Since the press never reports anything with enough contextual information, this “fuel mayday” means that the plane when landing was expected to have less than 30 minutes of reserve fuel. This would be at a cruising altitude of 1500 feet, though I am not sure if it’s different because they were landing in Australia (I know nothing about Australian flight regs).

Almost no plane has an actual reserve tank. That’s really not a thing. It’s just a calculation based on expected route, weather conditions, altitude, and cruising speed.

For understandable reasons, airlines don’t like to fly around with a lot of extra fuel as it’s heavy and reduces profits and is more dangerous on landing (plane more likely to go kablooey if something goes wrong).

Fuck webmail.

I’ve been using Thunderbird since 2002 and the interface has looked about the same the whole time, and worked the same. It’s a damn email client. It doesn’t need to change appearance and functionality radically every six months. It’s not (by Zeus) optimized for mobile. It just gets out of the way and works.

How people tolerate webmail, especially gmail and its horrid interface, its extreme slowness, and its data-thievin’, I have no idea at all.

I will keep using a real mail client until none exist.

I do wish I had an Ivy League degree. Not for the prestige, or for the money, but so that I could do any old stupid shit and people would laud me and say how brilliant and original I was.

Paint myself yellow and run down the road naked? Art. A social statement. Instead of me just being “Florida man.”

Write the most garbage, hackneyed, slapdash piece in human history? Get it published in The New Yorker. I’m not bitter, but I am envious. I’d like life on easy mode. I’d like people to fall prostrate at my feet for the most vacuous, sophomoric statements and actions. And more importantly, give me money for same.

Wouldn’t that be nice?