I wonder if those words immediately after the ones you underlined mean anything.
The Lumumba era is coming to a close
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How are you forming your opinion? Foxnews? I’ll ask you what L4 did…..do you know any controllers or anything about the industry?
I addressed social programs and you started in on social security and we are now on the USPS? And the goalposts are in place?
I’ll make it a very simple single question. If you got 7% of your federal tax dollars back with a mandate that it go to directly to a private program help put food in as many poor mouths, in the US, as possible, where are you spending it?
It doesn’t surprise me that you don’t get it.
USPS is part of that 93% that you are certain is perfectly fine.
there is plenty of money in that 93% that is wasted.
as far as the 7%? It would depend on the private program and its reputation. I’d have to research that but they exist.
or here’s a thought? Maybe I could just take my $2000 and give it directly to people that are hungry in my community?
I don’t have to know any controllers to read. Including multiple sources outside of Fox News but BRAIN ROT!
Got it. Carry on. MaHgUh MaYuN, wE gOnE fAhR sOmE mUh FuGgAhS aNd CuT mUh SpEnDiNg MaNe!!!!111 Do we know anything about the people or the spending? HaYuL yAyUh MaYuN fUgGeM!!11
How are you forming your opinions? You're just assuming it didn't happen for some reason with no basis. Any time information is provided to you, you just ignore it. And while I have worked with airports, that is not any real credential any more than L4 claiming to be in the medical field is. He's wrong about almost everything in the field he claims to be in and you think him claiming to know an air traffic controller (who by the way, don't set policy on hiring at the FAA; it's like claiming to know about OSHA policies because you know a factory worker) is going to give him better insight?
But I am basing my opinion on the fact that the FAA implemented a biographical questionnaire that was not validated at the same time that they threw out thousands of test results on a test that was validated. They are the choke point for flight training spots. They can take up to ~1,800 a year. But they don't take qualified applicants until they run out. They authorize a number of people to be admitted to training based on budgetary factors and projected hiring needs ~three years out, trying to account for the fact that as much as 50% will wash out before completing the class room work and field training.
FAA at one point had a wait list of thousands of applicants from CTI programs because they practically stopped admissions into the training program during sequestration, and right when they had this huge pipeline of people that had a higher chance of completing classroom and field training without washing out than people without prior training (granted, not much higher, but higher) and needed to catch up on hiring both to make up for sequestration years and to account for the fact that they had a disproportionate number of controllers nearing retirement, they threw out those applicants scores and gave CTI training zero weight in the hiring process. They wouldn't even let those applicants retake the AS-SAT tests unless they passed the biographical questionnaire.
Based on prior performance utilizing the AS-SAT and CTI applicants, they would have had slightly higher completion rates from admitted trainees had they not ignored those in favor of the biographical questionnaire. Not enough to make up for them just admitting too few people compared to projected needs, but it would have been slightly better.
So again, why are you just assuming that the FAA was lying about using the biographical questionnaire? Why is it an article of faith that the FAA wouldn't discriminate based on race? It's just a bizarre thing to latch onto to anybody that has been in the world for the past couple of decades. Unfortunately, it has just not been uncommon for well meaning efforts to grow the pipeline of minority candidates to turn into prohibited racial discrimination when the pipeline doesn't produce the hiring results that some people want.
All you are doing is quoting that ridiculous lawsuit. The only thing that's true is that they required that assessment, but it did not result in controllers not getting hired, who were qualified. You're listening to a small group of angry idiots, and obviously considering the politics right now, it plays well.
It's sheer stupidity.
Again, where are you getting your religious zeal for ignoring all information on this? Certainly some information comes from the lawsuit. Here is a letter from the lawsuit that noboby has claimed is fabricated to my knowledge. But your position is that just because it was included in a lawsuit it has zero validity. That's nuts. Lawyers can take a lot of license with allegations in a complaint, but submitting fabricated documents to the courts is still a no-no that the vast majority of lawyers are going to be unwilling to do.
There are FAA produced articles from 2006 that explicitly talk about reweighting the AS-SAT to improve the number of minorities that pass. Not because they had evidence that the AS-SAT was underpredicting minorities success in training. They just looked at the numbers and decided they wanted it to be different. https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/f...earch/med_humanfacs/oamtechreports/200616.pdf
But that isn't evidence of anything to you because you have just bizarrely made it an article of faith that the FAA wouldn't discriminate on race.
The FAA claimed that they stopped using the biographical questionnaire as a screening test. A screening test would be something used to screen out applicants. But you are sure that they didn't use it as a screening test. https://www.faa.gov/faq/faa-getting-rid-air-traffic-skills-biographical-assessment
Here's a story allegedly from 2014 about the change with a quote from a Democratic Senator talking about how many CTI graduates are failing the biographical questionnaire. Granted, a weird source just randomly on a website, but it corroborates others, particularly with the interest from Senator Murray. Such as here. https://www.timesonline.com/story/news/local/2014/05/19/faa-changes-impair-flight-tower/18479971007/ But I'm sure your well reasoned religious tenet is correct that it was all made up and nobody was being screened out based on the biographical questionnaire. After all, there was a lawsuit filed over it, so it must be completely made up. If it had actually happened, there wouldn't be a lawsuit. That's your reasoning, correct?
I know I can't reason you out of a position you didn't reason into, but I will try this one last argument. L4 is 100% certain of a position and you are taking that same position. Doesn't that trigger any warning bells for you? Hasn't he pretty well established that the more certain he is of his position, the more likely it is that he is wrong? If I ever find myself agreeing with something he has posted, I immediately have to go back to my priors and examine them and examine everything I think I know about the position I am agreeing with.
ETA: Another random source from 2014: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3608176#post425564987
Obviously faked by the plaintiff's lawyers, including the date stamp, and not evidence that the FAA was really tellikng people they had to pass the biographical assessment.
ETA 2: This is a cool deep fake of senator murray purportedly from when they changed talking about complaints about CTI grads failing the biographical assessment. Pretty cool how far AI has come and that the plaintiffs lawyers were able to plant this. That's definitely what happened because obviously the FAA wasn't using the biographical assessment as a screening tool like they said they were. https://news.grabien.com/story/duri...en-patty-murray-voiced-concerns-about-lowerin
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You either don't read, don't comprehend, or you are so sucked into culture wars that you are just clamoring to figure out what "gotcha" point you can make on something that was not politically oriented at all. Our federal expenditures have been as they are for basically ever.
So you are going to spend the time to vet people in your community who are hungry, decide who really needs help, and then divvy your $2000 among them? Assuming you don't give it all at once, you are set to hand out ~$5.50/day in food help. If your community is tiny, and you only have 1 qualified person, they may survive. Here are some issues that should be considered:
- Overhead - in my example above, and via your assertion, you will do all the vetting to make sure that the charity doesn't waste a dime, or you will directly vet and fund people individually yourself, effectively donating your time to build and execute the vetting process. That's going to be costly in time.
- Vetting organizations: you probably want to look for someone who has been audited against ECFA standards to be sure that they aren't just pocketing money or being wasteful. That audit itself will cost that organization at least $12k annually to be audited. That goes into overhead along with whatever other things that they have to support.
- Other organizations: you might love organization A, but your neighbor might support organization B. Well, that's two organizations that have to have whatever overhead is associated with them delivering their services, but I bet that there will also be organizations C - Z that other will choose. that's an overhead multiplier and while any single organization might not be wasteful, collectively, having 26 organizations increases the overhead/waste.
- Forget about your area: multiply the overhead above by whatever sub-entity you like (city/county/state/congressional district/etc.) and all of a sudden there are a lot of organizations competing to provide services and incurring overhead losses to do so. Each one of these is likely to overlap with others, or have gaps in coverage where nobody is helping.
- What about cheaters? I think we need a common database to register the needy so that they can't just grift from one organization to the next, otherwise, we will multiply waste. That's going to be costly to initiate, maintain and will likely require some subscription from supporting organizations to make it feasible. Since our goal here is 100% efficiency, we have to have this. Nothing makes people angrier than seeing their money go to help people who don't need it.
One thing that I am sure of is that I need to be supportive of those who are less fortunate...
Proverbs 22:2 The rich and the poor meet together; the Lord is the Maker of them all.
Proverbs 21:13 Whoever closes his ear to the cry of the poor will himself call out and not be answered.
Deuteronomy 15:11 For there will never cease to be poor in the land. Therefore I command you, ‘You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor, in your land.’
Dude, it was just a screen-out for EVERYBODY, not to discriminate. Like many other things. Stop twisting words.
You are using all these things that don't really make any point, to make your point. You are dug in on the wrong problem - DEI. DEI may be a problem, but it's not the problem here. The problem is the shortage.....same as with pilots.
Maybe this administration can figure out how to modernize ATC (whatever that means, because they don't even know and haven't offered solutions) and also get us some pilotless planes. That would solve the big problem. Then they can continue to vomit DEI on the rabble rabble masses.
If there were an abundance of controllers and pilots.....and folks were truly getting left out for minorities, then you'd have an issue. But that is simply not happening, it's just not logical. To believe this notion takes black helicopter conspiracy level paranoia that truly shocks me.
I am not aware of any Federal Government hosted RFI/RFP to take over mail delivery services. A quick google search didnt provide info either.
FedEx did hold a contract with USPS to fly mail, and it looks like that recently went to UPS.
I would be interested to see what this bid entailed though.
It would be interesting to read their detailed plan for how to charge less money while providing the same breadth and depth of delivery as USPS, also keeping prices the same, and also honoring the contracts/agreements that USPS is forced to accept.
Oh, so now you are admitting that it was used to screen people out and not just to add minority applicants. Halfway there. So let's take a baby step. Was the biographical test they used validated? Was the AS-SAT they threw out validated? If you answer those two questions, then the next question is why did they move to a biographical assessment that was not validated?
I'm dug in? You have just kept repeating that something that obviously happened didn't happen and are unwilling to consider any of the evidence. And yes, the shortage is the problem. But the shortage is worse because they were focused on discriminating rather than maximizing the number of people that made it through training once they were admitted. Not hugely worse. There is a high washout rate no matter and the difference wouldn't make up for the fact that they just didn't admit enough trainees to keep up with hiring needs. That's why I said part of the problem, not the problem. Unlike you, I don't have any religious zeal for this issue. I don't like discrimination based on race, but I don't know that it's gotten anybody killed or anything in this instance. It was an unnecessary risk besides being morally wrong.
Holy ****. You are just blindly ignoring that the the FAA is the chokehold of air traffic controllers. They have added some options, but for all the relevant time in question, they decided the maximum number of ATCs that could be produced. And they didn't set the number for admissions after looking at applicants. They set the number for admissions and then took that many applicants. So you are the one that has some magical theory that is shocking to see you dig in on. There were people that were more qualified based on validated tests and they were disqualified based on an assessment that was not validated for anything other than shifting the racial demographics of the applicants considered for admission. Again, not going to fix the problem generated by them just letting too few people in, but as a logical matter it did result in some fewer controllers.
Yeah, I get that he is saying its a combination of losing money AND bad service.
Thing is, 'bad service' is a nebulous term. People hate UPS and rant about their bad service. People hate FedEx and rant about their bad service. The internet is littered with decades of people ranting about how bad service is from UPS, USPS, and FedEx.
I removed the service part because it is subjective and also because I dont think for one second that if service improved and USPS was still 'losing' billions, that Pain would suddenly be OK with it.
The image below shows 8 years of satisfaction survey results from an ACSI survey for FedEx, UPS, and USPS.
USPS is 5 points lower than the other two.
- USPS does similar but different things than the other two.
- USPS is forced by laws to handle things the other two dont have to handle.
Knowing that, I strongly doubt UPS or FedEx would be viewed as highly if they were doing everything USPS does at the prices USPS has to charge.
And again, I strongly doubt that if USPS had the same satisfaction average as UPS or FedEx but was still 'losing' the amounts they have 'lost' each year, that Pain would be like 'yeah, I have no issue with USPS losing billions every year'.
I don't know. I think it very much depends on where you are. We have locations that we no longer send mail to and direct customers to not send mail or payments to. Just too high a likelihood that it won't make it and we can't get any movement. When mail does make it, we will randomly get a huge amount of mail from a period covering like two months. As best we can tell, it's not a capacity issue. They just have workers that will ignore their job for weeks at a time. I've never seen anything like that with FedEx or UPS. Certainly have had things get 17ed up, but I've never come across anything where it's just like, you can't use them for that area.
That said, the problem with the Post Office is not just the normal incentive issues that government entities have. It's also congress actively interfering. Lots of things that would obviously make the USPS more efficient they can't do because of Congress. There are areas that should probably only get mail a few days a week. You could probably cut your delivery drivers almost in half by moving to a Monday, Wednesday, Friday service for half the houses and Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday for the others. Hell, maybe no residential areas should get mail more than 3 days a week and businesses should be able pay more to get mail every day. Or just require that people come to a PO Box/Drawer if they want mail every day. There are post offices the USPS know need to be shut down because they are not justifiable and Congressmen get involved and stop it. When they try to do things to make delivery cheaper, like require mailboxes be at the street instead of doors, if they stop delivering mail to people without mailboxes on the street, they get political blowback. Same thing when they try to require that new neighborhoods to a centralized mail drop rather than individual mail boxes.
I stopped right here
In 2022 the government spends 61 times per person what it did in 1901 (adjusted for inflation)
let that sink in.
| Year | Spend | Adj Inflation | Population | Spend/person |
| 1901 | 525000000 | 17908198717 | 77584000 | $230.82 |
| 1950 | 42038000000 | 343381178164 | 152271417 | $2,255.06 |
| 1970 | 168042000000 | 765916815390 | 205052174 | $3,735.23 |
| 2000 | 1458185000000 | 2770258985164 | 281421906 | $9,843.79 |
| 2022 | 4763683000000 | 4763683000000 | 333287557 | $14,293 |
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Virtually zero. The airport belongs to the city. You can’t just confiscate it from them. This will go nowhere on the courts. But some lawyers have made a fortune on it.
Yeah. This is the only way it could happen. A negotiated settlement with Jackson getting a big check in exchange for giving up partial control of the airport.
The state could have a bigger, new airport built somewhere else if they wanted, and let's be honest, they should.
Not without a LOT of Federal money & FAA approval they can’t. They wouldn’t get even a sniff at either one even if they tried.
what should happen is a negotiated settlement with Jackson receiving compensation in exchange for giving up 3 of the 5 board seats.
I just want to insert this here as an example of how insane the former administration's policies were in relation to - well, everything - but in this particular case, transit. How the F*CK would it make sense to anyone that the Department of Transportation’s priorities should be “equity, accessibility, and climate change"? That's what the administrator of the FTA says in this video. But hey, we finally got the first Afro-Latina in that position, so no need to worry about safety, right?
As a bonus, Secretary Pete also says "Transit is not just about getting from A to B, it's about reaching jobs, education, health care, and so much more." No mention of "safety" or "efficiency" or anything real. To him and all of them, this job and the whole government is just a vehicle to funnel money into the "right" communities, whichever ones they decide are "right". This is a microcosm of how they feel about the government's role in general, which relates to the discussion about ATC, DEI, and the lawsuit.
Most of the beginning is just fluff, but start watching about 2:44 in for her quote. It's less than a minute and amazing if you listen to what she's saying.
Goat, I know Trump is a meanie, but you can't possibly be defending these policies.
FTA should be about equity and climate change?
As a bonus, Secretary Pete also says "Transit is not just about getting from A to B, it's about reaching jobs, education, health care, and so much more." No mention of "safety" or "efficiency" or anything real. To him and all of them, this job and the whole government is just a vehicle to funnel money into the "right" communities, whichever ones they decide are "right". This is a microcosm of how they feel about the government's role in general, which relates to the discussion about ATC, DEI, and the lawsuit.
Most of the beginning is just fluff, but start watching about 2:44 in for her quote. It's less than a minute and amazing if you listen to what she's saying.
Goat, I know Trump is a meanie, but you can't possibly be defending these policies.
FTA should be about equity and climate change?
Where would you suggest doing that? You could do south of Jackson and maybe get more of the Hattiesburg traffic instead of them going to MSY or GPT. But I don't know that lack of space is really a problem for JAN. It's just not a busy enough airport. I'm not even sure how much poor management has hurt it. Certainly could be better I'm sure but at the end of the day, I don't know that any airport around Jackson is going to have enough traffic for the foreseeable future that would make JAN too small.
I don't care where, we need a bigger, better airport. Most people I know don't use Jackson unless they have to. I see more using New Orleans than anywhere. If Jackson isn't going to do **** with the piddling little airport, the state should do something.
Most of the time I'm using MSY, it's because of pricing or a more direct flight out west. Not sure that would be cured by a new airport somewhere else in the state because it's all still east of the river.
Offer more, and more people will utilize it. It's someone's job to improve this damn state and that Jackson airport and nobody seems to want to do it. I'm not talking JFK here, just get the pricing and flight destinations better and upgrade the damn airport.
Hey I'm all for it. Especially if we can get better flights to Dallas, Vegas and Scottsdale.
I mean, I don't disagree that it'd be good to have a better airport, but I don't think the problem is the size of the airport. It's the number of routes available and the cost. Been a while since I've flown out of or into JAN, but from what I remember it was mostly empty and there was a long time between flights at each gate. So if Jackson started booming, I think they could add a good number of flights without having to expand capacity. If they actually were booming so much that they needed more runways and gates, I think they might could expand JAN. Not sure though. Looks to be undeveloped land around it, but probably would still have to buy out some people to create more buffer and then it may still all be wetlands that are not economic to mitigate.
If I'm wrong about how busy JAN is and they actually have demand for flights they can't add, then maybe putting one south would work. If you put it in Magee, that would suddenly be an airport that would be the closest option for Madison, Jackson, Hattiesburg, Meridian, and Laurel. You'd lose more delta people to Memphis but I'm not sure how many you are capturing there anyway. Still, that would be a hugely expensive project. The time for something like that was probably when we have the chair of the appropriations committee and senate majority leader. Plus you'd now have a state capital without a commercial airport within 50 minutes and you'd have a lot of vested interests that would be pissed about losing JAN and presumably losing what little commercial traffic you have at Hattiesburg/Laurel.
I used to fly a crap ton from 2010-2020 and I've never once flown out of or into Jackson, because it sucks! Gulfport is better to be honest.
It's hilarious how on brand this is for you. I cited the FAA itself, I cited quotes from a Democratic Senator, I cited news stories from 2014 and linked to video of a democratic senator, all affirming that the biographical assessment was used as a screening tool and actually eliminated candidates. And I attached a letter from an official at the ATO that was also attached as an exhibit to a complaint. The one thing I did not do was quote from a lawsuit. But you're so mentally fragile and unable to risk facing that you are wrong, your mind convinces itself that I quoted from a lawsuit and nothing else so that you can avoid having to confront that you are wrong (again).
He isn't defending anything, and neither am I. We are just pointing out that this has absolutely nothing to do with the shortage of controllers.
No, I didn't admit that. I knew you would clue in on that, though, so what's the point here. You're too eaten up with this extreme MAGA talking point that you can't see logic. I'm not changing your mind.
Man, you really don't get it. You're talking about a 2-time Trump voter here. You have to stop with these shock press clippings. I'll just tell you one thing.....if you think Republicans are better than Democrats about infrastructure, you've lost your mind.
LOL. Do you know any controllers? They weren't turning ANYBODY who was qualified down. They were and are shorthanded. Why is that so hard to understand? DEI is horrible, but that ain't why we have a shortage of controllers. There just aren't enough qualified people applying. It's not a great job to work.
The FAA is MAGA? Patty Murray is MAGA? All those people were MAGA in 2014? I don’t even remember MAGA being a thing then. Damn Donald Trumpnis good. I didn’t realize he had that much influence a year before he officially announced his candidacy.