If compliance were the goal, then I would be inclined to agree with you. However, this lawyer is suing first without any notification first that the shop is non-compliant. That's what makes it come across as predatory.
> These “shakedown” lawsuits, added Morin, are often based on small, “technical violations” that can be easily fixed if a letter is sent to the business owner. But under California law, a disabled person cannot claim money if they send the business owner a letter with their complaint first.
It looks like if a claimant sends a letter they would not be able to sue for damages. That seems like it might really limit any perspective plaintiff's options.
That depends. Is the plaintiff's goal to encourage a business to comply or is it to get paid? If compliance was the goal, sending a letter would always be the first step.
But if a claimant does send a letter and that letter gets ignored, what's their recourse if they can't sue? Send another, more angrily worded letter? That will show the defiant business owner what for! They'd likely have to find someone else to do file suit.
I'm not a lawyer and I'm sure that article is simplifying things, but using the information given, I would also sue first.
And it's actually comparable to the _intended_ failure mode of a 737 Max. If the system fails you can't let the computer control the trim, so there are manual trim wheels provided and you switch off electronic trim. Like the steering wheel of a large modern car, these wheels are mechanically connected to the thing you want to change but if you're feeble like me you'll struggle to even move them which is why the computer was in the loop.
As I understand it large trucks existed prior to power-assist, they just hired big strong chaps who could wrestle the steering.
We probably don't want (and Boeing doesn't want) to make 737 Max certification have a "Physical strength check" where you need to exert so-and-so much turning force for so-and-so many seconds or you can't fly their plane. So probably trim wheels need a re-think, whether that happens as part of the 737 Max work, its immediate aftermath or not for years because this incident scares manufacturers away from changing anything about trim.
Seismic shifts in safety considerations do happen, we haven't seen the last of them. And they aren't always ultimately for the better. Titanic had a few effects, many of them really good, but one notable one is that it pushed the narrative that you need to provide and test a LOT of lifeboats on an ocean liner. Titanic, as you can probably all recite, did not have enough lifeboats. But in practice lifeboats are very much a last resort for an ocean liner captain. You've got a whole lot of civilians who are incompetent at sea at the best of times, probably panicking and now you're trying to successfully get them into smaller boats under supervision of a relatively smaller number of crew. Some of them are likely to be injured or even die. A ship's master would prefer _anything_ over putting passengers into lifeboats, except them all drowning. Almost always the sensible course of action, taken by the ship's master, will be to take the still working ship to any port and unload the passengers. Yes even if the ship is somewhat on fire, or has grave engine problems, almost anything except actually sinking right now.
Meanwhile just owning the lifeboats means your crew have to keep testing them and servicing them, each time also has a chance of injury or death as crew fall into the water, boats fall on the crew, and so on. So owning a suite of lifeboats for your ocean liner (which you weren't planning to crash into an iceberg at any time) is probably a net negative in terms of injuries and deaths.
>We probably don't want (and Boeing doesn't want) to make 737 Max certification have a "Physical strength check"
Actually, I think they absolutely should. And then it should be made illegal to have a plane that has any such requirements, so these planes should be deemed unairworthy, and Boeing should be forced to scrap them. Either that, or female pilots should be able to claim discrimination, and every female or otherwise not-strong-enough pilot should get a free lifelong chief pilot salary as part of the settlement.
Basically, this plane should never have been built. It's a 1960s design, and because of crappy regulations that allowed this, Boeing kept making this 1960s tech because it was "grandfathered". Newly-built planes should not be allowed just because they were OK 50 years ago, when they aren't good enough according to modern standards.
I'm guessing you meant "bigger"? Otherwise I don't know what a bogger trim is. The wheels already have servo motors, but understandably the cut-out cuts those out also.
In some different articles I read, the change from 0.6 to 2.5 came after flight testing of the aircraft when it became apparent that the MCAS system needed greater authority to function properly. That part of it was totally normal. The major error, however, was that the documentation was not updated following the changes. That created a situation where some people were looking at documentation that no longer reflected the true system.
This sounds like a commercial operation. They're obeying the law, staying below 400ft, and operating in a rural area. It seems like the news articles are doing their best to make this sound bad when there's nothing nefarious going on.
The article states that small drones must be flown during daylight hours according to the regulations. These drones are flown at night, which means they would be in violation of those rules.
These drones don’t sound like small drones, and the article points out that these are likely over 55 lbs, and therefore subject to different regulations.
The article also suggests that these are not small drones and thus likely not covered under the regulations mentioned.
Also, from the article: "they emerge each night around 7 p.m. and disappear around 10 p.m.". 7-10 p.m. isn't night, it's evening. Yes, in the US it's (probably?) dark by then this time of the year, but maybe they're following some regulation that is defined in terms of time of the day, and not the amount of daylight?
14 CFR § 1.1: "Night means the time between the end of evening civil twilight and the beginning of morning civil twilight, as published in the Air Almanac, converted to local time."
Please note that sputnik is a Russian propaganda outlet 100% financed by the state and known to peddle disinformation. Sometimes they mix good content in to seem serious/relevant, bit even then it often has a spin. In short: you should take everything on sputnik with a massive chunk of salt and I'd recommend to always look for alternative articles.
> Gasses and odors of any type shouldn’t be able to work their way back into a building via the sewer pipes.
I don't see any claims in the article that the odors entered the building via the sewer pipes. What makes you think that was the path that the odors followed? It could have just as easily been through an open window, or the pipe work could have been near an HVAC intake for the building.
I was going to say it might depend whether the angle is measured along the middle of a face or along an edge, but with a face angle of 51.5 degrees I calculate an edge angle of 41.6 degrees.
That's assuming I still know how to trig, and it's entirely possible I don't.
Middle of the face, and probably more like 51.8° originally. That corresponds to base faces measured in turns of a measuring wheel and a height of the same number of wheel diameters, which would be an incredibly sensible way of laying it out (letting the tools do the calculation for you).
pretty easy really. Add acid to water, then add baking soda to the acidic water until it's neutralized. (no more bubbling), then pour it down the sink with more water. Use appropriate precautions, gloves, goggles, well-ventilated area, etc. Once the acid is neutral, it won't hurt anything in the pipes.
But is it acceptable to dump wastewater with Cu+/Cl- ions inside? I've read that according to some regulations in some areas, they are considered pollutants and should not be dumped directly to the drainage.
Or is it something you can just ignore, because at the end of the day everything goes to a wastewater treatment plant, and your volume/concentration is too low to be considered hazardous, and actually not more harmful than the wastewater of commercial chemical cleaners, and well within the wastewater processing capabilities for small volumes?
Can anyone give an authoritative answer to this question?
> The solution must not be put down the drain because of residual copper ions left in it. To make it safe for disposal, you can add sodium carbonate (washing soda) or sodium hydroxide to it to neutralize it, until the pH value goes up to between 7.0 and 8.0, testing it with indicator paper. Copper will be deposited as a sludge. Allow the sludge to settle, pour off the liquid, further dilute it with water and then it can be poured down the drain. Collect the sludge in plastic bags and dispose of it as required by your local waste authority.
Cl ions are fine; dissolved table salt consists of them, plus some cations. The copper is more of a problem, and I don't know the official answer. I'd think that if you could oxidize it to copper monosulfide (covellite), cupric oxide (tenorite), or even fully hydrated copper carbonate (malachite) if you don't have acid rain, that would adequately protect it from weathering and thus allow you to dispose of it safely. But it might be more practical, as well as legally safer, to electrolytically reduce it back to copper and sell it for recycling. Copper, as a semi-precious and semi-noble metal, is recycled actively everywhere the humans live.
I think the biggest problems for chip fabrication waste (not circuit board etching) are HF and nonpolar organic solvents. I'd think neutralizing HF with chalk would yield fluorspar, which is resistant to weathering even over geological timescales. But again I don't know what the official answer is. Maybe dumping fluorspar in your yard will get you arrested.
First warning with neutralizing acids: You're going to release a lot of heat, make sure you have a large thermal mass to absorb it. Someone else mentioned mixing your ingredients with water first. This is why.
From what I understand the last thing you want to experience is an explosion of hydrofluoric acid.
The internet seems to suggest lime (->fluorspar) or soda lye (->NaF, used for fluoridating water) to neutralize HF, but that's two other substances you wouldn't want raining on your head... be careful out there.
Why wouldn't you want fluorspar raining on your head? Just because it's heavy and hard?
I suggested fluorspar rather than NaF because a backyard full of fluorspar is a pretty rock garden, while a backyard full of NaF is a toxic waste dump.
Cu though is an aquatic herbicide (used to rid decorative ponds of all plant life including algae) and can mess up things.
> at the end of the day everything goes to a wastewater treatment plant
Some of these things, especially the photosensitive chemicals in particular ammonium dichromate will annihilate the wastewater treatment plant. Experienced this problem in an industrial context once, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in damages to taxpayers and a giant fiasco. As a result our privileges to use the municipal sewage system were withdrawn and we had to spend tens of millions in evaporation towers since no water could leave our facility ever again.
I used to make my own PCBs at home, and I still really enjoy the technologies that allow making high quality boards from home. I've found for my personal stuff that going through a low-cost fab house is just so economical, and the quality is so good that I usually can't be bothered to do it myself anymore. Still great if you want the learning experience, or if you really need it now.
It's true, that is one of the things about lies, damned lies, and statistics - the more creative you are, the easier it is to invent new record breaking stats.
2000 years seems somewhat arbitrary - would you apply the same threshold to "500 tornadoes within a 30 day span", what about 1,000, what about 10,000?
There probably ought to a threshold where extraordinary evidence is sufficient to make extraordinary claims, otherwise if your requirement is 2000 years, I'm sorry to report that nothing could ever persuade you about climate science, or really most science.
I was thinking more about it, feeling a bit bad about my somewhat glib comment, and I came back to add, I think as long as you can come up with equally impressive sounding statistics pushing the other side of the narrative, it’s no use.
But to your point, annual statistics showing multiple sigma deviation for several years out of a 10 year period, that to me would tells us something has changed.
Then it occurred to me, I don’t know anything about number of tornadoes per year, how much variance is in the data, and what’s the trend like, but a quick Google search brought me here;
And it sure looks like the “Violent US Tornadoes by Year” has massive variance and little to no discernible trend line.
What I learned is that almost all violent tornadoes happen in April and May and some years have huge clusters and some years have very few.
This kind of phenomenon requires a very long historical series coupled with a long stretch of deviation from the norm to be able to say anything meaningful about recent data, other than you are most likely seeing new random output from the same underlying/unchanged function.
It short, I hate news stories about the weather. They need to make something inherent about the world seem new.
EDIT: Here’s another good one from the same site;
“I decided to take a look at the number of tornadoes that have been reported in the Plains between May 16-31 over the past 25 years, from 1993 to 2017. ... The most was 204 in 2004, while the least was just nine in both 2006 and 2009.”
In that ~two week period (which coincides with the current burst of activity) we saw some years 9, one year 204, in the last 25 years.
What’s so discernible about this year in that context?
"Complete tornado records" don't go anywhere near as far back as 1950.
The modern NEXRAD system wasn't even deployed until the early 1990s, and has been upgraded since then. Also, we now have zillions of storm-chasers cruising the highways any time severe weather is in the offing.
> In the early 1990s, a major modernization program within NWS took place, which included the deployment of Doppler radar and a more rigorous spotter training program. In addition, the 1990s saw an increasing number of storm chasers using video cameras and cell phones to document and report severe weather. These facts are likely responsible for the dramatic increase in annual tornadoes reported since 1990.
Also, as recently as 2014, we were in a three year record low period for tornadoes.
> The headline was formed based on the quote from the academic involved:
The headline was cherrypicked from an interview.
> The headline was formed based on the quote from the academic involved:
No, it would suggest that the reporter picked the most sensationalistic quote he could find from a lengthy interview.
> But this constant shoot the messenger to climate change denial will not stop the contents of the message from playing out in time.
I notice that you did not address any of the facts linked from my post, such as the number of tornadoes being at a record low between 2012 and 2014, nor the fact that according to the National Weather Service's own site, the increase in the number of reported tornadoes is largely due to better radars and more storm-chasers looking for them.
