JAL 123 was because the splice wasn’t installed as a splice.

Hubris? No. It was built to comply with the regulations of the time. I think it was # of life boat per ton of displacement or some such. It cannot even be said it was to save money as they had all the lifeboats they were required to - no regulatory corners were cut by the backers. There have been repeated questions…

They aren’t resting. They are feeding the locals.

Around 200,000 other people died that same day. Another 200,000 or so were born. The ones in the submersible were in a novel situation.

It’s a pretext for a drug search and possibly civil asset forfeiture of cash. The speeding ticket is just an extra cash grab.

On an average day 200,000 people die. A few more than 200,000 are born. While any large group going at once is a tragedy of some note, it disrespects the 199,000+ that miss that consideration. On a regulatory basis the sinking of a vessel is concerning; however the loss of hundreds off of Greece and these near the…

The design should include accommodation for process failures, either in the form of a fragment trap or designing it to be unable to fragment.

If you’re in certain parts of Nevada or Idaho, you might think some kind of biblical plague is upon us. It’s nothing like that

Lucy with football.

They didn’t find a plane filled with people; they are unlikely to find her.

Given the image that Pres. Biden is a car enthusiast it seems unlikely he would have participated in this decision. I thought his approach was to let the experts in his departments make technical decisions rather than micromanage.

There will never be a situation that a cop will make better going the wrong way on a one-way street; it’s marginal if they are chasing someone who mistakenly went onto the wrong side of a highway, almost always doing nothing useful in that instance.

Most all Americans over the age of 12 would rather be dead than use a bicycle they have to pedal. As a result when they become drivers the vast majority see bicyclists as obstacles and not from the shared experience of being bicyclists themselves.

Nope - then they go into containers, get shipped to stripper facilities, and the precious metal cores get removed and ground up as industrial waste for export. The ones making the biggest problems are organizations that deal in thousands at a time. They don’t sell to scrapyards.

Change the CAFE requirement by 2% to allow for the extra weight. Beyond that the automakers don’t care if everyone has the same requirement.

I think the solution is to redesign catalytic convertors so they weigh 200 pounds. Use inch-thick steel and bolt it directly to the body. That’s about the same as one US passenger, so it’s not too big a problem unless a thief is trying to drag it from beneath a car and make a fast getaway. Plus - it will never…

Remember quaaludes? They are a complex drug that only a few companies had the facilities to produce. For a long time there were groups buying finished pills, wrapped and boxed. Then the makers got requests for them as loose pills. Later they were asked for just the powder. This was because various drug enforcement…

Yup - no one wants the housing, just the precious metals applied to the ceramic core.

This is the LAPD’s effort to convert (pun) the theft of a catalytic converters into “It’s Your Fault For Not Marking It” and to allow insurance companies to use that lack of marking as a means to deny the theft claim - as if one had left te driver’s door open, engine running, and a blinking sign, “Steal Me!,” on the…

Digging a hole is cheap. This hole needs to be 6 feet deep to match US highway standards of 16 foot clearance. That puts it about 2-4 feet below the neighboring river, at least on this particular day. As the river rises so does the water table. This road is built on top of a filled canal, for an idea of where water…