Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

US air traffic controllers start resigning as shutdown bites

thedailybeast.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 397 posts

Re: US air traffic controllers start resigning as shutdown bites

#331

Post by daemonologist »

user68858788 wrote: post #311

A quick search shows that there are over 20,000 ATCs employed in the United States. (I'm not confident in the sources I found - anyone know where to get reliable stats for things like this?) Is the number of retiring ATCs higher than normal? I assume it is, but the article doesn't mention the baseline. It's hard for me to understand the scale of the issue from this article alone.

Typical ATC career is 25-30 years, so naively you'd expect ~1.8 retirements per day. Maybe a little more if you assume the OP is talking only about working/weekdays, maybe a little less as the maximum age for trainees has been raised over time.

Re: US air traffic controllers start resigning as shutdown bites

#332

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

antonymoose wrote: post #329
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

60% of ACA recipients are in Republican controlled districts. That shows how much they care about their constituents.

What percentage of this recipients are Republican constituents?

It doesn't matter. A Representative represents everyone in their district, not their voters.

Re: US air traffic controllers start resigning as shutdown bites

#333

Post by pstuart »

samrus wrote: post #296

So the deadlock is over ACA premium tax credits. A subsidy towards premiums, inversely proportional to income. Republicans have to budge on this right? Health insurance is already dire in this country, you cant fuck it up even more. The working class is the biggest part of the citizenry, and we are in an affordability crisis

Project 2025 (the instruction manual that the president and his staff are hewing to) wants to shred everything in ACA and privatize everything. They offer nothing other than reducing taxes on the wealthy. The poors don't matter because they they are poor and exist only to be exploited for service work.

Re: US air traffic controllers start resigning as shutdown bites

#334

Post by rdtsc »

10 years or so ago the controllers got hit with a hiring scandal https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa...

Wonder how that changed the perception and the desire to become an ATC. Did it have a measurable impact, with folks avoiding that line of work. Or, it hasn't really made much of a difference? The idea is if many are retiring but we're graduating or hiring just as many or more, that's not that bad.

Re: US air traffic controllers start resigning as shutdown bites

#335

Post by jsrcout »

senderista wrote: post #319
retrochameleon wrote: post #307

I'm a heavy gamer. I like lots of strategy games. Sometimes I look at our country like a strategy game: where we are investing resources, infrastructure planning and investment, active problems or threats and how they are being prioritized and handled, managing citizen happiness, etc. The last 10-20 years feel like a massive lost opportunity to invest in some of these improvements and forward-thinking planning. In th…

I can't escape the impression that the person currently most responsible for these shortsighted decisions simply doesn't care what happens after he's gone.

Now, either (except, of course, to himself).

Re: US air traffic controllers start resigning as shutdown bites

#337

Post by pessimizer »

samrus wrote: post #296

So the deadlock is over ACA premium tax credits. A subsidy towards premiums, inversely proportional to income. Republicans have to budge on this right? Health insurance is already dire in this country, you cant fuck it up even more. The working class is the biggest part of the citizenry, and we are in an affordability crisis

I think this is the last stand they can take that will (under normal circumstances) be completely forgotten before midterms. Democrats need to drag it out as long as possible and look for populist Republican allies.

They need to start campaigning for midterms now, and to be generous towards those populist worker-friendly Republicans and especially those that are threats to Republican incumbents. That means campaigning on something other than illegal immigration and trans. It also means that shutdown misery will be part of what they'll be campaigning on, so everything Trump is doing now will backfire. He cut his base out from under him with H1Bs, Israel and Epstein, so as terrible as they are, Democrats have a chance to get to popularity parity or even turn the tables right now.

Trump also gasses when he starts losing control of the situation. He lost at the end of his last term because everything was going wrong; he looked tired, and like he had lost interest in the job completely. A dragged-out shutdown will weigh him down and bore him like covid did. He doesn't even care about ACA tax credits.

Re: US air traffic controllers start resigning as shutdown bites

#338

Post by generativenoise »

retrochameleon wrote: post #307

I'm a heavy gamer. I like lots of strategy games. Sometimes I look at our country like a strategy game: where we are investing resources, infrastructure planning and investment, active problems or threats and how they are being prioritized and handled, managing citizen happiness, etc. The last 10-20 years feel like a massive lost opportunity to invest in some of these improvements and forward-thinking planning. In th…

Indeed, to go along with your analogy it does feel like we have chosen to go for a "All in rush", rather that try and compound marginal advantage. Sometimes that does work, but is can be a really chaotic where small perturbations can wildly swing the outcome.

To me the most wild thing about our current circumstance is the abstraction away from the real with financialization. Pretending that money basically has unlimited optionality and liquidity in the future without having to manage, maintain and develop the resources, capabilities, infrastructure, and environment for the long future not just the next few quarters.

Especially when it comes to investing for retirement. So much people are delegating their excess to grow the "market" which by in large is destroying the foundations for that very retirement by chasing maximal growth of money while destroying the underlying systems (healthcare, housing, social and environmental stability).

Maybe this is the best we can do due to adversarial constraints and the current system state. But that is a pretty depressing thought.

Re: US air traffic controllers start resigning as shutdown bites

#339

Post by edmundsauto »

TylerE wrote: post #328
pinkmuffinere wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, didn’t realize there’s an age limit for new controllers! That does seem silly

No it doesn’t. They require years of specialized training paid for on the governments dime, and have a mandatory retirement at age 56. Much older than 31 and it simply does not justify the expense of training.

We can always re-examine our priors and assumptions given the current context. It's also worth considering other fields. For example, military helicopter pilots training is longer, more expensive, and frequently only requires a 6-8 year commitment. It doesn't pass a sanity check that a 25 year career should be too much of a concern... if they were treated well.

Re: US air traffic controllers start resigning as shutdown bites

#340

Post by denkmoon »

silisili wrote: post #330
retrochameleon wrote: post #307

I'm a heavy gamer. I like lots of strategy games. Sometimes I look at our country like a strategy game: where we are investing resources, infrastructure planning and investment, active problems or threats and how they are being prioritized and handled, managing citizen happiness, etc. The last 10-20 years feel like a massive lost opportunity to invest in some of these improvements and forward-thinking planning. In th…

It's hard not to zoom out and look at the world as a game at times. If you do that, and go back way more than 10 years, it feels like every country is playing terribly. Countries used to routinely go on domination quests for land and resources. They used to go find exotic lands and claim them as their own. They used to harvest resources and enslave the losers. Now, not so much. If you watched it zoomed out as a game,…

>Countries used to routinely go on domination quests for land and resources. They used to go find exotic lands and claim them as their own. They used to harvest resources and enslave the losers.

This is not a golden age to look back on fondly. That was colonialism. That was the world wars. That was the bleakest era in human history.

That doesn't mean power games don't exist anymore though. The order that prevents regression to the above is held in place by peaceful competition and a threat that nobody wants to relive those horrific experiences. Yet the leaders lived through these horrors are gone, replaced by their children who seem to not have a healthy fear of the depths of depravity humans can fall to. Instead focused on personal wealth accumulation to the exclusion of all else, and if the structures that prevent global war are in the way of that well they need to go.

Post reply on HN