Model Airplanes

Years before two Boeing 737 Max jets crashed in Indonesia and Ethiopia, U.S. regulators found a pattern of recurring safety problems with the manufacturing giant.

During a trip to Japan in 2015, an auditor with the Federal Aviation Administration discovered a Boeing subcontractor was falsifying certifications on cargo doors for hundreds of 777s and had been doing so for years, according to interviews and government documents.

Back in the United States, Boeing mechanics were leaving tools inside plane wings, precariously close to the cables that control their movements. Workers also were improperly installing wires in 787s, which could increase the risk of shorts or fires, FAA officials found.

Repeatedly, safety lapses were identified, and Boeing would agree to fix them, then fail to do so, the FAA said. The agency launched or was considering more than a dozen legal enforcement cases against the company for failing to comply with safety regulations, a review of FAA records shows, with fines that could have totaled tens of millions of dollars.

So FAA officials tried a new approach. Rather than pursue each violation separately, agency officials bundled them together and negotiated a broader deal.

“The thinking was, get everything wrapped into one case since we’re trying to address a bunch of broader systemic issues anyway,” said an FAA official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

As Boeing faces intense scrutiny over back-to-back crashes of its 737 Max jet, documents and interviews show that the company had safety problems known to federal regulators for years.

In

Article source: https://www.pressherald.com/2019/06/27/long-before-the-max-disasters-boeing-had-a-history-of-failing-to-fix-safety-problems/

Dell’s G Series is a priced-to-sell, configurable line of gaming laptops that scales well to a range of budgets and needs. That holds true for the 2019 G7 15 (starts at $949.99), but the $1,803.99 price of our test model doesn’t make a value case. The build and design would be solid and suitable for one of Dell’s lower-spec configurations, but they are underwhelming at this price, and its Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 graphics are matched, roughly, by less expensive laptops bearing the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti. The battery life is also brief and the feature set undistinguished. We won’t hold the test configuration against the G7 15 line as a whole. (You can order it in ways that represent a better value.) But we recommend the MSI GS65 Stealth among midrange gaming laptops for the best mix of price, power, and portability.

Design and Features: Better Than Budget

Dell doesn’t do anything too fancy with the G7 15’s design. The all-black color scheme of our unit is

Article source: https://www.pcmag.com/review/369589/dell-g7-15-2019

But when unions and employers both realize they want the same thing—lower costs and better care for workers— then “collective bargaining becomes about how we share savings rather than how we shift costs,” Blum said.

Though they had seats on a committee that designed benefits for the health plan serving state workers and teachers, it wasn’t easy for New Jersey public labor unions to get the government to join in a conversation about sharing savings. Then-Gov. Chris Christie was notoriously at odds with labor unions, but unions forced the issue, said Hetty Rosenstein, area director of Communications Workers of America New Jersey.

The price of buying prescription drugs for the 750,000 workers, retirees and dependents on the plan was about $2 billion per year, thus putting pressure on the state’s ability to pay for wages, pensions and other taxpayer priorities. The labor unions believed they were being overcharged by their pharmacy benefit manager. PBMs are middlemen who handle prescription drug benefits for employers, but they have come under fire for driving up drug costs.

“If you don’t approach the issue of price, how much you’re paying for services—and very often the prices have nothing to do with quality of services and outcomes—then the cost of healthcare will just continue to eat up more and more and more. That’s money that could go to wage increases, services, innovation,” Rosenstein said.

So instead of a typical request for proposals, in which PBMs would pitch contracts to the state,

Article source: https://www.modernhealthcare.com/insurance/labor-unions-strike-back-rising-health-costs

Witnesses to Apollo 11 revisit America’s divergent paths

SARASOTA — Whether you remember the day the Earth stood still on July 20, 1969, or if you have only the dimmest recollection of the Twin Towers going down on 9/11, the spectacle of Apollo 11 is as surreal now as it was 50 years ago.

In fact, the anniversary seems almost cruel in its reminder of how, once upon a time, in spite of itself, as America was tearing its foundations apart during an unpopular and unwinnable war, Emma Lazarus’ “New Colossus” managed to attain full stature by planting the star-spangled banner on the surface of the moon.

Reruns show Earthlings in every corner of the world, transfixed, massing before giant screens in public parks and small screens in saloons, clustering before display-window TV sets or huddled over radios. Phantom images of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin after they emerged from the Eagle were grainy, ghostly, the lunar desert X-rayed through their space suits. Some 240,000 miles away, audiences exhaled and cheered, then dried their eyes over the triumph of life.

“I was flabbergasted,” Apollo 11 command module pilot Michael Collins told CBS recently as he recalled the astronauts’ ensuing world tour. “I thought that when we went some place, they would say, ‘Well, congratulations, you Americans finally did it.’ And instead of that, unanimously, the reaction was, ‘We did it. We humans finally left this planet — we did it!’”

There were notable exceptions; in a repudiation of what they dismissed as a propaganda

Article source: https://www.heraldtribune.com/news/20190720/remembering-epic-summer-of-1969

The movie adaptation of German writer Michael Ende’s 1979 fantasy novel The Neverending Story () was released during that special era in the 1980s when a PG rating almost certainly meant nightmares for children under the age of 10 (see: Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal). But that didn’t stop Wolfgang Petersen’s magical adventure story from becoming a bona fide cult classic.

In honor of the movie’s 35th anniversary, now seems like the perfect time to revisit the world of Fantasia with some things you might not have known about The NeverEnding Story.

1. At the time of its release, The NeverEnding Story was the most expensive movie in Germany’s history.

At the time of its release, The NeverEnding Story was the most expensive film production in the history of German cinema. With a price tag of about $27 million, the project supplanted 1981’s Oscar-nominated Das Boot—also directed by Wolfgang Petersen—as the country’s priciest film. Luckily for Petersen and the studio, The NeverEnding Story managed to rake in approximately $100 million worldwide.

2. The book’s author called the movie “revolting.”

Despite having worked with Petersen on the script, The Neverending Story author Michael Ende publicly bashed the finished product. Following the film’s release in Germany, Ende organized a press conference where he referred to the film as “the revolting movie” and demanded that his name not appear in the credits, claiming that “The makers of the

Article source: http://mentalfloss.com/article/589633/star-wars-predicts-stranger-things-hopper-fate

The movie adaptation of German writer Michael Ende’s 1979 fantasy novel The Neverending Story () was released during that special era in the 1980s when a PG rating almost certainly meant nightmares for children under the age of 10 (see: Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal). But that didn’t stop Wolfgang Petersen’s magical adventure story from becoming a bona fide cult classic.

In honor of the movie’s 35th anniversary, now seems like the perfect time to revisit the world of Fantasia with some things you might not have known about The NeverEnding Story.

1. At the time of its release, The NeverEnding Story was the most expensive movie in Germany’s history.

At the time of its release, The NeverEnding Story was the most expensive film production in the history of German cinema. With a price tag of about $27 million, the project supplanted 1981’s Oscar-nominated Das Boot—also directed by Wolfgang Petersen—as the country’s priciest film. Luckily for Petersen and the studio, The NeverEnding Story managed to rake in approximately $100 million worldwide.

2. The book’s author called the movie “revolting.”

Despite having worked with Petersen on the script, The Neverending Story author Michael Ende publicly bashed the finished product. Following the film’s release in Germany, Ende organized a press conference where he referred to the film as “the revolting movie” and demanded that his name not appear in the credits, claiming that “The makers of the

Article source: http://mentalfloss.com/article/589698/the-office-ellie-kemper-talks-reboot-reunion-show