6 ms·

Why do so many jobs have this failure mode? Thinking about this should illuminate for you that funding is not the whole story.

jmalicki 7mo ago
Okay, so then what is? Most jobs have this failure mode because there's a tendency to strip funding until disaster happens, even when it was clearly foreseeable.
- doctorpangloss 7mo ago
  this whole thing about funding and disaster is a big red herring. it tells me why we're talking about it, but it has nothing to do with how to solve the real, meaningful socioeconomic problem and why it keeps coming up in so many jobs. this is SO simple to understand but people resist it stubbornly. they WANT outrage. economic stuff isn't outrageous. > tendency to strip funding until disaster happens well there's a tendency to pass unfunded mandates too. They are two sides of the same coin. Here's another way I've heard it described, to show you that this is a "bipartisan" issue: > the Daily Show problem. I love the Daily Show, and I think Jon Stewart is hysterical. But literally the answer to every single problem is “Congress should pass a new law.” https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/10/marc-andreessen-in-conversation.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/10/marc-andreessen-in-c... i don't think Marc Andreessen knows everything about everything the way that he thinks that he does. but he's not wrong. you are in the really lame "Congress should pass a new law" department - i guess to increase funding? - but you know, then it becomes, i don't see why it would be "enough" funding, we don't know, they could strike anyway... personally, i believe the problem with guilded professions like "ATC guy" come about from complex but nonetheless finite incentives. so in a narrow sense, as long as some ATC controllers want to "work more, earn more," this problem will persist, it doesn't even have to be all ATC controllers, or even many, but the proportion of "work more, earn more" to "work less, earn less" personalities predicts the scale of the issues facing buyers of the guilded profession's services. other economists have talked about this and i'm sure someone will write great Causality Revolution paper about it for ATC. broadly I think the problem has much more to do with the lack of economic opportunity in America, that there's minimum wage and everything else, and people are very risk averse like their peers in Europe or Asia but have less of a safety net so they are much more desperate. everyone is looking to guilds to solve their problem instead of demanding that their leaders support and deliver real growth, which makes me sound like Peter Thiel, and that should tell you everything you need to know about why this problem is so hard to solve. it's all politics, not a misunderstanding of the math about maintenance or disasters or whatever the fuck.
  - jmalicki 7mo ago
    We recently had a lot more probationary ATCs cut because of specific action by Elon Musk's DOGE, which has since then resulted in two major air disasters due to poor ATC handling, which was virtually unheard of before. This isn't some vague problem, it's a random asshole screaming "delete! Delete! Delete!" enlisting some random college dropouts to execute it for him, resulting in the loss of hundreds of lives directly attributable to those short sighted changes. This isn't a vague problem, it's a specific asshole who is killing people so he can appear on stage with a chainsaw.
  - watwut 7mo ago
    Considering congress republicans are dead set to cause maximal damage, congress being between useless and harmful might just be correct diagnosis of the problem. Also, ATC controllers are not the one in power here. It is not like they would made the decisions that lead to here.
smallerize 7mo ago
Well, there was the time Ronald Reagan fired all the ATC workers [Edit: I had the reason wrong but I still blame Reagan.]
- coredog64 7mo ago
  They were already in a union (PATCO) and they were striking illegally which lead to their decertification.
  - cogman10 7mo ago
    What's impressive is that if you look at the issues PATCO struck over, it was basically identical to the problems ATC faces today. The problem being that everything has only gotten a lot worse for ATC controllers. The union pretty loudly and early on pointed out major problems with that job and the response of ignoring them for 4 decades is what's driven us to the current situation.
  - kadoban 7mo ago
    Technically accurate. A union that isn't allowed to legally strike when needed isn't a useful union though. The state that ATC has been in for the decades after that suggests to me that they were correct to strike.
  - travisgriggs 7mo ago
    Huh. This seems selectively simplified. At least according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Professional_Air_Traffic_Controllers_Organization_strike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Professional_Air_Traffic_.... Multiple economic write ups have concluded that Reagan’s “stick it to the upstart guy” cost us tax payers way more than it would if they’d just acceded and maybe even thrown in a gracious bonus to say thanks. Larger sociology say the intangible cost to labor balance laws actually were much more. Reagan’s trickle down (great euphemism for “piss on”) movement was the beginning of the demise of the GOP IMO. Disclaimed: I voted both times for him and many GOP followers.
  - anigbrowl 7mo ago
    striking illegally How dare those peons use their economic leverage! That's only for the upper class
jjk166 7mo ago
Inadequate funding seems like the common factor across the vast majority of jobs with these failure modes.
- nine_k 7mo ago
  When paying for a (rare) failure is cheaper than paying for the (constant) absence of failure, it's just natural. You know, the optimal amount of fraud in a payment system is not zero. The optimal amount of fatal aircraft incidents is not an exact substitute, bit the pressure is of the same kind, I'm afraid :(
  - jjk166 7mo ago
    Did the FAA or some other agency release a statement saying they were relaxing safety standards because they deemed the increase in risk economically acceptable? Do you recall checking a box when booking your last flight acknowledging you would prefer a few cents off your ticket to a fully staffed ATC tower? Did safety technology suddenly get substantially worse, increasing the cost of preventing failure beyond a red line we set? Failures will happen, and resources are finite. But the idea that this particular failure is an inevitable consequence of a rational economic decision, that we as a society got together and decided we would permit X fatal aircraft incidents per unit of time, and that there is no point in improving because perfection is impossible, is patently absurd. No, we have been and currently are willing to pay for fully staffed air traffic control towers to prevent precisely this sort of accident. If you told someone at the airport there was a single controller doing double duty, there's a good chance they would choose to pay a premium to change flights to a time when the ATC was appropriately staffed. There is a reasonable expectation that when you book a service like a flight that you are paying for the appropriate staffing to provide that service. I'm paying for the person who maintains the engines, and the person who audits the paperwork to make sure the maintenance got done, and the engineer who checks that the latest revision won't cause the engine to explode in mid-air, and all the rest of the massive chain of people required for air travel to work as its supposed to. The airline is supposed to set the price such that they can afford to pay all these people. They don't get to make the decision that they can take my money and pocket what was supposed to be going towards engine maintenance because they don't value my life sufficiently. Likewise for air traffic control.
heraldgeezer 7mo ago
Because we need to trust people and it is not sustainable to overstaff. In my job we work 40h a week + oncall rotating. It works.

jmalicki 7mo ago

Okay, so then what is? Most jobs have this failure mode because there's a tendency to strip funding until disaster happens, even when it was clearly foreseeable.

doctorpangloss 7mo ago
this whole thing about funding and disaster is a big red herring. it tells me why we're talking about it, but it has nothing to do with how to solve the real, meaningful socioeconomic problem and why it keeps coming up in so many jobs. this is SO simple to understand but people resist it stubbornly. they WANT outrage. economic stuff isn't outrageous. > tendency to strip funding until disaster happens well there's a tendency to pass unfunded mandates too. They are two sides of the same coin. Here's another way I've heard it described, to show you that this is a "bipartisan" issue: > the Daily Show problem. I love the Daily Show, and I think Jon Stewart is hysterical. But literally the answer to every single problem is “Congress should pass a new law.” https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/10/marc-andreessen-in-conversation.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/10/marc-andreessen-in-c... i don't think Marc Andreessen knows everything about everything the way that he thinks that he does. but he's not wrong. you are in the really lame "Congress should pass a new law" department - i guess to increase funding? - but you know, then it becomes, i don't see why it would be "enough" funding, we don't know, they could strike anyway... personally, i believe the problem with guilded professions like "ATC guy" come about from complex but nonetheless finite incentives. so in a narrow sense, as long as some ATC controllers want to "work more, earn more," this problem will persist, it doesn't even have to be all ATC controllers, or even many, but the proportion of "work more, earn more" to "work less, earn less" personalities predicts the scale of the issues facing buyers of the guilded profession's services. other economists have talked about this and i'm sure someone will write great Causality Revolution paper about it for ATC. broadly I think the problem has much more to do with the lack of economic opportunity in America, that there's minimum wage and everything else, and people are very risk averse like their peers in Europe or Asia but have less of a safety net so they are much more desperate. everyone is looking to guilds to solve their problem instead of demanding that their leaders support and deliver real growth, which makes me sound like Peter Thiel, and that should tell you everything you need to know about why this problem is so hard to solve. it's all politics, not a misunderstanding of the math about maintenance or disasters or whatever the fuck.
- jmalicki 7mo ago
  We recently had a lot more probationary ATCs cut because of specific action by Elon Musk's DOGE, which has since then resulted in two major air disasters due to poor ATC handling, which was virtually unheard of before. This isn't some vague problem, it's a random asshole screaming "delete! Delete! Delete!" enlisting some random college dropouts to execute it for him, resulting in the loss of hundreds of lives directly attributable to those short sighted changes. This isn't a vague problem, it's a specific asshole who is killing people so he can appear on stage with a chainsaw.
- watwut 7mo ago
  Considering congress republicans are dead set to cause maximal damage, congress being between useless and harmful might just be correct diagnosis of the problem. Also, ATC controllers are not the one in power here. It is not like they would made the decisions that lead to here.

smallerize 7mo ago

Well, there was the time Ronald Reagan fired all the ATC workers [Edit: I had the reason wrong but I still blame Reagan.]

coredog64 7mo ago
They were already in a union (PATCO) and they were striking illegally which lead to their decertification.
- cogman10 7mo ago
  What's impressive is that if you look at the issues PATCO struck over, it was basically identical to the problems ATC faces today. The problem being that everything has only gotten a lot worse for ATC controllers. The union pretty loudly and early on pointed out major problems with that job and the response of ignoring them for 4 decades is what's driven us to the current situation.
- kadoban 7mo ago
  Technically accurate. A union that isn't allowed to legally strike when needed isn't a useful union though. The state that ATC has been in for the decades after that suggests to me that they were correct to strike.
- travisgriggs 7mo ago
  Huh. This seems selectively simplified. At least according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Professional_Air_Traffic_Controllers_Organization_strike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Professional_Air_Traffic_.... Multiple economic write ups have concluded that Reagan’s “stick it to the upstart guy” cost us tax payers way more than it would if they’d just acceded and maybe even thrown in a gracious bonus to say thanks. Larger sociology say the intangible cost to labor balance laws actually were much more. Reagan’s trickle down (great euphemism for “piss on”) movement was the beginning of the demise of the GOP IMO. Disclaimed: I voted both times for him and many GOP followers.
- anigbrowl 7mo ago
  striking illegally How dare those peons use their economic leverage! That's only for the upper class

jjk166 7mo ago

Inadequate funding seems like the common factor across the vast majority of jobs with these failure modes.

nine_k 7mo ago
When paying for a (rare) failure is cheaper than paying for the (constant) absence of failure, it's just natural. You know, the optimal amount of fraud in a payment system is not zero. The optimal amount of fatal aircraft incidents is not an exact substitute, bit the pressure is of the same kind, I'm afraid :(
- jjk166 7mo ago
  Did the FAA or some other agency release a statement saying they were relaxing safety standards because they deemed the increase in risk economically acceptable? Do you recall checking a box when booking your last flight acknowledging you would prefer a few cents off your ticket to a fully staffed ATC tower? Did safety technology suddenly get substantially worse, increasing the cost of preventing failure beyond a red line we set? Failures will happen, and resources are finite. But the idea that this particular failure is an inevitable consequence of a rational economic decision, that we as a society got together and decided we would permit X fatal aircraft incidents per unit of time, and that there is no point in improving because perfection is impossible, is patently absurd. No, we have been and currently are willing to pay for fully staffed air traffic control towers to prevent precisely this sort of accident. If you told someone at the airport there was a single controller doing double duty, there's a good chance they would choose to pay a premium to change flights to a time when the ATC was appropriately staffed. There is a reasonable expectation that when you book a service like a flight that you are paying for the appropriate staffing to provide that service. I'm paying for the person who maintains the engines, and the person who audits the paperwork to make sure the maintenance got done, and the engineer who checks that the latest revision won't cause the engine to explode in mid-air, and all the rest of the massive chain of people required for air travel to work as its supposed to. The airline is supposed to set the price such that they can afford to pay all these people. They don't get to make the decision that they can take my money and pocket what was supposed to be going towards engine maintenance because they don't value my life sufficiently. Likewise for air traffic control.

heraldgeezer 7mo ago

Because we need to trust people and it is not sustainable to overstaff. In my job we work 40h a week + oncall rotating. It works.