Althouse: Sunrise — 7:17, 7:19.

January 30, 2025

Sunrise — 7:17, 7:19.

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24 comments:

rehajm said...: Farage says elections being cancelled over politicians fear of reform; 1/30/25, 5:40 PM
Jerry said...: Seems reasonable. Politicians hate change.; 1/30/25, 5:43 PM
NorthOfTheOneOhOne said...: California legislature walks back Newsome's $50M Anti-Trump slush fund!; 1/30/25, 5:44 PM
Disparity of Cult said...: https://cwbchicago.com/2025/01/2-undocumented-migrants-in-custody-for-murdering-63-year-old-chicago-man-who-was-found-tied-up-with-duct-tape-and-cord-ald.html

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2025/01/30/breaking-arrests-made-in-brutal-chicago-killing-with-a-key-detail-revealed-n2651393; 1/30/25, 6:44 PM
DINKY DAU 45 said...: while they are still pulling bodies out of the water, the orange guy is blaming DEI and Obama and Biden when he is the one that reaped havoc on this department already and making claims that investigators dont even know yet..What a despicable orange person. He is the one one watch where this incident occurred ,cant sluff off he is responsible for ALL..thats the job description; 1/30/25, 7:24 PM
Leland said...: Investigators don’t know, and by typical policy the NTSB won’t claim to know for a year. The Tower was 2/3rds staff. Not sure how that is Trump’s fault, but plenty of articles about how the FAA turned away qualified white candidates for controllers because they needed to get their DEI quotas. These articles predate Trump’s election. Here’s one: https://www.natca.org/2023/06/27/dot-oig-faa-at-fault-for-controller-staffing-shortages/

Did you see the Quinnipiac poll showing Democrats with over 55% disapproval rating? Did you miss the John Stewart rant begging Democrats to quit demonizing Trump and start providing answers of what they would do with the power they seek? Do you think it might be better to explain why there were 1,200 fewer qualified air traffic controllers in 2023 than 10 years previous, when Obama changed the criteria for hiring?; 1/30/25, 7:40 PM
Peachy said...: ooo but don't call those power- thieves .... fascist; 1/30/25, 7:45 PM
john mosby said...: Had a thought. Not an argument. I am honestly not sure what to think of this:

Trump wants to simultaneously have federal workers come back in the office, and then disperse those offices all over the country. E.g. Kash was speaking gleefully about moving Bureau headquarters to Huntsville, Alabama.

Yes, part of the back-to-office thing is an attempt to piss feds off the job. But most of it is a supervisory philosophy that people need to be where you can see them and they can see each other, to get all the random interactions that generate innovation.

But when it comes to Trump's direct reports- the agency heads - they might as well be working from home, if their offices are all over the hinterland. Trump won't be able to reach out and grab them, nor will they be a 5-minute drive from each other if they want to hash something out quickly. The same will apply to the agency heads' senior staff, who are supposed to hash out the details of interagency cooperation.

So how to reconcile an industrial-age workplace within the agency, with a postmodern distributed capital?

I am honestly puzzled.

JSM; 1/30/25, 7:54 PM
Narayanan said...: make AI avatars of everyone in cabinet and keep in Trump bathroom closet?; 1/30/25, 8:01 PM
Mason G said...: "nor will they be a 5-minute drive from each other if they want to hash something out quickly."

A phone/video call is quicker than a 5-minute drive, I'd think.; 1/30/25, 8:01 PM
Narayanan said...: on server!!!; 1/30/25, 8:02 PM
DINKY DAU 45 said...: No permanent FAA director
There is currently no permanent FAA director at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport12345.
THIS IS TRUMPS WATCH WHERES THE DIRECTOR.iF YOU GOT ANY SENSE YOU CAN SEE WHY.. WHY did guy resign why wasnt he immediately replaced and freezes not put on in already highly understaffed air traffic people.s Gang that cant shoot straight sad these people are dangerous..; 1/30/25, 8:13 PM
Leland said...: Good points JSM. I learned, while working as a government contractor, to be capable of working wherever I happen to be. I’m writing this on an iPad that has cellular connectivity and can reach all my work files and make phone calls anywhere in the world. With it, I can work from any place with cellular or WiFi coverage. With T-Mobile, I could even use Starlink.
I can be at my desk, although my company got rid of assigned desks. I can be in my home study. I can work on airplane flight. I can work on a factory floor. It doesn’t matter if it is Baku, London, Kansas, Colorado, Alaska, or Houston.

I’m not a fan of the return to work directive. It doesn’t affect me, but it seems silly.

However, my wife is a nurse. She couldn’t do her job if she didn’t go to where the patients and means to evaluate and treat them are. I have a friend that is a lineman. He’s never at a desk, but he couldn’t do his job from a virtual environment. He doesn’t phone it in.; 1/30/25, 8:17 PM
Kakistocracy said...: One of the most interesting aspects of these WFH / RTO discussions is the absence of commentary on how significantly the technology has moved on over the last 5 years. It is almost never cited in these discussions, which all seem to suggest this is just some kind of culture war.

Depending on the kind of work you do, many of the collaborative computerized tools now available probably make you more productive when you’re sitting in an online meeting rather than in the office.

But instead most of the debate seems to be centered around what the “good old days” were like.; 1/30/25, 8:29 PM
Enigma said...: Trump is talking about the stuff below. After an hour of research today, it seems that in 2012 to 2013 Obama sought to ensure racial equity for people passing the FAA air traffic controller qualification exam. Per the successful lawsuit cited below, a weird biographical questionnaire was used to rejigger scores by race.

https://mslegal.org/2019/11/biographical-questions-forced-top-atc-candidates-out-of-faa-hiring-pool/

https://libraryonline.erau.edu/online-full-text/faa-aviation-medicine-reports/AM12-19.pdf

The FAA buried this in 2018, and I haven't been able to find a complete version of the bio questionnaire (see a partial at Scribd). This is odd, as most official federal documents get archived for posterity.

https://www.faa.gov/faq/faa-getting-rid-air-traffic-skills-biographical-assessment

https://www.scribd.com/document/218493751/ATC-Biographical-Questions; 1/30/25, 8:36 PM
TickTock said...: I'm working with a small startup run by two bright Berkeley graduates. They think that they can create and run a successful virtual company with employees spread across the country. But they are failing to create a company culture, and don't realize they are missing all those small interactions which foster co-operation and teamwork.; 1/30/25, 8:38 PM
Lem Vibe Bandit said...: AI Demo: This Person Does Not Exist

It's getting better.; 1/30/25, 8:39 PM
Unknown said...: I am an electrical engineer who makes industrial equipment. When Covid hit we all worked from home. One of my colleagues who was a mechanical engineer I had worked with for 10 years ended up getting fired because he ended up significantly missing deadline that caused equipment that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to miss ship dates.
Some people can world unsupervised from home just fine, but some people can't. Being in the office keeps them focused and their supervisor can make sure they are actually working. I personally just don't believe that the average worker is as productive working from home.; 1/30/25, 8:39 PM
Enigma said...: Musk (who fed this stuff to Trump post Twitter -> X) is incoherent and wrong. Period. Musk is projecting a technology and development model on an industry that is completely different.

Government doesn't build cars or rockets or satellites. Government 'regulates' and sets standards. Government researches and reports findings a lot, and has lawyers who interpret laws. Government gives billions of dollars away through Social Security, Medicare, as veterans benefits, and through either contracts or grants.

Half of all government jobs might be automated, but these jobs are designed as patronage jobs and to build support for local elected people both Republican and Democrat. They had to create the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) program back in the 1980s because no one would agree to shut down local--and obsolete--military bases anywhere.

The government tasks that cannot be automated are often very easily done remotely. At lower cost. In ways where DC politics could be defused by spreading the jobs all across the country. This is a simple analysis, as it did work just fine during COVID and the long and pointless lockdowns that followed. But, Musk is a retro "butts in the seats" manager. Is he in the wrong industry, or just insecure? His "only the paranoid survive" attitude fits with technology, but not the endless mediocrity required to pay routine bills. It's what the voters vote for...and demand...; 1/30/25, 8:51 PM
MadTownGuy said...: Here's the outgoing FAA Director:

REMINDER: Biden’s pick to lead the FAA was a DEI hire who couldn’t answer a single question about aviation.; 1/30/25, 8:51 PM
wildswan said...: There's an online tool that lets you look up government awards by keywords to see all the awards of a given type - such as "Migrant", "airport", "Control tower: and so on. I played about with it and some of the results seemed very suggestive. They'd be worth further study.

Keyword: "Homeless"
Showing 100 (limit) results
Taxpayer money spent: $3,787,730,900.05

Keywords:
F5H6HCJ64TB5 (= METROPOLITAN WASHINGTON AIRPORTS AUTHORITY i.e., Reagan, Dulles)
Showing 21 results
Taxpayer money spent: $385,158,726.00 - (Appears that10x less was spent on DC airports than on the homeless.)

Keyword: "Migrant"
Showing 100 (limit) results
Taxpayer money spent: $2,817,411,427.41

Keyword: "control tower"
Showing 49 results
Taxpayer money spent: $249,370,342.20 (seems to suggest that 10x more spent on migrants than control towers.)

Notice also that the totals for homeless and migrants are incomplete. This tool can only list 100 results. That was OK for DC airports (21) and for "control tower" (49) but "Migrant" and "homeless" were over a hundred. How far over? I don't know.

This tool is at https://datarepublican.com/award_search/; 1/30/25, 10:15 PM
Jim at said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 1/30/25, 10:30 PM
Mason G said...: MadTownGuy-

Just a "heads up"...

Biden's DEI pick, Phillip Washington, was never voted on, he withdrew his nomination. The outgoing director is Michael Whitaker.; 1/30/25, 10:40 PM
Jamie said...: I've known a good few government workers - most of them not very recently, but my experience with them is still relevant here, I think. In one office at the state level of s federal agency, there were about two dozen people. One truly worked hard and all day. One (back in the day) dedicated a lot of his time to organizing, or trying to organize, for a union. One did the research he hadn't been able to get funding for when he was a PhD candidate (or so I was told, although he seemed to spend a lot of time flipping through journals, which of course is PART of research - but he never generated a paper). What the department head did all day, I couldn't say - I was much too lowly.

In the office I came from in order to start working at that one, one guy spent almost all his time managing his portfolio - he was very into sector investing. Another, at my very low level, was late every Monday morning and left early every Friday, until our boss revealed to her that she had observed a "pattern of behavior" - whereupon my peer started putting in the right hours, but spent a lot of them chewing the fat with me and her other two coworkers. The computer room guys read books all day while running backup tapes (I did that job for a while and got a lot of creative writing done).

There were definitely people, many, in fact, who did their work. But their work did not take the number of person-hours that were being paid for.

In the modern era I have less exposure to government workers. But one I know, at a managerial level, works from home almost full-time, and takes a nap many if not most days. He definitely gets his job done - it just doesn't take 40 hours a week.

So I tend to agree with Musk 's overarching messages: for the most part, and given the choice, productivity will be higher when people are in the office. And, fewer people are necessary than we think.; 1/30/25, 11:13 PM