Dozens of countries have privatized or partially privatized.

Computer screens have replaced not-always-clear windows in many air traffic control centers. Controllers don’t use binoculars anymore because high-definition cameras let them see much more, especially at night.

A Government Accountability Office study found that in countries that privatized, there are fewer delays and costs are lower.

So why doesn’t America privatize?

Because our politicians get money from labor unions, who “advocate for keeping the same people in the same jobs,” says Furchtgott-Roth.

Another opponent is the private plane lobby. Under our current system, Congress makes sure that the big airlines, which you fly, subsidize private flights’ air traffic fees.

“If they have private planes,” says Furchtgott-Roth, “they should be able to pay their fair share.” Yes. Today’s pricing amounts to welfare for rich people.

A third obstacle is fear. “For-profit companies will cut corners and make flying less safe!” But this is nonsense. That GAO study found that safety stayed the same or improved in countries that privatized.

Also, “For-profit companies actually run the airlines!” Furchtgott-Roth points out.

The airlines get FAA supervision, but the main reason planes don’t crash is because the private companies don’t want to destroy their business by killing their customers. //

Today, computers controlling air traffic in other countries keep getting better. In America, privatization would reduce delays and make flying even safer.

But our arrogant politicians won’t allow it. They insist government run things.

Since governments rarely innovate, you must sit at the airport and wait.

Westinghouse's heat-pipe reactor theoretically outputs respectable power compared to larger reactors using light water, heavy water, or both, to cool the fission core. To scale this tech down to a form factor that fits on the back of an 18-wheeler trailer is a feat within itself. //

At its core, the eVInci heat pipe microreactor almost resembles a large gas canister more so than it does a mobile power generating station. Inside this large metal cylinder, nuclear fuel rods of particularly high quality are arranged into a compact but powerful fissile core with large metal heat transfer pipes running through the core's center. The fuel in question is known as Tri-structural isotropic particle fuel, or TRISCO for short. It consists of a proprietary blend of Uranium isotopes mixed with carbon and oxygen to form a fuel kernel the size of a poppy seed.

These highly enriched and energy-potent fissile fuel pellets can theoretically remain critical without the need for refueling for up to eight years. At this point, the whole device can be packed into a shipping container and sent back to Westinghouse's facility in Cranberry Township, Pennsylvania, for proper disposal of spent nuclear fuel rods. On top of that, Westinghouse reckons it's possible to install an eVinci power station in as little as 30 days. //

a pint-sized fission reactor capable of delivering up to five megawatts of electrical power and up to 13 megawatts of thermal energy out of a system that could fit comfortably inside an average-sized warehouse.

Some felt pressure to keep it secret, worried that if they reported their abuse, their parents would be sent home from the mission field.

Children felt that the mission work of their parents came before their needs. One alum in the report said going away to boarding school as elementary-age children left children with a “profound” sense of abandonment.

Cronly helps you sleep better at night. Just schedule your cron jobs in the cloud, and we'll tell you when your updates, analytics, payments or emails are failing.

Elon Musk’s Boring Company Vegas Loop has given one 1 million passengers a ride throughout the Sin City, the company confirmed today.

After being proposed in 2019 and unveiled in April 2021, the Vegas Loop has provided a new, express-geared method of transportation for residents and visitors to travel between various hotspots in Tesla Model 3 and Model X vehicles. //

Initial projections showed that the Vegas Loop was capable of transporting over 4,400 passengers every hour, and projections for the future could allow as many as 20,000 people to receive affordable, express rides in Tesla vehicles each hour to travel between points of interest throughout the city.

The Vegas Loop includes numerous stops along the Las Vegas strip, including to various casinos, the Harry Reid International Airport, Allegiant Stadium, and more. The fares vary according to each trip, but the Boring Company says the 4.9-mile trip from Harry Reid International Airport to the Las Vegas Convention Center takes 5 minutes and costs $10.

As has been widely reported, over a nine-month span before its demise, SVB did not employ a chief risk officer. However, SVB made sure it had a chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer on board at all times. Misplaced priorities, anyone?

When the rubber hit the road and the Fed’s decade-long money printing binge came to an end, banks like SBV, which didn’t see the economic writing on the wall because they were so concerned with showcasing their woke bona fides, were caught in a very perilous position.

To make a long story short, SBV had spent years taking cheap money from the Fed and investing poorly, mostly in long-term Treasury bonds. When the Fed hastily reversed course and started raising interest rates, short-term Treasury bonds began to pay a higher yield than long term Treasury bonds.

This is what economists call an inverted yield curve, and it was a huge flashing red sign that the economy is on unsound footing. Shockingly, even as this was happening, SVB and Signature just kept plugging along, business as usual.

Since the last ice age

It’s not the Sun
The Sun is the source of energy on the surface of our planet, so it stands to reason that variations in solar activity might cause climate changes. But solar activity has been declining over the past few decades as our planet warmed, so there’s no link. Although solar energy is immense, its variations are tiny.

“It was called the solar ‘constant’ for a long time because you need extremely sensitive instruments to see any variation in the Sun's energy output,” said Owens. Over an 11-year sunspot cycle, the solar energy reaching the top of the atmosphere varies by about 0.15 percent, but it rises and falls every cycle, so it can’t drive climate trends like ours. //

In addition to these 11-year cycles, the Sun also goes through “grand solar minima” and “grand solar maxima” of activity that last decades. One of those, called the “Maunder Minimum,” was once thought to be the cause of a cold period between about 1300 and 1850, called the Little Ice Age.” But “it just doesn't add up,” Owens told me. “The temperature starts to drop long before the Maunder Minimum happened.”

The Maunder Minimum may have contributed a fraction of a degree to the cooling during the Little Ice Age, which evidence has since indicated was mostly the result of volcanic eruptions and human land use changes.

The Sun also regulates the dose of cosmic rays inflicted on our atmosphere. These are mostly protons that originate in space from things like supernovae, and there was an idea in the late 1990s that they might affect climate by seeding cloud formation. But the data shows no correlation, Owens told me, and experiments with the CERN particle accelerator show that cloud seeding by cosmic rays is weak. “The growth rate of droplets is just too small to really do anything in the atmosphere,” said Owens, so it can’t explain the Little Ice Age or modern climate change.

Owens is underwhelmed by the Sun’s current activity: “We're ramping up into solar cycle 25. It's looking very, very average!” he said. //

Mann and others have found no discernible climate oscillation in the last thousand years that lasts as long as our climate has been warming, so the warming has outlasted all of these natural oscillations.

It turns out that some apparently natural cycles are illusions. The 40-60-year-long “Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation” is one of several that are really just echoes of decades-long cooling caused by explosive volcanic eruptions in the preindustrial era. More recently, competition between human-caused warming and human-caused cooling resulting from sulfurous pollution has also left its imprint on the oscillation. Consequently, “key trends, such as the warming of the tropical Atlantic and the increase in hurricane activity associated with it cannot, as some researchers have claimed, be blamed on an internal oscillation,” said Mann. They are instead the result of human-caused warming. //

If an eruption is explosive enough to loft material into the stratosphere and if that material includes a lot of sulfur dioxide gas, the gas forms tiny droplets of sulfuric acid in the stratosphere. These “act like a shiny mirror,” Schmidt said, which reflect some sunlight back into space and cool Earth’s surface.

Eventually the droplets “sediment out of the atmosphere,” as Schmidt put it, and temperatures recover. The 1991 Pinatubo eruption cooled the climate by up to 0.5°C for nearly three years, but bigger historical eruptions had stronger impacts. The eruption of Tambora in 1815 caused 1816 to be “The Year Without a Summer,” and eruptions in 1257, 1452, and 1600 were probably the main causes of the “Little Ice Age.”

“The ocean has a long memory of any changes in temperature,” Schmidt told me, so cooling by past eruptions, like the enormous 1883 eruption of Krakatau, still slosh back and forth in climate variations today.

Ironically, human-caused warming will raise the altitude of the stratosphere, making it harder for eruption plumes to reach it, and will also speed up a stratospheric wind known as the “Brewer-Dobson Circulation,” which will enhance the cooling by those fewer eruptions that manage to reach the higher stratosphere. //

We can rule out the usual natural suspects people often bring up to sow doubt about our role in climate change, and we can rule in humans because multiple lines of evidence prove our role. As the IPCC and agencies in the US, UK, Europe, Japan, China, and others have documented in exhaustive detail, global warming is unequivocally driven by emissions from human activities.

As sure as sure can be, it’s not natural—it’s us.