US air traffic controllers start resigning as shutdown bites • Hacker News Board

Re: US air traffic controllers start resigning as shutdown bites

#391

Post by sebastiennight » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 5:26 PM UTC

throw0101a wrote: post #325

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'm a heavy gamer. I like lots of strategy games. Politicians should have to play several hundred hours of 4X games (Civ 4/5/6/7, Stellaris, Europa Universalis, Hearts of Iron) before they're allowed to run for office. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4X If they can't beat some of these videos at the highest difficulty settings they should not be allowed to break things IRL.

I'm curious on your take on the necessity for political leaders to master the "exterminate" prong of the 4X?

The thing is, a game is a tool with a surface-level set of rules, and a ton of implicit belief systems of how the (game) world works.

You could say someone might become a shrewd negotiator by playing Monopoly, but that is based on a narrow set of winning negotiation strategies which either the game builders have consciously built their game around, or emerge due to their cultural/personal biases or even come up unexpectedly from the rules of the game.

So filtering your leader(s) this way requires agreement that the ideology promoted by the game(s) is what the people want to live under.

Re: US air traffic controllers start resigning as shutdown bites

#392

Post by djoldman » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 5:47 PM UTC

dylan604 wrote: post #381

djoldman wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a false dichotomy. If airlines didn't exist, we would have found some other way to move things. Maybe trains, which would have been the better future by far.

What timeline are you in that we skipped trains and went to airplanes instead? We went to planes because trains were slow, and have a problem going across large bodies of water.

The reasonably best examples of commuter trains are far superior to those of commuter airplanes as long as we are not talking about travel over or around significant bodies of water or long distances.

Trains carry much more weight, are more fuel efficient, are safer, generally experience fewer delays and cancelations, and door-to-door are faster for shorter trips (Safety: since 1964, the Shinkansen has carried over 10 billion passengers without a single passenger fatality from a crash or derailment.

Speed: for trips The majority of travel is not over water. It may be that trains' other advantages are preferable even for longer trips where a train would be slower.

Re: US air traffic controllers start resigning as shutdown bites

#393

Post by throw0101a » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 6:06 PM UTC

sebastiennight wrote: post #391

throw0101a wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm a heavy gamer. I like lots of strategy games. Politicians should have to play several hundred hours of 4X games (Civ 4/5/6/7, Stellaris, Europa Universalis, Hearts of Iron) before they're allowed to run for office. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4X If they can't beat some of these videos at the highest difficulty settings they should not be allowed to break things IRL.

I'm curious on your take on the necessity for political leaders to master the "exterminate" prong of the 4X? The thing is, a game is a tool with a surface-level set of rules, and a ton of implicit belief systems of how the (game) world works. You could say someone might become a shrewd negotiator by playing Monopoly, but that is based on a narrow set of winning negotiation strategies which either the game builders ha…

> I'm curious on your take on the necessity for political leaders to master the "exterminate" prong of the 4X?

Civilization, for one, has scientific and cultural victory conditions, and not just military. Stellaris takes economic and technological factors into account.

But the main skill in being able to "win" is the ability to balance various needs of the population: economic, technology, happiness, crime, foreign threats. And it may not even be able "winning" but about how you play the game: all potential candidates could be given several randomly generated seed, and their gameplay is available for evaluation. Some seeds could be militaristic species, others pacifists; some capitalists, some collectivists; etc, with the expectation that you don't (necessarily) play how you'd like the society to be, but role play as the species at it is: so you may be a pacifist, but you have to play as a militarist if that's what the species is in-game.

If you can't wrap your head around the interconnectedness of resources in something as simple as a video game, what chance do you have IRL?

Further, this can be a filter and not the filter.

Re: US air traffic controllers start resigning as shutdown bites

#394

Post by throw0101a » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 6:15 PM UTC

dzhiurgis wrote: post #376

throw0101a wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm a heavy gamer. I like lots of strategy games. Politicians should have to play several hundred hours of 4X games (Civ 4/5/6/7, Stellaris, Europa Universalis, Hearts of Iron) before they're allowed to run for office. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4X If they can't beat some of these videos at the highest difficulty settings they should not be allowed to break things IRL.

If this is such a good filter - has it been used elsewhere? I know US military tried to hire gamers before to fly drones. On a flip side - politics is deeply social game. My mental image of gamers is very opposite of social (yes I know many games nowadays are social).

> On a flip side - politics is deeply social game. My mental image of gamers is very opposite of social (yes I know many games nowadays are social).

On the flip-flip side, the US has a president which seems to have a high 'charisma score' and very little grasp on reality.

Being able to wrap your head around the interconnectedness of resources in something as simple as a video game is just one factor. I'd like to know how much candidates can deal with the complexities with something as 'simple' as video game society: they could suck at it, and that could be fine if they have other qualities, but it could be a useful data point.

Re: US air traffic controllers start resigning as shutdown bites

#395

Post by e40 » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 6:54 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #285

e40 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their goal, since they 80's, has been to make government look incompetent so they can privatize it and use as a weapon against their adversaries (who they argue want "big government").

Don't forget "so they can make a lot of money off of it." One of the critical legs in the "privatization" stool is to make everything more expensive to line the pockets of people profiting off of what was once a government-provided service.

Yeah, I should have explicitly said that. It's the whole point of privatization. Thanks.

Re: US air traffic controllers start resigning as shutdown bites

#396

Post by yason » Tue, Nov 11, 2025, 10:07 AM UTC

retrochameleon wrote: post #374

yason wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It feels like we are in a weaker position then ever: militaristically, > economically, scientifically, and so on. Meanwhile the threats of China > and Russia and what could happen in the next few years are quite concerning. On the other hand, it's not only USA really. Russia with their czarist structure of power and control hasn't really had an economy that's more sustainable than USSR ever pretended to have, and t…

In my eyes China seems to have a very strong position. They have invested so heavily in optimizing their industries, regulations, etc. that they really seem to operate many orders of magnitude more efficiently than anyone else. They also have a great advantage in their communistic structure. If they decide on a big project, pivot, allocation of resources for long-term strategy, they just do it. You don't have to conv…

China has been a rising star for a long time, albeit not without its share of problems obviously. I heartily agree there's a lot of momentum in China to the direction of things getting better whereas traditional western countries lack much of that, and might even ride a momentum for the worse. And China's centrally-led government can be very effective and more sophisticated, in a way most other dictatorships simply aren't. But China is still too weak to make moves. Their domestic policy and handling of their internal affairs eats up their resources of force, and they also have a long border full of territorial skirmishes they can't just ignore while acting out militarily. It's hard to see China being able to make a move that would be a threat to West and that wouldn't cost way too much. China can certainly posture threats left and right, but I think they understand they don't necessarily need to consider carrying out those threats for real. They also know the art of patience, and together with that and some effective propaganda they can just sit, wait, and slowly move the piece towards their favour, and there's some calm wisdom in that that I greatly appreciate. The constant talks and news we see about a threat posed by China is likely a significant part of just that.

Re: US air traffic controllers start resigning as shutdown bites

#397

Post by thephyber » Sat, Nov 15, 2025, 10:32 PM UTC

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #286

thephyber wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. But having 10%+ of all Americans panicking after missing a few meals is also enough to topple a country. There’s not a whole lot that can unify the different political factions of the US, but going hungry gets people focused on necessity and to deprioritize the shallow / vapid aspects of politics. Arguably it’s China’s governing body’s biggest single fear. I currently think this government shutdown is unlikely…

I can't see any rational politician letting this go beyond another two weeks. I can't imagine keeping people away from their families over Thanksgiving is gonna work out well for anyone. But then, maybe they're not rational.

I argue that politicians are absolutely rational. I frequently argue that even the dictator of N Korea acts rationally, only by very different rules than we are used to thinking about. Generally I reserve “irrational” to people who are functionally/mentally disabled, severely traumatized, or acting under the influence of mind altering substances (eg. RFK’s drugs history + trauma of 2 men in his life being assassinated during his formative years).

They are acting according to the expected responses to the stimuli they create. The problem is that the culture, society, previous legislation/jurisprudence, and the parliamentary rules they voted in all make the calculus of predicting what is rational for them uncertain.