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I am going to ask a question that I’m a little scared to ask because I suspect it’s really dumb, but here goes: is it at all feasible or practical to have a way to jettison a runaway battery from the aircraft? I guess most of the time the problems happen because nobody knows there’s a problem before it’s gotten too out of control for that.

You’d have to devise some sort of fire proof mini airlock, large enough for a laptop or whatever the largest device you expect to deal with. This would be pretty expensive and not very practical, but even if it was, then you’d have to deal with the ethical and legal issues of where it lands and whether or not it might cause a fire there too, to say nothing of injuring someone or damaging property.

> You’d have to devise some sort of fire proof mini airlock

Maritime patrol aircraft like the P-8 already have such a system, for releasing sonobuoys and float-flares while at altitude.

So it's not a technical issue, more one of regulation and maintenance.


Sure, I wasn’t trying to imply that it couldn’t be done, only that it would be expensive and impractical for civilian aviation, especially when there are good alternatives.

> then you’d have to deal with the ethical and legal issues of where it lands

Meh, it's a risk reduction thing. Aircraft sometimes dump fuel too in emergencies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_dumping

Earth is covered with a lot of water too, if you could eject it... risk is approaching zero on dumping a flaming battery over ocean.


dumped fuel does not land on the ground, it evaporates


it'd get caught by a bird

it was on a taxiway. The fire truck had to cross the runway to get to it.

Thanks for the info, I wasnt sure if the fire truck crossing the runway was normal operation.

I'm familiar with this strategy but there's one thing about it that I don't understand: After death, the loans are an estate liability, right? Doesn't the estate need to be settled before heirs get their inheritance? If i had an outstanding $1MM loan, wouldn't the estate need to liquidate some of that $RIVN at the $67 basis in order to pay the loan? and then whatever $RIVN was left over would go to the heirs at a stepped-up basis?

The step up in basis happens when you die, so the estate has no capital gain. Then the debts are paid, then the heirs get whatever they're supposed to get.

Ok thank you. That was the key to my misunderstanding.

I conflated the two, since it all happens pretty quickly, but the estate is actually the recipient of the updated basis. So the estate sells @ current price, pays the negligible difference on gains from appreciation while the estate settles, if any happened, and then passes out the rest.

Jeff Epstein? The New York financier?


Do we need to wait for a tragedy before we do something? Good on the airlines and regulators for recognizing a burgeoning problem and taking action before (hopefully) it leads to unnecessary deaths.


> Do we need to wait for a tragedy before we do something?

Yes, absolutely. It isn't pleasant to think about, but laws and regulations are meaningless if they aren't based on actual numbers. If I wanted to propose some new feature at work, people would understandably want to see some numbers and not just “feels nice” lol


People have died during fires on the tarmac while trying to evacuate. Every second saved could mean another person lives.


> In reality, it's more like the Fellowship of the Rings trying to make it to Mt Doom, but that realization happens slowly.

And boy to the people making the decisions NOT want to hear that. You'll be dismissed as a naysayer being overly conservative. If you're in a position where your words have credibility in the org, then you'll constantly be asked "what can we do to make this NOT a quest to the top of Mt Doom?" when the answer is almost always "very little".


Impossible projects with impossible deadlines seems to be the norm and even when people pull them off miraculously the lesson learned is not "ok worked this time for some reason but we should not do this again", then the next people get in and go "it was done in the past why can't we do this?"


Wow, sounds so familiar! I've once had to argue precisely against this very conclusion - "you saved us once in emergency, now you're bound to do it again".

Wrote to my management: "It is, by all means, great when a navigator is able to take over an incapacitated pilot and make an emergency landing, thus averting the fatality. But the conclusion shouldn't be that navigators expected to perform more landings or continue to be backup pilots. Neither it should be that we completely retrain navigators as pilots and vice versa. But if navigators are assigned some extra responsibility, it should be formally acknowledged by giving them appropriate training, tools and recognition. Otherwise many written-off airplanes and hospitalized personnel would ensue."

For all I know the only thing this writing might have contributed to was increased resentment by management.


> And boy to the people making the decisions NOT want to hear that.

You are 100% correct. The way I've tried to manage that is to provide info while not appearing to be the naysayer by giving some options. It makes it seem like I'm on board with crazy-ass plan and just trying to find a way to make it successful, like this:

"Ok, there are a few ways we could handle this:

Option 1 is to do ABC first which will take X amount of time and you get some value soon, then come back and do DEF later

Option 2 is to do ABC+DEF at the same time but it's much tougher and slower"


My favorite fact is that every single time an organization manages to make a functional development team that can repeatedly successfully navigate all the problems and deliver working software that adds real value, the high up decision makers always decide to scale the team next.

Working teams are good for a project only, then they are destroyed.


Jesus I just had flashbacks from my last jobs. Non-technical founder always telling me I was being pessimistic (there were no technical founders). It's just not that simple Karen!


I'm not an expert on the legal mechanisms but I believe it's a combination of all of those things through a hodgepodge of various local zoning regulations which the article references: limits on the number of unrelated people living in the same home where the limit varies by locality (i've always heard of these as anti-brothel regulations). Limits on number of leases in a single space or requirements for each leasable unit to have its own bathroom and/or kitchen. Requirements that each tenant have their own parking space. Lots of creative ways cooked up by local regulators across the vast USA to discourage anything but single-family homes occupied by single families.

Even what you described (single lease, 4 roommates) is very common and usually allowed but the single lease part is what self-limits the impact of boarding-house type places. You need to find 3 other people to go in on this place with. You need to trust those other people and coordinate lease payments and utility payments and deal with it when some of them to decide to move on. That's a headache!


I think it's well and good to try to address that problem too, but it does seem like a different, although not entirely unrelated issue. What you're describing is already happening now, it's just happening in public spaces (transit stations, parks, etc) where it affects everyone.


How will you know that Bob is typing into it if you're offline?


That's a fair question; we here being under a submission aout local-first apps, and al.

Of course, you know the answer: if you're offline, you're not online. Bob gets to type whatever Bob wants, and until you go online, you don't get to overtype anything.


But the offline enabled property allows exactly that.

Both sides type offline and only sync later. Neither would like their change to just be discarded.


I was responding only to the idea of having no conflict resolution: last edit wins (proposedin a great grandparent comment):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45341335 "We have a local-first app. Our approach? Just ignore the conflicts. The last change wins."

if you can see the edits being made in real time, keystroke by keystroke, that pretty much solves that problem.

As for offline editing, either don't support it (then you're not local-anything obviously) or you can have some lame workflow like "the document was changed by another user ..."


I take your point, but I think your hypothetical is a wonderful example of Hyrum's Law. And for that reason, if I was going to go to the trouble of mapping my internal v7 uuids into something more random for public consumption, then I'd be sure generate something that doesn't look like a uuid at all so nobody gets any funny ideas about what they can do with it.


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