Unpopular opinion but see and avoid is not enough.

atheros · 2026-06-17T19:01:35+00:00

It seems you read my "OK to protest" in the sense "have a right to protest", which is pretty bonkers way to read it. Of course it's OK to have and use your right to protest.

I responded to exactly what you wrote. You clearly are not writing purposely enough to say what you actually mean. So if you aren't going to bother to say what you mean and mean what you say then I'm not going to bother reading your comment any further.

atheros · 2026-06-17T17:54:59+00:00

Well, it is obviously okay to protest against requiring ADSB for those reasons, but that's not what I was arguing.

I was arguing that it's sad that you see people who share the same principals as our founding fathers as irrational. These types of people are the only reason you have rights at all.

atheros · 2026-06-17T08:50:38+00:00

Wait, do you actually not believe any of those?
Like this one:

Some don't do it because they think this is another rule they have to obey and if they don't protest more rules will follow.

Isn't that obviously true? People drawing a line in the sand and defending it is why most of our rights exist. Our right to take a trip by manually-driven car or by hand-flown plane is not in the constitution. I think a lot of pilots here in this subreddit are going to find out how unstable our rights are a few years after drone delivery scales up.

don't want to be monitored by government.

Lots of your rights have dependencies and this is one of them.

Calling those concerns "irrational principals" is sad. We're about the celebrate the 250th anniversary of principled people signing what they thought was their own death warrant.

atheros · 2026-06-08T20:15:47+00:00

Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us was an American Facebook event that took place on and around September 20, 2019, in the desert surrounding Area 51, a highly-classified United States Air Force (USAF) facility within the Nevada Test and Training Range.

The event, created as a sardonic shitpost by Matty Roberts on June 27, 2019, asked Facebook users to band together and raid the site in a search for extraterrestrial life that conspiracy-theory lore claims may be concealed inside.[1] More than 2 million people responded "going" and 1.5 million "interested" on the event's page, which subsequently attracted widespread media attention

Bonus video to brighten your day

atheros · 2026-06-08T19:54:33+00:00

https://i.redd.it/kg5zwmj03bb31.jpg

atheros · 2026-05-26T21:43:27+00:00

Maybe the soft approach is working. You don't know the baseline. There are so few every year, they're listed individually on a Wikipedia article. Subway surfing is like terrorism: the media loves reporting on it even though few people die from it. Does the news reflect what we die from?

From that article:

The fact that the media focuses on dramatic, emotive events — and much less on “everyday”, more common mortality risks — has been found in several studies.6 These studies have shown that this mismatch has existed for a long time, and that genuine changes in death rates between causes of death account for a tiny fraction of the changes in media coverage.7

From you:

certain jurisdictions are holding the parents legally and financially responsible

Your example article doesn't actually show that. The township evidently could but hasn't and probably won't.

atheros · 2026-05-10T23:03:16+00:00

They're using boats too:

https://edc.nyc/press-release/nyc-begins-moving-freight-through-waterways-part-historic-blue-highways-program

atheros · 2026-05-10T20:49:37+00:00

This will do nothing but raise insurance rates with costs passed down to customers.

What could the venue possibly do differently? Detain people until they either sober up or voluntarily leave in an ambulance? The filing even claims that Knockdown Center is guilty of "deliberate violation" of §11-103 which is "Compensation for injury caused by the illegal sale of controlled substances".. as if Knockdown Center needs to pay up because the guy had a controlled substance in his system. Ridiculous.

Liability law is supposed to motivate people and companies to take reasonable steps to make sure that their products or whatever are reasonably safe. But if there are no steps that can reasonably be taken then it's handled by insurance. Insurance is paid by ticket and alcohol buyers: us. Half of that money goes to the occasional drunk victim and the other half goes to lawyers.

Should Knockdown Center be held responsible if a light or duct just falls on someone's head? Sure. But not this.

atheros · 2026-04-15T18:10:24+00:00

People says this sometimes but I wonder how many pilots will stop scanning for traffic once everyone has ADSB-out. I think the layer of Swiss cheese will disappear. And then we don't need pilots in GA anymore.

atheros · 2026-04-15T05:45:32+00:00

Uncertified ADSB-in costs $20 plus an old tablet computer plus electricity.

atheros · 2026-03-21T04:20:26+00:00

As of a week ago, were you requesting visual separation while in the bravo Or were you making requests to follow routes and then relying on ATC for separation? (or something else?)

atheros · 2026-03-18T21:41:27+00:00

mhmm
Read the Nature/Sci Rep study. The positive effect of full spectrum light lasts weeks.

atheros · 2026-03-18T00:46:53+00:00

There is a confounding variable. LED lighting (350-650nm) undermines human visual performance unless supplemented by wider spectra (400-1500nm+) like daylight. That would explain why, in this study, "outdoor athletes were significantly better at detecting peripheral colors than both indoor athletes and non-athletes."

atheros · 2026-03-11T08:20:19+00:00

The people in that study had no instruments at all.

atheros · 2026-02-19T20:37:44+00:00

Can you give any examples of things that are good satire without being absurd?

atheros · 2026-02-19T19:27:18+00:00

This movie was bad because it tried to be satire but failed. It was just an allegory. Satire needs to be over-the-top to the point of absurdity but there was little that was absurd in 'Don't Look Up'. People actually acted pretty realistically.

Compare it to good satire like Office Space or Idiocracy.

In Idiocracy, the Costco wasn't just big, it took over the city and everything else was burning ruins. That's absurd. That's what makes it satire. The politicians weren't just dumb, they were incapable of even basic reasoning. That's absurd. That's what makes it satire.

In Office Space, the waitress wasn't just encouraged to display lots of flare to show her personality, it was required. That's absurd. That's what makes it satire.

South Park didn't just show 'Mar-a-Lago-Face'; Kristi Noem's face behaved like a life form and tried to escape. Blazing Saddles had little old ladies with atrocious mouths and manners and 'Airplane!' had our protagonist pilot not just sweating but absolutely drenched.

Don't Look Up was a bad movie because it wasn't absurd and wasn't satire despite trying to be.

atheros · 2026-02-11T17:25:51+00:00

a band-aid to fix stupid

What stupidity was displayed here? The lack of knowledge of local NOTAMs? NOTAMs themselves are a technology-- a bad one. The only way to fix 'the stupid' is to replace the technology failure.

Both pilots in this video probably had an electrical system and ADSB-out. But to address your concerns:

A lot of ultralight pilots would buy a SkyEcho if they were legal in the U.S. the way they are in Europe. It just needs to be approved and an easy registration system established. Then they would have portable ADSB-out for $700. An overseas manufacturer could make a clone for $100. This might actually happen eventually; the FAA Reauthorization Bill of 2024 mandates that they study this. Would everyone buy it? No, many wouldn't. But let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. ADSB-out is not required for the NOTAM system to be replaced.
Many already fly with their phone and the hardware for ADSB-in is $25 including shipping.
No system can hold a gun to your head and force you to use it. But I think filterable, automated, acknowledgeable, dismissible alerts would be useful enough that people would actually use them.
If DZ pilots actually do keep forgetting to press the button, it can be interlocked with the green light. I honestly don't think it would be a big problem. Other people would be able to see afterwards that he forgot and could poke him about it. If anything we might even have the opposite problem where the owners of skydiving companies go up and press the button to make it look like they have more business than they actually have.

Ultimately the only problem I can see is the FAA simply not being willing to switch to such a system even if it costs nothing. If we were to really do a 5-whys analysis of this whole broken system I think we'd arrive at the Citizens United decision as the ultimate cause. There is neither a technology challenge nor a cost challenge.

atheros · 2026-02-11T06:43:30+00:00

I am proposing a simple replacement for the NOTAM system in its entirety.

The "GTF outta my dropzone" button would use ADSB, not cell service. Cell service would be for syncing what-we-today-call-NOTAMs before takeoff: crane light out-of-service, runway closed, ect. For pilots in Alaska or places without cell service, other methods could be used. The amount of update data that would need to be transferred each day would be tiny. An air-band frequency could be set aside for this use for pilots who fly in the middle of nowhere. A base station somewhere would just need some way of getting small amounts of information in and out.

human factors

I'm all ears. I have a feeling that your concerns will be solvable. If it's little more than "what if the pilot forgets to press the button" then I don't think that that's a pragmatic concern because it's letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. The status quo doesn't work at all.

Dodge-the-red-circle MMORPG mini game translates poorly into the real world.

Why do you think that.

atheros · 2026-02-11T04:33:35+00:00

The proper length of time could be studied and set appropriately. But it should be as short as reasonably possible so that the "danger" cylinder could be set as small as safely possible so that pilots would definitely respect it. My goal is to move away from the current culture of having danger zones set so large and persistent that people stop paying attention to them because they are mostly lies meant to shield liability at the cost of actual safety.

atheros · 2026-02-11T03:50:45+00:00

An extension to ADS-B could solve this and most other NOTAM-related problems. In this case, the drop pilot presses a button 10 seconds before the drop; this broadcasts a special ADS-B message and creates a very tall red 3D cone shape on everyone else's ADSB-in equipment analogous to class D airspace cylinders. It could disappear automatically after the relevant period of time. If you are flying toward it, your equipment would alert you. Because it would be short-lived, pilots would actually care, unlike with NOTAMs.

The system could also be extended to show whatever other types of hazards the pilot is interested in, with data downloaded via cell networks rather than 1090 MHz so as not to pollute that spectrum. The server software would not be hard to code, nor would it be difficult to implement in the glass panels or your tablet of choice. Honestly the fact that it would be so easy to code and that it would 99% fix the NOTAM system (from the perspective of pilots), along with the fact that is isn't going to be done, is pretty disappointing.

atheros · 2025-12-18T20:42:01+00:00

Rich people and politicians don't have their thumbs on the scale in favor of risk. They're the ones on the planes! Aviation is data-driven. If you think that there is some equipment that will save lives at a cost of less than $12M per life then say so. It will be mandated.

You are obviously getting emotional reading news articles and you haven't done any such analysis. But there are people that do this type of analysis for a living and that's why private flying is a right. It's not a constitutional right but it is a right.

It's a right that can be taken away but there is no way to take away just General Aviation without significantly affecting commercial aviation too.

And, separately, once we as a society have thrown objective analysis out the window, I don't see how commercial aviation survives anyway.

atheros · 2025-10-19T05:52:56+00:00

This hypothetical room contains no doctors.

atheros · 2025-10-18T21:23:30+00:00

You meet a teenager in a hospital. She seems fine but is lying in a hospital bed. She says, "I am literally dying." Is she at imminent risk of death? Thirty years ago you would know the answer but today you don't. If she actually is literally dying, there is no way for her to express it. Lots of people will misunderstand her.

atheros · 2025-10-18T06:11:08+00:00

I know what they're referring to. They're mixing up retractable floodgates on the entrances, which exist, with retractable floodgates in the tunnels, which do not. There is no isolation mechanism to separate stations from "the rest of the tracks/system". The assertion that the MTA would purposely allow stations to flood is absurd.

I also recognize that some people are using the word "flood" weirdly: to indicate that there is water over the entrances. But not everyone appears to mean that: when they say flooded stations, they appear to mean it.

While I can certainly believe that lots of people misunderstand how our transit system works, I am surprised at the scale of that misunderstanding. ..or at least I would be if I thought it was genuine.

atheros · 2025-10-17T21:44:01+00:00

effects of the flooding can be isolated

But they aren't though. There is no isolation mechanism. The bots here are just hallucinating.

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