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Re:Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” f... by IgorPartola on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @10:10AM (#24341872)
You know it’s true because it’s 2020. Remember that whole alien thing back in April? Me neither because about 10 years worth of events has happened in the past four and a half months.
Re:Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” f... by paranoidrobot on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @10:27AM (#24342075)
On this, a Youtube creator Julie Nolke had a fairly popular couple of videos on "Explaining the Pandemic to my past self"[1] in April and a part 2 in June[2].

The first one was hilarious, and I struggle to believe that was only in April.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ms7capx4Cb8

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdyDpP2s-og

Re:Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” f... by peterholcomb on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @10:47AM (#24342343)
Thanks for posting that. That was great.
Re:Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” f... by ibejoeb on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @12:01PM (#24343240)
"You're gonna wanna pull all your investments..."

Markets are rockin'

Re:Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” f... by ant6n on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @01:21PM (#24344185)
Not between Jan and April
Re:Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” f... by sophacles on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @01:11PM (#24344069)
Turns out I needed to see those. Thanks!
Re:Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” f... by joosters on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @11:07AM (#24342591)
A quick recap of 2020:

https://imgur.com/gallery/x2o7JOi

"Anything else?"

..."I'm still in January"

Re:Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” f... by josepmdc on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @12:13PM (#24343385)
That was fantastic. It made my day, thanks for sharing!
Re:Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” f... by Yizahi on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @11:53AM (#24343146)
"Two dudes" was a nice touch :)
Re:Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” f... by failuser on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @01:41PM (#24344453)
ISS has a leak and they had to isolate in the Russian module to trace the leak.
Re:Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” f... by starpilot on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @12:04PM (#24343273)
Re:Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” f... by aceman22 on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @12:42PM (#24343678)
I have a theory that 2020 is not any more unusual than other years, but that information dissemination and digestion has become so efficient that it seems like it's a crazy year. Just think about the Beirut explosion without cellphone cameras. Maybe it would have been in newspapers, but because so many people caught it on camera we were able to understand what 4.1 kilos of ammonium nitrate exploding looks like.
Re:Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” f... by blhack on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @01:13PM (#24344103)
In 2020 the sitting US president was impeached, we saw a massive stock market crash, a global pandemic, the worst civil unrest in the US in 50 years, massive wildfires all over california, and are heading into what will almost definitely be a contested election where we won't know who won the most contentious presidential election in the last century likely far past what the inauguration date is supposed to be.

I think this year is worse than most.

Re:Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” f... by filoleg on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @01:30PM (#24344304)
>we saw a massive stock market crash

For this one specifically, i don't really agree, because the index is positive year-to-date, sitting at the historical all-time high right now. Doesn't seem like a massive crash to me, given that it dipped not that badly in the first place and then almost instantly recovered.

Re:Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” f... by IgorPartola on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @04:10PM (#24346427)
There was a crash in March/April. The stock market has since mostly recovered thanks to the Fed printing money any time there is a dip in the S&P500 while the economy is doing incredibly poorly. What we are seeing is the result of the stock market no longer representing the economy but simply being correlated to it at certain times. Think about it this way: every company is struggling to some degree and we are at record breaking unemployment, and yet here we are with the same index prices as we had in February. To me that doesn’t sound sane and my personal prediction is that if Biden wins the election the printers at the Fed will be slowed down, which will tank stocks and index funds. This will be unfortunate as many people won’t understand that printing unlimited cash to keep Fortune 500 stocks looking good eventually just results in insane inflation and then everyone would lose their investments. If Biden wins I might just buy a few puts on SPY for maybe February or March 2021 as I think a stock crash will be coming.
Re:Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” f... by bobbean on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @03:02PM (#24345570)
So the market didn't crash this year?
Re:Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” f... by filoleg on Thursday September 03, 2020 @01:49PM (#24366612)
At this point, I think it is just semantics. You can call it a crash, I would call it a dip.

Mostly because I cannot seriously call it a crash (in a way that most people think about crashes), if just a few months later the market looks like as it never even happened in the first place. When I think of a "real" crash, I think of something the effects of which are still present for at least a year or more after the dip.

But that's just my personal take on it, I do not expect everyone to agree with this interpretation of what constitutes a "real" crash.

Re:Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” f... by aceman22 on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @04:26PM (#24346630)
> In 2020 the sitting US president was impeached

Coming from someone who has used this against Clinton many times, having a congress with majority control by the opposition party pass articles of impeachment along party lines isn't really that big a deal.

> a global pandemic

The global campaign to make people aware of it would not have been as effective without modern information infrastructure. Think about Google, facebook, etc. and cell phones roles in that.

> the worst civil unrest in the US in 50 years

I'd like to see the data on that. Also, I feel it's over-hyped by our access to information. Anecdotally, I took a road trip up the west coast of the US a month or so ago. San Diego, LA, Santa Cruz, Portland, Seattle, fairly thoroughly exploring each city. Didn't see one protest. Not saying they're not happening, just saying a vast VAST majority of the population in these places are not protesting/rioting etc.

> massive wildfires all over California

we have these every year. Again, the VAST majority of Californians are not affected by them. But people that don't live here probably believe all their friends that live in California are affected because of the information provided. My GFs parents for example are very worried about us. We're like 100 miles away from them ...

> the most contentious presidential election

EVERY modern presidential election is, 'The Most Important, most contested, election of our lives!!!!'

Just think about the Trump admin. without Twitter.

It's like we're out of the 24 hour news cycle and into the hour-to-hour/minute-to-minute news cycle.

Re:Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” f... by IgorPartola on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @09:17PM (#24349054)
You are missing the forest for the trees. Yes we have access to more info than before, but for example not much more than we did in 2010. In fact in 2010 the signal to noise ratio was much higher.

I am not going to go point by point with you because frankly I don’t feel like it, but I can tell you that you are way off mark on all of them. As a sampling:

This pandemic has affected everything in a way that no other pandemic in the past has. The Ebola outbreak was the last thing we had dealt with as far as global health crises go and it pales in comparison. The Spanish Flu was in the era before TVs. Yet it was clearly such a huge global event that we all still know about it. 100 years from now COVID will be talked about abs studied. It is huge.

Trump’s admin couldn’t exist without Twitter. In a nutshell the GOP could tell that progressives as well as establishment democrats were starting to gain momentum under Obama while the Tea Party did major damage to the image of the GOP as the grown up party. So they sold their party to Trump and got his followers in the bargain. His followers are young, tech savvy, and very enthusiastic so short term it’s a good gamble. But imagine if any one of the Trump scandals has dropped for any other President. None of them could have survived it because none of them had the kind of blind cult behind them. Also, our president has a fucking cult. How is that not rare?

Re:Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” f... by marcosdumay on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @02:26PM (#24345058)
We got a few rare events all happening this year.

I mean... Something like the Beirut explosion only happens ever 3 or 4 years. Our current recession is a two or three times in a lifetime. Mass protests in large countries are some 1 in a decade event...

And, of course, the US, Russia and China trio threatening to end the world over the Mid-East and China sea happens a few times an year. It's just that they suddenly stopping because they have something more important to care about is a one in a century thing.

Re:Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” f... by cma on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @10:16AM (#24341929)
Most of that alien stuff was miscalculating velocities by not taking into account field of view (zoom in/out) changes in the camera.
Re:Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” f... by bitcharmer on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @10:31AM (#24342132)
Are you referring to the documented cases of UFO sightings by the US navy? AFAIK there were also numerous pilot testimonies and radar logs to prove what was happening.

Or is it a different case?

Re:Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” f... by dsaavy on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @11:25AM (#24342809)
Mick West on YouTube has some pretty good explanations behind the UFO sightings by the US Navy.

Here he goes through why the glare rotates while the horizon does not (and recreates the phenomenon): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ka_bX9Hx1H0

Here he highlights the relevant gimbal information on the Navy display that explains the "sudden" movements of the UFO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1di0XIa9RQ&t=251s

He's a retired developer who is now a science writer and skeptical investigator (just to give you an idea of where his expertise/bias may lie)

Re:Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” f... by ColanR on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @12:14PM (#24343388)
> retired developer who is now a science writer

Unless there's some unmentioned specific expertise, that's not a very high bar, relative to what he's trying to discuss.

Re:Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” f... by dsaavy on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @01:31PM (#24344313)
Sure it's not a high bar, I just wanted to point out what his background was. I don't want to suggest that you need specific credentials in order to conduct reasonable scientific investigations either.

His videos do a decent job of replicating the behavior seen in the UFO videos in a simple way and will give experts in the area a starting point to agree/disagree with his conclusions. Especially with the simple descriptions of the gimbal behavior/limitations in range of motion paired with the data given in the view of the video.

Re:Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” f... by rhinoceraptor on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @12:05PM (#24343277)
UFOs are just unidentified flying objects. It's pretty hard to identify flying objects when you're moving hundreds of miles per hour, looking at another object moving hundreds of miles per hour, from a distance of miles, and you're looking at it through a camera lens.
Re:Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” f... by cma on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @11:18AM (#24342716)
The most prominent was from a pilot who had a history of UFO pranks (flying in over campfires silently then turning on afterburners; his story about doing that showed up in an online UFO report contemporaneously with when he described doing it).
Re:Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” f... by vinalk on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @11:01AM (#24342501)
It’s fascinating to me that people with zero experience to be in that situation or use the equipment are saying what the pilots saw was wrong. Everyone is an expert on the Internet.
Re:Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” f... by sandworm101 on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @11:10AM (#24342628)
It is equally fascinating to me that people who do not work with aircraft, pilots, ships, radars or aviation in general automatically assume that the pilots are not incorrect. being a military pilot doesn't make one an expert on all aircraft/weather/radar etc. The scope of their expertise is far smaller than popularly believed.
Re:Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” f... by dang on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @01:37PM (#24344392)
I suppose that people were always this way and that the internet has just brought the phenomenon to mass visibility.
Re:Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” f... by l33tman on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @11:54AM (#24343151)
Yeah there were a lot of auxiliary interviews that corroborated the story, going back like for the entire morning with radar operators tracking multiple objects. Still, since it feels absolutely crazy that the navy wouldn't investigate more closely in that situation and then just "leak" 20 seconds of it, suggests that it's some kind of intentional or unintentional hoax..