The average American family is worth well over a million dollars. But they don’t know it. So they live in unnecessary poverty.
What asset do they possess that gives them this tremendous unrealized wealth? Their vote.
America is a nation of 200 million voters. Together, they hold absolute power over everything within its borders, just as shareholders of a corporation have absolute power over the disposition of that company’s assets.
When you buy a share of a stock, what you’re buying is the right to one vote of that company. A democratic vote. If you control more than 50 percent…
Months after a pair of deadly crashes, a narrative has emerged putting the blame primarily on bad pilots. Don’t believe it.
Six months and billions in losses after two of its 737 MAX airliners suffered deadly crashes, Boeing is still working on a fix for the troubled aircraft model. What’s clear by now is that the problem isn’t just, as originally suspected, a faulty sensor. Like a homeowner whose attempt to repair a soft spot in the molding reveals a rotten joist and then a whole rotten wall, the facts behind 737 MAX fiasco reveal a corporate culture that has been quietly deteriorating for decades. …
It’s fast — and expensive
The Urban Air Mobility vehicle is already waiting as I step from the New York City curbside into the waiting lounge. The room is sleek, equipped with couches and an open bar, but there’s no time for me to luxuriate. An attendant dressed in black ushers me through a door and out onto a platform that projects over the Hudson River. Another attendant helps me and a second passenger strap in — and then we’re off. Amid a thrumming downwash of air, we levitate, and the bustle of the city falls away beneath us.
Through the bubble windows I look…
An ‘Atlantic’ cover article claimed to have closed the case on the unexplained disappearance of MH370 in 2014, but there are still gaps in the story
William Langewiesche is a titan among aviation journalists. He has covered, in depth, some of the most important air disasters of our time for outlets such as the Atlantic and Vanity Fair. He also has extensive experience as a professional pilot. His credibility on the subject of aviation is, in a word, unmatched. So when he turned his hand to the greatest aviation mystery of our time — the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 — there was every reason to hope that he would bring some clarity, at last, to a story fogbound in confusion.
The 10,000 word Atlantic…
As technology becomes more complex, so must troubleshooting
Officials are still struggling to understand how the Boeing 737 Max — a plane model built with the latest, most advanced technology, one that has been flying commercially for less than two years — could have failed so catastrophically so early in its career. Two of these airliners crashed in the span of five months, killing 346 people in total. …
A faulty automated system leaves lingering questions
After a Lion Air 737 Max crashed in Indonesia last October, killing all 189 people aboard, Boeing anticipated that the plane’s flaw would be relatively straightforward to fix. A faulty sensor had caused an automated system to kick in and push the plane’s nose down; the startled flight crew struggled against the system and eventually lost control. Boeing set about rewriting the control-system software, so it wouldn’t misbehave in the same way again, and issued a directive telling pilots how to deal with such situations in the meantime.
When an Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max went down less than five months…
Kids love “edutainment,” but does the business model exploit them?
Perched on a rise overlooking the Hudson River, the Main Street School in Irvington, New York, looks like a study for a Norman Rockwell painting, with a century-old brick façade and a blacktop area where kids play four square at recess. But the lost-in-time vibe gets a record scratch once or twice a week when the computer cart loaded with Google Chromebooks rolls into each classroom. After using the laptops for editing essays or doing online research, the kids can spend the rest of the period playing a video game called Prodigy, a massively multiplayer online game in which players…
Power Trip
Abortion, guns, healthcare, impeachment — what to know now
Remember Sliding Doors, the 1998 Gwyneth Paltrow movie in which the heroine’s fate heads in different directions depending on whether she does or doesn’t make it onto a subway train? The United States is looking at a similarly split fate. If Republicans hold the House of Representatives, they will claim a mandate for the party to expand Trump’s refashioning of American politics along nationalist, authoritarian lines. If Democrats pry the chamber from their hands, it would signal a rebuke to the excesses of the Trump era and provide them the tools to slow the unraveling of democratic norms.
But what…
The cryptocurrency market’s reliance on Tether is a recipe for disaster
Back in January, the controversial cryptocurrency Tether (USDT), “anchor[ed] to the price of national currencies like the U.S. dollar, the Euro, and the Yen,” as its website puts it, found itself in the midst of an existential crisis. For months, concerns had been circulating in the media and in online forums that something was off. The company that produced the coin, Tether Limited, had promised since its inception that for each unit it created on the blockchain, one actual U.S. dollar would be held in reserve. But in August 2017, a blogger on Hackernoon.com who goes by Bitfinex’ed started raising…
Jeff Wise
Jeff is science journalist who lives north of New York City. He is the author of “The Taking of MH370” and "Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger."
