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US regulator considers stripping Boeing's right to self-inspect planes

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Re: US regulator considers stripping Boeing's right to self-inspect planes

#201

Post by pi-e-sigma »

moomin wrote: post #12
brink wrote: post #6

What other industry is allowed to inspect itself? It completely ruins the point of an inspection. It's like being the judge and jury in your own trial. I'm amazed this is a thing in the first place.

Famously, in the UK, Railtrack outsourced basically its whole operation. Including inspections, often to the same firms doing the work. This culminated in the Potters Bar crash. I worked with someone who survived it. He was, by his own estimation "not quite right" afterwards. People don't often make the connection, but at that point the government of the day started pressuring Railtrack to fix the rails. Railtrack's…

Alternative explanation is that there is no money to be made by privatization, not because anybody cares if there would be another accident and a lot of people would die

Re: US regulator considers stripping Boeing's right to self-inspect planes

#202

Post by returningfory2 »

baryphonic wrote: post #167
returningfory2 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In practice, parties tend to govern by attempting to control the supreme court, because there's no possible way to pass their agendas due to our vaunted checks and balances. I agree that the the Supreme Court is more important because of the inability of Congress to pass regular legislation. However I don't think the root cause is "checks and balances". I think the root cause is the (unconstitutional) Senate filibu…

How is the filibuster unconstitutional? The Constitution explicitly gives each House the power to select its own rules, and the Senate is never "dissolved" like the House of Representatives is, so its rules carry on.

Legal scholars as in [1] can make the point better than me:

> When considering the filibuster as a supermajority requirement for regular legislation, it is clearly unconstitutional. As a textual matter, the Constitution appoints the Vice President as the tie-breaking vote in the Senate, providing that they “shall have no Vote unless [the Senators] be equally divided.” This provision implies that the Senate must pass regular legislation by a majority vote.

In general, the Senate's ability to set its own rules surely cannot be unrestricted. For example, when the Democrats had 60 votes in the Senate would it have been constitutional for them to create a new rule that all tax decreases require unanimous consent of the Senate? Or for Republicans in the same situation to create a rule that all tax increases require unanimous consent? Both of these changes would seem to be within the rule-making authority of the Senate. However both rules would be profoundly undemocratic because they would generally prevent a majority (or supermajority) of US voters from changing US tax law in the future.

[1] https://legaljournal.princeton.edu/tyranny-of-the-minority-t...

Re: US regulator considers stripping Boeing's right to self-inspect planes

#203

Post by Adverblessly »

notJim wrote: post #141
wanderingmind wrote: post #101

As an aside, For all those who talk about corruption and getting money out of politics I suggest reading Federalist 10 by Madison. Its a deep analysis of a need for a republican democracy. Any government that depends on human virtuousness will fail. The only way to have a sustainable government is to have strong checks and balances and putting multiple factions with different interests against one another.

> The only way to have a sustainable government is to have strong checks and balances I don't think this viewpoint can be supported empirically. The US government has much stronger checks and balances than most parliamentary systems where the prime minister is elected by the parliament. This means that there's no split possible between the executive and legislative branch. I think the result of this in the US is that…

> In a parliamentary system, the need to build a governing coalition can result in greater incentives to compromise.

Alternatively, you get brinkmanship where you have a coalition of 53.33% where every party in the coalition that has >=4% of the votes (a.k.a. all of them) will threaten to bring down the entire coalition unless they get their most extreme demand. Incidentally, they are still trying to bring down the supreme court.

Personally, I'd gladly welcome some political deadlock over here.

Re: US regulator considers stripping Boeing's right to self-inspect planes

#204

Post by InTheArena »

TylerE wrote: post #131
wanderingmind wrote: post #101

As an aside, For all those who talk about corruption and getting money out of politics I suggest reading Federalist 10 by Madison. Its a deep analysis of a need for a republican democracy. Any government that depends on human virtuousness will fail. The only way to have a sustainable government is to have strong checks and balances and putting multiple factions with different interests against one another.

While the Federalist Papers are great works, I don't agree with taking them as enlightened guidance from on high. They were theorizing. No one of them really knew how a modern democracy/republic would actually work in practice. Remember, the authors of the constitution (large overlap) stated on the record that they expected they got a lot of it wrong, and expected large swathes of it to be amended and replaced once a…

The Supreme Court itself wasn't really defined by the constitution - they conveyed a need for it - but not how to structure it, given the lack of historical data. They also foresaw the problems with parties but didn't take enough steps to retire them.

This is why things like Roe V. Wade are (/were) so controversial. Does the Supreme Court have the right to imagine new rights to abortion with no textual basis in the Constitution? Even RBG didn't think so. OTOH, given the recent election results, Abortion is finally starting to become settled law - something the USSC could not do. Democracy works again.

That said - they got far more right then wrong, and ditching the lessons they learned first are a big reason we are in the state we are in now.

Once upon a time, leaders actually had to learn history to be leaders. Now-adays, not so much.

Re: US regulator considers stripping Boeing's right to self-inspect planes

#206

Post by philipwhiuk »

nickvec wrote: post #183
mattcantstop wrote: post #171

40,000 deaths each year in the United States resulting from cars, and nobody lifts a finger. The side of a plane pops off a few miles up in the air and everybody loses their minds.

And almost all of these deaths are the result of user (driver) error, whereas passengers on a flight have no say in Boeing's design of their planes and/or whether the door gets ripped off mid-flight. You're comparing apples and oranges here.

Because passengers are incapable of choosing not to fly?

Re: US regulator considers stripping Boeing's right to self-inspect planes

#207

Post by parineum »

notJim wrote: post #141
wanderingmind wrote: post #101

As an aside, For all those who talk about corruption and getting money out of politics I suggest reading Federalist 10 by Madison. Its a deep analysis of a need for a republican democracy. Any government that depends on human virtuousness will fail. The only way to have a sustainable government is to have strong checks and balances and putting multiple factions with different interests against one another.

> The only way to have a sustainable government is to have strong checks and balances I don't think this viewpoint can be supported empirically. The US government has much stronger checks and balances than most parliamentary systems where the prime minister is elected by the parliament. This means that there's no split possible between the executive and legislative branch. I think the result of this in the US is that…

This seems like a very presentism viewpoint. I don't think your points hold historically nor do they acknowledge that "strong checks and balances" and the adversarialness of congress is the same thing and considered a feature, not a bug.

Re: US regulator considers stripping Boeing's right to self-inspect planes

#208

Post by blibble »

throw0101d wrote: post #187
wanderingmind wrote: post #101

As an aside, For all those who talk about corruption and getting money out of politics I suggest reading Federalist 10 by Madison. Its a deep analysis of a need for a republican democracy. Any government that depends on human virtuousness will fail. The only way to have a sustainable government is to have strong checks and balances and putting multiple factions with different interests against one another.

> For all those who talk about corruption and getting money out of politics I suggest reading Federalist 10 by Madison. Its a deep analysis of a need for a republican democracy. Any government that depends on human virtuousness will fail. And yet in Federalist 55 virtue is needed to sustain self-government: > Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form. We…

> Donald Trump urged two Michigan election officials not to certify Democrat Joe Biden's victory in the state following the 2020 presidential election, personally calling them in a pressure campaign reminiscent of his Georgia tactics, the Detroit News reported.

it is utter madness that politicians are involved in anyway in certifying the results of elections

Re: US regulator considers stripping Boeing's right to self-inspect planes

#209

Post by autoexec »

akira2501 wrote: post #154
tw04 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And government should only have as much power as you think the worst possible people in charge should have. This immediately falls apart, by that logic we should literally have no government or society to speak of. "Only as much power as you think the worst possible person should have" would mean literally no power - there isn't a single decision in my life I would pass off to the worst person I could think of. Wha…

> we should literally have no government or society to speak of I don't think society is dependent on government. > would mean literally no power Literally no power ensconced in the hands of a _single individual_, I think was the point.

> I don't think society is dependent on government.

Is that a hypothetical or are there large and successful societies around today that don't have one (or a group by some other name fulfilling the same function)?

Re: US regulator considers stripping Boeing's right to self-inspect planes

#210

Post by InTheArena »

blibble wrote: post #134
hangonhn wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't most modern constitutional monarchies just a veneer over a republican democracy anyways? The monarch wields no real power -- even if on paper they may still retain a great deal. The US system is notoriously bad to get working and really seems to only work for the US. Anywhere else we have tried it has ended with some kind of failure. However, it's reasonable to call the parliamentary systems like the UK republ…

> Aren't most modern constitutional monarchies just a veneer over a republican democracy anyways? it's the other way round, by the time of the rebellion absolute monarchy was long gone, the things the colonists didn't like were being passed by parliament the US then gave its presidency more power than George III would have dreamed of (in practice the presidency also seems to be prone to dynasties)

Absolute monarchy was still a thread at this time. They just called it enlightened despotism. The colonists were objecting to taxation (and really any form of government) without representation, which both the monarch and the parliament were at fault for. Enlightened Despotism died when George III didn't apply reason (as the colonists saw it) to rectify the problem.

In terms of power then George III would have dreamed of - yes, we live in a era when the power of government is still orders of magnitude greater then what anyone could have imagined at the time.

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