A bus is generally a far more pleasant experience. When taking bus you are not herded like cattle into pens based on priority queue status. When a bus has technical issue, they don't hold you hostage on-board for hours to avoid paying compensation. in Europe, a long-distance bus has the comfort of a business class airplane seat.

Just the fact that people can’t talk on the phone whilst on a plane makes it infinitely better than a bus.

Starlink on flights could put an end to this

hooray for technology!

Multiple lifetimes of thousands of the most brilliant engineers collaborating, sharing algorithms, protocols, mining, smelting, developing tooling to create tiny rocks that can think and blasting them to hover over the earth just so we can slightly annoy the person next to us with a conversation about the weird stuff growing between our toes.

From a technical standpoint, the ability to make VoIP phone calls from planes exists right now, at least on planes with newer and better internet connections. It hasn't been enabled because of ferocious customer opposition every time the idea is proposed. Which, frankly, is just fine with me. People can still send emails and messages from in-flight Wi-Fi, no need to subject everyone else to your phone calls.

Could? I flew a month ago on a flight with Starlink. I downloaded 10s of gigabytes of data without hiccups. Calling was not an issue. And it was completely free.

Quite curious, which route was this on?

Not one time have I had a consistent internet connection whilst flying transatlantic on Delta, KLM or BA airplanes, to the point that I regretted having paid for it every single time.

I haven’t been to India for 7 years but I distinctly remember a very productive flight from Delhi to Heathrow on wifi while I was sshed into a machine and working on something for hours with no issue - far better than the signal I get on the train from London to Manchester.

Qatar/Virgin Australia, Sydney->Doha. I’ve never had really good connection either before this, and I tried many-many times. That was the exception when it worked as intended.

Phones in seats have been a thing for decades, WiFi has been a thing for 10-15 years.

Do you not own a pair of headphones?

Having been trapped on a 2 day flight to Madeira via Madrid, Porto and Porto Santo, eventually your powerbanks and headphones run out of charge.

EU621 comp was denied because the aircraft could not land due to wind.

I did spend about 12 hours in a fancy all inclusive on ryanair's dime (a bus arrived at the airport un-announced to the airport staff or us customers) while some slept in airbnbs and on the floor.

You can reimburse your costs of unplanned overnight stay, even when it happened because of weather. So those AirBnBs were also free. Even the taxi to and from there. Ryanair was unlawful if they hadn’t given this information.

Btw, there are power banks and headphones which can easily handle 2 days.

Surely you can recharge them on the ground too. Do Ryanair not provide in seat usb sockets? Wouldn’t surprise me if they saw an opportunity to charge £5 for their use (log into wifi and activate them etc).

Especially that it’s completely normal to talk with each other on planes.

The infrastructure for air travel requires all that for safe travel

As a pilot myself I know why all the holds exist and while not perfect, the majority of complaints aren’t random bullshit they are flight safety issues

The fact that people demand luxury because it went from veblen good to commodity is the problem

Different airlines have different policies. e.g. others you don't get stuck waiting on the plane because they don't load passengers while a mechanic is still working on the avionics.

Do you love that bus so much that you want to sit in it for 30 hours?

SciFi becomes reality.

Saw some funny bugs I don't remember from the original, but it looks a lot better.

Georgism is the only long-term solution to this problem. It's not like there is even disagreement on that; any economist would tell you so. However, the Landed gentry have no interest in solutions.

Which problem and which economists?

You can definitely find household named economists that don't agree with Land Value Taxes. Hell there's a grassroots push in the US to eliminate property taxes.

For 150 years they sat in their universities teaching land value taxes are the optimal form of taxation.

I do like Georgism, but taxing wealth and not a transaction is just going to transfer wealth from poor to government. Similarly how capital gains tax has 0 effect on billionaires and just rip off investors (aka the poorest).

> Similarly how capital gains tax has 0 effect on billionaires and just rip off investors (aka the poorest).

Capital gains tax has zero effect on billionaires precisely because it is not levied on them in most cases. When one's total wealth hits high tens of millions suddenly they get access to instruments to use their wealth without triggering "taxable events". Probably the most well-known example are loans against shares.

This eliminates [some of] downward pressure on some asset prices, triggering positive feedback loop on price and thus wealth transfer.

Loans needs to be paid off tho...

And taxable events do happen they are just deferred.

Taxing land is taxing unrealized gains, hence it would tax billionaires. In addition, land value tax rates don’t have to be flat, so the poor have no reason to pay them.

If anything, taxing transactions hits the poor, as they don’t have the ability to borrow against assets they don’t have, and all their work (which is a transaction) is taxed.

Depends on your definition of fun. In both Braid and the Witness, eventually you come across a puzzle you cannot solve and have to use Google to find the answer, because the game never bothered to even hint at how it could be solved. That's pretty much the opposite of fun. Just pretentious; I would expect more of the same.

My wife who had never played a video game beyond Pokemon played both of those games and completed them with no assistance, as did I, so I'm not sure what you're talking about tbqhf

That says more about you than about the game.

Blow has actually talked about those puzzles in streams, said he regrets it because more players than not stopped playing the games at that point. It's the definition of bad design to implement some untested abstract idea without giving the player any hints.

There are no hard puzzles in Braid, at least not that are required to beat the game, so not sure what you mean. I never played the witness so I don't know about that game.

There is one puzzle piece that you can't reach early in the game; to get it you have to bring a later piece back to the puzzle, put it in its place, then jump on the platform that is drawn on the puzzle piece. But most people just give up in frustration trying to reach the piece because the game hasn't given you enough information to know you need come back for it later.

Braid also has the stars which are so well hidden that I can’t imagine anyone finding them without a walkthrough (though some people obviously did in order to make the walkthroughs).

The Witness is different, it really does teach you everything you need to 100% it. I cheated on the ship puzzle but it’s totally possible to figure out.

Oh there are plenty of standards, including an official one. The problem is nobody uses them. Thai writing is weird, and between the tones and the character classes and silent letters might as well just make some shit up. My birth certificate, drivers license, and work permit all had different spellings of my name on them.

IIRC, the road signs for “Henri Dunant Road” were spelled differently on either end, which was ironic, because at least that did have a canonical Latin form.

Japan was not colonized, although it was briefly occupied.

Sri Lanka was a colony and Sinhala does not have a standard as far as I know. If there is one no one pays any attention to it.

In 1967 the Chinese people in Hong Kong were fighting against the English, English officers killed dozens of Chinese to retain their control on their "democracy". A city they had violently seized decades earlier to push opium and heroin on Chibese people, against the Chinese authorities wishes.

Now white, professional westerners who lost control of China weep and gnash about their supposed moral superiority over China.

At least they are using it for Biodiesel. This happens daily in China, hundreds of thousands of people collect used oil from drains/sewers and sell it to a refinery. However, the refinery doesn't turn it into bio-diesel; they clean it up and resell it as new cooking oil.

Any Boeing other than 777/787 does not use fly-by-wire.

However, that doesn't illuminate the possibility of these errors. Whilst the flight-controls are mechanically linked, the autopilot/trim is electric, so is still suspectable to bit-flips.

Still a lot of software involved in controlling the aircraft. The 737 Max incidents were eventually tracked to software quality issues, IIRC. All those old designs are being upgraded with modern avionics, so even if the airframe and linkages are old-school, the inputs are being driven by digital computers. At least that’s my understanding. I confess to not being a “plane guy,” though I have spent a lot of time traveling in planes, and I have stayed at a few Holiday Inn Express hotels.

The MAX issues are not software.

The plane is fundamentally unstable because of the huge engines (which they have to improve fuel efficiency).

The only way to correct that is software with an angle of attack sensor.

They only installed one sensor though.

Does that sound like a software error or a fundamental physical design flaw?

From what I've read, the plane was not unstable, it just handles different, but stable; pilots just need to do the aircraft-specific retraining to as they usually do whenever you encounter different aircrafts with different handling characteristics.

Boeing wanted to pretend there is difference at all, to skip on retraining.

> The plane is fundamentally unstable because of the huge engines

I'll leave the googling to you, but this isn't true. The plane isn't fundamentally unstable, and certainly not like a modern fly-by-wire fighter.

The 737 Max is unstable in the pitch axis. There is no debate about that.

It might help to read what aerodynamic instability actually means before making such a claim: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stability_derivatives

Outside of the typical flight envelope it absolutely is like a fly by wire fighter.

That's why there's an angle of attack sensor, to keep the plane outside of that failure range.

The high-level tasks are beyond what any single intern could reasonably hope to complete over a summer. Obviously a space agency has to set ambitious goals, but this is just unreasonable.