This lawsuit existed before Musk decided to venture into US federal politics. The (de)merits of the FAA’s actions here have nothing to do with Elon Musk.

Yes, it’s bad to have fewer ATCs. I think this was a contributing factor.

As far as I know frequency of plane crashed haven’t actually increased. Just frequency bias (happy to be proven wrong).

I don’t like what Musk/DOGE are doing with ATCs and fed employees either. Not sure how that’s relevant.

I agree — I think by “seen” I was trying to refer to how *program designers* (legislators, administrators, etc.) viewed them, and how they went about trying to implement them. Not just “public opinion” or whatever.

Fundamentally many of these things come down to embracing positive-sum vs zero-sum (or even negative-sum) politics. I will always choose the former.

Diversity programs should have never been seen or portrayed as zero-sum, as zero-sum thinking will doom all of us.

It’s not about forcing rebalancing and *redistributing the pie*. It’s about unlocking new opportunities in new markets and demographics to *add to the pie*.

In fact another critique of labor issues is that of occupational licensing and/or labor unions exhibiting guild-like behavior — requiring licensing through apprenticeship programs but then gating said apprenticeship programs via personal relations and gender + race/ethnicity.

Not to mention, the attempt at covering it up…know the phrase “the cover-up is worse than the crime?” this is one of them. What was a hiring cartel masquerading as a broad-based DEI initiative is now being used as a leading example of anti-diversity programs. Was it worth it? I think not.

The ATC shortage existed before the implementation of the 2014 BQ, and has continued to exist after said BQ was abolished in 2018. But four years is a long time for both people’s careers and hiring pipelines to be delayed, and adding another bottleneck as part of a hiring cartel was wrong.

In fact one of the first pieces I ever read about this wasn’t even from Trace, it was from Gary Leff who runs a pretty anodyne blog about aviation and travel called View From The Wing. He expressly also discussed how this wasn’t One True Cause of planes falling out of the sky.

In fact it should be packaged into criticism of the austerity aspect of it— among a shortage of ATC jobs (despite the need for more ATCs with rapidly growing airline travel), the federal government focused on the % share (diversity) rather than the total number (more ATCs) of employed minorities.

But why should have such a standard ever been established in the first place?

Pretty much every single contractor I talk to is thrilled about road speeds improving so they can get more gigs and do more pick-ups/drop-offs in one day instead of paying themselves/their workers hourly wages to sit in traffic generating zero value.

RETVRN (but not actually)

Can’t believe this nation used to use Chinese logographs (less than 5% of the population)
bsky.app/profile/theo...

I think quality merino is still amazing (especially for skiing and such). But HEATTECH is useful as a cheaper option for city-dwellers who need a simple thermal layer 😇

What’s impressive about them isn’t just their warmth but rather how thin *and* comparatively inexpensive they are. Cotton underlayers are thicker, merino underlayers are expensive.

For warmer weather underlayers, AIRism is also pretty great. There’s a slightly thicker “odor-resistant” one that I wear under my gym shorts

I see someone has discovered the HEATTECH line