if socialist ideology is why rainforests are cut down, what's the cause of them being cut down outside of socialist countries?

1/11/2019 10:19:43 AM

Btw life expectancy doubled in 60 years in Soviet Russia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Soviet_Union#Life_expectancy_and_infant_mortality

Quote :

"After the October revolution, the life expectancy for all age groups went up. A newborn child in 1926-27 had a life expectancy of 44.4 years, up from 32.3 years thirty years before. In 1958-59 the life expectancy for newborns went up to 68.6 years. This improvement was seen in itself by some as immediate proof that the socialist system was superior to the capitalist system."

1/11/2019 12:30:12 PM

Life expectancy in Communist Russia is never a good argument. Ever.

Hey look, the life expectancy in Cambodia under Pol Pot increased as well. Well, that proves socialism is a better system to capitalism. Just ignore all the genocide and murder by the authoritarian governments in each of those countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Cambodia#Life_expectancy

And how could you exclude the next sentence from the section you posted above:

Quote :

"After the October revolution, the life expectancy for all age groups went up. A newborn child in 1926-27 had a life expectancy of 44.4 years, up from 32.3 years thirty years before. In 1958-59 the life expectancy for newborns went up to 68.6 years. This improvement was seen in itself by some as immediate proof that the socialist system was superior to the capitalist system.[8] The life expectancy in Soviet Union were fairly stable during most years, although in the 1970s went slightly down probably because of alcohol abuse."

Gee, wonder what could have led to all of that alcohol abuse?

Do you realize that you are defending a system that is used by the most ruthless regimes?

[Edited on January 11, 2019 at 1:31 PM. Reason : 1]

1/11/2019 1:29:26 PM

you seem to have forgotten that you were the one who implied that life expectancy increased because of capitalism

1/11/2019 1:32:12 PM

Yes. Other countries couldn't possibly benefit from advances in medicine made in the US.

1/11/2019 1:37:16 PM

oh, so then government funded research is responsible

1/11/2019 1:44:29 PM

Government funded research doesn't make the populous rich enough to afford the medicine. But thank you for admitting the US healthcare system is socialist.

1/11/2019 2:00:11 PM

research is, yes. it's interesting to see a moronic capitalist admit that though.

1/11/2019 2:07:35 PM

Quality of life and life expectancy dropped massively in Russia when they returned to a privatized economy. The older generation, to this day, despite massive propaganda campaigns, views Stalin and the Soviet Union in a positive light.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/29/in-russia-nostalgia-for-soviet-union-and-positive-feelings-about-stalin/

I highly, highly recommend that anyone with a remote interest in socialism listen to this podcast episode on Stalin. While he obviously made mistakes, what the Soviet Union achieved under Lenin & Stalin should be hailed as a monumental achievement, given the time period. Had the Soviets not risen to power so quickly, and had they not crushed counter-revolutionaries, it's pretty certain that Hitler would have won. Much of the propaganda surrounding communism and communist countries can be traced back to literal German fascists, con artists, and later, the CIA. We don't need a Stalinist version of socialism today, but that doesn't mean we need to accept fascist lies and give people like HCH illegitimate fuel (100 MILLION DIED UNDER COMMUNISM)

https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/joseph-mother-fucking-stain

Quote :

"Gee, wonder what could have led to all of that alcohol abuse?"

Gee, wonder why I didn't include that sentence?

Quote :

"The life expectancy in Soviet Union were fairly stable during most years, although in the 1970s went slightly down probably because of alcohol abuse.[citation needed]"

[Edited on January 11, 2019 at 2:57 PM. Reason : .]

1/11/2019 2:47:52 PM

Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union does not have what we capitalists would call a "free enterprise" economy. The biggest short-coming is private property rights, as only those with favorable political connections enjoy safety in this regard. It is quite a bit closer to a 3rd world kleptocracy than a modern free market economy such as Sweden.

As for "Quality of life was better under Stalin", that is akin to Americans today that say "quality of life was better in the 60s" which statistics show is objectively false in every conceivable way. Statistics are hard to compare in the Soviet Union, but for Americans, it is just false. What they mean to say is life was better when they were young and still had their youth with parents to help absorb life's problems for them.

[Edited on January 11, 2019 at 8:56 PM. Reason : .,.]

1/11/2019 8:51:31 PM

Quote :

"Btw life expectancy doubled in 60 years in Soviet Russia"

You know, I hate Communism passionately, but I am willing to allow that it is probably better than feudalism. The piece you quoted does a fine job of comparing apples to, like, absolute monarchy oranges.

Quote :

"Quality of life and life expectancy dropped massively in Russia when they returned to a privatized economy."

Interesting choice of words. I suppose it was a privatized economy, but it wasn't a capitalist one, and it wasn't "returning" to it. Russia became a kleptocracy overnight. Kleptocracy is not capitalism, which generally presupposes things like "rule of law" and a voluntary exchange of goods and services.

Quote :

"While he obviously made mistakes"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet_Union_under_Joseph_Stalin

Mistakes, such as murdering 3 million people. And that's at the very low end of the estimates. Also invading Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, splitting Poland with Hitler, and encouraging the Ukrainians to starve to death.

Quote :

"Had the Soviets not risen to power so quickly, and had they not crushed counter-revolutionaries, it's pretty certain that Hitler would have won."

This statement is one of the more outlandish counterfactuals I've seen on here, which is saying something. It manages to let Stalin off the hook for murdering everybody and ignore the infinite range of other possibilities, which might have involved a non-Communist Russia that didn't murder everybody.

1/13/2019 9:17:39 PM

Being a history person, I think you would find the podcast I linked very interesting, that’s all I’m going to say.

1/13/2019 9:25:41 PM

Quality of Life is high in North Korea. Just ask them.

Quote :

"While he obviously made mistakes, what the Soviet Union achieved under Lenin & Stalin should be hailed as a monumental achievement, given the time period."

Dude, really? The gulags were not a mistake and is not a "fascist lie".

Please provide us your defense of Mao and the Khmer Rouge, as well. Or have you not listened to a podcast about that yet?

1/14/2019 9:34:22 AM

the US incarceration rate is higher than the soviet gulags, we allow forced slave labor of our prisoners, we allow capital punishment.

i guess that's okay because we have an effective justice system that is working fine?

1/14/2019 9:39:57 AM

Quote :

"The gulags were not a mistake"

Agreed. They were necessary to prevent kulak traitors from sabotaging the socialist collectivization process.

More on gulags, from none other than the CIA. They weren't nearly as bad as you think:

https://old.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/9mn1sl/the_truth_about_the_soviet_gulag_surprisingly/

More reading on the collectivization process in general (not unique to socialism)

Quote :

"The "millions of deaths" under Mao and Stalin happened during a process called collectivization, which is not unique to communism. Collectivization is the transition from individualized subsistence farming to integrated, large scale agricultural production. This process is a necessary precursor to the large, dense and high-population density cities necessary to sustain modern industrial production. The process of collectivization had already happened in the West by the 1930s, but it hadn't happened yet in China or Russia. Of course, in both the West and the East, collectivization was "forced". The process by which collective agricultural production was achieved in Europe was called the Enclosure, whereby individual subsistence peasants were forced off their ancestral lands in a long, laborious process that involved all sorts of political and rhetorical justification. It included witch-hunts against land-owning peasant women, anti-semitic pogroms, campaigns of mass butchery against peasant resistance (such as the butchering of 100,000 peasants in 1525 by the ruling classes in response to their uprising in Germany). It took three centuries to complete the process of collectivization of agriculture in Europe and undoubtedly cost many tens of of millions of lives. Of course, the collectivization of land was not limited to Europe. To fuel the growth of early capitalist industry, colonial policy forced people off their land too. The majority of excess deaths in India, Ireland, North America and South America can be clearly attributed to the seizure and enclosure of land for collective farming, with the early United States alone responsible for many tens of millions of deaths via the slave trade, which was the most brutal possible form of collectivization: literally buying people and forcing them, by whip and gun, to work on collective farms (plantations). All told, the process of Western agricultural collectivization cost HUNDREDS of millions of lives and took THREE CENTURIES. It spanned several continents and was mediated by absolute butchery on levels that literally defy comprehension. It staggers the mind the brutality by which the West was built. Let us consider, briefly, the contrary situation: Undoubtedly, millions of excess deaths occurred in both the U.S.S.R and the People's Republic of China as a result of forced collectivization. These deaths, like many of the deaths during Western collectivization, were the result of starvation caused by exporting food from producing regions to consuming regions. The key difference, however, is that collectivization and industrialization had a dangerous relationship in the West: the logic of profit demanded the development of an industrial base, no matter the human cost, allowing the fluctuation of the market to drag agricultural development and industrialization in uneven, contradictory back-and-forths, repeatedly building up and tearing down at will. In the Communist East, industrialization and collectivization occurred simultaneously under the conditions of an economy not organized towards profit. The principle cause for the excess deaths, aside from drought and counter-revolution, were errors in planning (the causes of which are widespread and do not exculpate the Soviets or the Chinese Communists, whose heavy handed collection policy contributed to falsified grain production reports). However, if you consider all of this, all of these things, a population roughly equal to the total population of the industrial capitalist world achieved collective agriculture not in centuries, not in decades, but in years with death tolls not in the hundreds of millions, but, by even the most lavish Cold War accounts, the tens caused largely not by greed but by the need to develop a productive industrial base to contest the Nazi threat and justified not by lies about racial superiority, but grand truths about equality and progress. The difference is the invisible hand of the market escapes culpability, whereas the fundamental honesty and transparency of the communist project opens it up to (often justified) criticism."

Quote :

"Please provide us your defense of Mao and the Khmer Rouge, as well."

Haven't read much on Mao, but I imagine the exaggerations are very similar to those surrounding the USSR. You won't find many real socialists defending the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot was originally backed by the US and actual socialists in Vietnam fought his government and deposed them. Funny how you fail to mention Cuba, btw.

But overall, this is a moot conversation. Material conditions were different back then, and a socialist United States would look very different than developing countries like Russia, China, Vietnam, etc.

[Edited on January 14, 2019 at 10:46 AM. Reason : .]

1/14/2019 10:42:34 AM

Honestly, at a minimum, every worker in the United States should be a market socialist. Workers defending a system where rich people siphon off the value of your labor to enrich themselves is just hilarious to me.

1/14/2019 10:49:12 AM

Quote :

"the US incarceration rate is higher than the soviet gulags, we allow forced slave labor of our prisoners, we allow capital punishment. i guess that's okay because we have an effective justice system that is working fine?"

It's not ok. Which is why we just passed significant bipartisan judicial reform, and will continue to freelydiscuss and make changes to our governmental structures. That's the difference between our system of government, and the authoritarian systems of government you keep defending above (we seem to have moved on from market systems). We still have imperfect people making imperfect laws, but it doesn't require a revolution to overthrow the group abusing its power.

1/14/2019 11:06:39 AM

lol, show me a single post where i defended authoritarian governments

1/14/2019 11:34:47 AM

Quote :

"We still have imperfect people making imperfect laws, but it doesn't require a revolution to overthrow the group abusing its power."

Who is calling for an overthrow? Marxist socialism is fluid and considers material conditions in the world. Conditions in developing countries are entirely different than conditions in the US, currently. Apart from impending climate doom, there's no reason why we can't democratically move toward socialism.

1/14/2019 11:46:59 AM

Quote :

"Agreed. They were necessary to prevent kulak traitors from sabotaging the socialist collectivization process."

So I'm aware that people wrongly through "gulag" around as though it were synonymous with "concentration camp," which is false. But the moment your political ideology starts justifying sending everyone who disagrees with it to Siberia, that's a problem. Dressing it up in fancy commie-speak doesn't change the fact that you basically said, "We needed these places so we had somewhere to forcibly relocate people who disagreed with us."

The American system is flawed, but I think on balance it's to our credit that we don't make every half-baked Marxist move to North Dakota.

Quote :

"Workers defending a system where rich people siphon off the value of your labor to enrich themselves is just hilarious to me."

It's hard for me to imagine a more backwards way of looking at it. Capital doesn't "siphon off the value of your labor," it pays you for your labor the same way everybody pays for every other good or service. Simply performing labor doesn't entitle you to money. I can go slave away digging a big hole in my yard, and that's hard labor, but nobody's going to pay me for it.

Quote :

"All told, the process of Western agricultural collectivization cost HUNDREDS of millions of lives and took THREE CENTURIES. It spanned several continents and was mediated by absolute butchery on levels that literally defy comprehension."

And very little of it took place under a system that could be described as "capitalist."

This is a fun game you have, where you treat "feudalism" and "capitalism" as being the same thing, but they're not. Market liberals don't burn witches; aristocrats and theocrats do. This dude is bringing up shit from 1525, a time when the most liberal political thing going was Henry VIII establishing the Church of England so that he, personally, could fuck other women. Give me a break.

1/14/2019 11:56:37 AM

Quote :

"So I'm aware that people wrongly through "gulag" around as though it were synonymous with "concentration camp," which is false. But the moment your political ideology starts justifying sending everyone who disagrees with it to Siberia, that's a problem. Dressing it up in fancy commie-speak doesn't change the fact that you basically said, "We needed these places so we had somewhere to forcibly relocate people who disagreed with us." The American system is flawed, but I think on balance it's to our credit that we don't make every half-baked Marxist move to North Dakota."

Kulaks didn't just "disagree". They were active saboteurs. They burnt their own crops to avoid sharing with peasants. They infiltrated the Bolsheviks to sow discord, even taking leadership positions and purging as many true communists as possible. They were terrorists. Dissidents were roped in of course, and that is regrettable, but not unsurprising given the time period and the surrounding conditions. And again, not something most socialists would praise today.

Quote :

"It's hard for me to imagine a more backwards way of looking at it. Capital doesn't "siphon off the value of your labor," it pays you for your labor the same way everybody pays for every other good or service. Simply performing labor doesn't entitle you to money. I can go slave away digging a big hole in my yard, and that's hard labor, but nobody's going to pay me for it."

Of course not all labor is necessary, but a capitalistic free market does not efficiently allocate labor resources for society's benefit. It allocates resources for profit, and that profit goes to the wealthy, not the workers. At the very least, I don't understand why you wouldn't want market socialism. It's a “free market” economy, but with shared profits instead of siphoned profits.

[Edited on January 14, 2019 at 1:03 PM. Reason : .]

1/14/2019 12:54:08 PM

Quote :

"Kulaks didn't just "disagree". They were active saboteurs. They burnt their own crops to avoid sharing with peasants."

You mean, to avoid having them confiscated by the government. Workers will sometimes sabotage their factories to avoid the owners bringing in scabs to break up a union strike. Do you call them terrorists too?

If it is the case that land is divided to the point that productivity is being hindered, then a profit can be made by buying the land from the owners and collectivizing it that way. This is how land concentration proceeds in capitalist countries, no need to confiscate and wage war on the countryside as Stalin did. However, ideology gets in the way of peace and good government. Especially since evidence suggests collectivization itself did not actually increase productivity. That others in history, even 21st century Americans, have engaged in land confiscation at the point of the gun does not exempt Stalin for his evil behavior.

Quote :

"a capitalistic free market does not efficiently allocate labor resources for society's benefit. It allocates resources for profit, and that profit goes to the wealthy, not the workers."

It is very true, the two allocation mechanisms do not always result in the same answer. However, they so closely overlap that many tend to make the simplification of presuming that they are in fact the same. There are libraries worth of books outlining all the instances when they aren't the same (externalities and the like), but outside those instances, yea, it isn't too far from reality to presume they are the same.

[Edited on January 14, 2019 at 5:43 PM. Reason : .,.]

1/14/2019 5:42:10 PM

Quote :

"It is very true, the two allocation mechanisms do not always result in the same answer. However, they so closely overlap that many tend to make the simplification of presuming that they are in fact the same. There are libraries worth of books outlining all the instances when they aren't the same (externalities and the like), but outside those instances, yea, it isn't too far from reality to presume they are the same."

Yeah gonna have to disagree with you there.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/mar/16/capitalism-efficient-we-can-do-better

1/14/2019 5:53:09 PM

So, you want me to find an article from theguardian about government waste a post it?

And as if government activities don't result in inequality and environmental degradation?

1/14/2019 7:37:56 PM

Here's a great debunking of the "capitalism pulled billions out of poverty" myth:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/29/bill-gates-davos-global-poverty-infographic-neoliberal

1/29/2019 11:07:39 AM

https://theaircurrent.com/aviation-safety/the-world-pulls-the-andon-cord-on-the-737-max/

Quote :

"Lion Air 610 should never have been allowed to get airborne on October 29, a conclusion shared by those familiar with the inquiry. The plane simply wasn’t airworthy. According to the preliminary investigation, PK-LQP’s Angle of Attack sensors were disagreeing by 20-degrees as the aircraft taxied for takeoff. A warning light that would’ve alerted the crew to the disagreement wasn’t part of the added-cost optional package of equipment on Lion Air’s 737 Max aircraft. A guardrail wasn’t in place. Once the aircraft was airborne, the erroneous Angle of Attack data collided with an apparently unprepared crew with tragic consequences as the MCAS system repeatedly activated, driving the jet’s nose into a fatal dive."

When you opt for the “sport” model with no options and it results in 189 deaths.

3/14/2019 6:55:49 PM

Originally I wrote this:

Apparently it's not unusual for commercial airliners to not have angle of attack indication in the cockpit. I do find it surprising that an automated control system would take action based on conflicting inputs without indicating that to the pilots.

Then I found this:

Quote :

"-Boeing’s design deficiency [JF note: having the MCAS rely on a single data source, the “angle of attack” indicator, without backup or comparative sensors] sets up the need for pilot training on how to overcome it. -Boeing’s failure to highlight the change resulted in no specific MCAS pilot training."

So, yeah. It does appear Boeing made a colossally poor design decision and didn't bother to tell the pilots about it. Though, based on some initial reports, MCAS may not be at fault in the Ethopian Air crash.

I think this is going to come down to Boeing overselling continuity between 737 generations as a way to reduce certification costs on their end and upgrade/training costs on the airlines' end. I wonder about regulator complicity in this.

3/14/2019 11:22:36 PM

My b, I must have missed that post (I also haven’t been following all that closely).

My guess is that the final verdict will be a series of cascading failures for both crashes, but I had to get that dig in. Can you imagine being a fly on the wall when executives/engineers are deciding what should be standard safety equipment and what they should try to upsell.........on a fucking airplane???

3/15/2019 8:42:23 AM

It's bad.

Quote :

"As Boeing hustled in 2015 to catch up to Airbus and certify its new 737 MAX, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) managers pushed the agency’s safety engineers to delegate safety assessments to Boeing itself, and to speedily approve the resulting analysis. But the original safety analysis that Boeing delivered to the FAA for a new flight control system on the MAX — a report used to certify the plane as safe to fly — had several crucial flaws. That flight control system, called MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System), is now under scrutiny after two crashes of the jet in less than five months resulted in Wednesday’s FAA order to ground the plane. Current and former engineers directly involved with the evaluations or familiar with the document shared details of Boeing’s “System Safety Analysis” of MCAS, which The Seattle Times confirmed. The safety analysis: - Understated the power of the new flight control system, which was designed to swivel the horizontal tail to push the nose of the plane down to avert a stall. When the planes later entered service, MCAS was capable of moving the tail more than four times farther than was stated in the initial safety analysis document. - Failed to account for how the system could reset itself each time a pilot responded, thereby missing the potential impact of the system repeatedly pushing the airplane’s nose downward. - Assessed a failure of the system as one level below “catastrophic.” But even that “hazardous” danger level should have precluded activation of the system based on input from a single sensor — and yet that’s how it was designed. The people who spoke to The Seattle Times and shared details of the safety analysis all spoke on condition of anonymity to protect their jobs at the FAA and other aviation organizations. Both Boeing and the FAA were informed of the specifics of this story and were asked for responses 11 days ago, before the second crash of a 737 MAX last Sunday. Late Friday, the FAA said it followed its standard certification process on the MAX. Citing a busy week, a spokesman said the agency was “unable to delve into any detailed inquiries.” Boeing responded Saturday with a statement that “the FAA considered the final configuration and operating parameters of MCAS during MAX certification, and concluded that it met all certification and regulatory requirements.”"

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/failed-certification-faa-missed-safety-issues-in-the-737-max-system-implicated-in-the-lion-air-crash/

Highly recommend the entire article.

3/18/2019 1:05:51 AM

3/18/2019 7:39:35 AM

Quote :

"So, yeah. It does appear Boeing made a colossally poor design decision and didn't bother to tell the pilots about it. Though, based on some initial reports, MCAS may not be at fault in the Ethopian Air crash."

This is a bit silly. For them to tell the pilots about it, they would have had to know it was a poor design decision. If they knew it was a poor design decision, they would have done something to fix the design, in software or otherwise.

Quote :

"I think this is going to come down to Boeing overselling continuity between 737 generations as a way to reduce certification costs on their end and upgrade/training costs on the airlines' end. I wonder about regulator complicity in this."

It is never good when an airplane turns out not to be as safe as its peers. But neither is it the end of the world. And to suggest it was somehow a conspiracy needing "complicity" from any regulator is absurd. Do you seriously think they're dumb enough to believe "oh, no one will notice when our planes start falling out of the sky. Let's save the $100 sensor costs"

Quote :

"- Assessed a failure of the system as one level below “catastrophic.” But even that “hazardous” danger level should have precluded activation of the system based on input from a single sensor — and yet that’s how it was designed."

If we presume what everyone is saying is wrong is actually what is wrong, it is not the case that "failure equals crash." A pilot can overcome this failure in every instance. The issue seems to be that these pilots became confused by the unusual behavior and as a result crashed their planes. No doubt, it would have saved their lives to train them before hand for this failure, but had they known this failure would be so deadly, they would have designed it out without the need to train for it.

3/19/2019 8:36:19 PM

They dont have to know that there was a design flaw to include in the information to pilots that there is a system that might give uncommanded flight control inputs to the plane they are flying. It is fundamental that pilots know the systems on board tr he plane they are flying and how to override them, which in this case was simply turning off the trim motor. The whole thing is looking like they were trying very hard to force the new plane into the old plane's type and were at the regulatory table lobbying for their changes to be allowed.

3/19/2019 8:52:11 PM

I assure you, it was not a secret from the pilots that MCAS existed. But there is a lot that pilots need to learn. Spending time teaching them of a theoretical possible failure that has never happened before and apparently most at the time thought wouldn't be a big deal if it did fail means spending less time teaching them lots of other things that we know damn well crashed lots of airplanes in the past.

Are they going to teach it going forward? You're damned right they will. It has bit them in the ass. But things can bite you in the ass without you doing anything wrong. Did they rush to approve the plane? Of course. If they hadn't rushed it to approval, it would have been the first airliner in history that didn't.

[Edited on March 20, 2019 at 1:37 AM. Reason : .,.]

3/20/2019 1:36:23 AM

they rushed approval and changed the design from what was approved and lied about training requirements so they could make more money and a bunch of people have died, but see this is just the free market working!

3/20/2019 9:33:38 AM

Rushing it to approval is not the same thing as making it fit the NG type rating. That is where I think we are going to see that Boeing had a thumb on the scale with the FAA.

3/20/2019 10:36:13 AM

^^ Did they make more money? All the aircraft were grounded. Orders have been cancelled. It seems to me that Boeing, given the choice at this point, would have preferred to never have made the 737MAX.

Airplanes are as safe as they are because all the design elements within them have been flown for hundreds of thousands of hours. The 737MAX contained some new systems, systems at this point that have only been flown for maybe less than a thousand hours. In effect, these new systems are new, they're going to kill people until they become old. To suggest Boeing did something "Wrong" just because a plane crashed is to proclaim that it is wrong to do anything new ever.

And as to the assertion that "a second sensor was an optional kit that should have been mandatory", this is wrong. The sensor is used in flight, but as stated before, a sensor failure should not have caused a plane crash. It is there to make the plane easier to fly, so its failure is not supposed to be a death sentence. They charge extra for a second sensor so the plane will be grounded less often due to maintenance having to replace the one sensor. It is only now that we're finding out that for some pilots this system was a critical safety system they'll crash without. Given this new information, they'll probably fix it by requiring three sensors and any one sensor failure grounds the plane. But, this is the risk of doing something new. We all wish they had known then what we've now learned through the cost of lives, but this is just how human driven systems work.

3/20/2019 11:19:48 AM

Quote :

"To suggest Boeing did something "Wrong" just because a plane crashed is to proclaim that it is wrong to do anything new ever."

We could've put this strawman in front of the WTC and prevented 9/11.

Quote :

"The sensor is used in flight, but as stated before, a sensor failure should not have caused a plane crash. [...] It is only now that we're finding out that for some pilots this system was a critical safety system they'll crash without."

I'm perpetually amazed at your ability to be wrong. I shouldn't be because clearly you haven't read.

This fiasco will end up as a case study in engineering decision making/ethics textbooks.

3/20/2019 11:43:42 AM

Quote :

"Did they make more money? All the aircraft were grounded. Orders have been cancelled. It seems to me that Boeing, given the choice at this point, would have preferred to never have made the 737MAX"

In hindsight, sure, but the claim concerns their foresight...which you conveniently ignore.

3/20/2019 11:49:24 AM

I suppose people are wondering if this new information would have come to light through more rigorous approval, rather than the rushed approval.

we're not stating that Boeing thought these were killing machines- of course they didn't as it would be irreversibly detrimental to their bottom line- but that isn't to say they took appropriate action to test their assumptions.

3/20/2019 11:50:40 AM

Quote :

"This fiasco will end up as a case study in engineering decision making/ethics textbooks."

I took an engineering ethics class in college. I remember we talked about the O-ring failures on the Challenger and Pintos that exploded when hit from behind at low speeds.

3/20/2019 11:58:17 AM

Quote :

"In hindsight, sure, but the claim concerns their foresight...which you conveniently ignore"

That is the question. It sounds to me like their foresight lacked the understanding needed to have foreseen this calamity. But A Tanzarian and others are talking as if Boeing bosses knew the thing was a death machine and concluded saving a few thousand in parts was well worth the billion dollars in losses that selling death machines was going to cost the company.

Quote :

"I suppose people are wondering if this new information would have come to light through more rigorous approval, rather than the rushed approval."

Anything is possible, but I think it is unlikely.

3/21/2019 1:02:53 AM

they knew they changed the function of the MCAS in a way that was both different than their federal approval and different from how it functioned before and proceeded to say no training was needed. They absolutely decided that not requiring training would make them more money, that was a primary selling point.

[Edited on March 21, 2019 at 8:42 AM. Reason : .]

3/21/2019 8:41:31 AM

Is LoneSnark really trying to suggest that failure modes are unknown and unforeseeable for a control system designed to manipulate control surfaces using critical input from a single sensor?

----

There's a criminal investigation into the certification process. It began before the second crash.

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/fbi-joining-criminal-investigation-into-certification-of-boeing-737-max/

3/21/2019 11:43:28 AM

Quote :

"They absolutely decided that not requiring training would make them more money, that was a primary selling point. "

Well yea. The intention of having the system on the plane was so it would perform like an old 737 and therefore didn't need extra training.

Quote :

"Is LoneSnark really trying to suggest that failure modes are unknown and unforeseeable for a control system designed to manipulate control surfaces using critical input from a single sensor?"

That is not what I said. What I'm saying is they didn't realize pilots would frequently respond to the system failure by flying their perfectly flyable aircraft into the ground. The failure was a lack of psychology understanding, not engineering, and a more in-depth certification process would have been unlikely to figure that out.

Quote :

"There's a criminal investigation into the certification process. It began before the second crash."

I would hope so. Without the results of an independent investigation, it would be hard for Boeing to clear their name after all of this.

3/21/2019 2:09:15 PM

https://www.wral.com/fda-food-sampling-finds-contamination-by-forever-chemicals/18428076/

Quote :

"PFOS, an older form of PFAS no longer made in the U.S., turned up at levels ranging from 134 parts per trillion to 865 parts per trillion in tilapia, chicken, turkey, beef, cod, salmon, shrimp, lamb, catfish and hot dogs. Prepared chocolate cake tested at 17,640 parts per trillion of a kind of PFAS called PFPeA. The FDA presentation also included what appeared to be previously unreported findings of PFAS levels — one spiking over 1,000 parts per trillion — in leafy green vegetables grown within 10 miles (16 kilometers) of an unspecified eastern U.S. PFAS plant and sold at a farmer's market."

6/3/2019 12:10:41 PM

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/06/28/736736444/a-tennessee-hospital-sues-its-own-employees-when-they-cant-pay-their-medical-bil


This one is pretty good. A hospital aggressively sues it’s lower wage workers because they can’t afford medical procedures at that hospital using said hospital’s medical insurance and wages.

7/1/2019 1:53:39 PM

You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store

7/1/2019 4:22:45 PM

Everyone knows scrip is only good at the hospital gift shop.

7/1/2019 5:01:17 PM

7/1/2019 5:43:07 PM

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/the-stock-buyback-swindle/592774/

A good one about stock buybacks. You can’t understand the current Trump tax scam grift without understanding buybacks:

Quote :

"By contrast, according to Federal Reserve data compiled by Goldman Sachs, over the past nine years, corporations have put more money into their own stocks—an astonishing $3.8 trillion—than every other type of investor (individuals, mutual funds, pension funds, foreign investors) combined."

Just ungodly amounts of money being poured into the market so a corporation can hit its Q3 stock price numbers. Actual investment in your company is for chumps.

7/23/2019 6:52:45 AM