I’ve observed airlines will do this as well if they have maintenance or gate queues. They will sacrifice 1-2 flights (hours late or even cancelled) to keep many other flights near on-time. Fewer angry customers, better reported average “on-time” metrics.
Concur. My kids and watched a “small” Falcon 9 launch from the mainland park nearest the pad at Cape Canaveral. The noise alone was astonishing; bring binoculars to see detail.
FIPS-140 allowed encryption using 3DES up until Jan 1 2024, and allowed certification of modules containing SHA-1 through the end of 2025. There is some transition-timeline nuance involved, but those examples are in general pretty horrible from a security perspective.
The shortage of ATC staff dates back to the Clinton Administration. It’s just hard to attract people into a 5+ year training program for a very stressful job where you might get bounced near the end with no payout and no transferrable job skills.
No the shortage goes back to Regan when their justified strike was busted. It ended the PATCO “union” and was a negative turning point for labour unions in general.
I think you mean Reagan. He removed the union for the ATC not Clinton.
Honestly, you can generally just blame Reagan for about anything. A presidency about weaking labor, strengthening Iran, and ballooning the deficit is uh never going to leave good traces.
Reagan did the right thing in that case. Government employees should never have collective bargaining rights. Public employee unions are contrary to the interests of taxpayers.
Over the course of the past year, I think we've seen more evidence that the federal workforce's collective bargaining rights aren't strong enough. Workers' employment contracts are being ignored, employees are being threatened, constructively terminated, all in an attempt to enact RIFs without following the law.
Things are happening to the federal workforce right now that aren't even legal in the private sector.
You have to have your contract violated for a significant amount before you can notionally afford to hire a lawyer to fight it out. Below 5 figures it doesn't make much financial sense to do that for most people, so they just eat it instead. It's how a lot of "theft of wages" and other mistreatment happens so often. Lawyers don't take those cases for free, and court isn't free either. And you're not going to instantly appear at the top of the docket for something small like that especially if the government buries you in procedure. They can do that for years.
But sure, yeah you can seek redress through the courts.
The result of some of the issues at hand might not even be damages, but simply to realign policies with what the law requires.... which may no longer be relevant for someone who lost a job a year ago and has since moved on out of necessity.
And this admin doesn't simply stop an initiative when courts block them, they find a new "creative interpretation" to do the same thing, and carry on for however long it takes the next trial to happen.
Suing the federal government solo is an insurmountable task for most people -- even more so while they're being constructively terminated. Employee unions have been suing on their workers behalf over the past year, but the executive branch can drag out federal trials for a lot longer than people can stay without a job.
People complain about police unions all the time, it's just their complainants don't overlap much with the people who complain about private sector unions.
Nope. Public employee unions bring zero value and this incident is not evidence to support such unions. Relying on unions to act as ersatz safety regulators would be stupid, just completely the wrong approach. Decisions about things like ATC procedures, staffing levels, and training standards should be the responsibility of apolitical career bureaucrats.
Why would a career bureaucrat be a more efficient way to figure out how to attract and retain ATC workers, ass opposed to a union representing those ATC workers?
Your proposal intentionally injects inefficiency and noise into the system because you don't like some political boogeyman.
The dead people on that airplane are a pretty strong contradiction too this.
I’d love to see ATC funded by usage fees (some kind of “landing toll”) instead of the government (with some kind of licensing / oversight - like how pilots and pilot licensing works). The current system clearly is not working.
The government is a great tool to regulate but not execute.
If the regulations are crazy let the people who have to implement them strike.
Yes, absolutely. No government employees should ever have collective bargaining rights. If they want better wages and working conditions then they can advocate for those through the political process, the same as any other citizen.
Collective bargaining rights shouldn’t even be a separate thing. They’re just a natural consequence of the fact that free speech is protected and slavery is illegal. The idea of an illegal strike is bizarre.
This adversarial mindset isn't conducive to good governance.
Of course public employee unions have conflicting interests with taxpayers in general. But that's not a bad thing, unless you subscribe to the peabrained 'everyone is ripping us off mentality' of some professional whiners and presidents. There is this image deliberately created of federal government employees who show up for work and collect a huge check for doing nothing except resting their feet on the desk all day, but I don't see any basis for believing this.
In reality, it makes a lot of sense for government employees to communicate information upward about safety and working conditions, not least because managers (many of whom are political appointees) have their own career interests and those too are not always aligned with taxpayers. It's weird to me that people demonize the bottom tier employees while turning a blind eye to the economic incentives for the managerial and secretarial class in government. Look at the recently departed secretary of Homeland Security, who racked up hundreds of millions of questionable expenses.
Yeah the job should say have 10 year income guarantee. If there are no jobs you get paid. We must be talking peanuts. Just do one less invasion per decade. Can call ATC defense spend if you like :)
ATC/GTC seems like a really strong candidate for partial automation with recent advances in AI. Obviously we'd still want some expert humans in the loop for exceptional situations, but I have to imagine there's a way to significantly reduce the cognitive burden/stress for these folks.
Recent advances in AI aren't useful for routine operations in safety critical domains such as aviation because we don't know how to verify and test them. An LLM is effectively an unpredictable black box with unknown failure modes. There is opportunity for greater automation but probably based on classical deterministic programming.
> Before the introduction of cars, “poor road engineering practices” wouldn’t result in those deaths.
Death by adverse horse encounter was very common before the 1920s. Not sure how many of those deaths can be blamed on poor quality road engineering. But putting a bunch of humans, carts, and excitable half-ton animals in the same crowded streets seems like poor engineering practice.
very common here is a gross exaggeration compared to cars.
After vast improvements in safety ~1.3% of American deaths are still coming from automobile accidents. Horses were never close to that, meanwhile back in 1970 cars where around twice as likely to kill you.
This article states higher per-capita horse deaths in 1900 New York City than automobile deaths in 2023. This stat does not account for the significant disease caused by all that manure mixing with water supplies. Its unclear if automobile pollution is overall worse from a public health standpoint than mountains of horse poo.
Most people outside of a narrow set of cryptography engineers are unfamiliar with the term anonymous credentials, while age and identity verification are two privacy-invasive requirements that are being heavily discussed and rapidly being written into laws lately. The post's intro discusses both quite heavily, and they form the author's entire motivation for writing the post.
The central question the post attempts to answer is "The problem for today is: how do we live in a world with routine age-verification and human identification, without completely abandoning our privacy?"
My rephrase is an attempt to surface that, compared to the dry and academic title that will get overlooked. I think this is a very important topic these days where we are rapidly ceding are privacy to at best, confused and at worst, malicious regulations.
China and Chinese companies flaunt every single law that at all hinders them, IP law being the typical example. The EU has the Privacy Shield agreement with the USA. Such an agreement with China would be effectively impossible, since even if it existed, they'd simply ignore it. People criticise Five Eyes, and for good reason, but it's existence at least means that intelligence agencies are willing to follow domestic law.
Not to mention the use of the word "Western", which is the kind of bullshit I could write a smaller book about.
Here in the USA quad-copter drones are used to inspect powerlines and other infrastructure; I see them a few times per year in my area. I don’t see why they wouldn’t use drones to visually inspect train tracks as well. Very cost effective and energy efficient alternative to manual inspection in a vehicle of some kind.
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