• 8 Posts
  • 153 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • On the contrary, puzzles can be half the fun, especially if your players are idiots

    There is a Young Black Dragon in my world who was literally never meant to be a major issue for any players but currently has EIGHT player character deaths attributed to him, because the first (level 8) party TPKd when they tried to move deeper into his territory to ambush him after he stole one of their bags, and they all drowned in a bog (trying to help each other and the ones who went to help also getting into trouble). Then there was a oneshot where a second (level 5) party went to his lair to avenge the first one and they also TPK’d because he got a surprise round against them.




  • You’re not wrong, but the comparison I like here is Ruth Bader Ginsberg. She wasn’t just doing her job well, she was one of the best Supreme Court Justicies EVER.

    She didn’t resign when the time was right, and as a result she died under Trump, a republican got her seat, and all the great things she did were swiftly demolished, wrecking decades of work over one single mistake: Not knowing when to step down.

    Now I know the situation isn’t perfectly comparable. But if Trump gets in, then every good thing Biden has done will be swiftly undone. This was a hellish dilemma, but if Biden wants to do his job well, he needs to do that by not letting Trump into the White House again.


  • Oh, this is handy, I specifically avoid these guys.

    Not for ethical reasons or anything, just I had these weird frozen meatballs from them when I was like 7 and nearly vomited myself to death in a holiday caravan’s bedroom before collapsing unable to move for an hour, conscious the entire time and simply unable to make my body respond. 1/10, not reccommended.




  • OK, checking out the article, actually it seems totally innocent on the maintenance side of things- there was a turbine blade fracture during flight. Turbines are generally very reliable but it’s a gargantuan pain in the ass to test those blades because they’re crystalline structures, so a fracture goes from nanoscopic to taking out the whole blade all at once. I wouldn’t expect maintainers to catch that.

    The criminal part is actually way more interesting and concerning.

    Civilian aircraft are built to be safe. I mean REALLY safe. Every system has a redundant (backup) system you can switch to if that system goes down and a way to isolate a damaged system. Planes can fly on only one working engine, or even safely glide down to the ground if they have no engines. We literally blow some engines up in their final stages of testing to make sure they can’t blow up hard enough to take the wing out. Regulations demand it.

    So that’s why this is a criminal case. Because after that engine blade came loose and hit the wing, it ruptured a fuel line…

    In an aircraft that was designed in compliance with regulations, while this would still be be cause to turn around and land the plane, it shouldn’t actually be a safety problem at all. Just isolate the damaged system and switch to the redundant one. And they didn’t have the ability to do that. Meaning that their aircraft design itself is likely out of compliance with regulations and doesn’t meet the minimum safety requirements to have civilians on it. Which is… honesty way weirder, because who the hell signed off on this thing if it had a design issue like this?


  • Yup, most engine manufacture is undertaken by specialists. As a good example, Rolls-Royce is an airplane engine company that sometimes makes cars as publicity stunts.

    HOWEVER.

    It’s not just about who makes engines. Aircraft are meant to last a good 30 years in service and you can’t just ask some schmuck to clean it for $7.50 an hour and call that maintenance. Maintenance is extremely skilled work that tends to be operating under horrible time crunches, especially if a part is suspect and needs to have a plane partially taken apart so it can be changed for a fresh one- a plane that might be due to fly again tomorrow. Maintenance that needs that sort of knowledge tends to have some involvement with the parent company who built the planes, or is even contract work for them.

    Boeing is rather notorious for being willing to put the schedule before safety- we’ve seen that in a lot of other accidents. I would absolutely believe that a Boeing manager skimped on engine maintenance because someone in the chain of command said “Get that plane out of the maintenance hangar today or you’re fired, and damn the safety regulations.”

    But, that’s just my industry knowledge. The actual circumstances could be way different, so let’s go read the article.



  • Very informative, thank you.

    You can kind of see how all these problems would compound with each other and make each other worse. Of course people don’t wand to pay taxes to a government that will waste or embezzle their money. But the government does need money to make things happen that might improve the situations of the everyday worker. The government needs competent administrators, lawmakers and judges to properly regulate the private sector, but the private sector can pay a competent person triple what the government pays because the private sector isn’t subject to laws that force them to be ethical.

    Guess there’s a reason that corruption is such a common cause of failed governments.