Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed • Hacker News Board

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

#551

Post by thowaway976351 » Mon, Oct 11, 2021, 9:10 PM UTC

twofornone wrote: post #264

downandout wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

this. hn is dead. all these websites are.

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

#552

Post by thowaway976351 » Mon, Oct 11, 2021, 9:12 PM UTC

unethical_ban wrote: post #475

baumy wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Vaccine mandates aren't new. You weren't protesting them 3 years ago, but now you are willing to take the side of 3.5 million members of the community slowly dying so you don't have to get a shot. Your persecution complex is out of control. The absurdity of peoples' accusations of world-ending authoritarianism and censorship is baffling.

lets mandate a dubiously efficacious product for a problem we created...

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

#553

Post by shartacct » Mon, Oct 11, 2021, 9:16 PM UTC

downandout wrote: post #540

unethical_ban wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vaccine mandates aren't new. You weren't protesting them 3 years ago, but now you are willing to take the side of 3.5 million members of the community slowly dying so you don't have to get a shot. Your persecution complex is out of control. The absurdity of peoples' accusations of world-ending authoritarianism and censorship is baffling.

Vaccine mandates aren't new. No. But mandating a brand new vaccine is new. We don’t know what the long term effects are. Nothing about COVID or the way in which tyrants around the world are using it to seize new powers is normal. People at the FDA are resigning left and right [1]. Nobody wants their name on this thing. [1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/09/anger-frustration-at...

[flagged]

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

#554

Post by downandout » Mon, Oct 11, 2021, 9:19 PM UTC

judahmeek wrote: post #509

downandout wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There have been ~180 million vaccinations in the US and approximately 16,000 deaths shortly after receiving it, along with over 75,000 hospitalizations [1]. That implies the odds of dying from the vaccine are 1 in 11,250, and odds of serious complications requiring hospitalization are 1 in 2,400. The odds of a healthy 35 year old dying from COVID are 1 in 2,700. So the odds of serious, possibly permanent injury, or d…

According to your own statistics... Odds of dying shortly after vaccine (for all agree groups?): 1 in 11,250 Odds of healthy 35 year old dying from covid: 1 in 2,700 So a healthy 35 year old is 4x more likely to die from covid than vaccine.

Yes, but the odds of hospitalization after vaccination (which might include permanent, life-altering injury from it) or death is 1 in 2,400. Which is precisely what my comment said.

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

#555

Post by downandout » Mon, Oct 11, 2021, 9:27 PM UTC

shartacct wrote: post #553

downandout wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vaccine mandates aren't new. No. But mandating a brand new vaccine is new. We don’t know what the long term effects are. Nothing about COVID or the way in which tyrants around the world are using it to seize new powers is normal. People at the FDA are resigning left and right [1]. Nobody wants their name on this thing. [1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/09/anger-frustration-at...

[flagged]

Your comment has been flagged, but beyond that, I said nothing about being hesitant about the vaccine. I am vaccinated. I believe the mandates are flawed, largely because they don't take natural immunity into account. I have said none of the things you're accusing me of saying.

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

#556

Post by chasd00 » Mon, Oct 11, 2021, 9:30 PM UTC

commandlinefan wrote: post #466

rzz3 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that vaccine mandates are some global scheme by bill gates. While they’re all wrong, anti-vaxxers are a whole spectrum. I do think one big of nuance is important here though: there are a lot of strongly pro-vax people, like myself, who are strongly anti-mandate. The choice to take the vaccine is the correct choice. The other choice hurts not only yourself, but others. However there is no circumstance in which I’d s…

> pro-vax people, like myself, who are strongly anti-mandate I’m vaccinated, but very uncomfortable with the government ordering me to be.

I want to get a comment in saying i feel the same. Fully vaccinated but fully against vaccination mandates.

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

#557

Post by shartacct » Mon, Oct 11, 2021, 9:48 PM UTC

downandout wrote: post #555

shartacct wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Your comment has been flagged, but beyond that, I said nothing about being hesitant about the vaccine. I am vaccinated. I believe the mandates are flawed, largely because they don't take natural immunity into account. I have said none of the things you're accusing me of saying.

[flagged]

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

#558

Post by downandout » Mon, Oct 11, 2021, 9:55 PM UTC

shartacct wrote: post #557

downandout wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment has been flagged, but beyond that, I said nothing about being hesitant about the vaccine. I am vaccinated. I believe the mandates are flawed, largely because they don't take natural immunity into account. I have said none of the things you're accusing me of saying.

[flagged]

I flagged that comment for wishing me and my children dead, and this one for calling me a "dumbfuck". And nothing I have posted is FUD, nor is it anti-vaccine.

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

#559

Post by hodgesrm » Mon, Oct 11, 2021, 10:06 PM UTC

oh_sigh wrote: post #218

hodgesrm wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Southwest runs 3 to 4K commercial flights per day, which is about 1 in 7 commercial flights overall in the US. They depend on aircraft doing many short hops over the course of a single day: 7 or 8 is not uncommon. When things go bad it tends to disrupt the system very badly. These numbers come from the US DOT ontime database. You can access the data in ClickHouse at https://github.demo.trial.altinity.cloud:8443 (user…

This seems like a strategy designed to kill airframes via sheer number of pressurization cycles?

It certainly wears them out. Hawiian Air has the highest number of pressurization cycles of any US commercial airline (at least as far as I can tell--ontime data shows up to 18). So far they seem to have managed it without issues.

Another airline in the region, Aloha Air, did suffer an inflight fatality in 1988 when the fuselage ruptured. The cause was apparently poor maintenance. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243

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

#560

Post by hodgesrm » Mon, Oct 11, 2021, 10:12 PM UTC

corpdronejuly wrote: post #539

hodgesrm wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the day it was mostly very verbose but extremely fast. Cobol was designed for batch processing on use cases like accounting systems. We used it on signal processing apps, which had a lot of data, mostly on tape. It could rip through data stored on high-density mag tape--it was able to process data at the speed of the device. (I did COBOL apps in the early 1980s.)

I love stories like this. It's so much harder to push our hardware to "the speed of the device" anymore, and hearing stories about others doing that is cool.

You could tell if you screwed something up performance-wise, because the tape would have to reposition and reread if your program was not ready to read blocks coming of the device. With IBM 6250 BPI drives this meant it would overshoot massively, rewind a bunch of tape, and then have another run at it. [0] It was painful to watch and not super good for the mag tape either.

The old movies that show tape drives sort of stuttering back and forth reflect slow program performance. That's not really how they looked for most of the things I worked on.

[0] https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_342...