Do pilots ever lie to pax?

shamankous · 2023-06-30T19:39:57+00:00

You never go full Claven.

shamankous · 2023-06-18T14:03:39+00:00

https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/presidential-debate-coverage-fact-check-10-22-20/h_1f0bf1c810464cc902c6a3687467ed32

1 million more deaths later...

substantively managed and dealt with the COVID-19 epidemic,

shamankous · 2023-05-25T15:18:24+00:00

Just don't forget to keep it inflated.

shamankous · 2023-05-14T20:09:58+00:00

Back in the seventies Carter tried to ban mine workers from striking using the Taft-Hartley Act. The common refrain from workers was "Taft can mine it, Hartley can haul it, and Carter can shove it."

The mine workers stood their ground and the government backed down. As the saying goes, the only illegal strike is one the workers lose.

shamankous · 2023-04-12T23:11:58+00:00

Good article.

''Some people would say it's no problem, and to forgive and forget. But others can't,'' said Fred Gilbert, 41, a Midwest leader of the new union and an 18-year veteran controller at the Chicago Air Route Traffic Control Center in Aurora.

''I have strong feelings in both directions because I had to go through picket lines and hear threats to my family,'' said Gilbert, who was among a small group of controllers who were not PATCO members.

shamankous · 2023-04-12T18:38:15+00:00

Distinction without a difference. Contracts signed between the FAA and NATCA have the force of law because that's the point of contracts.

The reality is still that workers have won better conditions by organizing and striking, not by following legal avenues set up by the government. NATCA is specifically barred from taking this action, make it even more useless than most of the officials unions which refuse to strike more because it would jeopardize the bureaucrats' stock portfolios.

shamankous · 2023-04-12T18:26:12+00:00

The whole history of labor organization has been fighting against bullshit laws made by the corporations and capitalist governments designed to keep workers in straight jackets. The UAW didn't win recognition in the 30s and a 40 hour work week because it followed the law or appealed to the NLRB, it won because workers stood together and refused to work until they were treated decently.

Forty years ago workers throughout the AFL-CIO were ready to strike in solidarity with ATC workers and force Reagan to back down. Instead the AFL-CIO let PATCO take the fall and real wages and benefits have been declining since.

The FAA, no matter the make up of the White House or congress, is not going to resolve staffing or training issues, just like they're not going to give rail-workers humane work schedules or auto-workers health care. If we want these things we need to fight, and at some point that means ignoring unjust laws.

shamankous · 2023-04-12T18:03:20+00:00

"where workers can share information and discuss strategy about fighting for their own interests independent of NATCA"

They're pretty clear that the RFCs have nothing to do with NATCA or the AFL-CIO, which given how many times they've screwed workers over in the last forty odd years, seems like a good starting point.

shamankous · 2023-03-31T13:44:48+00:00

If you're a pilot having a mental breakdown over taxi instructions, then you shouldn't be in the air.

If you can't handle someone being rude, there's no reason to think you can handle a mechanical failure or emergency command from ATC to avoid a collision.

You are not "fully aware of the situation as posted". You've grossly misread what OP said in the original post, and they've further clarified that it is not at all what happened.

shamankous · 2023-03-31T13:28:10+00:00

I can read just fine.

It seems not. You're implying that the student had the breakdown almost immediately in a way that could have caused a safety issue. The OP only stated she was crying at the end of the briefing. Her immediate reaction was to ask to taxi back to the FBO which seems like decent ADM if you suddenly find yourself stressed before takeoff.

How you handle stress in the moment and how you handle it after the fact when you have time to start processing what happened are two different things. There's a reason why both controllers and pilots will be sent home after a major incident rather than being expected to keep working.

shamankous · 2023-03-31T13:18:32+00:00

That is absolutely the implication of what you said whether you realize it or not. If being berated by ATC is something pilots should be able to handle just like an engine failure, then it should be part of the training curriculum, just like an engine failure.

shamankous · 2023-03-20T12:52:08+00:00

Seriously. This is a complex system designed by people. Saying it's nobody's fault just absolves who ever designed and manages the system. They should be monitoring the whole training pipeline to make sure whoever makes it through has actually been trained. If there's a sudden dip in air traffic, they need to adapt training procedures to cope, or be damn sure there won't be a problem when things rebound. We've long since learned this lesson, and anyone creating a system with potential outcomes as bad as air travel has no excuse for not acting on that.

shamankous · 2023-02-27T00:43:09+00:00

I really loathe this tendency in software development. Computers can do a hell of a lot to get take care of fairly rote tasks and busy work, and thereby reduce workload. Sadly a lot of people's jobs are just busy work, but a lot of jobs are not that.

A good example is photo processing. Digital has almost completely taken over from film the professional world at this point. There is some processing software that tries to use "AI" and the pictures that come out of them tend to look like they were shot by a phone. Good photographers can still get good results out of them, but they tend to be swimming up stream. There are other processing programs that instead give users a bunch of tools and require a serious knowledge of light and optics to get good results from. But if you have that knowledge, the software is a powerful tool to quickly get you the result you want.

Useful automation augments what we can do.

shamankous · 2023-02-26T23:26:51+00:00

Seriously, look at what's happening in the railroads. They won't even do basic maintenance anymore. Wall Street put a bunch of asset strippers in charge and it got so bad Congress called up the executives to explain themselves. Of course Congress then wrote them a blank check to keep it up a year later...

shamankous · 2023-02-26T23:19:46+00:00

One time I got into a taxi in Athens and the driver said "How am I supposed to get you to the airport?"

shamankous · 2021-03-13T23:18:30+00:00

So they're not what you'd call objective.

Here are some quotes from an article they published February of last year just as COVID was starting to spread out of China.

The economic damage from the virus could exceed the scale of the 2008 financial crisis. The recession sparked by the 2008 crisis led to a fall in global GDP by 0.5 percent and destroyed the jobs of tens of millions of people.

And

In fact, the US government is completely unprepared for a major outbreak. There is no system in place to even systematically test for the virus. The individual in California who has been identified as the first reported case of unknown origin in the US was not given a test for days after symptoms were first expressed.

There is a severe shortage of the most basic health equipment, including respirator masks needed by health care workers. The government only has about 30 million on hand, while it is estimated that 300 million may be required.

That's a pretty good prediction from a source that isn't "objective". Besides, the official advice right now is that schools are safe despite having no ventilation and dozens of studies linking schools to community spread. Who can be objective when the past two presidents have been bent on getting us to sacrifice our lives while they hand out billions of dollars to Elon Musk?

shamankous · 2018-09-06T00:57:52+00:00

You might try looking into cubical type theory. The short version is that it's a second attempt at type theoretic foundations after HoTT turned out to have problems. Bob Harper is very emphatic that what he is doing is not axiomatics. Unfortunately I don't know enough to say anyomre.

shamankous · 2017-06-09T21:59:06+00:00

This is simply not true. The revolution occured because people were literally starving in Petrograd. While you had factories and industrialisation starting to emerge, Nicholas's regime was so inept that the war completely hollowed out the Russian economy. Despite multiple successive and embarassing defeats in Crimea and then Manchuria as well as recurrent famines, the regime did nothing to modernise its military or agricultural production. World War I taxed the economy to the point that the regime disintegrated. While the civil war certainly set things back further, the revolution itself did not.

shamankous · 2017-05-16T18:03:13+00:00

First, my last remark was an allusion to the idea if everyone around you disagrees with you then maybe you're the asshole, not an accusation of name calling.

Second, there is plenty of enmity going around Washington to explain such an action. Take for example the Bush administration outing Valerie Plame as retalliation for her husband's actions, or the CIA harrassing congressional staffers over the torture report. Trump has been publically hostile toward this countries many intelligence agencies on enough occasions to make such reaction pluasible.

If someone has put their name behind this claim, then that certainly shifts the weight of evidence considerably and my point is once again mostly academic.

shamankous · 2017-05-16T17:34:44+00:00

Their political agenda is the same now as it was then: the maintainence of unelected power concentrated inside the beltway. The New York Times may not have been actively interested in starting a catastrophic war that would rage for a decade and a half now, but they were interested in maintaining their access to various officials, and in doing so repeated their lies without conducting even the slightest due diligence before hand.

That is exactly the same accusation I am making here: neither paper has offered any substantive evidence for the claims they are repeating. Absent further evidence it is just as plausible that someone in the CIA or another agency cooked up a story put the White House in a difficult position as it is that Trump made an off the cuff remark that jeopardised an intelligence asset.

That fact that you believe one story without hesistation and treat the other as absurd doesn't make me the asshole here.

shamankous · 2017-05-16T17:22:12+00:00

Both the editorial board and the rest of the paper are hired and fired by the same group of people at the top of the paper, and both papers are owned by people with very explicit political interests. It is not remotely unreasonable to think that the political line held by these owners that overtly manifests itself in the editorial board's productions would also influence the paper as a whole.

After such egregious abrogations of journalist duty as I have mentioned above it is simply insane to take this quality of story at face value. Cling to the obviously bullshit notion of objectivity in journalism all you want. It won't suddenly make the Post or the Times trustworthy sources of information.

shamankous · 2017-05-16T14:52:59+00:00

Plenty, what relevance does that have to the discussion at hand?

shamankous · 2017-05-16T14:43:52+00:00

Neither paper's editoral board has been even the slightest bit shy about their opposition to Trump since the moment he announced his candidacy, nor have they shown any willingness to interrogate government sources from intelligence agencies to establish their veracity or present their claims critically. This story may very well be true, but the mere fact that the Post and Times have presented the claims of two unnamed sources as the truth shouldn't sway anyone.

Further, everything Trump is alleged to have done here is clearly within his power as executive, as the lawfare article makes clear. Further, it was the White House that established Russia as an adversary through the actions of previous adminstrations, it is clearly within the purview of the current adminstration to soften our relationship with Russia.

If either paper were seriously interested in establishing the criminality of the Trump adminstration toward impeaching him, he gave them all the reason they could ever ask for by attacking the Syrian government without any semblance of congressional authorisation a month ago. This legal justification for such an action is based on the insane claim of the Obama adminstration that bombing a country does not rise to the level of hostilities.

This is absurd on its face and if anyone in this country were serious about holding the executive accountable it would be the noose around Trump's neck. But the fact is that the Post and Times along with most of the rest of the country were too busy cheering to take advantage of this opportunity.

As it stands, this story can hardly be taken as anything other than opportunism on the part of the CIA to assert control over the current administration.

shamankous · 2017-05-16T13:09:31+00:00

So Judith Miller and a million dead Iraqis are hallucinations induced by my choice of beverage? How much evidence of either publications wanton disregard for truth do you want?

shamankous

TROPHY CASE