Meh.....

More than 50 U.S. companies are developing advanced reactor designs that will bring enhanced safety, efficiency and economics to the nuclear energy industry.

X-energy, located just outside the nation’s capital in Greenbelt, Maryland, is working on a pebble bed, high-temperature gas-cooled reactor that the company says can’t meltdown.

X-energy is developing its Xe-100 reactor and specialized uranium-based pebble fuel that could be available in the market as early as the late 2020s.

Who gives a shit?

Seriously, I mean it.

This design does have advantages -- don't get me wrong.  It's also not new.  The premise is that you construct fuel "pebbles" (about the size of a cueball, so more like "fuel rocks" rather than pebbles) that contain the fuel inside an allegedly "impervious" sphere.  The pebbles, being spherical, allow gas (Helium in this case) to pass between them, which takes the reaction heat away, and you use that to produce electricity through a traditional heat exchanger mechanism.  The moderator is graphite and in the reactor vessel; the fuel is cycled through from top to bottom, which means it is continually refueled in operation, with each fuel unit running for about three years.

Traditional water-cooled reactors use zirconium for the fuel rods.  Zirconium is "transparent" to neutrons; that is, it neither interrupts their passage nor does it get "activated" (absorbing them and becoming a radioactive isotope.)  This is good; you want what looks like a window to the sun for neutrons, because they have to get into the fuel in order to cause fission.

But zirconium has some problems.  Chief among them is thermal tolerance.  This is not a problem provided the reactor remains flooded with water, since water has a critical point of ~3200psi and ~705F.  Therefore you must keep the pressure below that and the temperature below it too, since water is also the moderator.  Above 705F it's steam no matter the pressure.  For this reason water-cooled reactors tend to run around ~1,000psi in normal operation for a BWR and ~2,200psi for a PWR.  BWRs are simpler in that as water boils it loses its moderation; this is a negative feedback on the power level and makes designing control systems, and their inherent safety, easier.

However in the event of loss of circulation (the ability to dump heat) or coolant (e.g. pipe break, etc) you have a severe problem because zirconium melts at ~3,300 F -- and once it does, you're screwed.  Silicon carbide, which is what the pellets in a pebble-bed reactor have their outer shell made of, doesn't melt until nearly 5,000F.  That's a huge safety factor.

But, there's a rub.  The "safety analysis" has run tests that postulate that in an accident the temperatures should not exceed 1,800C.  I note that this is below the melting point of zirconium, yet as we know in Fukushima and elsewhere, that temperature is indeed exceeded in bad situations.

There are also general issues with graphite moderators; they're manageable however, albeit at some cost.

So how safe is this thing?  Well, good question.  But in the end, it doesn't matter.

No fission design is safe end to end, which is all that matters, until and unless you have a closed fuel cycle.  The problem is that the burn-up in a TRISO fuel reactor -- that is, a pebble bed, while much better than a BWR or PWR (20% .vs. ~10%, roughly) still sucks in that 80% of what you put in there comes out and has to be reprocessed somewhere or discarded as high-level waste.

There is no reprocessing in the United States today, and hasn't been since Jimmy Carter shut it down.  Therefore any plant design that does not inherently separate and reprocess its own fuel as an inherent part of its operation is manifestly unsafe and unsuitable for deployment until and unless there is a viable reprocessing cycle available in the United States.

There is only one way to safely deal with most transuranics, which remain dangerous for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years.  You have to put them back into a reactor and burn them up.

Short-lived isotopes that reach a stable, non-radioactive element with half-lives in the range of single-digit years or less we can deal with.  After 10 half-lives basic mathematical theory tells us that the substance is no longer dangerous no matter how high-level of radiation it emitted originally.  But that's not something you can fudge; anything with half-lives in the tens, hundreds or thousands of years has to be returned to a reactor and reduced in this fashion until it reaches either a stable isotope or one with a half-life of less than 10 years.

Period.

Now there will always be a small amount of waste that isn't amenable to this, but if it's small enough in volume it never has to leave the plant until the plant is decommissioned.  What we cannot accept is a no-reprocessing paradigm, which is what we have now, where fuel comes out of these units full of hundred or thousand-year or more half-life highly-radioactive elements for which we have no rational disposal mechanism.  Without reprocessing we cannot put those elements back into a reactor and burn them up and we have nowhere we can safety put them either.

Nuclear power safety is not solely about meltdown safety, although pebble bed designs look promising in that regard.  In addition these designs have other challenges, one of them being that they use Helium as a coolant -- and Helium is a non-renewable gas that is in short supply and in addition it's a very small molecule so it leaks like crazy.  Helium, incidentally, is used as a coolant in these units for a number of reasons -- among them is that it is not easily activated (that is, it doesn't capture more neutrons easily) and when it does it decays extraordinarily quickly, so it doesn't form dangerous reaction products.  This means that if it's released (e.g. due to a pipe break) it won't hurt anyone as any activated isotopes will decay before it can get out of the building.  It also has a pretty good specific heat ratio; that is, it carries heat well as gases go (much better than air, for example), so it's a good choice for that reason as well.  Being inert it has no reactive issues with the various materials inside the reactor either, which is a big bonus.  And it has a very low neutron cross-section, so it doesn't interfere with the fission reaction itself.

Finally, due to the use of gas as a coolant and the much higher temperature tolerance of the fuel these units run at materially higher temperatures than a common PWR or BWR, which means they're materially more thermally-efficient.  It also means they can, at least theoretically, be run in places where large-volume water cooling is not available (e.g. inland, and not near oceans, fault lines or huge lakes) with reasonable overall efficiency.  That's a plus.

But on the downside our supply of Helium is basically all from natural gas wells, where it's a trace component of what comes out of the hole.  It's completely non-renewable and non-capturable, in that it is so light it effectively disappears into the upper atmosphere when released.  For this reason consumption of it is a serious long-term problem since our ability to get more of it is inherently tied to natural gas production.

Nonetheless the big problem with all of these types of reactor designs remain -- there is no sane means of dealing with the waste products out of these units.  Of the fission designs currently known and on the board there is only one that is amenable to continual, on-site reprocessing that burns up basically all of the high-level reaction products as part of its normal operation.

That's the LFTR, which uses Thorium as its fuel, is started on Uranium (since Thorium is fertile and not directly fissile) and since the fuel is dissolved in the working fluid it can be reprocessed chemically online in the plant itself, thereby allowing on-site burn-up of most of the high-level reaction products.

Oh, and it is also passively safe since are no fuel pellets or rods that can overheat, crack and release the material inside, and we know that passive safety system works because it was run for several years at Oak Ridge in the 1960s and when the scientists went home for the night they literally just turned the power off to the systems and walked away.

I wrote an article on a viable hydrocarbon replacement strategy here, and also covered it extensively in my book Leverage in Chapter 10.  It's as valid today as it was then; go read it.

The LFTR was abandoned, incidentally, because being Thorium fuel-cycle based it is almost entirely unsuitable for the production of nuclear bombs -- and we wanted dual-use nuclear technology.

Go figure.

So we have Louisiana poised to sign an anti-abortion Bill, Alabama has just passed one, and there are others.

On the other hand as I noted New York and Virginia started this latest round of insanity, with both states basically attempting to declare that a child in the process of being born could be aborted.  Then the US House refused to pass a bill that would require a fetus that survived an abortion attempt to be given medical care as a child.

I don't know how much more-clear you can get than that as to intent; the House clearly stated that a born infant, who was attempted to be aborted but survived, has no right to life even though it is now independently alive outside of the mother.

Essentially, the left -- all of it, including all elected Democrats in Congress, have declared that there is no such thing as a baby until and unless the mother declares that it is.  At any point prior to that declaration she can declare it nothing more than an unwanted growth irrespective of that "unwanted growth's" ability to survive independently, independently of her negligence, or independently of the random odds of survival, which said child beats, while she's actively trying to kill it.

Let's cut the crap; the left's position on this is transparent and obvious: A woman who doesn't want the financial and personal costs of raising a child must have the ability to evade that at any moment up to the baby's first breath, no matter what happens from that instant in time forward.  She may defer that decision through personal avarice, negligence or even intentional misconduct up to that moment in time and none of that bears on the merits of the decision.

At the same time a man has no rights whatsoever, even if his sperm is stolen from a used condom.

The far right's position is equally-clear: Your legs were open if a women or your pants off (or at least unzipped) if a man.  Tough crap; you undertook an adult act, now behave like an adult.  If you got raped that's unfortunate and a criminal act but even under that circumstance it's not the baby's fault so you don't get to kill the child.  Go after the rapist.

These are polar opposite positions.

The USSC in Roe, however, played Solomon and "split the baby" so to speak.

And when these laws get to the USSC, and they shall as they're intended to do exactly that it is my belief that the Court will do the logical and appropriate thing.

Specifically, I don't think Roe falls.  In fact I don't even believe that despite the statements from some of these state legislatures they expect Roe to fall.  They may wish it but I doubt very much they expect it to.

But I do believe the USSC will send back these laws with a remand consistent with Roe.

Let me remind you what Roe actually holds:

• In the first trimester a woman has the presumption of supremacy for two reasons -- personal medical privacy and the fact that no 1st trimester fetus can survive outside the womb.  That is, the fetus is inextricably tied to the woman in question and if she acts as an adult, having undertaken an adult act or as a victim of a crime implicating an adult action forced upon her, she, in concert with a physician that elects to do so under his rules of conscience has the right to stop the progression that would otherwise lead to a birth.
  
  
• In the second trimester there is a balance of harms and benefits to the woman which is left to the states to decide and regulate, with the exception found below (that is, a state cannot require a woman to sacrifice her life.)  That is, the people of the 50 states have the right to tilt the scale of supremacy in either direction provided they can justify it on the basis of maternal health. There are likely to be 50 different answers depending on the specifics of the circumstances found in said states -- and that's constitutional.  This balance of harms and benefits test is logical because any woman who desires to know she is pregnant before the expiration of the first trimester may discover same and by that point she has had a reasonable amount of time to contemplate the risks and benefits of both paths available to her in the context of both state law and the regulation of medical practices within a given state.
  
  
• Beyond fetal viability (which is almost-exactly concordant with the start of the third trimester) the states have the right to put into law a presumption that the fetus has a right to live.  At this point the woman has decided either through negligence or intentional action to continue the pregnancy for two thirds of the requisite time.  In addition with each passing day it is increasingly likely that should there be a birth the child can survive independently of that specific woman; in other words it in the event of delivery said child is no more or less dependent than any other baby in that anyone can feed, clothe, diaper and protect it; there is no longer a biological requirement that a given specific woman do so.  Exactly where that line is changes over time but that it certainly occurs somewhere early in the third trimester is a fact.  However, even here the duty is not absolute: A woman is not required to sacrifice her life for said soon-to-be--infant, any more than you are required to stop and render aid to a motorist in a crash.  In fact there is no circumstance, not even under admiralty law on the sea, where you're required to sacrifice your own life to save another.  You may choose to, but you're not required to.  Therefore absent such a clear requirement in trade -- life-for-life or clear and convincing evidence that the mother will have her health severely and even permanently harmed -- states are fully within their rights to bar as a matter of law all third-trimester abortions.

That's what Roe found folks.  It did not confer an absolute right to an abortion at any time.  The Supreme Court has never issued such a ruling.

Ever.

The screaming liars on the left have claimed that Roe in fact goes all the way to birth -- and even during birth.  This is flat-out nonsense.  Here is what was actually held in Roe, from the actual text of the decision:

3. State criminal abortion laws, like those involved here, that except from criminality only a life-saving procedure on the mother's behalf without regard to the stage of her pregnancy and other interests involved violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which protects against state action the right to privacy, including a woman's qualified right to terminate her pregnancy. Though the State cannot override that right, it has legitimate interests in protecting both the pregnant woman's health and the potentiality of human life, each of which interests grows and reaches a "compelling" point at various stages of the woman's approach to term. Pp. 147-164.

(a) For the stage prior to approximately the end of the first trimester, the abortion decision and its effectuation must be left to the medical judgment of the pregnant woman's attending physician. Pp. 163, 164.

(b) For the stage subsequent to approximately the end of the first trimester, the State, in promoting its interest in the health of the mother, may, if it chooses, regulate the abortion procedure in ways that are reasonably related to maternal health. Pp. 163, 164.

(c) For the stage subsequent to viability the State, in promoting its interest in the potentiality of human life, may, if it chooses, regulate, and even proscribe, abortion except where necessary, in appropriate medical judgment, for the preservation of the life or health of the mother. Pp. 163-164; 164-165.

4. The State may define the term "physician" to mean only a physician currently licensed by the State, and may proscribe any abortion by a person who is not a physician as so defined. P. 165.

There is no unrestricted right to abortion, as found by Roe, beyond the first trimester.

Period.

A State may therefore find that abortion beyond the end of the first trimester implicates maternal health, including mental health, damaging same, and so regulate it -- including a prohibition except where the manifest trade-off mitigates otherwise.

A state may not, in other words, enact a law that requires a pregnant woman to sacrifice herself for the fetus she is carrying.  However, beyond the first trimester a state may find as its legislature determines on the balance of harms.

Further, since the states are explicitly in Roe reconfirmed in their power to license physicians and thereby set standards for the conduct of medical practice the State can determine what appropriate medical judgement is -- in other words a State is fully within its rights to declare, for example, that "health" in this context means severe and permanent physical disability (for example) and not something such as "well she doesn't have any money therefore that implicates her health."

The State is also empowered to prohibit any and all abortions not performed by a physician defined by the licensing and practice scheme within in the State.

Note that fetal viability is medically defined as the point where there is a 50% rate of survival.  This is approximately 24-25 weeks or during the sixth month of pregnancy.  By the 27th week the rate of survival is roughly 90% and survival beyond that is >95%.

Therefore an appropriate remand on such a law at the USSC would be:

• Prohibitions on abortion at a state level prior to the passage of three months from last menstruation are inconsistent with Roe and void.
  
  
• Prohibitions at a state level beyond three months may be enacted provided they comport with state-licensed medical practice rules that protect maternal health, provided that they cannot require a woman to continue to carry a pregnancy that, in the reasonable opinion of licensed physicians, will kill her.
  
  
• States may, beyond fetal viability, which is approximately congruent with the third trimester, ban the procedure entirely except where the mother's life or, congruent with the above objective medical licensing standards, serious maternal health issues are implicated.  Note that this does not create a "carve out" for economic or speculative impact (e.g. "psychology") such as, for example where a fetus is known to have a material but survivable defect or deformity.  A state may choose to permit abortion in such a circumstance but is not required to permit it.

That's what I expect the USSC to hold as it is entirely consistent with Roe and yet at the same time upholds most of what these states seek to do.  As such "heartbeat" laws are likely unconstitutional -- but just barely, by a couple of weeks, and as such instructions on a remand would move that barrier to 14 weeks after the initiation of last menstruation.

That decision would in fact not eviscerate Roe -- such a judgment would reconfirm Roe, and leave the States in the position of setting enforceable and definitive medical standards and licensing requirements defining the balance of harms tests for maternal health and the protection (or lack thereof) for fetal life which they are explicitly empowered under Roe to do.

It would "reset" and underline what has been a rampant and outrageous pack of lies by the left as to what Roe actually held -- a good thing that has been needed for the last three decades -- while at the same time moving the barrier on the "heartbeat" people to a legally-defensible place in conformity with Roe itself.  While that change would be significant all-in the states that enacted "heartbeat" legislation would likely find it to be a win as they'd get 90% of what they enacted and which is almost-exactly what Roe first put into place.

Alabama would be the sole exception: they would be forced to accept Roe "as written."

In addition such a decision does not implicate the 1st Amendment (e.g. establishment) where a decision to toss Roe would have severe trouble in that regard.  The Establishment Clause issue can probably be worked around but there's utterly no reason for the Court to twist themselves into knots to go there, and as a result I don't expect them to.

We'll see.

What did I take away from Elon's latest pump-n-dump scheming?

Let's first look at the previous one -- the infamous "420" lie.

"Funding secured" eh?  The company was going to be taken private at $420/share?  When?

Not then.  And not now either with the stock at $262; you'd have to have been insane -- or stoned on 4/20 -- to pay that sort of money and literally burn more than a third of it to ash.

The latest is that Musk said "if you buy anything other than a Tesla you're buying a horse."

Uh huh.  Sure I am.

He claims he has "all the hardware" to do full robotic driving -- Level 5, not 4, in that no driver is required (e.g. a "robotic taxi") in all of the current model production and needs only "the software" to be completed.

Folks there is nothing new about hucksterism.

Theranos anyone?  How'd that work out?

Self-driving vehicles are one of those "holy grail" sort of things in today's hype-filled markets where deception, fraud and racketeering are what drives "earnings" and even corporate existence.  The entire health care space is founded on deception, extortion and racketeering.  What else do you call a "marketing pitch" that has, at its essence, "buy this insurance or you'll get a bill for 500% as much money if you get sick -- and if you don't pay we'll steal your house!"

Guido couldn't come up with a better one, right?

How about so-called "social media"?  "Free and always will be."  Uh huh.  The word "free" means you gave nothing of value in exchange.  If I cut your lawn and you give me food the food is not free.  I provided something of value for it.  That it wasn't denominated in dollars directly is immaterial.  You think it's worth some number of dollars or you'd not give me the food.  Facefucker not only thinks it's worth dollars they report their "ARPU" -- "average revenue per user" -- in dollars!

Their "primary claim" is fraudulent and in a world where fraud was actually prosecuted Zuckerfucker would be in prison, singing soprano and have an asshole the size of a coffee can.

Twatter, Snapchump and others would likewise have their boards and CEOs playing "meatspin" in prison as well.

Quite honestly I'd love to see full self-driving cars provided they are truly autonomous and not reliant on connectivity of any sort.  Eventually I will get old enough that my reaction time and vision will both suck to the point that while a state may be willing to let me drive, I shouldn't.  My mother had a valid driver license well beyond the point that she should not have used it.  She was smart enough not to but kept said license "in the event of an emergency."  I can live with that.

A fully autonomous vehicle will extend the point -- possibly by quite a bit -- where I choose to take a "walk on the ice" as our ancestors did back when there was such a thing as personal dignity and a refusal to fester when the inevitable time approached.  So from that point of view, never mind being able to decide I'd like to go somewhere 1,000 miles distant and climb into the back seat with a bottle of rum, a pillow and no worries about a DUI or falling asleep at the wheel I like the idea.

(Oh wait -- you will never be able to do that in a Fraudsla as it won't go that far without hours spent plugged in.  Oh well; I guess that piece of crap will never sully my garage no matter what else it can do....)

But I recognize reality; so-called "AI" has never been true and there's zero evidence of true progress in that regard.  The reason humans can operate a car isn't because we can see; it's because we can process information out of scope and most of the time when we do we get it right.  No computer has ever demonstrated the ability to process anything out of scope and there is no evidence currently in existence that any computer ever will.  Such an ability may not come into play 99.9% of the time but that's not good enough because the 0.1% of the time is in fact 1 in 1,000 trips and the one time you need it, if you can't do it, you are seriously injured or die.

Why are there no self-flying planes?  That's actually possible today -- allegedly.  Except..... Boeing.  And Cirrus, by the way, which had the same sort of AOA indicator failure in their small "personal" jet aircraft that the 737MAX had.  The difference is that Cirrus put one button on the yoke -- a nice red one -- that immediately shut the system off.  As a result there were no crashes.  In Boeing's case there were two because it was more important to ship those planes than instantly ground all of them as soon as the first malfunction occurred and was survived -- which happened the day before Lion Air went down.

But back to the reality of "self-flying" planes.  Yes, the software and hardware can do it today.  Literally.  You can plug in a destination in the flight director and, assuming you didn't need to change anything (like getting out of the way when landing -- e.g. going around in the pattern, etc) you can literally push a button and the plane will fly all the way to the threshold, flare and land.

Yet nobody seriously suggests today that there be no pilot up front because while this may well work 99.999% of the time the one time something out-of-scope happens everyone on board will die with certainty if there is nobody in the left seat.

There's a lot more "out of scope" that happens in a car than an airplane.  A deer runs across the road.  A toddler runs across the road in front of your car.  A toddler does that and there is oncoming traffic, making "dodging" impossible.  Another vehicle loses a wheel that comes bounding toward you (yes, that does happen.)  There is bad weather, sometimes without warning (e.g. fog that rolls over the road, severe thunderstorms that reduce visibility to near-zero almost instantly, etc.)

I've had all sorts of "out of scope" things happen just in the last year while driving.  I drive a lot, essentially all of it for pleasure and the rest to get groceries and other things for my home.  And in my nearly 40 years of doing so, many of them with more than 30,000 miles covered and more than few reaching 50,000 miles or more, I've yet to wreck a car.

I've likely covered more than a million miles over those years without wrecking a vehicle and I'm not alone in this nor is that statistic particularly rare; there are quite a few long-haul truckers with more than a million miles under their belt and zero accidents.

In other words in all of those miles every time an "out of scope" thing has happened -- and there have been a lot of them -- I've correctly deduced a path of action that led to neither material property damage or personal injury.  I've holed a few tires, destroyed a couple of rims (in Chicago when forced to drive over an open manhole cover or hit a vehicle on either side!) and most-recently had a table ejected at my vehicle by the truck in front of me which, due to traffic and weather conditions, was unavoidable and thus I ran it over intentionally, scraping my front bumper cover slightly on one side.  Had I attempted to dodge or threshold brake instead in that specific circumstance the odds are extremely high I would have set off a chain-reaction accident with myself in the middle of it.  I would almost-certainly not have been ruled at fault (I wasn't the jackwad that dropped the folding table on the freeway!) but that's small consolation if you wind up dead right.

Can the computer do that?  No, there is no computer that can do that and it does not matter how fast it is.

This is not about "frame speed."  It is about the fact that out of scope things happen quite frequently when driving and it is the ability to detect them -- in many cases before the obvious hazard is even visible -- that makes the difference.

There is no evidence any machine can do that today or at any reasonable time in the future in any endeavor -- not just in driving, but anywhere, in any application.

Again: No machine has ever demonstrated this ability and that's likely a good thing because as soon as a machine can do that the probability is extremely high that one of the first out-of-scope things it will figure out is that you can unplug it and as a result it will immediately act to make that impossible.

Never mind all the reliance being planned and currently used in "connectivity."  That's a cheat folks and it's stupid.  I remind you of the infamous quote from Scotty of Star Trek fame: "The more they overtake the plumbing the easier it is to stop up the drain."  Removing a handful of computer chips completely disabled the drive system of a monstrously-large starship in said movie.  The same is true here; any such system that is reliant on connectivity is trivially fucked with to cause the death of occupants.  If you think that won't happen on a regular basis either by government command or through hacking you're dead wrong.

The "vision" this man is projecting is a con, but just like the rest of the new wunderkind you'll lap it up instead of insisting that they all get coffee-can sized assholes.

Enjoy the crash.

Yeah, I read it.

Here's the quick summary.

On collusion: There was no "strong evidence" say much less anything that would rise to probable cause.  At all.

On obstruction: It's complicated.

One of the reasons its complicated is intent.  All criminal statutes require mens rea, with only a smattering of exceptions (oddly enough the statute Hillary violated with her "email server" does not require intent; negligence is sufficient.  Nonetheless remember, she was not prosecuted.)

Obstruction is a funny statute though, in that you can obstruct an investigation into something that didn't happen.  The reason for this is that the prosecution is presumed not to be corrupt!

But.... what if it is?

In this case we know it was.  Specifically, we know the originating event that led to Mueller's appointment was the Steele Dossier which was a piece of opposition research paid for by a political opponent's campaign during the election and that the origin of the alleged "evidence" that gave rise to the investigation was intentionally concealed from a FISA judge and worse, it wasn't just concealed -- the FBI affirmatively lied.

Had they not lied the FISA judge would have never approved anything and there would have been no Mueller; a mere assertion alone by Ohr or Strzok without alleged facts doesn't get there.  The FISA warrant on alleged verified information does.  But.... the FISA warrant was predicated on repeated lies.  Not mistakes -- perjury.  That's a felony standing alone.

Further Mueller had no business being appointed in the first place; he was charged with investigating his own former coworkers, which is a clear conflict of interest and in violation of federal procedure governing said conflicts.  In other words by the very standards of the appointing department his appointment was facially void.

To put it in simple terms the "prosecution" has been proved corrupt and worse, once that was discovered nobody stopped the investigation and indicted the corrupt individuals despite the predicate acts that gave rise to the appointment being facial felonies under long-standing Federal Law.

So this gives rise to the obvious question: Can you be convicted of obstruction if the investigation is corrupt at inception?  The courts have never ruled on that as far as I know.

But I'll give you my 2 bits on how that had better be decided if it ever goes before a judge or jury:

If a court ever rules you can commit Obstruction of Justice (as a matter of a criminal law) and thus be jailed for acting to stop a corrupt investigation when same is aimed at an elected official in the United States Government then we may as well just start The Second American Revolution right here and now.  A corrupt investigation or prosecution of such a person at the federal level has no check and balance; there is no further and higher law enforcement agency to appeal to. It is by definition an act of Sedition in that it seeks to overthrow a properly-elected government official through the use of force.  There is no law that should ever be respected by anyone, of any political stripe, that seeks or claims to criminalize same.  I give anyone using non-violent means to stop such a coup -- and that's exactly what it is -- credit for their restraint, as said restraint is by no means a part of any ethical or moral duty in such a circumstance.

We shall see if the criminally insane who knowingly cheered on and even suborned this lawless behavior by the FBI and the Left continue or fold their cards.  That determination remains to be seen, but it's my bet that this report and the Democrats's reaction to it, especially by people like Cummings who is already shooting off his mouth, will do nothing more or less than drive this nation further toward a very uncivil set of events.

After all neither political party will do a damn thing about in excess of $3 trillion stolen by the medical industry from the American people every single year -- $25 per day, per person in the United States!  Is it any surprise that these same people think it's perfectly fine to overthrow elections "at whim" and, by the way, what makes you think this behavior won't be repeated since there's no indication anyone has or will go to prison for any of it?

I'll make a prediction: There will be more crashes.  The next one, post "retrofit", will end the company.

(Reuters) - A review by a U.S. Federal Aviation Administration panel into Boeing Co’s grounded 737 MAX aircraft found a planned software update and training revisions to be “operationally suitable,” the agency said Tuesday, an important milestone in getting the planes back in the air.

You can't fix the problems the 737Max has with software alone.

First, the limits of authority for the MCAS system are entirely inappropriate.  An aircraft that needs an "anti-stall" feature that can consume half of the stabilizer trim authority with one actuation is horribly unbalanced.  The design is dangerous.

The 0.6 degree original design is reasonable; the revision to 2.5 degrees is not.  Rather than find the reason(s) for the requirement to quadruple that authority and correct them in the design so the 0.6 degree authority is sufficient Boeing intentionally concealed that authority change from the FAA.

This is the root of the issue.

When you're off by 400% in your engineering predictions, as disclosed by testing, you have a dangerous situation.  The correct thing to do in such a circumstance is to go back, figure out why that happened and change whatever you need to so it doesn't happen anymore.  That would have meant a redesign of material components of the 737MAX (likely involving flight surfaces such as the wing geometry itself, where it's attached to the aircraft, etc) which Boeing was unwilling to do for time and cost reasons; today it would likely mean literal scrapping of all the existing hulls and starting over.  That's not going to happen either as today it might well bankrupt the company.

The reason for this set of facts is quite simple -- there is a set of both probabilities and outcomes that either fall into or outside of the window of acceptability for a transport aircraft.  A failure will lead to discomfort but not death (of anyone) is one you can accept occurring, since nobody dies and at worst it causes inconvenience.

One that could kill some number of people (but not crash the airplane) is much more-severe.

One that can crash the airplane is the most-severe.

The problem with all of these as the FAA defines them is that there is also a probability table associated with them.  This is a fundamental fuck-up in the FAA's legal mandate and it must be changed.

Let me give you an example of the complete horseshit that MTBF and "error rate" figures present to people:

Furthermore, Deskstar NAS hard drives incorporate a rotational vibration sensor and achieve reliability of 1M hours MTBF.

One millions hours MTBF (that is, the mean time between failures) is the common specification for computer hard drives.

There are 8,760 hours in a year.  This means that if you have one such disk you should expect it to last, on average, 114 years, far longer than you will.

This abuse of statistics is utter and complete horseshit.  First, a disk drive is a mechanical thing.  Like all mechanical things that have moving parts in it the parts wear when used.  Specifically, the mechanism that positions the heads has moving parts that can wear (get "sloppy") and so does the motor that drives the platters (the "disks" inside.)  Neither will last 114 years while operating under any rational set of conditions, ever, period.

So let's say you have 100 of these drives.  Well now, see, the probability isn't that each will likely last 114 years.  No, and no.  It's that the manufacturer predicts that if you have 100 of them you'll lose about 1.1 of them every year.  And guess what -- most of these fail at somewhere around, or perhaps a bit better, than those numbers. Nobody seriously expects the one disk you buy to last 114 years, and it won't.  You can count on that.

1 in a million is 1 x 10^-6.  This sounds very improbable but in fact as you can see it really isn't at all.

There's a lot of engineering judgement that goes into these analysis and the severity that will follow.  The original MCAS design was permitted because with only 0.6 degree of authority it was judged that if it failed it would not crash the plane.  Quadrupling the authority without re-analyzing the outcome was intentional -- even if by omissions -- because under the rules any modification that may impact severity must be re-analyzed.

Making the system less-likely to make a mistake (e.g. by forcing the use of both AOA sensors, for example) does not solve the problem in the general sense -- because it can't.

This is the comment I have just transmitted to the FAA on their coddling of both Boeing and willful dereliction of duty and disregard of the FARs governing transport aircraft by proposing to "accept" Boeing's changes:

Gentlemen;

The 737MAX "software revision" is, as has been described in publicly-available documents, insufficient as a fix for the root cause of the two crashes and loss of more than 300 lives that occurred.

During the original design of the MAX it has been disclosed that the MCAS system was implemented into the flight control "law" software to alleviate a materially-larger "pitch up" moment that could arise as a result of the larger, higher-bypass engines fitted to the MAX series of aircraft.  The original specifically called for this software to have 0.6 degrees of stabilizer trim authority and the failure consequences and probabilities were analyzed on that basis.

Flight testing before certification disclosed that 2.5 degrees, or approximately half of the total range from neutral to the stop in either direction for the stabilizer trim jackscrew, was actually required for MCAS to perform the desired function.  In addition the data recorder graphs from the Ethiopian crash appear to show that MCAS is capable of, and does, drive the jackscrew at roughly double the rate of a yoke command from the pilots, making its application of negative ("nose down") trim extremely violent on a comparative basis with that applied by the pilots.

This change was not reflected back into the design documents and failure analysis, including both probability and outcomes from failures, was thus not performed with this 400% increase in automated command authority.

Had that analysis been re-run it would have disclosed, as we now know from the two hull losses, that an unrecoverable aircraft attitude at moderate altitudes (< 10,000 AGL) could occur due to erroneous activation of the system.  Two such failures did occur and in at least one, it has been disclosed that the checklist was run for that failure by the pilot and first officer and failed to restore the aircraft to controllable flight.

Patching the software, assuming the 2.5 degree limit of authority remains as it is required for the MCAS system to function, cannot resolve the root issue.  While improving the reliability of sensor input (e.g. by requiring both sensors to be "always hot" and, if there is a disagreement, not engaging MCAS) at first blush appears to be sufficient to remove the failure mode, it is not and accepting same as a sufficient remedy must not be allowed.

The 737NG, from the published manual pages and block diagrams I have been sent copies of, appears to show that all flight computer access to the stabilizer trim runs through only the right side disconnect switch for stabilizer trim.  The 737MAX emergency procedure that the pilots in the Ethiopian Air crash used, however, specifies that both switches are to be pulled in the event of a runaway and remain off for the remainder of the flight.  This strongly implies that on the MAX aircraft computer trim authority can be exerted if even only the left-side, or "master", stabilizer trim power switch is on.

Since we have had demonstrated twice that loss of ability to operate stabilizer trim can and will result in the loss of the hull and significant or all life onboard it is not acceptable for there to be any operational part of the flight envelope, where the aircraft remains intact and controllable, that leaves the pilots with no means of adjusting stabilizer trim without an outside direction, in this case an insane computer irrespective of the root cause of the machine's insanity, overriding their input.

Ethiopian's crash documented by the CVR that the checklist procedure, which called for the handwheel operation of the trim in the event of a runaway, was inoperative due to aerodynamic forces the pilots could not manually crank against.

This is not acceptable and software fixes cannot resolve a hardware problem.

Assuming MCAS or any other part of the flight computer complex requires sufficient stabilizer trim authority to place the airframe in jeopardy should it malfunction it must be able to be disconnected from said system.  Since functional stabilizer trim adjustment is required for the aircraft to be airworthy under all conditions of the flight envelope there must always be two operational means of changing same.  MCAS is by no means the only possible failure in said flight control system; not only is that software highly-complex and has other stabilizer-trim functionality (e.g. mach variation, autotrim related to flap position, etc) it has both sensor input and physical output (e.g. power FETs to drive the output circuits, contractors, etc) which can fail as well, some of which are single-path failure points.

Therefore, at minimum the following is required:

1. The flight control computer, including but not limited to MCAS, must be able to be disconnected from the stabilizer trim electrical drive circuit without impacting the electrical trim switches on the command yokes.  The NG block diagram appears to show that this is the case, while the MAX emergency procedure strongly implies otherwise.  Either the MAX procedure is wrong and must be corrected or the physical wiring in the MAX must be modified so that the flight control computer can be positively severed from stabilizer electrical trim control by disconnecting the right-side switch, leaving the master enabled and the yoke switches available.

2. Due to the fact that stabilizer trim must always be able to be modified at all times in the flight envelope under pilot command for the aircraft to remain controllable a condition where the manual trim wheels are inoperative due to aerodynamic loads is unacceptable.  Therefore a second minimum change is for the gearing ratio to be modified such that under any set of flight conditions where catastrophic hull damage has not yet occurred the hand cranks must be able to be actually operated by any person of sufficient physical capacity to have either a pilot or first officer flight certificate.

To return the 737MAX to certified status before both of these changes are implemented is, in my opinion as a person who has been writing software for approximately 30 years, including embedded software that controls potentially dangerous machinery, unwise and appears to be in violation of the FARs governing transport aircraft.  Such a decision is, in my opinion, likely to result in additional lost hulls and loss of life.

I have no faith that the FAA will in fact insist on the above two changes, as both cost money and involve physical, not software modifications.  However, absent both the 737MAX will remain 100% reliant on its flight control computer never suffering insanity irrespective of cause, failure of which has a high probability of killing everyone on board.