Recent comments in /f/explainlikeimfive
Leftstone2 t1_j1g8xio wrote
Back when countries all existed on the gold standard, governments needed to be able to back their currency with huge volumes of gold in reserves. In order to trust that a government's money was worth anything they needed to have sufficient gold in reserves they could potentially pay it out if money holders wanted gold instead. However, most governments began transitioning off the gold standard around the 1970s meaning that they had no need to hold enormous gold in reserves.
So why is the United States still holding so much gold when Canada is not? It costs a ridiculous amount of money to hold onto gold. You need a facility to keep it in, you need to guard it and the gold doesn't really do anything for you while you're holding it. Canada has realized that instead of paying all this money to hold, they can sell it and buy bonds, assets that don't cost any money to keep and actually make you money. The United States on the other hand keeps most of its reserves in Fort Knox, a military facility that they would still be paying for with or without gold because it guards numerous other secrets.
croninsiglos t1_j1g7ydo wrote
Quote from David Dodge, former Governor of the Bank of Canada and Senior Advisor at Bennett Jones LLC.
> "[The] issue is quite clear, that it costs to hold gold, whereas holding U.S. or Chinese or Euro bonds yields you a return," said Dodge. "…That was a strong view. And a view that our international monetary system was in a place that was sufficiently robust, that holding this antique instrument of stability called 'gold' really didn't make any sense."
So you can hold on to gold, but it costs money to house it, secure it, etc and it may or may not increase in value, whereas you can get something on paper/digitally that will gain value and not cost as much to maintain.
[deleted] t1_j1g6ic3 wrote
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jasandliz t1_j1g64mu wrote
Canada’s is sitting on lots of gold. It’s just in the ground. If people are buying what you can dig up, then print that money.
RandomName39483 t1_j1efi2v wrote
Twenty years ago the joke was that the flight crew of the future was going to be a pilot and a dog. The dog was there to keep the pilot from touching anything, and the pilot was there to feed the dog.
gabrieltaets t1_j1e3njl wrote
there's been fatal accidents caused by bad software in planes, and for relatively "simple" controls. As a programmer myself, I'm never getting on a plane without a human pilot.
clocks212 t1_j1c2vl7 wrote
Quite frankly the pilot is not the most expensive thing on that aircraft. A 737 burns $2100/hour of fuel at cruise, more during takeoff. Total operating cost of a 737 might average $4000-8000/hour factoring in all costs. And you want to save $400 by not having a crew?
Also the average payout for an aviation death is like $5-10million. So you’re talking about something like $1 billion in wrongful death liability alone per aircraft. Your insurance carrier isn’t going to be happy about that decision to save $400/h in crew costs. So whatever those premiums go up by has to be less than the $400 you’re saving.
NoPlaceForTheDead t1_j1bzxze wrote
Reply to comment by zzupdown in ELI5: why do we still need human pilots on airplanes? by Gavica
Yup.
[deleted] t1_j1bzr1i wrote
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664C0F7EFEFFE6 t1_j1bv3yo wrote
Reply to comment by explainlikeimfive-ModTeam in ELI5: If yawning is so the brain can get more oxygen, why do we seem mostly yawn when tired or bored? by StormCloudzz
Bruh, there is no definitive proven answer to why. They’re all theories with limited data.
explainlikeimfive-ModTeam t1_j1bsnnj wrote
Reply to comment by [deleted] in ELI5: If yawning is so the brain can get more oxygen, why do we seem mostly yawn when tired or bored? by StormCloudzz
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Flair_Helper t1_j1bpug4 wrote
Reply to ELI5: If yawning is so the brain can get more oxygen, why do we seem mostly yawn when tired or bored? by StormCloudzz
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explainlikeimfive-ModTeam t1_j1bpu3z wrote
Reply to ELI5: If yawning is so the brain can get more oxygen, why do we seem mostly yawn when tired or bored? by StormCloudzz
Please read this entire message
Your submission has been removed for the following reason(s):
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If you would like this removal reviewed, please read the detailed rules first. If you believe this was removed erroneously, please use this form and we will review your submission.
explainlikeimfive-ModTeam t1_j1bni6j wrote
Reply to comment by [deleted] in ELI5: If yawning is so the brain can get more oxygen, why do we seem mostly yawn when tired or bored? by StormCloudzz
Your submission has been removed for the following reason(s):
ELI5 does not allow guessing.
Although we recognize many guesses are made in good faith, if you aren’t sure how to explain please don't just guess. The entire comment should not be an educated guess, but if you have an educated guess about a portion of the topic please make it explicitly clear that you do not know absolutely, and clarify which parts of the explanation you're sure of (Rule 8).
If you would like this removal reviewed, please read the detailed rules first. **If you believe it was removed erroneously, explain why using this form and we will review your submission.
[deleted] t1_j1bm6pd wrote
[deleted] t1_j1blone wrote
noonemustknowmysecre t1_j1b9tux wrote
Reply to comment by Any-Growth8158 in ELI5: why do we still need human pilots on airplanes? by Gavica
> I can't imagine that people who actually work with software would trust these things.
There's a whole different genre of software when it comes to life-critical or mission-critical software. The sort where a bug could kill people or cost millions of dollars. Real engineering. Used to work on OBOGS which let fighter pilots breath. If you have a bug and the thing stops generating oxygen, the pilot has about 30 seconds to notice and pull an emergency lever to switch to the emergency tank. DO-178 would be the super-fun process to make this sort of software. And yes, you have to start worrying about stray cosmic rays flipping random bits in your memory. Lots of CRC checks and watchdogs and heartbeats. The time to reboot a system is important if the pilot can't breath in the meantime.
But if you ever.... drive a car on cruise control, ride an elevator, get an X-ray, then you've trusted your life to some lines of code.
noonemustknowmysecre t1_j1b7vpo wrote
Reply to comment by TheLuteceSibling in ELI5: why do we still need human pilots on airplanes? by Gavica
> Some of them land themselves, but only in nice conditions. The new and fancy ones land themselves in mediocre or poor conditions.
Uh, you have that exactly backwards. The worse the conditions, the more that autoland is advised by the FAA
> Auto-landing tech in aircraft is very rare.
Wut? All airliners have it.
Cactusjack_96 t1_j1b72b1 wrote
We have an anti-drone system in the military called the DRAKE. It allows us to kill drones/send them back to the sender. Now imagine if someone could kill/return to sender an automated 737 with 300 souls on-board.
Would be a nightmare, especially with the amount of air traffic all over the world.
Moskau50 t1_j1b3awp wrote
Reply to comment by ZizouGOAT10 in ELI5: why do we still need human pilots on airplanes? by Gavica
Which means that it’s not actually a backup, because if there’s some sort of electrical short that causes the connection to fail, that plane will crash.
Autopilot systems are routinely used today, so that pilots don’t have to have hands on the control for the entire flight. In any situation, or during takeoff/landing, the pilots take over for the autopilot. Outsourcing the pilots to a remote connection means that you’re outsourcing the backup, not the primary.
So you’re either swapping the autopilot to the role of backup (which is already a no-go in the current aircraft setup, so there’s no reason to assume they’d suddenly be okay with it) or you’re relying on the remote pilots to be as reliable as a pilot physically in the plane, which is foolish.
Any-Growth8158 t1_j1b2844 wrote
Reply to comment by TheLuteceSibling in ELI5: why do we still need human pilots on airplanes? by Gavica
I can't imagine that people who actually work with software would trust these things. Without the ability to over-ride it, you'd never catch me in even an autonomous car even as a demonstration.
Everything is bug free and/or with sufficient redundancies until something no one expected to occur does and things go to hell.
ZizouGOAT10 t1_j1az4tn wrote
Reply to comment by Moskau50 in ELI5: why do we still need human pilots on airplanes? by Gavica
Oh I’m assuming the remote pilots are the main source and the autopilot would be to keep the plane afloat until the pilots come back but not good enough to fully take over or anything
Moskau50 t1_j1aywvp wrote
Reply to comment by ZizouGOAT10 in ELI5: why do we still need human pilots on airplanes? by Gavica
The pilots are the backup for the autopilot, not the other way around. If the autopilot were to be good enough to replace the pilots during the outage, there would be no need for pilots.
druppolo t1_j1ayoxy wrote
Basically, cars and trains have a simple autopilot rule: if things go south, brake, stop, wait for instructions.
Planes simply can’t be told to pull the handbrake and wait rescue. The airplane crew is a very well dressed rescue team.
(Drones don’t count as they won’t carry people, so you can apply the rule if things go south “soft crash in the place you took off from”, which is nice but it means strike a power cable on the way to the soft crash or land on a person head, and in fact, you’d hood let the drone take off place completely free for emergencies. Real life personal example: Dude sent his drone from a parking lot, and the drone came back for an emergency, I was parking in that spot, if I came a little earlier that drone would have landed on top of my car. Now imagine two airbus 380 emergency landing on the same runway at the same time. If you make it simple they gonna crash one in the other, if you make it more complex you increase the point of failure of the machine and autopilot… ultimately, the more you try to code different scenarios the more new scenarios you open in an infinite spiral. Then you are back to the old set brakes and wait, which a plane can’t do). Or you use a human pilot so multiple pilots on multiple planes can adapt and sort it out.
XSauravX OP t1_j1g9ssc wrote
Reply to comment by jasandliz in Eli5 Why did Canada get rid of it's all gold? by XSauravX
But it takes a lot of time to mine cuz it involves a lot of things and will that not create a problem when there is need of gold