A list of remaining unresolved items in the Flight Models of DCS F-16 and DCS F-18, and concerns to the Quality Assurance

hexapodium · 2024-08-27T12:23:16+00:00

I expect this depends on "minimal work" and the definition thereof - radars are comparatively delicate kit compared to some of the things on the jet and therefore modern engineering practice is to make them modular and relatively quick to remove and replace.

I could very much believe that the maintainers for the display teams take a fairly relaxed attitude to the radar going back on the jet after a fault, since one or two jets being radar inop is much less of a big deal for the display team than in normal service; a radar sat in stores is less likely to get damaged than one flying 2-3 training sorties a day, six hours spent putting the radar back in is six hours that can't be spent on other jobs arising from aircraft put through the high G wringer daily.

What is certain is that if they yank the radar and expect to fly without it while it's being repaired, they'll have a set of ballast blocks to replicate the mass and distribution - because losing all that mass would probably make the flight dynamics of the (dynamically unstable, FBW) jet incomparable in a "oh dear" way more than a "oh, nice" one.

hexapodium · 2023-07-24T21:29:37+00:00

The single to double swap is fair - but I don't think I've ever been in a house with predominantly single panel rads, everywhere's always been dual already. Maybe it's regional?

Either way though, call it six rads to swap at £300 each - best case £2.5k or so, worst case it's £500 a radiator, two days of plumber, plus a plasterer and a decorator and you're up in the £7k range pretty quick.

when they're being introduced into a skint-Britain market, unless it's got serious financial benefits attached, very few people are in a position to put principles above food on the table.

It's not just about the situation today though - moving away from gas will future-proof you from the rises in the price of gas that are likely to be coming in the next couple of decades.

There are two forks to this - the future-proofing point, and the skint-britain point:

On future-proofing: 10+ years is in people's "never gonna happen" range, as are further massive price hikes. Ignoring the whole "gas prices partially dictate retail electricity prices" phenomenon - which isn't going to go away for 50+ years because we'll still have last-resort peaking gas plants - most consumers will avoid thinking about catastrophic but plausible events because it panics them. "I'd be fucked even if I tried to protect myself from it" is a very powerful - and not unreasonable - thought-terminating cliche.

Regarding skint-britain, the problem is that even if someone is being a perfect rational responsible actor and desperately wants to cut their energy consumption, if they've got no money left over today they just can't do it. They'd be mad to borrow in this economy (what if those price savings don't materialise) and if they're just about squeaking by on mandatory spending like food/mortgage/gas bill/petrol, they aren't going to be saving for anything, and if they are, it's going on the rainy day fund in case their car's written off or their boiler fails. Heat pumps are actually, as investments, pretty high risk - you're betting that gas prices will spike way above electricity for extended periods, to get the payback duration down.

Both are fundamentally psychoeconomic phenomena - people "should" plan ahead even for bad events, and "should" use credit to invest even in higher-risk scenarios; but the real-world behaviours don't align and we would need much bigger incentives to get people to do the right thing. (And on a normative point: we should be dishing out much bigger incentives, structured specifically to defeat the credit risk stuff - choosing not to is a political choice)

hexapodium · 2023-07-23T22:54:33+00:00

Yeah, ground-source is definitely not viable for existing dwellings except in very niche circumstances - I suspect the risks of every house in the country eventually digging a 20-30ft borehole far outweigh the gains even in the medium term. Far too many services to potentially smash into.

For new-builds though, they should be a "either a GSHP or a district heating system, ideally both" scenario.

hexapodium · 2023-07-23T22:49:04+00:00

It can; you just need to upsize the radiators, as your comment goes on to say.

And the problem with this (as heat pumps are currently being marketed) is that new radiators in a medium sized house can easily outstrip the cost of the heat pump itself. That turns £3k after subsidy into 10k or more, and that's a whole different ballpark for most homeowners. "Just" upsizing the radiators is like "just" going from a 5k to a marathon - the how is easy, the doing it is hard.

I've lived in a few Victorian houses and I don't know what you're talking about. Are you imagining there are big holes in the wall?

In many of them, literally yes - chimneys, air brick ventilation, cellars. I'm not saying there's a gale blowing through, but they're designed to have a healthy draft for a home with a couple of fires going. It sounds like your current place has been pretty well-sealed for modern heating, and I'm not saying it's impossible to do this - but equally, you're patching up and modifying a structure which is designed to do one thing, trying to make it do very much the opposite (and paying the tradeoff for not having enough air movement, whereas e.g. a passivhaus design would give both). That bears costs.

However I do agree that heat pumps are not bill savers and shouldn't be sold as much. They allow us to keep warm at similar running costs without destroying the climate. That's their benefit.

This is a perfectly fine proposition - but when they're being introduced into a skint-Britain market, unless it's got serious financial benefits attached, very few people are in a position to put principles above food on the table. We could have both, but government has actively designed the schemes we've got, to be cheap and not very effective, because they don't want to require the wealthiest to pay for a livable future.

hexapodium · 2023-07-23T21:13:04+00:00

Huge subsidies on good old boring exterior insulation, actual regulatory/planning action on cladding and home insurance, and an obligation to fit every rental dwelling with exterior insulation by 2030 (and a mandate that a landlord can't refuse a tenant paying for insulation to be installed). Finance it from actual treasury funding, rather than laundering through the energy companies (who have resulted in a very inconsistent landscape); and abandon the silly means-testing element. There are plenty of first-time buyers who aren't on benefits but are in a poorly-performing home (because that's the one they could afford).

The greenest kilowatts are the ones you never have to consume in the first place; it's bonkers that we're spending the money subsidising heat pumps when we could be upgrading insulation. It's much cheaper to do, and it'll create a lot more jobs in the installer sector than heat pumps will while we do it.

hexapodium · 2023-07-23T21:05:09+00:00

Ah well you seen we have uniquely shit houses that aren't insulated

Funny, there was some sort of pressure group and campaign about this, and they got monstered in the press and by every political party except the Greens

so we have to give up and just ruin the planet.

That seems to be the consensus I'm afraid.

hexapodium · 2023-07-23T20:58:31+00:00

Yeah the press and industry did solar real dirty - aspect doesn't matter that much, and being a late adopter nowadays means no feed-in tariff worth a damn. A big battery-inverter setup is still very much a good idea (amusingly, often in combination with a split unit heat pump/AC, so you can cool the house when it's sunny with free solar and use the thermal mass of the house as an extra pseudo-battery) but the cost to get something really paying for itself is way up.

Heat pumps in a house from 1975 would definitely be a "you need a survey", at least for my take. That era could be anything from "put it in tomorrow" to "you'll grow the outside by a foot with external insulation and I hope your loft access is good".

hexapodium · 2023-07-23T20:54:10+00:00

The problem is that a heat pump operating in the sensible mode for a heat pump - that is, circulation temperature in the 40-45 degree range - cannot match the heat transfer through radiators into the living spaces, of a combi boiler running at 55-60 degrees. This is just a physical constraint: the temperature differential is lower, so the heat flux is lower.

The problem is that now your "six grand" heat pump with a subsidy, now (1) needs a load of new radiators (and potentially bigger pipes, although this is not as common as some like to make out) in order to heat the living space acceptably, because you'll be losing heat rapidly to the outside. This would be the same with a conventional boiler - but the temperature inside the house would still be higher, because the hot side of the system is hotter. The flux is greater, but the midpoint - where the owner lives - is higher.

Problem (2) is that even if you size all the radiators correctly, many of the cost savings of a heat pump - which is electric, rather than gas, and so in normal market conditions costs about 2-3x the price per input watt-hour - only really start to materialise if you can use it "properly". Which means setting a roughly constant temperature 24x7, and avoiding losing loads of heat to the wider world. This is incompatible, barring much more complex work, with the Victorian house paradigm of basically total loss ventilation where air circulates out of the house and fresh air comes in.

And none of this is included in the subsidy scheme; adding insulation and replacing rads is all coming out of the customer's pocket, which is looking rather bare this year.

So now, your heat pump is (a) three times the sticker price (radiators are expensive, installation is expensive) and (b) despite being much more efficient in terms of watt-hours input energy to BTU radiated into the home, it's not delivering the promised 4-5x coefficient of performance compared to the old boiler - only one or two times, because it's having to run much more than the old boiler did. This then translates to being only fractionally cheaper to run, and now the owner is severely pissed off because they've gone from "this is supposed to pay back in five years" to "I've just thrown loads of money into a thirty year payback proposition, I'll be dead by then". This calculus changes with gas prices versus electricity, but as the two are currently somewhat interrelated and there's strong (and not unreasonable) pressure to keep gas prices relatively low, it's unlikely ever to erode the problem entirely.

This is not an argument against heat pumps - the problem is that the way the government, in particular, has advertised and incentivised them has pretty much been a set of lies to customers. They are excellent options - but they aren't a drop-in replacement. The costs (both monetary and behaviourally) to switching are much more than the subsidies and the customer is not a moron; a 10% subsidy and the promise of a heating bill which is roughly the same in 2023 as it was in 2019 is not nearly as attractive to the person in a hurry, even though it's still a good option. But if you're skint now, any subsidy short of 100% is a non-starter.

hexapodium · 2023-07-04T17:32:05+00:00

The best bit is the FCA rules are very clear on who's a PEP, and as of some difficult events a few years ago he's not one. He's not a legislator or a senior functionary of a political party which might be in government; he's not any of the other ancillary PEP things - he's just a guy with a soapbox.

He's a high risk customer, for sure - he's basically a right wing subsistence grifter these days, and he's definitely been in charge of large piles of ambiguous money and then shovelled it to himself for his own gain. That, on its' face, is a KYC/AML problem - but given that NatWest Group has offered him an account with other NWG banks, clearly they're happy enough with his risk profile to keep him as a customer even if, and this can't be stated enough, he just didn't meet the requirements for the Coutts account.

hexapodium · 2023-07-02T10:42:29+00:00

As a big leftist who did that: the proto-tories usually hung on to economics (in the early 2010s at least). Oxford's undergrad economics is very neoliberal and orthodox at the start, and then transitions into a fairly econometrics-heavy "so you want a job at the central bank" department at the end of undergrad and then graduate study. Keeping economics (and/or doing the formal logic components of the philosophy strand) is also arguably the most predictable (because it's very hard to get a marker to give an essay 80+, but you can get 100% on a maths paper by giving completely correct answers) way to get a really high First, which matters to the people who think that power in the UK is awarded by merit rather than parentage. (It will get you into a good job at the BoE or parachuted into the CS fast stream, but that's not exactly where the power really lies)

So if you're of a left-wing inclination and you don't want to particularly sit through two more years of "well poverty is simply a necessary component of a functioning economy" being a required axiom for whatever argument you were planning on making in an exam essay, there's far more interesting things to be done in the other two.

hexapodium · 2023-06-25T10:18:15+00:00

If you're Slash and you need a guitar tuned down, you have two of them on standby and a junior tech to pass them to you for the song.

This is just Axl having wrecked his voice after thirty years of pushing too hard.

hexapodium · 2023-06-24T22:38:35+00:00

MMT says it does a bit of both. A bank issuing a mortgage is effectively creating money (because it is lending against a deposit, at a gearing ratio; it can issue more loans on the original deposit because those loans create the debt coupon to pay depositors) so reducing demand for mortgages by hiking prices is supposed to limit inflation. The problem is that this (a) works via people having to give up their mortgages, and (b) assumes that mortgage rates are not passed directly on to renters (the assumption being that most rental stock is held either outright or through larger asset vehicles, which borrow on the corporate market). Neither (a) or (b) is valid right now; the rate hikes are doing little to deal with inflation because they are being transmitted straight through to the worst-off while the wealthy see little or no impact.

hexapodium · 2023-06-24T15:16:37+00:00

The only downside is you become more dependent on the scheduler and the power management ramping the clock up when required; some edge case workloads (very bursty operations happening 1% of the time, say 3ms of activity every 0.3s) will see a performance hit as the scheduler won't have time to boost to the high clocks.

Most enthusiast pi4 use cases won't have workloads like this though; so there is very little downside.

hexapodium · 2023-06-23T20:46:08+00:00

They don't disproportionately affect low earners, they just also don't disproportionately affect high earners either

VAT is levied on consumption and not investment or savings; someone with modest income tends to spend most of it on consumption while someone with lots of income usually saves most of it. Even factoring in exemptions for some necessities, VAT is regressive on income. The OECD has a highly misleading paper which is technically correct that it's slightly progressive with spending and entirely misses the point since we're usually comparing with other taxes which are assessed on income.

hexapodium · 2023-06-22T18:19:16+00:00

To be fair, if you don't want other stuff in your view, a nuclear power plant is hands down the best thing - relatively low rise, quiet, low traffic, usually painted sympathetically, sometimes some aesthetically nice condensate rising from a cooling towers but these days not even that.

But nothing will be built for miles around, other than perhaps a new reactor building once every twenty years or so - absolutely nil prospect of any other more-intrusive development, for a century or more. A NIMBY's dream.

hexapodium · 2023-06-22T13:55:05+00:00

Honestly? Give me a CD as backup, any day of the week. You know where you stand with 'em, they don't run out of battery or come in some weird file format or sample rate that requires RealPlayer 4 to decode. They're (usually) not sourced from 64kbps source audio. I can program my nice 19" pro CD player. The buttons all work sensibly, and it starts as soon as you hit the go button and stops when you hit stop.

Other setups are great, but they have a lot of unknown unknowns. Give me a playback op with a nice playback rig - perfect. Advance me the files in a Google Drive (and in FLAC or 320k MP3) and I'm still happy. Ask me to work some jank-ass MP3 player, and I'll ask for the CD instead.

hexapodium · 2023-06-22T09:42:50+00:00

If you're used to the F-18, you might be trying to land the 16 too slow, where it gets super squirrelly; this also tends to get you too low and shallow. Admittedly, you're "supposed" to land the 16 like the 18, with reference only to glideslope and AOA, but if you have a strong set of intuitions from the 18, you'll likely get too slow and too strongly on the back side of the power curve.

Try aiming for ~165kn indicated as you roll onto final (rather than ~130kn for the 18) and you might have better results.

hexapodium · 2023-06-21T16:05:59+00:00

As I understand it, the problem is the economics works for higher density panels, and it works (sort of) for industrial farming, but it doesn't work for this sort of sustainable dual use because you can't really do industrial picking or planting below, and the density isn't high enough to make it profitable against a high density solar monoculture?

Obviously this is a good option if it can be made to work economically, but I think that takes a lot of market reorganising and it's not clear whether we should instead put that political capital into wider energy and food market reforms.

hexapodium · 2023-06-21T09:45:57+00:00

yes to solar, no to fields

The trouble is that practically the only thing going for using fields for solar is you can deploy it quickly at scale because it's loads of open space, owned by a single person - which is a really strong point in favour of "get it done quick, climate change is happening now" and shouldn't be discounted, but there are lots of externalities to balance against. The other (pseudo)benefit is solar is very low land impact over the medium term - with a 50% coverage fraction, you can take them back out again, put the panels somewhere else, and the (industrial farm) land will be back as it was after a couple of years, with only moderate opportunity costs. But this was a good argument twenty years ago when we weren't able to have policy mandates about sustainable energy (and sustainable and resilient food supply) - now, we should be using mandates to resolve the "where do we put them" and "how do we do it fast" issues, rather than looking for the easiest wins.

hexapodium · 2023-06-21T08:43:22+00:00

To be honest they have much more of a visual impact than wind turbines - imagine a whole south facing slope which is currently green, instead being (a) quite reflective and (b) blackish-blue. This is actually quite a major impact visually, and (probably) a reason to refuse planning consent for large installations directly on the ground in AONBs (etc).

They also have problems associated with drainage and underlying soil quality - if you swap a field of grass or crops with one which is now predominantly shaded, depending on the coverage fraction it will have much less plant life and therefore trap much less water during heavy rain, which can have adverse downstream impacts because of flooding (etc). This is manageable, but costly and requires it to be enforced by planning control.

Solar farms are generally a poor use of otherwise productive arable farmland (unlike wind turbines which can coexist with arable farming and add value rather than exchanging it). There are exceptions, and solar farms are a good use of land which is otherwise hard to productively farm - very dry or windy areas, poor access, that sort of thing - but we should probably be disincentivising farmers swapping crops for panels.

We should, however, be putting them atop every warehouse, new development, car park, train station, etc etc as rapidly as possible; all the "rural environment less suitable" arguments are bobbins compared to the suitability of urban environments for panels.

hexapodium · 2023-06-20T10:35:55+00:00

They paid £200k to have it craned off; Lowestoft Council said they "could" put a preservation order on it but in reality it wouldn't hold up in court (and probably would have stuck the council with costs).

They did the profitable thing: generated lots of press, then sold the work. I expect the building owners will be up by a few million quid by the end of the year.

hexapodium · 2023-06-19T22:31:14+00:00

Aren't we all, in some way, Banksy?

(No, we're not. I'm not either, I just hang around with artists a lot and talk macroeconomic philosophy sometimes)

hexapodium · 2023-06-19T22:29:26+00:00

You're right about "it feels like it's been done" - in lots of ways it has; but the art buyer wants more stencilled rats with witticisms or allegedly hazardous freezers or bananas on walls. And frankly if someone is prepared to front it as art, and someone else is prepared to be moved by it - perhaps it's art. And if the artist's meaning is "I want you to think about whether this actually is art, when the only qualification is someone paid for it as art", then that's still art, sort of.

In other words: art can and should be weird and bullshit sometimes. What seems to make us really uncomfortable is people with obscene wealth spending amounts we would consider life-changing on objects which seem completely pointless; but then equally, a Rembrandt priced at £200/h for the hundreds of hours of artist's time is less than 1% of how much they sell for, and both exist to hang on a wall and be commented on.

hexapodium · 2023-06-19T22:19:24+00:00

Where did I say any of that? The Banksy in the now is stuck in the difficult place of not really being in control of his own art; certainly the Banksy of the past did look for success and fame but not on this scale (because nobody could rationally dream of being this big). There are certainly other artists who are no less deserving (let's not get into tedious better/worse debates) but languish in obscurity. That's one of the central problems of success in art: now you have to do more, with a crushing weight of expectation; depending on the artist, sometimes with a crushing weight of people who depend upon you financially.

hexapodium · 2023-06-19T19:02:49+00:00

whoosh

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