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Wednesday’s Forum
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18 responses to “Wednesday’s Forum”
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What’s really bad about the US’s $40 trillion national debt is not the amount of money, nor how much gets paid yearly on interest. Rather is what there is to show for it.
There is no first rate infrastructure, no robust power grid, no high speed rail network, no universal healthcare.
Instead what $40 trillion and the ongoing interest payments accomplished is a large number of billionaires and other wealthy people who hoard an insane amount of capital while they make life more expensive for everyone else.
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Not to put too fine a point on it, the underlying principle in the US is that those are not things done by the government(s), those are reserved for private sector businesses. Whether that’s a good principle is open for debate, I think.
The power in my city is delivered by a municipal utility. Power is obtained through a non-profit power authority owned by the city (and three more cities also with municipal utilities). The power authority owns generation facilities and a couple hundred miles of transmission line tying them all together. They also buy/sell power from/to other regional entities. I’ve never lived anywhere that had electricity this clean and reliable. Recently, the state government passed a law requiring all the generation and transmission entities to join an RTO by 2030. Mine bit the bullet and joined the one available RTO sooner rather than later. There are a number of problems already emerging.
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Some more info on the Amazon Air accident in Miami.
The data readout might indicate an attempt at a go around that somehow didn’t work out right.
Over at the AvHerald, there’s this line in the Sept. 8th entry: “There is no indication in the FDR that speed brakes or thrust reversers were deployed.”
The speed brakes are the spoiler on top of the wing that you may have seen deployed on every landing. They add some drag, but their main purpose is to push the plane downward, so as to increase the force on the landing gear. This increases friction between the tires and runway, and helps in slowing the plane down.
Thrust reversers do what their name says: provide reverse thrust. This also helps the plane slow down.
We know there was no goa round, but now it also seems there was no effective attempt to slow down. I won’t speculate as to why this happened. There are too many options, from some kind of crew issue to faulty training to some kind of malfunction.
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For four seconds they tried to go around. Seems the decision was made it was too late, and they would accept a crash as slow as they could achieve it to be.
From the One Mile article:
-0:30: the nose gear and right main landing gear touched down at a ground speed of 158 knots
-0:23: the brakes were applied, and the plane was at a speed of 146 knots
-0:19: the left main landing gear touched down, and the plane was at a speed of 134 knots
–0:15: the brakes were released and the plane was at a speed of 120 knots, and the throttles “increased to values consistent with go around thrust”
-0:11: the throttles were reduced to idle, the brakes were reapplied, and the plane was at a speed of 117 knots
-0:07: the plane had a lateral, longitudinal, and vertical acceleration change, and was at 96 knots
-0:00: the plane had a final ground speed of 65 knotsSketchy data. Don’t know if those speeds are airspeed indicator or ground speed, and certainly their final ground speed was zero. There is much to discover.
Everybody will be asking them why they didn’t manually deploy the spoilers on a touchdown that far down a mere 8,000ft runway, but I think the go-around attempt clarifies that a bit, a pilot thinking go-around as his bail out plan wouldn’t touch the spoilers.
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Well, this is cheerful.
‘Gambling with our lives’: AI researcher quits Anthropic with dire warning about safety
An artificial intelligence researcher who worked at Anthropic — and previously OpenAI — has resigned, saying both tech giants are “gambling with our lives.”
Jacob Coxon shared his exit in a post on X, warning that the world should “not underestimate the power of this technology.” He added: “These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains, and progress is not slowing.”
Coxon said both Anthropic and OpenAI are “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence,” which refers to a scenario in which AI models can develop a more capable successor of themselves, creating an unstoppable feedback loop.
Apparently it is not just one malcontent.
“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” Coxon said in a follow-up post.
Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s staff lead on keeping the technology aligned with human goals and values, backed up Coxon claims in a follow-up post of his own, though he didn’t quit the company.
“Jacob is correct here — we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans,” he said.
Laissez le bon temps rouler
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I saw that earlier this morning. It’s insane to me that no one with any authority is saying, “wait, hang on a minute…”
What do we do with this information? Do I throw in the towel with my work and just spend what I’ve saved for retirement? Because from what I’ve observed, there are no adults in the room.
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Seen on Xitter:
“We have to build AI that murders us, because if we don’t, China will build it first, and I don’t want to get murdered by a computer that speaks Chinese. That would be ridiculous.” -
I think it is quite likely that we will see some sort of catastrophe at scale that can be attributed to something an AI did. Probably the scale will first be something like 20 people dead.
At which point, the legal system will churn into motion to assign liability to the owners/operators/creators of the AI, and we will see another 20 years of litigation to sort this sort of thing out, which will also have a chilling effect on AI deployment.
Yes, it is definitely possible to have much bigger catastrophes. I think that humans, though, are really good at noticing threats that come from agency, and responding to them.
In contrast, humans are terrible at responding to environmental threats. It’s the difference between “gang members are performing drive-bys” and “Car accidents kill thousands a year”. I think AI will go in the former bucket.
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Some of the things that have been suggested that could be issues are already things that AI can do.
AI can design synthetic compounds, and labs are already highly automated, so hackable. AI can hack into systems, including electricity generation. Shutting off power in the middle of winter to a major metro area? Yep, doable. Shutting down banking systems? Wiping out trillions in currency? Yes, and probably.
It’s un-f#cking-believable that no one has demanded these clowns have some standards. They are all so busy rushing trying to be FIRST that they aren’t thinking.
I hate that these dipshits have billions of dollars at their disposal and this is how they choose to work.
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https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/sep/09/treasury-bond-buyback
The US treasury will buy back $6bn worth of government debt in an effort to alleviate a sell-off in the US bond market, the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, announced on Wednesday.
They know that we can see them borrowing money to buy back these bonds, don’t they?
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I’m not seeing any decrease in interest rates so far. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/dgs10
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/09/trump-911-falsehoods
They list 6, which seems wrong. Either trim it to 5 or expand it to 10.
They’re missing the “Muslims dancing in Jersey City when the towers fell” lie, which is a pretty big one. They would just need three more, which seems very possible, even with Trump’s repetitiveness.
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Thank god Apple finally invented the foldable phone.
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And on the more ridiculous side of the news, El Taco’s private jet, aka Fake Force Bribe, was delayed by 20 minutes after an emergency exist slide was deployed.
It seems to be from a door on the upper deck, which is rarely ever opened on commercial 747s other than for maintenance. So maybe air force personnel were checking the door, and opened it without disarming the slide first.
You do NOT deploy the slide on purpose to test it a few minutes before the flight, even if El Taco lies to that effect.
I don’t think the slides are tested anyway, not after being installed on a plane. It’s not easy to reset one. Remember they have to inflate quickly, so they use either nitrogen or a nitrogen/CO2 mix, compressed to 3,000 PSI (that’s like 200 times the air pressure at sea level). You don’t just deflate it, fold it, and stow it and go on your merry way.
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