The Heart Is a Lonely Long Distance Runner | Boeing’s Rush to Revenue | America’s Rural Decline

“Why do people have to be this lonely? What’s the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?” – Haruki Murakami

“The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone.” – Carson McCullers

“I suppose all of my films have a common theme. If I think about it, though, the only theme I can think of is really a question: Why can’t people be happier together?” – Akira Kurosawa

Boeing Locates The Closest Exit, Keeping In Mind That It May Be Behind Them: Ask almost anyone who is responsible for certifying the safety of the flying public and the answer will probably be the FAA—Federal Aviation Administration. It might surprise most people that in fact, US aircraft manufacturers tell the FAA whether their planes are safe to fly. It’s a system akin to the fox guarding the henhouse. The practice of delegating safety certification–and the controversy surrounding that–goes back many decades. In the mid-1990s, the FAA came under intense criticism for allowing Boeing to control much of the safety certification process for the 777, the first generation of computer-guided aircraft and one of the most complex pieces of machinery ever assembled. Boeing controlled every part of the 777 testing regime from start to finish and also shielded that process “from public review by claiming the need to protect trade secrets.” The FAA supported Boeing’s “refusal even to release a full list of tests performed on the airplane.” Then in 2005 policy changes by the George W. Bush administration went even farther, giving aircraft manufacturers virtually total control over the safety certification process for their own products.

In 2015 Boeing was rushing to certify its new 737 MAX airplane in order to catch up with Airbus. FAA managers pushed their own safety engineers to quickly approve the safety analysis done by Boeing engineers. There were three elements central to the MAX’s new flight control system, called MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System). First, contrary to a long Boeing tradition of giving the pilot complete control of the aircraft, the MAX’s new MCAS automatic flight control system was designed to act in the background, without pilot input. Second, it was designed to activate automatically, by swiveling the horizontal tail to push the nose of the plane down, but only in the extreme flight situation of a high-speed stall. And third, since MCAS was supposed to activate only in extreme circumstances far outside the normal flight envelope, Boeing decided that 737 pilots needed no extra training on the system.

Boeing delivered its original, rushed-up safety analysis for the MCAS to the FAA. Not surprisingly, the report had several crucial flaws. Again: the report used to certify the plane as safe to fly had several crucial flaws. Information gleaned from Indonesia’s Lion Air crash October 29, 2018, where 189 people lost their lives, was enough for Boeing engineers to start developing “a flight control software enhancement for the 737 MAX,” updating pilot training requirements and flight crew manuals to include MCAS, and making other proposed changes. None of that was done in time to prevent the March 10, 2019 crash in Ethiopia that killed all 157 on board. The FAA said it will mandate Boeing’s software fix in an airworthiness directive no later than April.

Help Me Help You: There’s an ongoing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but doctors trying to treat the disease are under such attack they cannot remain in certain hotspots. Last August a team of three CDC experts and one USAID staffer arrived in the town of Beni, on the country’s eastern side, several weeks after the current outbreak was declared. Days later one of the scores of rebel groups active in that part of Congo attacked a nearby military base. The State Department immediately ordered the teams out. From then on CDC’s Ebola experts were restricted to Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, on the western side, some 2,000 miles from the outbreak zone.

Now CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield says he’ll be assigning about a dozen health experts to work in the DRC for a year, and positioning at least some of them much closer to the epicenter than earlier teams. A crucial role of the CDC is to provide the Congolese health workers who are directly managing the response the highly technical training that’s needed. Redfield says these health workers need to be people who hail from the outbreak zone rather than from the capital. Doctors Without Borders suspended their work in an Ebola treatment center they were running in Katwa after a violent attack on February 25. It’s an isolated, impoverished area that Ebola had not reached before, and the mistrust of outsiders is great. (NPR)

Weaving The White Flags: The US-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) has gained control of the last remaining ISIS encampment, on the eastern banks of the Euphrates River in the Syrian village of Baghouz. The latest offensive, which began March 10, has moved slowly to allow civilians to flee and let thousands of ISIS fighters and their families surrender. The head of the SDF press office said: “This is not a victory announcement, but a significant progress in the fight against Daesh.” In a tweet, he added, “Clashes are continuing as a group of ISIS terrorists who are confined into a tiny area still fight back.” According to one news report: “More than 60,000 people have poured out of this area in the past two months. Most of them have been ISIS fighters, supporters, and their children, but there have also been ISIS victims – Yazidi children and women who were taken by the group from Iraq and used as slaves.” Baghouz sits along the Euphrates River at the Iraqi border. In February US intelligence officials said they believed ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi may still be alive and hiding in Iraq. (NPR)

• Racing Against China, U.S. Reveals Details of $500 Million Supercomputer (NYT, $)
• Coalition launches elder abuse crackdown and new national hotline: Christian Porter estimates that as many as 185,000 Australians could be experiencing elder abuse each year (Guardian)
• Indonesia election mired in claims of foreign hacking and ‘ghost’ voters: Fears of Chinese influence and ‘Russian propaganda’ dog last weeks of campaigning before vote in April (Guardian)

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For Amber Waves Of Strain: America’s heartland is in decline, and there aren’t many good ideas for reviving it. In 1950 US agriculture directly employed more than six million people. Farmers supported a network of small towns that provided local services and sometimes fostered the growth of various specialized industries. Back then there were some 500,000 coal mine workers. But major urban centers are the magnets for economic growth, and in the intervening years, while America’s population has doubled, the number of farmers has fallen by two-thirds, and only about 50,000 coal miners remain in the trenches. Not that long ago the concept of social collapse was thought of as an inner-city problem. Today, people living in rural areas can feel left behind. A lack of job opportunity for men in their prime working years, or worse, surging “deaths by despair” from drugs, alcohol or suicide are concentrated in declining rural areas. And politically, rural America is increasingly a world apart; sadly, the role it used to play in our nation is being undermined by powerful economic forces that nobody knows how to reverse. (NYT) Additional read: Why Are So Many Farmers Markets Failing? Because The Market Is Saturated(NPR)

The Sun Never Sets On A Good Idea: Former NASA scientist John Mankins has spent his professional life working on novel ideas that could transform the way humans use technology in space. One of his concepts was a space-based power system that would capture the sun’s energy that never makes it to earth, and use laser beams to send that energy back to meet the planet’s energy needs. The idea got support from the Bush White House and Congress in the 2000s, and positive reviews from the National Academy of Sciences and a national security unit within the Department of Defense, but the program never took off. Now it’s being revived—by the Chinese government.

In a recent announcement China said a big advantage of space-based solar power is its ability to offer energy supply on a constant basis and with greater intensity than terrestrial solar farms. The solar power station plans being contemplated by China include the launch of small- to medium-sized solar power projects in the stratosphere to generate electricity between 2021 and 2025, followed by a space-based solar power station that can generate at least a megawatt of electricity in 2030, and a commercial-scale solar power plant in space by 2050. (CNBC)

• Jeff Bezos is hosting his super nerdy Mars conference again, complete with flying robots and a Blue Origin engine (CNBC)
• Flying Taxis. Seriously? (NPR)
• As air pollution gets worse, a dystopian accessory is born: The air is getting more dangerous to breathe all over the world — and a suite of companies are hoping to capitalize with a new fashion item. (Vox)
• The ‘bliss point,’ or why you can’t just eat one cookie or potato chip(CNN)
• The Bizarre Lives of Rome’s Emperors: Roman Emperors From Augustus to Constantine (NYT, $)
• The Twenty Craziest Investing Facts Ever (The Irrelevant Investor)
• Spending Is as Easy as Pushing a Button. The Hard Part? Keeping Track.: Tara Siegel Bernard, a personal finance reporter, recommends apps for budgeting, investments and helping little ones as young as 6 understand the value of money. (NYT, $)

“Don’t feel sorry for yourself. Only assholes do that.” – Haruki Murakami

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