This is hilarious. 15 years ago, every company blew up their rockets after one launch. Apparently reusability is so common now, we expect the opposite.
But also, I don't think this is unexpected. It hasn't flown any real missions or delivered any commercial payloads. It look them quite awhile to reuse a Falcon9.
Yeah, I'm not an Elon fan, the guy is incapable of comprehending that he's overextended his abilities, but that has little if anything to do with starship. The thing will blow up, until one day we notice that it hasn't in a while, and then there will be a useful heavy launch platform.
I have no idea what I have -3 votes, but this is also fascinating. It's pretty common knowledge that Saturn 5 never was reused for instance... really just the Space Shuttle was the first "resuable" (term used loosely) spacecraft.
The NATO was never an ideological partnership. It's a strategic partnership, that's all. There have been other dictatorships in the past that were NATO member as well: Greece, Portugal.
> by blaming the disaster on diversity programs, a pronouncement that baffled many in the agency’s workforce
Fascinating, because the FAA has one of the largest scale DEI programs that limited hiring of qualified individuals. I think this criticism is completely valid.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42944203 is the broader discussion on this claim from a month ago. I’m not taking a position here, just sharing the rabbit hole if people want to burn their day.
>Taking old, resolved scandals - slapping a coat of culture war paint on it - and then selling it as a new scandal is already a popular MO for state-sponsored propoganda, so we should be extra wary of stories like this being massaged.
and the top reply to "legitster"'s comment with that quote says:
"The article actually shows that dei considerations were central to the original changes, not just recent framing."
User "legitster" is not very legit. They wrote nonsense including something about a "secret racial kabal" elsewhere that I took apart and they didn't have any reaponse to because they were so wrong.
If that's you're take, I hope you have a good one too, you seem to need it.
I also hope you learn that in ATC, hiring (and firing) practices can have a long, very long, lasting effect.
Opinions are my own and not necessarily that of the FAA. (I'm an Air Traffic Contoller and I'm required to say something to that effect. I also was not directly affected by that quiz, but the quiz had effects which impacted the NAS (National Airspace System) which indirectly impacts me.)
It definitely doesn't apply to jobs like McDonald's that can easily adapt its workforce numbers. McDonald's has maybe a 3-5 day training period, ATC has a 3-5 year training period.
In other professional jobs, people generally aren't forced out at a certain age, so that's fairly unique to FAA ATC and adds the dynamic that I mentioned in another comment in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43356217
There is a source posted, and it's pretty damning. You should genuinely read it. It includes a test with questions like what was your best course in college, and what is your best course in high school, that have different correct answers. The answers to the test were also given out to groups of interest. You can take the test yourself, it's genuinely baffling.
The FAA also pulled a Trump University on people in FAA college programs, destroying their recruitment pipeline in the process. Pulled the rug on students on a very specialized program, that transfers nowhere, and that had near guaranteed placement.
I mean what I saw is that planes started falling out of the sky the moment the war on diversity was made official policy. It certainly gives the impression DEI is what was keeping this country running.
were there significantly more plane crashes or significantly more media coverage of the plane crashes? this seems similar to the train derailment a few years ago where they seemed more common due to more media exposure.
I don't actually believe DEI policies were why our air safety was good. I'm drawing attention to the fact that OP doesn't think DEI was why it was bad either, because it wasn't.
They want segregation again and this is their most sympathetic case for it. One that journalists and HN commenters are happy to "steelman" into a policy that sounds like it makes sense even though it does not.
Calling someone racist is not hate speech my lord. If you don't want to be called racist don't say racist shit it's not hard.
But if saying racist things on the tech news site is important to you then you're going to have to stand up for your values and take a little heat about it.
I support DEI initiatives in general and think they’re important.
But please educate yourself about the situation at the FAA. There’s a failure mode that DEI opponents point to regarding deprioritizing actual talent for the sake of the DEI goals.
This failure mode is often a red herring because the two goals aren’t mutually exclusive (find talent, build a diverse team).
But the FAA by many accounts did the thing people were worried about. This is not an indictment of DEI efforts in general, but is an issue with a specific implementation.
In the end calories are calories, but what I learned from endurance sports is that these two surgars have different transport pathways. You can absorb a certain amount of each one individually up to your individual chemistry's max.
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