Pete Buttigieg has more intelligence, integrity, and sense in his nail clippings than Trump has exhibited in his entire oxygen-wasting life.
this post was submitted on 08 May 2025
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I posted this on another thread, but thought it was worth sharing here as well.
Heads up this is about to get worse. Republicans recently voted to cut retirement funding for air traffic controllers. By cutting the Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS) for workers retiring before 62 (all Air Traffic Controllers are required to retire at 56 and are eligible to retire at 50), this is completely fucking over ATCs who continue working by changing their retirement math.
An open secret with ATCs is that they have numerous medical qualifications that they have to maintain to keep working. For example, if they see a doctor about sleep apnea, depression, alcoholism, etc they lose their medical qualification and are forced to take a medical retirement.
So what happens if you're an ATC in your 40s and the government says "hey you can keep working for the next 10 years and retire without this FERS supplement... Or you can tell your doctor that you snore at night and take an immediate medical retirement right now and get paid more in retirement"?
TLDR; We're about to have a shit load of Air Traffic Controllers taking medical retirements and these staffing problems are going to explode.
Meritocracy in action.
If we’re playing that game I choose to play the Ronald Reagan card
Funny, things seemed to be fine under the previous administration. Odd!
It wasn't fine. ATC hasn't been properly staffed in decades, and many of them are functioning alcoholics because they can't get mental health support or they'll be forced to take unpaid leave for 6 months.
Like everything else, Trump made it all worse, but ATC has been struggling since before Reagan due to chronic underfunding. It's been getting worse as more and more of them retire. Trump made it worse by firing the replacements who had undergone years of training. When things began to derail, they hired back the ones that had already retired.
There's no game plan. Congress has no game plan in place to fix this. I'm not a both sides kind of person (check my comment history), but most elected officials in Congress are completely incompetent. It goes without saying for this administration as well.
As one example, the current problems in Newark are because there are just 20 ATCs that work that airport (from Philadelphia by wire) and 5 of them went on leave. This in turn caused downstream effects in other places because airlines cancelled flights or had to reroute. Think about that: the Northeast aviation system begins to fall apart if a single-digit number of people who normally work 6 days a week, who work overtime, decide to take leave.
The reason they went on leave is because they lost all communications for like 90 seconds when they were tracking a couple dozen flights. These people are such nervous wrecks and it came so close to a major aviation disaster that they had to go on leave to recuperate from the stress.
It's become very clear over the last 20 years that most people in charge all just assumed everything would continue to coast, the status quo would never change, and have absolutely no idea what to do when someone grabs the steering wheel and jerks it into the oncoming lanes.
In part, this is the thesis of the doc HyperNormalisation.
Everything became about the maintenance of the current order, instead of moving forward.
Just like climate change
That one I think is more "the people in charge figured they would all be dead before it became a problem"
I fully expect that if the cure for aging was discovered, billionaires would suddenly care a LOT more about climate change.
I mean that's kind of the significant problem... before it was basically stretched to the max, running in a way where an eventual problem was inevitable. Attempting to fix something that was unsustainably hanging by a thread by... thinning the thread created the insane powderkeg we have now though.
This is unfortunately the tip of the iceberg. Trump campaigned on the idea that the federal government was bloated and incompetent, then started firing people en masse without understanding what these people do.
It would be easy to blame Buttigeig for this outage had Trump not immediately made the condition worse.
Every time the federal government fails at doing something, DOGE is going to be blamed.
Honestly I'm expecting the federal government to effectively stop mattering due to cascade failure. Even somewhat stable empires can succumb to such events, but when you add in the raw unadulterated fucktards Trump has running things well it becomes inevitable.
I've always been leery of people who are never at fault and always blame someone else.
The buck stops literally anywhere else but here.
Nothing screams greatness and leadership like being a spineless weasel
PLus that claim responsability for archievements they had nothing to do with.
Or cheat and be proud of winning.
And so on...
Classic cluster B.
Wait. I thought it was DEI’s fault. Instead it’s really the fault of a guy who hasn’t worked there since Jan 20. It’s also not the cuts to the air traffic control sector of jobs that happened after Jan 20. Got it.
Of note, the producer of The Apprentice liked working with Trump because even after ratings fell and the show was in the dumpster, Trump would get out there and sell the show as brilliant, beloved, and with top ratings. It’s what he does.
Duh, Pete was a DEI hire for being gay
Biden's dei hire for being gay, and I heard he used a laptop and had emails!
He literally wears clown makeup. It's just so bizarre.
And no aliens even? Lame.
Imagine you're an astronaut for a national space agency on an exploration mission.
You are charting a usual star system named after an astronomer, Kepler.
Everything is normal but you detect trace gases of Nitrogen, Oxygen, Methane and Carbon Dioxide coming from the third planet orbitting the star.
News breaks about potentially organic compounds detected on an exoplanet and your space agency gives you authorization to approach and orbit for closer study.
When you get closer, you find an alarming sight -- more than half of the planet, Kepler-3, has golden lights dotting the dark half of the planet.
Initially, it's dismissed as natural atmospheric disturbances, but a few insightful individuals point out that they can see what look like geometric shapes, organized behavior of some kind.
It's at this point, the close range scans indicate not just some "organic gases" but trillions of organisms , all of them alien, and worst of all, possessing a chirality opposite to your own.
Your immune system and their pathogens, and your pathogens, are wholly incompatible. You touch anything, you get sick and die, and they get sick and die.
No amount of medicine cures opposite handed chirals. So you do the smart thing, and turn around and leave.
Then, a few years later, an organism on their planet says:
"Lame. Bad event happened and not even any aliens", being completely oblivious to the biological apocalypse their planet has been spared from.
It’s at this point, the close range scans indicate not just some “organic gases” but trillions of organisms , all of them alien, and worst of all, possessing a chirality opposite to your own.
Your immune system and their pathogens, and your pathogens, are wholly incompatible. You touch anything, you get sick and die, and they get sick and die.
Organisms on earth use right handed chirality without issue. Even humans manipulate some. Eating an alien would probably go poorly, but interacting with one (all you mass effect fans out there can lose the burgeoning boners, creeps, I mean in something as light as a 'handshake scenario') wouldn't be some terrible biological curse. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10851380/ I'm trying to scratch my head to remember because it's been a while, but I think there are archaebacteria that use the D forms even more than the normal incorporation into peptidoglycan. It's not a death sentence.
The fat orange guy is like if your project manager was also the junior-est dev on the team and insisted on getting permissions he didn’t need for projects he didn’t understand making changes without consulting senior devs or running smoke tests first.
“Why did you let me do that?”
The fat orange guy is like if your project manager was also the junior-est dev on the team and insisted on getting permissions he didn’t need for projects he didn’t understand making changes without consulting senior devs or running smoke tests first.
We have a guy on another team like that. Hired as a junior, suddenly he knows how to spell Ai and is an Ai Automation Engineer. The guy is clueless and feckless, and has the brains god gave a gnat when it comes to proper process to safeguard personal info or similarly important stuff. It's a daily gong show.
And his peer has begun making The Scrap Book. It'll get harvested the first time he fucks up, which may actually be too soon as he's running out of nice people to carry him.
The son of the CEO am I right?
But he’s not Biden…?
?
Typo
I'd love to hear his rationalization for why planes falling out of the sky under Buttigieg.
you aren't fooling anyone Donnie
Sadly I fully expect to hear that parroted from family soon.
Yep, that’s the problem. People do listen and accept without question.
Just keep asking them “why?” and watch their argument fall apart without Brett Baer or whatever ghoul they listen to making their argument for them.
Except, you know, tens of millions of American voters...
And I blame Trump's psychopathology on his mother
Urgent message from GOP: Get Outta Planes!!!