Here’s a heart-warming (no pun intended) rescue story from a ship en route (Durban to Djibouti) on the Indian Ocean.
…urgent request for aid Saturday on behalf of U.K. mariner Kevin Nixon, who was experiencing symptoms of a heart attack while onboard U.S. cargo ship Liberty Grace.
Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa then deployed the five Air Force PJs aboard MV-22B Ospreys to rappel down to the ship and stabilize the patient.
Because the ship was 500 nautical miles east of Kenya in the Indian Ocean, a Marine Corps KC-130 tanker also had to provide aerial refueling for the Ospreys…
Quite a change since the 1980 Operation Eagle Claw outcome, foundational to the Osprey development and this rapid deployment force model from the Horn of Africa.
Feynman participated in the commission investigating the causes of the Challenger disaster. He harshly criticized a decision-making process used to launch in the face of warnings from engineers who knew the system best. Previous missions had evidence of joints between the sections of the solid rocket boosters escaping hot gasses, with a worse problem in cold weather. Expert recommendations to postpone the launch were ignored. Tesla promised bulletproof glass. Then their chief designer Franz von Holzhausen gently threw a small metal ball as a demonstration… and smashed it. Tesla also said this model would arrive “late 2021”; it’s now November and delivery hasn’t yet started.
I’ve written far too many times on this blog already about the abysmal engineering management practices of Tesla.
It really is an example of how not to run a company, given its atrocious safety record and sub-par quality compared to other brands.
Explanations are very easy to come by… for one thing the CEO is a serial liar. A complete lack of integrity is always bad for quality control.
Second, consider that the CEO repeatedly flaunts and ignores science. He recently sent an email to all workers that distractions should be enjoyed even when they affect focus on safety.
An associate just sent me a note asking if we could have one ear bud for music so the other ear can listen for safety-related issues. That sounds fine to me.
What problem do you think the CEO is trying to solve here?
The reason for not allowing employees to listen to music while working should be crystal clear, OSHA says. “Listening to music may produce a safety hazard by masking environmental sounds that need to be heard…” […] Even in the absence of a specific regulation regarding use of headphones, employers still could face enforcement actions if OSHA finds that they have violated the General Duties Clause, which requires all employers to maintain safe workplaces. “The key takeaway from the letter is that employers must address employee use of headphones to listen to music on the worksite, even if there is not a specific OSHA standard prohibiting it…”
You should probably read the CEO email as thumbing his nose at OSHA (“Tesla Had 3 Times as Many OSHA Violations as the 10 Largest US Plants Combined”).
It’s subtle encouragement to flaunt safety to juice the rate of vehicles made while ignoring more safety-related issues. The only problem the CEO really seems to care about is preventing slow down in production, nothing else. He has literally said a trip in one of his vehicles should be marketed as something that will isolate and then kill you (“risk of fatality will be high“) like a trip backwards into South African apartheid.
Musk has used the medium of dreaming and exploration to wrap up a package of entitlement, greed, and ego. He has no longing for scientific discovery, no desire to understand…
That means measuring only raw numbers shipped, regardless of harms to workers or consumers, because that means easy thoughtless profits short term while totally overlooking long-term fundamentals like recalls, deaths and all the reality of problems engineers are meant to care about solving.
Hint: Tesla’s deaths are astronomically higher than other vehicles. Source: tesladeaths.com
Their newest model is literally killing an unheard of average of 30 people per year! (Pinto infamously destroyed Ford’s brand with just 27 deaths total).
Tesla’s Model S, Model Y, and Model X all got below-average reliability scores…. Tesla’s quality issues have been well-documented over the years as the company has raced — perhaps too quickly at times — to accelerate production and deliver more vehicles.
Consumer Reports also dropped a hammer on those trying to gin up weak excuses.
“There’s no reason fully electric cars can’t be as reliable or even more reliable than traditional vehicles with internal combustion engines,” Fisher said. “It’s how they implement the technology.” Electric drivetrains weren’t the problem. Instead, Fisher blamed unnecessary high-tech bells and whistles. “For EV introductions, there is a tendency to just add so much tech that is not necessary,” Fisher said.
That’s a subtle criticism of the fact that Tesla focuses almost entirely on tech that is not necessary, and not at all on real engineering issues.
…the firmware is now competing with logs for space on the eMMC… definitely some kind of oversight in general that was missed in the engineering… newer cars are at higher risk of [media control unit] problems than the older ones… every MCUv1 has high probability of failure.
It’s unclear whether they will get the falcon wing doors right ever.
Consumer Reports even emphasized that the hardest engineering is being done by other brands and yet producing the most reliable and safest cars, further driving home the rudimentary failures of Tesla.
“What stood out is that the most reliable was actually compact hybrids and plug-in hybrids,” Fisher said. “This may be counterintuitive. They are probably the most complex when it comes to the powertrain.”
Tesla is, to put it simply, a dangerous scam.
The car is not only dangerous to workers and customers, though; it’s dangerous to anyone in or around a Tesla.
Police say around 7:30 a.m., Philip Henkin, 58, was driving his Tesla northbound in the southbound lane of Lizards Tail Road near Park Center Drive at a high rate of speed. While Henkin was steering along a curve, officers say he hit a bicyclist head-on before crashing into a tree.
Coral Gables police Officer Kelly Denham said the driver of the Tesla crashed the car into a tree. Cellphone video taken after the crash shows the vehicle engulfed in flames. Denham confirmed that two people inside the car were killed.
…heading north on Manning Road in a 2021 Tesla Model S Plaid at a high speed when the driver failed to stop at a stop sign…hit the embankment while going through the intersection, launching the car in the air before it crashed into a house on Caird Way, going through the home’s exterior rear walls. […] The FHP said the car hit and killed one of the three residents at the home, a 69-year-old woman.
Killed a cyclist on the opposite side of the road. Killed a passenger. Killed a woman sitting in her home….
To be clear, other brands had the safest records in history, improving at the same time that Tesla’s record is getting worse and worse.
A GM electric car sold 150K units and averaged a death rate of less than ONE person each year over a decade (again, I must reiterate that Tesla’s newest model in just its first three years has been killing an average of 30 people each year).
Volvo continues to speak about a goal of ZERO deaths even while selling more cars than Tesla and switching their fleet to electric. Tesla is like night compared to the sunlight of other car manufacturers.
So here is what the Tesla graph looks like today (each bar updates as more and more news reports are found, even from past years).
However, there also was a trend among ranchers and farmers (driven by overly technology-focused agriculture investors — like what Bill Gates is doing today) to see only the worst of native species instead of the best.
Take the honey locust (Gleditsia triacanthos) for just one example.
Here’s how the U.S. government’s National Park service describes them:
Imagine walking through a forested area alongside the Missouri and discovering one of these – a honey locust tree. It’s very possible the men of the Corps did come face-to-face with these nasty thorns, especially in today’s Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska and southeastern South Dakota. But if anyone was injured by them, it didn’t get recorded in the journals.
One of the times honey locusts are mentioned is by John Ordway on July 3, 1804: “The land is Good high bottom pine Timber & black wallnut honey locas oak &C.”
In nature honey locusts grow in both thornless and thorned forms, with spikes growing up to 12″ long. Many regions in the South once referred to the trees as Confederate pin trees because those thorns were used to pin uniforms together during the Civil War. Others claim the thorns have been used throughout history as nails.
And here’s the image the NPS wants you to see.
Source: NPS
Nasty thorns. Any guesses why nobody on the expedition recorded being injured by them? My bet is because it didn’t deserve any more mention than any other thorns.
And I have found zero evidence to support any such idea that Confederate soldiers used tree thorns to “pin” their uniforms. Nada. Zilch.
Or let me put it this way: the alleged phrase “pin tree” appears exactly never in an exhaustive search of literature from the 19th Century.
Any guesses why nobody ever recorded the phrase “pin tree”? My bet is because it never happened.
To be fair to the NPS perspective of today, these trees do have a lot of thorns on them. Yet so do roses and raspberries, and how many people go around describing those two beloved plants as nasty?
Instead of focusing just on the thorns of a branch or trunk, let’s talk about delicious edible beans of the locust tree for a minute.
They get the name “honey” from the fact that they in fact have a tasty orange “goo” between seeds in a pod.
And their beans seem to be a high protein source easily grown in the wild (member of the legume family, like lentils and garbanzo).
Ingredients
4 Tbsp oil or fat
1 Tbsp locust beans
1 small chopped onion
2 small tomatoes
Handful of dried and seasoned meat (e.g. fish, fowl)
Pinch of seasonings (e.g. salt, pepper)
Recipe
Depod the locust beans (clean, soak/boil for tenderness, wash and remove hull)
Chop and mix onions and tomatoes
Put pan on fire and pour in oil or fat to heat for 2 minutes
Add prepared chopped mix to the oil/fat, stir and cover for 2 minutes
Add seasonings, prepared locust beans, stir and cover for 5 minutes
Add prepared meat, stir and cover for 5 minutes
Of course the younger green pods of the tree could be cooked like a green bean. And of course the hard seeds of a mature (dry, brown) pod could be ground into a flour. There are many options, so this is just one to give you an idea of why the NPS focus on the thorns in a story about exploration seems… not very exploratory.
What is truly unfortunate and bizarre is how nobody anywhere seems to have collected traditional recipes from the people who lived on locust bean for generations — Native Americans.
A few years back the President of the National Cattleman’s Beef Association (NCBA) paid me a visit in Silicon Valley.
Very purposefully I took him out for a nice sushi dinner and ordered edamame.
“Soy beans” he exclaimed! “We are supposed to eat livestock feed” he stated flatly albeit genuinely.
“Wait until you see the bill. We’re paying $5 a bowl” I sat back and replied with a wide grin.
Then I helped him off the floor and back into his chair as he said “what in the… we get barely $5 a bushel for our damn soy beans!”
If only he had explored what was all around him the whole time; tried harvesting honey locust beans growing naturally (literally falling from the tree).
Who knows what could have happened if he had ever thought about packaging honey locust beans for human consumption…
A serious and fresh vulnerability discovered in September led to a notice in November from NETGEAR. As you might expect, that company “strongly recommends that you download the latest firmware as soon as possible”.
Fine. That sounds normal until you consider the totality of vulnerable products versus the ones getting updates (those models under active firmware maintenance are fixed, other models are… uh-oh):
Note that big caveat/footnote from the researcher that a previous NETGEAR fix “broke” GRIMM’s exploit code. An odd perspective on something being fixed for users, calling it “inadvertently broken” for adversaries…
Speaking of perspective, it’s worth noting that perhaps GRIMM smelled blood in the water after NETGEAR had to disclose major issues in March and June.
I mean this kind of attention gathering could help explain why summer months turned into two additional unique September disclosures (1 and 2) before now.
To be fair, 2020 was an even noisier vulnerability banner year for NETGEAR disclosures with 22 unique CVE assigned (mostly XSS).
Source: CVE Details
As bad as all this year’s unauthenticated bypass disclosures sound, still we’re talking UPnP in the latest one. Thus it’s also worth mentioning that Shodan probes give a clear “honeypot” warning for those scanning the globe right now.
