Because it was designed to operate in the same atmosphere as we had in the 1950's, it's highly customized with unique instruments and communication gear specialized for NASA and its systems, and they have a big shop filled with tools and spare parts accumulated over half a century to adapt to whatever conceivable thing comes up. They could drop a few hundred million and replace their WB-57s, but there isn't a real need.
> Are they machining their own engine parts?
The WB-57 engines are basically downrated, high-altitude versions of the Pratt & Whitney JT3D/TF33, not the original Avons. They are still in service today in military applications, so servicing them isn't some extraordinary concept. Plus, they don't see many flight hours, as these aircraft (there are 3) spend most of their time in a shop getting reworked for future missions, so engine overhauls aren't that frequent.
> I would imagine it's incredibly expensive to maintain.
All such aircraft are incredibly expensive. However, the Canberra is as old fashioned rivet and sheet metal design, and modifying it is relatively straightforward compared to most of what is manufactured today. It was designed as a bomber and has a large fuel and payload capacity, and a handy bomb-bay with large doors, filled with racks of mission specific gear.
I suspect this one can be repaired and returned to service. That's not uncommon for controlled belly landings. It did not appear to incur excessive damage in that landing, and there are mothballed Canberra in various boneyards around the world to provide replacement parts.
I've grown to dislike the smell of 3-in-1. It's not awful, but once it gets on the skin you smell it for hours, even after washing.
I've started using M-Pro 7 gun oil for the same tasks. Not that it solves world hunger or anything, by I always have some around, I don't end up smelling volatile organics for the rest of the day.
3-in-1 is pretty unpleasant, I agree. I use it as a cutting fluid for drilling steel mostly and it's not any nicer when hot. Perhaps I will try some of your gun oil.
Best smelling shop liquid I've yet encountered is Marvel Mystery Oil. It's amazing.
Pluses and minuses as cutting fluid. It's not sulfurized or chlorinated, like actual (and lower cost) cutting fluid. On the other hand, the vapors are non-toxic, being mostly polyalphaolefin synthetic oil, and it likely is better than 3-in-1 as cutting fluid for adhoc use, if only due to significantly lower vapor pressure and higher flash point.
Came to post this; Ballistol works brilliantly; and can also be used as a leather conditioner, wound dressing, & marinade for carne de cheval, with the addition of some juniper berries and a little rosemary.
There are a whole raft of "ideals" the Founding fathers held that we've obviated, beginning with who got the franchise. I can confidently say that government being the payor for ~50% of all healthcare, and operating the databases necessary to monitor all the money and behavior, was certainly not among their "ideals" either.
This was predicted by many, long ago. The predictions were ignored because they were inconvenient to desires and ambitions. Yet here we are. One wonders if it were known at the time, before we constructed these schemes, that one day there would be fabulous machines that would wade through all the (predicted) streams of data, hunting people, if perhaps those predictions might have been heard.
The cynic in me says "no." At some point, as the streams of politics oscillate, they occasionally converge very strongly, and all doubts are overcome, and the ratchet makes another click.
But it's not all bad news. In the natural course of events there is a high probability that one day, you'll have such folk as you prefer back at the helm, and they'll have these tools at the ready. If you make the most of it, you'll never have to suffer the current crowd ever again!
> It sounds like their Election Commission takes their job very seriously.
A key part of India's system is the Elector's Photo Identity Card (EPIC), required to cast ballots. Similar obligations are present wherever election integrity is taken seriously.
No un-answered serious questions. Serious questions are asked, regularly, as well as un-serious ones by cookers. But, the serious questions, the audit, the sense "did we do ok" is continuously asked.
We have an independent electoral commission. I'm not saying its incapable of being reproachable, nothing is "beyond reproach" but I have yet to hear a serious, non-cooker accusation any political party has tried to stuff the electoral commission.
What we don't have, (and I think should have) is capped party donations. I'm tired of the money aspect of who gets the most billboards.
We also have silly bad behaviour emerging: People doing their billboards in the same style and colours as the electoral commission. Often in foreign language support roles, using words like (not a quote) YOU MUST VOTE FOR PARTY A LIKE THIS which I think is really trolling the voter badly.
>Similar obligations are present wherever election integrity is taken seriously.
The flip side is even more true. If someone is claiming they care about election integrity and isn't willing to pair that with funding of an equivalent ID system that is both free and easy for voters to acquire, they don't actually care about election integrity.
I’d like to respectfully challenge you on this. There is no chance anyone can ever create an effortless-to-get ID. Even if it was like the census where they sent someone to your house repeatedly to try to find you, take your picture and print an ID on the spot, it wouldn’t be effortless because you might not know where your passport or birth certificate are.
Some people probably are so badly organized and/or ignorant that they can’t manage making and keeping one single DMV appointment even once every 15 years so that they could get an ID (I think we can all agree that an “expired” ID would do fine, as long as the picture isn’t so out of date it can’t be verified).
Anyway, it’s only those people who would be “disenfranchised” under a voter ID system and I’m not convinced our government would benefit from incorporating the opinions of someone so unserious. It’s ok that some things in life are reserved for people that have invested a tiny amount of effort once in their lives. There’s also not a free and effortless way to feed or bathe yourself.
By the way, a state ID costs $15 in Mississippi and $9 for “eligible people” in California.
The main problem with obtaining ID is that is takes time, and it's not evenly distributed. In the US its not folklore that people of color are less likely to have ID, it's a statistical fact.
This can be fixed, but you will notice the people who champion voter ID never bother trying. Naturally, the only reasonable conclusion is they like it that way. They're not stupid, after all.
>Anyway, it’s only those people who would be “disenfranchised” under a voter ID system and I’m not convinced our government would benefit from incorporating the opinions of someone so unserious
I hate calling something a slippery slope, but I don't know how else to describe an argument that is fundamentally "Sure, it will disenfranchise people, but who cares about those people anyway?" Once you accept that people's rights can be taken away simply because protecting those rights is an inconvenience, then none of us actually have any protected rights.
Exactly, a freedom you have to pay to access isn't a freedom. "If people can't get it together to pay a modest $9 fee for the 'don't get imprisoned forever' tax, who cares if they get throw into the forced labor camps?"
Beyond this point: voting isn't just a freedom, it's a duty in a civilized democracy. We don't enforce it like Australia does, but anyone who not only doesn't care if it's performed, but is sanguine about it, isn't fully on board with government by the people.
Voting itself takes effort (even to vote stupidly, where you just vote a straight ticket blindly and pick all the judges and ballot props at random). Voting in a way that's good for society (meaning you read about the candidates and ballot props and actually think through their true implications) takes WAY more effort. Why is it so important that we enable people who can't be arsed to make more than a trivial effort at all to vote?
There are already a bunch of arbitrary de facto restrictions:
- If you can't read, you won't be able to use your ballot.
- If you don't have transportation or any time off to vote, you can't vote in person. (Also the main objection given to requirements to get an ID card).
- If you don't know where you'll be living consistently, mail-in voting is problematic.
We accept that there will be people whose lives are so chaotic and messed up that voting probably won't be easy for them. So why is the requirement of identity proof, which is not more difficult to overcome than the above existing barriers, such a trigger to some?
> anyone who not only doesn't care if it's performed, but is sanguine about it...
My response is, anyone who cares so little about casting a vote that they wouldn't set aside time once in a decade to get an ID for the purpose of voting isn't fully on board with participating in government by the people -- and I'm totally fine with that.
I also don't see the point in the Australian idea, especially since paying $20-50 is trivial for anyone who's not homeless, and uncollectible (moot point) if you are actually destitute. You're still getting basically the same set of people in the voting booth anyway -- only the ones who give a shit about voting.
> By the way, a state ID costs […] $9 for “eligible people” in California.
A state ID is not required to register to vote in CA[1]. (The requirement is CA ID number or last-four-of-SSN or a third complicated way, but I'm assuming ID or SSN is attainable for nigh everyone eligible.)
That fascinates me. Intel deserves a lot of credit for PCI. They built in future proofing for use cases that wouldn't emerge for years, when their bread and butter was PC processors and peripheral PC chips, and they could have done far less. The platform independence and general openness (PCI-SIG) are also notable for something that came from 1990 Intel.
> Really needs an agent-oriented “getting started” guide to put in the context, and evals vs. the same task done with Python, Rust etc.
It has several such documents, including a ~1400 line MEMORY.md file referencing several other such files, a language specification, a collection of ~100 documents containing just about every thought Jordan has ever had about the entire language and the evolution of its implementation, and a collection of examples that includes an SDL2 based OpenGL program.
Obviously, jkh clearly understands the need to bootstrap LLMs on his ~5 month old, self-hosted solo programming language.
Because it was designed to operate in the same atmosphere as we had in the 1950's, it's highly customized with unique instruments and communication gear specialized for NASA and its systems, and they have a big shop filled with tools and spare parts accumulated over half a century to adapt to whatever conceivable thing comes up. They could drop a few hundred million and replace their WB-57s, but there isn't a real need.
> Are they machining their own engine parts?
The WB-57 engines are basically downrated, high-altitude versions of the Pratt & Whitney JT3D/TF33, not the original Avons. They are still in service today in military applications, so servicing them isn't some extraordinary concept. Plus, they don't see many flight hours, as these aircraft (there are 3) spend most of their time in a shop getting reworked for future missions, so engine overhauls aren't that frequent.
> I would imagine it's incredibly expensive to maintain.
All such aircraft are incredibly expensive. However, the Canberra is as old fashioned rivet and sheet metal design, and modifying it is relatively straightforward compared to most of what is manufactured today. It was designed as a bomber and has a large fuel and payload capacity, and a handy bomb-bay with large doors, filled with racks of mission specific gear.
I suspect this one can be repaired and returned to service. That's not uncommon for controlled belly landings. It did not appear to incur excessive damage in that landing, and there are mothballed Canberra in various boneyards around the world to provide replacement parts.
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