Human nature is weerd.

Good and useful list, but there's no point in watching teevee news anyway.

That kid is back.

Anybody notice that Dad sounds like Beezertwelve Washingbeard?

I personally have had a Profound Hollywood Experience™ at this storied institution. (But my date was a married woman from work, so it was going nowhere.)

First there was the chair, now there's the barbeque.

Crid, that is awesome. Planespotting pro tip: If you're looking at the front of a jet airplane's engine, and the opening kind of looks like a flat tire, you're looking at a 737.

Sticks, but no stones.

https://twitter.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1141595100545507328

You'd know better, but IIRC the weird shape of the cowling is an adjustment to retrofit new, better engines on existing airframes, providing essential ground clearance.

In other words, the sort tomfoolery which eventually cascades into the 737 Max 8 nightmare.

HRA = health reimbursement arrangement. Emphasis mine, but if it decouples your health insurance from your work place that's a win.

Enter President Trump and his team at the National Economic Council, led by Larry Kudlow. The council found an elegant way to give employers the opportunity to voluntarily convert their health benefits from a defined benefit into a defined contribution. For example, an employer could fund an HRA for each worker and their family, which they could then use to shop for a plan that best suits their needs.

The administration estimates that as many as 800,000 employers — mostly smaller businesses — will choose this option, expanding health care choices for 11 million workers in the next decade. These employers will benefit from having fiscal certainty over their health expenditures. And workers will benefit from being able to choose their coverage and take it from job to job.

https://www.twincities.com/2019/06/20/avik-roy-trump-could-revolutionize-the-private-health-insurance-market/

Facebook booted from Standard & Poor's index of responsible corporations.

Color me surprised.

A reminder about Facebook, and in support of Gog's link.

Excuse me, but… what? A reporter from the Daily Beast can just pick up the phone, call up Facebook, and have an official there reveal one of their user’s personal information? How does that work? One might expect that they wouldn’t be doing that for anyone other than a law enforcement official with a warrant.

https://hotair.com/archives/2019/06/03/kevin-poulsen-symptom-not-disease/

"You'd know better, but IIRC the weird shape of the cowling is an adjustment to retrofit new, better engines on existing airframes, providing essential ground clearance."

It is. The engine itself is called the CFM-56; it's a collaborative effort between Snecma of France, and GE. The funny thing is, it was originally designed for a project in the early 1980s to put modern engines on a bunch of old DC-8s. They built about 100 engines for that project, and then Boeing came along and wanted to use it for the second-generation 737. Because of the ground clearance issue, CFM designed a "special" variant of the engine, with a smaller fan (the thing you see in the intake) and a bunch of the accessory stuff moved around in the nacelle so they could give it the flat bottom. This "special" variant has far outsold all of the other variants.

And yeah, the ground-clearance problem is really the root of everything that has happened with the MAX. CFM developed an entirely new engine for it, known as the LEAP-1B. It has a much larger fan, enough so that the flat-bottom trick wasn't going to work. To avoid having to re-engineer the landing gear to give the airplane more ground clearance (which would have had a lot of knock-on effects), they moved the engine way forward so that it's mostly in front of the wing rather than under it. That engine placement causes a pitch-up (the plane wants to climb) motion when the engines are throttled up. Boeing tried to compensate for that with software... and we all know what happened.

I was still working for Boeing around 2009 when there was a bunch of internal discussion about whether they could squeeze one more generation out of the 737 (which was an early-1960s design), or go to an entirely new design. They 787 had gone over budget, and they had had some big charge-offs due to acquisition costs and accounting rule changes, and the decision was that the company couldn't fund a new design. And there was competitive pressure from the Airbus A320neo. I was not close enough to the 737 program to really have an informed opinion, but I was rather suspicious of it just because I knew what compromises had been made with the third-generation 737s, and it was a matter of how much more blood could be squeezed out of that turnip. The MAX systems, like the NG versions that preceded it, still has a lot of vestiges of 1960s system design -- it's not quite as steampunk as the original, but it's not as up to date as a 787 or an A350.

Regarding the B737: there's a reason they're called snow suckers.

Are the progressives attempting to kneecap Floppy Joe Biden?

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/06/20/limbaugh_joe_biden_is_finished_its_over.html

Stolen Rolex(es?) in the vajayjay is totally Florida Woman.

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/its-another-florida-man-friday/

Smollett not out of the news.

it's not that this is wrong, it's just that Bezo's Amazon is Google's greatest competitor for world (financial and logistical) domination.

Hey Radwaste! The TRUMP family! Billionaires! Special cell phones that we'll never know about!

Idiots!

Idiots!

Yeah, maybe.

Or maybe the idijit is Floppy Joe Biden making promises he knows - and we know - he can't keep.

Biden Promises to 'Cure Cancer' If Elected. Here's Why That's Laughable.

https://www.livescience.com/65717-biden-cancer-cure.html

The WSJ has an article about how the divorce rate is falling, especially so for millenials.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-divorce-rate-is-at-a-40-year-low-unless-youre-55-or-older-11561116601?

I just wanted to put this comment out there for everyone's enjoyment:

"Research on women and their sexuality suggests that the majority of women need MORE variety to remain sexually engaged, and tend to lose interest in sex much more quickly in committed relationships. The claim that women find it "emotionally unpleasant" to have varied partners is precisely the patriarchal social stigma that still lingers - even in 2019, women are invariably judged harshly for having greater numbers of partners or for being more sexually open, while men are celebrated for it.

See Daniel Bergner's "What do Women Want?", Esther Perel's "The State of Affairs," or really any modern study of intimate relationships."

Congrats Jolly Patriarch, you are doing a good job from keeping women from slutting it up as they so desperately desire. Or as someone else put it 'These scientists aren't so scientific.'

> Boeing tried to compensate
> for that with software...

We notice in that stream of tweets that the software guy was saying 'But software wasn't the problem! The software worked!'

And maybe it did. But someone in this chain of exception-makings (Engine mount! Nacelle layout! Cowl shape! Software compensation! Pilot training!) should have stood up and said something about first principles.

Okay guys, so none of you fucked up your assignment, but hundreds are dead anyway.

You're all blameless and/or forgiven, but I hope like Hell the plane never flies again.

I mean, like, what is the actual solution to this problem? The constraint is that a major new airframe design is so cosmically expensive that nobody can afford it, right? Something similar has been going on in the car business. Turning the Falcon into the Mustang was novel in 1965, and nowadays no manufacturer would dream of getting a single line of cars out of a platform.

I don't see how women's lib or Asian/Indian brains or new Linux distros or cryptocurrency is going to make this go away. All the 3D printing in the world isn't going to help if a modern engineering venture requires years of work from enormous teams of fantastically expensive talent.

(Had a rental this week, a Ford Fusion hybrid. Not glorious, but not miserable, either. But there were only a couple hundred miles on it.)

Side note, apropos of nothing:

I read the ingredients list on a beef chorizo package yesterday.

Yeah, I'm pretty much done eating THAT. *shudder*

Story of my life:

Why Am I Always Hungry?

Some moar inspiration.

I take it back. I wandered a little bit, and not drunkenly, but laterally, in an exit lane, and the dashboard said "Driver rest suggested." It was a very quiet night on a quintessentially lonely highway.

I don't care for this "suggestion."

I especially dislike the idea that the car, when asked, will report all such "suggestions" to law enforcement when asked.

> Joe Biden making promises he
> knows - and we know - he
> can't keep

We all understand that there's no genuine, heartbreaking, flesh-and-blood affinity which these savages won't exploit in a synthetic way to convince voters that they are in fact mortal beings at work alongside the living, right? They're actually daywalkers, the worst of our worldly realm, and we all know this.

He gets to pretend that it doesn't matter that he can't keep the promise, because he'll score pathos-points anyway. They're the cereal box-tops, the proofs-of-purchase, for actual human emotion.

His presumptive (and presumptuous) voters, and there are millions, each have a fantasy about which particular lever of power they would pull if they could get away with it. Even if he has no such delusion, they'll take the "promise" as an affirmation of his commonality.

I hate him.