I understand that imposing the restrictions may have involved great amounts of wishful thinking as to the outcome. Even this is not so certain because certain politicians were able claim a victory for having Done Something by writing words on pieces of paper. It may even be against their interest — and they are self-interested actors despite claims to being detached public servants — to solve an issue that is evidently so effective at getting people so worked up.
Vendors’ compliance is not disputed, and you have produced no credible evidence of cheating. If there were demand for the smaller, more efficient engines that you’re fantasizing about, someone would already be building them with no legislative restrictions necessary. Under capitalism, any valid complaint can be rephrased as a business plan. You may not like how they complied with the law, but that’s a you problem. If you can’t bear to see it that way, then take it up with the inept authors of the restrictions. The purpose of a system is what it does.
Stating a broader principle in order to apply it to this instance, we in the U.S. are not obligated to go out of our way to pay more in taxes: “The legal right of a taxpayer to decrease the amount of what otherwise would be his taxes, or altogether avoid them, by means which the law permits, cannot be doubted” (Gregory v. Helvering, https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/293/465/). Similarly, the law requires manufacturers to meet the restrictions and does not require them to go out of their way to incur the enormous costs of design, certification, building and tooling up new factories, testing, hiring, training, etc., etc., etc. to produce entirely new engines. Anyone who seriously proposed such a rigamarole would have been accused of over-engineering or Rube Goldberging. Executives who put such a plan in place would have been sued and likely lost their jobs.
Intertemporal effects matter, but they are so frequently left out of what passes for economic analysis.
This is essentially the situation in the general aviation market for certificated aircraft, and it sucks. Costs are triple or more compared to the experimental market. Finding a decent mechanic is a serious chore. Repairs take forever.
1a. They may have thought they knew what they were doing, but their work product shows otherwise.
1b. They may have thought they knew what they were doing and spoke confidently enough to convince whoever was doing the acquisition, likely non-technical, of the same, but the bad hire and the bad hire’s work product shows that neither was the case.
2. Ideas merely exist. To be constraints, they must be enforced.
This is a surprising result. With structured inputs like source code, I’d expect grep to outperform semantic search, but natural language’s errors and inconsistencies seem to leave so many cracks for information to fall through.
Someone learning to fly may be described as paying careful attention: to every little sound, vibration, and sensation. A common tactic by student pilots is overcontrolling the aircraft, e.g., large sudden changes rather than smooth pressures from flying with a light touch.
Automation requires active, intentional attention particularly when flying in clouds. What are my instruments telling me? Are they all telling the same story? Have any failed? Which ones?
A significant part of flight training and testing emphasizes the ability to divide attention between multiple competing needs, being able to correctly prioritize them, and responding promptly and safely in order of priority.
The circumstance doesn’t have to be that dramatic to be abnormal.
Landing after a merely unstable approach, too many significant changes too close to landing, increases risk.
Landing too fast may result in overrunning the end of the runway, pilot induced oscillation, or loss of control. Energy being proportional to the square of velocity means the margin doesn’t have to be huge to pose significant danger. Landing too slow risks an aerodynamic stall or worse a spin, which at low altitude is nearly certain to be fatal.
Landing safely with a crosswind requires technique changes. Too much crosswind or “running out of rudder” is extremely dangerous.
Landing after accumulating airframe icing is triply bad because the ice reduces the control surfaces’ aerodynamic effectiveness, makes the airplane heavier, and requires a faster landing.
The FAA describes taxi, takeoff, landing, and operations other than cruise flight below 10,000 MSL as critical phases of flight because of increased risk. The aircraft is closer to the ground, other aircraft, and hazards such that prompt, correct responses are essential to the safe outcome of the flight.
Any equipment on the aircraft can and will fail. Becoming dependent on autoland — not a worry on most general aviation aircraft — is terrible risk management. Every pilot must maintain hand flying skills. Automation is nice and reduces workload, but the pilot must actively manage it.
This is an example of risk compensation. When people perceive greater protections around themselves, they tend to become more aggressive at the margin, such as with the driving habits that you mentioned or hitting more violently in American football because of improvements in helmets and padding.
> “It would not be an exaggeration to call these criminals capitalists,” he concludes, “even if their idea of making money was more literal-minded than the bankers whose notes they imitated.”
Counterfeiting is fraud, not capitalism. Even a so-called “lender of last resort” cannot exist under capitalism, but only under a system of dirigisme or worse.
Slowly lets you meet pen pals from your smartphone! Match with someone that shares your passions, write a letter, and collect stamps from around the world. Speak your mind—one letter at a time!
Letters take time to be delivered
The farther away your pen pal lives, the longer it will take to reach them. Why rush through replies? Make your letter be worth the wait!
Interesting concept, and I’m glad the magic was there for the two of you.
Words and ideas are meaningful. Finding a physical artifact from a far off place in the mailbox; seeing the stamps, markings, smudges, and other evidence of its journey; opening the envelope; and reading the other’s handwritten words add another dimension. Similarly, holding a paper book is a different experience, so I suspect that more than nostalgia is at work.
Unlike Jevons, [Carl] Menger [(1840–1921)] did not believe that goods provide “utils,” or units of utility. Rather, he wrote, goods are valuable because they serve various uses whose importance differs. For example, the first pails of water are used to satisfy the most important uses, and successive pails are used for less and less important purposes.
Menger used this insight to resolve the diamond-water paradox that had baffled Adam Smith (see marginalism). He also used it to refute the labor theory of value. Goods acquire their value, he showed, not because of the amount of labor used in producing them, but because of their ability to satisfy people’s wants. Indeed, Menger turned the labor theory of value on its head. If the value of goods is determined by the importance of the wants they satisfy, then the value of labor and other inputs of production (he called them “goods of a higher order”) derive from their ability to produce these goods. Mainstream economists still accept this theory, which they call the theory of “derived demand.”
Menger used his “subjective theory of value” to arrive at one of the most powerful insights in economics: both sides gain from exchange. People will exchange something they value less for something they value more. Because both trading partners do this, both gain. This insight led him to see that middlemen are highly productive: they facilitate transactions that benefit those they buy from and those they sell to. Without the middlemen, these transactions either would not have taken place or would have been more costly.