They'd have had to enjoin more parties, probably to include state agencies. Any party can push back, stall or blow the whistle if they feel something wrong and risky to them is happening. Which is exactly the opposite of what the feds want. They want to act unilaterally, on anything and everything.

Second, the incident I'm referencing is well documented. You should look it up. It's basically the "feds radicalize then arrest muslim man, pat themselves on back for catching terrorist" playbook but for white people.

Now that I'm jaded I ask myself how many government and private sector jobs were "created" (in sarcasm quotes because broken windows fallacy) washing all those boats for free over the years and whether they even expected to prevent the spread or if the spread is the justification for expansion.

Academia is basically a reputation laundering industry. If the cigarette people said smokes good or the oil people you'd never believe them. But they and their competitors fund labs at universities, and sure those universities may publish stuff they don't like from time to time, but overall things are gonna trend toward "not harmful to benefactors". And then what gets published gets used as the basis for decisions on how to direct your tax dollars, deploy state violence for or against certain things, etc, etc. And of course (some of) the academics want to do research that drives humanity forward or whatever, but they're basically stuck selling their labor to (after several layers in between) the donors for decades in order to eek out a little bit of what they want.

It's not just "how the sausage is made" that's the problem. It's who you're sourcing the ingredients for, who you're paying off for the permit to run the factory, who's supplying you labor. You can't fix this with minor process adjustments.

They keep getting arrested because some fed informants show up and convince them to kidnap a governor of whatever before they can become "Well regulated".

"Do whatever the F you want as long as you don't challenge the state" isn't that incompatible at first glance and might work ok if you have a low touch state. Where it gets obviously incompatible is when you have eastern european style oligarchs and western style administrative state and state favored businesses and industries that leverage state violence to stifle competition.

I don't think it's possible to have an authoritarian government in a modern society that doesn't trend in one of those directions.

Ain't no different than leasing bajillion dollar process equipment.

This peasant is faulty. He's not indoctrinated enough. Someone nab him and send him for reeducation. /s

That's faster than most professionals by a substantial margin. I guess when it matters you make it work.

If you're just doing something and intend to meet or exceed the rules then dealing with government enforcement apparatus is pure overhead. You were always gonna do the right thing so you gain zero upside and have to deal with a potentially capricious and unaccountable (in any practical way) enforcer which is a huge downside.

Second, the rules are chock full of 10,000ft ivory tower view type stuff that makes statistical sense but is inefficient compared to using judgment. But you can't use judgement because the whole point of code is to make everything quantitative so that idiots can inspect other idiots and parties can more efficiently bicker in court and whatnot.

In reality building code is how a huge amount of back handed regulation is done. When the powers that be can't make a particular rule, because of other laws, or because of precedent to the contrary, or because the peasants wouldn't stand for it, what they do is they adopt a ridiculous code and then slap a "can be waived at the discretion of board X" on it. This way they can make the thing they don't like a non-starter economically for most people.

In my city you can park a semi trailer as storage. But it counts as a "structure" and because it's not a commercially manufactured shed, car port, stick framed garage or litany of other exemptions you have to go through the "everything else" process which includes all the "normal code shit" that any other non-exempt structure would hav to go through like an engineered foundation and snow loads and all sorts of other stuff that's just inappropriate. They have a similar set of BS they use to prevent DIYers from erecting kit buildings.

Every single one of these rules that amounts to death by a thousand cuts preventing these sorts of businesses (as well as many others) will be rabidly defended by many/most if presented in the abstract. That sort of inability to reason about the forest based on what you're doing to the trees is the root problem. And it's a social/ideological/moral one, even if it expresses itself via governments.

It's no more "reasonable in isolation" to peddle rules than it is to justify littering in the park because they don't take effect in isolation. If everyone does it everything goes to crap and we all know it so we don't let anyone justify littering in the park using the effect in isolation.

Then you have no excuse for having such a nuance free opinion for you must know things are often not obvious at "first glance of pictures someone else took" which is what we're all doing here.

>I'm doing the exact opposite of what you claim. I am just taking the bits of evidence already available and rejecting root causes that would require those bits of evidence to not exist, which is entirely valid, this still leaves a massive amount of uncertainty which I have underlined on more than one occasion.

I disagree. You are acting like this is a cut and dry situation wherein the Boeing advice that this was not safety critical is just wrong on it's face. That assessment was made 15yr ago (perhaps by "old good boeing" engineers) and on a part already under a lot of scrutiny from the other MD11 that lost an engine. Sure they could be wrong, but I wouldn't bet on it so confidently.

This bearing moves a few degrees. It's not like the engine is doing loops around the pylon. It's possible that for whatever reason the bearing stopped doing bearing things as well as it should. Now, this is a plane, everything is light, aluminum and made to flex to varying degrees. It's hard to say where exactly the movement was taking place in lieu of the bearing. Without specific knowledge it's hard to say how the failure happened. Maybe things got loose and failed from stress concentration. Maybe the movement happened in the wing assembly and the force+vibration of making that happen caused the engine mount to fail. You don't know. I don't know. Nobody in these comments know with a sufficiently low chance of being wrong to point the finger in any one direction.

To act like "well of course when the bearing wore/failed/whatever it ripped its mount right in two because now the force was concentrated and the part it was concentrated on was sus to begin with" is to confidently oversimplify the situation.

Engine pylons, landing gear, control surfaces, these are key systems, not the "built to within an inch of their life because they gotta be light" like a lot of other things on an airliner (though I admit the MD11 is a particularly questionable application of this heuristic)

Big planes generally don't fall out of the sky because one party misleadingly labeled something in the service literature. I would be very surprised if there weren't also maintenance failing of some sort here.

Usually this is because the design constraints are complex and in satisfying one you wind up having orders of magnitude more overkill than you need on others.

For example, in situations involving hollow shafts with through shafts or perhaps fluid passages often times you wind up with insanely huge for the load bearing supporting the outer most part because it simply needs to be that big in order to fit around the shaft and have space for reasonable sized roller elements for the speed and realistic race thicknesses, etc. Sure you could go custom, but $$, sure you could use needles or balls, but maybe the stuff on either side has reasons it shouldn't be hard like a race and that might add assembly/construction cost. Now say this overkill bearing is held up by a big web in a big honkin cast housing, because the housing needs to be like that for structural reasons (say it's a specialty pump or maybe this housing is load bearing in the overall assembly, like a tractor's gearbox). Now, say this bearing is in some more complex gearbox that has lubrication windage problems. A valid fix might be to go and cut out a chunk of the web that holds this bearing. Sure it's only supported by 300deg now instead of 360, but it was so overkill to begin with that doesn't matter.

Edit: better example: You can roach dozens of automotive cartridge style wheel bearings without hurting the knuckle it presses into because the knuckle has to be so strong to withstand suspension forces you basically can't apply enough force via the wheel failure to break it and the assembly becomes unserviceable faster than you can get to the point of damaging it by wearing through it.

Edit2: You also need to consider the cost of QA and testing. Sometimes it's cheaper to do a simple overkill waste of material design than something than to do speed holes and engineered webs, etc, etc, because all those features add testing cost as well as manufacturing cost and (especially in ye olden days of the slide rule) make it harder to predict stuff like resonance, exact failure mode, etc, etc and every feature has to be QA'd to some extent. And this all needs to be balanced against expected production volume.