The American furniture maker. wsj.com/business/furniture-m…
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Brigham McCown retweeted
Six weeks ago, the captain of a Japanese container ship was hit by severe abdominal pain in the North Pacific. The nearest U.S. rescue helicopter was more than 1,000 miles away.
His ship, the One Majesty, was 58 miles south of Adak, Alaska. He was 58 years old and he needed a hospital.
There was no hospital. There was ocean in every direction.
The U.S. Coast Guard in Kodiak launched an MH-60 Jayhawk anyway.
A thousand miles is Tampa to New York. No helicopter flies that in one hop.
So the Jayhawk hopped down the Aleutian Islands, refueling at Dutch Harbor and again at Adak.
That solved the fuel. It did not solve the crew. Nobody should fly a thousand miles through Aleutian weather and then hold a hover over a moving ship.
So the Alaska Air National Guard sent an HC-130J. It carried a fresh Coast Guard helicopter crew and two pararescuemen out to Adak to take over.
And if that one helicopter broke down out there?
A second Jayhawk flew to Cold Bay just to stand by.
The fresh crew flew the last 58 miles over open water with the HC-130J watching from above. They lowered the hoist to the deck and lifted the captain off.
Back at Adak he was moved onto the HC-130J and flown to Anchorage.
Two Coast Guard helicopters. One Air Guard rescue plane. A relief crew. Two pararescuemen. More than a thousand miles.
All of it for one Japanese sailor none of them had ever met.
From Japan: we saw this. Thank you.
This is the simplistic brilliance of a futurist @elonmusk It also tends to be the opposite of what institutions and government do when we reacts and builds layer upon layer of safety and economic regulations and laws to “fix” whatever happened, which of course rarely happens.
This is about removing complexity and tackling problems head on. Seeking to deconstruct more than you construct, seeking to simplify rather than to increase complexity.
We should all be thinking this way.
Elon Musk explains his 5-step process for running companies:
"First, make your requirements less dumb. Your requirements are definitely dumb. It does not matter who gave them to you.
It's particularly dangerous if a smart person gave you the requirements because you might not question them enough. Everyone's wrong no matter who you are.
Everyone's wrong some of the time. So make your requirements less dumb. Then try very hard to delete the part or process.
This is actually very important. If you're not occasionally adding things back in, you are not deleting enough.
The bias tends to be very strongly towards let's add this part or process step in case we need it. But you can basically make in-case arguments for so many things and for a rocket that is trying to be the first fully reusable rocket.
There's never been a fully reusable rocket. People don't understand. This is like the holy grail of rocketry. So you've got to delete the part or process step. Super important.
You can't hedge your bets. That's why the grid funds, for example, do not fall down because that's a whole extra mechanism that we don't need.
Also, whatever requirement or constraint you have, it must come with a name, not a department. Because you can't ask the department. You have to ask a person. That person who's putting forward their requirement or constraint must agree that they must take responsibility for that requirement.
Otherwise, you can have a requirement that basically an intern two years ago randomly came up with off the cuff and they're not even at the company anymore. These things are often just way more silly than you think. So step one, make your requirements less dumb.
Step two, delete the part or process step. If you're not adding things back in 10% of the time, you're clearly not deleting enough.
And then only the third step is simplify or optimize.
The third step, not the first step. The reason it's the third step is because possibly the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize a thing that should not exist.
Everyone's been trained in high school and college that you've got to answer the question. Convergent logic. So you can't tell the professor your question is dumb. You'll get a bad grade. You have to answer the question. So everyone's basically, without knowing it, they've got a mental straitjacket on. They'll work on optimizing the thing that should simply not exist.
And then finally, you get to step four, which is accelerate cycle time.
You're moving too slowly, go faster. But don't go faster until you have worked on the other three things first. You can always make things go faster.
And then the final step is automate.
Now, I've personally made the mistake of going backwards on all five steps multiple times. Literally, I automated, accelerated, simplified, and then deleted.
One example I've talked about before is there were these fiberglass mats on top of the Model 3 battery pack that were in between the floor pan and the battery.
And it was at one point choking the battery pack production line. And I was basically living on the battery pack production line trying to fix the line.
It was choking the entire Model 3 production program. So the first mistake was I tried to fix the automation, like make the robot better. So automating was a mistake. Then accelerating was a mistake. Then optimizing was a mistake.
And finally, I said, what the hell are these mats for?
And I asked the battery safety team, what are these mats for? Are they for fire protection or something?
They said, no, they're for noise and vibration. Then I asked an NVH, a noise, vibration, harshness team, what's it for? They said fire safety.
So literally, it was like being in a Dilbert cartoon. Actually, I feel like I'm in a Dilbert cartoon quite frequently. So then finally, OK, great, let's try a car with the fiber glass mats and without. And they put a microphone to both and see if you can tell the difference.
In fact, I was like, which one is which? So we just deleted them and just bypassed this $2 million robot cell.
It was just a complete pile of nonsense."
At least, as of this morning, it appears permitting reform will pass both the House and Senate by a wide by bipartisan margin.
Interesting how both Democrats and Republicans are claiming major victories for this piece of legislation, while a few outlier members of both parties have attacked it.
#BAAJA #Permitting #Infrastructure
If we don’t pass BAAJA, we risk losing $50 billion in electricity savings and missing out on 600 million metric tons in emissions reductions through 2040. That’s like keeping 16 extra coal plants running for a decade. We can’t afford to wait.
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Brigham McCown retweeted
Absolute scenes from inside a Bengals bar in Madrid.
PACKED with Bengals fans from all over the world.
This would be no bueno.
REPORT: Biden's Interior Secretary, Who Invoked 'Indigenous Knowledge' To Ban Oil Drilling, Wins Governor's Race in New Mexico, America's Second-Biggest Oil Producer:
“New Mexico's workers and families cannot afford to become collateral damage in a political fight over American energy…If the state were to scale back oil and gas production as Haaland promised, it would dramatically decrease energy supplies nationwide at a time when the country's supplies are already strained and prices have surged.”
An excellent read from @HudsonInstitute CEO @john_walters_ "Why Russia's Expanding Threat Must Be Confronted." Please read and share.
nationalinterest.org/feature…
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Mitsubishi Electric seeks to expand North American grid foothold
In August, the Japanese conglomerate said it would spend $1.4 billion to buy PCI Energy Solutions, whose platform manages about 60% of U.S. power generation.
utilitydive.com/news/mitsubi…
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The "Big-E" CVN-65. What an amazing career. @USNavy
This morning around 11:15 am the USS Enterprise CVN-65 the first of nuclear powered aircraft carriers left her berth at Pier 2 Newport News Shipyard under tow to Mobile Alabama for dismantling. As I posted earlier this has a connection to my family of my dad at Nuclear Engineer for fueling/refueling and brother for defueling /decommisioning on the same boat. I presume the deck that shows a rust color is where they removed the flight deck for removal or reactors/decom.
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While in #Poland discussing democracy a while back, the incoming political party leadership said to me, 'We have to get rid of the existing judges.'
I said no, you don't. 'But they were installed by the other party', they protested. I told them that in time they will become an independent, non-political pillar if #democracy is to flourish.
Fast forward to today. Łukasz Wojdyga at @FundacjaWEI writes the best expression of situational clarity I've seen on the #Polish #constitutionalcrisis. Here it is:
"After more than a decade, arguing endlessly about who was right in 2015, 2024 or last Friday will not restore public trust. Nor will replacing judges associated with one party with judges closer to another. Poland needs a constitutional reset, not another change in who controls the Tribunal. A new model should require broad agreement on appointments, public scrutiny of candidates, restrictions on moving directly from government into judicial office, and safeguards against domination by any single parliamentary majority. Any overhaul would require constitutional change and lawful arrangements for sitting judges, not dismissal by decree. Judges will always have political opinions. Some may sympathize with PiS, others with the Civic Coalition. What matters is whether they can rule against politicians whose views they share. A Tribunal that cannot do so leaves citizens exposed—and businesses paying for risks that a functioning state should reduce."
insideclimatenews.org/news/2…
Powerful Interests Aim to Weaken #California’s Landmark #EnvironmentalLaw - #Utilities, #developers and #tech companies have spent tens of millions to pass #Prop45 which fast-tracks “essential” projects by limiting #public and #environmental review.
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Possibly. Would explain severe icing and potential structural/ control damage as well. This is so very sad for all affected regardless of the why.
We've reviewed radar and temperature data surrounding the crash of N722BD. This loop depicts the rapid vertical development of a convective cell, which lofted plentiful moisture.
The aircraft entered this cell at 12:47-48 p.m., encountering severe icing and turbulence.
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I'm closely watching developments in #Poland which has risen to the level of a #constitutional crisis.
Here’s my take.
Poland has a genuine constitutional crisis. The previous conservative #PIS government made judicial changes that were highly questionable.
But the current #Tusk governments suspension of Constitutional Tribunal President Bogdan Święczkowski and his deputy by judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, while Poland’s President was out of the country, is on shaky grounds as even legal scholars opposed to the conservatives are criticizing those methods.
Some are calling it an attempted judicial coup and the bottom line is that one cannot restore the rule of law by disregarding it themselves.
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Catch my latest @HudsonInstitute? "#EnergySecurity Is Built Before the Crisis." hudson.org/energy/energy-sec…
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"The United States and #Hungary signed a memorandum of understanding Thursday to strengthen regional #oil and #naturalgas #infrastructure, expand access to American energy, and diversify supplies across Central and Eastern #Europe."
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