue except insofar as the USA wants Boeing to deliver reliable high quality products.
However, Boeing executives can (and should) get in to trouble. They probably care very much about what comes to light in court.
> Boeing will never fail financially or fall out of use because of their importance for US geopolitical status
If the trial concludes with “Yes boing knew the planes were not safe but let people fly in them” it doesn’t matter how important it is to the US, no passenger will want to fly them.
1. Ivestigation/prosecution/Trial of which country? (people can be influenced)
2. As last resort: Us Gov can take over and actually reform Boeing (fixing public perception)
And there is whole continuum between 1 and 2.
(I really doubt that anything shady happened with this pneumonia; but IF something shady was done, US will make effort to preserve/save national aviation giant)
People may not want to fly Boeing but they still want to fly.
Even if all US airlines wanted to switch, it would take Airbus a few decades to deliver replacements, by which time the issue will be forgotten (unless they keep crashing and falling apart midair).
US airlines will probably not be allowed use chineese planes as replacements.
I’m not trying to minimise Boeing’s responsibility, just saying that assuming the company starts to turn things around, nothing that comes out of the trial will affect the future of Boeing the company much, but it might well be catastrophic for the top brass.
I want the world to move to a system of very large and spacious and cool aircraft for major hub-to-hub travel, and then nice and comfortable high speed rail from hub to destination.
I’m tired of cramming into a narrowbody with no service. Let me fly on an engineering marvel like the A380 or 747 and then relax or work in a comfortable train seat.
What buffer for solving delays would you consider acceptable for that mode switch? Train schedules are inherently fragile because there's so much interdependence. Every tiny bit of the trip is locked into a signaling segment block time slot and one train causing a shakeup leads to wild butterfly wing effects fanning out in all directions. Rail networks in places that have more than just a trivial amount of service tend to run very close to saturation, even if they don't look like that at all. But you can't cram trains on a line like you can cram cars on a highway (or planes in an approach pattern), that's just not how safe signaling for wheel-on-rail works.
And no, I won't accept "but it works in Japan!" as a counter, because Japan does not really have anything resembling a train network. They have a number of lines going up and down one corridor, plus two appendices branching off to the west coast. Compared to that, even the French star of lines separated by metro rides appears complex.
The real answer is "wings clipped to tubes". Load the cheap tube at your leisure, drag it by semi under the waiting "wing". Clip, clip, vroom...
There was a great concept video of a train/bus station that did something similar, divorcing the loading of people into the tube from the attaching the tube to the train.
It allowed the train to keep going nearly 100% full speed, "magically" grabbing the tube loaded with passengers, and letting them pass into the moving portion (below) without stopping the train.
The passenger pickup capsule was then dropped off at the next station for the process to repeat.
Today you'd do it with electric buses(/trucks) that run on dedicated highways, or at least on dedicated lanes that are not only electrified (bus operates from a pair of pantigraphs except for that "last mile" part of the trip in regular roads or when there is some maintenance situation), but also exclusively run computer controlled in paceline formations. No physical connection (or perhaps physical connection for power crossfeed, to share pantograph wear, but no physical connection for push/pull), just a low latency, ack-heavy data link so that they would all accelerate and brake perfectly synchronized. Those buses (or trucks) would benefit from slipstream just like train cars do, but still be able to independently branch away or join at any exit. Of course the power bill would have to be shared by the whole formation, no need to rotate the lead (like a bicycle paceline would do) except perhaps in an unelectrified segment or during a power outage.
This would offer point to point connections, have all the efficiency benefits of trains except for the energy cost of rubber-on-tarmac relative to steel-on-steel, and would also offer greatly increased throughout compared to trains because a formation like that would retain almost all of the emergency breaking capability of trucks (and realistically speaking, have better capability than a queue of human-operated trucks that keep almost but not quite enough safety distance for human reaction). The only reason I see why this is not the obvious future is that it requires enormous critical mass to pick up. It probably needs electric trucks first, then electric trucks with pantograph on some main lines, and only then pantograph electric trucks joining into robotic pacelines at some even later point.
(the absolute end game state of course would be dedicated rights of way with a rail option useable to dual mode vehicles that could quickly drop on their road wheels not only for exiting formation but also for braking - note that breaking should not even exist in a formation like that, outside emergencies.
It’s not really comparable because the pollution was being generated as a byproduct of a presumably useful service or industry.
This puts polluters under a regulatory limit that didn’t exist before, gives the time to adjust while also providing an early incentive to decarbonise sooner rather than later (they can sell the credits they didn’t need to use).
DEI does to society what the penny pushers at Boeing did to their business: chasing the wrong objectives in search of some theoretical goal leads both to ruin. If any DEI implementation is not 'stoopid' that is only by happenstance, not due to some kernel of truth lurking behind the discriminatory revolutionary synthetic-society ideological hodgepodge that DEI is. There is no truth to be had there, only ideology.
The Ideology is common people having baked in prejeduces, not becoming aware of them, and I'm continuously baffled how so many people on HN can't see beyond their own default view.
The other Ideology is DEI usually being a pet project in corporate, more there to use for PR than to enact real change. HR will always reserve the right to fuck you over with all means available, and if that includes your race, gender or religion, they'll happily use that. This is a good extreme example: https://fandomwire.com/transgender-former-bethesda-employee-...
The fundamental observation that many kinds of prejudices that continue for generations create lasting harm for those that have been prejudiced against and their descendants is kind of self-evident.
The “woke” or DEI mindset is as far as I can tell, in origin basically about acknowledging that.
Then all sorts of things, including social media pressures, combined with grievance and resentment have led people really far astray in their attempts to “make things right”.
So I understand the visceral reaction the words can cause for some people, and partly agree.
However, the underlying observation is true, and if one for example were looking for a candidate and would, inspired by this observation, spend extra effort to advertise to certain groups, then that would be a pretty sensible DEI implementation.
Any sort of relaxed standards or claims that math is racist or something is bad however.
Racial or gender quotas are also dangerous, if they’re used it needs to be very careful and temporary.
I do feel that while this sort of stupid stuff obviously happens, is discriminatory and very bad, and should be stopped, it is probably being blown out of proportion as part of a bigger political fight.
