The fuel intended for a prop plane with an old-fashioned gas engine is avgas, which at this kind of airport would be an oddball fuel that comes from what looks like ordinary gas station pumps in an out-of-the-way area. It would be completely out of the fuel trucks' workflow.

Contaminated fuel isn't totally impossible but is highly unlikely since no other planes had an issue that day, and even with contaminated fuel the odds of the two engines shutting down so close together are quite low. The theory of the jet fuel being contaminated with avgas is also pretty much impossible at a big commercial airport like the one this jet took off from.

Something weird may have caused an electrical or electronic failure that took out both engines at once. Highly unlikely again but not impossible.

Another greater possibility is that one engine failed for some reason and the pilots reacted incorrectly causing the good engine to be shut down. This is the most likely and there have been other crashes caused by this kind of mistake. Pilots spend their whole careers maintaining equal thrust between a plane's engines, but then when an engine failure happens they have to go for maximum unequal thrust.

Few people seem to know that there are almost no hard and fast rules with a currency: * There is no unacceptable debt to GDP ratio. Some countries have faltered at 60% others have sustained 200+%.

* Confidence is seemingly a factor, but this can be so fickle as to have little predictive value.

* It doesn't have to be backed by anything. Gold backed can increase confidence, but take somali currency. The government was never solid, and has been a basket-case since the 90s. Yet, people go to the market to buy/sell stuff using the "national" currency. For international trade it is entirely useless, so they use neighbouring or solid currencies.

* Once currency can be terrible, but people living under an even worse currency will find it attractive. I fully believe this is one of the things propping up the USD. Other people (in some countries) want it because they want their own even less.

* Too much of it isn't entirely a problem. It takes a confidence crisis to usually push too much over the edge. Going right to the edge of "too much" will stimulate an economy to produce things to mop up the ever growing amount of currency. I would argue this is where things like crypto currencies are becoming attractive. They are just a way to mop up the huge amounts of USD sloshing around. Some people argue these are a hedge, I would say at this point this is not the case.

* Most people are unaware of the velocity of money problem. Once various categories like M1 and its friends are actually crossing the line of "too much" people will dump their now inflating currency faster. This increases velocity, which effectively increases the money supply; which (everybody sing along) increase the incentive to increase the velocity. This is a positive feedback loop with very negative consequences.

* People forget that you have to pay your taxes in USD. This means that people will still do part or whole of all transactions in USD, so as to pay their taxes. This can place a support for a currency for a period. If the US federal government said that all taxes had to be paid in Leopard pelts, the leopard would go extinct in weeks.

* Most of the rich world is quietly dumping US debt, and only acquiring what is needed for basic trade.

* The USD debt is safe because the US can always print more. This is technically, and pedantically true, but the reality is that if you hold a 10 year bond with a 5% and a 10% one comes out, the first one is now only worth $69.30. That is a massive massive massive haircut. If you are thinking that 15% is on the table, then you are thinking your bond could go to $49.81. That is a halving in value if rates on a 5% bond go to 15%.

* Crises come along on a fairly regular basis. Not every presidential term, but pretty close. Right now the US deficit spending is at a crisis level (the level you would expect during a crisis like 2008, 2001, a major war, etc) This means a real crisis would require way more spending. Where is this money coming from?

* The world can't supply limitless money to the US. Think of it this way. If you have a trusted friend and they come to you looking to borrow $1,000. I think most people could manage this, some could manage $10,000, some could manage $100,000 or even a million if they mortgage against their house, etc. But a point would come for the vast majority of people where they could not round up the money to loan. If the US goes to the rest of the world looking for 5T, 8T 10T, a point will come where no matter how much they threaten, or the world even wants to desperately help, they can't cough up that much. Seeing that the US is not inspiring confidence, and is no longer a trusted friend; there will very soon be a point where bond auctions don't produce results. So, they will start cranking up interest rates

* Triggers. This is one many are actually worried about. If they screw with the fed's independence, this will trigger an instant bond auction failure. Minimally, this tags 2-5% onto the next successful auction. Other triggers include punishing some country by nullifying its debt in some way. This an instant confidence crisis and the world goes from quietly dumping US debt to quiet panic dumping of US debt. The US bond auctions have to compete with this debt.

* On this last, going back to the value of lower interest debt to higher interest debt, it gets weird. Many countries hold US debt from over the last 20 years. Much of it is at 1.5% or so. Thus, selling it into a market where the US is printing at 10% means you have to sell it at less than $47.77. Seeing you are in a buyers market, this could be far lower than that. Many countries would not be happy to have something which seemingly has a value of $100 and are dumping it at say $30. I say seemingly in that most people would see a bond with a face value of $100 as worth at least $100. The reality is far more complex. But this highlights that this whole event would not be simple.

* Revenge. Quite simply, there are a whole lot of countries in the world now who are still having to do business with the US but no longer want to. Beyond the financials, things like pension funds, etc are not inclined to be buying US anything. This is a little bit of a doom loop. If large pension funds are slowly exiting the USD, then it will drop, which makes the US stock market look less attractive; which makes all of them less inclined to invest in US anything.

* Quantitative Easing. This is a financial term we all learned in 2008. This was the pumping of massive amounts money followed by trying to slow down and mop it all up before the economy overheated. With the amount of money now being paid in interest payments on US debt; the amounts dwarf QE. With the new debt being issued at much higher rates, these interest payments are flooding the economy with massive amounts of money.

* Economic indicators. People are saying these are lies now. Who knows. But with organizations like ICE getting a budget triple that of the US Marine Core, and larger than the military budget of russia, that is a whole lot of hiring to produce a whole lot of nothing.

* Risk free interest rate. This is a foundational part of the math behind finance. Everyone was comfortable with this number in the US being the 3 month treasury. People are now realizing that while still low risk, it is no longer no risk. This has ripple effects on all kinds of things like options, derivatives, etc. I couldn't even guess as to how this could blow up; but these are massive markets, so if they do blow up or hiccup, it would be quite bad.

* Post WWII Britain is a very good analogy for what is going on now. They had too much debt, a crumbling empire, and a new world competitor. But, it really didn't come to a head until 1959. In the few years up to 59, it looked like things were on the mend. Did the UK come to a screeching halt and everyone died? Nope, but they were no longer an empire.

TLDR; various tropes about the US being sound, a world reserve, no alternatives etc, are all basically BS based on ignorance, misplaced confidence, and hope. As most financial reports say, "Past performance is no guarantee of future results."

I read it as All Pies.

These stories on the supposedly shortened British working week are never specific as to whether they're working less hours per week for the same pay. If hours per week are the same, then the only thing workers may be gaining is some scheduling flexibility.

Today's workers should be down to about a 30-hour work week based on productivity improvements since the '70s. Either that or about 40% more pay.

I once had a single IT job that contained about 2 jobs worth of work. Maybe I should hook this guy up with them?

That's just a minor side effect, what they actually used it for was to grow corporate profits continuously for half a century while keeping worker pay stagnant. If workers got any benefit from their own productivity improvements over that time, they'd be making 40% more money or working 2 less days per week on average now.

This is just the latest escalation in a long-running arms race that incentivizes both sides to spam and use automation. It goes back at least as far as employers using keyword filtering. Now with AI-generated applications, AI-hosted interviews, and ghost jobs, the process is so completely broken that hires rarely happen without "connections." It's turned previously somewhat-meritocratic job markets into the pure cronyism of a corrupt 3rd world country because that's the only hiring option that hasn't been ruined by automation.

Unfortunately applying for 100 jobs doesn't mean getting invited to 100 computerized interviews these days, on average you'd get a number of interviews you could count on one hand, so things are far worse for job seekers who have clearly lost the arms race and are getting absolutely massacred.

I've heard people propose attaching fees to job applications to keep job seekers from growing the haystacks with spam, and while it would work to do that it would also act as an inequality accelerator. But if there were some system in place to limit the number of applications that job seekers could send and punish companies that post ghost jobs it would greatly improve the system.

There are lots of really crappy developers out there with the word "senior" in their title.

The only thing senior about them is that they have mastered their horrific legacy codebase, build system, and cancerous corporate culture. They know some obscure C or some other mostly ancient language.

When they do interviews, they lord it over the interviewees that they know extremely esoteric things about old C, old microprocessors, and weird esoteric jargon BS from their own domain. They make it seem like the interviewee should know all this, even though this "senior" person knew none of it on their first day. Their goal in interviews is twofold. To make themselves look very smart, and not to hire anyone more capable than themselves.

But, these are not people prone to growing, learning, and personal evolution. Thus, they won't learn rust, they certainly can't grok rust for what it is. This means that if a company starts the transition to rust they won't be able to be assh*les all the time using their title "senior" to make everyone around them miserable.

But, the executive hate them as well, and when they learn that rust can give them some fresh new blood, they will ignore their bleating about "fads" and "unproven" and shove them aside with a fury; a genuine angry fury; as they too have been putting up with their BS for decades. These old seniors have been saying "No, that can't be done" for decades, while their competition would regularly do it. Then the seniors would blather on about how much risk the competition was taking and that everyone was going to die.

Now the executives will realize, they can clean house, and they will.

So, if you are trying to get rust into your old sclerotic organization, don't go to the executive with explanations about borrow checkers, but explain, that the old fogies will be fish out of water with this new tech and can finally be entirely ignored, or even thrown out the airlock. If the fogies push back with the useless phrase "institutional knowledge" just tell the executives that an AI knows all their stuff, better, and more. This last might be lies, but those seniors have been lying for decades and doing untold damage.

Not enough to affect overall costs signficantly.

I remember seeing a study that came out around the pandemic that found that at that time, replacing all fossil fuels with synthetic e-fuels would require world grid electricity production to be tripled to quadroupled, in which scenario at least 1/3rd of this theoretical world's grid power, more than the entire output of the real world's electrical grid at the time, would end up being turned into waste heat through combustion engines (vs EV powertrains which are well over 90% efficient). How much have things improved since then?

We've had a few decades of "experience" and the build times have only gotten longer, if a lack of experience were the problem you'd expect build times to get shorter over time, especially after clusters of successful builds, but what we see is closer to the opposite. I'll get to the reason for that later...

Being proven wrong would be mildly annoying to me but what I'm really afraid of is being proven right, that would be catastrophic for the only life-bearing planet in the known universe.

Actually that's quite plausible. It's the only competitively priced option for new energy generation builds.

And that artificial construct is tied exclusively to nuclear power. It's social constructs doing it rather than the laws of physics, but the end result won't be much easier to escape in our lifetimes. Attempt nuclear power build, receive development hell because most countries have a societal phobia of nuclear energy.

Most countries don't have the relatively low nuclear power resistance of Canada or France unfortunately. Germany has fucked up mightily by closing nuclear plants unnecessarily and becoming highly reliant on Russian fossil fuels at the same time, but even with that they haven't been doing that badly on emissions, with fairly steady decreases in emissions per capita and global CO2 emissions percentage. Gross emissions only kicked up as Russia invaded Ukraine:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.worldometers.info%2F...

The problem isn't the technology, it's the public perception and the increasing regulatory scrutiny that comes with it. It gets worse after every blockbuster nuclear scare movie, actual nuclear disaster no matter how improbable like Chernobyl or Fukushima, or overblown nuclear hiccup like TMI. The only regulatory barriers getting worse for renewables are from fascist backlash which is generally not a majority opinion.

Renewables use storage now, so a solar plant still puts out energy in the dead of night. You should look into it.

Synthetic fuels won't work as a mainstream solution, they're incredibly energy-intensive to produce and then they go into engines that turn most of the energy the fuel holds straight into waste heat anyway. So having an advantage for synthetic fuel production isn't much of a positive.

That's just an average of construction time over roughly the entire history of nuclear power, which doesn't account for the fact that building nuclear power in modern times is much slower:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.abc.net.au%2Fnews%2F20...

Saying that the average build time is under 8 years now is like counting all the cars made since the Model T and arguing that an average new car has a significant chance of having a carburetor or whitewall tires.

I want to avoid tarpitting any money that could go to decarbonizing the grid in nuclear development hell. That money could go into renewable power that could be putting electricity on the grid before the nuclear project has even defeated all the NIMBYs and anti-nuclear groups for a site to finalize a plant design on. Nuclear has a much longer and more failure-ridden history of trying the same things over and over than renewable does. Renewables look like a runaway success in comparison:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fourworldindata.org%2Fele...

If nuclear power could help then why couldn't renewable? They both produce electricity which faces similar challenges for fueling vehicles and producing fertilizer. Nuclear is more expensive than renewable and far, far slower to build. If waiting for a solution is dangerous, then nuclear power is the most dangerous of potential solutions. Reactor build time is measured in decades. We should start building reactors now for areas that don't have the geography for renewables, but they'll only be possible to complete in time to put the finishing touches on a mostly-renewable solution.

The reason fossil fuel use isn't in rapid decline in favor of renewables is mostly that existing fossil power is cheaper than new renewables. It's the same problem for an ICE-powered vehicle you already own vs. a new EV, or an existing LNG plant vs. a new wind farm.

A big part of the problem is economic, this won't be cheap to fix and we have an economy where an ever-increasing share of humanity's productive output goes toward pointlessly filling up the Scrooge McDuck vaults of the ownership class, and when they do spend a decent chunk of their wealth it's on stupid shit that often makes the problem worse. Instead of having a middle class that can afford new EVs and renewable energy we have billionaires with full-scale rocketry hobbies and ruined social media sites accelerating the spread of pro-fossil-fuel fascism.

You build a Mr. Fusion nuclear reactor and use it to power your DeLorean time machine with which you go back in time several decades and get a whole planet's worth of nuclear reactors started in time to contribute to solving today's global warming problems.

Orrr you could build lots of renewable power today which is cheaper and way faster and doesn't require a time machine, but may cause damage to conservative feefees.

It's weird that you understand that Trump is a nutcase and yet you also buy into every manufactured culture-war controversy that his party excretes.

It sounds like you'd like a President who does all the anti-woke culture-war crap that Trump does but with more level-headed economic policies.

The "racism and sexism" you have a problem with is largely a strawman constructed by the right for the right.

This. Bernie is wrong. We should've had a 3-day work week back in 2021 based on productivity improvements since the '70s.