Joseph Rigdon

the sheet metal suitcase has landed

royal canadian air force flying over hohenzollern castle in germany

This might be a very dumb question, but if an airline goes out of business while its planes are mid-flight, do they still continue to their destinations? And how does the crew return to their home base?

The Slanic salt mine in Romania is the closest thing to the Mines of Moria on Earth

Spirit was always a creepy name for an airline.

regardless of your account size, do you identify as a reply guy?

GOP Congressman: Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7th, 1941. Do you know how long it took for the US to have its first major victory of WWII in the Pacific? Hegseth: A number of years. GOP Congressman: No. It was actually 6 months.

"If I told you there was one free thing you could do every Sunday that would make your kids happier, healthier, smarter, and closer to you, you'd think I was selling something." Take your kids to church regularly. I don't care if you believe. The data is so lopsided that skipping it is the parenting equivalent of refusing vegetables because you don't like the taste. Grades. Religious teens get As at almost twice the rate of nonreligious teens. In a class of 100, that's 24 A-students instead of 14. Church gives a kid the same academic boost as being born rich instead of poor. College. Working-class religious kids earn bachelor's degrees at double the rate of their nonreligious peers. Middle-class kids do it at 1.5x the rate. For families without a trust fund, this is one of the most powerful forms of upward mobility social scientists have measured. Character. Religious teens are far less likely to lie, cheat, or do things they hope their parents never find out about. They're more likely to care about racial equality, the elderly, and the poor. They reject the idea that morality is whatever works for you in the moment. That kind of kid doesn't happen by accident. It's built. Closeness. 60% of parents of religious teens say they feel "extremely close" to their kid, compared to 50% of nonreligious parents. The kids report the same thing back. They get along better with their parents, talk about hard stuff, and actually want to spend time with their family. Despair. Religious teens are dramatically less likely to be depressed, anxious, lonely, or feel that life is meaningless. 90% of devoted religious teens never binge drink, compared to 41% of the disengaged. Economists named the modern epidemic "deaths of despair." Regular church attendance is one of the strongest known buffers against it. Parents are spending fortunes trying to solve teen mental health. The most evidence-backed intervention is free. Purpose. Religious young adults report higher purpose, gratitude, life satisfaction, and resilience. These are the exact traits every parent says they want their kid to have. Here's why it works. Affluent families already surround their kids with networks of stable, accomplished adults through neighborhoods, schools, and parents' colleagues. Working and middle-class families usually don't. A congregation is often the last institution in American life that puts your kid in weekly contact with dozens of stable, employed, sober adults who know their name. It used to be called "a village." Now it barely exists outside of churches. "But I don't believe." Your kid doesn't need your theology. They need you to show up. "But church is boring." So is sitting through a kindergarten music recital. Parenting is the deliberate choice to be bored on purpose for someone you love. There's a church within 15 minutes of nearly every American home. You don't need money, connections, or credentials to walk in. Nothing else in this country will surround your kid with engaged adults, teach them moral seriousness, and give them a stable weekly rhythm at zero cost. You already drive them to practices that produce far less. The free thing on Sunday produces more, on more dimensions, than almost anything else you do as a parent. You don't have to believe anything. You just have to take them.

We have 3 teenagers now, 16/15/13. I cannot understand the idea that teenagers are any kind of problem. I love hanging out with them, and, surprisingly, the feeling is mutual. Every stage of parenthood has been delightful.

wyd in this situation

John Ternus, Apple's SVP of Hardware Engineering, explains why Apple deliberately made the iPhone harder to repair, and why the math says it was worth it: In a conversation with MKBHD, John frames the design challenge by asking you to imagine two extremes: "Sometimes for me I find it helpful to kind of think about the book ends. Like if you imagine a product that never fails, right? That just doesn't fail. And on the other end, a product that maybe isn't very reliable but is super easy to repair." His position is clear: "Product that never fails is obviously better for the customer. It's better for the environment." When pushed on whether infinite repairability and infinite durability have to be mutually exclusive, John acknowledges they aren't always, but explains why the tension is real, using the iPhone battery as an example. Batteries wear out. If you want to extend the life of the product, they need to be replaced. But in the early days of iPhone, one of the most common failures wasn't the battery, it was water: "Where you drop it in the pool or you, you know, spill your drink on it and the unit fails. And so, we've been making strides over all those years to get better and better and better in terms of minimizing those failures." That work led Apple to an IP68 rating, the point where customers fish their phones out of lakes after two weeks and find them still working. But there was a cost to achieving that level of durability: "To get the product there, you've got to design a lot of seals, adhesives, other things to make it perform that way, which makes it a little harder to do that battery repair." That's the deliberate tradeoff. Apple chose tighter seals and stronger adhesives, knowing it would make battery replacement more difficult, because the reliability gains were worth it. John argues the math backs this decision: "It's objectively better for the customer to have that reliability and it's ultimately better for the planet because the failure rates since we got to that point have just dropped. It's plummeted, right? The number of repairs that need to happen and every time you're doing a repair, you're bringing in new materials to replace whatever broke." His conclusion reframes the entire repairability debate: "You can actually do the math and figure out there's a threshold at which if I can make it this durable, then it's better to have it a little bit harder to repair because it's going to net out."