All the people mentioned in the article are alt-right lunatics and/or Trumpworld grifters. The only other place they might conceivably take their schtick is Truth Social – this is really only interesting as confirmation that the thin-skinned and insecure FrEe SpEeCh AbSoLuTiSt running that shithole is absolutely willing to silence anybody who annoys him, over the pettiest of disputes, regardless of political affiliation.

Twins are safer in theory but with caveats, mostly to do with pilots putting too much trust in that sense of security. A twin with one engine out has serious differential thrust that needs to be managed, and significantly reduced climb rate that can easily catch the pilot off guard. Pilots can get into an unrecoverable situation thinking that they’re still airworthy, whereas in a single when the engine starts sputtering you immediately are looking for a place to put the plane down.

What I will say about them publicly is that if we are afforded another shot at democracy after all this, they and their fellow travelers cannot be permitted to have a voice in the political process. Just about any system of government can work if everybody involved is commited to making it work, but if 1/3+ of voters hold pluralistic, representative democracy in active disdain there is no system that can protect itself against those people engaging with the system in bad faith. This was the fundamental failing of reconstruction, and it’s shaping up to be the undoing of freedom in the US now.

I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that just letting the “marketplace of ideas” play out is tantamount to throwing the gates open to any demagogue with a big enough megaphone. Participation in the political process must be restricted to good-faith actors in some fashion, be that at the “supply side” of media and content creation or at the voting booth. Anything else is akin to a basketball team kicking, biting, and throwing punches on the court and the referees shrugging and insisting they have to be allowed to play anyway.

Elon in his Cave Johnson era and we’re here for it

UHC denied coverage after the fact for my wife’s gall bladder removal surgery because they claimed she was insured with a other carrier through her previous employer. That got straightened out with a couple phone calls, but it was still ridiculous.

Even more ridiculous, though, was the time that they convinced a former insurer of mine to retroactively deny already-paid claims, on the (false) basis that they had been my primary insurer in that time period, only to then deny those same claims when the doctor resubmitted them on the (correct) basis that I had no active policy with them at the time! I suspect that it was a case of a faulty automated system rather than active malice, but the net result was a massive headache for three unrelated parties and a mind boggling amount of paperwork on my part, because they couldn’t be bothered to write software that could properly handle the same person having two different policies with a gap between them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Science: knowledge workers stop being consistently productive past 40 hours per week, and probably less than that

Rentier-capitalists hot boxing their own farts recreationally: ackshually the problem is we let you dirty fucking peasants go home to sleep at all

Cops don’t usually distinguish between net and gross revenue when they put out these kinds of press releases.

Right now Intel and AMD have less to fear from Apple than they do from Qualcomm – the people who can do what they need to do with a Mac and want to are already doing that, it’s businesses that are locked into the Windows ecosystem that drive the bulk of their laptop sales right now, and ARM laptops running Windows are the main threat in the short term.

If going wider and integrating more coprocessors gets them closer to matching Apple Silicon in performance per watt, that’s great, but Apple snatching up their traditional PC market sector is a fairly distant threat in comparison.