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There was a lot of discussion about that in the YouTube comments. What made sense was one commenter who said when he had run into similar situations out kayaking he had plenty of warning because of the motor noise and it was simple to pull over until the jet boat passed. He wasn’t so sure about how electric boats would announce themselves.

The calm of pilots during situations that would cause normal people to shit their pants is amazing. One of the most chilling and heartbreaking ATC conversations I ever heard was from the pilot of a PSA heavy immediately after a mid-air collision. His jet was doomed, and when he made transmission, it was nose down and screaming towards earth. He simply said:
"Call the equipment."

I think most of them had been drinking before their big moment. Big fan of the Katydid and the house fly looked like a fighter jet in comparison to all those other bugs.

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That had to be one of the most predictable events to ever happen lol
the grit being jet blasted into your face--why is that a good idea???

Newt, you don't know the half of it. The reason they need a bail-out? Two words, my friend: stock buybacks.

Back in '16, good ol' AA was ~$20 BILLION in debt. Yes, their DEBT was larger than the GDP of some nations. Bad situation, right? What to do, what to do -- HEY! I got it! Let's spend NINE FUCKING BILLION on stock buybacks. In doing so, they turned $5b in reserve cash into $550 million. Trump himself couldn't have fucked this up worse if he tried.

It gets worse. Here, I will quote from Forbes:

"The numbers boggle the mind. American Airlines spent nearly three times its current value on stock buybacks over the last six years."

It gets even worse from there.

Over the last ten years, AA spent ~$13b on stock buybacks. You know what their free cash flow was over the same 10-year period?

-$7,935 million.

That's not a typo. Their free cash flow, unique among all major airlines, is NEGATIVE. The number on their -negative- cash flow is greater than the -positive- cash flows of Jet Blue and Alaska combined.

Guess where that money went?

Shareholders? Nope.
Employees? Nope.
Improvements to the business as a whole? Nuh-uh.

If you guessed "The CEO's pocket", you win a $4 Snickers bar. If you also suspect that any bailout will end up in the same place, I'm throwing in a free Baby Ruth or an Abbazabba (your choice).

That's right: your tax-paying American ass is going to bail out these cocksuckers not to save jobs -- no fucking chance in Hell that's going to happen -- but to make Doug fucking Parker, an asshole of utterly legendary proportions who made $11.5 MILLION in 2019 thanks to those buybacks, even fucking richer.

There's not enough Prep-H in the world to compensate for that level of ass-fucking. And you WILL smile when you're getting raped, otherwise it's getting stuffed in your mouth afterwards.

(BTW: when they started this financial cocksuckery, AA was ~$60 a share. On Friday, it closed just below $13. Dough Parker still made money. The funds, including pension funds, who invested in AA @ $60? Not so much.)

EV will be 85% of all new vehicles sold on showroom floors in with in 10 years

Tesla dominates today and is ahead of all by at least 5 years in technology.

1100 shares and want more.

They build factories in 11 months.

Giga Shanghai factory 2 will be pushing out cars in about 2 months
Giga Berlin should be pushing out cars next march.


Tesla just adding super stamper in Fremont CA Factory and the new shanghai factory 2.

My guess, they will exceed their goal this year of 560,000 and will hit 600K

By end of 2021 their goal is 2 Million vehicles.

Battery day/ investor day is this Sept 22. This is the biggest event of the year.
Their Nevada battery factory in NV is large enough to hold 97 747 jets. And its not enough. I expect big news. The million mile battery is all but a done deal. IE after 1 Mil Miles the battery only degrades 5 to 8 %.



In 1967, this movie scene told the future.




Today the word is TESLA

Oh yes I take ITER as good news, but it still leaves us 20 - 40 years from a... well I wanted to write a commercial fusion plant, however that might be a trifle optimistic.

Lets say we are at best 20-40 years from a functional prototype of a commercialy viable plant.

ITER is very much a test, any way you bend it. DEMO is waiting for ITERs outcome. Of course ITER will work, tokamaks have operated since the 1960s, that is like claiming a rocket will almost certainly fly. Yet we still stand in awe when it does.

It took 50 years from Einsteins nearly blind-guess prediction of a physical phenomenon to fission power plants. 50 years from the Orvilles hops to jet passenger planes. 58 years from Ciolkovskys crazy drawings to a man in space. In my grandfathers lifetime we went from horse-drawn carriages to the SR-71.
In my lifetime we have gone from landing on the moon to almost maybe landing there again some time.

We are slowing down or the going is getting more difficult.

Because this is not a phalanx, which has a cyclic rate of up to 4500 rounds per minute with up to 5500 meter range firing 20×102 mm made to intercept missiles and jets, it's a mark 38 with a cyclic rate of 180 rounds per minute with a 2700 meter range and apparently modded to fire 30mm rounds made for ship self-defense to counter High Speed Maneuvering Surface Targets (HSMST).

Newt,

This is in response to your comment on my statement about Biden needing to lose in '20.

I recently wrote this as a reply to one of my readers (I write under a number of different names in other places).:

Dear <name>,

>I took some time to absorb what you wrote. It's a lot to juggle. The Atlantic has an article in the July-August issue on the worst and best case scenario in CLO defaults. I'll read more.

I read the article you mentioned, and while it's certainly good, it also misses a very important point that explains the mess we're in: the collapse of Lehman and Bear-Stearns, while catastrophic in their own ways, were not the nightmare that caused the Fed to freak out in 2008 -- AIG was. Had AIG gone under and the counterparty default contracts triggered, we'd be on the barter system right now. We came within hours of not having an economy in the western world. The $700b ($.7t) the Fed coughed up to stop this from happening calmed the panic, but did nothing to resolve the underlying issues. These issues continued to compound during the 2011-2020 stock run-up and now we're at the point where the Fed is throwing trillions of dollars at every piece of bad debt they can find just to keep the whole thing from imploding into an economic black hole. It is important to note that in September '19, the credit markets started freezing because of the debt that was already on the books then, -before- CV-19 started rolling, and it took $3t just to get them unlocked again. Absolutely nothing has gotten better since then, and I would argue things have gotten dangerously worse.

In an odd coincidence, the NYT ran an article today about the looming bankruptcy crisis. They're calling for 30-60 days before things start imploding, but I'll stick to my estimate of ~90 days. There's some talk about extending the $600 benefits (we'll see) and chatter about another stimulus check, but that's kicking the can as well as telegraphing how bad things really are. When the Republicans are getting behind free money, you know we're in some uncharted territory. For all intents and purposes, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) -- the reason the Fed is backstopping debt and printing money like crazy -- is the hill the US economy will live or die on. Should the US dollar come unpegged as the world's de facto currency or should inflation begin (and there's already worrying signs this is happening), that's game over.

Please don't take anything I say as the Word of God; please do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Everything I've said is an opinion based on my education, experience and way of thinking. Your mileage may vary.

Here is the article I mentioned: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/business/corporate-bankruptcy-coronavirus.html -- might be paywalled, but clear your cookies for the NYT and you should be able to read it.


>Frankly, it's the physical danger in my area of the States that concerns me. There are the guns and bullying. During some BLM demonstrations in the Midwest, locals were standing around with semi-automatics. I drive a Prius for the fuel efficiency. Pick up trucks enjoy tailgating, trying to intimidate me. This behavior isn't going to change with a change of President but will get worse is we don't change. This ideological push to takeover the country instead of ruling by compromise started around the same time we came to the US in 1981, Reagan's first year. I was so shocked when I heard talk radio for the first time; this wasn't the country I had left in the 1970s.


And now we come to the giant pile of sweaty dynamite that's just waiting for the right shock to set it off. I could give you a prolonged lecture about how this all started in 1978 with California's Proposition 13, or how David Stockman's tragically prescient warnings were blatantly ignored, but Haynes Johnson does a far better job at this than I ever could in his 1991 book "Sleepwalking Through History", as does Kevin Phillips in 2006's "American Theocracy". Honestly, at this point, the prelude is academic. The reality of the situation is that a large swath of adult Americans are appalling ill-educated, innumerate and devoid of even the most basic critical-thinking skills. These people are now locked out of the Information Economy. They lack the most basic skills required to compete in the 21st century job market and thus will watch their standard of living sink into the abyss. These people are not blind to this fact because they're living with the reality of their situation every single day. They're totally without hope, cut off from all avenues of control over their own lives and they feel utterly abandoned by the very people who're supposed to be helping them. The reason you're seeing bullying and behavior like that is because these same people are totally removed from any avenues of recourse and the only people they can take their anger out on are people like you and me. Their anger is being stoked on a daily basis. FOX News and the GOP are experts at this and have a host of boogeymen to keep the anger from being pointed their way: ANTIFA, BLM (black Americans have always made a perfect target), "coastal elites" and, of course, Liberals.

Trump's election was a warning, not an outlier. Trump was the primal scream of these people and Liberals and the Democrats as a whole chose not to listen because they found the sound so abhorrent. The rage will only get worse and the number of people enveloped by this rage will only grow as economic conditions worsen. At this point, it no longer matters who wins in '20. Winning the election will be like winning the deed to the World Trade Center one second after the first jet hit. The damage has already been done and no steps are being taken to repair it; if anything, people are actively making it worse either through ideological blindness, deliberate malfeasance or outright stupidity. It took almost 50 years to get to this point and the endemic issues will not be undone in a single generation, much less a single election. Until the people who voted for Trump feel a sense of real hope, a sense of control over their lives and a genuine expectation of recourse for their grievances, they will keep right on voting for Trump, or people like him.

My unfortunate suspicion is that this country will rip itself to shreds long before those reforms are enacted.

Side note: the fundamental difference between the United States and Europe is that European history has forced the nations of Europe to live with the consequences of their actions. Not so the United States. Europe has suffered for her sins. Not so the United States. The two bloodiest wars in human history were fought on European soil. Not so the United States. The United States has never faced true suffering, nor has it ever had to live with the ramifications of its own actions. Both these facts are about to change and a nation whose character is built on a mythology of individual action and violence is going to have to face reality. The people of this nation are not prepared for this and they will not like it.

Second side note: many people are erroneously comparing the current situation to the Wiemar Republic. This is a lack of historical understanding. A more apt comparison would be to Spain in late 1935.


>As for re-opening, we could have gotten some control if the "leader" had simply donned a mask and used realistic thinking. People could go back to work more safely, wash hands, stay a certain distance. But his hubris led the way, so now we'll have a roller coaster for months and years that will affect the economy even more. France is a good comparison because they were unprepared also, having slashed the public healthcare budget for the last twenty years. But when they laid down the rules, troops patrolled the streets to be sure they were followed. So far, they've flattened the curve (for now), and used different economic incentives, such as paying part of employees' salaries to keep them employed.

At this point, the pace of re-opening is a difference between very bad and much worse. Had $3t been used to pay the yearly salary of every American, we could have saved lives and the economy, but we didn't. The history of 2020 will be littered with "what-ifs". However, the first thing you learn when studying history is that what-ifs are useless because things are what they are and you can't change that. It's already obvious we're going into a second wave. If previous pandemics are any indication of what's to come, this second wave will be many times worse than the first. The wait for a vaccine is indeterminate, but if we're going for herd immunity, ~70% of Americans will need to catch the virus. To date, ~1.5% have. If the US population is ~330 million, ~230 million will need to catch the virus. Call the mortality rate 2%, that means ~4.6 million Americans will die. That's a lot of dead Americans and grieving families.

Take care,

(my actual name)

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Not one of them would even notice if you took half their money away and cooked the books so the numbers looked the same.

They can still buy megayachts, private jets, mansions all over the world with 20 billion instead of 40.

In fact, many studies have shown that they would actually be happier if much of their money was taxed away. To most of these people money is an addiction. It's as destructive as most other addictions, driving family and friends away, ruining relationships, and isolating the individual with the addiction. More money will never make them happy for long, it will only make them want even more to get that sweet dopamine hit.

I say if they've got Billionaires this upset they must be doing something right!