737s don’t have RATs. According to some 737 pilots I’ve seen commenting, the APU is operable in flight, but doesn’t kick in automatically and would have required ~60 seconds to start. The main electrical generators don’t automatically restart after tripping, either, so a scenario where electric power is hypothetically available, but a panicked or overloaded flight crew don’t take the steps to bring it online, is plausible.

Hydraulics and electric system are independent in commercial aircraft – hydraulic pumps are directly driven from the engines, as are electrical generators. Redundancy is provided via independent loops/buses from each engine. A bird strike on its own is unlikely to be energetic enough to sever one of those independent systems, let alone all four. Losing both engines could do it, – but again, they had enough thrust to attempt a go-around, so they weren’t a glider immediately after the bird strike. The 737 is an old-school design, too, so most critical components have full manual reversion – as long as you have airspeed and altitude enough to get to the runway, you can fly and land the plane just with cable controls and manual releases in the event of total electric and hydraulic failure.

I did a bit of reading from other sources and this particular aircraft predates the requirement for battery backup of the FDR and CVR, and the APU does not start up automatically on a power failure, so the failure chain for that part of the incident isn’t as long as I initially thought. Still, lots of questions, and I think the simplest explanation so far is the aircrew panicking and making a survivable situation into a bloodbath.

Everything about this incident is just so fucking odd. That a bird strike could take out both engines isn’t unheard of (see US Airways Flight 1549) but I’ve heard reports that there was a failed emergency landing attempt before the one that we saw video of, so they clearly had thrust enough to stay in the air for a go-around, and from the video we saw they carried in a ton more speed than I would expect if there had been catastrophic damage to both engines.

Except that the lack of landing gear suggests loss of hydraulic power from both engines… Except there is an emergency release that drops the gear on a 737 with just gravity, and there’s no evidence this was even attempted.

Now it looks like some electrical systems, including power to the data recorders, died right at the start of the incident, which would require not just double engine failure but failure of the APU and backup battery systems. That just seems incredibly unlikely.

Catastrophic electrical failure several minutes before the crash, though, would suggest that it wasn’t just a case of a panicked aircrew making a chain of bad decisions, which was my initial read of the situation and maybe the best fit for the rest of the circumstances.

I just can’t think of a chain of events that could reasonably lead to all the failures in evidence while still allowing the aircraft to remain airworthy for two landing attempts.

And then you get to the horrifying fact that a relatively new and modern airport had a giant concrete obstacle in what would be considered the Runway Safety Area at a US facility… Like, what the fuck? That seems like it’s designed to create this sort of a disaster.

I’d been planning for a new HVAC system for a while when that video came out, and it gave me the idea to cross-check the thermostat data with the Manual J calc I’d already done. They were in general agreement, though the Manual J block load was more conservative than empirical data for a design day.

In your case, since you don’t have data from a healthy system on a representative heating design day, I’d suggest using a web tool like CoolCalc to simply calculate an approximate Manual J total heating and cooling load, and use that to guide your choices.

A little headroom ain’t bad, but it had three times the required heating capacity for my area’s “design day” low, which meant that for most of the winter it was kicking on for maybe 5-10 minutes per hour and then leaving massive cold spots in the house, because the thermostat was smack in the middle and all the walls were bleeding heat.

My new heat pump is just about 2x the design day heat requirement, but that also means it’s got capacity to handle extreme lows without resorting to resistance heat, and in any case it’s fully modulating so the house has stayed quite comfortable so far.

My old furnace was hilariously oversized for the house.

One of the nifty things about smart thermostats like Ecobees is that you can pull usage data from their web portal. I grabbed a CSV file covering a cold snap last year that reached a 100-year record low, and using Excel I summed up the total heat output while we were at that low.

The furnace was only running 50% of the time, even when it was with a couple degrees of as cold as it’s ever been where I live.

Needless to say, when I got a new system installed I made sure it was more properly sized, and given that I had a convenient empirical measurement of exactly how many btus I actually needed in the worst case as scenario, that was easily done.

hard disagree. The residential building code isn’t terribly hard to adhere to – especially in new construction – and nearly every bit of it is written with the health and safety of building occupants in mind. I’d much rather deal with a bit of bureaucratic oversight to be sure my house and/or my neighbor’s house doesn’t collapse in a stiff breeze, or blow up from a gas leak, or kill all its occupants in a fire, or turn into a heap of rot after the first heavy rain, etc., etc. You might have the skills and ethics required to do the job right without somebody looking over your shoulder, but not everybody does, and I’d venture at least half the big home building firms would cut every corner they could in the absence of code enforcement.

There’s no reason you couldn’t still do that, as long as you pull the necessary permits and your work can pass inspection. Most jurisdictions make specific exemptions in the contractor licensing rules for homeowners working on their own properties.

Just got my late, not-so-great furnace and AC replaced with a new cold-climate heatpump setup, and in the process moved the indoor equipment from a too-tight niche in the main floor of the house into the basement where it really should have been to start with. Now I need to frame up a wall where the furnace access panel used to be, properly tie in the return ductwork, and (eventually, need to relocate some other utilities first) add a linen cabinet in the vacated space. Next big stage in the huge-slow-moving basement Reno I’m in the middle of is to get the 60-year-old galvanized steel water supply line replaced, and then I can start inside plumbing work.

The Cirrus CAPS system works as low as 400 ft if the plane is still in level flight, but if it’s not got forward motion – say, in a spin or stall scenario – it needs more altitude to fully inflate. I’d guess that in this case, if they’d had a BRS system it probably would have had time to work, if only just, but they’d have needed to deploy it pretty early on in their emergency.

Cirrus aircraft are expensive even by the stratospheric standards of general aviation, which leads to a “no seatbelts, we die like real men” attitude from your average GA pilot with a 60-year-old Cessna that flies backwards in a stiff breeze.

That said, the RV-10 is a (relatively) inexpensive kit plane, and one that has a couple parachute systems available for it. In the case of a kit plane, I think it’s not unreasonable to say that adding the parachute system is a good idea… the incident rate with such aircraft is much higher than with other general aviation aircraft, and the cost of adding the chute isn’t eye-popping compared to the other costs involved.

Tom’s Hardware was on the lowest tier of tech journalism even in its heyday. You never relied on their benchmarks if there was a better source, and their news was WCCFTech-grade rumor mongering most of the time. The real travesty is that it’s the last one standing out of all the early-2000s hardware review sites, when sites like TechReport (who pioneered things like frame time analysis and power supply load bank testing, and did some of the first test-to-failure analysis of SSDs back when nobody was sure how reliable they actually were) are dead or (worse) zombie husks being used for linkspam SEO.

Immediately, and in a vacuum? No, and you’re right to fear that it will get worse before it might get better. But the wealthy and powerful have constructed a society that insulates them from consequences for committing vast amounts of (banal, legally-sanctioned) violence against the broader public. Mangione’s actions, and more importantly the public response to them, are a demonstration that there can still be consequences for that kind of predatory behavior, even if it’s state-sanctioned and protected, and at the end of the day consequences lead to changes in behavior.

I respect your point of view, but I personally have long been of the opinion that one’s human rights are contingent on one’s humanity, which is a quality that one can degrade and destroy through acts of inhumanity. Societies have a right and need to defend themselves from amoral predators that do not respect the social contract, and in cases where that society has become so corrupt and sclerotic as to have de-facto predator and prey classes, vigilantism may even become justified. (To be clear I don’t think it’s good that it came to this, or that further escalation won’t start to have terrible collateral damage, but there is a certain inevitability to it.)

I did some SWAGging as to how many deaths could be reasonably attributable to UHC’s policy of excessive denials, and based on the studies I was able to find about mortality rates and delay of care, I conservatively arrived at a number of ~4,600 per year. Since Brian Thompson became CEO of UHC, that adds up to 17,000+ premature deaths. In another context he would have been standing trial in front a war crimes tribunal, but because our criminal justice system doesn’t have a mechanism to handle homicides where the murder weapon is a contract dispute, he was on his way to tell shareholders about quarterly profits – profits earned from the immiseration and death of thousands --when he was shot.

I won’t say that Brian Thompson deserved to die, but I will say this: Nobody calls it murder when an antelope gores the lion.

A quick scroll of your comment history suggests you are happy to make an exception for CEOs.

Not saying I necessarily disagree, but only pointing out that the axiomatic statement you’re making here isn’t a universal truth, and might not even be true for you. I personally think that the death penalty should be reserved exclusively for people in positions of power who abuse that power – call it a Sword of Damocles exception – but an exception that still is.

Given that the guy used a (partially) 3D-printed gun, I just can’t fucking wait to see how the overbroad knee-jerk restrictions are going to impact the hobbyist maker space.

Maybe he has an Internet or social media presence with persuasive and/or humanizing postings, and they want to deny him the PR bump he’d get from them becoming public.

Keep in mind that when 10nm was in planning, EUV light sources looked very exotic relative to current tech, and even though we can see in hindsight that the tech works it is still expensive to operate – TSMC’s wafer costs increased 2x-3x for EUV nodes. If I was running Intel and my engineers told me that they thought they could extend the runway for DUV lithography for a node or two without sacrificing performance or yields, I’d take that bet in a heartbeat. Continuing to commit resources to 10nm DUV for years after it didn’t pan out and competitors moved on to smaller nodes just reeks of sunk-cost fallacy, though.

Intel’s problems, IMO, have not been an issue of strategy but of engineering. Trying to do 10nm without EUV was a forgivable error, but refusing to change course when the node failed over and over and over to generate acceptable yield was not, and that willful ceding of process leadership has put them in a hole relative to their competition, and arguably lost them a lucrative sole-source relationship with Apple.

If Intel wants to chart a course that lets them meaningfully outcompete AMD (and everyone else fighting for capacity at TSMC) they need to get their process technology back on track. 18A looks good according to rumors, but it only takes one short-sighted bean counter of a CEO to spin off fabs in favor of outsourcing to TSMC, and once that’s out of house it’s gone forever. Intel had an engineer-CEO in Gelsinger; they desperately need another, but my fear is that the board will choose to “go another direction” and pick some Welchian MBA ghoul who’ll progressively gut the enterprise to show quarterly gains.

This feels like complaints over asset flips bleeding over into first-party asset reuse, because the people complaining don’t understand why the former is objectionable. It’s not that seeing existing art get repurposed is inherently bad (especially environmental art… nobody needs to be remaking every rock and bush for every game) but asset flips tend to be low effort, lightly-reskinned game templates with no original content. Gamers just started taking the term at face value and assumed the use of asset packs was the problem, rather than just a symptom of a complete lack of effort or care on the developers’ part