Huh. Well, erm, I stand corrected. I’ve just been mixing the packet of powder into sour cream all these years.

Whoa whoa whoa. Mayonnaise?! Ranch dressing is based on sour cream with a little bit of powdered buttermilk. No mayo.

The next 5-10 years are make or break for Ford, too. Of all the world’s automakers, the only ones I’d say are certain to exist 10 years from now are Toyota, Volkswagen-Audi Group, and BYD. Everyone else has fixed costs that are too high for their declining demand.

Ding ding ding. You get it.

Sorry about your Passat. 

Need a more vibrant blue, like BMW Estoril Blue. A complex metallic bronze, like Aston Martin Kopi Bronze. And a darker metallic yellow, like Porsche Saffron Yellow.

No, 700 gallons is a pain to drain and refill, and it’s enough to notice on your water bill when you do. But man, the number of crazy dangerous things I’ve seen tradespeople do.

Yes.

Yeah, fair point.

200 hours on that particular airframe. Not 200 hours in total flying experience.

Yes, and yes.

Oh, chill out, man. Airbus, which is a government-owned-and-run company, has made similar errors in its control systems, and Airbus planes have crashed as a result.

The NTSB has issued plenty of reports that say “well, the particular aircraft system created a situation that was confusing for pilots. And these particular pilots became confused. Partly design error, partly pilot error.”

You do see a fair bit of redundancy in cars. Go read the Bosch ESP manual for how sensor inputs are interpreted to inform brake vectoring, for example. The control systems in cars are only slightly less complex, and they have to perform without any real maintenance or 3rd party systems verification for 20 years / 200k…

That rudder actuator thing was the craziest fucking thing I’ve ever read in an NTSB report.

Pilots *could* disconnect the MCAS. But if you don’t know that’s the thing overriding your control inputs, you don’t know you need to disconnect it.

The MCAS is active even when autopilot (the “No Crash Plz” system!) is off. That’s part of what makes the failure mode so confusing for pilots. “I turned the goddamn autopilot off! Why aren’t the controls doing what I tell them to do?!”

I think you’re right, although angle of attack is with respect to prevailing wind velocity. The vector of that velocity is not always parallel to the ground. So maybe using an IMU would introduce some complexity that is more dangerous overall.

Yeah, this really undercuts the stereotype of the Tesla owner as an educated techie.

Plus, her parents / siblings can bring a civil suit for criminal negligence. Not my area of law, but this is a level of dumbassery that sure seems like it would make for a colorable claim.