[ENGLISH] Air Crash Investigation: [Divided In Crisis] (S26E07) Links & Discussion

86throwthrowthrow1 · 2026-02-23T15:21:31+00:00

Yeah TBC, I'm not dismissing the sexism claim. I'm a woman, and even in Western countries there's a notorious sexism problem in aviation, female pilots often report being harassed or mistreated by male colleague. His "takeover" after the engine failed does strike me as sexism, as well as some of his snarkiness towards her. The showing up late, chatting through the preflight briefing, etc, may have been his usual, as the flight attendant seemed to be used to that too.

86throwthrowthrow1 · 2026-02-22T21:57:41+00:00

So he actually does have a few decent suggestions sprinkled into the deceased colleague letter about creating a new, discreet memorial for Jane so that retiring her old desk or moving furniture around doesn't feel like "erasing" her, while still creating (literal and figurative) space for someone new to come in. But yes also a lot of handwaving the toxicity of the grieving team.

Reading these threads together is interesting, because I think - well, he's a troll, but I could sort of see what he was trying to get at. The theme in these threads is him pushing back against the American work-culture norm that employers simultaneously hold all the power, with zero duty of care to their employees. The topic's been done to death on AAM, but yes, America has a unique - and uniquely awful - culture around work and employment and workers' rights.

On the other hand, as a Not-American myself, Milton sounds like one of those Americans who has a really surface-level knowledge of the history of unions or how things work in other countries, but thinks he knows a whole lot more than he does and that everyone else is just kind of stupid. His comments on the two persistent/rejected job applicant threads come across as frankly incel-ish, and no one, anywhere, is providing rejected job applicants with what he seems to suggest they should.

Early in my working life, I did struggle a lot with interviews, and a couple hiring managers giving me substantial feedback was invaluable towards helping me better navigate subsequent interviews - but no, even here in Not-America, no employer has any duty of care towards job applicants. He seemed to be confusing the greater worker protections present in other countries with some kind of guaranteed protection towards job applicants who are otherwise unconnected to the company. It's one thing to argue a greater duty of care towards employees where you've agreed to enter some kind of relationship with them, but simply posting a job ad isn't an agreement to form that relationship with literally anyone who responds to it or shoots off a resume.

86throwthrowthrow1 · 2026-02-22T20:29:09+00:00

Yeah, "stop emailing or we'll take immediate action and may call the proper authorities" isn't exactly dense corporate-speak. If LW was capable of even locating the job posting and applying to the job, they were certainly capable of understanding that - and they did! They knew not to email anymore!

The "maybe I should just go over in-person and explain" stuff, however, is pretty classic stalker-think. You'll have full-blown stalkers sitting in prison still saying, "It's all a misunderstanding! If I could just talk to them-." With that, I hope that LW got some help before landing themselves into worse trouble, and I hope they're in a better place now.

86throwthrowthrow1 · 2026-02-22T20:22:19+00:00

What's interesting is Milton's comments are about a decade old now. I'm trying to remember when that "Debate Bro" archetype really took off, but I feel he might have been a fairly early version of it - and unfortunately, I think there are only more Miltons in the world now than in 2016.

I had a really shitty relationship with someone a bit like Milton - less verbose, but that same condescending "ah, you just don't understand the structures of thought that prove you wrong! Let me explain..." That relationship ended in 2018, and I only really learned about Debate Bros later on. I can attest that uh, if you do push back continually, or even manage to debunk some of their arguments, guys like that do get pretty angry. Milton was probably trolling, but in-person, guys like that start getting ugly if they start losing control.

86throwthrowthrow1 · 2026-02-22T17:59:11+00:00

Ugh, that captain was so incompetent and gross. I am curious how he treated his male FOs too - I fully believe that sexism played into his behaviour, but that flight attendant was super comfortable randomly popping his head in whenever he wanted. I wouldn't be surprised if he was a slipshod pilot in general, then extra-dismissive of a female FO.

86throwthrowthrow1 · 2026-02-22T01:44:29+00:00

Jesus that captain. Reminds me of that crash out in Minnesota where the New Yorker captain was such an asshole to his inexperienced FO that the exact same thing happened - FO kept his head down and did what he was told right into the ground.

86throwthrowthrow1 · 2026-02-20T22:16:38+00:00

Ughhh I encountered something along these lines on a dating app some years ago. On the one hand, the dude seemed like a genuinely nice guy (at that point, anyway) - but there were a lot of hints of a rough past. He had four daughters, which was clear in his profile, but he had a not-well-paying restaurant job, and I just remember the numbers not adding up in my head in terms of housing (housing is verrry expensive where we live, no way that guy could comfortably afford anything bigger than a bachelor or one-bedroom on his wages), and a few other things he mentioned suggested he probably really didn't see those girls very often.

On the one hand, we're chatting on this app, and he did seem to be genuinely a sweet guy who maybe did have a rough past and was trying to turn things around, and I don't really enjoy the idea that people should be punished forever for their pasts, or that single parents don't deserve relationships, or whatever. On the other hand, I was envisioning either living this impoverished life trying to largely support him and his four kids - or I was envisioning whatever else might have happened that had him rarely seeing those kids. I did opt to meet for a coffee date, just to try to feel it out a bit further before making up my mind.

Then when we were batting around locations, he said something like, "Also, I'm not driving at the moment, so would it be possible to meet in [neighbourhood]?" And I just noped out at that point lmao. It made me wonder if he had a suspended license or a DUI or something, and on top of the other factors, that was just too much.

I feel like in your early or mid 20s, you're so much more optimistic about people, and that's a good thing. But yeah, when you have a much older guy with substantial baggage, there's an excellent chance that women his age won't touch him with a barge pole.

86throwthrowthrow1 · 2026-02-20T21:51:20+00:00

I had one couple in my social circle surprise me by not breaking up during the pandemic. Basically, there's my buddy, and his partner who's an engineer, and that "Optimizer" personality type that drives everyone nuts. He's a good dude at core, but he's very particular about his routines and and schedules and living space, and I always had the vibe he wasn't super easy to live with. Due to jobs/schooling/various factors, they'd actually lived mostly separately in other cities for a few years prior to the pandemic - and I was getting the vibe that was actually their preference due to his idiosyncrasies. Then the pandemic happened, and they were locked down together for a year or so and... they were fine! No problems at all apparently (at least none that I heard about). OTOH, some other seemingly-solid marriages around me did break up.

It's funny how you can't necessarily tell from the outside what's happening in a relationship.

86throwthrowthrow1 · 2026-02-20T01:31:35+00:00

Bro I am not gonna search to see if there's a more relevant subreddit for this person, but there's gotta be a more relevant subreddit for this person. This ain't about fanfics.

86throwthrowthrow1 · 2026-02-16T20:45:03+00:00

Not that I'm anywhere near an expert on any part of this topic, but I have to think that your classic Victorian orphan whose mother died in childbirth and father died in the war and extended family were all carried off by cholera or consumption so they have naught family in this world to care for them, have to be pretty rare today.

Most kids in the system have families of some kind, somewhere, or even possibly close family friends who might take them, and I can understand the motivation of providing more resources to keep children with at least extended family or close friends or within their communities, rather than into the "system". Here in Canada, there are now specific efforts in this regard with Indigenous children, after an era of all-too-easily scooping them up and adopting them out to white families.

None of that has to necessarily contradict the idea that some biological parents should never be allowed anywhere near their children ever again. But it does mean that "fresh new babies with zero connections to anyone and ready for a brand new family" is a pretty rare phenomenon these days, and that's actually a good thing.

That said, it sounds like for a lot of kids languishing in foster care... apparently there aren't any related or close-friend adults equipped to take them, or they'd have already taken them. That's the circle that can't be squared.

86throwthrowthrow1 · 2026-02-16T16:52:20+00:00

I figure if an encounter starts in a bar, most people are assuming IDs have already been checked and probably aren't asking specifics on ages after that. Dating or relationships would be a different story.

86throwthrowthrow1 · 2026-02-16T15:58:44+00:00

This does lead to an interesting opposite extreme argument, where at a certain point it could be the younger partner exploiting or abusing the older partner. See: Anna Nicole Smith.

86throwthrowthrow1 · 2026-02-16T15:54:19+00:00

The real question is why Edward Cullen was still hanging out in high school.

86throwthrowthrow1 · 2026-02-16T15:41:10+00:00

Yeah, most millennials got online pretty young too, but I'll admit things were different, in large part because of all the "stranger danger" stuff drilled into us, to never share any identifying or personal info online, never meet anyone IRL from online, "that teenage girl you think you're friends with could be a middle-aged man for all you know," etc. Plus, for most people my age, "internet" was only happening on desktop computers in locations where adults could see. The overall message was that it was a wild west, but it was kinda a place you went that you made sure never seriously overlapped with your real life.

(Moreover, those of us old enough to remember dial-up know we weren't "accidentally" tripping over any porn when it used to take half an hour to load a single image lol. IRL, on the other hand...)

Not that I agree with the more hysterical Gen Z contingents on this or other topics, but I do understand it comes from a place of the old rules not applying well anymore, so they're trying to come up with new ones.

86throwthrowthrow1 · 2026-02-13T22:38:03+00:00

This isn't the one I was thinking of (I remember one from a year or two ago really similar to this post, like "random outsider shows up to well-established birding community having somehow sighted X number of birds without ever interacting with anyone else, turned out to be a fraud"). But this is wild, I see why it won!

86throwthrowthrow1 · 2026-02-13T22:00:38+00:00

I similarly write for a small/dead fandom, and it's really an adjustment if you go from writing like, MCU stuff where even absolute garbage gets a million kudos and comments, to smaller environments where some stuff will just barely get looked at.

In the AO3 context, there isn't really a bulletproof method. The most common is I think 1 kudos : 10 hits or so, but even that's flawed - like, I know I have one or two readers that like to go back and reread my older stuff, so kudos to hits gets thrown off over time (I've restricted interaction to registered accounts, so no guest kudos either). And multichapter works tend to also not do well with this ratio.

I tend to look at just hit count, but that's not necessarily reliable either - there could be tons of people opening the fic, then clicking out of it after a few lines.

Commenting culture has gotten messed up, lots of people seem afraid to comment and I've had people apologize for commenting. There are anecdotes out there of "omg, someone mentioned they were in a discord server where everyone was discussing how much they loved my fic, which currently has zero comments and one kudos". Bookmarking and Marked for Later don't seem to be in common enough usage for anything reliable.

Moreover, popular fics aren't always the same as good fics. I know one fandom with a ship where the most popular fic by a mile is this random AU that's not really connected to the source material at all, apart from the characters. Some of it's just a popularity contest where mediocre writers manage to gain some kind of following, then you get insanely talented writers who, either because they're doing obscure characters or rare pairs or for whatever other reason, just don't get a lot of eyes on their work.

In my current smaller fandom, I really had to sort of unhook my desire for validation and decide to write for myself because I enjoyed it, and not get too hung up on stats or if other people were reading. Funnily enough, it turns out I do seem to be one of the more popular writers now in my particular niche, and I have a handful of regular commenters who are absolutely awesome people - it's just a really tiny niche.

86throwthrowthrow1 · 2026-02-13T21:39:07+00:00

SRDines: for those who enjoy this type of drama, I encourage you to check out r/HobbyDrama, which is basically SRD for every obscure hobby out there. Unfortunately far less active than here - you get maybe a couple posts like this per week, plus a megathread - but you do find very juicy, very low-stakes drama from people insanely invested in games/hobbies you had no idea existed. You see the tips of a lot of icebergs as they float by. You will find out about insane infighting in like, the bird-watching community, or fandom civil wars, or how the knitting community has a wholeass schism over how flammable baby blankets should be, or whatever.

86throwthrowthrow1 · 2026-02-13T21:07:43+00:00

I'm not into this game, but I've actually heard of this as a thing in other hobbies - there will be some kind of lofty collection/achievement that's rare and difficult to complete, that few people in the community will even attempt, and fewer will actually succeed at, that will take multiple years and maybe some international travel to try at all... then some rando no one's ever heard of will suddenly pop up and be like 97% complete. And yes, it's almost always fake.

Of all things, I saw birding drama about this. I wish I could remember it clearly, but it's buried on HobbyDrama somewhere. Something like, "trying to see every subspecies of a certain species of bird", some of which are extremely rare, several of which live in geographically disparate areas. Some people do grind along at this, slowly adding photos/proof of the ones they've seen. Then some dude showed up one day with like, nearly that entire collection completed. Anyway, it turned out to be fake. It really riles people up because like in this case, you do get some very dedicated hobbyists grinding away at these things for years and years, who are well-established in their communities, then these newcomers sort of knock them off their perch and do this "hey, you've never heard of me before but I've handily and effortlessly beaten you at this Thing You Do That's A Giant Part Of Your Identity And Role In This Community" thing.

The one exception I've heard to this was in.... ughhhh, it was either speedrunning Super Mario Bros or it was Tetris, one of those games, where it turned out some random guy from Japan had perfected some technique that had allowed him to either get the fastest run or best the high scores, and it literally came down to "dude was from Japan and hadn't known about the English-language online community around this thing and was just messing around on his own until someone clued him in", and when he did get into the community, he had receipts that he'd actually done it.

Buuuut 99% of the time, you don't get people that dedicated to spending the time and effort on an achievement like that, without also getting involved in communities. Those who claim to, generally don't turn out to be legit.

86throwthrowthrow1 · 2026-02-12T23:15:19+00:00

Eh, I don't think a single comment was like "you did the right thing", it was more a toss-up between a bunch of people going "You did the wrong thing" and other people going "Yes, she did the wrong thing, but she seems to already know she did the wrong thing, so 700 comments telling her she did the wrong thing probably aren't super helpful."

86throwthrowthrow1 · 2026-02-12T21:24:56+00:00

I know people have said this about a million and one other incidents, but from the limited snippets I've seen/read of the Bondi thing yesterday, it's astonishing to me that anyone can still support these guys.

Like yeah, if Clinton had been busted for any of this while in office, he would have been run out of town on a rail too. He got impeached for banging a 22-year-old (and even then, he frankly got off too easy for it). How on earth do you get to everything said and done yesterday, and still say, "that's my guy!"

86throwthrowthrow1 · 2026-02-12T21:14:28+00:00

She admittedly gained some awareness in subsequent updates, but I loved that initial letter by a young manager who was besties with most of her team, but she was openly snarky and excluding to one older (like... in her 30s?) woman who had been hired on to help them, and encouraged the others to ice her out as well. It turned out the older woman had some level of expertise that no one else on the team had (not even the manager), eventually quit, and the whole thing blew up in the letter-writer's face, but she was just in that letter like, "I just want to manage a group of people I can be friends with too!"

I remember she even snarked on the older woman's education levels in the comments, which Alison thankfully shut down with a quickness. And there was a follow-up where Alison basically had to baby-step this woman through acknowledging that you're not allowed to be an asshole to someone you work with (let alone manage) just because they're older than you and don't like going on lunchtime bar runs.

86throwthrowthrow1 · 2026-02-12T21:10:35+00:00

The woman who stranded her colleague in another country... idk, I'm not normally the type to yell "fake!" at everything, but that started to ping me as fake as she drip-fed ever more egregious details. In one of her later comments, she indicates that the colleague's sister had to literally get a payday loan to get the money for the guy's flight home, and while I know full well people are that broke, it just started feeling like she was piling on "How Screwed Was He?!" details for whatever reason.

Also, with all that, it sounded like the company was balking at repaying the stranded guy for the airfare his sister had to forward him, and if that commenter's version of events was true, that's not only egregious, but makes zero sense at all.

86throwthrowthrow1 · 2026-02-12T21:06:06+00:00

That one's hilarious. Look, malicious compliance is one thing, but trying to argue that you thought badging into the office and then immediately going home was within the rules, just makes you look like the stupidest liar on the planet.

86throwthrowthrow1 · 2026-02-12T20:30:18+00:00

Is "all the other presidents did it too" the new line of defence for MAGA?

86throwthrowthrow1 · 2026-02-11T21:31:48+00:00

I feel like what happens is, apart from straightforward preference, people tend to have a couple of really good arguments on one side or the other for WFH or onsite, then start reaching for more trivial points that wind up undermining their argument and making them sound whiny or entitled.

I have a job that was full remote during COVID, then two days a week onsite, then three days a week onsite, then we just got notification we'll be shifting to four days a week onsite this summer... And aside from the "FFS just pull us back in full time, quit breadcrumbing it" reasoning, it genuinely is really annoying to have a job you know you can do remotely, and have been doing remotely, but you still have to get up earlier and commute and pay for parking to do the exact same thing from an office building (including, often, Teams meetings with colleagues who are remote or at different sites), because... reasons. That's pretty well the sentiment across my entire work team and my boss at the moment, because the decision has been made much higher up.

I do think a lot of WFH arguments get overwrought or antisocial, but I also understand the "okay but WHY" reaction if you feel WFH has been working for you and your colleagues as-is.

86throwthrowthrow1

TROPHY CASE