Hospitals in the USA are not super concerned about patient outcomes at the administrative level. Everyone just wants to be middle of the road “good enough” to not get sued for negligence. There isn’t really any incentive for doing better than that and it costs a lot to be better
Hospitals in the US are actually pretty concerned with hospital acquired infections. For the sole reason that medicare/medicaid and insurance typically don't cover costs associated with them. So the hospital itself is on the hook for diagnosis, treatment, and any associated costs.
Not really because moral hazard occurs when you’re protected from consequences. Missing an early nosocomial infection means you’re now on the hook for very long admissions with expensive treatments and interventions.
Personal experience in US academia also suggests not, far more concern for early diagnosis of infection and IPAC than I saw practicing in Canada.
The goal wouldn't even be to be better - it would be to measure how much benefit could be had with perfect biological isolation, so that we could decide where on the cost/effort/benefit scale to put our hospitals.
I don't know what to think about splitting into regions. Personally I wouldn't want that to happen because I think it would be worse, but I am biased as I am strongly against tribalism - ie I wanted a united states of europe and closer ties with the US, Canada, NZ, Australia and all aligned countries. The only logical defense for things to come is in my view closer ties and unity. It worked during the last cold war, it should work now, but as challenges are growing I think what we have in place should be further galvanised.
What I am worried instead about is increasing authoritariasm on both sides of the political spectrum taking places in all western and western alined countries, which may lead to further fragmentation and further encouragement of our foes.
I've never found this to be the case. The big titles are usually $70 USD new, and it's easier to find physical copies of PS4 and PS5 games because Microsoft has been focusing on digital-only as of late.
I’ve tried tweeting the fill settings and while it works the rest of the components are undersized for that load and sometimes the motor overheats and the whole thing shuts down. The side load also tends to leak at too high a water pressure.
You can make diy detergent by adding a teaspoon of TSP to the wash. It helps a lot.
It's incredibly difficult to build an airplane, especially a completely new design.
It's absolutely impossible to do that at the same time as making one that will last 30-50 years and have a low failure rate.
What is difficult, incredibly expensive, and very time-consuming, but possible - barely - is starting with the first airplane and eventually getting to the second.
The first is the job of a Skunk Works. The second is the job of more traditional aerospace organizations.
I agree with the sibling comments, but let me add a few ideas. Let's not even worry about the bureaucracy, safety regulations, etc. for a "Skunk Works" phase. The safety and reliability stuff is even harder, but just the first phase of building anything that flies is really hard.
Aircraft design requires truly careful engineering. There is very little leeway. EVERYTHING is a trade-off. You have huge forces and need very light weight. You add a pound of structure to tolerate the loads, now you have more loads and need more power all of which adds weight, requiring more fuel to make range. All of that requires more structure, which adds weight. To find a workable design that "closes" is hard because there is a very small corner of the design envelope that will even work.
It's also hard because when working at these extremes of what is even possible, there is no room for failure and you can't just add reliability by brute force (adding more power, more metal, etc.). There are fine margins because you can't afford thick ones. And to live with these fine margins, you must have extremely tight manufacturing tolerances and predictable performance.
Aircraft are also a very complicated system. The physics are complicated, the behavior of all the required subsystems is complicated.
So now, you have to do the most precise careful engineering you can think of, across a set of super complicated interdependent systems.
So all of this costs a lot of money, and at some point - for a new design - it has to take off for the first time. At that point, basically nothing can go wrong. You can't exactly fire up gdb, find the bug and recompile. There is no edit-compile-test cycle (well, or it's a very short cycle).
The only thing that seems harder is rocket design. Actually turbo-pump design for the engines for the rockets.
ok I see but at the same time, I guess there is a ton of knowledge about previous planes floating around. You don't do it from scratch, do you ?
Processor are really hard to do, as well as software for physics simulation, as well as a ton of other things. But for both of them, I can confidently say that nobody starts from scratch: it's improvements upon improvements and from time to time, a bit of breakthrough...
I do understand that the safety aspect is pretty specific and really tough to get right.
> I guess there is a ton of knowledge about previous planes floating around. You don't do it from scratch, do you ?
Well, derivative designs bring their own problems. Also a double edged sword. Making significant mods to a complex system is often even more difficult. There's a lot of analogy with software and computing. Take 737-Max for example. Obviously boeing royally screwed that up - but mainly because their business people underestimated the difficulty and tried to patch over it and take short cuts. That itself is a hard problem: a commercial company does eventually have to make a profit.
And yes, absolutely there are new greenfield designs. If you need a Cessna 170, you don't usually start from scratch. But one reason to start from scratch is that you are pushing the envelope even further because of new materials, new requirements, etc. So more problems.
As someone who is in airplane engineering, the biggest barrier today to building a new aircraft is regulations. But if we completely ignored regulations, and you were building a mostly aluminum aircraft with analog avionics and the goal was just to get it to fly (nevermind things like designing for fatigue), then no it wouldn't be that difficult conceptually on paper. However, manufacturing would still be the bottleneck, and that is still challenging today (tolerances, QA, technical expertise).
However, if you were designing and building a new aircraft to meet the latest Part 25 regulations for passenger transport, it's almost insurmountable. There's a reason why there are so few aircraft OEMs.
And to go along with it for Part 25, you're pretty much guaranteed to be doing something "thinking outside the box" if you're doing a clean-sheet design, because the current models (737 Max8, A320, etc) are all pretty darned close to their local optima. No one's going to do a clean-sheet design for 5% more pax and 5% less fuel burn, they're just going to riff on something that already has type approval so that a good chunk of the regulatory burden is already mostly taken care of.
Slap a motor and a few servos on a piece of cardboard and you've got yourself a model airplane. Sometimes I'm surprised how easy it is to get something flying.
I work in the UAS industry and we absolutely do use things like these cardboard airframes for prototyping. They're awesome out of the box and really easy to repair with some tape and hot-melt glue if necessary.
I have no idea what point you're trying to make - and also it definitely isn't easy to build an airplane. R&D, prototyping, and manufacturing are all hard
When you look at what the skunk works were doing back in the day with drafting tables and plywood you would also think it’s easy. These days less so due to electronic/computer driven flight surfaces and all the crazy sensing
The U-2 is still flying, even though it was expected to be obsolete quickly. The SR-71 and F-117 are no longer operational, I think they both were retired before 30 years of service.
Military aircraft lifespans rarely fit their projected timeframes.
Are training systems considered operational? It depends. In a systems readiness point of view, yes, they're operational even if they've been re-roled, as opposed to being withdrawn-from-use or having another status.
But if you consider only front-line combat systems operational and exclude all other aircraft including training aircraft like the USAF's Texan IIs, then these wouldn't be included in that category.
The SR-71 officially served for about 32 years, although the last few years weren’t very active - there was a retirement followed by a brief comeback IIRC. NASA had one that might have flown a few times after that, I’m not sure.
What led you to believe the U-2 “was expected to be obsolete quickly?” It would be interesting to know who amongst Lockheed and Air Force personnel were right, and wrong, about something like that.
The U-2, being subsonic, was not expected to last long according to one of the books I read, don't ask me which. In addition to being vulnerable to high altitude interceptors, it was difficult to fly as the stall speed was just knots away from Vne. And landing it was an adventure all its own. That said, the airplane found its niche and outlived expectations.
> The U-2, being subsonic, was not expected to last long according to one of the books I read, don't ask me which
Probably either Skunkworks or Kelly: More than my share of it all. I recall that very soon after shipping the U2, they saw the writing on the wall for its operational limits and started working on the SR71 very soon after. Looking at the timelines, U2 first flight was 1955 and the first discussions for the SR71 were done in 1957 with work beginning in 1958. Powers was shot down in 1960 in his U2.
You can see how certain people would think the SR-71 would naturally be a permanent replacement for the U-2. It'll fly at the same extreme height a lot faster, etc. etc. If you're not aware of the enormous operational cost, which is what really killed the blackbird, it seems obvious which one should succeed. (or if it's not your money...)
Every time one of these threads comes up I think I should reread Ben Rich's book, which I read over twenty years ago and gave to a friend about five years ago. It would be interesting to recall his perspective on this. I think he had something in there about how proud they were about keeping the costs of the reactivation and final flights of the SR-71, which were sort of mandated by congress, as low as possible. They were still a lot more expensive than, for example, recent programs to equip the U-2 fleet with more modern avionics.
The B-52 is the real star here. It is the primary reason that I included the word "rarely". For each of these aircraft, though, I could name two dozen types that did not last 30 years in service.
“ Expect AI to continue spreading into more legal gray areas as companies take advantage of the lack of clarity on legal responsibility to raid and pillage our economy and societies.”
This is exactly what’s happening, it doesn’t even need ai just an algorithm that allows companies to have an excuse for denying care. If there is no human in the loop nobody is responsible. You can’t send an AI to jail so they can just abuse the system.
Judges need to force companies to stop using algorithms and allow approve all expenses when an algorithm is found to be illegal or potentially illegal and that will end the practice quickly. The burden of proof should be on the algorithm writer to show its legal
