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Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

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Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#131

Post by CydeWeys »

tcpekin wrote: post #87
baddox wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm much less forgiving of the format. Every example I've seen has been a colossal and seemingly deliberate waste of the reader's (my) time. Even when it is reasonably skillfully written and contains information on a subject I'm interested in, I vastly prefer the writing style of, say, Wikipedia.

Why not just read for the pleasure of it? Do you every read anything from The New Yorker, or Esquire, or The Atlantic, etc.? There can be great stories that are enjoyable to read, while still being nonfiction.

I read lots of novels for the sheer pleasure of it. But reading the news is different. I don't read it for the same reason I read novels; I read it because I want to find out what's going, and because learning interesting things is fun. I too find writing styles that don't optimize for those purposes in the news to be infuriating, and I agree with baddox that I would much rather read Wikipedia articles (of which I have read many, for hours on end) than meandering news stories.

Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#132

Post by platz »

tomphoolery wrote: post #123
monk_e_boy wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live by the Atlantic, people go missing every so often. It seems tragic but normal to the locals. The sea is the sea. It'll slurp you out and kill you. Tourists seems quite shocked that there isn't more that could be done. Everything in a city is very safe, it's pretty hard to accidentally kill yourself. It stands to reason that we should put up some more signs, or have someone stop them from doing something silly.…

Sounds like the perfect retirement community for a serial killer.

Now we're talkin'!

Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#134

Post by linuxkerneldev »

I would hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but Malaysia's politics are quite a spectacular bowl of spaghetti. You have Saudi "donations" of billions, a Prime Minister who stands accused of using the country's Speciall Forces team for blowing up a Mongolian woman involved with a billion dollar French defense company purchase of Scorpene submarines. The accused murderer now resides in Australia. You literally have the financier of the Wolf of Wall Street movie, parties with Paris Hilton, squandering of billions of Malaysia's taxpayer funds. You have bankers being murdered in broad daylight. You have attorney generals being fired and prosecutors being found dead inside barrels of cement. You have Deputy Prime Ministers being kicked out. You have ex-Prime Ministers raising a 5 alarm fire demanding that the Prime Minister be arrested. You have apartheid policies being increased in the country. You have sudden import of millions of foreign workers, who have been accused of being used as false vote banks. So.... when they write "keeping secrets forever", that almost seems like what was intended for this flight.

[1] http://www.sarawakreport.org/2016/01/court-case-opens-agains...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Shaariibuugiin_Altan...

[3] http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/7/28/malaysias-na...

[4] http://www.sarawakreport.org/2015/11/kevin-morais-drew-up-th...

[5] http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/malaysia/article/kevin-mo...

[6] http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/true-stories/mala...

[7] http://www.themalaymailonline.com/malaysia/article/malaysia-...

[8] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/01/27...

[9] http://www.asiasentinel.com/politics/banker-murder-connectio...

[10] http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/malaysia/article/zahid-de...

[11] http://www.theantdaily.com/Main/Lindsay-Lohan-Paris-Hilton-a...

[12] http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2015/12/29/fbi-probes-wolf-of...

Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#136

Post by rquantz »

vacri wrote: post #126
rquantz wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it help if you think of it as a form of literature, rather than a means of devouring information by the most efficient means possible? It may still not be for you, and this may not be a good example of it, but it is a genre with purposes other than what you are assuming.

I'm probably a bit old-fashioned, but I think that the set 'literature' does not intersect with the set 'bounces a giant angled magenta byline in my face' (the "find a $100 smartphone" bit) Actually, one question I used to like to ask people: "In bookshops, what qualifies a book to move from 'fiction' to 'literature'?" (yes, you can get poetry and whatnot in the literature section, but it's primarily fiction-based)

In the Strand, the section you're talking about is called "Literary Fiction." Since we're talking about sets:

  literature ⊃ literary fiction
There's plenty of literature that is not fiction.

Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#139

Post by willvarfar »

julianz wrote: post #98
mikestew wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking about this on a motorcycle trip to Alaska. For $250 one can buy a consumer device that updates my location via satellite every few minutes to display on a web page. $35/month, and they have cheaper plans. Were I to have been eaten by a bear, or splattered by a semi on the Dalton Highway, my wife would have at least known where to recover the body. Any yahoo with $250 and a shipping address can have one…

Which satellite would it talk back to? There's no coverage over that part of the Southern ocean. It's ridiculously remote and nobody is out there.

There is coverage. The plane was pinging a real working comms satellite, its just at the time nobody was paying attention. This will change.

Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#140

Post by WalterBright »

Zikes wrote: post #73
SeoxyS wrote: post #69

I find it hard to understand how we can be justified spending so much money and effort trying to find the wreck. What is there to gain? The only benefits I see are: - Giving family members (maybe a few thousand people) closure. - Understanding what happened, and potentially making a few improvements to plane safety as a result. Given the very slim chance of them even finding the plane and learning anything useful out…

And when it happens a second time, you will be asking why we never bothered to find out what happened the first time. Honestly, $130m is not a lot of money to an industry such as that. I'll bet the majority of it was covered by insurance anyways.

The insured always winds up paying the cost of the claims, and then some, eventually. The premiums are based on the expected claims.
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