But I'm not talking about whether the captain has final responsibility and authority for the operation of the aircraft.

I'm talking about whether it's sane to escalate directly from something that is very much not an explicit threat of violence, to involving people whose primary tools are suspension of physical liberty and acts of violence.

(Also, please note: that rule says two things. The captain has final authority, yes, but they are also responsible for the choices they make. It's not a free pass to do anything they want for any reason.)

That is a very, very, very different statement than "I'm calling the FBI."

You're talking about should or shouldn't. The issue here is past that point: whether it's then right to involve people who are empowered to take away your physical liberty, and worse.

It isn't this simple for liquid oxygen and methane mixtures, and there's a great deal of disagreement between industry and regulators over what the right percentage of TNT equivalence is. Naturally, industry thinks the percentage is low, and regulators are skeptical, so there's a government-run test campaign going on as we speak to collect data for proper modeling.

And what exactly does it mean to "compete"?

Choices are made by people who have power and imposed upon people who don't.

The people with power under current systems don't care about the people who do the work. They care about getting rich. So if there's an efficiency gain to be had, all of that new efficiency is going to be put towards increasing output or reallocating work. None of it - under current power structures - will ever go towards allowing workers to work less, because workers aren't the ones deciding where it will go.

Are you sure about that? Just because it's now in the custody of the NTSB doesn't mean it's public domain. The NTSB didn't create it.

I'm using the terms consciousness and conscious in the "hard problem" sense here.

EDIT: 14 CFR Part 260.

This particular restriction we're talking about was completely unjustifiable. But the regs exist, and they aren't just made up nonsense. They're the result of systems engineering and a real risk management process.

If you decide that your work is against your values, you're also deciding to separate yourself from the group, even if you don't actually leave the company. That's painful. It's not an excuse, but it is a powerful motivator.

Very few software engineers understand that tolerances are fundamental.

In the physical sciences, strict equality - of actual quantities, not variables in equations - is almost never a thing. Even though an equation might show that two theoretical quantities are exactly equal, the practical fact is that every quantity begins life as a measurement, and measurements have inherent uncertainty.

Even in design work, nothing is exact. It's simply not possible. A resistor's value is subject to manufacturing tolerances, will vary with temperature, and can drift as it ages. A mechanical part will also have manufacturing tolerance, and changes size and shape with temperature, applied forces, and wear. So even if a spec sheet states an exact number, the heading or notes will tell you that this is a nominal value under specific conditions. (Those conditions are also impossible to achieve and maintain exactly for all the same reasons.)

Even the voltages that represent 0 and 1 inside a computer aren't exact. Digital parts like CPUs, GPUs, RAM, etc. specify low and high thresholds, under or over which a voltage is considered a 0 or 1.

Floating-point numbers have uses outside the physical sciences, so there's no one-size-fits-all approach to using them correctly. But if you are writing code that deals with physical quantities, making equality comparisons is almost always going to be wrong even if floating-point numbers had infinite precision and no rounding error. Physical quantities simply can't be used that way.