Thursday Open Thread [3.13.14]
Are you following the dissapearance of the Malaysian Airways plane? It is remarkable to me that somehow this flight just vanished without a trace — and that it seems that the flight may not have been on the track it should have been. Then there is the WSJ reporting today that the plane was in the air (or at least the engines were running) well past the time currently suspected.
U.S. investigators suspect that Malaysia Airlines 3786.KU -4.08% Flight 370 stayed in the air for about four hours past the time it reached its last confirmed location, according to two people familiar with the details, raising the possibility that the plane could have flown on for hundreds of additional miles under conditions that remain murky.
Aviation investigators and national security officials believe the plane flew for a total of five hours, based on data automatically downloaded and sent to the ground from the Boeing Co. BA -0.60% 777’s engines as part of a routine maintenance and monitoring program.
I’ve heard that the families are disgusted with the information available to them so far, and the fact that just the general location of that flight is in dispute is just plain strange. What do you think?
A year ago today, Pope Francis was elected to lead the Catholic Church. I’m impressed by his focus on the pastoral church, rather than the political church — and I’m impressed by how disturbed conservatives are by this. It tells you something about the nature of their claimed Christianity, right? In any event, The National Catholic Reporter has an interactive feature highlighting the Pope’s most memorable quotes in his first year. I can’t embed this, but click here to let it load.
And if you read nothing else today, please take a look at this ProPublica report that documents how blue collar temp workers are the new migrant farmworkers — with similar working and living conditions as those documented in the 1960’s Edward R. Murrow documentary, Harvest of Shame:
Across the country, farms full of migrant workers have been replaced with warehouses full of temp workers, as American consumers depend more on foreign products, online shopping and just-in-time delivery. It is a story that begins at the ports of Los Angeles and Newark, N.J., follows the railroads to Chicago and ends at your neighborhood box store, or your doorstep.
The temp industry now employs 2.8 million workers – the highest number and highest proportion of the American workforce in history. As the economy continues to recover from the Great Recession, temp work has grown nine times faster than private-sector employment as a whole. Overall, nearly one-sixth of the total job growth since the recession ended has been in the temp sector.
Many temps work for months or years packing and assembling products for some of the world’s largest companies, including Walmart, Amazon and Nestlé. They make our frozen pizzas, cut our vegetables and sort the recycling from our trash. They unload clothing and toys made overseas and pack them to fill our store shelves.
It is WAY past time to stop letting politicians sucker people with the promise of jobs, without a single care about the quality of those jobs. It is also well past time to stop subsidizing this kind of work — John Carney, are you listening?
If you take a ruler and draw a line between where the Malaysian jet was last located and it’s destination of Beijing, it looks like there would be enough fuel to get that plane to Yemen or Somalia if they filled the plane with a couple hundred miles of extra fuel which I assume they would have.
A new Boeing 777 costs about 250 million dollars. It also could be turned into a hell of a weapon in the wrong hands.
“It also could be turned into a hell of a weapon in the wrong hands.”:
That only works when the plane is full of passengers. Do you really think a rogue airliner that shows up on radar somewhere is a match for military aircraft?
“That only works when the plane is full of passengers. Do you really think a rogue airliner that shows up on radar somewhere is a match for military aircraft?”
Who’s to say that it would have to be a “match for military aircraft.” The skies are filled with commercial aircraft. I’m not sure how hard it would be to somehow blend in with regular activity.
Anyway , like the Somali pirates do with stolen ships, they might just want some money to give the plain and passengers back.
Odds are that the plain is crashed I’m thinking, but there is always room for speculation until we know.
The plane crashed. The people died. It is sad for the families, but it isn’t terribly mysterious. Maybe it was crashed intentionally. Maybe the pieces will show that the pilots or some part failed. It happens. Planes are complex. That every plane doesn’t crash is a mystery to me.
Plain? Yep, I’m in that sort of mood, and it was typed that way twice.
The mystery is that the plane apparently kept flying in a westerly direction after the transponders were turned off.
Yeah, pandora. The dyslexia kicks in once in a while. What’s your speculation on the plane, pandora?
There are theories. Me? I’m waiting for facts. However, the plane being turned into a “hell of a weapon” isn’t on my radar (get it?). Basic understanding of how a rogue plane would be detected and identified makes that “theory” silly. So… basically, what Geezer said.
FBH-
I’m mildly dyslexic. I’ve never confused the word “plane” (airplane or mathematical/geometric/trigonometric plane) with “plain” (a large area of flat land with few trees.)
Care to try again, or are you willing to admit you just PLAIN fucked up?
Yeah, you are right LeBay. That’s why I spelled it correctly in my first comment. and then forgot how to spell it in my second comment.
Man, you are seriously petty.