Heh, I think you’re overestimating how informed people are — or are liable to become, at least. It’s true; most people don’t know that Trump makes most of his money by licensing his name and that he has very little to do with most of the buildings with his name on it. But it also wasn’t until he ran for President that Trump Steaks to gain a high profile in the media as a failure, and even then, the media fixated on that story because it was exceptionally funny. If he hadn’t run for President, you probably wouldn’t know about it now. Nobody talks about Trump Vodka, or GoTrump.com, his travel website, or Trump magazine. His failed airline got some coverage during 2016 and after, but not as much as the steaks, in part because Trump intentionally drew attention to it. Trump had been engaged in that sort of “base hucksterism” for years, and there’s little suggestion that there was a real risk to ruining his reputation by selling steaks by being found out.

I suppose that could be. I guess my reasoning also comes from my super low estimation of Trump. I basically think there's no way Buckhead Beef or The Sharper Image truly gave a **** about the Trump brand, so he'd be required to do the "hard work" while both partners would do the bare minimum. The Sharper Image we know this pretty much directly, and Buckhead Beef is still around so they can't be so incompetent at business.

Here's where I could see Trump branding working with food in the 00's, though. Run a faux-posh Trump restaurant in a place like Vegas. You basically sell $10 entrees, but you mark up the price to $25 since it's "fancy" (but still within the price range of Trump's core brand appeal). Place items on the menu that make people feel it's sophisticated but in reality you know they'll order the Trump Angus burger and the kids will order the chicken tenders.

I.E. basically Applebee's but Trumpy. The most significant cost would be buying fake potted plants and putting brass everywhere.

The issue in practice is you'd either need to license out the Trump name to a competent restaurant, who'd want it? Or the Trump org would have to contract restaurant staff, who'd do it?

BTW, has Trump really had any significant American real estate projects since the casinos failed in the 90's? It seems most of his licensing is out to foreign real estate investors. IIRC Trump's brand is more popular outside of the United States because it represents the "American dream" to people who don't know any better, so it still works. But from what I know Trump's not doing too much in America anymore, probably burned too many people?

Heh, what you’re describing is Trump Steaks except not marked up nearly as much and with all the overhead of running a restaurant that doesn’t exist if you’re selling mail-order steaks.

His Hotel in DC is a more recent venture in the states

He has restaurants like this already. I walk by one almost every day, as it happens.

Not really the same at all. Trump Steaks is a pure grift that adds no value. Anyone in the price range can see through how ****ty a deal it is immediately.



If they're still in business then it can't be failing too miserably.



So he's not completely dead in the water.

https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3070503/google-now-pays-more-in-eu-fines-than-it-does-in-taxes

hah

https://twitter.com/ErynnBrook/status/1127605211764338689

~but russia~

Backed myself into a corner with that unforced error. :p

Trump Steaks? Wasn't this all already discussed and made fun of pretty much universally three years ago?

You need to reevaluate what you consider to be a reliable source. It's been widely reported that MCAS is active all the time due to engine placement, but it's 100% bull****. More technical sources, as well as Boeing have all confirmed that it is only active during high throttle, high AoA (near stall) conditions. The old 737 also pitches up under throttle. It's not really a problem it's just part of knowing how to fly the aircraft. MCAS is there to deal with some weird stall characteristics that would otherwise require retraining.

I'm extremely annoyed at how blatantly garbage reporting has been on this. If you look through articles, it's clear that 95% of them are just rewrites of some original "journalist" who couldn't be bothered to put any effort at all into understanding or confirming what they were reporting. It's just an incestuous cycle of garbage. And given how easy these facts would have been to verify, it's pretty much guarantees that everything else they report on is given the same lazy slap dash treatment as well.





So, in your mind, specific requirements can't also be wrong requirements? Interesting.




Many aircraft are fully fly by wire. I don't see your point here. Pilots aren't taught to understand the control laws of their aircraft so they can debug them on the fly when something goes wrong. There is necessary abstraction. If system doesn't work properly, the solution isn't to teach pilots how to hack it, it's to make it work correctly.




You can tell that I did by the way specifically contradicted the incorrect facts you used to support your post. Like the ludicrous idea that Boeing went through a period where they didn't face significant competition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Orders_for_and_deliveries_of_Airbus_and_Boeing_aircraft





It's not novel if you know a little about the aviation industry and stop to consider Boeing's incentives. Boeing is inherently a long term company. They have very little control over their performance in the next few years. They can really only control their performance several years down the line. If they can't deliver a product that is perceived as safe and reliable, they don't really have a company. There are a lot of market pressures, but this one is absolute. They have no reason to try and get the FAA to "go easy" on them. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter who put their sticker on the thing, if they can't deliver safe planes, the buck is going to stop at the Boeing sales department.

So they have value added engineer peer review that is paid for by US tax dollars. It's not some cynical attempt to hoodwink everyone into letting Boeing save a buck on safety.

For what it's worth, Airbus has a pretty similar issue ten years back, though that was more of a software bug than a systems bug. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72 Heck, the Columbia blew up in largely due a crap power point presentation.

Solution there, it seems to me, is to create unhackable systems.

I get pilots are just failsafes for the automated systems in today's world, but the systems should allow them to do their ****ing job and take control of the airplane rofl what are you even talking about.

yeah I’ve got problems with sarcasm too. also eye contact.

If you have to create a manual override, it means you didn’t do your job right.

Edit: If your machine needs an e-stop, it means you didn’t do your job right.

The 737 is one of a dying breed of aircraft where that is still possible. Many new airliners are fly by wire, so the "manual" controls are just varying degrees of software abstraction. In the A320, if the electronic control systems go haywire in such a way that "manual control law mode" doesn't work, you are SOL.

MCAS could be disabled. MCAS is just a term for a component of the electronic stabilizer trim system. Boeing has a memory checklist for all forms of stabilizer trim control surface runaway, and those procedures can be effective for correcting erroneous MCAS activation. This checklist did not change between the NG and the MAX series.

It doesn't make sense to have a special override procedure for every software sub-component of a system. That creates additional troubleshooting complexity and task loading in an already difficult situation. If the system fails, instead of troubleshooting why it failed, it makes more sense to cut out the entire system, and revert to backup controls, which is how the existing procedure works.

The problem here is that MCAS causes very quick trim changes, and the pilots, especially in the Lion Air flight, reacted very slowly, and if things progress too far, it can be physically very difficult to actuate the manual mechanical control wheel without unloading the control surfaces. It's not clear if the pilots of the Ethiopian airlines flight had time to do this, but it looks like the Lion Air pilots should have.

At this point, it appears that inadequate peer review processes somehow lead to shipping MCAS command rates that were excessively high. It also appears that the AoA sensor failure rates were much higher than expected. It is also possible that pilot emergency preparedness training isn't sufficient.



Yeah, my point is that it's not a subsidy in the way you are describing it. Proper safety oversight is inherently a subsidy in this case.

Boeing's desire for safe planes and a credible FAA are so obvious that I'm honestly bewildered that this is the hill you've chosen to die on, but whatever.

I "concede" that Boeing does not want their planes to crash.

I "concede" that a properly funded FAA that can provide proper oversight is a benefit to Boeing.


The FAA is not capable of providing proper oversight due to American political preferences. The rest of the world should no longer recognize FAA type certifications. If this happens it will hurt Boeing, because right now they only need to certify their planes in the United States, but after that change they would need to get their planes certified many times. Boeing wouldn't be able to sell as many planes. Americans will lose jobs. Statistically, half of them will deserve it.

I'm no engineer, but the way you improve the reliability of systems isn't to make systems which "don't fail", it's to add redundancies so that a single failure doesn't take down the whole system.

I'm pretty sure when I looked into this that MCAS depending on precisely one AoA sensor, with the ability to use two sensors locked behind expensive software licenses (why?). Given the MCAS is active during flight, it seems pants-on-head stupid to fly airplanes using only one sensor.

Ideally the MCAS would depend on three sensors and vote out any bad one. Moreover seems like they'd want to not lie about critical changes in the 737 MAX so that trained pilots would know wtf was happening when the nonredundant AoA sensor fails and the plane decides to pitch itself down repeatedly.

We should not be attempting to use "invisible" software to correct poor engineering choices. Whether or no you disable all systems at once or not is irrelevant. Boeing's application of software, their engineering choices and marketing choices all contributed.

For what it's worth, the ACM does have a code of ethics, but even before skimming it I already gleaned the heading "respect privacy", which I can only imagine would elicit my deep bemusement, just considering the number of ACM members working for Google, Facebook, et al.

Yeah but the software developers almost certainly didn't make that call. They would have had extremely rigid requirements that were given to them by sales and management.

something something only following orders

Mussolini described himself to Il Fatto Quotidiano as “a post-fascist who refers to those values in a non-ideological way.”

[thinking emoji.gif]

For those unaware, Mussolini had like a crapton of children and his descendents keep popping up in the far right of Italian politics. This one is "Caius Julius Caesar Mussolini" and claims people like him more for the Julius Caesar than the Mussolini, as if that's an improvement.

Yes, but I don't think it's due to regulatory capture as you claimed. Due to the way the incentives align, I expect that Boeing would much prefer a fully funded and functional FAA.

I also don't see any grounds to claim that the FAA is as in bad shape as you say. The EASA also took a close look at the 737 Max, and did find some concerns about the trim cutout system with MCAS, but they didn't really follow them up beyond a vague reference to "additional training materials" that they never bothered to follow up. I think you are trying to paint some sort of US late stage capitalism narrative out of this that just isn't well supported by the information available.

I think the real lessons to take from this are more practical. Specifically, the dangers of working on old programs. Old programs exist because people want to leverage existing work. The problem with that is that, over time, the project looses coherency. No on really understands the full context of design choices made 40 years ago by people who now dead. The attitude is to assume they knew what they were doing, but even if they did, we don't know why they did it. Being as conservative as possible and crossing your fingers doesn't work. That just turns everything into a giant kluge of patches sitting on patches, which is more work to sort out that a clean sheet design.



What you described is just another way to reduce the failure rate. My point was that MCAS itself should remain abstracted. Obviously it should have a low failure rate as well, but if it should fail, the pilot's response shouldn't require specific knowledge of MCAS. It should be treated as part of a larger system from the pilot's perspective. The pilot shouldn't need to worry about what specific subcomponant of the automatic trim system is causing erroneous trim commands, they should just see those erroneous trim commands, and switch the electronic trim system into a more manual mode.

I didn’t claim it was due to regulatory capture. I claimed it was due to popular austerity measures.

Sorry, it sounded to me like you were saying that the austerity measures were something corporations were advocating for so they had more control over the regulatory. I guess by "not just regulatory capture" you meant "not at all regulator capture", but I took it as "more than just regulatory capture."

So I think we agree on the cause of the impact, but not the severity. This one thing has happened, but it doesn't really paint a trend, either. Boeing has been lobbying hard for better FAA staffing for a while now, so maybe this means they'll get it now. I mean, one way or another, extra staff are probably going to be ex-Boeing employees, but that's simply due to the low number of airline manufactures. The EASA is going to face the same issues with Airbus.

We also don't really know exactly why the system was designed the way it was. We can speculate all day, and suggest "common sense" hindsight solutions, but unless you've work on aviation controls before, we are mostly shooting in the dark.
A Kalman filter fault detector sounds great, unless you are worried about proving that it will always make the correct choice.

A voting system sounds great, unless you are worried that the voteing system itself represents a high MTBF single point failure than the sensor. It also assumes uncorrelated failure probabilities, which isn't an assumption that can be made. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XL_Airways_Germany_Flight_888T

So, yes, the system should have been better, but the specific way in which it should have been better, and the reasons that it wasn't caught aren't clear at this point. Until the whole thing in investigated, and the furious finger pointing and blame shifting dies down, we won't really know for sure.



The US shootdown of flight 655 is a good example if this. There were many associations that could have been made but at the end of the day, it turned out that the crew had been trained in such a way that they had a strong cognitive bias toward detecting a threat. Learning that this was an issue and correcting for it was really valuable and had much broader applicability than the initial reaction might have indicated.

Yeah, I'm fine with that solution. They don't need a metaphorical switchboard for each component.



Lusser's law doesn't always apply, you're right. Though pointing it out isn't "furious finger pointing and blame shifting", exactly as much as pointing out it might not apply isn't a "stammering backpedaling defense mechanism". AoA sensors are not flawless, in fact there's a long history of these sensors failing:

https://www.heraldnet.com/nation-world/not-just-the-737-angle-of-attack-sensors-have-had-problems/

Independent failures of the AoA sensor are not rare, so it's reasonable to expect Lusser's law applies. Especially when the systems are purposefully designed for redundancy to take advantage of Lusser's law.

And sure, it's not foolproof as you note. However I'll take the square of a failure rate over the raw failure rate every day. Plus there's the added bonus with two sensors, an independent failure means the system can detect its own failure and shut off and the plane doesn't kill you.

Can’t we just agree that airplane food is bad and that the bags of peanuts are difficult to open and be done with it?

It wouldn’t be the square of the failure rate because they’re the same design, installed at the same time, and subjected to the same conditions. It would be better to have more than one though.

That's a good point.

Probably what should be said is, the failure event for each sensor is largely independent, as one sensor failing doesn't seem likely to cause the other sensors to fail. I'd treat them as independent variables. However there is a positive correlation between the failure events of each sensor. Just like why snowflakes are symmetric, no internal causation, just correlation in where the molecules bond.

But what do I know, I've never taken a course in probability.

If the event is mechanical fatigue then they're not independent. I'm not an aircraft mechanic, but I'd assume that if a sensor has never failed, they'd all get replaced at the same time. They'd also have been installed at the factory at the same time. So I think the odds are pretty good that all of the sensors were installed by the same person and checked by the same person. They probably shipped in the same crate, subjected to the same shipping mistreatment, they were probably picked and packed by the same person. They were probably picked from the same production run, probably in the order they were made. They were probably QA tested by the same person. They were definitely assembled by the same workers.

So I think there's a decent chance that whatever causes a sensor to fail prematurely will also cause the others to fail prematurely, at least if the root cause is a manufacturing defect.

Maybe airlines have practices to mitigate this? Since they never even knew the sensors were important before, I'd assume they wouldn't have even cared.

You're right. I didn't understand the definition for dependent variables well enough. They're definitely dependent.

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-ca-mn-disneyland-60th-anniversary-solo-20150705-story.html

This is quite a roller coaster of emotion. This is very personally revealing from the author and.. it's a bogglin' my mind a bit.

This may as well be my university. Three people in my courses last semester went to disneyland on their honeymoons and all of their husbands had captain america **** for their groomsmen

BLECH

When do I get LinuxGNUmingle.org? Or do I have to result to posting personals on my website? And how much toe cheese do I have to eat to get noticed?

The problem with LinuxGNUmingle is the open sores

Oh my God. What does it say about American culture that we produce this sort of thing? This feels so wrong to me. I don't blame any of the individuals really, but what's wrong with our society that people do this?

Bruh Stallman. Bruh. Bruuuh. I'm proud of you for owning that post.



Nice