Now throw-in a President* who cannot complete two sentences without lying, an FAA dedicated to $$more-Moar-MORE for 'shareholders' (And the high cost/mile of modrin Rail Fares): is any of this surprising in the least?

tl;dr: Mammon (Drumpf's only 'god') Trumps all reason.
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[not merely employing ∱eare as DJT's raison d'etre): now Be Very Afraid! is merely common-sense. It's a fucking circle-jerk!

(Not having flown since pre-9/11, I cannot escape vivid recollection of that utter-Idiot-child) in the RH-seat of the plane crashed in Atlantic [all pitot tubes iced-up] via this Idiot's having held his (invisible-to-PIC! ) bloody Airbus fly-by-wire JOYSTICK ...
all-the-way to Max-climb: all the way down from Angels 30 ... perfectly stalled==like a rock, (descending like a bloody-heavy leaf).

Somebody Certified this tyro/killed all those people. Prolly never stand trial.
(Had one of Mine deceased via that mis-Certification, $$$ would have been spent in finding out the SIG on that Certificate and suing accordingly.)
I wonder if any of the bereaved DID?

Airbus lacks the simple MAJOR PRINCIPLE in cockpit design: that BOTH pilots' controls must be VISIBLE TO BOTH: AND mechanically-or via whatever means, LINKED so that there is TACTILE-awareness which cannot be compromised (aka: NO JOYSTICKS placed at ass-level/incognito to each other)

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I know the odds, likely shall have occasion to fly next (never in Airbus natcha), still: Boeing's first secret-fly-by-wire MOD bodes ill for all future 'odds'. Oh. Well. :-)

Carrion, sometimes it has initials, like 'FAA' + Mammon.

.. ditto on the "One-button" (whereby if car's battery goes tits-up/or the Gadget's does) yesss... there are some ways to recover ... and last I heard: no two car models do that the same way.

Personally--as clearly n%-iggerant of what a Passenger-carrying Pilot must know--I would have thought that (as with dual-Linked Mechanical er, steering-wheels, by sight AND feel): that whatever button on the yoke says, "I'm Flying This Plane NOW": should, always and everywhere-defeat; ALL the layered-drill-down menu gadgetry.
{Too-many-words, not needed here re the accumulation ie incremental increase in the elevator rate-of-change: only these words maybe): Boeing Supervisory Engineer: should be charged with manslaughter or, just-short-of pre-meditated murther for

A) single-point of failure design [as has its own algorithm re mandatory redundancy: at "Critical" Levels, if I read that right.
B) Keeping MCAS so secret that it isn't in the Manual nor HIGHLIGHTED-in-RED on the cute little iPad. (Add-in the seamy love affair of FAA-with-biz-money, for emphasis by the Prosecution.)

And if the Liar-in-Chief propaganda machines get him in for 1460 more days in a daze:
given all the other Planetary-life-support matters as will next be trashed: "flying" shall also take-on something like that iconic pic of Rollie Free, middle-aged and--in a bathing suit, prone--stretched out on a Vincent Black Lightning at 150 mph. (Well, at least it was salt, below.. and not at 30,000 feet.)

(I'm still finding it surreal that such a chain-of-Obvious-Danger actually got through--sales race or not--ALL those intermediaries along the way. We'll likely never know if even One of their staff ..tried to Reason with the stock-holder 'wing'/phalanx of Boeing-Bizness Strategists??)

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Jeez, we coulda saved a $bundle with the Bevatron accelerator: all those 30-Ton blocks to shield against [10¹³ protons/pulse] ..since we got to Half of that, but only in its final development: we coulda waited out the years at [n X 10¹¹] ... then added some extra shielding. But we weren't thinking like Boeing-Armani-Suits.

tl;dr: Pshaw!!