> "When accomplished at 1.4 Mach or greater (as required per the SpaceShipTwo checklist procedures and the PF-04 test card) the feather system remained retracted due to a sufficient closing pre-load from the feather actuators and favorable, tail-down aerodynamic loads."
> "On normal rocket-powered flights, checklist procedures called for this step to occur after rocket motor burn out while in space just prior to apogee."
I still haven't seen any information on exactly why this particular flight test card called for actuating the feather mechanism at some time other than apogee. Were they trying to test the flying qualities while feathered at a particular dynamic pressure? It doesn't make any sense for the copilot to move the unlock lever while the aircraft was still accelerating unless the test card called for it. And if it did, then did the engineers and test planners fail to take this possible failure mode into account before the flight?
The feather is always unlocked during ascent, in order to make sure the unlock mechanism works. If the unlock mechanism fails at apogee, the ship will not be able to decelerate appropriately and will overspeed and break up in reentry.
Your comments about modern air-to-air missiles may be correct, but in 1968, the beyond-visual-range (BVR) engagement was more of a bomber general's fantasy than a reality. Kill probability of the AIM-7 Sparrow missile in those days was less than 10% [1].
Pilots' accounts of air combat in Vietnam routinely mention the firing of a salvo of missiles --rather than just one-- when a firing solution presented itself, due to the notorious unreliability of missiles.
The specific aircraft I was referring to, the F4 Phantom II, first flew in 1958 and was introduced to service in 1960. The missiles that the designers had in mind were the Sidewinder and the marketing promises of the Sparrow.
And also, the sparrow had a decent hit probability -- that is, unless the target aircraft released chaff, in which case it was very unlikely to hit.
Instead of asking ourselves which particular jobs are "bullshit" and which are not, maybe we should ask why we need or want "jobs" at all. If every citizen received some minimum universal basic income, what might we do with our time instead of going to jobs we hate?
I think the point might be that we've reached a state of technological progress where many of the functions of a modern civilization can be handled by a very few people. Maybe it's time to redefine what we mean by "work" and why we do it.
>"If every citizen received some minimum universal basic income, what might we do with our time instead of going to jobs we hate?"
I think you need to quantify what you mean by that. It seems that every time I hear this UBI idea being defended with a sentence similar to the one you made, the tone set implies that something "beneficial" will happen that does not because they go do jobs they "hate".
I.e. If we free ourselves from going to work we will... And then insert anything from "do art", "be creative", "come up with novel ways to improve the world", or something of the like.
(Feel free to correct me there, but that seems to be the implicit argument/idea behind that sentence you made)
> If every citizen received some minimum universal basic income, what might we do with our time instead of going to jobs we hate?
We might do amazing things. Then again, we might have a world where nobody scrubs toilets and lots of people make lousy paintings.
"What do I want to make/do?" and "what produces value for others?" are not always in sync. Having to sell your labor means there must be at least some link between supply and demand.
Perhaps we will just find that the wages paid for scrubbing toilets will increase, till we find that people are indeed willing to scrub toilets. Why shouldn't a job of that sort be well-compensated?
Universal basic income doesn't intrinsically mean less work being done. It just means different leverage in the negotiation process.
But it does mean that it's much easier for a person not to do anything that benefits others. There would certainly be people who say "I can get drinking money without working" and do nothing but drink. If you need to work to eat, it gives you some incentive to sober up.
I think people have a natural need to work and contribute things, but we also have laziness tugging at us. Enabling someone to waste their life is not doing them a favor; it impoverishes them in a way that lacking money alone cannot.
Wouldn't a UBI simply be inflationary? That is, rather than making 0 you make 1500 (say). But since everybody is making 1500, then it would be the same as making 0 again.
So unless we have strict blocks on pricing things, UBI seems nonsensical.
I've heard this argument several times before, but I've never understood the reasoning behind it. No matter how you look at it, a basic income is redistribution of wealth. If we finance a basic income by just printing money, then yes it would be inflationary, and the value of the basic income, along with the currency as a whole, would depreciate. But it certainly wouldn't be eliminated, and wealth would have been redistributed.
Printing money isn't the only way to finance a basic income, however. A much more sane approach is through effectivization, by eliminating bullshit jobs and (most) existing means-tested benefits, as well as increased taxation. There's nothing inflationary about this approach.
It doesn't work that way. How could it possibly work that way? That would mean that the first item you buy each pay period would cost $1500 + its old price, and all other items were normally priced. Perhaps prices for all goods would rise, but you're still able to buy things, unlike the "making 0" scenario.
At the very least, it skews peoples' motivations for work. I.e. Do nothing and get 1500, or work as a low-wage say woodcutter/garbage man, and get 1600. You're effectively doing a shitty 9-5 job so you can get 100 (or whatever $X) more than the guy next door doing nothing all day.
People say that's liberating and "equality" for all, buy I say it's completely the opposite and directly unfair to a lot of people.
And now that I re-read your post about it being an inflationary scenario, it makes more sense. All of a sudden, you have a reduction in individuals willing to do hard/hateful labor for a small amount more than basic income. This reduces their supply, and thus the salaries go up. Essentially, it sounds like it would make 1500 the new 0 as you put it. Not sure where to follow that train of thought further, though.
There is some reduction in incentive to work, but the idea is that most people will still want more money so they'll keep working.
Also you're assuming people have the right incentives today. Is working two minimum wage jobs to make ends meet really what you want people to do?
This is really about changing the relative negotiating power between employers and employees. Having some fallback income makes it easier to take time off to go to school, start a business, or find a better job. Also it goes right back into the economy as revenue for some business, so it's hard to see how it can be bad for business.
Yes, shitty jobs would actually pay well. That's hardly unfair is it? The labour market would become an actual free market, where prices are properly determined by supply and demand, not by "motivation for work", more aptly known as wage slavery.
Here's a recent video from NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center discussing the Automatic Collision Avoidance Technology and the DROID UAV platform specifically.
And I think this simple ignorance illustrates the looming problem for the UAV community. As a commercial pilot and experimental aircraft owner, I can tell you that if the UAV community does not start to self-police these types of excursions, either by education or with software solutions (like the GPS-limiter mentioned in the article), then the regulating bodies will do it for them.
Most HN readers would agree that there is huge potential for UAV technology, but one needs only to look at the glacial progress of certified aviation technology in both the US and Europe to see that over-regulation can and does stifle innovation.
For readers familiar with the differing regulations in the US for experimental category amateur-built aircraft vs. certified light aircraft, you've seen the wide gap between what is possible to do with technology and what is legal to certify. In most cases, an aircraft built in your garage is far superior in display and sensor technology than your average certified airplane. This trend has only recently started to self-correct.
The point is, US organizations such as the EAA and AOPA do a tremendous amount of work to educate their members and to lobby Congress to ensure that what limited freedoms we have are maintained. I think the UAV community needs something similar or their industry will get regulated to death -- especially after the first drone gets ingested into a jet engine.
there's no such thing as "UAV community" in this case. the vast majority of stupid flights are made by the general public getting a "drone" in some shop and flying it in "funny locations" such as airports.
These have no idea what they're doing and do not participate to forums/communities/etc thus are difficult to regulate.
Blaming it on the UAV community is actually also being ignorant. The actual community is literally spammed by posts about flying safe/where to fly/etc.
I think that a decent analogy to these drone pilots are laser-pointer owners pointing at airplanes. That's totally retarded, doesn't achieve anything exciting - it only risk other ppl's life with low chance of getting caught. Just like drones attempting to "film" 747's landing and the like.
I agree completely with the laser-pointer analogy, and I think UAV operators who make "stupid flights" will eventually suffer similar federal penalties to the laser operators.
I wouldn't say I "blame" the UAV community at all, because, as you say, there are always outliers who can't/won't be educated.
But since I imagine the UAV forum-readers and would-be professional operators are interested in keeping government oversight out of their industry as much as possible, I'd say it's their responsibility to take action on this matter, much like the EAA and AOPA do with personal aircraft.
> I agree completely with the laser-pointer analogy, and I think UAV operators who make "stupid flights" will eventually suffer similar federal penalties to the laser operators.
Much easier to find the source of a laser pointer than the person flying a drone though. I'm not sure how you can deal with that.
The best thing one can say about the F-35 is something akin to what rocket designer Robert Truax once said about the Space Shuttle, that it "represents a truly marvelous implementation of an absolutely absurd concept."
If you've read the "Boyd" biography mentioned here by other commenters, you'll recognize many of Boyd's and Sprey's criticisms of the so-called "F-X" fighter procurement program (which eventually led to the F-15) in his critique of the F-35. [1]
None of the Fighter Mafia actually "designed" any of these aircraft, but Boyd, Sprey, Christie and others did play a pivotal role in changing how the Pentagon defined and proved the specifications of the fighters it was buying. The F-X was supposed to be a larger, swing-wing, multi-role behemoth, similar to the abysmal F-111, which Boyd proved to Pentagon brass to be inferior to virtually all enemy fighters, by way of his brilliant "Energy-Maneuverability" theory. In this way, Boyd and Sprey influenced the final design of the F-15, but to a much lesser extent than the designs of the F-16 or A-10. [2]
One key point Sprey brings up in several of his other interviews on the F-35 topic (which he curiously leaves out of this one) is that, regardless of the capabilities (or lack thereof) of the F-22 or F-35, neither will ever be as successful as the historically-great fighters like the P-51, F-4, F-15, or F-16, simply because they'll never be built in sufficient numbers.
For a fighter to be great, its pilots must also be great, and to do that they must train regularly and often, something which has proven impossible with the low dispatch reliability of these complex fifth-gen fighters. Sprey notes that in WWII, the U.S. P-51 fleet triumphed over the vastly superior German fleet of ME-262s, by first developing tactics that could defeat this amazing jet (i.e., shooting them down while taking off or landing), and because there were simply more P-51s available to fight.
Sprey and Boyd were right about a few things: build them light (which helps make them fast and maneuverable), build them cheap, and build lots of them.
To add to the WW2 examples - The German Bf-109 wasn't the best fighter of the war by most standards, yet it got flown by arguably the best fighter pilots in history (thanks to the insane Luftwaffe policy of keeping the best pilots on the front line in perpetuity), and so is responsible for more aerial victories than any other aircraft.
Also small, also cheap, and the Germans built scads of them. You could really see the difference in training and experience, however, toward the end of the war, where badly trained German pilots were thoroughly outclassed by their Allied opponents.
Actually, portions of the SR-71 skin were corrugated, much like the older (and much slower) Ford Tri-Motor, because the high temperatures of Mach 3+ flight caused the skin to expand and contract dramatically throughout the flight profile. This corrugation was actually against the wishes of the aerodynamicists, who would have preferred a smooth surface.
