Comments by "Helium Road" (@RCAvhstape) on "Plainly Difficult" channel.

  1. The guy accidentally poisoned his own horses, worth a lot of money. Why would he do that knowingly?
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  2.  @JoshStLouis314  Being aboard an airplane for weeks on end eating nothing but MREs and dealing the attendant MRE-related digestion issues sounds like a special kind of hell. You'd be praying for a war to start just so you could end it all.
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  3.  @leDespicable  I figured it had to be water, I don't think an animal that big and heavy could survive a fall like that without breaking its legs.
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  4. Aluminum is literally rocket fuel. The Space Shuttle solid rocket boosters used aluminum powder in the fuel mix.
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  5. It's interesting to look at the aftermath. For a while at least, NASA took safety seriously again. Then by the late 90s they were pulling PR stunts again such as the John Glenn flight. The normalization of deviance trend never ended either. Since the very first flight debris from the ET's foam insulation had been striking the orbiter during launch, which was NOT supposed to happen, but because they got away with it so many times they quit worrying about it, right up until loss of Columbia in 2003. As with Challenger, this was a preventable accident had they just followed their own rules. For some reason, the Columbia accident didn't have the devastating effect on the public as Challenger. Two years after 9/11 and with endless war in front of us, it was like people just felt they had more important things to worry about than another Shuttle accident.
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  6. Designer: "politicians, remember to inspect the cables regularly" Engineers: "politicians, the cables are in bad shape. Spend money or else disaster is coming" Politicians: "sorry not spending any money. Besides we passed off responsibility for this to some corporation so we can ignore it" Bridge: collapes Politicians: "Designers and engineers, we're blaming you, go to jail!"
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  7. Ah yes, back when History Channel was worth tuning in to.
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  8. Good to see you finally covering this one, and in more detail than I've seen before, great job. When I was very little I remember seeing this on the news.
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  9. As if being in a Japanese POW camp wasn't already bad enough, your day gets even worse.
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  10. 6:18 there he is again, Lab Coat Guy. Always suspect. Also, at 10:22, when a Ford Pinto enters a disaster scene you need to start running.
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  11. Sorry, but no. If you read more about this kid, you'd see why. David was kind of smart, but also a borderline idiot. Almost like he was autistic or something. He could barely write legibly and sucked at every subject except science. He literally had no regard for safety measures at all, nor did he seem to give any thought to why doing his experiments in his house or back yard was a bad idea. A "scholarship" wasn't going to help him, because he could barely make it in school, and training him to be safe would be like training a cat to stop liking the taste of meat. When he joined the Navy and served on a nuclear ship, the officers were careful to make sure he was never allowed anywhere near the powerplant. If they'd have had their way he'd never have been allowed aboard. In short, he was a F-up with brains. Too bad he lived a tough life, but some of it was his own making.
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  12.  @jasonfuller9440  Their problems would be fixed if they'd just put guys like you in charge and tell them what to do, right? Make sure you mock their accents, too, they'll love your leadership for that.
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  13. I've rode the Southwest Chief several times both ways. Takes 3 days and 2 nights to get from Chicago to LA, but I enjoy it, especially if I get a sleeper roomette. Passenger trains can be a pretty comfy ride, and accidents are rare, but things like this make you wonder how awful it would be for those inside these rail cars when they are involved in collisions or roll-overs. There are no seatbelts or airbags inside them, just some padded seats and lots of metal fittings, doorframes, tables, etc. If you are in the process of walking between the cars you are in even greater danger one would imagine. Still my favorite way to travel, though, especially eating in the diner car with random passengers and having conversation.
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  14. Where did you get all the cool super gritty black and white photos? Are those from an accident report or something?
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  15. There's a reason people make bombs out of fertilizer.
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  16.  @animalmother9339  Well, in a sufficiently large group of passengers, there's probably at least one psychopath who looks around the cabin at everyone and laughs with his eyes wide open the whole way down.
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  17.  C O  I read your book, Ryan. Your conclusions were all wrong. Halsey acted shtupidly.
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  18.  @CantHandleThisCanYa  FDR's works projects were not "capitalism", try again.
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  19. It can't hurt the magnetic field; the mag field is emanated from the earth's liquid metal core, which couldn't care less about some nukes in space. What it does do, though, is fill the field up with charged particles which can damage satellites and interfere with radio comms for a while. The mag field deflects and contains charged particles from the sun all the time, and when solar activity picks up more particles get trapped in the field and race between the poles, interacting with the atmosphere and causing the aurora. A big nuke injects a huge load of particles into the field, causing the aurora effect seen in this test.
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  20. This was an emotional and politically charged event that had to result in jail time. The fact that the crew and their employer were comfortable blowing off the rules for years before this suggests they were not deterred by the law.
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  21. One of the Soviet reactors is scattered across northern Canada. If you're hiking in the Great White North and run across grizzly bears with tentacles you'll know why.
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  22. The bridge was being disagreeable.
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  23. Funny, I see it the opposite way. Despite all these screwups and even a couple of major disasters nuclear reactors seem manageable, if not completely safe. Weapons are a different story, however...
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  24.  @thatoldyankeesguy  Uh, what?
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  25.  @fnoigy  Oh, so it was the government that was worried about losing money. I thought you said it was capitalism.
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  26. "I'd rather have a bottle in front of me Then have to have a frontal lobotomy!"
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  27.  @Axius27  The snake was thirsty.
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  28. I think my favorite "Balls!" moment was the one where a dog got dosed with radiation and yells "Balls!".
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  29.  @RealCadde  But many speed limits are complete bullshit, tied to politics and one-size-fits-all highway engineering, as well as an obvious fine money grab by government entities. You are still correct, but the cynical way in which speed limits are implemented makes it hard for anyone to take this kind of lecturing seriously.
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  30.  @Wolf-md2ui  It's Australia, you have to be more specific. It might actually cause mutated animals that don't kill you, which would be weird for Australia.
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  31.  @justingrey6008  It's always clear when you are reading subtitles along with it.
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  32. And following that machine, a lake of water at 20 atmospheres of pressure finally let loose in the room you're in.
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  33.  @BeeWhistler  He probably thought it was valuable and he could sell it later, until he got radiation burns and maybe saw on the news that they were looking for it?
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  34. You know it's bad when the instrument starts flashing "balls".
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  35.  @TheBeigeBox  I like the cut of your jib.
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  36. Driving off a downed bridge in the dark or fog is some pretty good nightmare fuel.
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  37. Gods helps those engineers who do the math.
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  38. "The IAEA determined that there were no other radiation sources on site." Yeah, okay, but I'll still skip the tour all the same if you don't mind, thanks.
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  39. He had that old school New York City accent that made him come off like the guy who comes to fix your plumbing instead of the nuclear bomb-building mega brain he actually was.
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  40. The real question is which would you rather fly in: a Mk 1 Comet or an early production Boeing 737 Max.
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  41. I remember a show on one of the cable channels, Discovery maybe, where they sent a camera crew in with the fire fighters and showed them blowing fires out using explosives and some of the other methods. It was pretty fascinating stuff. I was in the area when this happened and remember the smog being so thick it blocked out the sun at high noon. Fortunately I never had any health effects that I know of from it. A lot of troops complain about it, but the troops got to go home when the shooting stopped. People need to remember that war zones are also where people live, and I feel bad for the Kuwaiti and Saudi civilians living downwind from the fires. I saw shepherds tending their flocks, people who spend most of their lives outdoors, breathing that crap.
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  42.  @lukasribin4168  Uh oh, we got an edge lord over heah!
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  43. 4:57 I think you meant to say C-141's. aka the Lockheed Starlifter.
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  44.  @PlainlyDifficult  If I recall NY City's subway system history is also convoluted, started off as 3 or 4 private companies I think.
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  45. Given the general anticapitalist bent of the usual commenters here, it's more popular to bash than to praise, sadly.
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  46. Best one since the live action version in the film "Airplane"
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  47. Did it land in water?
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  48.  @SnafuFourTwo  One, the B-52 is a combat aircraft, not a commercial jetliner, so apples to oranges and all that. Two, there must be something good about the B-52, since the Air Force is still flying 60 year old airframes and plans to do so for another few decades. But let's get real here: the 747 is one of the greatest, safest airliners ever built. Boeing's reputation was solid up until five years ago when the MCAS scandal hit, but idiots on the internet live in a simplistic world where a company like Boeing with a hundred-year-old history remains static and never changes. The Boeing that designed and built the 747 was almost 3 generations and many mergers ago.
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  49.  @fixedguitar47  Why use paintball, when you can just use real guns?
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  50.  @fnoigy 1. I wasn't talking to you, and 2. you didn't explain how any of that specifically led to this accident, you're just trying to link something you hate (because you don't understand it) to a catastrophe.
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