I’ll scapegoat a single politician. Ronald Reagan - he owns 100% of the responsibility for the current state of things when he refused to negotiate better working conditions in 1981. The entire US is still feeling the aftermath.
This is not true. Aviation in the US has problems because of the tendency for safety regulators to do CYA when making decisions instead of adopting new technology.
Leaded gasoline? Illegal to use in the US - unless you're putting it into an old plane, where it's not likely legal to put unleaded in.
ATC? Done with old radar screens and physical cards.
Ground Control? Someone has to be standing in the tower with a pair of binoculars.
The US has an extremely safe aviation system, but the price for that safety has been technological stagnation. If I spend $70k on a small airplane, the best that'll get me is a 1975 Piper with a lawnmower engine and analog gauges. Replacing those with digital instruments will run ~$20k - the instruments themselves are only $7k, but the regulatory burden is quite pricey.
Reagan didn't do the US any favors when he treated ATC as disposable, but the truth is that the volume of flights has increased enormously and the job of ATC has gotten much harder while at the same time controller staffing has been screwed by budget fights in Congress and a couple years of one very misguided DEI policy.
The US needs to automate more of ATC. Human beings should be dedicated to emergencies, not issuing the exact same clearance 300 times a day.
It is absolutely true. I stated that Reagan is the reason that ATC are overworked and underpaid.
You proceeded to list a bunch of things that have absolutely nothing to do with ATC being overworked and underpaid.
"Automating more of ATC" would change absolutely nothing about the fact they're overworked and underpaid, there would just be fewer controllers with the same workload because they lost all ability to collectively bargain with Reagan.
Name an industry that has automated, and the end result was they kept the same number of employees, but paid them more and reduced their hours. Oh, and it can't be a unionized industry. I'll wait patiently wait for that list.
> Name an industry that has automated, and the end result was they kept the same number of employees, but paid them more and reduced their hours. Oh, and it can't be a unionized industry. I'll wait patiently wait for that list.
I'm not providing that list because it's stupid. ATC is not a jobs program; it's a profession that exists to solve a problem. The goal is not to pay ATC more, the goal is to safely manage air traffic at a reasonable price.
There is a ton of low hanging fruit because ATC is done today via phone calls and analog radio despite digital radar and mandatory transponders. It would substantially reduce controller workload, because important yet brainless tasks like "don't issue a clearance to cross a runway with landing traffic" are trivial for a computer but require the same amount of synchronous focus for a human as managing an emergency landing.
Clearances to cross a runway are given by someone with a radio and a pair of binoculars right now, which is how this was possible. With another few controllers it would have been less likely.
With a few traffic lights and computers controlling them? This wouldn't be possible at all, because the controller could focus on the emergency and the rest of the traffic could just run as normal.
The number of flights in the US is enormous and still growing. ATC, as a job, really sucks because you have to spend years in school and then commit to a career where the government can just decide where you're going to live on a whim (no, a union would not fix this, because everywhere needs ATC but not everyone wants to live everywhere). You have criminal liability if you make a mistake and while you can make six figures, it's very hard to make as much as you would at a similarly stressful and intellectual job because anything in the private sector that's this critical just gets automated ASAP.
I have a pilot's license. I can tell you with certainty that even when ATC is staffed for conditions they still make mistakes fairly often. That's just the nature of the problem no matter how much you pay them or how many controllers you hire. When you're landing a 200mph jetliner every 60 seconds there is too much room for error in a human brain.
So public sector unions can do no wrong? Can never ask for too much? The public, and by extension, the politicians that they elect, is never allowed to question or refuse their demands?
Your belief is that no other politician in the next half century has had any responsibility for the state of ATC today? No politicians in that time could have increased their pay or increased recruiting and staffing numbers?
We elected a narcissistic millionaire who bankrupted every company he was ever in charge of. His primary concern while in office was becoming a billionaire, rewarding the Russians that bailed him out of several of those bankruptcies, and trying to punish anyone he felt wronged him.
When the goal is to burn it down and you put people in charge who actively want to burn it down, they can. See: project 2025.
They only get the money if they reinvest in oil and gas. It’s not just trying to kill wind, it’s actively trying to expand burning fossil fuels. We are being lead to our demise by idiots.
They aren't idiots, they are evil. They know what they are doing; enriching themselves and hoarding political power and resources. Claiming these folks are dumb rather than evil propagates the idea that we should give them some sort of leeway. In fact, we should have sent these clowns to prison 5 years or more ago.
I don't think they even care about enriching themselves. I don't think they care about the money. I don't even think these little projects move the needle much.
Yes. Many of these people are rich enough that they could stop working today and their descendants could maintain their lifestyle for generations. It's about power, and leveraging that power over people they don't like, for petty reasons.
Those who aren't rich enough... yes, just pure evil. Their parents didn't hug them enough or something, and now they think that "owning the libs" is a life strategy. It's pathetic. I'd feel bad for them if they weren't causing so much harm in the process.
Unfortunately it is malice and greed, not ignorance (though Trump in particular is clearly mostly just a useful idiot puppet being lead around by others). They know climate change is real and serious impacts are imminent, this is why the US has shown interest in "taking" Greenland and Canada.
Trump being the impulsive egotist he is gave the game away too early wanting to take credit for these land grabs while still alive, but there's no way there isn't some overall plan in place as the predictable results of climate change accelerate and the world has to geographically realign through mass migrations (some of it likely to result in wars) to deal with it.
A lot of what they are doing now is to profit off the opportunities of the chaos that they themselves are accelerating.
It's tempting to dismiss them like that, but that doesn't fix anything.
The reality is much more complicated. The Democratic party is far from perfect (they kinda suck, in fact), and if they aren't attracting voters, "the other side is just stupid" is a useless, arrogant way to go.
Attracting voters with things like repeatedly promising to drastically cut consumer prices on most everything ‘from day 1’, repeatedly promising no new wars/stopping being ‘the world police’, quickly ending the Russian invasion of Ukraine, etc?
Hey, I'm not saying Trump and the GOP are great. They disgust me. But they talk to people in a way they find engaging. Even when they lie, somehow. But regardless, I'm not sure how what you said has anything to do with what I wrote.
The Democratic party often sounds like a bunch of elitists, and that turns off many voters, even those who might consider themselves liberal or progressive. I'll likely vote for Democrats in every election until I die, but I don't think of myself as a Democrat, and haven't registered as one in decades (fortunately the Democratic party has open primaries in California, so I don't have to declare a party).
Oh I absolutely agree. I'm not trying to "both-sides" this. I'm just saying that calling conservatives stupid/idiots isn't productive and isn't going to solve anything.
The voters are the source of the problem and we need to focus on them instead of Trump because once he is gone they'll just elect another piece of shit.
A large portion of the population doesn't vote but if they understand the real danger of Trump supporters maybe that will motivate them
Calling them ewaste is a little dramatic. While sites like this are a cancer, there is free WiFi in basically every town in America. You can get data for free, even if it’s slightly inconvenient.
It was a bit dramatic, but I've seen these guys just leave these phones behind once the data is gone. They're not likely to carry it around for the next 27 days until the data is refreshed. They'll generally just hustle for $10 to bribe the phone agent to bypass the SSN check and give them another fresh phone.
The issue is that the wifi isn't available where they need it. If I send them to the SSA building to get some federal docs, it's in a dead zone. It might be in the middle of Chicago but there isn't any free wifi for a mile in any direction from there. How do they pull up Google Maps to get home? And it's not always obvious how to get the free wifi as it doesn't just let you connect, you had to go through a multi-step process of signing in and accepting T&Cs these days. Which the phone doesn't always want to do.
I think you may be a bit out of date. There was free WiFi in basically every town. Now it's frequently a vestigial, no-longer-maintained free WiFi that works like crap, because there's no maintenance, because "everyone has cellular data nowadays".
Actually, this is based on my personal experience. I don't use a smartphone for internet. Many of the places where I've tried it, the "free wifi" doesn't work. Maybe the wifi is there, but the uplink is 2G speed, or it has a web sign-in that doesn't work any more. Or maybe an employee accidentally unplugged the router. Days/weeks ago. And "no one complained about it".
I've traveled Greyhound and Amtrak recently. They both advertise free wifi, but it's quite clear they no longer prioritize keeping it working.
Libraries are (probably/hopefully) an exception. But, seeing as Starbucks has been wanting to discourage people from hanging out in recent months, I wouldn't count on Starbucks wifi being reliable.
I have as far as I'm aware the cheapest 800v car on sale in the US (Hyundai Ioniq 5) and in the right weather conditions a 20-80% charge is legitimately 10 minutes.
The weather conditions do unfortunately matter. Travelling during the post-Christmas blizzard last year was very much less than ideal. The battery heaters in my car could not keep up with how bitterly cold and windy it was and I had multiple 30-45 minute charging sessions because it wasn't ever warm enough to accept more than ~120kW.
I'm looking forward to traveling with it in the warm season and seeing how things compare.
Now (in China) there are also cars with sodium-ion batteries, instead of lithium-ion batteries.
Sodium-ion batteries have the disadvantage of a worse energy per weight ratio, but they also have an advantage (besides the fact that they will become cheaper when their production will be more mature): they work much better at low temperatures, not losing capacity or charging speed until minus 40 Celsius degrees.
Therefore, they may become preferable in colder climates, where they will not have the problems described by you.
So still nothing about local accounts, or disabling copilot entirely.
This is basically: we’re doing the absolute minimum possible to claim we’re listening to users while still pursuing exactly what we were doing before. We realized we just need to boil the frog a little slower.
If they were hoping this would help shake microslop, they’re in trouble.
Or random telemetry, or random network usage of some anonymous service that leaves you unable to pretty much do anything internet-related until that service has done it's thing.
Nah, in context it's more like if your neighbourhood police have been sanctioning counterfeiters across our borders for years, we're not going to take lectures on how inappropriate it is for our neighbourhood police to pick on your pimps too seriously.
>It's kinda cool to see a whole lot of otherwise intelligent people who are so dogmatically and ideologically opposed to anything AI that they're going to willfully dismiss anything that AI produces regardless of utility.
You'd probably put me into that bucket, although I'd disagree. I'm not at all against using AI to do something like: type up a high level summary of a product featureset for an executive that doesn't require deep technical accuracy.
What I AM against is: "summarize these million datapoints and into an output I can consume".
Why? Because the number of times I've already witnessed in the last year: someone using AI to build out their QBR deck or financial forecast, only to find out the AI completely hallucinated the numbers - makes my brain break. If I can't trust it to build an accurate graph of hard numbers without literally double checking all of its work, why would I bother in the first place?
In the same way, if you tell me you've got this amazing dataset that AI has built for you, my first thought is: I trust that about as much as the Iraqi Information Minister, because I've seen first hand the garbage output from supposedly the best AI platforms in the world.
*And to be clear: I absolutely think businesses across the board are replacing people with AI, and they can do so. And I also think it'll take 18+ months for someone to start asking questions only for them to figure out they've been directing the future of their company on garbage numbers that don't reflect reality.
Asking an LLM to analyze data directly doesn’t work. But they’re great at writing scripts to analyze (and visualize) data. Anthropic just figured this out last week and gave Claude a mode that does that for you.
This. I only ask LLMs to summarize non-critical stuff, i.e. just give me a general summary of all the work done over the past week.
If I were in need of hard analytics you can be damn sure I'd have it build a tool with a solid suite of tests following a rigorous process to ensure the outputs are sound. That's the difference between engineering and vibing.
Yes, you have to calibrate the effort to the task, you can't just blindly vibecode it. But if you treat it like a new college hire who still remembers their stats course, rather than a senior analyst who will just come back with the right answer, you can do some pretty high-level stuff that's trustworthy. It's so fast that it's no problem to double/triple check everything and even do it with multiple methods.
I'm wondering if you're confusing "AI" with "LLMs" here.
I think LLMs are the equivalent of someone with a PhD in English literature and a few other things, and can be very intelligent and literate without being particularly good with numbers.
On the other hand you have plenty of machine learning numbers that are absolute beasts at everything number-related. I'm assuming you wouldn't put George RR Martin in charge of building your datasets.
Your response just proves his point. All of that paperwork, all of those contracts- that assumes you can trust the government to fairly enforce the law.
In a society where corruption rules, you have no reason to spend time and money on any of that because you know you’re one bribe away from it all being kindling for your next bonfire.
So yes, in areas with high corruption they don’t bother. They either just set aside some cash to pay off whatever official they need to if things go sideways, or they hire the local judge’s son to an empty position of power so that they can win anything that goes to “court”. That’s not a sign of high trust, that’s an acknowledgment there’s no point in bothering.
Lawyers in the west are a high status career, because we trust the rule of law. In China, its considered a joke career. What is the point of being a lawyer, when relative position, influence and power within the CCP is the lone factor in winning a case? Big companies all end up with shadow positions that are there just to pay money out to CCP honchos and their kids. Board positions and executive positions go to the CCP.
I feel like that's breaking down in the west. I've seen more and more news articles describing someone as a "well-connected lawyer." The idea that the most important things that a lawyer possesses is connections to people in power is becoming normalized.
When I was young I remember people describing Alan Dershowitz as "the greatest legal mind in America." The idea was that he got his clients what they wanted through fiendishly good logic and argument. Of course we now know that he just knew who to send poorly-written emails to.
I'm of the opinion that most legal judgements and arguments (especially at the highest levels like SCOTUS or circuit courts) are just post-facto rationalization of the outcome they want. Any superior logic and argument is just a reflection that such minds tend to be more cunning at access the inner workings of power if they weren't already born there.
Mid-century I think judges were more committed to "fair and honest application of the law." This actually led conservatives to rage against judges who would "become liberal" on the bench. The quintessential example of this was Chief Justice Earl Warren (appointed by Dwight Eisenhower) but there were may other cases like Justice Souter (appointed by George HW Bush).
So conservative groups started developing lists of "ideologically reliable" judges who the Republicans were supposed to appoint. Reagan and HW Bush would negotiate with these groups that they would appoint a judge from the list followed by a more "normal" judge, splitting their appointees between hardliners and institutional jurists.
Clearance Thomas was one of HW Bush's "hardliner" appointments opposite Souter. In the Clinton era, Thomas was frustrated at the pay SC justices received and threatened to resign to make his fortune in private practice. To prevent this conservative activists started showing him with gifts. His main benefactor was mega-landlord Harlan Crow.[1]
This more than anything started the eara of "justice for pay" in America, where the purpose of getting on the bench was to be ideologically reliable, partisan, and to make a fortune off of the people coming before the bench.
source is my wife who spent the first 25 years of her life in China. So I guess vibes? But she was/is pretty academically rigorous, so I believe her.
So I would caveat it as if you are a really good strong student in China, it would seem that you are much more likely to go into Engineering, Business, or Join the CCP. Its not an A student type of career, more of a B or C student.
It's widely believed in Western society due to the language barrier to access Chinese social media.
But it's not true , or only half true 30 years ago. I personally know 3 or 4 of my alumina abandoned their expertise of Optical Engineering to pursue Lawyer career 20 years ago and made big money.
Another example is one of celebrity law professor (not lawyer though) who recently got involved in a controversy because of Epstein file. He shut down his “weibo" (a Chinese Twitter ) account. He also made tons of money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luo_Xiang
China moves very fast compare to the western society. Something true today might not be true 3 years later. Let alone half-truth 30 years ago.
> It's widely believed in Western society due to the language barrier to access Chinese social media.
> But it's not true
Is it even widely believed in the west? I'm European and my idea of China is that it's the home of Confucianism and legalism and that bureaucracy, the state and the law are all taken seriously there.
I certainly do not believe the Rule of Law matters at all in the US, even if we ignore the current administration. US courts have been corrupt for many decades, if not longer, and the only thing that matters to US cops and courts is extorting civilians for money. People with money to spend on lawyers get off easy every time, people without money for lawyers get fucked every time.
And that's exactly what's happening here too, starting with the high-powered law firms who settled with Trump when he sued them instead of fighting. Overnight they ruined their reputation, because who is going to trust them when they folded so easily to government pressure? Moreover, as Trump's will becomes law, literally everything they went to school for becomes moot. All their experience about intellectual property or contract law or whatever is worthless when the law is actually whatever the guy in charge wants on any given day.
That's nonsense. No matter how corrupt the CCP is, it cannot have a stake in all court cases in China. Maybe politically sensitive trials are a farce (arguably that's the case in much of the West too, but that's a different story) but that doesn't make the profession as a whole a joke.
The central government in Bejing doesn't care even a little bit about some property dispute in Henan but there's a local apparatchik who cares or who could be made to care with the right consideration.
This is from my Chinese wife, basically by "joke" I mean its not the top students who are going into it. You don't become rich becoming a lawyer. The top students in Schools join government, become Engineers, do Business, etc.
In places where you can’t trust courts, you see organized crime fill the gap - goons start enforcing rules for the bad guys and there are no individual good guys big enough to stop an army of well paid goons. With tech enabling every kind of surveillance in the US, that could be a very dangerous combination (bad guys get privacy, while normal people can be ripped out of their homes).
If a person or an organization can "trust the government", that means they don't have to trust their business partners that much, and don't even have to bother with a lot of contract language, since the government will force the other party to general legal norms and to act in good faith.
If the government cannot be trusted, or rather, can be trusted to be biased and corrupt, then - a person or an organization needs a lot of trust in their partner, and writing contracts is, like you say, not very interesting.
But actually, I would say it's the middle ground, where trust is partial, is where you see long and detailed contracts with provisions and indemnification clauses and long definitions and long lists of corner cases etc.
In societies where the government is corrupt, or even where the courts are slow and expensive, people then trust in the individuals becomes more important.
Being able to rely on being able to enforce contracts means you need less trust in people you do business with.
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