It’s so much worse than I had assumed. Look at the question about how many “Art/Dance credit” hours you took in college. The scoring is completely random. The most points for 0, but then second most points for 7-12 hours, but 0 or 1 points between 1-6 or 13+. It looks clearly designed by the FAA basically to have “secret codes” that could be given to favored applicants through affiliated advocacy groups.
Labor shortages don't exist. Every empty seat can be filled with attractive compensation until your unemployment rate hits zero. Labor competition has only one constraining factor, and it's name is money.
The correlation of compensation to educated workers probably explains why the US government is staffed by morons that treat the economy like a teething ring.
Then it's topical for understanding the makeup of ATC controllers right now, isn't it? The impact of hiring decisions in 2018 would continue through their retirement age in the 2050's.
We still talk about Reagan's mass-firing of ATC controllers, and that event was in *1981*. The impact is multi-generational and is still very visible.
Not necessarily. In the reparations lawsuit, there are only 1000ish individuals. Assuming all of them would have qualified, you are talking about around 2% of the current workforce. Not nothing. But the last admin grew the workforce by more numbers. And did not have this policy.
So, by all means, chase reparations. But don't think you've stumbled on the reason, either.
The evidence is shortages and safety incidents and that hiring scandal. Now we're able to use instinct and "innuendo" (as you call it) to find more rot
But what evidence is there that the shortage was caused by those 'DEI' policies? For example, in 2013 the FAA Academy was shut down for most of the year (April - December) due to the sequester. They had planned to hire more than 1300 controllers that year but hired fewer than 600.
Additionally, part of the changes that brought along the biographical questionnaire had another major change: they opened up positions to the general public--meaning a candidate didn't need to go through one of the college-affiliated programs anymore. However, that also meant that people had to find their way through the on-boarding process, which at least initially was not well developed and many candidates failed to complete the necessary steps to move the process along.
I'm arguing that DEI/"biographical" standards are indicative of greater rot. The one and only priority of the FAA should be the safe and efficient operation of our nation's airways.
That we would sacrifice any amount of safety/efficiency in pursuit of other goals is a major problem.
I also apply this thinking to other fed gov programs (eg NSF, DoD, etc)
Edit: in other words, how many lives should we sacrifice in our civilian air travel to achieve equity?
Encouraging talented people from underrepresented or marginalised groups to apply, for example through DEI programs, will help find the best candidates to ensure safe and efficient operation.
Apologies, I do think I screwed the numbers. Rerunning, it seems the actual compute to about 5%? That has to keep the assumption that all in the reparations suite would have passed.
Yes! How long does it take to go from a brand new applicant to an ATC controller that can successfully run ops in the DC airspace? What about that person's supervisor?
I'm pretty sure what's more topical is Trump telling all ATC controllers to leave, immediately. Rather than a shitty test that was used for a few years and then phased out.
This is disengenious. They received the same deferred resignation email that every other federal employee got. They weren't told to 'leave immediately' nor was anyone else, they were offered an option to leave or stay on for 9 months, with pay. I'm getting frustrated at 'my people' seemingly just making things up on this topic.
If I get an email from my superior telling me to either pledge loyalty or resign I'm going to read the very obvious writing on the wall here. You would have to be a massive idiot to not see it.
And the ATC was told they're not included in the offer after the emails were already sent out. Like you trying to reframe it and add more context makes it more stupid, not less.
This is made up. It's a layoff letter like we see at big corps any other week. "We're reorganizing, here's an offer, take it or not, your job might get cut in 9 months."
Well, it's not made up. I think it's fair to interpret it that way. The word 'loyal' literally appears in the text.
"Enhanced standards of conduct: The federal workforce should be comprised of employees who are reliable, loyal, trustworthy, and who strive for excellence in their daily work. Employees will be subject to enhanced standards of suitability and conduct as we move forward. Employees who engage in unlawful behavior or other misconduct will be prioritized for appropriate investigation and discipline, including termination."
They didn't make anything up. What they said is 100% accurate and lines up with what you said, you just have additional context they didn't have. Your fight should be with the reporting outlets because that is how they are reporting it.
The fact that it was done in the first place is widely known and would discourage many from even considering a career in ATC. The negative effects are still in play.
Have you asked any? I mean has anyone literally told you this?
Because people here in the field are saying what discourages others from applying is low pay and high stress. Yet you seem to think it’s an outdated hiring practice, so who told you that?
No, not directly. but I've been reading news items about how military recruitment is falling well short of goals, and how traditional pools from which recruits are drawn are now ignoring recruitment offers.
We also had 20 years of pointless wars that were started with lies and cost several trillion dollars. And we saw the people who fought in those wars were discarded into the gutter. They actually ruined a lot of lives.
Maybe that has something to do with why recruitment is down. But no, you're probably right it's DEI.
And yet, this utter nonsense doesn’t appear to be DEI nonsense, just incompetence.
I imagine this was the result of an inappropriate and inadvertently p-hacked analysis of a silly survey of existing employees, along with a large helping of unjustified assumptions.
This is the kind of thing that might be, gradually, mitigated by improved high school math education. We don’t need more calculus to fix this, and we also don’t need more Pandas or R or “data science” or statistics-taught-the-way-it-usually-is. I think students could use a serious education in what data and statistics means, how to ask the right questions, and how to identify cases where the wrong question was answered, even if the answer came from fancy math.
edit: I saw https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-... — wow, apparently a good amount of actual bad intentions may have been involved. Although the people in charge may well have thought that their bad intentions were good intentions. Sigh. One of the worst parts of the current anti-DEI madness is that its proponents are not entirely wrong.
>And yet, this utter nonsense doesn’t appear to be DEI nonsense, just incompetence.
??? From the OP:
"This assessment was implemented in large part due to a push for diversity among ATCs by the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees (NBCFAE)."
And from your link:
"In 2012 and 2013, the NBCFAE continued pushing this process, with members meeting with the DOT, FAA, Congressional Black Caucus, and others to push diversity among ATCs. "
I can't see how anyone would read those two sentences and conclude "this utter nonsense doesn’t appear to be DEI nonsense". Diversity, the D in DEI was specifically the reason why it was implemented.
It's too early to tell, but I would not be surprised if later at least a portion of this is found to be "malicious compliance".
For example, President Truman ordered the US military to be (re)integrated. Through malicious compliance, racist officers put their own spin on the orders.
"Well, he didn't say that black officers would get equal access to the officers club, so we won't let them in."
It too a former 5 star general (President Eisenhower) to stamp out the malicious compliance and make it stick.
There was already a case of malicious compliance with the DEI EO on the part of certain US air force personnel taking down material about the Tuskugee Airmen. The new sec def stomped that out within 4 hours.
Beyond a few specific documents, nothing in there requires the CDC to pull down all this data immediately. There is even a section about "progress updates by 120 days".
The CDC is still run by the same people as under Biden. They are the ones that immediately pulled down the data, not Trump hires.
So we met with very senior people in the White House, in the inner core.
We basically relayed our concerns about A.I., and their response to us was, “Yes, the national agenda on A.I. We will implement it in the Biden administration and in the second term. We are going to make sure that A.I. is going to be a function of two or three large companies. We will directly regulate and control those companies. There will be no start-ups. This whole thing where you guys think you can just start companies and write code and release code on the internet — those days are over. That’s not happening.”
PRISM, Five Eyes, Lawful Intercept, Stingray/ECHELON wiretapping:
Bipartisan support, completely ethical, and an imperative of national defense. We simply cannot trust our tech companies enough to do the right thing on their own. The guidelines are entirely necessary.
DMA, DSA, conglomerating and regulating international AI businesses:
A liberal ploy, an anti-American conspiracy and incredible hubris. How can we exercise this much power over private businesses that consistently make the right choice? The guidelines are entirely unnecessary.
I would need to see evidence of his claims in order to believe him because it is all just so wild that it has the appearance of an unhinged delusional paranoid rant.
Besides that, Andreessen has been pushing the outlandish conspiracy theory that the nuclear testing program of last century was all fake, so I am not sure why one should consider him to be credible.
Less than 3% of the water reserve was available, as the reservoir for the area had been drained to repair its covering since last Feb. It was not necessary to drain the reservoir to make the repair. The repair should have taken a couple of weeks.
The fire department was not informed of this ahead of time, and so made no preparations in the lead up to this predicted event.
How do you fight a fire with more than 97% of the water unavailable?
During the civil rights movement, racist businesses and other associations hid behind this excuse. Some restaurants famously refused to serve people who were black, Italian, or Jewish.
But it is now pretty much settled law that people cannot weaponize their freedom of association to discriminate on these grounds. If you offer a service, you have to provide the service to the classes of people that you could be reasonably expected to serve.
Doesn't that depend on when the firefighters started attacking the fire? You don't have to put out the full extend of the fire if you can stop it.
Example: a grease fire starts in my kitchen and burns down my house. I don't need the water required to stop a full bore house fire to put out the grease fire in my kitchen and save my house.
The hydrants ran out of water very quickly, because the reservour feeding them was taken out of commission because there was a tear in its cover. It's been offline since last February. The cover is only needed to prevent evaporation. They could have had water in it, which very well may have been enough to stop the full spread of the fire.
Here's the timeline for the Palisades fire (one of several):
Hour 0 at detection by an automated system: 10 acres
Hour 1: 200 acres
Hour 4: 1260 acres
The first few hours were in the wildlands which are difficult to access, don't have fire hydrants every 500 feet, and aircraft were grounded due to 60 to 100mph winds
No, the fire hydrants did not run out of water because the Santa Ynez reservoir is down for repair. They ran out of water because the system depressurized.
The fundamental issue is extremely dry vegetation and extreme wind. The dry fuel is caused by increasingly violent oscillations between extreme wet seasons (causes lots of growth) and extreme dry seasons (causes dryness).
I agree that it is grossly negligent to subsidize the building of a major city in a desert or semi-arid area, and then not invest in sufficient infrastructure to take care of easily forseable issues such as this.
But, come on!
The hydrants, which are fed from smallish tanks, which are fed from the reservoir, did not run out of water because the reservoir was offline?
What magic pixie dust was going to feed those hydrants with the reservoir empty? They could pump water up to those tanks, but we already know that just isn't going to work at any kind of scale. It's barely adequate to meet normal domestic water needs.
I guess we should just throw up our hands and not hold people accountable for basic maintenance of basic systems, or taking systems completely offline to do ancilliary repairs to things like a covering tarp. Or making massive cuts at the state and local level to fire prevention and fighting efforts.
https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/
Spend a bit of time taking it and it's clear what at least one reason for this shortage is.