Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 8: Bezos Takes Over the World

[ScoobyDoo]

Re: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 8: Bezos Takes Over the World

joe doesn't give a sh-t about guns as far as I know.

Then it's the other one. They get a lot of loyalty out of those two issues.

[Kepler]

Re: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 8: Bezos Takes Over the World

Then it's the other one. They get a lot of loyalty out of those two issues.

Yeah it's the other one.

One of the cleverest tactics the Right ever deployed was to promulgate that ridiculous pseudo-scientific idea to get doctrinaire Catholics to slice their own throats. My parents were just on the other side of the line where they personally opposed abortion but understood the separation of church and state. Unfortunately, beginning with Reagan, a lot of otherwise decent and intelligent Catholics, even some Catholic intellectuals, fell for the bait and got fleeced.

These were people who completely understood that the GOP was just a Trojan horse for Plutes destroying the American middle class but they couldn't shake that one bullsh-t talking point that they were duty bound to pretend their personal and highly eccentric interpretation of a medical procedure was a universally applicable moral deal-breaker, and Mother Church of course encouraged them because absolutism is their sine qua non. So ironic since in retrospect it turns out the Church is nothing but garden variety rapists and conspirators.

joe and his ilk were conned by the people they trusted, and that's a shame, but it's their own fault. They had brains and eyes. All the rest of us saw the Right was exploiting them as useful idiots and laughing behind their backs. They could have, too.

[rufus]

Re: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 8: Bezos Takes Over the World

Once again, grasshopper, you miss the sarcasm.

Behind every dose of sarcasm, there's a kernel of truth. You leapt to the sarcasm, while completely dismissing the underlying truth that that's the way your party really feels.

[rufus]

Re: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 8: Bezos Takes Over the World

joe and his ilk were conned by the people they trusted, and that's a shame, but it's their own fault. They had brains and eyes. All the rest of us saw the Right was exploiting them as useful idiots and laughing behind their backs. They could have, too.

"You effed up. You trusted us"

[Kepler]

Re: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 8: Bezos Takes Over the World

"You effed up. You trusted us"

"My advice is to start drinking heavily."

[bronconick]

Re: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 8: Bezos Takes Over the World

A crack just emerged in the financial markets: The New York Fed spends $53 billion to rescue the overnight lending market - CNN https://t.co/K1cB7SHW2M

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) September 18, 2019

[St. Clown]

Re: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 8: Bezos Takes Over the World

A crack just emerged in the financial markets: The New York Fed spends $53 billion to rescue the overnight lending market - CNN https://t.co/K1cB7SHW2M

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) September 18, 2019

The catalyst for the stress, according to Cabana, was the fact that US companies withdrew vast sums of money from banks to make quarterly tax payments to the US Treasury Department. That forced banks to draw down their reserves at the Fed.

The rate spike may also be a symptom of the sharp increase in Treasury bonds being issued to fund the federal government. The federal deficit has spiked to $1 trillion this fiscal year because of the tax cuts and surge in government spending.

Banks typically buy Treasuries by borrowing in the overnight market. The jump in Treasury issuance caused a large increase in demand for short-term financing.

"The fundamental issue is there are just too many darn Treasuries out there," Cabana said. "Both parties are to blame. The $1 trillion deficit will keep this an issue."

Seems about right.

[Deutsche Gopher Fan]

Re: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 8: Bezos Takes Over the World

Interest rates cut. Fuhrer not a fan.

Jay Powell and the Federal Reserve Fail Again. No “guts,” no sense, no vision! A terrible communicator!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 18, 2019

[St. Clown]

Re: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 8: Bezos Takes Over the World

Interest rates cut. Fuhrer not a fan.

Jay Powell and the Federal Reserve Fail Again. No “guts,” no sense, no vision! A terrible communicator!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 18, 2019

President Stroganoff berates the Fed for keeping interest rates too high, and then berates the Fed for cutting them. What a joke.

[Kepler]

Re: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 8: Bezos Takes Over the World

President Stroganoff berates the Fed for keeping interest rates too high, and then berates the Fed for cutting them. What a joke.

Yeah, that makes no sense. Shi-tler should love a rate cut. I assume he wanted a larger one.

[mookie1995]

Re: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 8: Bezos Takes Over the World

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/m...sultPosition=2

incredible article.

[Kepler]

Re: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 8: Bezos Takes Over the World

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/m...sultPosition=2

incredible article.

I'd liked to know what our resident aerospace engineer thinks of this.

[LynahFan]

Re: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 8: Bezos Takes Over the World

I'd liked to know what our resident aerospace engineer thinks of this.

Definitely quite an article.

Human factors are the hardest things to design around, because they are so uncertain. Flight Critical (i.e. they have to work or the airplane crashes) functions are required to be designed to have a failure rate of less than once per billion flight hours (1e-9). Commercial airplanes may have a useful life of up to 50,000 flight hours, so to reach a billion hours of flying would require a fleet of 20,000 airplanes. So unless there are errors by the engineers (errors can be either technical or judgmental), the systems themselves are supposed to be incredibly reliable.

So the weakest link in any aircraft should be the humans involved - the pilots and maintainers. I don't care how well designed the cockpit is or how much training you provide, you'll never convince me that during those same billion hours of flying, the human pilots and maintainers would only make a single error that would crash the plane. It's absolutely no surprise to me that pilot and maintainer error was a major, perhaps even dominant, factor in these cases. I've also never assumed it was coincidence that the two airlines that crashed were both from countries with less than robust political and regulatory systems.

However, the aircraft designer has to give the pilots a fighting chance. Maybe pilots properly trained in both airmanship and safety attitude should be able to correctly diagnose and correct a runaway trim condition 99.99% of the time. That still doesn't mean it's okay to design an aircraft that can throw that condition at the pilots due to a single failure of an angle of attack (AOA) sensor. Boeing has built ~10,000 737s, so if each of them accumulates 50,000 flight hours, that's 500 million flight hours. Individual aircraft components typically have failure rates of around once per 20,000 flight hours, so that would be 25,000 failures of that AOA sensor over the life of the fleet. If pilots can "only" be counted on to correct the problem 99.99% of the time, that means that this design flaw would be expected to initiate .0001 x 25,000 = 2.5 crashes. That's the problem with huge numbers - even a tiny fraction of a huge number is still an unacceptably large number.

In contrast, there are ~400 737Maxes, and they've only been around for 5 years. If we generously say that they each have 5,000 hours, that's a total fleet life of 2M hours. If the AOA failure rate is close to my 20,000 hour estimate, that means the fleet should have experienced 100 AOA sensor failures by now. 2 of those have led to fatal crashes, so that implies that pilots have only reacted correctly 98/100 times = 98%. Extrapolated to the full fleet (500M hours) that would mean that there would be .02 x 25,000 = 500 crashes. There's just no way that an airplane should be designed such that a pilot should have to react correctly more than 99% of the time to keep the number of crashes at an acceptably low level.

So yes, pilot error exists and was definitely a factor in these cases. But Boeing KNOWS that pilot error exists and therefore should not design in situations that require ridiculously high pilot reliability in order to prevent crashes. In my mind, the responsibility still lies with Boeing.

[Kepler]

Re: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 8: Bezos Takes Over the World

Thank you for this response. If there was an award for best Cafe post this would win it.

[dxmnkd316]

Re: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 8: Bezos Takes Over the World

Yeah. I kind of wanted a cigarette after that. And I don’t smoke.