• 32 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 26th, 2023

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  • I didn’t take it as a dunk on Tesla at all, you’re fine. I’m not a gatekeepong fanboy. I just find the conspiracy theorists that circle around his work irritating. A lot of people do blindly accept that marching across a bridge will cause a collapse, but the science says it has to be deliberate and accentuated to make it happen.

    Tesla was an odd character. Highly likely he was autistic, which created a lot of problems for him getting so easily taken advantage of as he didn’t really get the business side of things and focused on his work. He made a lot of wild claims even though his inventions were amazing enough as they were.


  • Wrong and right.

    In the context of alcohol, you have to notify your substance abuse program before you “get caught”. IOW, if you know you have a drinking problem and call before you check in for duty, you will be removed from flying and placed in the program. You’ll piss people off, but you won’t get fired. If you show up, check in for work, then get caught, you’re fucked. No program for you.

    As far as other mental health issues go, yeah. It can be really, really hard to get treated without jeopardizing your job, which can also be part of the reason why alcohol is such a problem in the industry. Self medicating away a problem. Luckily antidepressants are becoming acceptable.



  • This DUI charge is probably going to be dropped in favor of federal charges by the FAA. Maybe not and he’ll get both state and federal charges. The legal limit is not the same as cars. It’s 0.04%, half of the automotive limit as noted in the article.

    The pilot will be suspended immediately.

    If guilty;

    The pilot will lose all pilot certificates

    Lose pilot medical certificate

    Be immediately fired. No airline allows aircraft OUI incidents

    Face possible incarceration

    Get some nasty fines

    Alcoholism sucks. Sometimes it can also just be a shitty one-time decision. This dude is fucked because they pulled him from the flight deck. If you’re caught before getting in the flight deck it’s still gonna suck and you’ll still lose everything, but you have a hope of flying commercially again with a lot of effort.



  • I was a huge Tesla fanboy decades ago. I even built my own Tesla Coil. Still have quite a few books on him and his experiments. The quote you cited is the one always used by people to imply the device has far greater power than it really does - note it says “alleged” - and people trying to reproduce the effect haven’t managed it. Hence the missing magical property.

    As far as the bridge collapse goes, there’s only one known reference to a bridge collapse thanks to soldiers crossing it. That collapse was because the soldiers noticed the resonance of the bridge with their pace, thought it was fun, and deliberately acted to increase it, just like you would on a playground chain bridge, thereby causing some of the cables to fail. The bridge would not have failed had they continued to march normally, so the random collapse due to regular marching isn’t really a thing.


  • There was a device made by Nikola Tesla called an “oscillator” that could allegedly cause small earthquakes. Nobody has ever managed to reproduce the effect, usually blaming some missing magical property of the device that Tesla deliberately withheld from knowledge. I imagine many people have tried to recreate such devices, but driving large amounts of mass to violent movement with tiny inputs when that mass has a lot of energy dissipation and resistance to movement is really not gonna work. A large motor like that with massive out of balance rotation would probably fall apart or pull free of it’s mounts before it could do any damage.