The Crazy Years

clock_2023-02-16

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Why “small”? Give the kid credit for including a table clock housing so that it could be distinguished from a clock on a clock tower.

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Sounds like the decendants are asking the university to put their money where their virtue signaling is.

More great families that have supported the now “woke” universities should sue for return of their donations.

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Some avant-garde applications of cultured (“lab-grown”) meat:

Scientists and designers from the US have created a ‘grow-your-own’ steak kit, which uses human cells and blood to pose a question to the cultured meat industry.

The Ouroboros Steak, named after the ancient Egyptian snake that eats itself, can be grown from cells scraped from the inside of your cheek and fed serum from old donated blood.

We are currently working on: the Siberian tiger, leopard, black panther, Bengal tiger, white lion, lion, and zebra.

We have previously discussed cultured meats here.

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Potemkin Steel:

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So the plant will use hydrogen instead of coal, and the hydrogen will come from electricity generated by replaceable sources like windmills. Presumably the electricity to drive all the steel-making equipment will come from the same source. Let’s hope the wind does not ever drop while the plant has a cauldron filled with molten metal.

One can’t help but notice that the BBC’s photo features a diesel-powered backhoe in operation building the site. Maybe that backhoe was built using very much cheaper steel from a coal-fired plant in India or China?

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uturn_2023-02-17

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Curious. If only New York had another airport. Or Boston. Or Philadelphia. Or the DC Swamp. Presumably the passengers would have been less inconvenienced by landing at another US airport. So what was the real reason for sending the plane back to New Zealand?

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https://www.yahoo.com/news/usaf-grounds-kc-135-stratotanker-003617035.html

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https://www.yahoo.com/news/atlanta-tesla-thief-more-90-021331854.html

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Yet they still have a low birth rate:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/japan-weighs-finally-lifting-age-084511572.html

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I’m more curious about where they got the gas. Airliners generally have low reserves as weight eats into profits, so they calculate the amount of fuel the weather will probably require, plus the diversion to their published secondary, plus some small margin.

The other question is, since ALL commercial flights require IFR flight plans, AND those generally require a secondary airport if conditions at the primary deteriorate to the point of the plane not being legally landable, what was their secondary - and why didn’t they use it.

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In recent times there is so much incompetence that when I ask a logical question like yours, I immediately ask the follow up is it just pure incompetence.

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Another article reported the airline saying that landing at their alternate would have tied up the aircraft for several days, and they needed it for other routes.

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Excellent question! It is worth noting that a great circle route from NZ to New York involves flying across much of the breadth of the United States – not far from airports like LAX, DFW, ATL, ORD. As a passenger who has from time to time been on diverted flights, I would much rather have been landed at an alternative airport in the US and then made my own way to my final destination on another airline. The plane could have returned to NZ not far off its original return time.

In the meantime, the airline now has the problem of a planeload of passengers whom they still have an obligation to transport from NZ to NY. That is going to tie up a plane.

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In this case, the plane had only gotten about as far as Hawaii when they received news of the JFK terminal closure. They would have had to arrange flying on to the U.S. mainland, finding an alternate able to accept the passengers, and arranging onward transportation for them. Then they would probably have had to “dead head” the empty airliner back to New Zealand, at substantial expense, to maintain the schedule. Since it had the fuel to return to Auckland, that was a simpler solution.

If they had reached the U.S. mainland before receiving the news, they probably would have made a different decision.

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In other words they thought it was cheaper to blow the gas for the equivalent of a one way trip, then have to do it again - for free, as the pax had already paid, than to go to an alternate, discharge the pax, and then find some work to help pay. for the trip home. That way they wouldn’t have totally lost a plane load of gas, which they do this way.

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