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Bigger issue is that the engines need to be idled for a while anyway to get up to proper temps, etc. you don’t want to start the engines and jam them into full takeoff thrust 5 seconds later.

True, the engines need to be warmed up and the hydraulics need to be pressurised, but given e.g. airbus recommends single engine taxi without APU (SETWA) warming up the engines probably doesn't take that long in the grand scheme of things. Definitely not the 15~25mn of taxi. From the sources I can find, "normal" warmup takes 2~5mn depending how long ago the engine was shut down, unless outside temps are exceptionally low, and you can do that while reaching the end of your taxi.

> but given e.g. airbus recommends single engine taxi without APU

This is wrong, unless you have a source for it


The software in modern engines wouldn’t let you do that anyway. The engine startup process can be quite long - several minutes in a 737 MAX - while the engine’s ECU brings things to proper temperatures etc.

But with e-taxi, the startup cycle could be performed while taxiing, potentially saving airlines time on pushback as well as fuel/maintenance cost savings.


False. Gold and silver have intrinsic value beyond their use as currency.

True, but only a minuscule fraction of it is used for that purpose. If that were the sole source of its value, it would be worth pennies per once.

https://pse-info.de/en/scale/price - gold doesn't stand out, there are a few similar ones (Rhodium/Palladium/Iridium/Platinum). I haven't checked, but we'd probably find the gold price sits in a boring-looking distribution of the prices of other elements. Probably an exponential or something that could be mistaken for it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prices_of_chemical_elements if you prefer wikipedia.

If it wasn't radioactive, poisonous and pyrophoric people would probably all just leap into the Neptunium market.


That is obviously false on it's face.

If it were only worth pennies an ounce, numerous industries wouldn't be paying what they do for it. The fact that many industries value it at several thousand dollars an ounce is self-evident from their continued use of it.


This is interesting to think about: For gold I'd say the demand is coming from both industries and from people who want it as a store of value. If it was only used as an industrial chemical, then surely the price would drop because there would be less demand.

Some bitcoin advocates will talk about how useful it is as a currency, and I wonder how much bitcoin is actually used for purposes other then to hope you can sell it to someone else for more than you paid.


If the price dropped, it would be even more in demand and reach equilibrium. Gold has several unique mechanical properties, being the most corrosion resistant metal and one of the most electrically conductive, as well as being able to be flattened into extremely thin sheets and drawn into extremely fine wire.

Not for most people. They aren't going to smelt it down and use it to build electronics or jewelry.

For most people the value is what they can receive for it in trade. Which holds for all money.


This is like fusion energy. It's been 4 years away since I've been a child.

I personally regrew my teeth since I was a child. Granted, once.

Fun fact - all of your adult teeth were already there from the start, hiding under(inside?) the gums. We don't "grow" new teeth when the baby teeth fall out - the adult teeth were always there under them.

It may be fun, but it's not a fact. At birth, you likely have all the tooth buds to grow your primary teeth and maybe your permanent molars. Premolar and canine buds typically form during the first year of life. Second molar buds form around age two. Third molar (wisdom teeth) buds don't begin developing until around age five to six and in some folks they don't grow at all.

I have a condition where my lower front permanent teeth never developed. We weren't sure if any of our kids would have the same issue so we discussed it with the dentist. They couldn't tell us if all the permanent teeth were present or developing because there hadn't been enough time for first xrays to show all of the permanent teeth buds growing. Even at age 3.


This is not true. I’ve seen x-rays of a child’s mouth with clearly no adult teeth visible below the gums. Later I’ve seen X-rays of the same mouth with one or two adult teeth below the gums where baby teeth are about to fall out. The adult teeth are there underneath once the baby teeth fall out but they are not there “from the start”. That isn’t even to mention the size problem.

so I used to think this (till this past week), it's not quite true. Yes, ther are images of showing child skulls with lots of teeth. those are generally hyperdontia.

A regular child skill looks more like this x-ray

https://ccdcsmiles.com/userfiles/651/images/IMG_4253.jpg (from a dental clinic I found while searching).

Yes, you can see the adult teeth, but not all of them, and not like the hyperdontia cases.


Did they get bigger as you were "Growing up"? Then we grow teeth, you're just being pedantic about whether they're brand new or not.

It's not pedantic in this context unless you already have a way to set up fresh seed teeth.

The engineers at the car company that designed the body in the first place are also artists.


They have as much control over this as I do, i.e. none at all.


Now look at something like the Bede BD-5 and see how many of it's amatuer builders IT killed. Death rate on the first flight alone was something like 10%.

PS: AIrcraft aren't assembled in cleanrooms.

Frankly, you don't have a damn clue on and are getting basically everything wrong in the process


We have decades of data saying that isn’t true. Homebuilt aircraft have much worse accident rates than factory built aircraft.


On the other hand, if you'd bought two laptops... you'd have another laptop.


While that is true, it's not like I can use two laptops at once


In cars, yes. In the aviation world the fuel is very much still leaded.


> In the aviation world the fuel is very much still leaded.

In the general aviation world, to be precise: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/leaded-gas-wa...

The fact that GA is the quintessential arrogant rich man's hobby makes the environmental and human health externalities of it all the more disgusting. However, looking at it from a glass half full perspective, GA does exist at that sweet avocational intersection of "expensive" and "deadly," often putting a significant dent in the finances of those whom it seduces before killing them.


Why lie? If you have a valid point, make it. Don't pull made up stats out of your ass.

The US isn't close to being the highest per traffic fatality rate in the western hemisphere.

I count 14 countries higher.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...


When people say "western" they often don't mean "western hemisphere" but the "first world". So Peru wouldn't be "western" by this definition but Australia might be.


Yeah, HN just loves the term "The West" / "Western", which weirdly includes Australia and New Zealand, but excludes Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. (What about South Africa? Unsure.) To me, it is better to say something like "G7-like" (or OECD) nations, because that includes all highly developed nations.


It’s referring to a specific culture of people.


No, what they really mean is "a subset of typically rich typically western europe that I can cherry pick to prove my point" though anywhere formerly colonized by a European power and any developed nation in Asia is fair game depending on context.

Notice eastern europe is nearly always left out of social issue discussions.

Some Mediterranean bordering nations are always left out of government efficacy discussions.

It's not about comparing like-ish for like-ish. It's about finding a plausibly deniable way to frame the issue so that the US gets kneecapped by the inclusion of West Virginia or 'bama New Mexico or Chicago or whatever else it is that is an outlier and tanks its numbers while the thing on the other side of the comparison exempts that analogue entirely and this makes whatever policy position the person doing the framing is advocating for look good.

You see this slight of hand up and down and left and right across every possible topic of discussion in communities composed of american demographics that generally look towards Europe for solutions for things.


No, they're generally referring to the set of countries depicted in these maps [1], for the reasons described in the article [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world#/media/File:West...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world


I thought the UK ranked well, I didn't realise it ranked that well.

Maybe there's something to be said for left-hand driving, I see Japan ranks very highly too. ;)

The real reason is I guess we take road safety seriously, we have strict drink-driving laws, and our driving test is genuinely difficult to pass.

I seem to remember road safety also featuring prominently throughout the primary national curriculum.

And of course, our infamous safety adverts that you never quite forget, such as: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKHY69AFstE


    > Maybe there's something to be said for left-hand driving
Is this written in jest, or is there something more serious behind it? Off the top of my head, I cannot think of an obvious reason why "road handedness" (left vs right) would matter for road safety. Could it something about more people are right-handed so there is some 2nd order safety effect that I am overlooking?


Their comment was in jest, but I've wondered before if left vs right hand driving could affect safety. As you note right-handed people are more common. The countries with the highest percentages of left-handed people are around 12-13%.

In countries that drive on the right then drivers use their dominant hand for any controls that are on the inward side and their other hand for the control that are on the outward side of the driver.

Generally that means that the non-dominant hand handles exterior lighting, turn signals, windows, and locks. The dominant hand handles windshield wipers, transmission, and anything on the center console such as the climate and entertainment systems, and often also the navigation system.

In left drive counties that is mostly reversed for right-handed people, with the possible exception of the exterior lighting, turn signals, and windshield wipers. Those exceptions are the controls that are usually on stalks attached to the steering column. From what I've read sometimes manufactures use the same stalk positions in left and right drive models instead of reversing them like they do the rest of the controls.

Could dominant vs non-dominant hand for operating things on the center console make a difference? If everyone obeyed safety recommendations I'd expect it to not make enough difference to be noticeable, but not everyone obeys safety recommendations 100% of the time.

If someone for example tried to type in a destination using the on-screen keyboard on the navigation system console while driving I'd expect that they would take longer to do so if they were using their non-dominant hand, so they would be distracted longer.


> Could dominant vs non-dominant hand for operating things on the center console make a difference?

Large airplanes usually have a pilot on either side of the center console, and they AFAIK take turns operating the airplane, so if it made a difference, I'd expected it to be studied by the aerospace industry. Given that I've never seen it mentioned on any of the airplane incident reports I've read, it probably isn't a big factor, and I see no reason why it would be different for cars.


Yes, it was in jest.

  ;)



The US is just a big place. We drive a lot. Average annual mileage is about 13k vs 7k in the UK.


The USA don’t do very well on the deaths per km metric either.


> The US isn't close to being the highest per traffic fatality rate in the western hemisphere.

Is this a serious comment? Is that actually what you think they meant by "Western"? When people talk about Russia vs "the West", do you also think they mean Russia vs the Western hemisphere?



It gets you the non-existance of a PDF full of reversible black boxes.

Can't leak a file that doesn't exist.


But you can leak the content of a file that you printed out and couldn't redact properly by using an inferior method


But such a document is obviously unredacted. A black boxed PDF appears to be redacted, but isn't. Accidents happen.


Now that you've shifted the goalposts back closer to the original discussion, what's your point? Yes, you can leak the "nonexisting" file in multiple ways, including the printed one, and yes, "accidents" happen. So are they more likely to happen if you ban digital search and force paper and ink redaction instead? Are they more likely to happen if you black out digitally before printing or underline digitally and ink out physically?

And the "obvious word needle in a haystack of many thousands of pages" isn't as self-healing as you appear to think it is.


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