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

The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

tracingwoodgrains.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 724 posts

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#51

Post by bamboozled »

p3rls wrote: post #50
bamboozled wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trump was also likely referring to the female pilot of the military helicopter. His new head of the military doesn't think women should be in active duty roles, so this would make sense.

Are you thinking of frontline roles? No active duty women would be absurd, but I am not familiar with this Hegseth or whatever his name is I suppose it's possible

He seemed to mostly talk about combat, flying a VIP person out of the white house during an attack would be some form of combat IMO.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#52

Post by LightHugger »

motorest wrote: post #26
Manuel_D wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The undisputed facts at hand are: * The FAA introduced a bigraphical questionnaire which screened out 90% of applicants. * The answers to this questionnaire were distributed to members of the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees. * Members were explicitly told not to distribute the answers to other people, to reduce competition for admission. This is as bad a scandal as though the answers to the SAT…

> I'm... totally at a loss as to you you can get this takeaway from this piece. The undisputed facts at hand are: This is exactly the kind of one-sided nitpicking I pointed out. You purposely decided to omit the fact that the "biological questionaire" was in fact a change in the way applicants were evaluated, which eliminated the privilege of an in-group to avoid to compete with "walk-ons", i.e., anyone outside of th…

Is "eliminated the privilege of" some kind of dogwhistle for being racist against white people? You're intentionally using circuitous language but that appears to be the message. People are individual human beings, discrimination on the basis of skin color is evil. Not sure why this is so hard to understand for some people.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#53

Post by scott_w »

ars wrote: post #13

[flagged]

Like many things Trump claims, there's a kernel of truth wrapped in a pack of lies. It's likely people in Trump's orbit knew about this (as the article highlights, it was visible to Congress), however what Trump claimed was pretty much nonsense: the crash was obviously not caused by someone with "severe intellectual or psychiatric disabilities" in ATC.

I think the end of the article clearly sums things up: when Democrats had power, they didn't take deliberate, thoughtful action to resolve the real issues being raised. Because of that failure, we get to watch Trump take a wrecking ball after making DEI a thoroughly toxic issue during the election.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#55

Post by rayiner »

pjc50 wrote: post #49
scott_w wrote: post #6

This is a truly excellent article and shines a light on a real problem and how it affects people in a real way. It’s an example of something that I’d seen rumblings of in left leaning media: that DEI was being implemented in the laziest and stupidest possible ways (though the ire was mostly directed at marketing efforts by corporations). A story of a smaller, not that harmful, example of this laziness and stupidity:…

> that DEI was being implemented in the laziest and stupidest possible ways This is .. certainly something that might be happening, but it's also something that a lot of people are lying about. It's become increasingly difficult to find out what actually happened once it's been filtered through media, social media, activists, and algorithmic propaganda. What happens if every single instance of "DEI overreach" is over…

It’s absolutely not being over reported. In the last four years, we have had the Supreme Court smack down Harvard for blatantly discriminating against whites and Asians (granting admission to black and Hispanic applicants with similar academic credentials at 3-10x the rate). A federal court smacked down Biden for racially discriminating in granting SBA loans. Another federal court smacked down NASDAQ for diversity quotas for board seats.

Just personally, in the last four years:

1) The acting Dean at my law school held a struggle session where white people declared they were “white supremacists”

2) My kids’ school adopted racially segregated affinity groups. My daughter was invited to go to the weekly “black girl magic” lunch once a month (because I guess half south Asian = quarter black in the DEI hierarchy). Following that lead, a kid tried to kick my daughter out of a group chat for her circle of friends by making it black-kids only.

3) I’ve had coworkers ask if I count as “diverse” for purposes of a client contract and have had to perform diversity jigs during client meetings.

I’m not even going to list all the alienating behaviors from overly empathetic but deeply ignorant white people—the likes of which I never encountered living in a nearly all white town in the 1990s.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#56

Post by rayiner »

scott_w wrote: post #11
thaumasiotes wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s an example of something that I’d seen rumblings of in left leaning media: that DEI was being implemented in the laziest and stupidest possible ways That's not news; it's been true for several decades. There isn't another legal way to do it. The least harmful thing you can do, assuming you need to meet hiring quotas, is to specify that you have X slots for whites and Y slots for nonwhites, and then hire by meri…

You fell into the instant trap I was talking about by equating DEI to “hiring quotas.” That’s a lazy and stupid approach to the problem of increasing opportunities for people from disadvantaged backgrounds. The solution is, unfortunately, much more difficult and requires work across society to achieve it.

Except that’s what it becomes in practice. As soon as you inject race into these decisions, it becomes de facto racial quotas and preferences: https://nypost.com/2023/06/29/supreme-court-affirmative-acti...

It took like five minutes for Biden to start deploying SBA loans whites weren’t eligible for and for NASDAQ to create diversity quotas for boards. Racial gerrymandering is always the ultimate goal of this stuff.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#57

Post by scott_w »

pjc50 wrote: post #49
scott_w wrote: post #6

This is a truly excellent article and shines a light on a real problem and how it affects people in a real way. It’s an example of something that I’d seen rumblings of in left leaning media: that DEI was being implemented in the laziest and stupidest possible ways (though the ire was mostly directed at marketing efforts by corporations). A story of a smaller, not that harmful, example of this laziness and stupidity:…

> that DEI was being implemented in the laziest and stupidest possible ways This is .. certainly something that might be happening, but it's also something that a lot of people are lying about. It's become increasingly difficult to find out what actually happened once it's been filtered through media, social media, activists, and algorithmic propaganda. What happens if every single instance of "DEI overreach" is over…

> This is .. certainly something that might be happening, but it's also something that a lot of people are lying about

For the avoidance of doubt, I 100% agree that right-wing media is telling a lot of outright lies and you pointed out some good examples. However, I have seen left-leaning criticise tokenism in companies' DEI efforts. Philosophy Tube and Unlearning Economics are 2 examples off the top of my head.

> Investigations of the form "what actually happened here, who was actually responsible, what should have been done differently, and what could be done differently in the future" simply get destroyed by very loud demands for racially discriminatory violence, culminating in rioters trying to burn people alive in a hotel.

I disagree with this because I feel it misrepresents the riots this summer as a genuine expression of rage. It was not. It was organised violence by hardcore Nazis and football hooligans bussed in from Stoke to smash up a job centre in Sunderland and attempt to murder women and children.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#58

Post by bena »

scott_w wrote: post #6

This is a truly excellent article and shines a light on a real problem and how it affects people in a real way. It’s an example of something that I’d seen rumblings of in left leaning media: that DEI was being implemented in the laziest and stupidest possible ways (though the ire was mostly directed at marketing efforts by corporations). A story of a smaller, not that harmful, example of this laziness and stupidity:…

> I do think that, particularly in the USA, the refusal of the left in power to critically engage with this topic in a thoughtful way has left the space open to Trump and people like him to turn it into a toxic rallying cry for supporters.

You've said this, but in this thread alone you've seen the opposition refusing to engage with the topic thoughtfully. They just repeat their rhetoric ad nauseum.

I don't think critical thinking and thoughtfulness from the left, or lack thereof, is the issue here.

I think the issue is simple, rhetoric beats nuance, every time. Rhetoric is the rock to nuance's scissors. We need to find the paper.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#59

Post by selimthegrim »

scott_w wrote: post #6

This is a truly excellent article and shines a light on a real problem and how it affects people in a real way. It’s an example of something that I’d seen rumblings of in left leaning media: that DEI was being implemented in the laziest and stupidest possible ways (though the ire was mostly directed at marketing efforts by corporations). A story of a smaller, not that harmful, example of this laziness and stupidity:…

Is your friend interested perhaps in getting back in at the intersection of EMS and software engineering? She is welcome to contact me at my HN handle at gmail or my LinkedIn from the who wants to be hired post. We might have an opportunity for her she might find agreeable.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#60

Post by jefftk »

anal_reactor wrote: post #54

[flagged]

> if you pointed that out before Trump's election

This article is an expanded version of the author's reporting a year ago: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-...

While it didn't make the same splash then, I saw it and didn't see people responding by trying to cancel the author.

Post reply on HN