booly

Exactly. Some of the fears that people have are about factors that affect all flights, not just the risk of a single pilot operating a single aircraft.

Flying is still safe and has a strong safety culture built into the industry independent of government regulation, that wouldn't change overnight even if the government regulators change. But removing a slice of Swiss cheese is still bad, and cause for concern.

You're mostly right, but your comment also assumes independent probabilities rather than correlated probabilities of danger. Sometimes multiple crashes can trace back to the same cause: one particular manufacturing defect on a model of aircraft sold thousands of times, one bad practice on air traffic control procedure, one bad actor targeting multiple aircraft, etc.

Purely hypothetically, as an example, if it turned out that there was a terrorist group targeting aircraft via anti aircraft missiles, then that group's success at bringing down an airliner would actually worsen the odds of passengers on other aircraft, at least until we receive external information that the threat has passed.

This article compiles some information, but I know a lot of lawyers are currently going through the work of citing specific provisions and putting out guides to people's rights.

I believe the death penalty is immoral because I don't believe there is such a thing as an act so heinous that it would be moral to kill them after the fact.

There is room in my moral framework for killing in self defense or defense of others, but I leave that to require some kind of immediacy. And I think enemy combatants in a hot war are fair game, too, but that requires a hot war as a precondition, and I don't think we're there right now.

To clear up some of what you're saying, it sounds like you're applying private sector rules to government jobs.

Government probationary jobs have fewer protections than non-probationary, but they still have way more protections than the private sector. Once they make it past probation, government employees can only be fired after 30 days notice and an opportunity to challenge the firing in writing, so it takes a while to lay the groundwork for firing an employee. And then a fired employee has appeal rights.

While on probation, government employees don't have the right to notice before firing, or an opportunity to challenge the firing before it happens, and their appeal rights are seriously limited. But the law is that they still can't be fired except for poor performance.

These were his loyalists. He purged the career staff from leadership/management positions in these offices, and replaced them with people like these 6 prosecutors (conservative credentials like clerking for Scalia). The leadership in the Public Integrity Section got forced out (either resigned or got reassigned to an immigration task force), so the leaders who remained were specifically appointed by Trump.

The US Attorneys generally all resign upon a change of administration, unless asked to stay, and this Danielle Sassoon was appointed acting US Attorney by Trump. She's a conservative Republican.

You're just not paying attention. Here is the EPA map of where Combined Sewer Outflows happen.

As you can see, it's hundreds of American communities, including major cities like New York, Chicago, DC, San Francisco, Seattle.

Oil is just in a precarious position with supply and demand.

High prices will accelerate demand destruction, as people and businesses move to cheaper energy sources, like solar/wind/geothermal/nuclear, plus spur the continued development of grid scale storage and demand management technologies. Sustained high prices could cause lifestyle and consumption habits to change, too: fewer gas guzzlers, fewer supercommuters, improved shipping efficiency, etc.

Low prices would put strain on the finances of producers, whether for profit corporations in the West or state owned (or closely affiliated) producers in places like Saudi Arabia or Russia, and would weaken those countries' influence on geopolitical issues.

There's a reason they want a strong cartel, which is what OPEC tries to be, but that cartel has been weakened considerably by non-OPEC Plus nations becoming huge producers. OPEC cut supply to try to hurt Biden, but it ended up being a handout to American, Canadian, and Norwegian companies, by propping up prices while losing market share. Meanwhile, sanctions on Russia (and Iran and Venezuela) add a bunch of friction (and some cost) to their exports, so that they need higher prices to break even.

For the first time in modern history, societies have access to non-fossil-fuel energy sources in competitive volume and price, to where an oil oligopoly can't push around consumers. Trump can't put that back in the bottle.

We can agree to disagree. I don't miss the days of paying for long distance phone calls, all the waiting around in trying to link up with friends at a designated place, looking up addresses in a physical book of map grids, manually maintaining a calendar in a planner, driving across town and waiting in line for tickets to a show. The internet made things better.

The other stuff back then wasn't always better, either. Smoking eveywhere, unreliable cars, air pollution, crime, etc., really cut into quality of life.

Peak was mid to late 2000's. Late enough for most people to have broadband Internet and lots of websites with user submitted content that bypassed the traditional cultural gatekeepers, before smartphones and social media ruined everything.

The same preppers who hoarded ammo and canned foods and water filters couldn't be bothered to wear a mask when a real pandemic showed up, too.

Does anyone have the picture of these guys that was shared on X, the one that Elon Musk was proudly replying to?