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This is a fascinating read, but the thing that bugs me about this whole affair is that when this came to light many years ago it was treated as a cheating and r

This is a fascinating read, but the thing that bugs me about this whole affair is that when this came to light many years ago it was treated as a cheating and recruitment scandal. But only recently has it been reframed as a DEI issue. 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.

s3r3nity 2y ago
The cheating element is only _part_ of it, and the dominant regime at the time downplayed / ignored the DEI elements because that was supported by their ideology...like a sacred cow. Litigating "disparate impact" cases across any category became a successful attack vector against capitalist structures, and supported by Democratic leadership. This isn't "slapping a new coat of paint for propaganda," but rather exposing the rest of the iceberg that was otherwise concealed. Both pieces are relevant.
- perching_aix 2y ago
  > This isn't "slapping a new coat of paint for propaganda," but rather exposing the rest of the iceberg that was otherwise concealed. Our Blessed Homeland vs. Their Barbarous Wastes
  - s3r3nity 2y ago
    Their Blessed Homeland vs. Our Barbarous Wastes
    - perching_aix 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - Gud 2y ago
        What’s up with the hostility? You doing ok?
        perching_aix 2y ago
        Thanks for asking, I think I do, yes. I'm not sure what you find particularly hostile about it - they edited out what they originally had to say, but even then, I'm not saying anything extraordinary. Telling people they're acting childish and are not bringing anything to the table argumentation wise I think is pretty low on the hostility scale. The irony of being called out as hostile after confronting someone that they're just asserting their opinions is definitely not lost on me. What a thread...
      - s3r3nity 2y ago
        It’s more of a “yes, and…” comment. Namely, both are relevant, but previously only one side was highlighted.
        perching_aix 2y ago
        Neither are "relevant" in my opinion, not yours, not theirs. Both are inflammatory, subjective characterizations from different ends of the horseshoe. These are never productive or insightful, and that's why I brought up "Their Blessed Homeland vs. Our Barbarous Wastes".
- legitster 2y ago
  > and the dominant regime at the time downplayed / ignored the DEI elements because that was supported by their ideology In the eye of the beholder. The current regime is upplaying the DEI elements because of their ideology. The difference though is, unless everyone involved has a time machine, using current cultural agenda items and going back in time and attributing them to people is always going to be wild speculation.
  - SR2Z 2y ago
    > using current cultural agenda items and going back in time and attributing them to people is always going to be wild speculation. I'm as blue as they come, but let's not mince words. This was a racial equity policy. Like a lot of them, it was designed by idiots and/or racists. Much like the elite college admissions lawsuit, we don't need to guess at people's ideology - they WROTE DOWN that the cognitive test "disadvantaged" black applicants and so a biographical questionnaire was needed to re-advantage them. When Trump opened his mouth to blame DEI for the crash, about 95% of what he said was hateful, totally-made-up bullshit. Despite that and speaking practically, DEI had a significant role to play in the ATC understaffing during the crash. I really wish that our party was better at calling out crazy people within our ranks, ESPECIALLY when they do stuff that's guaranteed to alienate a solid chunk of the country just based on if "their worst subject in school was science" or whatever other deranged, racist proxy for race they come up with.
    - legitster 2y ago
      The difference between this and the college scandal is that there were limited numbers of seats at colleges, so to putting in an underqualified white student meant you had to pull an overqualified Asian student. The situation here was the ATC was chronically understaffed and unable to fill positions. So an effort for them to boost applications makes sense even under non-DEI principles.
      - jtbayly 2y ago
        If they wanted more applicants, then they shouldn’t have been disqualifying good applicants on the basis of their biography.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  If I had to blame anything on the Democrats it is this: Valuing competence is one thing. Valuing diversity is another thing. You can have neither, either one, or both. The democrats make a conspicuous show of not valuing competence in addition to making some noises about diversity. Nobody said Barack Obama was an affirmative action case, no, he was one of the greatest politicians of the first quarter-century. On the other hand I feel that many left-leaning politicians make conspicuous displays of incompetence, I'd particularly call out Karen Bass, who would fall for whatever Scientology was selling and then make excuses for it. I think they want donors to know that whatever they are they aren't capable, smart and ambitious like Ralph Nader but rather they don't connect the dots between serving donors and what effect it has on their constituents. When Bass was running for mayor of L.A. in a contested election for which she had to serve the whole community she went through a stunning transformation and really seemed to "get it", all the duckspeak aimed at reconciling a lefty constituency and rightist donors went away. Nowhere is this disregard for competence more conspicuous in the elections where a senile or disabled white man is running against a lunatic. Fetterman beat Oz (they said, it's nothing, he just has aphasia, except his job is to speak for Pennsylvania) but they held on to Biden until the last minute against Trump and his replacement lost. Democrats need to make it clear that you can have both, but shows of competence increase the conflict between being a party that is a favorite of donors and being a party that has mass appeal. Being just a little sheepish and stupid is the easy way to reconcile those but we see how that went in 2024.
  - techapple 2y ago
    I would more likely say that the qualities that make one popular or wanting to deal with the bullshit of managing Americans disputes are in opposition to the qualities that make one qualified. See: almost every politician that’s not a Democrat. Incompetence is staggeringly bipartisan.
  - xcrunner529 2y ago
    But you also have MTG who literally believes “they” control the weather so I’m not sure exactly why you single democrats out here or even the it to any kind of ideology specific consequence.
BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
From an external (not US) PoV, it might also be that DEI was too much of a sacred cow before to call a spade a spade.
- legitster 2y ago
  Maybe! But in this case, the bulk of the mistakes by the FAA happened in the 2012-2014. In the middle of the Obama administration, but well before the bulk of the really controversial post-BLM DEI stuff that the current administration is largely attacking.
  - Covzire 2y ago
    It's all connected, DEI(B) is just the latest revision of the beast.
  - aikinai 2y ago
    DEI quotas have been around for decades. We just used to call it affirmative action and it was far less aggressive and blatant.
    - SR2Z 2y ago
      It was MORE blatant and transparent, which IMO is the bare minimum for government-sanctioned racism. If we are going to do AA, we owe it to EVERYONE to make it clear exactly how and when we will do it. Sneaking it in disingenuously will rightfully piss people off.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - cyberax 2y ago
      Affirmative action is strictly _better_ than some of the DEI nonsense. With affirmative action, you just reserve a bunch of positions for minorities, and then give them out based on merit. With most of DEI, you either tweak the criteria to make job positions easier to get for minorities, or you lower your standards.
deleted 2y ago
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andsoitis 2y ago
> then selling it as a new scandal is already a popular MO for state-sponsored propoganda, I don't know that it is limited to, or even most prevalent, in state-sponsored propaganda. Private individuals, media, etc. do this too without any state sponsorship.
- legitster 2y ago
  Sure, I wasn't even insinuating that this was state-sponsored, just highlighting that it's known to be a super effective way to manipulate stories.
  - andsoitis 2y ago
    > I wasn't even insinuating that this was state-sponsored, just highlighting that it's known to be a super effective way to manipulate stories And yet, although this is a fact, the choice and the phrasing paints a particular story.
Manuel_D 2y ago
> Taking old, resolved scandals The lawsuit is still ongoing. The scandal has not yet resolved.
- legitster 2y ago
  No, but the problematic assessment in question was eliminated by congress in 2016. That would not explain the FAA's current recruitment problems.
  - stackskipton 2y ago
    ATC training and dropout rate is so long and high, that mistakes made 8-9 years ago could still be impactful.
    - clutchdude 2y ago
      COVID would likely have a bigger hand in the current issues than mistakes from 10-15 years ago though. I found it somewhat puzzling we discuss ATC staffing and don't mention it: https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/air-transport/2024-05-01/paving-way-controller-ramp https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/air-transport/2024-0... > 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.
      - stackskipton 2y ago
        Yep, COVID didn't help either. However, I'll note that hiring != actual ATC controllers because drop/fail rate which for some insane reason is so hard to find.
bz_bz_bz 2y ago
The Brigida lawsuit, from which we get a lot of the documents in the article, was filed in 2016 and has framed this as a DEI discrimination issue from the get-go.
- legitster 2y ago
  With a grain of salt - any hiring lawsuit by its nature is going to be a discrimination case. The fact that everyone is really quick to just throw around DEI = discrimination is kind of my point. Even the text of the Brigida lawsuit clearly points out that nobody would have a problem with the FAA increasing minority representation in other ways.
  - oremolten 2y ago
    Could you please elaborate how DEI is not discrimination? Is hiring based on someone's RACE ever not discrimination?
    - dingnuts 2y ago
      if this question is in good faith, you can read about this ideology by looking up Robin DiAngelo or Ibram X Kendi, who are experts on the pro-DEI academic theory that answers your question. It seems that the American voter disagrees with Kendi et al > The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination. As President Lyndon B. Johnson said in 1965, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun wrote in 1978, “In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently. - Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist
      - armitron 2y ago
hitekker 2y ago
That's a misreading of the article. This scandal was not just "cheating and recruitment" but forcing "Diversity" with a side of "Equity". To quote the facts: > The NBCFAE continued to pressure the FAA to diversify, with its members meeting with the DOT, FAA, Congressional Black Caucus, and others to push for increased diversity among ATCs. After years of fiddling with the research and years of pressure from the NBCFAE, the FAA landed on a strategy: by using a multistage process starting with non-cognitive factors, they could strike “an acceptable balance between minority hiring and expected performance”—a process they said would carry a “relatively small” performance loss. They openly discussed this tension in meetings, pointing to “a trade-off between diversity (adverse impact) and predicted job performance/outcomes,” asking, “How much of a change in job performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?” This was DEI before it was called DEI. The label changed, the spirit did not. That spirit, of sublimated racial grievance, metastasized everywhere in our society. It went from quiet, to blatant, and now to a memory hole.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  I don't think I even know what "DEI" is anymore. Political pundits have turned it into a generic slur, a boogeyman that vaguely means "I have to work with minorities now??" I've always thought it simply meant "drawing from the widest possible candidate funnel, including instead of excluding people who have traditionally been shut out." At least that's how all of my training sessions at work frame it. But, like everything, the term has become politically charged, and everyone now wants to overload it to mean all sorts of things they simply don't like.
  - deleted 2y ago
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    - deleted 2y ago
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  - Galatians4_16 2y ago
    DEI: Diversity Equity Inclusion Diversity of race (encouraging racism), equity of income (encouraging envy), inclusion of "the marginalized" (discouraging free association) Except, as a government program, this turns from mere encouragement to forcing the issues, under threat of fines, imprisonment, and ultimately death. In the words of famous actor Morgan Freeman; "If you want to end racism, stop talking about it." (1) 1) https://atlantablackstar.com/2024/06/16/morgan-freeman-doubles-down-hates-black-history-month/ https://atlantablackstar.com/2024/06/16/morgan-freeman-doubl...
some_random 2y ago
Framed as a cheating and recruiting scandal by who? Is it truly resolved if the racial discrimination element was never addressed?
- sneedle 2y ago
  [flagged]
taeric 2y ago
Worse, it doesn't prove what it asserts. The assertion is that the quality of hires obviously got impacted. But, not once does it look at performance of hires. This narrative also doesn't expand the look at hiring numbers over the years, where it would be seen that the last 4 years are the only growth years in the organization going back even before this scandal. Nor does it look at any other problems. Sequestration is mentioned in passing, but the impact it had was sizeable. By the numbers, it is almost certainly more impactful than even the scandal that is focused on. What this does is appeal to the public court for justice on an old scandal. And right now, the public court is dominated by Trump and his supporters. One can try and couch ideas by "guys, I'm not an extreme Republican" all one wants, but that doesn't change that this feeds their narrative far more than it does to help any progress on the actual court case that is ostensibly being highlighted. So, now instead of getting quantitative analysis in a rigorous court with investigations, we get people carrying water for Trump as he blames DEI.
- BenFranklin100 2y ago
  Hiring people who are responsible for the safety of people lives on anything but merit is a problem no matter how you frame it. Not only is it racism, it is dangerous.
  - taeric 2y ago
    You are begging the question that they were hired on anything other than merit. Do you have hard evidence that the people that were hired did not pass qualifications? The main evidence of the scandal is that the recruitment funnel prioritized on things that were bad. And, make no mistake, that was a scandal. It does not, however, even attempt to show that recruitment forced hiring to accept people that lacked merit. That is, it does show there is a good chance RECRUITING rejected qualified people. But that is not enough to show that HIRING was necessarily lowering the bar. There is a begging of the question where we assume that they must have. But show the performance numbers! Without those, you don't know. And again, in context of the current debate, realize that the last 4 years are the only growth years in that agency. Such that the last 4 years are the only ones that made ANY progress on helping understaffed towers.
Jimmc414 2y ago
> when this came to light many years ago it was treated as a cheating and recruitment scandal. But only recently has it been reframed as a DEI issue. Respectfully, thats not accurate. The article actually shows that dei considerations were central to the original changes, not just recent framing. The FOIA requests show explicit discussions about "diversity vs performance tradeoffs" from the beginning. The NBCFAE role and the "barrier analysis" were both explicitly focused on diversity outcomes in 2013. The article provides primary sources (internal FAA documents, recorded messages, investigation reports) showing that racial considerations were explicitly part of the decision making process from the start. This is documented in realtime communications. The scandal involved both improper hiring practices (cheating) AND questionable DEI implementation. These aren't mutually exclusive; they're interrelated aspects of the same event. > Taking old, resolved scandals In what way do you consider this resolved? The class action lawsuit hasn't even gone to trial yet (2026). The FAA is still dealing with controller shortages. (facilities are operating understaffed,controllers are working 6-day weeks due to staffing shortages, training pipelines remain backed up) The relationship between the FAA and CTI schools remains damaged, applicant numbers have declined significantly since 2014.
- alcima 2y ago
  Was deeply aware of it at the time - was not really a DEI issue even then - it was pure cronyism.
  - aesh2Xa1 2y ago
    The source article includes primary material that strongly contradicts your anecdote. The policy change arrived in 2013, and there are materials from that same year indicating DEI. For example, here's an FAA slide from 2013 which explicitly publishes the ambition to place DEI as the core issue ("- How much of a change in jo performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?"): https://archive.ph/Qgjy5 https://archive.ph/Qgjy5 The evidence in this source does not discuss cronyism, although I believe you that it could have been relevant to your personal experience; it's just false to claim the issue as a whole was unrelated to DEI.
ls612 2y ago
The problem is it hasn’t been resolved, there is a big lawsuit about it still working its way through the courts.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
techapple 2y ago
A thing I wonder about like the nature of government and power is why does it feel like going back and forth between ridiculous policies. Like I’m sure 10 years from now, we’ll be uncovering crazy things the Trump administration did that were racist or sexist or whatever and it won’t make any sense! You’ll look at it and go why would a reasonable person have decided that approach! Talk about a footgun. And then maybe there’s a New Democrat administration that creates a new catchphrase that replaces DEI and we get familiar excesses again.
timewizard 2y ago
> be extra wary of stories like this being massaged. I'm wary of all stories. This is Hacker News. Why wouldn't "critical analysis" be the default?
- burnished 2y ago
  Sometimes people share a tech thing they thought was interesting
clutchdude 2y ago
From the article: > 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.
- EdwardDiego 2y ago
  > Likely yes. Love the in-depth analysis they use to answer that question...
  - clutchdude 2y ago
    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.
- teractiveodular 2y ago
  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?
  - clutchdude 2y ago
    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 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.
eastbound 2y ago
In 2021, the Al Jezeera documentary on Boeing’s airframes was commented in Yt as a DEI scandal. Post-reframing consists in telling people it wasn’t introduced as this, which may be true for journalists but clearly understood by the audience as a DEI issue, then claiming the DEI issue is slapped upon an existing problem. Agressive DEI has been uniformly contested since it was introduced, by (practically) everyone who has ever lost a promotion on non-skills criteria. It’s just that today, the good side has finally won.
- fallingknife 2y ago
  Not yet. The SC has ruled it illegal for university admissions but it somehow still remains allowed for corporate hiring. Even then, just because the court has ruled on it doesn't mean it will actually stop. The DEI people are snakes and will continue to find more sneaky ways to implement their illegal racist quotas and more newspeak to describe it in a "legal" way.
  - dmix 2y ago
    It’s also still deeply embedded in education. DEI might be less popular in the workforce but in primary and secondary education stuff like lowering standards, ignoring test failures, removing gifted classes, merging special needs classes in mainline, changing classroom conflict resolution to not remove disruptive kids from classrooms, etc are all still going strong and increasing in prevalence. That will have a ripple effect in the workforce for decades after the Overton window has shifted back. And in the US the federal government can’t stop it as it’s mostly defined in local and state gov (which is many times larger than the federal workforce). Dept of Education would only have limited influence there.
    - xcrunner529 2y ago
      Athletes are the original DEI. And Trump (the president!) didn’t have good grades.
  - HideousKojima 2y ago
    > Even then, just because the court has ruled on it doesn't mean it will actually stop. See California public universities still practicing affirmative action despite it being made illegal decades ago for a good example of this
generationP 2y ago
Resolved? By whom?
avn2109 2y ago
> "... slapping a coat of culture war paint on it - and then selling it as a new scandal..." Astounding level of misdirection/cope here, bordering on non-factual. Did we just read the same article? This is the textbook example of a DEI scandal and was so from the very beginning. I mean the "textbook" part literally, employment discrimination law textbooks will dedicate whole chapters to this scandal for decades at a minimum.
- codingrightnow 2y ago
  "Students understood that the FAA hired virtually everyone who completed the program and passed the assessment." It sounds like they couldn't hire enough people to fill vacancies. The diversity push could have been an attempt to encourage a wider range of people to consider the occupation.
  - Manuel_D 2y ago
    > The diversity push could have been an attempt to encourage a wider range of people to consider the occupation. Except it was demonstrably of the opposite of this. The bigraphical questionnaire rejected 90% of applicants for no justifiable reason. In practice, diversity is much easier to achieve by reducing the opportunities of the undesirable demographics. This is one such example.
  - frugalmail 2y ago
    It litterally has plaintiffs that weren't hired with 100% scores, and tons of experience. Not only that, sometimes they were minorities, just not the "in" minority. I believe, the second major plaintiff is a Native American.
deleted 2y ago
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rayiner 2y ago
The FAA worked with a race advocacy group to create a screening test blatantly calculated to give preferences to that race. That’s not an isolated incident. Harvard was smacked down by the Supreme Court for racially discriminating in admissions. Biden was smack down by courts for racially discriminating in small business loans. A court just smacked down NASDAQ for diversity quotas on corporate board. Maybe we can acknowledge that there is a real problem that people were responding to.
- davorak 2y ago
  > Maybe we can acknowledge that there is a real problem that people were responding to. I am not seeped in all the cases you mention here. You have not drawn a picture for me though to see that all of these are the same issue and that should all be treated the same way rather than be dealt with individually.
  - rayiner 2y ago
    Add to that the effort to repeal California’s ban on affirmative action: https://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/prop-16-failed-in-california https://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/prop-16-failed-in-californ... It’s all the same issue and has been since the 1970s. Many people believe you need explicit racial references in hiring, government programs. This is a deeply unpopular idea, so it gets hidden behind various labels. Though there was a “masks off” moment starting in 2020 when people were openly subscribing to Ibram Kendi thought (who lays out his view clearly that the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination).
    - davorak 2y ago
      > It’s all the same issue and has been since the 1970s. Many people believe you need explicit racial references in hiring, government programs. I draw a line between "need explicit racial references in hiring" and the "biographical questionnaire" in the article. The later was explicit deception, what I want to call fraud though maybe dose not fit the technical definition, and was correctly labeled cheating since the answers were apparently handed out. I can not lump all this activities together and label it as one thing at least due to the line I drew above and likely other lines I would draw as digging in to more details. > Though there was a “masks off” moment starting in 2020 when people were openly subscribing to Ibram Kendi thought (who lays out his view clearly that the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination). I think you are simplifying too much here. The way this reads is that everyone on the other side of the issue to you is either masks off and is like Ibram Kendi, or is masks on and hiding it how they are like Ibram Kendi. I do not buy it is that simple, the world is more complex than that with people that have a wide variety of motivations and goals.
refurb 2y ago
> But only recently has it been reframed as a DEI issue. Did we read the same article? I didn't see this as a "reframing" but rather an investigative expose into the history and most importantly "why". And it's pretty clear that at the time the cheating scandal came out, the FAA wasn't interested in implicating themselves. "The FAA investigated, clearing the NBCFAE and Snow of doing anything wrong in an internal investigation."
dqft 2y ago
Spot on for this guy.
caycep 2y ago
If you look at the articles on this blog, it’s clear the author has an agenda. The site is filed away as “view with suspicion” for me
frugalmail 2y ago
You're suggesting DEI wasn't the problem then? Using a new colloquial term doesn't suddenly change the foundation of the concern.
smsm42 2y ago
How it's "resolved"? Just because it happened a while ago (and continued in some different form since then pretty much until now - a lot of "we love DEI" stuff from FAA that I've seen are pretty recent) does not make it "resolved". Also, people still remember and discuss stuff that happened decades ago, including on HN, all the time. I don't see why the exception must be made for this story, so that since it started a while ago, it must never be mentioned again. Your reference to "state-sponsored propoganda" is very strange too - if you accuse the author of being the agent of some state, say it openly - and bring the receipts to prove it. Otherwise, this kind of innuendo should not have a place anywhere.

s3r3nity 2y ago

The cheating element is only _part_ of it, and the dominant regime at the time downplayed / ignored the DEI elements because that was supported by their ideology...like a sacred cow. Litigating "disparate impact" cases across any category became a successful attack vector against capitalist structures, and supported by Democratic leadership. This isn't "slapping a new coat of paint for propaganda," but rather exposing the rest of the iceberg that was otherwise concealed. Both pieces are relevant.

perching_aix 2y ago
> This isn't "slapping a new coat of paint for propaganda," but rather exposing the rest of the iceberg that was otherwise concealed. Our Blessed Homeland vs. Their Barbarous Wastes
- s3r3nity 2y ago
  Their Blessed Homeland vs. Our Barbarous Wastes
  - perching_aix 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - Gud 2y ago
      What’s up with the hostility? You doing ok?
      - perching_aix 2y ago
        Thanks for asking, I think I do, yes. I'm not sure what you find particularly hostile about it - they edited out what they originally had to say, but even then, I'm not saying anything extraordinary. Telling people they're acting childish and are not bringing anything to the table argumentation wise I think is pretty low on the hostility scale. The irony of being called out as hostile after confronting someone that they're just asserting their opinions is definitely not lost on me. What a thread...
    - s3r3nity 2y ago
      It’s more of a “yes, and…” comment. Namely, both are relevant, but previously only one side was highlighted.
      - perching_aix 2y ago
        Neither are "relevant" in my opinion, not yours, not theirs. Both are inflammatory, subjective characterizations from different ends of the horseshoe. These are never productive or insightful, and that's why I brought up "Their Blessed Homeland vs. Our Barbarous Wastes".
legitster 2y ago
> and the dominant regime at the time downplayed / ignored the DEI elements because that was supported by their ideology In the eye of the beholder. The current regime is upplaying the DEI elements because of their ideology. The difference though is, unless everyone involved has a time machine, using current cultural agenda items and going back in time and attributing them to people is always going to be wild speculation.
- SR2Z 2y ago
  > using current cultural agenda items and going back in time and attributing them to people is always going to be wild speculation. I'm as blue as they come, but let's not mince words. This was a racial equity policy. Like a lot of them, it was designed by idiots and/or racists. Much like the elite college admissions lawsuit, we don't need to guess at people's ideology - they WROTE DOWN that the cognitive test "disadvantaged" black applicants and so a biographical questionnaire was needed to re-advantage them. When Trump opened his mouth to blame DEI for the crash, about 95% of what he said was hateful, totally-made-up bullshit. Despite that and speaking practically, DEI had a significant role to play in the ATC understaffing during the crash. I really wish that our party was better at calling out crazy people within our ranks, ESPECIALLY when they do stuff that's guaranteed to alienate a solid chunk of the country just based on if "their worst subject in school was science" or whatever other deranged, racist proxy for race they come up with.
  - legitster 2y ago
    The difference between this and the college scandal is that there were limited numbers of seats at colleges, so to putting in an underqualified white student meant you had to pull an overqualified Asian student. The situation here was the ATC was chronically understaffed and unable to fill positions. So an effort for them to boost applications makes sense even under non-DEI principles.
    - jtbayly 2y ago
      If they wanted more applicants, then they shouldn’t have been disqualifying good applicants on the basis of their biography.
PaulHoule 2y ago
If I had to blame anything on the Democrats it is this: Valuing competence is one thing. Valuing diversity is another thing. You can have neither, either one, or both. The democrats make a conspicuous show of not valuing competence in addition to making some noises about diversity. Nobody said Barack Obama was an affirmative action case, no, he was one of the greatest politicians of the first quarter-century. On the other hand I feel that many left-leaning politicians make conspicuous displays of incompetence, I'd particularly call out Karen Bass, who would fall for whatever Scientology was selling and then make excuses for it. I think they want donors to know that whatever they are they aren't capable, smart and ambitious like Ralph Nader but rather they don't connect the dots between serving donors and what effect it has on their constituents. When Bass was running for mayor of L.A. in a contested election for which she had to serve the whole community she went through a stunning transformation and really seemed to "get it", all the duckspeak aimed at reconciling a lefty constituency and rightist donors went away. Nowhere is this disregard for competence more conspicuous in the elections where a senile or disabled white man is running against a lunatic. Fetterman beat Oz (they said, it's nothing, he just has aphasia, except his job is to speak for Pennsylvania) but they held on to Biden until the last minute against Trump and his replacement lost. Democrats need to make it clear that you can have both, but shows of competence increase the conflict between being a party that is a favorite of donors and being a party that has mass appeal. Being just a little sheepish and stupid is the easy way to reconcile those but we see how that went in 2024.
- techapple 2y ago
  I would more likely say that the qualities that make one popular or wanting to deal with the bullshit of managing Americans disputes are in opposition to the qualities that make one qualified. See: almost every politician that’s not a Democrat. Incompetence is staggeringly bipartisan.
- xcrunner529 2y ago
  But you also have MTG who literally believes “they” control the weather so I’m not sure exactly why you single democrats out here or even the it to any kind of ideology specific consequence.

BoingBoomTschak 2y ago

From an external (not US) PoV, it might also be that DEI was too much of a sacred cow before to call a spade a spade.

legitster 2y ago
Maybe! But in this case, the bulk of the mistakes by the FAA happened in the 2012-2014. In the middle of the Obama administration, but well before the bulk of the really controversial post-BLM DEI stuff that the current administration is largely attacking.
- Covzire 2y ago
  It's all connected, DEI(B) is just the latest revision of the beast.
- aikinai 2y ago
  DEI quotas have been around for decades. We just used to call it affirmative action and it was far less aggressive and blatant.
  - SR2Z 2y ago
    It was MORE blatant and transparent, which IMO is the bare minimum for government-sanctioned racism. If we are going to do AA, we owe it to EVERYONE to make it clear exactly how and when we will do it. Sneaking it in disingenuously will rightfully piss people off.
  - deleted 2y ago
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  - cyberax 2y ago
    Affirmative action is strictly _better_ than some of the DEI nonsense. With affirmative action, you just reserve a bunch of positions for minorities, and then give them out based on merit. With most of DEI, you either tweak the criteria to make job positions easier to get for minorities, or you lower your standards.

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andsoitis 2y ago

> then selling it as a new scandal is already a popular MO for state-sponsored propoganda, I don't know that it is limited to, or even most prevalent, in state-sponsored propaganda. Private individuals, media, etc. do this too without any state sponsorship.

legitster 2y ago
Sure, I wasn't even insinuating that this was state-sponsored, just highlighting that it's known to be a super effective way to manipulate stories.
- andsoitis 2y ago
  > I wasn't even insinuating that this was state-sponsored, just highlighting that it's known to be a super effective way to manipulate stories And yet, although this is a fact, the choice and the phrasing paints a particular story.

Manuel_D 2y ago

> Taking old, resolved scandals The lawsuit is still ongoing. The scandal has not yet resolved.

legitster 2y ago
No, but the problematic assessment in question was eliminated by congress in 2016. That would not explain the FAA's current recruitment problems.
- stackskipton 2y ago
  ATC training and dropout rate is so long and high, that mistakes made 8-9 years ago could still be impactful.
  - clutchdude 2y ago
    COVID would likely have a bigger hand in the current issues than mistakes from 10-15 years ago though. I found it somewhat puzzling we discuss ATC staffing and don't mention it: https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/air-transport/2024-05-01/paving-way-controller-ramp https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/air-transport/2024-0... > 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.
    - stackskipton 2y ago
      Yep, COVID didn't help either. However, I'll note that hiring != actual ATC controllers because drop/fail rate which for some insane reason is so hard to find.

bz_bz_bz 2y ago

The Brigida lawsuit, from which we get a lot of the documents in the article, was filed in 2016 and has framed this as a DEI discrimination issue from the get-go.

legitster 2y ago
With a grain of salt - any hiring lawsuit by its nature is going to be a discrimination case. The fact that everyone is really quick to just throw around DEI = discrimination is kind of my point. Even the text of the Brigida lawsuit clearly points out that nobody would have a problem with the FAA increasing minority representation in other ways.
- oremolten 2y ago
  Could you please elaborate how DEI is not discrimination? Is hiring based on someone's RACE ever not discrimination?
  - dingnuts 2y ago
    if this question is in good faith, you can read about this ideology by looking up Robin DiAngelo or Ibram X Kendi, who are experts on the pro-DEI academic theory that answers your question. It seems that the American voter disagrees with Kendi et al > The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination. As President Lyndon B. Johnson said in 1965, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun wrote in 1978, “In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently. - Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist
    - armitron 2y ago

hitekker 2y ago

That's a misreading of the article. This scandal was not just "cheating and recruitment" but forcing "Diversity" with a side of "Equity". To quote the facts: > The NBCFAE continued to pressure the FAA to diversify, with its members meeting with the DOT, FAA, Congressional Black Caucus, and others to push for increased diversity among ATCs. After years of fiddling with the research and years of pressure from the NBCFAE, the FAA landed on a strategy: by using a multistage process starting with non-cognitive factors, they could strike “an acceptable balance between minority hiring and expected performance”—a process they said would carry a “relatively small” performance loss. They openly discussed this tension in meetings, pointing to “a trade-off between diversity (adverse impact) and predicted job performance/outcomes,” asking, “How much of a change in job performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?” This was DEI before it was called DEI. The label changed, the spirit did not. That spirit, of sublimated racial grievance, metastasized everywhere in our society. It went from quiet, to blatant, and now to a memory hole.

ryandrake 2y ago
I don't think I even know what "DEI" is anymore. Political pundits have turned it into a generic slur, a boogeyman that vaguely means "I have to work with minorities now??" I've always thought it simply meant "drawing from the widest possible candidate funnel, including instead of excluding people who have traditionally been shut out." At least that's how all of my training sessions at work frame it. But, like everything, the term has become politically charged, and everyone now wants to overload it to mean all sorts of things they simply don't like.
- deleted 2y ago
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- Galatians4_16 2y ago
  DEI: Diversity Equity Inclusion Diversity of race (encouraging racism), equity of income (encouraging envy), inclusion of "the marginalized" (discouraging free association) Except, as a government program, this turns from mere encouragement to forcing the issues, under threat of fines, imprisonment, and ultimately death. In the words of famous actor Morgan Freeman; "If you want to end racism, stop talking about it." (1) 1) https://atlantablackstar.com/2024/06/16/morgan-freeman-doubles-down-hates-black-history-month/ https://atlantablackstar.com/2024/06/16/morgan-freeman-doubl...

some_random 2y ago

Framed as a cheating and recruiting scandal by who? Is it truly resolved if the racial discrimination element was never addressed?

sneedle 2y ago
[flagged]

taeric 2y ago

Worse, it doesn't prove what it asserts. The assertion is that the quality of hires obviously got impacted. But, not once does it look at performance of hires. This narrative also doesn't expand the look at hiring numbers over the years, where it would be seen that the last 4 years are the only growth years in the organization going back even before this scandal. Nor does it look at any other problems. Sequestration is mentioned in passing, but the impact it had was sizeable. By the numbers, it is almost certainly more impactful than even the scandal that is focused on. What this does is appeal to the public court for justice on an old scandal. And right now, the public court is dominated by Trump and his supporters. One can try and couch ideas by "guys, I'm not an extreme Republican" all one wants, but that doesn't change that this feeds their narrative far more than it does to help any progress on the actual court case that is ostensibly being highlighted. So, now instead of getting quantitative analysis in a rigorous court with investigations, we get people carrying water for Trump as he blames DEI.

BenFranklin100 2y ago
Hiring people who are responsible for the safety of people lives on anything but merit is a problem no matter how you frame it. Not only is it racism, it is dangerous.
- taeric 2y ago
  You are begging the question that they were hired on anything other than merit. Do you have hard evidence that the people that were hired did not pass qualifications? The main evidence of the scandal is that the recruitment funnel prioritized on things that were bad. And, make no mistake, that was a scandal. It does not, however, even attempt to show that recruitment forced hiring to accept people that lacked merit. That is, it does show there is a good chance RECRUITING rejected qualified people. But that is not enough to show that HIRING was necessarily lowering the bar. There is a begging of the question where we assume that they must have. But show the performance numbers! Without those, you don't know. And again, in context of the current debate, realize that the last 4 years are the only growth years in that agency. Such that the last 4 years are the only ones that made ANY progress on helping understaffed towers.

Jimmc414 2y ago

> when this came to light many years ago it was treated as a cheating and recruitment scandal. But only recently has it been reframed as a DEI issue. Respectfully, thats not accurate. The article actually shows that dei considerations were central to the original changes, not just recent framing. The FOIA requests show explicit discussions about "diversity vs performance tradeoffs" from the beginning. The NBCFAE role and the "barrier analysis" were both explicitly focused on diversity outcomes in 2013. The article provides primary sources (internal FAA documents, recorded messages, investigation reports) showing that racial considerations were explicitly part of the decision making process from the start. This is documented in realtime communications. The scandal involved both improper hiring practices (cheating) AND questionable DEI implementation. These aren't mutually exclusive; they're interrelated aspects of the same event. > Taking old, resolved scandals In what way do you consider this resolved? The class action lawsuit hasn't even gone to trial yet (2026). The FAA is still dealing with controller shortages. (facilities are operating understaffed,controllers are working 6-day weeks due to staffing shortages, training pipelines remain backed up) The relationship between the FAA and CTI schools remains damaged, applicant numbers have declined significantly since 2014.

alcima 2y ago
Was deeply aware of it at the time - was not really a DEI issue even then - it was pure cronyism.
- aesh2Xa1 2y ago
  The source article includes primary material that strongly contradicts your anecdote. The policy change arrived in 2013, and there are materials from that same year indicating DEI. For example, here's an FAA slide from 2013 which explicitly publishes the ambition to place DEI as the core issue ("- How much of a change in jo performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?"): https://archive.ph/Qgjy5 https://archive.ph/Qgjy5 The evidence in this source does not discuss cronyism, although I believe you that it could have been relevant to your personal experience; it's just false to claim the issue as a whole was unrelated to DEI.

ls612 2y ago

The problem is it hasn’t been resolved, there is a big lawsuit about it still working its way through the courts.

deleted 2y ago

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techapple 2y ago

A thing I wonder about like the nature of government and power is why does it feel like going back and forth between ridiculous policies. Like I’m sure 10 years from now, we’ll be uncovering crazy things the Trump administration did that were racist or sexist or whatever and it won’t make any sense! You’ll look at it and go why would a reasonable person have decided that approach! Talk about a footgun. And then maybe there’s a New Democrat administration that creates a new catchphrase that replaces DEI and we get familiar excesses again.

timewizard 2y ago

> be extra wary of stories like this being massaged. I'm wary of all stories. This is Hacker News. Why wouldn't "critical analysis" be the default?

burnished 2y ago
Sometimes people share a tech thing they thought was interesting

clutchdude 2y ago

From the article: > 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.

EdwardDiego 2y ago
> Likely yes. Love the in-depth analysis they use to answer that question...
- clutchdude 2y ago
  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.
teractiveodular 2y ago
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?
- clutchdude 2y ago
  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 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.

eastbound 2y ago

In 2021, the Al Jezeera documentary on Boeing’s airframes was commented in Yt as a DEI scandal. Post-reframing consists in telling people it wasn’t introduced as this, which may be true for journalists but clearly understood by the audience as a DEI issue, then claiming the DEI issue is slapped upon an existing problem. Agressive DEI has been uniformly contested since it was introduced, by (practically) everyone who has ever lost a promotion on non-skills criteria. It’s just that today, the good side has finally won.

fallingknife 2y ago
Not yet. The SC has ruled it illegal for university admissions but it somehow still remains allowed for corporate hiring. Even then, just because the court has ruled on it doesn't mean it will actually stop. The DEI people are snakes and will continue to find more sneaky ways to implement their illegal racist quotas and more newspeak to describe it in a "legal" way.
- dmix 2y ago
  It’s also still deeply embedded in education. DEI might be less popular in the workforce but in primary and secondary education stuff like lowering standards, ignoring test failures, removing gifted classes, merging special needs classes in mainline, changing classroom conflict resolution to not remove disruptive kids from classrooms, etc are all still going strong and increasing in prevalence. That will have a ripple effect in the workforce for decades after the Overton window has shifted back. And in the US the federal government can’t stop it as it’s mostly defined in local and state gov (which is many times larger than the federal workforce). Dept of Education would only have limited influence there.
  - xcrunner529 2y ago
    Athletes are the original DEI. And Trump (the president!) didn’t have good grades.
- HideousKojima 2y ago
  > Even then, just because the court has ruled on it doesn't mean it will actually stop. See California public universities still practicing affirmative action despite it being made illegal decades ago for a good example of this

generationP 2y ago

Resolved? By whom?

avn2109 2y ago

> "... slapping a coat of culture war paint on it - and then selling it as a new scandal..." Astounding level of misdirection/cope here, bordering on non-factual. Did we just read the same article? This is the textbook example of a DEI scandal and was so from the very beginning. I mean the "textbook" part literally, employment discrimination law textbooks will dedicate whole chapters to this scandal for decades at a minimum.

codingrightnow 2y ago
"Students understood that the FAA hired virtually everyone who completed the program and passed the assessment." It sounds like they couldn't hire enough people to fill vacancies. The diversity push could have been an attempt to encourage a wider range of people to consider the occupation.
- Manuel_D 2y ago
  > The diversity push could have been an attempt to encourage a wider range of people to consider the occupation. Except it was demonstrably of the opposite of this. The bigraphical questionnaire rejected 90% of applicants for no justifiable reason. In practice, diversity is much easier to achieve by reducing the opportunities of the undesirable demographics. This is one such example.
- frugalmail 2y ago
  It litterally has plaintiffs that weren't hired with 100% scores, and tons of experience. Not only that, sometimes they were minorities, just not the "in" minority. I believe, the second major plaintiff is a Native American.

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rayiner 2y ago

The FAA worked with a race advocacy group to create a screening test blatantly calculated to give preferences to that race. That’s not an isolated incident. Harvard was smacked down by the Supreme Court for racially discriminating in admissions. Biden was smack down by courts for racially discriminating in small business loans. A court just smacked down NASDAQ for diversity quotas on corporate board. Maybe we can acknowledge that there is a real problem that people were responding to.

davorak 2y ago
> Maybe we can acknowledge that there is a real problem that people were responding to. I am not seeped in all the cases you mention here. You have not drawn a picture for me though to see that all of these are the same issue and that should all be treated the same way rather than be dealt with individually.
- rayiner 2y ago
  Add to that the effort to repeal California’s ban on affirmative action: https://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/prop-16-failed-in-california https://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/prop-16-failed-in-californ... It’s all the same issue and has been since the 1970s. Many people believe you need explicit racial references in hiring, government programs. This is a deeply unpopular idea, so it gets hidden behind various labels. Though there was a “masks off” moment starting in 2020 when people were openly subscribing to Ibram Kendi thought (who lays out his view clearly that the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination).
  - davorak 2y ago
    > It’s all the same issue and has been since the 1970s. Many people believe you need explicit racial references in hiring, government programs. I draw a line between "need explicit racial references in hiring" and the "biographical questionnaire" in the article. The later was explicit deception, what I want to call fraud though maybe dose not fit the technical definition, and was correctly labeled cheating since the answers were apparently handed out. I can not lump all this activities together and label it as one thing at least due to the line I drew above and likely other lines I would draw as digging in to more details. > Though there was a “masks off” moment starting in 2020 when people were openly subscribing to Ibram Kendi thought (who lays out his view clearly that the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination). I think you are simplifying too much here. The way this reads is that everyone on the other side of the issue to you is either masks off and is like Ibram Kendi, or is masks on and hiding it how they are like Ibram Kendi. I do not buy it is that simple, the world is more complex than that with people that have a wide variety of motivations and goals.

refurb 2y ago

> But only recently has it been reframed as a DEI issue. Did we read the same article? I didn't see this as a "reframing" but rather an investigative expose into the history and most importantly "why". And it's pretty clear that at the time the cheating scandal came out, the FAA wasn't interested in implicating themselves. "The FAA investigated, clearing the NBCFAE and Snow of doing anything wrong in an internal investigation."

dqft 2y ago

Spot on for this guy.

caycep 2y ago

If you look at the articles on this blog, it’s clear the author has an agenda. The site is filed away as “view with suspicion” for me

frugalmail 2y ago

You're suggesting DEI wasn't the problem then? Using a new colloquial term doesn't suddenly change the foundation of the concern.

smsm42 2y ago

How it's "resolved"? Just because it happened a while ago (and continued in some different form since then pretty much until now - a lot of "we love DEI" stuff from FAA that I've seen are pretty recent) does not make it "resolved". Also, people still remember and discuss stuff that happened decades ago, including on HN, all the time. I don't see why the exception must be made for this story, so that since it started a while ago, it must never be mentioned again. Your reference to "state-sponsored propoganda" is very strange too - if you accuse the author of being the agent of some state, say it openly - and bring the receipts to prove it. Otherwise, this kind of innuendo should not have a place anywhere.