There’s not a single news story on google news landing page or the front page of reddit. I don’t think anyone who isn’t directly impacted really gives a shit.
It’s kind of amazing really.
There’s not a single news story on google news landing page or the front page of reddit. I don’t think anyone who isn’t directly impacted really gives a shit.
It’s kind of amazing really.
the last one was 7 years ago and it hit 35 days.
certain programs have little pockets of funds that do not run out immediately when the federal fiscal year ends (October 1st, 12:00a), and those are going to start grinding to a halt. one of them has to do with air traffic control and the subsidization of smaller airport operation, which will have knock on effects to general aviation.
right now, air traffic controllers are being forced to work without pay (once the government is funded again, they will receive back pay) and their contract does not allow them to strike. there are already stories about yesterday’s rolling air travel delays and FAA spokespeople doing damage control.
edit**: just to add to that, the air travel issues so far have been due to a handful of air traffic controllers calling in sick to find other income in the near term. the ATC program has been cut to the bone already this year, re: staffing. and it has been subject to austerity and worker hostility since the last shut down, and even the strike breaking of the 1980s. so these shutdowns are like a kick in the teeth to a labor force thay is already beaten down. to me, there are thousands of programs that people will begin to feel the pain of absense from, but ATC shit is gonna be the powder keg.
what ended the previous shutdown was air travel grinding itself down. rich people do not like to have their jetset lives fucked with.
We can just replace air traffic controllers with grok
We’ll just lose a few dozen planes a day until the ai is sufficiently trained. Then it’ll be a few dozen every month.
And by “lose” I do mean midair collisions.
This is how we end up in a post-technology hellworld, worshipping LLM boxes that hallucinate answers all day.
I’m sure it’s healthy and fine that big tech companies have created a technology that will soon make it nearly impossible for anyone non-discerning to tell what’s real or not, and trap people in isolated consumer bubbles. I mean, it’s already happened, but people used to have to spin videos and pictures, now they’ll be able to invent them. Hyper-HyperNormalization?
There is a difference between LLMs like Grok and your average machine learning project
Yeah, the scale of electricity necessary to make it function drives up our power bills on a completely different scale.
it looks like they keep gutting air traffic control only to realize they need it too
it is wildly deranged how the US treats ATC. the pay seems OK at a glance, but the training requirements, stress, and working conditions make it difficult to recruit and retain people.
so, in naturally capitalist fashion, they treat them like none of this is true, like the workers are just appliances that can be summoned at will from a factory, and management runs everything on the heroic efforts of a skeleton crew… making it all worse on the workers and the whole thing fumbles when somebody takes a sick day because there is no redundancy.
and like, i dont fly anymore. probably most americans don’t fly at all, or if they do its less than once a year. but a shitload of rapid logistical BS relies on cargo flights, and rich people love to hop all over on a whim.
so major delays are going to absolutely infuriate the bourgeoisie who are used to the world at their fingertips.
I used to know a guy who went on to become an ATC. That was before the last shutdown. I wonder if he’s still doing that, or if he got got by cuts, or if he’ll still be doing it in a couple months.
That makes sense.
The Dems will cave when they can’t fly for fun.
Republicans get to paint Dems as intransigent do-nothings for a month… a message seemingly confirmed when they inevitably cave in a month and meekly sign a bill with no concessions. Because the worst of the disruptions are avoided, Republicans also get spin the 'ol yarn about how “see? The government was shutdown and you didn’t even notice! That’s why we need to get rid of more government!”
It’s such a stupid gambit. Suicide vest politics.
Its so funny that its just how the goddamn government is structured that does this
The Dems actually need to have things crash and burn bad under Trump. In a way that truly humiliates Trump.
But they will never.