If you think about Gruber as a gossip columnist, then it's quite natural that people who just do their job well don't generate much gossip that would reach his ears.
Fair enough, I guess I was just surprised to read from someone who makes their living from Apple insider baseball and Cupertinology that they have “never heard much” about one of the most influential software designers at the company over the last 20 years.
Volcanic ash is particularly bad because it is so abrasive, having been freshly formed without any opportunity for erosion to smooth it down like regular dust.
That's not the only problem - volcanic ash also has a low enough melting point that it'll melt in the combustion chamber of a jet engine and leave glassy deposits on cooler components.
How about waiting for a Geomagnetic reversal? They happen on average every .45M years, the last one .78M years ago, big chance one happing anytime now :-)
The most recent hilarious example of this was a British newspaper that contacted “Bill DeBlasio” by email for comment on the NYC mayor election (Bill de Blasio is a former mayor of NYC), without ever verifying (or apparently, even asking) that they had found the person they intended.
The man at the heart of a high-stakes mix-up that rippled through global political journalism in the final days of the New York mayoral campaign was neither “falsely claiming” to be former Mayor Bill de Blasio — as the Times of London suggested — nor, as The New York Times wrote, a “de Blasio impersonator.”
He is, instead, a 59-year-old Long Island wine importer named Bill DeBlasio, who merely responded to an email from a journalist seeking his views on Democrat Zohran Mamdani’s policies.
“I’m Bill DeBlasio. I’ve always been Bill DeBlasio,” DeBlasio said in an interview conducted Wednesday evening through his Ring doorbell in Huntington Station, Long Island, from his current location in Florida.
“I never once said I was the mayor. He never addressed me as the mayor,” DeBlasio told Semafor. “So I just gave him my opinion.”
It reprinted articles from other popular magazines, often in an abridged format (shortened, glossing over the boring details). I think by the 1980s though, quite a few of the articles were original.
You can buy the supplies and make nano silver flouride now, relatively cheaply compared to dental work. If you have a non corporate dentist, you could even ask them to apply it. The basic mechanism has been used on teeth forever, and adding the nano particles prevents the chemical from permanently staining your teeth black or blue (which is why it hasnt ever been more popular to begin with.)
I found other sites indicating it's entering trials soon to be on the market next year. That's still a bit speculative obviously, but it sounds more promising that just being a working theory.
If it a commercial product marketed as "homeopathic" or various nonsense loopholes that the government has been bullied into leaving open, then sure.
But an actual medical product for sale to consumers that makes claims like "restores dental enamel" would have to present scientific evidence to the FDA that this claim is accurate.
> IMHO, this is a perfect example why the government needs to regulate prices in safety-critical industries. The "race to the bottom" must be prevented - sorry, flying NYC-SFO for 70$, that's not sustainable.
This is nonsense. Commercial aviation is already ridiculously, insanely safe and has been for decades. Your proposed solution would not have done anything to prevent the one major accident in the past 15 years of commercial aviation in the US, which was caused by a military helicopter pilot violating an ATC restriction in complex airspace, not a maintenance issue.
What evidence do you have that "NYC-SFO for $70" is not sustainable? From March 2009 to December 2024 years in the US, the fatality rate in commercial aviation was 0.4 per passenger-light-year. That's nearly 15 years of operation with the foreign repair stations that you are accusing of putting profits before safety.
This is, like, the most ridiculous industry possible to demand more regulation of.
> This is, like, the most ridiculous industry possible to demand more regulation of.
And yet, we got hundreds of people dead because Boeing by all accounts clearly isn't regulated enough - and cut corners because airlines wanted to maintain their pilot type ratings.
1. The Boeing 737-Max crashes had nothing to do with maintenance, which is what the original poster was concerned about.
2. Arguably, these crashes were due to the FAA's failure to apply existing regulations, not a lack of adequate regulation in the first place! I don't have any problem with better funding for the FAA to do their job effectively.
Because aviation is already incredibly, ridiculously safe compared to essentially every other activity humanity undertakes, and adding additional cost, complexity and expense to the system would produce zero discernible benefit relative to the cost.
Of course it was not unpreventable, though it might turn out that preventing it would have been unreasonably expensive.
But, the FAA inspectors are not responsible for making sure planes are safe to fly. They are responsible for making sure the people whose job that actually is, are doing their jobs effectively. That’s a critical difference.
It’s UPS maintenance personnel who are responsible for making sure that UPS planes are safe to fly. Yes, it’s possible that there is some institutional failure at UPS, that could have been caught if FAA inspectors were working in the past 30 days, but this isn’t the most likely scenario, and the root cause and responsibility (in this hypothetical) would still lie with UPS and not the FAA and the shutdown.
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