I don't think it's money. I think it's requirements and training pipeline restraints. The system is predicated on being able to throw bodies at the problem, but there is a distinct lack of qualified individuals to back that up. Personally, I didn't realize ATC as a possible career path until I was 36-- imagine my surprise when I found that I had already aged out.

The training is also not run particularly well. There's a single facility in Oklahoma that every prospective air traffic controller has to go through. I had a friend in college who graduated in the early 2010s with a four year degree in air traffic control. He waited several years for the FAA to tell him he could start training, a spot never opened up, and he moved on with his life and did something different. It's broken on a pretty fundamental level if we have a shortage of air traffic controllers but also people who want to do it can't get in.

> but there is a distinct lack of qualified individuals to back that up

Which means either the compensation is insufficient to attract and retain the necessary number of qualified individuals, or the FAA lacks the resources to train an appropriate number of qualified individuals. Either way, it's about money.

Who would want to work that job once they find out what the day-to-day is like? I had an intern who looked at that out of the Air Force but he found out what you get paid and what the expectations are for the job and he figured he'd try his luck on something easier and better-paying like life-preserving medical devices. On a related note, why do you think nobody who you'd actually want teaching public school actually teaches public school in the US?

I know this is a throwaway comment, but I can't let it pass.

> why do you think nobody who you'd actually want teaching public school actually teaches public school in the US?

We're currently doing school visits for our kid, in a low-performing school district, and the teachers and administrators we've met have been impressive. I've worked in education, and visited a lot of schools in another professional capacity, so I know the questions to ask, and things to look for. I have no illusions about there being absolutely terrible teachers out there (and I'll tell you some horror stories, if you'd like), and doubtless any (hypothetical) bad teachers at those schools are being kept away from prospective parents, but your statement is hyperbolic in the extreme. The problems in the US school system are legion, but "every single teacher is crap" is not remotely true.

I dunno.

I was at school for 12 years.

There were two good teachers.

The rest of them, and all the staff at those four schools, are hopefully spending the rest of eternity burning in hell.

I think the comparison to public education is apt: often (at least initially) great people trapped in a terrible system. I suppose you can pay people to ignore a certain amount of misery on top of the job, but I do not believe you can (or should) completely obviate all brokenness in a system at the end of two weeks in a paycheck.

To play devil's advocate, ASEL into small deltas is significantly different than receiving full-stop IFRs late at night.

This small mistake (and it is initially small, just catastrophic) is a system breakdown, not necessarily a staffing breakdown. Though staffing is definitely a wider issue in the NAS.

Edit to add: looking at this incident closer it appears LGA was busy enough to make a single tower/ground controller an obviously bad plan. Still, systemically, there's enough low hanging fruit here, like ADSb in for the airport trucks or hold short line guard lights. I hope the takeaway isn't just "don't have controllers make mistakes".

Yea, if you listen to the ATC audio, you can hear that in addition to the normal high workload of handling both ground and tower, this guy had an emergency aircraft on a taxiway to deal with, too. A lot of holes in the swiss cheese lined up, but one of them clearly is ATC workload.

Perhaps in a scenario where there is an active emergency and one controller, protocol should be that ground and air frequencies are combined.

That would have given the jet a chance to hear the truck cleared to cross the runway they were landing on.

For a long & low trip like that, ATC staffing is a common story. Higher sectors not having the manpower leads to clearance delays, and this is a somewhat common workaround for that somewhat rare situation.

Your use of "our" makes me wonder if the people of Mexico see the drug cartels as "theirs".

Merely pointing out that the US administration is operating like a cartel now a days.

I doubt Mexicans see the Mexican cartels as “theirs” in the same way. Cartels have only been interested in paying off politicians and (as far as I’m aware) weren’t interested in being politicians. However, our politicians here… would LOVE to be Cartel members and make millions it seems. Because they definitely don’t give a shit about law and order.

Absolutely. I suppose my question was really more interested in the perceived legitimacy (or lack thereof).

So much AI statementmaking seems to be structured around "It's not X, it's not Y, it's not Z [emdash] it's A" and "What's important is '[experiential first-person descriptive quote]'". Maybe they overfit on Linked In data.

Through some interesting turns of events I've made more and more acquaintances with some people well outside the city I live in. One thing that caught me off guard was just how true this is. People there would rather-- by a large margin-- see stagnancy than improvement. Literally arguing against adding a grocery store due to there being nothing there to support it, no roads, nowhere to even buy food. They are fiercely opposed to anyone doing anything.

It has made me wonder what proportion of that sentiment is held by my neighbors in spite of the obvious city problems we face.

I'd probably be most inspired to make an AI video of doing something awesome in a national park just after having visited the park, too.

They'll need a flock cam on the summit if they want to push that any further.

The local obscenely named utility company dug in our road a few years ago, necessitating a large patch. They proceeded to drive through their patch as they left. The tire dents & ridges are still there years later. You're right, of course, but I think you may be overestimating the concern patch crews give to their craft.

That's a method in the manual - "roll-and-go". The fact that it's still there years later is actually proof that the patch was effective, if maybe not well applied.

That's ... How you compact a patch.

Anyhow, it doesn't matter how much care they put into the job, if the substrate fails the road fails. Simple as that. Patches are temporary fixes.

Eh, maybe I didn't describe it well. We're talking 1 lane wide, maybe 80 ft long. Dually tire path through the patch. Indented, with the displaced material ridged up along the side, diagonal across the lane. It yanks my motorcycle tire sideways if I hit it, and it's a decent bump in a car. If that's… how you compact it, we need new standards.

Are we sure it's opposition to enforcement of existing basic immigration rules? What I've seen has been more opposition to unjustifiable detainment, oppression, and killings of American citizens (i.e. murder). The same militarization of immigration policy that has plagued American police in recent decades.

I do think there's a conversation to be had in an effort to bifurcate rote racism from immigration policy, but I don' think we're quite there yet.

Not to mention the normalization of masked, non-identifying agents invading homes without warrants and disappearing people into unmarked vans.

If these were legitimate, above-the-board policing operations, they'd be carried out by visibly identifying officers in uniforms and vehicles marked as government vehicles.

My brother bought a Tesla recently. They dicked him around with delivery, and he had to pay a ton to get charging infrastructure installed at his house, but it's fast so he's happy. On a recent visit, he finally showed me the car, and it was hilarious how janky the final product is. Everything seems cobbled together-- a good example is that there's apparently two separate voice assistants (plus his phone) and none of them can talk to each other, so commands like "turn on the defrost" are responded to with "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that".

Controls as simple as the door handles are unintuitive, with the handle apparently being the emergency release that doesn't lower the window (for who knows why). You have to brief your passengers on egress like it's an airplane.

EVs might be a solved problem, but Tesla is still fighting their own additional layer of complexity that they added on top. The added subscription nonsense makes him look like a fool for having bought in, something I am definitely even more reluctant to do now that I've seen it play out.

> Controls as simple as the door handles are unintuitive, with the handle apparently being the emergency release that doesn't lower the window (for who knows why). You have to brief your passengers on egress like it's an airplane.

I caught a ride with a friend in a Tesla, and when we stopped I opened the door - like a human being operating a century-old piece of technology - and he looked at me like I was crazy, and told me not to do that.

Truly, a bonkers decision.

Yeah, it apparently damages the weatherstripping (and maybe the window and other things) and is meant to be used only in an emergency /facepalm. Which is probably why your friend was alarmed.

I didn't care, I still tested it out the day I picked up mine to see where the manual handle is and make sure it works, because just a couple days earlier two people had gotten trapped in a burning Tesla, were unable to figure out the mechanism, and died.

I have a 2022 Model 3, and the hilariously tragic part is that the voice assistant was great and basically never gave me any problems until they shoved Grok into it, whereupon it broke completely. I never use it anymore, they effectively removed a feature from my car.

Whoa, did Tesla pull an Apple? Siri used to work okay on the iPhone, but once it got LLMed it frequently sits there indefinitely while failing to make any progress on even the simplest commands.

Apple did an even worse job than you think: they didn't even LLM Siri so I guess it just broke.

Counterpoint: I like my Tesla, and I find the AI assistant diverting and useful. I have very little doubt the functionality of the limited on-board voice assistant will be merged into Grok (it's literally on the coming features).

Whether you like this or not, who cares? The pace of improvement in Tesla software compared to any other manufacturer is astonishing, and astonishingly good.

I have no love for the CEO, but my Model Y is a very interesting (and intuitive) car.

Diverting?

In Italian divertente is entertaining. Parent probably speaks a Romance language and got hit by a "false friend".

That's actually a valid (of old fashioned) usage in English too, it's just a bit weird to value in a voice assistant for your car.

I have it set to the "Gork" personality, which is occasionally correct and useful, but is very often genuinely funny. It's like a Spicoli-with-a-PhD that answers your query when it "feels like it".

I have a RULES file for my coding agent which I invoke when I get bored. It basically simulates a real office environment saying things like "while the queue is full our worker is sitting in the corner with its thumb up its ass looking at the wrong queue".

Which is hilarious, but when I'm driving on the freeway and trying to add milk to my grocery list or add a navigation stop at the hardware store (no idea if these are things you can actually do, I'm just using what feel like plausible use cases for a car voice assistant) I wouldn't want the additipnal distraction of the voice assistant being funny.

I have an older X, and I'm kind of happy that the AP and Infotainment hardware in it is largely deprecated, and they are unlikely to be able to shove Grok crap into it. It will stay largely the same for the life of the car.

Do a quick press of the voice button and the old voice control activate; if you hold it down or press too long, it uses the grok AI which can't do anything (and I never use).

What if I don't have my phone, or if someone else drives the car?

These are niche enough use cases I don't think they're worth bothering about.

I wouldn't dump millions into a custom GPS solution for that 1 time out of 1 million someone drives a car without a smartphone. Especially when that GPS system is guaranteed to be worse than Google maps and not as well supported.

If someone else drives your car they can connect their phone. Which is an improvement, because now they have THEIR music and navigation. See, it comes with personalization out of the box and automatically!

> Especially when that GPS system is guaranteed to be worse than Google maps and not as well supported.

I use my car's GPS nav over my phone's because I don't notice being appreciably worse for navigating, but I do notice the ads on Google Maps being appreciably worse than the lack of ads on my car's nav system.

Also doing nav on my phone thrashes my phone battery.

It should be impossible to drive a car without a phone?

No it should definitely be possible, I just don't think it's worth while creating a subpar and poorly-supported GPS system when phones exist. Especially when said system is forced over phones, which often happens because companies want to promote their own shit. As if their shit don't stink, when really it's the smelliest.

We don't need 1 million different applications that we have to try to integrate together. Just let me connect my messages, my GPS, my music player, even my calendar. Personally, I could give a rat's ass how fancy Tesla's interface is or GM's. It will always, always be second best to what's available on modern smartphones.