> Schedule A, a special authority that allows government managers to “hire persons with disabilities
This is misleading:
Schedule A(u) is for disabilities. Schedule A(r) is for short term appointments with a cap of a few years. I believe they are simply using short term positions.
I believe schedule A refers to a whole set of options to forgoe the standard job posting and interview process, where disability is only one such exemption.
"FAA spokesperson Steven Kulm told WIRED that "the FAA is overseeing the SpaceX-led mishap investigation." The FAA did not respond to further questions about whether the presence of SpaceX engineers at the agency would constitute a conflict of interest.
In September, the FAA proposed $633,000 in fines following two 2023 incidents in which SpaceX allegedly did not follow its license requirements, violating regulations. Responding to an X user posting about the penalties, Musk wrote, "The fundamental problem is that humanity will forever be confined to Earth unless there is radical reform at the FAA!" Shortly afterward, Musk called for FAA head Mike Whitaker to resign.
In January, more than three years before his term was due to end, Whitaker did resign."
Funny that people focus on the „Schedule a“ part, when the actual problem is the worst form of regulatory capture this seems to be by the looks: the regulated industry simply taking over the regulator.
It is. The article full of innuendo seemingly linking personnel reductions at FAA with recent catastrophes. While they don't say it explicitly they write it so that the casual reader would conclude those ate related events. They also call the new employees "not fully vetted" while not specifying which vetting is needed and knowing they are seasoned competent professionals who held multiple positions of trust. Again, creating an impression of impropriety without any substance to back it up.
I am all for removing the enormous overhead created at regulatory agencies all over the western world. i do not think that this is the way to do it. if trump was cutting jobs left and right or maybe even slash an agency, fine. but getting in a HNWI to rule over himself is the worst nightmare. this will not end well.
Got to say, I expected Trump take 2 to be bad, but I am quite surprised at how _rapidly_ the US is moving towards the Russian mafia state model, and how quiet the legislature is being about it.
The legislature that spent the last 20 years not legislating and ousting anyone who tried legislating across the aisle with Democrats? They’re mostly feckless cowards serving now. I don’t think they would actually know how to write real legislation that benefited the people and not their lobbied interests.
It’s mostly because most Americans have very little clue of what the end state and the process to get there looks like. A lot of commonalities like borderline legal or gray area business practices are often extolled as virtues here or “clever business hacks”. It takes only a few to apply them in the direction that a lot of folks are simply unfamiliar with without having lived in the Soviet bloc.
The 2016 legislature, esp Senate, was still mostly the "GOP old guard" and wouldn't have put up with this. But they're either gone, or "converted" to avoid Trump's direct retribution (now even more powerful as backed by Musk's reach and dollars), which is no joke.
It really bothers me that there are a bunch of goons who flag every single story about the stuff Trump and Musk are up to. Really makes you realize that a solid chunk of HN or even HN itself aren't on the up and up.
It’s the year 2032, free speech is now only allowed on Twitter. Any speech criticizing Trump is automatically flagged and your personal details used to automatically fire you from your job, executed by the new “efficiency heads” installed into each board of private companies. People are always fired for “efficiency and performance” reasons. The people feel the cold grip around their neck removing their ability to scream. Most people have fallen in line, out of fear of being labeled a terrorist and getting your life ruined.
As I write this with a humorous cautionary intention, I’ve made myself worried by how plausible this scenario sounds.
Yeah, pretty shocking. Not sure what intellectual gymnastics you have to do to defend Trump/Musk's actions -- either you've drunk the Kool Aid, are cashing in on the scam, or don't care as you already have yours.
Having said that, one group that are happy with Trump are the crypto bros, because the SEC just dropped its lawsuit against Coinbase as a result of their support for Trump's re-election.
I guess that's true as you openly admit to flagging everything that mentions trump or doge even if it's irrefutably tech related.
OOP said "It really bothers me that there are a bunch of goons who flag every single story about the stuff Trump and Musk are up to" and you took personal offence
Calling you, someone who by their own admission, flags every single article mentioning trump or doge (even things that belong on HN) a "goon" is way too kind on my opinion. You support the censorship of HN-relevant news on HN. It's disgusting.
>one-sided propaganda stories
What about this article was "one-sided propaganda"?
>as evidenced by your insults to half of U.S. voters
When did OOP do this?
I believe your attitude and willingness to try and hide any articles you don't want propagated (ones that irrefutably belong on HN) is vile and malicious and you probably shouldn't be allowed to flag posts anymore.
Very happy with the people doing that, keeps the place sane. If you want a dozen daily hysterical takes on the latest thing that Trump&co did, go on r/politics. I have no interest in seeing any of that here.
Considering that the most upvoted and active posts are related to DOGE, it appears that your interests are not aligned with the interests of many others on the site.
I don't want to hear about Trump all day either. I'd rather just hear about tech and science. But what's happening is having a huge impact on tech and science. If it weren't for Musk and DOGE these posts wouldn't even be here, so you can blame them.
> Very happy with the people doing that, keeps the place sane. If you want a dozen daily hysterical takes on the latest thing that Trump&co did, go on r/politics. I have no interest in seeing any of that here.
The fact that you are reading and posting in this thread suggests otherwise, my friend. If you truly had no interest, you wouldn’t read or post in threads about Musk and Trump.
Excellent reporting by Wired. I've been impressed by the depth of their coverage in the past year.
This is outright corruption. These ghouls don't even attempt to hide the conflicts of interest.
Musk is hiring employees from his own company SpaceX, using a backdoor to avoid vetting, to an agency that regulates his own company, to change critical safety systems. After the secretary of that department outright lied about what's happening.
Meanwhile contracts continue to be awarded to SpaceX with no attempt from Musk to recuse himself or separate the conflict of interest.
> By the time these posts were made, though, according to sources who were granted anonymity because they fear retaliation, SpaceX engineers were already being onboarded at the agency under Schedule A, a special authority that allows government managers to “hire persons with disabilities without requiring them to compete for the job,” according to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).
> Excellent reporting by Wired. I've been impressed by the depth of their coverage in the past year.
Depth of reporting is not accuracy, and there may be a bit of illusion here.
For instance, the bit you cite (their reporting on Schedule A) is a great example of lazy reporting for a cheap "gotcha" to amplify ragebait with misinformation -- the Wired reporters either couldn't be bothered to look up the various forms of Schedule A hiring (in this case, Schedule A (r) [0] vs. Schedule A (u) [1]), or they are intentionally mis-reporting in order to add more outrage. Only section U deals with disabilities -- section R deals with temporary hiring.
I think you and I are walking away with very different impressions of the quality of Wired's "depth of coverage".
Is the idea that software experience has been holding the FAA back?
The vague applicable part of the r is this:
professional/industry exchange programs that provide for a cross-fertilization between the agency and the private sector to foster mutual understanding, an exchange of ideas, or to bring experienced practitioners to the agency;
Amazing that rocket application guys are the most valuable experts when dealing with air traffic control.
I noted downvotes of displeasure. Rebuttal would be more informative. Focus on "cost savings" and doing away with "corruption". Bonus points for connecting dot$ between El Doge's various businesses and the MIC.
It is 100% Orwellian doublespeak. It should be a five alarm fire, but cowed media outlets are incapable of calling it out for some reason. Probably because they are terrified of the consequences. Preemptive surrender. Dark times ahead.
Like they care at all about using anything else that gives them more power and control. They will use all the freedom created by the previous generations of Americans to reduce as much freedom for others as they can. Fascists do fascists things.
Under Biden, the FAA was slow walking SpaceX approvals. Now the political wind has reversed, Musk is stretching the limit on what he can get the FAA to do. If the worst that happens is SpaceX gets to crash its rockets faster then no worries. FAA and aviation in general may or may not benefit from any reform due to Musk, but the worst thing is the indication of how Musk is operating in all other areas of government - underhanded techniques to push an agenda to the limit.
His shitcoin was mostly benign -- ok, a pyramid scam, but not damaging to the country. The rest of what he and Musk are doing is real, lasting damage that will take a long time to recover from.
> His shitcoin was mostly benign -- ok, a pyramid scam, but not damaging to the country.
How do you figure? It used to be the President couldn't leverage his office to make money. Now he has multiple legal vectors to solicit a bribe. I say that damages the country greatly. And the fact that the president is literally launching scams -- what message does that say to other scammers?
That coin is not even in the top 10 of the worst things he did recently. My personal "worst of" is (in no particular order):
- siding with Putin and scolding Ukraine for being attacked by Russia (although this follows a tried-and-tested pattern: according to the Nazis, the Poles were also to blame for being invaded in 1939)
- interfering with European politics to support populist/far-right parties like the Reform UK or AfD (who also side with Putin - starting to see a common thread here...)
- and of course the dismantling of USAID, because money spent on helping other countries (especially poor shithole countries and countries who have the nerve to disagree with you) is wasted, right? Why not put it into the woodchipper and spend the money on tax cuts for the rich instead?
It's an intentional strategy. It's a more intense form of the classic Gish galloping technique to just spam the zone with so many actions it's impossible to meaningfully talk about all of them.
With so many saying "the economy" is why they voted for this regime, it's going to be excepionally difficult to convince them to make their own economic prospects worse by striking.
The other issue with a general strike here is that the people backing this up have more money than $deity, and I'm sure that they realize that they have more than a single person could resonably spend in a lifetime. I think that would lead to an acceptable tradeoff of smaller "income" for more power.
I'm afraid a general strike would just be ignored.
Most people won't care until it starts to directly affect them. And I don't mean "this will make air travel less safe and you fly sometimes so this directly affects you," I mean direct, immediate consequences. 90 million eligible voters didn't bother to vote last time around. Another 77 million voted for this. That's two thirds of voters who either don't care or are in favor. And it's not like there was any mystery. Nothing that's happening now should be the least bit surprising.
That is one thing Europeans do well which Americans do not.
Gov workers aren't allowed to strike, and if they did, Trump is the type of person who might just fire them all and leave the government for dead.
There are probably only a few groups who have real striking power and are difficult to replace. ATCs maybe the most. If they all walked out in protest, the government would be in a major pickle. But boy would they be targeted by the MAGA crowd. I can see Elon doxxing them and the striking ATCs getting death threats and worse.
I'm not sure why people think that would change anything. The people in charge are completely insulated to any repercussions and aren't accountable to anyone.
Any Republicans who turn against the regime will be ousted and replaced with bootlickers.
There is no light you can shine on this that makes it look good. None. It's corrupt to the core. You can want a government organization or whatever to be run more efficiently and still find it horrifying when a private actor runs amok in that organization with obvious, blatant conflicts of interest and no oversight.
You are right about one thing: Musk and Trump are the enemy. You may mean that as snark, but it's the truth. This isn't "oh, Musk and Trump are Republicans, so anything they do is bad" -- this is "Musk and Trump are mask-off fascists tearing down government to serve their interests to the detriment of almost everyone else".
This is so much wannabe driving a narrative of your own choosing. If you can’t see the difference from generic hiring of engineers to fix an “ailing” government agency vs doing the same thing being led by the guy that owns the company said engineers are beholden while working for the very agency that directly regulates said company immediately after said owner has gone in and wiped out the employees of the agency so that it is now staffed with yesmen, then you're just not anyone near the same spaceport as reality.
Run on sentences be damned this is such a head in the sand comment you’ve made
"That poor, poor, richest man the world. He's demonstrating that he's above the law every day, but someone on the internet doesn't trust his motives. Hasn't this man been through enough?"
This implies the other engineers were unsuccessful because they worked for government.
The reality is the goalposts are being moved. Congress had set up all sorts of rules and regulations, and, most importantly, pay scales for public servants that are wildly out of alignment with industry.
None of these DOGE employees even list themselves as DOGE on their linkedin (most have removed their last name or profile altogether), it’s unclear if they are still getting paid their industry salaries, and some of them worked for government before working at a Musk company.
Yeah, if Elon hadn't bought in to the election, wasn't responsible for firing a good percentage of the federal workforce especially in areas that effect his companies, and wasn't pulling all this other shit, I'd have no problem with FAA hiring SpaceX engineers to improve their systems.
I mean, yes. Trump has thoroughly demonstrated that he's a colossal piece of shit and incapable of doing anything good unless by total accident. Every action he takes is correctly interpreted through that lens.
> Schedule A, a special authority that allows government managers to “hire persons with disabilities
This is misleading:
Schedule A(u) is for disabilities. Schedule A(r) is for short term appointments with a cap of a few years. I believe they are simply using short term positions.
https://handbook.tts.gsa.gov/hiring-staying-or-changing-jobs...
I believe schedule A refers to a whole set of options to forgoe the standard job posting and interview process, where disability is only one such exemption.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-5/chapter-I/subchapter-B/...
Your link says that A(r) still requires posting the jobs officially, though. It certainly seems like they skipped that. Also, the director lied.
The article implies they lied about having disabilities which is not true.
This carries more weight than failure to post a job properly.
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[flagged]
"FAA spokesperson Steven Kulm told WIRED that "the FAA is overseeing the SpaceX-led mishap investigation." The FAA did not respond to further questions about whether the presence of SpaceX engineers at the agency would constitute a conflict of interest.
In September, the FAA proposed $633,000 in fines following two 2023 incidents in which SpaceX allegedly did not follow its license requirements, violating regulations. Responding to an X user posting about the penalties, Musk wrote, "The fundamental problem is that humanity will forever be confined to Earth unless there is radical reform at the FAA!" Shortly afterward, Musk called for FAA head Mike Whitaker to resign.
In January, more than three years before his term was due to end, Whitaker did resign."
Musk also threatened litigation.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/17/elon-musk-says-spacex-will-s...
Whitaker's replacement has promised to reexamine the SpaceX matter.
https://www.surfrider.org/news/surfrider-sues-faa-to-address...
Funny that people focus on the „Schedule a“ part, when the actual problem is the worst form of regulatory capture this seems to be by the looks: the regulated industry simply taking over the regulator.
Whoever wrote the schedule A line intended to mislead, rather than inform. So I can’t trust that the other material here isn’t misconstrued.
It is. The article full of innuendo seemingly linking personnel reductions at FAA with recent catastrophes. While they don't say it explicitly they write it so that the casual reader would conclude those ate related events. They also call the new employees "not fully vetted" while not specifying which vetting is needed and knowing they are seasoned competent professionals who held multiple positions of trust. Again, creating an impression of impropriety without any substance to back it up.
No conflict of interest here! Move along, folks.
I am all for removing the enormous overhead created at regulatory agencies all over the western world. i do not think that this is the way to do it. if trump was cutting jobs left and right or maybe even slash an agency, fine. but getting in a HNWI to rule over himself is the worst nightmare. this will not end well.
Careful, it may soon be illegal to say this.
> Trump's pick for FBI director, Kash Patel, has vowed to "come after" the media
Yes, it is alarming. May even develop into FBI just forcing private companies to ban speech they don't like! Oh wait tgeycalready did: https://www.newsweek.com/fbi-colluded-twitter-suppress-free-...
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Got to say, I expected Trump take 2 to be bad, but I am quite surprised at how _rapidly_ the US is moving towards the Russian mafia state model, and how quiet the legislature is being about it.
The legislature that spent the last 20 years not legislating and ousting anyone who tried legislating across the aisle with Democrats? They’re mostly feckless cowards serving now. I don’t think they would actually know how to write real legislation that benefited the people and not their lobbied interests.
It’s mostly because most Americans have very little clue of what the end state and the process to get there looks like. A lot of commonalities like borderline legal or gray area business practices are often extolled as virtues here or “clever business hacks”. It takes only a few to apply them in the direction that a lot of folks are simply unfamiliar with without having lived in the Soviet bloc.
They also think they can reverse it easily. "How bad could it be in 4 years?"
6 replies →
The legislature are the henchmen. Why would they be anything but quiet?
The 2016 legislature, esp Senate, was still mostly the "GOP old guard" and wouldn't have put up with this. But they're either gone, or "converted" to avoid Trump's direct retribution (now even more powerful as backed by Musk's reach and dollars), which is no joke.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43101009
Must be an interesting topic!
https://archive.ph/sVJ7m
It really bothers me that there are a bunch of goons who flag every single story about the stuff Trump and Musk are up to. Really makes you realize that a solid chunk of HN or even HN itself aren't on the up and up.
It’s the year 2032, free speech is now only allowed on Twitter. Any speech criticizing Trump is automatically flagged and your personal details used to automatically fire you from your job, executed by the new “efficiency heads” installed into each board of private companies. People are always fired for “efficiency and performance” reasons. The people feel the cold grip around their neck removing their ability to scream. Most people have fallen in line, out of fear of being labeled a terrorist and getting your life ruined.
As I write this with a humorous cautionary intention, I’ve made myself worried by how plausible this scenario sounds.
> Any speech criticizing Trump
You mean any wrong thoughts detected by the DOGE-issued mandatory Neuralink.
Be aware that a large number of comments on these articles are also flagged and not visible.
You can turn on showdead in your profile if you’d like to see them.
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Yeah, pretty shocking. Not sure what intellectual gymnastics you have to do to defend Trump/Musk's actions -- either you've drunk the Kool Aid, are cashing in on the scam, or don't care as you already have yours.
Having said that, one group that are happy with Trump are the crypto bros, because the SEC just dropped its lawsuit against Coinbase as a result of their support for Trump's re-election.
[flagged]
I thought you guys were for free speech
>but I have no hidden agenda
I guess that's true as you openly admit to flagging everything that mentions trump or doge even if it's irrefutably tech related.
OOP said "It really bothers me that there are a bunch of goons who flag every single story about the stuff Trump and Musk are up to" and you took personal offence
Calling you, someone who by their own admission, flags every single article mentioning trump or doge (even things that belong on HN) a "goon" is way too kind on my opinion. You support the censorship of HN-relevant news on HN. It's disgusting.
>one-sided propaganda stories
What about this article was "one-sided propaganda"?
>as evidenced by your insults to half of U.S. voters
When did OOP do this?
I believe your attitude and willingness to try and hide any articles you don't want propagated (ones that irrefutably belong on HN) is vile and malicious and you probably shouldn't be allowed to flag posts anymore.
1 reply →
Very happy with the people doing that, keeps the place sane. If you want a dozen daily hysterical takes on the latest thing that Trump&co did, go on r/politics. I have no interest in seeing any of that here.
Considering that the most upvoted and active posts are related to DOGE, it appears that your interests are not aligned with the interests of many others on the site.
I don't want to hear about Trump all day either. I'd rather just hear about tech and science. But what's happening is having a huge impact on tech and science. If it weren't for Musk and DOGE these posts wouldn't even be here, so you can blame them.
2 replies →
> Very happy with the people doing that, keeps the place sane. If you want a dozen daily hysterical takes on the latest thing that Trump&co did, go on r/politics. I have no interest in seeing any of that here.
The fact that you are reading and posting in this thread suggests otherwise, my friend. If you truly had no interest, you wouldn’t read or post in threads about Musk and Trump.
You realize that you're pushing a narrative just as much? Sticking your fingers in your ears and going "la la la" isn't the "neutral position".
3 replies →
Excellent reporting by Wired. I've been impressed by the depth of their coverage in the past year.
This is outright corruption. These ghouls don't even attempt to hide the conflicts of interest.
Musk is hiring employees from his own company SpaceX, using a backdoor to avoid vetting, to an agency that regulates his own company, to change critical safety systems. After the secretary of that department outright lied about what's happening.
Meanwhile contracts continue to be awarded to SpaceX with no attempt from Musk to recuse himself or separate the conflict of interest.
> By the time these posts were made, though, according to sources who were granted anonymity because they fear retaliation, SpaceX engineers were already being onboarded at the agency under Schedule A, a special authority that allows government managers to “hire persons with disabilities without requiring them to compete for the job,” according to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).
> Excellent reporting by Wired. I've been impressed by the depth of their coverage in the past year.
Depth of reporting is not accuracy, and there may be a bit of illusion here.
For instance, the bit you cite (their reporting on Schedule A) is a great example of lazy reporting for a cheap "gotcha" to amplify ragebait with misinformation -- the Wired reporters either couldn't be bothered to look up the various forms of Schedule A hiring (in this case, Schedule A (r) [0] vs. Schedule A (u) [1]), or they are intentionally mis-reporting in order to add more outrage. Only section U deals with disabilities -- section R deals with temporary hiring.
I think you and I are walking away with very different impressions of the quality of Wired's "depth of coverage".
[0]: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-5/part-213/subject-group-...
[1]: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-5/part-213/subject-group-...
Is the idea that software experience has been holding the FAA back?
The vague applicable part of the r is this:
professional/industry exchange programs that provide for a cross-fertilization between the agency and the private sector to foster mutual understanding, an exchange of ideas, or to bring experienced practitioners to the agency;
Amazing that rocket application guys are the most valuable experts when dealing with air traffic control.
> This is outright corruption
Mars, baby. You ain't seen nothin yet.
I noted downvotes of displeasure. Rebuttal would be more informative. Focus on "cost savings" and doing away with "corruption". Bonus points for connecting dot$ between El Doge's various businesses and the MIC.
> special authority that allows government managers to “hire persons with disabilities
Just to add to the irony, that type of authority is exactly the type of "DEI" practice that Elon/Trump is railing against as "corrupt/Marxist".
Piling on corruption under the guise of rooting out corruption. It's an old trick used by dictators in other countries.
It is 100% Orwellian doublespeak. It should be a five alarm fire, but cowed media outlets are incapable of calling it out for some reason. Probably because they are terrified of the consequences. Preemptive surrender. Dark times ahead.
10 replies →
Like they care at all about using anything else that gives them more power and control. They will use all the freedom created by the previous generations of Americans to reduce as much freedom for others as they can. Fascists do fascists things.
> This is outright corruption. These ghouls don't even attempt to hide the conflicts of interest.
It was better when folks in the FAA tried to hide their conflicts of interest!
Unironically yes. The need to hide them makes it more difficult to have them.
But...but daddy Trump says Elon can totally be trusted to remove himself from any conflicts of interest!
>When questioned about potential conflicts between Musk’s private business interests and his government work, Trump said: "He won’t be involved."
>Musk echoed the sentiment, saying “I’ll recuse myself."
>Trump added that “if there's a conflict, he won't be involved. I mean, I wouldn't want that, and he won't want it."
They've certainly recused themselves from a conflict of intelligence and/or common decency.
Someone noted that determining if something is a conflict of interest for you is in itself a conflict of interest.
Yes, exactly. By definition, you cannot police your own conflicts of interest.
Flagged in the next hour after the cultists wake up.
It took 48 minutes.
And watching anything reasonable takes get downvoted into the grey if they mention any skepticism over anything Elon does.
Under Biden, the FAA was slow walking SpaceX approvals. Now the political wind has reversed, Musk is stretching the limit on what he can get the FAA to do. If the worst that happens is SpaceX gets to crash its rockets faster then no worries. FAA and aviation in general may or may not benefit from any reform due to Musk, but the worst thing is the indication of how Musk is operating in all other areas of government - underhanded techniques to push an agenda to the limit.
> Under Biden, the FAA was slow walking SpaceX approvals.
Source?
Lacking a whistleblower this kind of thing is impossible to prove, but is obvious from the public conflict.
2 replies →
Trump launched his shitcoin 1 month ago, and it's already a distant memory.
His shitcoin was mostly benign -- ok, a pyramid scam, but not damaging to the country. The rest of what he and Musk are doing is real, lasting damage that will take a long time to recover from.
> His shitcoin was mostly benign -- ok, a pyramid scam, but not damaging to the country.
How do you figure? It used to be the President couldn't leverage his office to make money. Now he has multiple legal vectors to solicit a bribe. I say that damages the country greatly. And the fact that the president is literally launching scams -- what message does that say to other scammers?
1 reply →
That coin is not even in the top 10 of the worst things he did recently. My personal "worst of" is (in no particular order):
- siding with Putin and scolding Ukraine for being attacked by Russia (although this follows a tried-and-tested pattern: according to the Nazis, the Poles were also to blame for being invaded in 1939)
- interfering with European politics to support populist/far-right parties like the Reform UK or AfD (who also side with Putin - starting to see a common thread here...)
- and of course the dismantling of USAID, because money spent on helping other countries (especially poor shithole countries and countries who have the nerve to disagree with you) is wasted, right? Why not put it into the woodchipper and spend the money on tax cuts for the rich instead?
One assumes that Putin has gotten the ol' piss tape out of storage.
6 replies →
"Firehose of bullshit" at an unprecedented scale, that's what this is.
It's an intentional strategy. It's a more intense form of the classic Gish galloping technique to just spam the zone with so many actions it's impossible to meaningfully talk about all of them.
When do we start the general strike?
Because that is what is going to take to stop this corruption, which otherwise will be endless.
With so many saying "the economy" is why they voted for this regime, it's going to be excepionally difficult to convince them to make their own economic prospects worse by striking.
The other issue with a general strike here is that the people backing this up have more money than $deity, and I'm sure that they realize that they have more than a single person could resonably spend in a lifetime. I think that would lead to an acceptable tradeoff of smaller "income" for more power.
I'm afraid a general strike would just be ignored.
Most people won't care until it starts to directly affect them. And I don't mean "this will make air travel less safe and you fly sometimes so this directly affects you," I mean direct, immediate consequences. 90 million eligible voters didn't bother to vote last time around. Another 77 million voted for this. That's two thirds of voters who either don't care or are in favor. And it's not like there was any mystery. Nothing that's happening now should be the least bit surprising.
1 reply →
Has the US ever done a general strike?
2 replies →
Many people have so many of their own problems, debt, whatever, that it takes a lot more than this to get them out of their homes and on the streets.
That is one thing Europeans do well which Americans do not.
Gov workers aren't allowed to strike, and if they did, Trump is the type of person who might just fire them all and leave the government for dead.
There are probably only a few groups who have real striking power and are difficult to replace. ATCs maybe the most. If they all walked out in protest, the government would be in a major pickle. But boy would they be targeted by the MAGA crowd. I can see Elon doxxing them and the striking ATCs getting death threats and worse.
I'm not sure why people think that would change anything. The people in charge are completely insulated to any repercussions and aren't accountable to anyone.
Any Republicans who turn against the regime will be ousted and replaced with bootlickers.
I don't think they would be insulated from a general strike.
5 replies →
Worse than that, Republican elected officials are scared of violent retaliation by Trump's mob of goons for disloyalty.
Newer, different boot-lickers.
[dead]
The flagging gets out of control on HN these days.
@dang can we start flagging some flagging ?
The flags are a function of the repetition. We turn off flags sometimes but we can't do it too much or the frontpage would be only about this.
I've been posting a lot about this—ironically I suppose, since the moderation comments are even more repetitive. Here are some recent posts:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011
If you (or anyone) will take a look at those, then if you still have a question that isn't answered there, let me know and I'll take a crack at it.
Vouching should be something for flagged as well
Make flagger usernames public.
[flagged]
[flagged]
Is there a good light under which to view this? It's corrupt. Isn't that far worse than whatever benefit you presume "HN" would be cheering?
You can be ok with the “what” and disagree with the “how” and the “why”.
There is no light you can shine on this that makes it look good. None. It's corrupt to the core. You can want a government organization or whatever to be run more efficiently and still find it horrifying when a private actor runs amok in that organization with obvious, blatant conflicts of interest and no oversight.
You are right about one thing: Musk and Trump are the enemy. You may mean that as snark, but it's the truth. This isn't "oh, Musk and Trump are Republicans, so anything they do is bad" -- this is "Musk and Trump are mask-off fascists tearing down government to serve their interests to the detriment of almost everyone else".
This is so much wannabe driving a narrative of your own choosing. If you can’t see the difference from generic hiring of engineers to fix an “ailing” government agency vs doing the same thing being led by the guy that owns the company said engineers are beholden while working for the very agency that directly regulates said company immediately after said owner has gone in and wiped out the employees of the agency so that it is now staffed with yesmen, then you're just not anyone near the same spaceport as reality.
Run on sentences be damned this is such a head in the sand comment you’ve made
Your pearl-clutching is a bit overwrought here.
"That poor, poor, richest man the world. He's demonstrating that he's above the law every day, but someone on the internet doesn't trust his motives. Hasn't this man been through enough?"
This implies the other engineers were unsuccessful because they worked for government.
The reality is the goalposts are being moved. Congress had set up all sorts of rules and regulations, and, most importantly, pay scales for public servants that are wildly out of alignment with industry.
None of these DOGE employees even list themselves as DOGE on their linkedin (most have removed their last name or profile altogether), it’s unclear if they are still getting paid their industry salaries, and some of them worked for government before working at a Musk company.
Yeah, if Elon hadn't bought in to the election, wasn't responsible for firing a good percentage of the federal workforce especially in areas that effect his companies, and wasn't pulling all this other shit, I'd have no problem with FAA hiring SpaceX engineers to improve their systems.
I mean, yes. Trump has thoroughly demonstrated that he's a colossal piece of shit and incapable of doing anything good unless by total accident. Every action he takes is correctly interpreted through that lens.
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