There is some nuance to risk management here. Yes, no one can make something that has genuinely zero risk, but we can and must eliminate particular known risks. A fix being too expensive is not a valid excuse. There are plenty of things we don't do because there is no economical way to do them safely.
Which may have been a very reasonable conclusion based on what they knew of the issue. The letter sent out reported a split of the bearing race. A split bearing race won't prevent it from supporting the load. It's easily possible that Boeing's simulation of an aircraft operating with a split bearing race was fine.
The NTSB investigation found that for this crash, not only did the bearing race crack, but also that the bearing lugs, which hold the bearing in place, were fractured. I don't have access to the original text of the letter Boeing sent out, but based on the NTSB report, it sounds like only the issue with the bearing race was previously identified. The two may very well be related, but that doesn't mean that the lug fractures are an expected result of the race failure - perhaps some contributing factor made the lugs more susceptible than predicted. It also remains possible that the bearing damage is a red herring; the aircraft was nearing the end of its service life and had known structural issues in other parts of the pylon. The fact is that for more than a decade after the bearing race issue was reported, it didn't result in a safety of flight condition.
The insinuation that Boeing was deliberately trying to hide or downplay a known issue is simply unwarranted. It would be irresponsible for the NSTB not to mention a known issue that could have potentially been relevant, it's not evidence the issue was improperly handled.
In bi-polar systems like the decades-long standoff between Saudi Arbia and it's coalition against Iran and theirs, you don't actually want your opponent to collapse. They serve as a boogeyman that keeps your alliance cohesive and justifies immense efforts to counter them which typically are enriching your key friends. At the very least, they are the devil you know - you have spent considerable resources developing the infrastructure to predict and observe their movements, you know how to talk to them at the negotiating table, you have gentleman's agreements with your counterparts on their side. You want to be the dominant power, so the opportunity to bloody their nose, to embarrass them, is always good, and you want to do everything to stop them from getting an advantage over you. But if they are in serious trouble, you want to ease off the pressure or even help them, because if they fall you're suddenly going to be playing a very different game which you may not be any good at.
Even if some Arab states legitimately do want the Iranian regime to collapse, they don't necessarily want it to randomly collapse right now with no clear indication of what will take it's place. Add in the fact that the major driver of this unrest, high inflation and excessive corruption, are probably not flames they want to fan domestically. Best to watch closely and cautiously keep their options open.
> There are also very easy things that you can do to hugely reduce intake of MNPs. If you are concerned about water, just filtering through charcoal works.”
Filtering your drinking water is one thing, but what about filtering the water of the animals you eat, the water that irrigates crops, water used in industrial processes to produce drinks and foodstuffs, water in which you cook, the water with which you wash your dining utensils, water you consume in public spaces. And that's just for ingestion - consider the water you bathe in, water you wash your clothing in, washing your hands in public restrooms, anything that produces an aerosol spray. Without society level changes to how water is processed, avoiding exposure is not practical.
The lesson from Ukraine is the importance of having access to drones. It doesn't take any remarkable mental feats to realize that if your primary source of drones is China, then that access may not be reliable in the event of conflict with China.
Reducing the diversity of your supply chain and instead making your self so incredibly vulnerable that all an adversary has to do is fubar your own domestic supply chain (because imports have long been banned) is way less robust than maintaining imports. If you actually wanted what you claim, you'd allow imports while taxing or subsidizing until they look roughly break even with domestic offerings.
Your position is completely untenable here and relies on it being easier to destroy multiple 'industrial bases' plus the US drone industry rather than your straw man of just the "entire" US industrial base.
Even going off your theory that the US drone industry is not easily sabotaged, it can't possibly be easier to sabotage the US drone industry plus all the import pathways (which you would otherwise have to re-establish). That is why you chose this dismissive fake-quote rather than address what I've said.
I am not arguing it is easier to destroy the world's industrial capacity than just the US industrial capacity. I am saying that in the situation where you have so utterly devastated the US mainland that it is incapable of producing drones, the war is over. If you defeat the US then you defeat the US.
Of course I am rather dismissive of the claim that this is a small feat. I accuse you of not fully thinking through what exactly it would take to fubar domestic drone production.
I see, you think my argument is moot because a successful sabotage or halt of domestic drone production is a victory condition for war.
It's an interesting strategy to sidestep the conversation; rather than acknowledging the superiority of having redundant international supply chain you can just suggest it doesn't really matter anyway if US drone capacity is gone because at that point the war is lost.
I don't see the evidence for why this must be true, whether you think it is a 'small feat' or not.
> I see, you think my argument is moot because a successful sabotage or halt of domestic drone production is a victory condition for war.
No, I claimed that to fubar the domestic supply chain was a victory condition of the war. Sabotage can be repaired or bypassed, halts can be unhalted. But to fuck up beyond all reason the US domestic industrial capacity, i.e. to render it so that it can not assemble basic electronics of the sort that are used in drones at all with no ability to get production back online within a strategically meaningful period of time, yes that means the war is over. At that point drones are the least of our concerns. Everything you are fighting for has already been destroyed, the death toll is already catastrophic, the enemy is clearly superior by a massive factor, continued fighting at that point would be suicide.
Now I am not arguing that a redundant international supply chain is a bad thing, I am opposed to banning all foreign drone firms. But that being said, the claim that it is obviously superior is the extraordinary claim requiring evidence. As we clearly saw in 2020, international supply chains are incredibly vulnerable to disruption. Can you be confident that a foreign nation supplying us drones would be on our side in the event of a major conflict? Would all of their suppliers be on our side? Even if they are all on our side, would they be able to ship materials and products between themselves and to us unimpeded? Would they still be able and willing to do so when we are being beat so bad that our domestic industry has collapsed? A strong international supply chain is a good supplement to domestic production capacity, but the claim it is a superior alternative can not be taken as a given.
Silly me, I thought we were talking about the supply chain of drones. You merely wanted to argue against a straw man that literally the entire US industry was destroyed. Since for some reason that is necessary to destroy the domestic supply chain of the thing we were talking about.
Again, not a straw man. It is necessary to destroy the entirety of US industry to destroy the supply chain of drones. Drones are incredibly easy to manufacture, among the very easiest. It does not require highly specialized machines or exotic skillsets. Components can easily be substituted and designs easily modified to match available resources. There are tens of thousands of manufacturers in the US with the capability to produce such devices. If something happens to a random electronics factory, that production can move to a different electronics factory.
To knock out out the domestic drone supply chain, such that it can not quickly be brought back online, you need to create a situation such that none of these manufacturers are able to make drones. Of course if there is no one who can make a drone, there's no one who can make a missile guidance system, there's no one who can make fighter jets, there's no one who can make radars, there's no one who can make radios, there's no one who can make spare parts for any of these systems and more out in the field. If you still had any of that capability, you would still be able to make drones. Losing the capability to make drones means you have been completely and utterly knocked out of the fight.
Again, I accuse you of not previously thinking through what the supply chain of drones is, and thus your argument is indeed quite silly.
> It is necessary to destroy the entirety of US industry to destroy the supply chain of drones.
I was hoping you'd say that, because it cleanly proves my case. Allowing importation of drones won't destroy the drone supply chain; in your own words that would require destroying the entirety of US industry, which importing drones cannot do even if Chinese drone imports or functionality is suddenly cut off.
You've thus crushed the premise and neatly rested the case in my favor. Because you can't possibly simultaneously argue destroying the entire US industry is required and also argue all it takes is flooding and then poisoning the market with import drones.
> then that access may not be reliable in the event of conflict with China.
Some might call that poor pre-planning. If you're about to go to war with your biggest supplier, you'd be well advised to stock up on supplies before firing the first shot.
Satellite synthetic aperture radar can have a resolution of like 6 inches. I can't imagine consumer grade drones are significantly improving on this, and even if they could do better I would question the utility of higher resolution data for anything military related.
It's not like weapons targeting needs to have high precision data. Robotics or drone planning definitely doesn't need high precision data. Nah. You're right. Higher precision data is absolutely useless to everything.
Hint: these are not independent, random samplings. Turns out when you eliminate restrictions on campaign finance the people who run corporations, the people who get elected, and the people hired and appointed by those elected all wind up being aligned.
It's like commenting that it's weird everyone in any sort of position of power in Russia just happens to be a Putin supporter.
EVs provide a lot of storage, but people tend to drive during the day and charge at night, so it might actually exacerbate the storage issue. Increasing access to charging stations usable during the day such as in employee parking lots helps, but short term storage is definitely going to need to increase.
I was being slightly tongue-in-cheek, but if we stopped fighting one another and built a planet-circling grid (I have ofc made a modest proposal for a US/Europe interconnector including wind generation along its route) then the issue would become transmission from where electricity is being generated to matching (EV) charging demand.
Or you could call them interconnectors strung with solar and wind generation.
In any case, if PV is available from somewhere on the globe much of each 24h, and cars are plugged in to recharge then (typical UK cars are parked ~96% of the time), then it's mainly a transmission problem again, maybe?
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