South America and Africa would probably get off pretty lightly. And then they'd experience the worst economic depression that has ever been seen due to the complete collapse of global trade. They're not going to be up for the job of rescuing entire continents.
No, but they’ll go on living as they have for 300,000 years.
I spent time in 35 African countries getting as remote as possible. The vast major Of remote peoples lives would not change at all if entire continents were completely destroyed (unless they cop the fallout, or the ash causes crops to fail).
The discussion here isn’t about whether the lives of remote people would be upended, but whether those countries would help to rebuild the ones hit by the war, the way devastated cities were rebuilt after WWII.
"How is anyone supposed to take that seriously? Is that how Cologne, Dresden, Würzburg and Pforzheim, or Hiroshima and Nagasaki looked a decade after they had been destroyed in Allied bombing raids? The truth is that even after infrastructure gets bombed back to the Middle Ages, life remains surprisingly normal, and people quickly rebuild."
The nukes that would fall today are a few orders of magnitude bigger than those that fell in Japan, and there would be many orders of magnitude more of them, and close together.
The world has never seen destruction and fallout that is even remotely comparable to what we’d get.
US states do this frequently - for example, Texas often passes laws that stipulate "cities having a population over...." such that only the major cities have laws applied to them or certain companies having over employees/users/customers over a certain amount.
I have a bunch of white oak from a tree I cut down and had milled into lumber.
I wanted to make a bunch of benches for friends/family, etc. I have the lumber so all I needed was the bench ends/legs.
I looked at the domestic options and it was going to cost. I couldn't find anyone that would sell a set of legs for under $300 a piece or wanted me to "contact them for pricing." and that's all BEFORE shipping.
Keep in mind that your local bigbox store sells an almost exact replica of the made in China bench legs with crap lumber for $99. It'd be cheaper for me to buy those, junk the lumber and use my own.
I then checked alibaba and walked through the process of getting RFQ. The competent sellers who knew what I wanted and what to do were easy to work with and quick to check the various shipping costs - the per unit price would be pretty low($20ish even with my low volume order) but shipping would be $50-$70 a per set of legs due to the weight of the cast iron. BUT, now, even with tariffs, that leg would go from $~90 to $180ish AND I'd still be well below what the domestic cost is.
If I go forward at all, I'll still probably go with the Alibaba folks. I don't see how USA manufacturers will suddenly start producing these sort of bulky intermediary consumer products anytime soon.
Reading their alternatives, it strikes me with "ZCTA's are the worst form of small area aggregation except for all others."
Its not a great geography to use but it is quite useful if you know it's limitations and inaccuracies when you get into it. Stuff like multipolygon entities, island-polys, etc aren't fun to resolve but can be accounted for.
Add on that ZCTA's will historically follow some sort of actual boundary(rivers/highways/etc) they can tell a story in a way Census tracts can't.
> When training at the academy resumed in July 2020, after the four-month shutdown, class sizes were cut in half to meet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s social distancing guidelines.
> The pandemic hit controller hiring and training hard with on-the-job training for developmental controllers significantly dropping at facilities, resulting in delayed certification. In fiscal year 2021, the controller hiring target was dropped from 910 to 500.
> Since then, the FAA has been working to restore the training pipeline to full capacity. The agency’s Controller Workforce 2023/2032 Plan had a hiring target of 1,020 in FY 2022 (actual hires were 1,026) and 1,500 in FY 2023. The is set to increase to 1,800 in the current fiscal year.
This is really helpful. I take something different from it than you do (it looks like attrition starkly increases after 2014, in ways I'd strongly argue it's reasonable to attribute to the new hiring methods), but I'm grateful you posted it. Do you know if more complete/precise numbers are available anywhere (hiring counts, hiring+attrition, etc?
I'm going to assume you mean "academy" attrition for sake of conversation.
You have a wave of much higher attrition after 2013 because....You have a lot more trainees on fewer trainers.
That means more load is placed on fewer trainers resulting on page 45 where you spike from 20% to 25% ratio.
Combine that with the very valid point that this is not CIT folks but qualifying citizens being admitted, you can see the impact of having a 56% higher attrition rate!
Here's a bunch of plans to comb through for the full numbers. I don't have a spreadsheet off hand.
> Has this had a long-term impact on aviation safety and air traffic controller shortages? Likely yes."
may have been highly attributable in 2018 timeframe but the real culprit is just as likely the 2013 sequester - I'd caution to say any one cause is the reason but rather there is a combination between a shift in applicant pool, having to deal with a slight burst in retirements, recovering from sequester and revamped training processes. Heck - maybe even not having an administrator from 2017-2018 might have caused issues.
In the cold light of 2025 with impacts from COVID still reverberating, I'd doubt hiring practices as much as any other arbitrary reason.
When the methods of selection aren’t selective at all (the “qualified” bar on the AT-SAT only eliminated some 5% of candidates), “qualifying citizens” is a bit misleading.
Yes, academy attrition.
I don’t disagree that the 2013 sequester played some role, but to radically change hiring practices in the wake of the sequester and then blame radically higher washout rates primarily on the sequester doesn’t pass the sniff test.
My basic case is simple: when articles and reports considering the reasons haven’t even mentioned this massive change in hiring practices as one contributing factor, shifting to including this as a contributing factor is a genuinely major change, and while it would be convenient for people if it didn’t impact anything I don’t think you can disrupt the pipeline that much and then shrug and attribute all issues to other things. That just doesn’t make sense.
Ok-but you make a sweeping statement about the impact to safety and ATC numbers in the wake of an air tragedy - do you expect me to weigh this as heavily as COVID?
While I agree with the surface evaluation(you have likely lower quality initial candidates(not necessarily race induced) = more academy failures = more pressure on upstream DEV/CFC training) - you'd need to identify a few things such as why the spike didn't occur in 2014-2016 in such large #s compared to 2017, what safety data tells us about this time and how number of flight actions per controller has changed over time after this hiring change.
I find it somewhat disingenuous to consider safety and tie it back to this as you present it as the only cause while failing to mention other inputs.
This is NOT TO SAY you do not have a very valid discussion here - I just am frustrated to see it tied into modern day without hashing through other modern causes - folks who want to point a finger at "disadvantaged candidate hiring." get all the hay they need when nothing else is mentioned.
Figure, it was in a PDF that search engines had trouble scraping. I feel like FAA is burying this data on purpose because it looks terrible.
Reading deeper, on page 40 that has historical data, starting FY14 when this survey had been implemented and initial class hired, Academy Training Attrition appears to be much higher though all I can base this on is comparing bar graph sizes. So yes, this change to hiring process did impact staffing levels because academy attrition was higher.
Possibly but I'd argue it's far from a smoking gun.
The sequester of 2013 did a number on things and they hired to maximum capacity in the years after to make up for lost time. It stands to reason that by filling training to the max, they'd have more washouts due to lack of more attention during training.
> The sequestration in 2013 and subsequent hiring freeze
resulted in the FAA not hiring any new controllers for nearly
9 months across FY 2013 and FY 2014. The effects of this
disruption on the hiring pipeline, as well as the FAA Air Traffic
Academy’s operations, were substantial.
For some jobs, your aptitude should matter. If a test has some discriminating power between people with aptitude and those without aptitude, then perhaps failing that test should really matter. For ATC staff perhaps OCD-adjacent traits are good and ADD-adjacent traits are bad. Maybe you don't want someone with epilepsy in ATC even though that's unfair.
Maybe we all want to be Olympic athletes and a few work hard to become so, but what should happen if we lack some necessary skill?
Bar exam is different because it's just taking a test. Testing is really easy to scale.
This is more not allowing something who dropped out of law school due to academics to be readmitted because law school slots are precious if your goal is to make X amount of lawyers per year.
Across 2023 and 2024 the en route academy pass rate was ~66% and terminal pass rate was ~73%. Of that, ~25% of en route trainees fail at their facility and ~15-20% of terminal trainees fail at their facility. There are ~2 en route trainees per terminal trainee.
> Has this had a long-term impact on aviation safety and air traffic controller shortages? Likely yes.
This was a terrible conclusion. Ask any ATC person what's up with staffing and "COVID training and hiring disruptions" will be in the first few sentences they say.
The fact this article goes on and on without a single mention of the impact COVID has had gives me all the stock I need to place in it.
Some folks may find it hard to believe, but the 1-2 year interruption in hiring pipelines can cause large ripples that take years-to-decades to resolve.
Slapping a DEI strawman up and trying to tie it to a tragedy reflects on the changes some seek.
This article is not talking about COVID, it's talking about the absurd changes to the hiring process that disadvantaged qualified candidates in favor of people who said science was their worst subject in high school (15 points). How could this not have an impact on hiring?
Because COVID happened much sooner and has likely had a bigger impact than the hiring practices from a decade ago - notice we don't have a concrete number of "disadvantaged qualified candidates" from this article. Whereas, I can point COVID with actual numbers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42952695
If we're going to say "Did that contribute to a shortage of qualified ATC..?" then you have to considering all inputs into what is a current conversation rather than extrapolate your already asserted points from the article.
> the 1-2 year interruption in hiring pipelines can cause large ripples that take years-to-decades to resolve.
Looking at [1], the difference between planned and actual hires in 2013–2015 was 1362, much higher than during 2020–2022 when it was just 384 (and this is using the pre-COVID target).
I don't know what happened in 2013–2015, but whatever it was, it seems to have had a 3.5 times bigger impact than COVID.
Well, we do know one thing that happened: this scandal.
> The Federal Aviation Administration has imposed a hiring freeze to help blunt the sequester’s impact, but that threatens to disrupt the pipeline of new air traffic controllers needed to replace the thousands of workers eligible for retirement.
That is the frustrating part - the article had it's lane and just had to stick in it.
Instead, we get someone extrapolating and guessing when we have actual data from COVID on class delays/size reduction(as well as more controllers retiring earlier) coupled with lower training intensity while air traffic was depressed.
To pile on, the very data they have in their hands probably has very strict legal requirements for storing/moving and distributing. Failure to account for proper processes can be held against them.
It's only matter of time until one of these clowns starts "accidentally" touching data like the 2020 census individual response data.
To me, that's the red line: If they can touch that and suffer no consequence, then there is no law or process can exist to ensure accountability of the government.
Great question, I’m not sure about the answer. I’ve heard those that meditate describe similar experiences, and have had some profound perspective shifts trying it myself years ago. I can’t also rule out the age I was at the time, being one where’d you’d expect to go through new and transformative experiences anyway by virtue of still growing and maturing.
But my intuition says no, it really does feel like those were peak, pivotal experiences that still stand out as some of the most significant in my life. Not to say it’s not possible, but maybe more so that in my little corner of the world with the relatively limited experiences available to me at the time, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have simply continued to tread the very uninspired life path I was on.
In a way it felt like waking up in the middle of a dream, and realising I could go back to sleep, or get up and change my circumstances. Probably a bit of a cringe analogy, but it feels about right — it was still work and a conscious choice to make positive changes, but prior to then it hadn’t even occurred to me that I could. It’s not lost on me that for positive stories like mine, there’s many people that could counter with negatives.
Drugs aren’t safe, but neither is a life unchallenged I think. In my case that was what I needed I suspect, a challenge to my own views on myself, other people, the world, and what’s possible. Therapy might’ve gotten me there too, for all it’s worth, but I don’t know that I would’ve considered it prior.
This is destruction on a scale that has not been seen in the likes of civilization outside the bronze age collapse.
The fact is there is going to be no one coming to help replace burned up hoes and shovels.
Threads and the Day after weren't a snapshot of one single city - they were a snapshot of what would be happening everywhere else at the same time.