Live data from Hacker News

Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

thepointsguy.com

341–350 of 627 posts

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Groups of chimpanzees are often led by the strongest one. They are also often not led by the strongest one - you can take over the group by forming a coalition to depose the current leader. Then you fight him.

That's interesting - still seems like a "military action".

Well, yes, that's my point.

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#342

There is currently a major outage at a major part of the infrastructure of our nation, and nobody believes anybody about why. The airline is saying it's something to do with weather, but somehow they're the only airline effected. Everybody online seems to the think it's some sort of labor strike, but the union denies this and nobody can find anywhere where people are planning this. And yet thousands of people are stu…

The most likely explanation is here [1]. Pilots (and apparently some air traffic controllers) are doing a sickout to protest vaccine mandates, presumably to make the powers that be understand just how difficult they can make things for the country if they proceed with intended mass firings. But the sickout is technically illegal, so nobody will acknowledge it. That is why you won't see a clear explanation of this inc…

Agree. Have family members in the pilot's union and in the air traffic control union.

The White House thinks they can force unilateral changes to the union contracts.

If the unions admitted to what was going on, the White House would have more legal authority to intervene more directly with the unions.

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't forget all of the future losses by losing the trust of both the customers and the employees. Who's going to remember this? Even a large percentage of the stranded passengers are likely to fly Southwest again to save $36 on a flight. > This assumes that they can absorb these losses. If they couldn't, then they could very very likely receive a bailout or other assistance. It is the existence of these safetynets…

> Who's going to remember this? Even a large percentage of the stranded passengers are likely to fly Southwest again to save $36 on a flight. You can see how this is a problem, right? This essentially means the market is not working as it should - instead of improving quality of service, it makes people absorb the bad experience, ad infinitum. The market is not able to deliver feedback to the companies, who instead r…

  > You can see how this is a problem, right?
Without a doubt. I am among the cynical.

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#344
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is the price we pay for rewarding "efficiencies" up and down the entire chain, leaving no slack whatsoever. with large companies or operations these efficiencies can be over really minor things as well because it means bonus for someone. the root cause of all of this is "short-termism". everyone is only worried about the next quarter, not the next 5 let alone 20-40 years.

The US commercial air transport industry is an absolute marvel. Millions of people moved thousands of miles every single day, mostly at extremely affordable fares. And tons of cargo moved as well. All with an excellent safety record, especially in the past decade. If "the price we pay" is a day or two of one airline (not any of the others) grounding most of its fleet, most likely due to a controversial internal HR po…

You make it sound as if it was impossible to have such a marvelous industry without this deep degree of over-optimization. I disagree. The way I see it, with a bit more buffering here and there, it would be mostly the same - perhaps with less bullshit flights that could've been just as well taken by trains (which would be in a better condition, having more business flowing through them), and less middle-men everywhere sucking up the savings from all that optimization.

This is the thing with markets: whatever optimization you make, you won't reap the fruits of it for long. Someone - either competitors or adjacent third parties - will show up to suck out your margin, leaving you mostly as you were, but locking that optimization in as a permanent fixture in the industry. This means that when companies over-optimize, shoot past the optimum "value to profits" ratio and aim for higher margins still, they make the industry permanently (well, until next collapse) worse for everyone.

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#345
post #314
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> our operation has become brittle and subject to massive failures under the slightest pressure I somehow notice a lot of this lately, in many different areas. I wonder if there isn't a common cause behind those. Is it just covid or something bigger?

According to this substack[1], it was a pilot walkout/"sickout" due to vaccine mandates. It's actually happening in more companies/industries than widely reported. I imagine it's also picked up steam since last weeks revelation from leaked internal Pfizer emails[2] that they used cells from aborted fetuses while testing the RDNA vaccine (testing - it's not in the vaccine), but have publicly stated otherwise. It was a…

It's telling that this is downvoted, even though it presents actual evidence from an actual SWA employee vs the random speculation found elsewhere in the thread. The cause isn't leanness or MBAs, its pilots protesting against vaccine mandates, by the testimony of an actual pilot who works there.

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#346
post #305
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the specific question that the government is answering is "should these people be employed if they make choices I disagree with". It is more borderline than it might appear at first blush. I'm not sure I can think of a precedent for being so willing to eject that many people from the workforce in such a way.

> should these people be employed if they make choices I disagree with This is a disingenuous way to frame it. The current govt is anti-Nazi, but it's never tried to mandate that all employees found to be Nazis must be fired. The reason vaccines are an issue of employment (only at larger employers, by the way) is that unvaccinated people endanger their coworkers. People have a right to be unvaccinated, and the rest o…

That isn't true. There are a lot of unvaccinated people - notably any that have recovered from COVID - who pose less danger to their coworkers than someone who has only been vaccinated.

This isn't based on risk assessment, this is based on ideology. There are situations developing where someone who is less likely to transmit COVID is being fired while someone more likely to transmit the disease is kept on - and everyone involved in the process knows it.

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

"Pfizer Comirnaty" and "Pfizer BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine" are biologically and chemically the same thing.

Biologically and chemically but not liability-wise, which makes no sense, and is exactly the point the throwaway is making.

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The downvotes on this site have gotten insane. This is a perfectly rational comment. Whether you agree with them or not, just burying your hand and refusing to acknowledge that a nontrivial percentage of workers oppose mandates is just asinine. Boneheaded authoritarianism. If you ever wondered how horrors like the soviet union and nazi germany are possible, take a look at the religious groupthink that has seemingly c…

> "99% survival rate" 1% dead means around 3.5 million dead, in the US alone. Do you consider that acceptable?

Luckily 1% IFR is an over-estimate by around 10x, may 5x if you use pessimistic assumptions, especially now with the vaccines. UK govt admitted in Parliament a few weeks ago that IFR is now Moreover that number assumes everyone will get infected, but there's nothing deep driving that belief. Scientists don't understand to what extent the immune system can recognize and fight viruses based on prior exposure to other similar viruses, so they just ignore the possibility and assume no such ability exists at all. Yet it's been nearly two years now and I never got infected even after I spent 10 days self-isolating with someone who had it and had symptoms. Most of the population hasn't tested positive despite saturation levels of testing. The assumption of 100% infection doesn't seem to be a very good one.

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I deleted a tweet in the comment that was an afterthought, not the comment itself. The comment itself still holds true. I am not an anti-vaxxer, and you couldn't have drawn that conclusion if you had actually read the comment. I was simply stating why this happened. I don't like that it's happening anymore than you apparently do, nor did I render any opinion on whether or not I agreed with the pilots and ATCs that ar…

[flagged]

What studies has he fabricated?

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#350
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "99% survival rate" 1% dead means around 3.5 million dead, in the US alone. Do you consider that acceptable?

If the choice is between 3.5 million dead, and the rise of authoritarianism and censorship, then yes the former is much less tragic than the latter and therefore the more acceptable option. And that's before taking into account that the survival rate is quite a bit higher than 99%, so it won't be 3.5 million dead. And also before taking into account that the vast majority of the dead will be the very old, and people…

What about people who can't get medical care like cancer treatments, because hospitals are full of people unnecessarily ill from COVID?
Post reply on HN