When you say that, do you mean the part that reads
> Online speculation that Southwest’s new vaccine mandate has led pilots to stage a sickout is being denied by the union representing Southwest pilots.
>That follows reporting on social media that some of the issues the airline is suffering could be related to that issue. A spokesperson for the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association (SWAPA) told the Arizona Republic it was not aware of any work stoppage and wouldn’t condone it anyway.
>SWAPA, however, has authorized its members to demonstrate against the mandate.
sounds like there is a vaccine mandate-related sickout going on, but it's officially unofficial. I don't know why that would be the case; there's no law against airline pilots doing such. Maybe the union doesn't want to be denounced for being allegedly "anti-science"?
Vaccines sickout would be a great misdirection for any company suffering an outage or internal failure. I haven’t actually heard of many of any effects ones though
Right, but unfortunately it leads to asking the most obvious question: Why are Southwest flight crews anti-vax when all the other airline flight crews are not?
That's dumb, and it makes no sense. But if it did, then everyone would want to know what the hell is wrong with the people at Southwest. Since it's not, the question is what the hell is wrong with the systems at Southwest.
It's just a baseless rumor as far as I can see. SW says there's a staffing problem at "one location in florida," and blames weather otherwise. Meanwhile at least the SW pilot's union says "our pilots are not participating in any official or unofficial job actions." Union goes on to say the disruption is because of SW's "bad management."
Given that the people who are ostensibly striking have yet to say anything, I think that no one is striking or walking out.
Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz tweeted claiming it was because of the vaccine mandate. I haven't seen anything from reliable sources with direct knowledge saying it had anything to do with vaccines. There were FAA staff issues specifically with the Florida area.
My take on it. If it was a strike I think we'd hear about it in more definitive terms than rumor. That's the point of a strike, disruption and attention.
Everyone who? As far as I can see no one is missing. At least no one who will stand up and be counted. Makes more sense SW fucked up trying to pinch pennies and got caught with their pants down.
Is there any indication that a greater than normal number of people are sick? The only people talking about a sickout that I can see are the ones who are congratulating the pilots on their sickout without any confirmation that there’s actually a sickout.
> Is there any indication that a greater than normal number of people are sick?
Aren't flights being cancelled? I guess people are just not showing up or something? I asked that question because if there isn't a protest then what? Something is being covered up, at least.
Lol, no, this started back in June; Southwest cancelled 2600 flights during that month and delayed something like 40% of its flights. It's a combination of several unrelated delays (weather, ATC staffing, military exercise) propagating back through the system and flight crews timing out before they can get to their final destination. It takes days if not longer for them to resolve these issues. There's no coverup; Southwest is just stretched too thin and has let their business get too fragile. And they're not alone: I feel like no one remembers American, United and Spirit all struggling with mass cancellations over the summer.
Would you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamewar comments to HN? You've been doing it repeatedly and we've already had to ask you more than once. I don't want to ban you, so it would be good if you would review the site guidelines and use the site as intended: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
The informational content of that tweet, or if you regard it as more than mere uninteresting noise, is an entirely different and more subjective matter.
> Pilots had to sleep at the airport because all the hotels were full. Since they weren't staying in beds or whatever, it didn't count as "crew rest" so all the crews were illegal.
Whether that particular story is true or not, or whether it explains all of the cancellations, there is a kernel of truth in it.
> "The ones [cancellations] that showed up on Saturday they said were because of crew hours," said Stewart, noting airline flight crews are mandated to rest after so many hours on duty.
A union would be incredibly foolish to admit that it is engaging in an illegal wildcat strike, so I don't think that statement is particularly useful either way.
I saw a similar claim in the comments of the tweet. Not knowing any southwest employees, I'm not sure how to go about either validating or invalidating the assertion.
It's in the air though, so I'll reserve judgement until we have more info.
Wouldn’t a widespread coordinated protest be extremely easy to verify?
To the contrary, the southwest pilots union (SWAPA) is explicitly saying these delays are not caused by vaccine protests, despite their continued opposition to the mandate.
Doesn't a strike need an authorization vote? Perhaps they couldn't get one. United Airlines has over 90% vaccinated employees. If the numbers are similar at Southwest, it might mean there isn't enough will to oppose the mandate through a formal action. That puts union leadership in an awkward position - they could say "some employees have gone rogue and taken sick time to protest the mandate", but that's kinda throwing some of their members under the bus.
> they could say "some employees have gone rogue and taken sick time to protest the mandate", but that's kinda throwing some of their members under the bus.
I suspect it would be a far better alternative than what happens if it turns out the union was used to organize a walk-out, although I don't know what the ramifications of breaking those laws are (criminal charges? union disbandment?)
I don't know what else it would be given the current timing. POTUS went in front of everyone bragging how mandates worked and used airlines as an example. Obviously people will be against promoting this if true. We'll see I guess.
The explanation of "weather and an FAA shutdown" doesn't make sense given that, according to the article, other airlines aren't experiencing this at all.
Oh, and for folks talking about a pilot protest against vaccine mandates, that theory is discussed at length toward the end of the article.
I imagine this kind of thing cascades quite badly if it goes wrong, so it's not unimaginable that they just got unlucky regarding where machines are/where crews that are rested are and it collapsed from there, whereas other airlines got lucky/predicted the consequences better/had more resilient planning.
(EDIT: which would match the union statement /u/hnburnsy quotes: but what was a minor temporary event for other carriers devastated Southwest Airlines because our operation has become brittle and subject to massive failures under the slightest pressure. Our operation and our frontline employees have endured continuous and unending disruptions since the first time our airline made headlines in early June due to widespread IT failures.)
Southwest also operates a flight network that relies on flights making multiple stops along the way, whereas many other airlines may have more direct flights that aren’t impacted as much by distant flights being delayed.
To counteract this Southwest does not do red eye flights which theoretically should allow them to reset operations overnight. This does not seem to be working for some reason.
Because to reset the whole network, they need a lot more pilots than they actually have. Someone would have to fly all the planes around at night, but it can’t be the pilots who flew during the day (they need to sleep at night). Like any airline, Southwest does not keep many more pilots on the payroll than they need under normal operations.
Often the limiting factors for an airline aren't the planes, but the humans to operate them. If the pilots aren't in the right place and available to fly, then an overnight to reset the positions of the planes does nothing. Nevermind the fact that resetting the network would in fact burn up flight time which seems to be in short supply.
Agreed, SWA canceled 2000 flights over the weekend, seems like they should enough rested crew to reset.
I did see in the Dallas Morning News that SWA had schedule the most flights today since the start of the Covid.
>Dallas-based Southwest planned more than 3,600 flights on Sunday, the most of any day since the COVID-19 pandemic began, but nearly one-third of those were canceled.
The union explicitly denies that a sickout is occurring in that same statement you've quoted:
> There are false claims of job actions by Southwest Pilots currently gaining traction on social media and making their way into mainstream news. I can say with certainty that there are no work slowdowns or sickouts either related to the recent mandatory vaccine mandate or otherwise. Under the RLA, our Union is forbidden from taking job action to resolve labor disputes under these circumstances. SWAPA has not authorized, and will not condone, any job action.
Southwest runs 3 to 4K commercial flights per day, which is about 1 in 7 commercial flights overall in the US. They depend on aircraft doing many short hops over the course of a single day: 7 or 8 is not uncommon. When things go bad it tends to disrupt the system very badly.
These numbers come from the US DOT ontime database. You can access the data in ClickHouse at https://github.demo.trial.altinity.cloud:8443 (user=demo, password=demo). This is a public instance running on Altinity.Cloud.
Nope, it's how short-haul single-aisle aircraft are operated. They make money only when operating a flight, and the more you can squeeze in a day, the more money it will make.
That's why their life in years is usually significantly lower than medium/long-haul multi-aisle aircraft, which often get converted to freighters after retirement, since the main thing that matters is number of pressurisation cycles ( and fuel efficiency, but it's whole different story).
It certainly wears them out. Hawiian Air has the highest number of pressurization cycles of any US commercial airline (at least as far as I can tell--ontime data shows up to 18). So far they seem to have managed it without issues.
Another airline in the region, Aloha Air, did suffer an inflight fatality in 1988 when the fuselage ruptured. The cause was apparently poor maintenance. [0]
Seeing stories like this makes me wonder if we'll ever see a company actually go bust based purely on the instability of its decades-old, duct-taped architecture.
I have a relative who works for a large credit card processor running on mainframe systems and I hear over and over again that they're all retiring and unable to fill the newly opened roles. This problem is compounded by the fact that their offshore contracting firms are cutting back on providing COBOL resources because there's a lot more money in supplying java/.net/etc. devs. The work culture there sounds so unsustainable and yet they're one of the largest payment processors in the country. If they were have widespread stability issues like this, things could get interesting.
It is maddening. Even if the stated goal is to “get off the mainframe” everybody deep down knows it isn’t going anywhere for 10 years. We recently had a discussion about porting from one mainframe “module” to another due to cost. I asked why we don’t just continue paying for the current module since the goal is to sunset mainframe. Everybody on the call laughed.
So we will go ahead and “invest” several man years and god knows how much money into a platform everybody agrees we should get off of.
I've been on the other side of this and seen too many teams neglect to fix even the simplest and most frustrating bugs in a system because they're going to rewrite it "in the next six months". Usually the rewrite is still going years later, and the actual code used in production is left to rot, holding back other teams as well.
Can you blame them? These are the same teams who typically refuse to adopt practices that would allow them to create tests and we'll encapsulated designs. So inevitably the team is once bitten twice shy about breaking production. Why be the poor bastard who introduced anything but the tiniest bugfix?
I definitely agree it's a matter of incentives. Even in an environment with a now healthier quality culture, fixing bugs to bring an old system from 70% functionality to 100% is typically a career dead end.
It's much better to leave it broken and build a new system with 105% functionality so you can take credit for the whole 105%.
And typically, optimists that we are, it seems like completely reimplementing the original functionality will be "trivial" compared to merely trying to understand how the existing solution works.
It happens when you have a lot of new people who refuse to work with legacy code (which is anything over 2 years old), trivialize the complexity of the existing system (because they don’t understand a tenth of what it does), go create a sub par replacement with tons of people and years of work (that ends up coupled to the legacy system anyways), and now the company has two systems to maintain requiring double the resources as before. When everyone gets fed up and leaves, the cycle will start again. Our system is about four levels deep now. It’s the f’ing matrix.
Most of the new development I've worked on has been terrible, I attribute it to agile and the two week sprints churning out non stop MVP code that's technical debt from day one.
The way the survivorship bias works out, this is generally a strength, not a weakness.
You want to get good money, you learn how stuff works under the hood and get familiar with your predecessor architectures, emulate them if you need to.
I have to disagree. These systems aren't "survivors" - they're held together with a fragile weave of scripts, hacks, unsupported hardware and outdated knowledge. Often treated as a black box, they become an object that people have to hand-nurse through issues that would never trouble modern systems. The amount of effort and money that's expended to maintain these systems is typically far more than the upfront cost would be to replace them every decade with a more modern one, but that would look bad in the short term financials, so we keep babysitting the tower of glass and praying it doesn't fall.
I spent multiple years of my life working on a (at the time I started) decade+ project to retire such a system (i.e. a duct-taped hodgepodge of poorly documented COBOL and mainframe assembler that was understood and maintained by staff who was entering retirement age at an astounding rate), at a "midsize" financial company (i.e. between 3k and 4k employees, all told). While the cost of maintaining the old system was certainly high, it worked astonishingly well (provided you didn't need to add new features, such as a "graphical interface"), and the cost and difficulty in replacing it was truly enormous. I think you're drastically underselling the difficulty of re-implementing a company's entire suite of LOB software, complete with migrations and training, and likely with very little in the way of flexibility to change the core business rules/logic.
Furthermore,
> they're held together with a fragile weave of scripts, hacks, unsupported hardware and outdated knowledge
Swapping out COBOL for typescript and mainframes for linux boxes and a pile of YAML is not going to change any of that. People can and will build garbage with any set of tools you give them. Not ever software problem is like use-after-free where you can fix it forever with a sufficiently clever piece of tech.
> These systems aren't "survivors" - they're held together with a fragile weave of scripts, hacks, unsupported hardware and outdated knowledge.
It can be, depending on the system and who's complaining about it. Sometimes a fragile, buggy, mess of a legacy system is actually fragile and buggy, with failures causing downtime or lost business, and creaky processes slowing new development to a crawl. Sometimes it's just a system that has an unfamiliar or slightly less ergonomic developer experience, that uses older technologies that some developers don't want to learn. You have to look past the complaints and judge for yourself.
A reply to myself since I can't edit: Survivorship bias may not completely describe what I'm talking about here but another commenter posted about Lindy Effect, which is 100% on the nose:
Right... they can't train someone on COBOL? I call b.s. on that. It's an HR issue, you need blah blah degrees and yadi yadi yada experience. Big corps don't adopt to job economy changes over time like this unless their core business is built to adopt to economic changes. Inability to make exemptions and place the right first line managers over teams is what kills big companies, or forces them into an endless loop of unoriginal aquisitions and failures imo.
Not if they can’t find anyone willing to learn COBOL.
There’s huge demand for developers on modern systems. Seriously, how much are you going to pay a developer to do mainframe COBOL - and is that developer going to produce commensurate value, really able to hold together a crumbling antique infrastructure?
Fwiw, one of the highest paid coders I ever knew worked for a big stuffy bank. He was unfireable because he was the only one that knew the internal systems as well as he did. Learning COBOL may be a huge long term competitive advantage in the workforce, especially if the current dotcom-esque funny money dries up.
Plenty of people working helpdesk that know a bit of python who can learn COBOL if they knew a job offer was on the other end of the investment in learning the language. There are hoards of people learning python and powershell just so they can make more money, trust me when I say they (the people I see learning python for career prospects) have no sentimental attachment to the language.
I don't think it's learning COBOL language that's the hard part. An inexperienced programmer who hasn't worked on financial systems is going to make security mistakes and write buggy code for awhile, both of which can be deadly to a bank. But it would be better to have that person rewrite the infrastructure than try to fix bugs. The problem with these ancient systems is trying to understand how bugs arise from subtle unintended interactions within millions of lines of code. I've been coding many languages for 25 years and I would consider it extremely daunting to try to tackle a bank bug knowing that one wrong assumption about one line of code could crash whole systems or cost millions of dollars.
Sure, but a veteran coder at least understands that tampering with something may affect some other subsystem you don't even know exists until it breaks... which you wouldn't even think to test. The idea of throwing the phone staff into COBOL instead of them learning Python just obfuscates the real problem which isn't that the language is uncool and dying but that the systems are like the rules of the NFL. They stopped making sense a long time ago to anyone who wasn't immersed and paying attention.
Ah, yeah, fully agree - I just saw your mention of having 25 years experience, which made me think basically "if not you, then who?"
I didn’t intend to imply that the problem could be solved by an army of people fresh out of boot camps with no senior level supervision.
I'm also realizing now that just because you "would consider it extremely daunting" does not necessarily mean that you don't think you could be a net positive contributor.
Suppose you accept 1.5x or 2x or even 3x your annual salary to take a COBOL job. Nice... for now.
What happens in 2, 5, or 10 years when this COBOL gig ends?
Now your skills have withered or disappeared and you're 2, 5, or 10 years behind when it comes to "modern" technologies where 99.9% of the job opportunities are.
In a sense, that COBOL job is a gamble. You are gambling that you can ride that sucker until retirement.
Of course there are other possibilities. You could sock most of that extra $$$ away and spend a year retraining yourself, or something, if/when that COBOL job ends. Or whatever.
Staking a career on something that has existed for only 8 years is a huge gamble. Most people build careers around concepts and tools that have existed anywhere from decades to millennia.
> What happens in 2, 5, or 10 years when this COBOL ends?
What happens in 1 or 2 years when the current hottest new full-stack, mvc, reactive 3.0 whatever is old and tired and you have to learn the new thing? You learn the new thing.
I meant, "when this COBOL gig ends", not "when this COBOL ends" which is what I initially typed.
I agree that COBOL will outlive a lot of these modern flash-in-the-pan frameworks.
However, the number of COBOL jobs will dwindle over time, and if I took a theoretical COBOL job today it's not clear to me that I would be particularly employable if/when that job ended. Particularly if I am unable/unwilling to relocate as I suspect COBOL jobs may be much less likely to be remote.
Whereas, in comparison, if one stays current in Ruby/Python/JS/.NET/Java then one's prospects would remain strong for the forseeable future. "Staying current" on the tech treadmill is of course its own special hell, but it is probably the safer road.
What happens in 1 or 2 years when the current
hottest new full-stack, mvc, reactive 3.0 whatever
is old and tired and you have to learn the new
thing? You learn the new thing.
OK, but how employable are you at that point?
It's going to take some significant effort to catch back up.
Perhaps more crucially, your resume is not going to be appealing to potential employers. If they're looking for hotshots in the latest framework, do you think they're going to look kindly upon a candidate who's spent the last X years working with COBOL?
There are ways to address that, such as getting up to speed in Trendy Framework XYZ and making some portfolio pieces, open source contributions, etc. But, that's not always a smooth road.
>It's going to take some significant effort to catch back up.
You got 2x (or whatever) the salary until then. That should give you plenty of time to catch up. Currently anybody is employed anyways if one knows how to use a keyboard. I don't think that is ending anytime soon.
Will they learn enough COBOL to be worth the money? Seeing how hard it is to find good mobile developers, and having lived in a COBOL shop back in the heyday, I don’t see a meaningful number of talented “show me the money” types passing up modern tech for antiques.
Banks are genetically incapable of doing anything useful in terms of technology. Their mainframe architecture was outdated 40 years ago! They will forever maintain their hacks and buggy software.
Please define "buggy software." Can you point to a single confirmed case in the US of a person's bank account balance disappearing, or even a deposit not appearing, due to a software bug? I doubt it. Banks' core software is rock solid or they would be out of business very, very quickly.
Banks have procedures and regulations that protect customers from those issues. In fact there's a lot of of secondary checks and offline reconciliation precisely to catch potential software errors.
Not the US, but in the UK which I think is comparable:
* https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/aug/28/many-hsbc-cust... (I believe this one was caused by firing greybeards who understood a certain very complicated batch processing system and offshoring to undertrained staff in India who then make a mistake and basically brough the entire system down as a knock-on effect)
Now, in all these cases I believe the outages lasted a few days at least where people had limited or no access to bank accounts, salaries not paid on time, incorrectly charged overdraft fees, automated payments not happening etc.
It can probably be argued what is "core" here and as far as I know no money actually disappeared into the ether but, in the UK at least, I am not sure I would be so confident in my declaration of Rock Solid software.
Thanks, these examples confirm my point. The old, ancient, "outdated" (as the original poster claimed) software worked fine for years/decades. The failures that you cited were introduced during an upgrade, a rewrite/outsourcing, or due to a 3rd party outage.
But requirements change, so upgrades are a normal part of business, due to at the bare minimum legal reporting requirements changing, even if there weren't all sorts of new things like internet banking making their old APIs inadequate.
If the software isn't extendable or changeable then it isn't 'working fine', because if you can't offer internet banking or do FATCA reporting you go out of business or get shut down.
You've cited two comparatively minor failures confined to a very small subset of what banks do. There's a whole lot of critical software systems in banks that don't touch personal bank accounts. If you've ever worked on bank systems before, it was certainly in a very limited capacity.
I did code-level support for a large internal data management system for the federal reserve bank in the mid aughts. I'm not really interested in disclosing the specific bland but critically important data we moved/managed. It involved a giant amalgam of legacy commercial AIX and HP-UX software with some newer Java stuff in a Websphere environment. It was all duct-tape-and-bubble-gummed together with huge ksh88 scripts that were in constant development by devs and support people like me who'd just ssh into production systems to make changes. None of the internal software had dev/test systems, there was definitely no code review, and there was no version control. Yep. The system on a whole required constant monitoring and intervention to keep it plodding along. We did periodically see data loss that was unrecoverable from a technological standpoint but recovered with physical media kept around from their necessarily belt-and-suspenders business practices and tons of available staff for data entry. I reckon tens-of-thousands of folks outside the bank would have been affected per incident.
If you're committed to not knowing something then I can't stop you.
But compared to, say, tens of thousands of investment transactions for pension and retirement funds evaporating, disbursements to a hospital's operations budget being delayed, sending confidential historical balance records in bulk to a large corporate customer's competitor, having an online investment system down during a period of extreme market volatility, or even large-scale customer data breaches, then yes. 'Money missing from a bank account' is in every significant way a comparatively minor problem probably fixable with a phone call and a couple hours of investigation on the bank's part, even with a significant sum of money. The bank would almost certainly catch it themselves during an automated audit. It's exactly the sort of problem that bookkeeping organizations are designed to mitigate and root out if they do happen.
The others could affect many, many more people's lives for much longer— potentially permanently.
Money disappearing is a minor failure in the sense that it is easy to track. Banks do daily audits to check that money sent in one side is deposited in another. If there is any issue, they will track it and rectify within the 3 days grace period created exactly to work around these bugs.
Has that really not happened to you or someone you know? It is (typically) eventually recovered, yes; and you can often understand how/why it happened. But it definitely happens, and requires manual human intervention for fixing. Here's 2 incidents that happened to me or friends in the last month:
- took a trip to the neighboring country, my friend tried to take out money from an ATM; first two transactions failed, third succeeded (at the atm). In the bank though, all "succeeded", and money were gone (first 2 eventually were reversed with manual intervention).
- I sold a house (in a remote mountain village), buyer sent 8100EUR from Germany, 78xy.z EUR made it to my personal bank account. Apparently due to multiple currency exchanges, but this is a SEPA transfer between two accounts both denominated in EUR, this was absolutely not supposed to happen and nobody was able to articulate exactly "why it happened" (or even exactly what happened). For this one the buyer decided to just eat the loss and sent me an additional 300EUR.
What do you mean by 'useful' here? Facebook goes down for half a day and everybody laughs. Take 'banks' down for the same amount of time and see what happens.
It's pretty standard for banks to "go down" outside the hours of 9am-5pm. Nearly everything meaningful that a bank does is processed in batch, often with days-long delays.
Operationally, Facebook is a vastly harder problem.
Multi-hour outages are already relatively common and getting more frequent by the year for banks. About 10 days ago there was a massive Bank of America outage.
Decades-old, duct-taped architecture is endemic across the airline industry though, and AFAIK Southwest isn't even particularly bad on this front. American Airlines's original reservation system Sabre, still a major GDS player today, was first put together in the 1950s and is by some reckonings the oldest commercial (as in, non-government/military/research) computer system out there.
Southwest are better than most NA carriers in this regard, they switched to Amadeus a few years ago. Which is "only" 10-30 years old (depending on the components).
Your comment is being downvoted not because people disagree with you, but because it is not bringing anything constructive to the discussion. Perhaps if you bothered to write about what you think the meltdown really is related to, your commend would have some value.
The original comment from the union only mentioned IT issues from June.
"Our operation and our frontline employees have endured continuous and unending disruptions since the first time our airline made headlines in early June due to widespread IT failures."
That's what makes it misdirection, mentioning an issue from June, and very specifically not talking about a current IT issue. If there were a current issue, they would have called it out. The union has also been pretty clear in other statements that operational issues over the past few months were due to staffing shortages, not IT.
Right. COBOL is not some mythical ancient knowledge that can't be learned today. I'm pretty sure anyone who can learn Haskell can learn COBOL too, it's just a question of making them want to.
Sounds like it isn't a myth - you yourself admit there aren't people who know it, just that would OFFER to learn it given the appropriate compensation.
By that logic, there isn't a shortage of anything if you have enough money.
Decades-old does not mean duct-taped. It means every edge case has been hit, it's rock solid, and it works. There are many patches on top of patches, and the system is hard to comprehend for someone new. But it's a heck of a lot more stable that something redesigned.
The real issue here, is during bad weather and understaffed ATC, for some reason the airforce decided to do some training in airspace used by commercial flights. This military training part in the article is mentioned quickly, then completely ignored.
This was the US Military causing delays, cancellations, and people getting stuck overnight at airports. This was the US Military causing huge operational and financial issues for one of the most customer-friendly airlines out there. And the did this while eating up millions of dollars that are taken out of our paychecks - that they used to screw us. Time for congress to remove the funds that allowed them to conduct this training at a time when it caused problems for the general population paying their salaries.
If the cause is the military, why is southwest so disproportionately affected, and being affected in so many cities?
> “The problems weren’t concentrated in just one particular region. The cancelations affected the entire Southwest network. People living in cities where Southwest has a big operation, like Phoenix, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and where I am in the San Francisco Bay Area, saw cancelations in the double-digits.”
an airport is a hub for an airline, but not for other airlines. if southwest has 50 planes at an airport, and delta has 10 southwest is going to be impacted. when your plane takeoffs are cancelled at your hub, every single flight that was going to use that plane later in the day, or the following day, is now missing a plane.
if Chicago O'hare is shut down, United is done for the day in half the country, because half its planes are stuck at O'hare. if Chicago Midway is shut down, only Southwest is screwed. if Atlanta shuts down, only Delta is screwed.
Yes, I'm sure there are other cities that also had planes. Like Phoenix. Except the plane that was supposed to land in Phoenix is stuck in Florida. Or the pilot piloting the plane already in Phoenix is stuck in Florida.
Planes go from one city to another. If you introduce a blockage along the way, you've now taken that plane, or a crew out of commission.
Decades old might definitely mean duct taped and unstable. In about 1995 I witnessed the beginning of the end of at the time very successful company that just had tripled their whole organisation. But the code base was 5 million lines of a lot of copy pasted literal spaghetti code. And only a handful of ageing coders that had been with the company almost from the start could get anything done. And then, one day, those damn customers demanded a Windows application, instead of the classy DOS application.
>Online speculation that Southwest’s new vaccine mandate has led pilots to stage a sickout is being denied by the union representing Southwest pilots.
>That follows reporting on social media that some of the issues the airline is suffering could be related to that issue. A spokesperson for the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association (SWAPA) told the Arizona Republic it was not aware of any work stoppage and wouldn’t condone it anyway.
>SWAPA, however, has authorized its members to demonstrate against the mandate.
sounds like there is a vaccine mandate-related sickout going on, and the union is unofficially encouraging it but doesn't want to be seen as doing so. I don't know why that would be the case; there's no law against airline employees doing an industrial action. Maybe the union doesn't want to be denounced for being allegedly "anti-science"?
If this is the result of a sickout, I assume the current administration could direct the Dept of Defense to make military pilots available to Southwest in the event of an extended availability issue with their union pilots.
Not as brutal as Reagan breaking the ATC union, but supporting a common carrier in a time of crisis. I don’t believe a federal case has been heard yet where the vaccine mandate or terminating those refusing it has been found unlawful.
Groups of chimpanzees are often led by the strongest one. They are also often not led by the strongest one - you can take over the group by forming a coalition to depose the current leader.
> I assume the current administration could direct the Dept of Defense to make military pilots available to Southwest
Yeah just have them switch to a completely different type of aircraft without getting trained or checked out at all, this will definitely fix the problem in short order.
I understand you have an axe to grind, as many of your recent posts are anti vaccination in nature. Regardless, public support is robust for the measures being taken to bring the pandemic public health crisis to a conclusion, and with regards to vaccine mandates and terminating those who refuse, so far those actions have been adjudicated as lawful. So, the current administration has to get creative when you have cohorts purposely attempting to subvert public health measures (for whatever benefit they believe there is).
I don’t disagree it’s your right to decline a vaccine, but it’s also your employer’s right to mandate it and terminate you if you decline it. I’m unsure why these are controversial points or are heated conversations; this is the natural conclusion of everyone exercising their rights. This isn’t even novel; vaccine requirements have been standard for some time (hepatitis, measles, etc) in schools and workplaces.
I ask because I am genuinely curious as someone willingly vaccinated.
Unsubstantiated claims that any level of vaccination is sufficient to "end the pandemic" notwithstanding, anyone who thinks it's a good idea to give employers broad power to mandate unwanted medical procedures can't see more than two inches in front of their own face.
Public support for vaccine mandates for employment stands at about 60%. Let's see how that number holds up when they find themselves without plane flights and hospital beds.
"This isn't even novel" is such blatant gaslighting it's hardly even worth addressing. Aside from hospital employees and soldiers no one in this country has ever had to demonstrate vaccination to their employer for anything -- and certainly not with vaccines with the paucity of long-term study and godawful side effect profiles that characterize the Covid vaccines.
Can you explain employers and schools who previously had vaccine mandates (hepatitis and measles are examples I’ve seen for schools and healthcare workers) and what makes this vaccine different?
If the argument is “mandates are wrong”, we’ve had them for over 150 years. If the argument is it’s not safe, its FDA approved and has been administered over a billion times.
EDIT: @LurkingPenguin: While this is a good point, the data shows that vaccination protects against an intense infection resulting in the need of ICU and ventilation care (protection having been infected by COVID and recovering from previously does not).
Both of those vaccines had been in widespread use for years before any mandate was ever instituted. Hospitals often also accept natural immunity in lieu of vaccination for every other vaccine besides COVID, where orthodoxy demands denying that natural immunity even exists.
Schools also never mandated flu shots, which are a much closer analog to the Covid vaccines both in terms of effectiveness (imperfect, leaky, marginal reduction of transmission at best, wearing off over time) and seriousness of the underlying disease than measles or hepatitis.
They haven't mandated flu shots yet. Once they see how easy it was to manipulate public opinion, wouldn't be surprised to have mandated flu shots in the near future in addition to whatever other gain-of-function research virus they accidentally release next:
The evidence suggests this vaccine has zero effect on reducing the spread of covid: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-021-00808-7 . The vaccinated have also been found to carry no less viral load than unvaccinated (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34176397/) and a greater proportion of variants: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.19.21262139v... , possibly due to it being a non-neutralising vaccine (unlike e.g. the measles vaccine). Such a vaccine only reduces symptoms, doesn't kill the virus, so much like an incomplete course of antibiotics can encourage the spread of antibiotics-resistant bacteria, a non-neutralising vaccine can encourage the spread of vaccine-resistant bacteria (termed "immune escape").
That first link doesn't really back up "zero effect on reducing the spread of covid". It's a non-peer-reviewed discussion of some graphs from Our World In Data.
Their analysis is incredibly shallow, for example comparing Portugal or Iceland (high vaccination rate, mostly open, lots of COVID cases) to Vietnam (low vaccination rate, completely locked down at the time the analysis was done, not many COVID cases). You can't make any inference about the vaccine / caseload relationship when you ignore the fact that one country is completely open and the other had such a strict lockdown that people were struggling to get food.
>It's a non-peer-reviewed discussion of some graphs from Our World In Data.
A discussion published in the European Journal of Epidemiology. It doesn't just look at those two countries; its statistical analysis covers 68 countries and 2947 US counties. You don't think that if the vaccine were effective at preventing spread, there should be at least some evidence of this effect when comparing vaccination rate and spread across different regions?
The discussion completely ignores basically all the potential confounding factors. Two huge ones are lockdown measures and level of testing.
Even in a largely vaccinated population, if you do widespread community testing you will find a lot of asymptomatic cases. If you don't do widespread community testing you won't. So you can have wildly different caseloads in two highly-vaccinated populations, yet no meaningful medical difference in the outcomes (since, as we know, vaccination is an effective prevention against serious illness and death).
Even ignoring all confounding factors it should still be possible to detect an effect via regression. It's like if you try to price S&P off just one of its constituent stocks; you're still going to observe some correlation even when only looking at a single large constituent.
> since, as we know, vaccination is an effective prevention against serious illness and death
Could you please share a meaningful study that comes to this conclusion and does not ignore all potential confounding factors? (I don't mean it in a confrontational way; I'm genuinely curious since I only managed to find heavily confounded data)
Could you please provide a peer reviewed study that takes into account all potentially confounding factors that shows the claim you made in the last sentence related to prevention against deaths?
When I look at the pfizer 6 month study (not peer reviewed) I do not see that.
Every dataset I look says the opposite so I would love to see the peer reviewed study that takes into account all potential confounding factors that led you to your conclusion.
Surprising how many people downvote blindly without even making an attempt to argue against the data and conclusions of those studies. It's like an anti-critical-thinking cult.
Most of the "vaccine mandates" provided as supporting examples for absolute COVID vaccine mandates have exclusions for those who have existing immunity.
For example, individuals who have had a laboratory-confirmed measles infection or can otherwise prove immunity do not need to be vaccinated against measles according to the CDC[1].
Over 44 million Americans have already had a laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection and the science indicates that people who have recovered from infection have significant protection not inferior and perhaps superior to vaccine-based immunity[2].
The vast majority of people who have had a laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection in the US can prove it as easily as people who have been vaccinated can prove they were vaccinated.
The conclusion is that because the approval process was expedited, the safety risks Moderna posed to under-30s were not discovered until millions had already taken it. I.e. these vaccines have gone through a much shorter time period of testing than previous ones.
I am not familiar with the Nordic legal environment, but this could be that because Pfizer has a better safety profile than Moderna, so they'd rather use Pfizer. At the same time, both Pfizer and Moderna are much safer than raw covid according to all direct data that I've seen.
Haha, not sure about below 30, but below 18 both covid and vaccines have minuscule negative impact. Instead of arguing whether the impact is 1:100,000 or 1:90,000 (AHA, vaccine mandates for children are a moral imperative because after adjusting for adverse effects short term numbers lean oh so slightly in favor of vaccines), perhaps drop the conversation as irrelevant altogether? There are other concerns in life...
> godawful side effect profiles that characterize the Covid vaccines
Can you provide some references regarding the side effect profiles of these vaccines being any worse than a typical vaccine? Genuinely interested, as from casual observation it doesn't seem to be the case.
VAERS is unverified, unfiltered user-generated content.
> “Many of these types of claims that we hear are actually a misrepresentation of the VAERS data,” Vasudevan said.
> The pace of reporting has picked up: In North Carolina alone, roughly 70,000 reports have come in related to the COVID vaccines — more than triple the total back in May, when CBS 17 explained what the database does — and does not — tell you.
> “It is reasonable to expect that reports on VAERS increase whenever there is a new vaccine on the market,” Vasudevan said. “And that’s definitely what we are seeing with COVID.”
> What the system makes perfectly clear: It does not establish a cause-and-effect relationship between any vaccine and those side effects. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explicitly says the reports “may include incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental and unverified information.”
> Among the reported side effects of the COVID vaccines in North Carolina: Yawning, fractures, a foot deformity, and wisdom tooth removal.
> She estimates that 85 percent of the reports on VAERS are “either completely unrelated to vaccinations, or about events that pose little to no concern.”
So, going back to the slide, let's assume most stuff in VAERS is trash. Why then have we been running it for 31 years? As the slide puts it, is VAERS a functioning pharmacovigilance system?
If not, what is? From what I've heard, the similar systems abroad are seeing the same kind of stuff. Are they trash too? What accounts for the system being polluted at such a higher level during the last two years?
If we don't have a working system that would warn us about vaccine adverse reactions, that's not evidence that the vaccines are safe, it's just failure to keep track of something very important.
> It does not establish a cause-and-effect relationship between any vaccine and those side effects.
It's not supposed to. The system is supposed to warn us about problems which kick off investigations.
The SNR is probably pretty high in VAERS in general most of the time, but when we have a misinformation pandemic combined with a real pandemic, it's easy to see how the data becomes polluted pretty fast.
And I agree, the USA should probably have better reporting systems!
Some other countries do, some of them have much better data quality than VAERS, and genuine analysis of them still agrees that the vaccines have a good safety profile. To just select a few English-language systems:
> but it’s also your employer’s right to mandate it and terminate you if you decline it
I don't believe any significant number of employers genuinely want to terminate employees who don't have it. They are being coerced into doing it by the Biden administration, which has actively proclaimed its desire and intention to do just that. This isn't the natural conclusion of free individuals exercising their rights, this is top-down authoritarianism.
If "public support is robust", then why are they actively suppressing news about the cause of this issue? Regardless of what you or I think, it sure seems like whoever is doing these things thinks that we're a hair's breadth away from large-scale rebellion and they don't dare let anyone know why this action was really done or how successful it has been.
> so far those actions have been adjudicated as lawful
This feels more like a dismissive dunk than an attempt at understanding, compassion, or logical argument. It says, we have the power to force you to do it, nobody cares what you think, so shut up and do as you're told or we're going to smash you and nobody will care. The only "rights" being exercised here are the self-proclaimed "rights" of the elite to jam any policy they want down everyone's throat and destroy them using aggressive force if they object or resist.
I am also willingly vaccinated. But I see that these vaccines are clearly much less effective than we were told and have more significant side-effects than anyone is willing to admit. I am against mandating them for anyone who doesn't decide they want one without coercion, and I am becoming increasingly appalled at how many of my fellow citizens are embracing authoritarian measures.
>So, the current administration has to get creative when you have cohorts purposely attempting to subvert public health measures (for whatever benefit they believe there is).
You didn't address AndrewBissell's point. As others have pointed out, there just aren't enough military pilots who are rated today to fly even a small fraction of Southwest's fleet. Further, assigning a large number of active-duty aviators to gain certification to fly 737s would massively disrupt the US's military posture. This is fact, no matter how "creative" the Biden administration may try to be. (And don't even try to bring up federalizing ANG/Reserve pilots. Most of them are already pilots at other airlines!)
The military only has a small number of pilots trained on the C-40, and they're needed for actual military operations. Even with basic type familiarity, every airline has it's own unique operating procedures and so new pilots always have to pass an extensive training program including classes, simulator time, and rides with check pilots. This is mandatory for safety. No legitimate airline would take shortcuts there just because of a temporary crew shortage. If a Southwest flight crashed because the Captain and First Officer weren't following identical checklist procedures in an emergency that would be far worse than cancelling a bunch of flights.
A fairly high percentage of airline pilots are also part time pilots in the National Guard or Reserves, so they may be simultaneously rated for a certain airliner type as well as a military aircraft. But that doesn't really help for this situation.
28 C-40s built, ever [0]. Southwest has 737 737s in service [1]. (also, lol at the coincidental number)
There's 91 P-8s [2] in USN service, but still not really enough to make up the shortfall. 165 737NGs delivered in military configurations worldwide, according to [3].
How many military pilots do you think have a current type rating on the 737? The C-40 pilots could probably transition quickly but there's only 28 C-40s in the US fleet so probably not enough pilots to make a realistic difference.
This isn't just a case of paperwork, either. A pilot can't safely operate a completely different type without training. Even if you expedite it, it's likely that resolving the industrial action will take less time.
I don't think vaccine mandates should be unlawful from private companies, but IMO it would be better if they gave a choice between a vaccine and having a recent test. If you need a vaccine or a negative test administered in the last 72 hours to attend work, it's very inconvenient to choose the test route but at least employees wouldn't be able to make the argument that they are being "forced" to get the vaccine.
The rapid test isn't very accurate especially in the absence of a full blown infection. The annual cost of doing a PCR test twice a week to ensure you always have an actually accurate test within 72 hours of working would be around $15,600. This is about 43% of the gross individual median income.
For practical purposes employers can't afford to pay near 50% more for the least reasonable employees, the government isn't incentivized to do so to make it easier not to vaccinate when this is really a poor substitute insofar as public health, and only the minority of employees can afford this.
In effect the end result of a practical testing alternative is to pretend we are giving them a choice while in fact giving them little choice.
% chance of having covid * % chance of being asymptomatic * the % chance of the test failing * % chance that you transmit it to someone who is vaccinated * % chance they actually become sick..... this is one figleaf of an excuse for these mandates
Such chances are cumulative over time and number of unvaccinated coworkers. Given a large body of unvaccinated there is no reason to suppose that the chance of infection doesn't continue over many years and approach 1 over multiple years.
I and a lot of others don't accept any reasonable chance that you are going to kill me or my family members at work today.
Instead of trying to reason badly via analogy I invite you to consider to consider the plain facts of the case. In terms of strategy especially near term the overall health of the American people is what it is. A multitude of factors like aging and many health conditions are immovable rocks beyond our power to affect while others like weight are diet may be individually tractable but in aggregate we cannot expect at a stroke to make massive change whereas we absolutely can vaccinate everyone.
Even the best of choices at this juncture will leave you at some risk even if you are young healthy and hale and far less risk if you choose to vaccinate. Describing it as a weak patch to bad health just belies reality.
For many who make up much of the dead the best route to safety lies in both they and people like you choosing to vaccinate so you don't infect and kill them. I have bad asthma. I cannot just "do some sports" and eat some leafy greens to ameliorate that risk. Worse my wife has an autoimmune disorder that requires her to take immuno suppressive medication. The best data so far suggests that if she were to get infected despite vaccination her chance of mortality would be on the order of 1 in 8 with some cardiovascular or lung damage being likely inevitable because she wont know to stop taking the weekly meds that stomp on her immune system until the virus already has a foothold.
She is hardly alone. There are millions of people like her in addition to 54 million 65+. People who by and large can't afford to live in a bubble. It just impossible for a large portion of the population to isolate. I have little choice but to do an in person job that might expose me to someone who thinks like yourself and have their sniffles scar my lungs that don't work that great to start with or end my wife's life whereas if we could get people like yourself to understand the unmitigatable risk others face we could drastically reduce that risk by taking a risk that in the scheme of things is no riskier than driving to work this morning and just getting a shot.
The rapid antigen test is considerably less accurate than a PCR test if the goal is individual medical treatment, but if the goal is public health, it's potentially more effective. Michael Mina makes the case for this persuasively in a recent UCSF Grand Rounds[1].
These tests could be made available at scale and cheaply, as is the case in many European countries, but we have chosen not to do that. This is a mistake we can fix, but it's agonizing how late we are - I was pushing my congresspeople to unblock it in January or February.
Correction, as was the case in many European countries. Freely available tests in e.g. Germany ended today, as the cost of a vaccine shot is cheaper than that of a rapid test while tests need to be repeated every 24h.
> I assume the current administration could direct the Dept of Defense to make military pilots available to Southwest in the event of an extended availability issue with their union pilots.
No, they could not, not without a wholesale reworking of the entire FAA. Pilots are trained and certified on individual airplanes; even highly experienced pilots need retraining in order to safely fly a new aircraft. Shoving a bunch of military pilots into 737s is both highly illegal, and would probably result in some plane crashes.
They might have enough, there are 122 P-8s in service, and surely the Navy has > 1 pilot per P-8.
I can’t speak to any material differences between the P-8 and the civilian 737, but legally this still seems problematic. The DoD isn’t required to type certify their aircraft, and it doesn’t look like the P-8 or the C-40 (also a 737) are type certified as a 737, which means their pilots probably can’t legally fly a 737 civilian model. I could be wrong though, the FAA’s website is hard to navigate.
According to an analyst that CBS talked to https://www.cbsnews.com/news/southwest-flight-cancellations-... Southwest was hit harder because of they way they organize their routes. Not having "hubs" means they can't create alternate routes quickly. So the delays in Florida cascaded back, stranding planes and crews as well as passengers. He also says they'd already scheduled more flights than they can handle, but I don't know exactly what that means.
That's very subjective and anecdotal, and no doubt reflects a huge selection bias. Why not compare with Kuwait, which has a similar rate of so-called "obesity", but has a lower rate of COVID-19 than many US states?
This assumes that COVID-19 deaths are equally distributed across the entire population, regardless of obesity. Without evidence, it is not accurate to assume this equal distribution.
Nor is there evidence for the claim that the so-called "obese" (as measured by the flawed and worthless BMI standard https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106268...) are dying disproportionately. Calling it the fault of the "obese" is just another way of deflecting blame from the criminally selfish and incompetent behavior of the previous administration and leaders in states like Idaho, Texas, Tennessee, and Florida.
>SWA has claimed that the immediate causes of this weekend’s meltdown were staffing at Jacksonville Center and weather in the southeast U.S., but what was a minor temporary event for other carriers devastated Southwest Airlines because our operation has become brittle and subject to massive failures under the slightest pressure. Our operation and our frontline employees have endured continuous and unending disruptions since the first time our airline made headlines in early June due to widespread IT failures. Our Pilots are tired and frustrated because our operation is running on empty due to a lack of support from the Company.
They also explicitly deny that a sickout is occuring:
> There are false claims of job actions by Southwest Pilots currently gaining traction on social media and making their way into mainstream news. I can say with certainty that there are no work slowdowns or sickouts either related to the recent mandatory vaccine mandate or otherwise. Under the RLA, our Union is forbidden from taking job action to resolve labor disputes under these circumstances. SWAPA has not authorized, and will not condone, any job action.
Or at least not publicly admiting to it - which if the statement is to believed would be illegal, which sounds like a good motive to deny any knowledge.
>Under the RLA, our Union is forbidden from taking job action to resolve labor disputes under these circumstances
They couldn't admit it if that's what they're doing. They'd have to deny it either way. Even an "unofficial" unorganized sick out.
On the other hand- if a pilot knew he was getting fired in two weeks for not getting vaccinated, and he happened to have two weeks sick pay, well then the company policy did all the "organizing" that needed to be done.
Being required to do a thing and actually doing a thing are two completely different things. Having the money to turn around and sue somebody for not disbursing your accrued vacation time is a third thing altogether.
Where I am, they pay out vacation time, but not sick time (unless it's a combined pool, in which case vacation takes precedence.) I don't know how common that situation is, but it certainly incentivizes getting "sick" right before you leave a job.
As a result, there are many companies (at least in the US) which will refuse to honor sick time taken through your final day without legal pressure - they'll take it out of your vacation time, and if not there your salary.
Heh, many are moving to a “it’s all one bucket” policy. Oh and it’s all one “unlimited” bucket which means they don’t have to pay out anything at all for vacation or sick time.
In reality, a lot of pilots can just message each other on the side and say "f-it". Idk how many it takes to take down the system, but I suspect even 20% out sick could cause a cascading failure.
20%? That would mean they have 20% extra pilots on standby ready to take over for the sick. I think it is far lower than that, more like 5% or less. I suspect it might be closer to 2%, that there are no real backups. I bet that when someone is stick someone else is called in on their weekend. That would be the labor action: pilots refusing to work overtime/weekends when called to cover for someone.
My dad is a commercial pilot for a different carrier. The tl;dr is there are typically a subset of pilots on-call at any given time. Pilots who aren't on-call won't be asked to give up their weekends to cover flights.
Pilots either "sit reserve" or "hold a line" based on seniority/airframe and to a lesser degree rank (ie a pilot may choose to sit reserve as a captain when they could be a line holder as an FO). Line holders have a set schedule that they bid on (again based on seniority). If someone calls in sick, misses a flight, or if a flight goes unscheduled, scheduling contacts a pilot that is sitting reserve who then fills in the missing position.
When sitting reserve they get paid to hang out near the airport. Pilots are typically based out of some airport, reserve pilots need to be able to get to their airport within a set amount of time after being called (iirc 2 hours).
It's not that there aren't real reserve pilots, it's that there are exactly the number of backups that there needs to be under normal circumstances. Airlines don't like paying people to sit around and they've got scheduling down to a science. I think I was in high school the last time my dad sat reserve. It felt like he had to fly almost every time (but not every time!) he was on reserve.
>> there are exactly the number of backups that there needs to be under normal circumstances.
So, as I said, no redundancy for abnormal circumstances. If they are sitting on a reserve roster, but nearly always fly, then those aren't really a reserve pool. One or two extra people calling in sick and there won't be backups available.
alexberenson may have his own biases. But the situation is strange. From the opposite corner of the country, the ferry system in Puget Sound is already cancelling tens of crossing a day because of sick calls leading to "lack of Coast Guard documented crew". A vaccine mandate is looming for Oct 18 with 250 ferry employees still unvaccinated. "It wouldn't take much to cripple the system," said retired ferry Capt. Ken Burtness.
> Employee exodus could 'cripple' Washington ferry system as dozens of sailings canceled again Friday
> 'The new norm': Washington ferry workers call out sick in protest of COVID-19 vaccine mandate
> Under the RLA, our Union is forbidden from taking job action to resolve labor disputes
Which is the reason why the union can't explicitly say it's because of the vaccine mandate. Once a company begins demanding injections in exchange for the right to keep your livelihood, previously agreed upon "forbidden labor actions" are null and void. I support them to shut down the entire country....and I have a feeling this is just the beginning.
(Not to mention an actual "FDA approved" vaccine isn't even available in the United States...they deceived you.[1][2])
Vaccine requirements are nothing new [1]. I would hope any organization expeditiously terminates any employee who fails to meet vaccination policy, COVID or otherwise. I'm pleased to see that this is already occurring in many industries and expect it to accelerate in the coming weeks and months.
> Indeed, contrary to the claims of Malone and others, the Comirnaty vaccine has the same liability protection as the vaccine approved under the EUA. That’s because of a law known as the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP Act).
> In early 2020, after the coronavirus emerged, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar invoked the PREP Act to “provide liability immunity for activities related to medical countermeasures against covid-19.” So that covers all vaccines that might be produced to combat the coronavirus, whether fully authorized or not.
> “The liability protections afforded under the PREP Act are tied to the declared public health emergency and not whether the vaccine is sold under an EUA,” Castillo said. “Therefore, both Comirnaty and the Pfizer-BioNTech covid-19 vaccine receive the same liability protections as medical countermeasures against covid-19.”
i.e. there is no liability for either of them? The point of granting full approval was so the government could claim that it is no longer be considered 'experimental'. Normally that means the usual liability rules kick in. If not because the usual rules are overridden by other rules elsewhere it would appear the approval was pointless and changed nothing.
Whether it's covered under CICP or VICP, we made a national security decision in the 1980s that having companies willing to make vaccines was a net positive, and thus set up a no-fault system funded by a tax on every vaccine dose administered.
Approval was never going to change the liability status. That's not the point of FDA approval.
In my experience, efficiency usually results in an increased level of resilience. You can easily sacrifice both, jeopardizing profits. Every time I saw that happen, it turned out some department-specific KPI (it doesn't matter which department, finance, production, sales, logistics,..) looked really good while that happened. All other sucked, but nobody cared. IMHO, this over emphasis on one silo, at the expense of all the others, puts so much stress on those other functions that they only can crack if something external puts even more stress on them. I guess that is what Covid and all the resulting disruptions is doing. Some orgs crack earlier than others, every one does have its cracking point so. The question is if an organization can adapt before it reaches its breaking point.
Single KPIs definitely not. Good system come close enough, more often then not I think the issue is the culture that prioritizes one KPI over all others. Or one department's priority.
> our operation has become brittle and subject to massive failures under the slightest pressure
I somehow notice a lot of this lately, in many different areas. I wonder if there isn't a common cause behind those. Is it just covid or something bigger?
Optimisation culture. Cut x cost by y%? Promotion! Everything collapses a few years later because there’s no buffers for anything? Who cares, those managers are already at their next job so it’s someone else’s fault!
That's also "I want it cheap and I don't want to consider complexity" culture; if an airline were consistently more expensive but claimed "hey you know that once a decade issue that happened to Southwest last year? it will never happen to us", maybe some businesses with particularly critical flights would go for it, but not only would most people go for the cheaper flight given the option... I bet almost no one would be able to tell you what the benefit of the more expensive airline was as they probably just don't care enough to learn or research (which is different from then deciding the difference didn't matter).
this is the price we pay for rewarding "efficiencies" up and down the entire chain, leaving no slack whatsoever. with large companies or operations these efficiencies can be over really minor things as well because it means bonus for someone. the root cause of all of this is "short-termism". everyone is only worried about the next quarter, not the next 5 let alone 20-40 years.
The US commercial air transport industry is an absolute marvel. Millions of people moved thousands of miles every single day, mostly at extremely affordable fares. And tons of cargo moved as well. All with an excellent safety record, especially in the past decade.
If "the price we pay" is a day or two of one airline (not any of the others) grounding most of its fleet, most likely due to a controversial internal HR policy, it's an exceptionally low price.
You make it sound as if it was impossible to have such a marvelous industry without this deep degree of over-optimization. I disagree. The way I see it, with a bit more buffering here and there, it would be mostly the same - perhaps with less bullshit flights that could've been just as well taken by trains (which would be in a better condition, having more business flowing through them), and less middle-men everywhere sucking up the savings from all that optimization.
This is the thing with markets: whatever optimization you make, you won't reap the fruits of it for long. Someone - either competitors or adjacent third parties - will show up to suck out your margin, leaving you mostly as you were, but locking that optimization in as a permanent fixture in the industry. This means that when companies over-optimize, shoot past the optimum "value to profits" ratio and aim for higher margins still, they make the industry permanently (well, until next collapse) worse for everyone.
>The US commercial air transport industry is an absolute marvel. Millions of people moved thousands of miles every single day, mostly at extremely affordable fares. And tons of cargo moved as well
As opposed to...? tons of cargo and millions of people are being moved around everywhere, welcome to the modern world. The US commercial flight industry sucks in the grand scheme of things mostly due to a lack of competition. Flying in the US is expensive compared to Europe/Asia.
I don't claim to know all the price/cost dynamics, but it's mostly the regional low-cost carriers (which people seem to generally hate except for their cheapness) that are cheap in Europe and Asia. Otherwise airfares are pretty similar to the US.
It is large due to corporations taking on lean-business models from MBAs over the last decade+. When a business runs lean, it becomes more fragile to disruptions. Unfortunately due to our economic system, there is a semi-regular boon-bust cycle, so if it wasn't COVID, it would have been something else that kicks the stool out from under the legs of these corporations.
In the past this wasn't as big as an issue because the risk was spread out amongst a multitude of small to medium size corporations. But again, over the last few decades corporations have become mega-conglomerates through buyouts and mergers/etc... Too big to fail. All the eggs in fewer baskets. Again, in an attempt to keep growing, because in our current economic system and the culture promoted in it (partially by MBA's) is the idea that if your company isn't growing it's dying. And even if it's growing, if it's not growing by a large enough amount it is failing...
So you could have a 1,000 person corporations stabley making 100 million in revenue. Providing good benefits and salaries to all. But if its not growing, then it is viewed as failing ... It's truly an absurd mindset and culture.
MBA here. Does not sound like hate but statement of fact. In my experience the US MBA and general management management teaching is very dollar-based in stark contrast to, say European management education. This will lead to extreme efficiencies and the M&A boom of the past few decades is probably linked to it as well. And it does not have to be the CEO: most practical daily decisions cutting all buffers for maximum efficiency are made by mid to upper management.
Your statement shows lack of understanding of how the modern corporation works.
The COO may have been there 30 years, and may lack an MBA, but increasingly it is this type of CxO that has been reyling upon MBAs and other consultants (operations research) to restructure the organization into an optimized-but-fragile state.
It is the rare old-hand that can standup to younguns talking tech and math, subjects he does not feel comfortable with.
Are you suggesting that old people uncomfortable with math and tech are the best people to be leading major corporations? Even Herb Kelleher was only 40 when he started Southwest.
Not disagreeing, but also I don't think it's even necessary for any MBAs to be involved (although such a corporate structure would be very unlikely). All that's needed is a set of incentives that reward a certain style of business to the detriment of others. Based on our total set of economic policies, the US has those incentives in many (most?) sectors of the economy.
It's not really MBAs, more like "business rules cult". MBAs are just the primary vehicle through which these viral rules of operation have spread. For example, when I worked in semiconductor manufacturing in the 90s you'd constantly hear at management training seminars "reduce inventory because it costs money". Also "offshore because it's cheaper" and "outsource activities that aren't core to the business". Every single one of these things has a downside, often not visible until "bad stuff happens".
These trite rules get repeated so often they become like The Mandalorian "This is the way".
I think every industry is full of this kind of nonsense. Some closer to home examples : everything needs to be in the cloud; immutability is good; use 3rd party SaaS services for everything; code comments are bad; ...
If you use a saas for login, one for business process A, one for business process B, C, D,... if just one of these fail, you might be at risk of losing business and huge amount of money for something you have no control on.
You are lowering you cost but by doing so, you are increasing your risk.
Furthermore, by using external saas, some business will have a tendency to get rid of some IT people to "really" save on cost which means you'll lose manpower for when something happens.
Software development has changed in the last decade and now everybody knows that they have to take failure into account when building software. Chaos Monkey opened the eyes of a lot of It people.
There should be some "MBA" level chaos monkey solution.
Dangerous is a word that doesn't actively justify trade-offs. With SaaS offerings, you're trading opex costs to save on capex costs, which can mean a really big difference in terms of opportunity costs. You also are paying for the expertise that you'd need to develop internally otherwise. These aren't simple black and white choices. Operating at FB level scale means that saving 2% on your cost of revenue is billions of dollars. If this is the only "Big" outage FB has for the next 2 years, and it's saved them billions of dollars, isn't the fairly small risk of a single point of failure worth it?
You have to accept some risk, and it's often hard to compare risks on the business side vs risks on the technical side.
But isn't this the exact point of operation, controlling and finance in any large corporation wants to find? Extract from bottom to the top until it breaks and then hope to steer back a tiny little bit and keep operating in that state?
Finance never did produce, it's whole purpose is to extract.
Run a gasoline engine to lean and it will start to heat and stutter...
As for the growth, in a peaceful society you can grow as much as the amount of people you supply, so without war there will probably no other way than saying goodbye to growth.
No company wants it to break to the point of "meltdown". From a practical view, it loses too much money. From a (maybe, maybe not) cynical sense, it makes it too obvious how much they're extracting from the bottom and invites action from the government or workers.
Sure that's the theory. But how do you accurately price in risk for rare events? The uncertainty is so large that any price you set is effectively just a guess.
Insurance and derivatives are supposed to find prices for rare events. And if an organization can't insure or securitize a risk it should make them think real hard about mitigation.
You guess based on data and do your best, that is more or less how all expert opinion works. An actuarial table also doesn't tell you anything about what will happen, but it allows you to do your best.
Yes, but with finance based on transitory MBA executive suites job-hopping around the corporate world, the right play is to price in the risk during your term and a bit after, so the 10-year risk is ignored, but if you can strip everything out of redundancy, product development, etc., the numbers will look better for a while, you get your bonus package, and move to the next opportunity/victim.
When things have been built to last, there is a lot of "fat" that can be cut - for a while.
The numbers will always look better - until they don't.
When the music stops, the "lean" "financial engineers" will be long gone, and those still there will have not the slightest clue how to re-start a culture of serious product/service development or robust operations, and the corp falls into a death spiral.
If you are a trader, you DGAF.
If you are an investor, watch for numbers improving without product and operations improving, and new markets being opened.
I was not disagreeing. The biggest problems come where finance is not sophisticated and management is seduced by cost cutting. Those often go hand in hand.
"Lean" is an idea that worked so well at first that it transitioned from being a brilliant insight into finding "stale" capital hiding in in-process inventory and parts to being a management fad, applied to things that do not actually benefit from the approach. It's not the only thing that went that way.
As an MBA with BSEE/MSEE, this is exactly correct. Too many take the degree and training as a blindly followed cookbook rather than just "ideas to think about and think of trying". It SHOULD BE the latter!!
The "religion" of profit maximization and cost minimization has a price - it's NOT GLOBALLY OPTIMAL OVER TIME for the survival of the organization (profits, anti-fragility, etc.) nor for the larger system of a national or global economy.
Mathematically, flat, non-cycle economic systems are IMPOSSIBLE. You can never achieve it WITHOUT introducing systemic instability because you are eliminating ALL the information REQUIRED to maintain feedback control and you are removing agility of the system. Once the error signal goes to zero, the system is 100% out of control! It's open loop. Then any "environmental" change can tip the entire system over where that could be a competitor, other nation or "act of God" disruption.
And this is what happens when you profit maximize/cost minimize to its ultimate limit. And on the way to that extreme, you are increasingly make the system more brittle and the probabilities of failure increase.
Re having all people being "productive", the reality of things like Price's Law also make reliability worse as an organization (corporation, government, etc.) grows.
Price's Law says that the number of people who actually do most of the work is proportional to the square root of the organization size. In the case of supply chains, most of the people who are "assuring system reliability" actually aren't and generally are incapable of doing so anyway. It's a reality due to network effects (adverse ones but the same dynamic as the good ones - you can't control or differentiate the two).
Note you can take it to the other extreme: not worrying about profits is just as bad if not worse. Socialism/Collectivism doesn't work either for similar reasons actually.
Your anti-MBA, anti-profit-maximization rant misses one thing: Southwest is the only major US airline with zero bag fees (for the first 2), no business or first-class cabin, no seat upgrade charges, and until recently, the only one with no change fees (other airlines backed off change fees during the current pandemic). It doesn't chase major international routes, partner with 3rd party booking engines, or fly overnight/redeyes. LUV has consistently, for 40+ years, optimized its culture over profits.
>LUV has consistently, for 40+ years, optimized its culture over profits
Something has changed in the last 10 years - the last five in particular. I obtained my frequent flyer number from them in 1985 and have flown them hundreds, if not thousands of time so yeah, I have a LOT of experience to draw from.
> But if its not growing, then it is viewed as failing
I’ve only seen this in wealth generation instruments. Outside of those, I haven’t seen much of the “culture“ you’re referring to. In that framing, I think it makes sense and is anything but absurd.
The company is dual purpose at this point: part original mission (airline) part communal investment. Being a great airline that is comfortable with its current market definition isn’t sufficient for its second purpose. The commune’s investment expects growth in the abstract sense. They aren’t interested in Airlines, they’re interested in purchasing a piece of future growth.
Your Vanguard mutual fund’s performance depends on exponential growth - healthy retirement strategies live primarily off of growth, not principal, during the retirement phase. Maintaining value (~+2% on paper growth) doesn’t earn your company a place in society’s communal pool of assets.
Take a look at earnings reports...a company that doesn't grow from last quarter is considered a failure. A company that grows but doesn't hit goals from last quarter is considered a failure.
Aye, I think that’s the point I’m making. Earning reports are for public companies. The company is part of society’s communal wealth if it’s publishing a quarterly earning report. Check out the companies not posting quarterly earning reports - because they aren’t publicly traded - and not building towards a public offering; I don’t think you’d find this same “culture.”
In your scenarios, the public communally purchased shares of future growth, priced in against the stated goals - and the public’s confidence the company would reach those goals.
What other outcome would you expect? If you think this is the market being irrational, you -personally- can buy at the “failure” price. If you’re right, you’ll do well over a long time horizon.
Your opening statement impresses me as a rather gross generalization. Kind of pro-union, anti-big business.
Nothing wrong with making an effort to lean out an organization, which is simply meant to make it more efficient and more competitive. It's not specifically just cutting staff, it's a lot of things. The trick is to not confuse leaning out with cannibalization. Like Musk says, if you aren't having to add stuff back in, then you aren't deleting enough.
The airline industry is under insane pressure given the environment, and this stuff is bound to happen. Safety may even be unintentionally sacrificed. This space is far from thermodynamically sound right now. If somebody has an easy answer for it, that would be some fat consulting stacks for the BTC fund.
I'll counter your generalization with my own: F250's are hammered with middle-management baggage. MM makes shitty decisions, and still causes tons of wait states. Having consulted for five F500's now, my observation so far is that the 250-500 range are much more incentivized to do what it takes to become more competitive. OTOH, the F20's I've consulted for severely need some waves of boomer (my gen) retirements.
BTW, the general reason M&A activity increases is because the associated market space has contraction pressure on it. What else are you supposed to do? The beginning of the end for markets, governments, empires. That's just the way us humans do things.
"Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle For the Soul of American Business"[1] by Bob Lutz tells this story really well, from Lutz' vantage point trying to salvage General Motors from the clutches of an army of MBAs.
There's a decent summary of the book (and the general problem) in the 2012 Time article "Driven off the Road by MBAs"[2] as well.
This is only “a failure” if the loss from this is worse than all of the money they have saved over the years by running so lean.
This type of event is the obvious possible downside that is well known when you structure a company this way. It’s not that events like this aren’t expected, it’s that prepping for them costs more than the loss from not being able to absorb them.
> Don't forget all of the future losses by losing the trust of both the customers and the employees.
Who's going to remember this? Even a large percentage of the stranded passengers are likely to fly Southwest again to save $36 on a flight.
> This assumes that they can absorb these losses.
If they couldn't, then they could very very likely receive a bailout or other assistance. It is the existence of these safetynets that allows these businesses to operate so lean. The cynical might say that bailouts encourage the practice.
> Who's going to remember this? Even a large percentage of the stranded passengers are likely to fly Southwest again to save $36 on a flight.
You can see how this is a problem, right? This essentially means the market is not working as it should - instead of improving quality of service, it makes people absorb the bad experience, ad infinitum. The market is not able to deliver feedback to the companies, who instead rely on some degree of "capacity for suck" in their customers, and the fact that there's a new sucker born every minute - by the time they burn out a cohort of their clients, a new population of naive, hopeful people shows up to replace them.
I don't think people will be as forgiving of this as GP thinks. I will certainly not book with them for my next N flights unless I hear that they have massively changed their tune.
> This essentially means the market is not working as it should
Actually the market works just fine: it transfers price pressures efficiently across all participants - including human beings. It's society that doesn't work anymore, because it has now lost any meaning of 'value' beyond monetary terms for most of the population. Most consumers now cannot choose not to minimize expenditure: either because they cannot afford it, or because they simply don't know how to look at experiences through a lens different from "what is the price".
>Most consumers now cannot choose not to minimize expenditure:
Leaving aside flying private--which is a whole different magnitude of cost--consumers can absolutely choose to pay more to insulate themselves from much of the unpleasantness of flying. Doesn't help much when flights are canceled or delayed of course but you have Pre-Check, airline lounges, business class seating, etc. which do generally improve the experience.
But, yes, society in the aggregate does not value the better experience at what it would cost to deliver--certainly not to the point of effectively excluding a significant segment of the population from routine flying but, in the process, making it a more pleasant experience for others.
Well, some people are OK with getting shitty service once in a while in exchange for drastically lower prices. The thing is, I don't see Southwest prices being drastically lower - I had been checking it for a while when travelling and at least where I go, their price level is no different from their competition - they occasionally have a good deal, but so do the competitors, and their regular prices aren't that different otherwise in my experience. Maybe statistically it's not true but anecdotally for me I'm not sure there's even minimizing expenditure that much...
The money they earned in the past are already spent and forgotten. The failure is now. So for the people who got the bonuses in the past it may be worth it (that's probably why they did it), but for the company as an ongoing concern it certainly isn't. It's like eating a lot of unhealthy foods and later getting sick - maybe some people consider it worth it, but most people kinda regret it when they get sick.
The thing is, a company isn't a person. In fact, LTDs were effectively invented in order to dissociate company lifecycles from human ones.
So, from a purely rational perspective, if the company makes $100m profit over 10 years then gets "sick", well, job done - you just start another one and carry on. Money doesn't care for future consequences; if anything, inflation puts pressure on disposing of profits quickly while postponing losses (and risk), even if doing so will eventually kill the company.
Extreme "financialization" of our ways of production has given us great rates of efficiency and innovation, at the expense of long-term stability.
> So, from a purely rational perspective, if the company makes $100m profit over 10 years then gets "sick", well, job done - you just start another one and carry on. Money doesn't care for future consequences; if anything, inflation puts pressure on disposing of profits quickly while postponing losses (and risk), even if doing so will eventually kill the company.
This is a purely financial take, not necessarily a purely rational one. I say that because it's pretty easy to dismiss all the human aspect of a company dying, all the suffering it creates as something to not be taken "rationally" but what it actually means is to push the human-factor into the statistics field and be done with it.
The human element doesn’t matter at all? Their workers are fed up.
This tunnel visioning on financial metrics is so superficial and narrow that it makes me angry. A company is a community of interacting, real people, not a video game.
Operating a business is a lot like flying an airline in one respect: It's not your average hight above the zero point that matters so much as never, ever going below it.
Failure to maintain altitude above ground level and failure to maintain solvency are in many ways equivalent.
Both domains involve taking risks, but with severe consequences when either risks are miscalculated or ground truths change. Financial bets can be hedged in ways flight profiles often cannot be, and Southwest are credited for doing this (with fuel purchase futures notably), but there's a sense in which businesses are arbitraging latent risks for present profits in ways which can prove catastrophic. (Venture start-ups are particularly prone to this IMO.)
Southwest's single-airframe fleet affords efficiencies, but also risks should faults arise with that airframe or subsystems of it (as with the 737 MAX scenario).
"Solvency", writ large, is ability to service debts.
It's not quite as simple as cash-on-hand, turnover, or profitability. Start-ups without revenues or net profits may be solvent if investment capital is available, premised on future profitability or a viable exit strategy. But it's fairly strongly related.
Airworthiness is more an overall assessment of risk.
A substantially compromised aircraft, with expert piloting and favourable weather, can still land successfully.
A fully-airworthy aircraft experiencing CFIT won't. Nor will one flown into unanticipated adverse conditions such as violent weather, volcanic ash, or wind shear.
And of course, a sufficiently crippled craft cannot be landed successfully no matter what.
(An additional case is of a landing with partial survival of passengers and crew. We'll omit that.)
Airworthiness increases he probability of a successful flight. It's neither strictly necessary, nor sufficient. It is part of the overall risk assessment, effectively a creditworthiness rating.
An airworthiness certificate is a specific certification of such airworthiness.
Southwest is literally the poster child of low cost carriers. They started the whole business model, which consists of a few things:
* they operate literally one type of aircraft, and therefore only have to train their crew once, keep the specific set of parts, etc.
* they optimize the hell out of making sure their planes are in use carrying paying passengers for the maximum amount of time
* they fly a vast network of point to point using secondary airports, as opposed to coordinating at massive hubs
These are all things that would make recovering from a massive widespread disruption very hard, and Southwest has been doing it better and longer than anybody else.
How operating one type of plane makes recovering from disruption harder? I'd expect it to make it easier - you can replace any crew with any other crew, and any plane with any other plane. Same with secondary airports - I am not sure how it makes recovery harder. Distributed systems are usually more robust against disruption that centralized ones - if you can't fly in an out of the hub, then all your flights in that hub's vicinity are grounded, but if you just lost one secondary airport, there might be another close by. So I'm not sure I am convinced those particular qualities are detrimental to robustness, at least without a convincing argument.
well, as an example, when the 737MAX was grounded, many airlines had already started taking delivery of them and were operating them. Southwest was the largest recipient at that time.
Southwest had plenty of older 737s as well, but the new MAX planes both fly farther and have more seats, so while the grounding was in effect Southwest was essentially paying to keep the things on the ground while scrambling to reconfigure their flight network, and it affected them the most.
Single AC fleets mean an airline has somewhat of a single point of failure. If the issue at hand is caused by that point of failure, sure recovery will be harder. In most other cases it makes it actually easier, at least on paper. No need to get crews to certain planes, just a crew to a plane, as every crew is certified on any plane.
I've followed many 737MAX threads on HN, and they sure did dismiss this issue. It was always "why didn't they design a whole new airplane from the ground up".
> why you’d prioritize that over the aircraft’s ability to stay in the air.
This is an egregious misunderstanding. There was nothing wrong with the purpose of the the MCAS system nor the concept of it. What went wrong was its failure to follow the dual path design, and do a proper failure analysis of its design. There was a further problem with some pilots not understanding how to deal with stab trim runaway.
These problems have since been corrected, and MCAS is still on the 737MAX.
IIRC a few 737MAXs fell out of the sky. Clearly there being nothing wrong with the purpose nor concept of MCAS wasn't sufficient to keep the airplane from crashing.
MCAS in itself doesn't seem to have been the problem. The fact that MCAS relied on a single sensor (no idea how that got certified in the first place) and that pilot were not aware of MCAS and how it worked were the problems. The latter was due to Boeing trying to avoid re-training and re-certification of air crew.
> pilot were not aware of MCAS and how it worked were the problems
If the pilots followed runaway trim procedure, which is how the MCAS failure manifested, they would have been fine. In fact, that's what the other unmentioned crew of a 737MAX did that survived MCAS malfunction and landed without incident.
Boeing issued an Emergency Airworthiness Directive about the procedure, which the Egyptian Air pilots didn't follow, either.
The utilization rate is so high that specific planes and crew are needed in specific times and places.
If plane going from A -> B is late it cannot become flight B -> C. If crew for this plane are stuck in the ground long enough, they have to wait til the next day to fly as they‘re only allowed to be awake and work for so long.
Yeah. Part of Southwest‘s high utilization rate is their ability to turn around planes and crew quickly.
In the event of widespread disruption, planes will not make it to their next airport to become a different flight, nor will their crew. Crew can also only be awake and working for a limit of time, so if the disruption causes a crew to go over that limit they are not going out until the next day, etc.
With cloud computing, it‘s a bit different because which host you‘re using in a region doesn‘t really matter, but for airline a specific plane with specific people need to be in a specific time and place.
But not using the same plane would not make it any better, neither would using a hub - that's my point. This is a common problem, but the properties outlined in the parent post which are supposedly specific to SW do not make the problem worse.
They're no longer low cost because of service erosion at the main carriers (squeezing more seats in, getting rid of baggage allowances, etc.). As a result of that erosion and southwest's holding the line, they are now one of the higher quality carriers (and some would say one of the best!). An interesting course of events to get us here...
I took my first and last Spirit flight ~7 years ago to fly cross-country. It honestly felt at some points like the plane was going to fall out of the sky.
Spirit & Frontier (and Ryanair in Europe among others) are actually classed as ULCC's (ultra low cost), where everything is nickel and dimed.
At the higher end, it certainly isn't necessarily the best any more, but I do think that's mostly because Southwest has kept to its two free checked bags, whereas the major carriers now make significant revenues from checked bag fees.
According to this substack[1], it was a pilot walkout/"sickout" due to vaccine mandates. It's actually happening in more companies/industries than widely reported. I imagine it's also picked up steam since last weeks revelation from leaked internal Pfizer emails[2] that they used cells from aborted fetuses while testing the RDNA vaccine (testing - it's not in the vaccine), but have publicly stated otherwise. It was also pretty clear that they did not want the public to know from the text. And a lot of "religious exemptions" are being turned down. This would be a bit like taking a staunch vegan and forcing them to eat something (via threatening career) that was tested on animals while they said otherwise.
> The pilot emailed following the first Southwest post today (and provided his SWA ID to prove his identity). He asked that I paraphrase the email.
> Essentially, the union cannot organize or even acknowledge the sickout, because doing so would make it an illegal job action. Years ago, Southwest and its pilots had a rough negotiation, and the union would not even let the pilots internally discuss the possibility of working-to-rule (which would have slowed Southwest to a crawl).
> But at the moment the pilots don’t even have to talk to each other about what they’re doing. The anger internally - not just among pilots but other Southwest workers - is enormous. The tough prior negotiations notwithstanding, Southwest has a history of decent labor relations, and workers believe the company should stand up for them against the mandate. Telling pilots in particular to comply or face termination has backfired.
It's telling that this is downvoted, even though it presents actual evidence from an actual SWA employee vs the random speculation found elsewhere in the thread. The cause isn't leanness or MBAs, its pilots protesting against vaccine mandates, by the testimony of an actual pilot who works there.
That is because it goes agaist the narrative that the only people that oppose mandates are backwater rednecks that have no education.
It can not be that high skilled professionals oppose having their body autonomy revoked... it can not be that "my body my choice" should extend to more medical choices than 1...
If fetuses were infectious - if you could stand by a pregnant person at the bus stop or grocery store or school, and suddenly find yourself pregnant by breathing the same air - "my body, my choice" would not be the reproductive rights slogan.
That is both a weak and dangerous argument if you place any value at all on individual freedom. As a vaccinated person I have a MUCH MUCH greater risk of dying in a car accident on the way to the grocery store than I do of contracting a deadly case of COVID.
Before the vaccine was widely available you may have had a case but once you become vaccinated your risk level drops to well below other risks we already accept as part of having a free society.
Our society has always balanced individual freedoms versus the impacts exercising them have on others.
I cannot have murder, child porn, or heroin use be a part of my religious ceremonies. I cannot have libel be a part of my free speech and expression. I cannot be Typhoid Mary and spread disease around. I cannot open a restaurant that skips hand washing. I cannot go to public school unvaccinated for measles and a number of other diseases in most states. I cannot drive drunk, despite research showing doing so actually improves my chances of surviving an accident (https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/odds-favo...).
Immunocompromised people exist. Tens of millions of children aren't yet eligible for the vaccines. I'm inclined to consider their individual freedoms not to be needlessly infected by a pandemic disease as important, too.
That is a very weak rebuttal and does nothing to address that fact that risk from COVID once you are vaccinated falls below the other accepted risks of society.
Care to address that or do you just want to keep building strawmen?
1. Vaccinated people still spread covid, Vaccination primary effect makes a person asymptomatic, this has been proven.
2. "Large portion" is false, it is children under 12, who have a lower chance of serious illness than a vaccinated person. That said if you as a parent feel that risk to do high then you as a parent can take measures to ensure you children only come in contact with vaccinated person, this however does not mean you can impose that desire via government. To be clear I am fine with parents advocating business require vaccinations of their own business policy, I am not fine with government telling a Bar that is for adults they also must require vaccinations. Government mandates bad, private business choices good.
"When infected with the delta variant, a given contact was 65 percent less likely to test positive if the person from whom the exposure occurred was fully vaccinated with two doses of the Pfizer vaccine. With AstraZeneca, a given contact was 36 percent less likely to test positive if the person from whom the exposure occurred was fully vaccinated."
> "Large portion" is false, it is children under 12
That's clearly not true given that the number of cases in highly vaccinated countries is as high or higher than before.
Firstly, NBC? They're not exactly going to give you a balanced view, are they. Anyway. The article is about an academic study. Those are near worthless: even theoretical studies with 100% external validity frequently come out too late to be informative. The real world data is what matters here. Perhaps someone who was literally just jabbed spreads it less, but if the protection lasts three months it's irrelevant and misleading to make a temporally unbounded claim "vaccinated people are less likely to spread COVID".
> I imagine it's also picked up steam since last weeks revelation from leaked internal Pfizer emails[2] that they used cells from aborted fetuses while testing the RDNA vaccine (testing - it's not in the vaccine), but have publicly stated otherwise.
The fact that fetal cells are used in testing has been public for a long time.
The “it’s the vaccine mandates!” argument has to figure out a way to explain why all the other airlines weren’t similarly affected when they instituted theirs.
> And a lot of "religious exemptions" are being turned down. This would be a bit like taking a staunch vegan and forcing them to eat something (via threatening career) that was tested on animals while they said otherwise.
Considering all of the other household items that are also commonly tested using fetal cell lines (including acetaminophen, aspirin, ibuprofen, albuterol, pseudoephidrine), the analogy doesn't apply.
Heh, incidentally, there was a hospital that (reportedly) said, "okay sure, if you're swearing off all those other things you can claim a vaccine exemption":
Many (most?) of those medicines are quite old and were developed before widespread legalization of abortion, let alone use of fetal stem cells in drug development.
Nevertheless, human cell culture testing has become a fundamental part of the safe production of many common drugs. FDA regulation and approval extends not just to the chemistry of a drug but also to how it is manufactured, to ensure that the delivered product is safe.
Old medicines are still evaluated for ongoing safety profiles, including interactions with new classes of drugs that may come on the market. Users of these medicines benefit from this.
Just to clarify this YouTube link: HEK293 cells are used in TONS of research, yes they are derived from fetal cell lines in the 70s. When I say tons, I mean if you say "HEK cells" to someone who does any cell culture they know what you're talking about. It is completely noncontroversial, and cancer/bioenergetic research utilizes them.
I don't appreciate this YouTube channel doing what they are doing, it is pouring fuel on a giant nothingburger.
> Wikipedia can be a great tool for learning and researching information. However, as with all reference works, Wikipedia is not considered to be a reliable source as not everything in Wikipedia is accurate, comprehensive, or unbiased.
It is a good thing that employers are rejecting made-up religious objections that have no basis in consistent and longstanding practice. If they don't, it will come back to bite them over and over and result in endless litigation.
The root cause is because "anti price gouging" laws are being enforced.
Previously, if there was a shortage of say plane brake discs, the wholesaler would jack the price up 10x for the last 3 sets. That would lead to one of the 4 customers who wanted to buy them to say "nah, it's too expensive, we don't need it that badly".
The person who wouldn't get a set was probably the guy restocking the spare parts shelf, while the people who really really needed those parts right now so a plane can takeoff got them.
In todays world, it's illegal to jack the price, one customer buys all the cheap stock (one to use, 2 as spares cos they heard about a shortage), and now 2 planes can't take off.
The same happens for thousands of other products all across the world. The end result is the people who really need goods can't get them, while others sit on piles of stock 'lucky we bought some just before they ran out!'. Endgame: The economy grinds to a halt over tiny shortages everywhere.
The proper solution is to allow and encourage price gouging again, and have a PR campaign to explain to the public how changing this law really is in their interests, even if it appears on the surface that paying $100 for a flashlight in an emergency can't be good for anyone.
Careful: you're letting ideology get in the way of the facts.
Price gouging laws are exclusively a local and state matter, and only apply at the retail level. Although there have been proposals for price-gouging laws at the federal level, none have been enacted. State laws don't generally apply to B2B interactions.
Any goods wholesaler I know of goes straight from "in stock, the price is X" to "out of stock, even if you offer a million $ you can't have any". Nobody auto-increases prices as stock runs low.
Perhaps it isn't illegal to do so, but nobody does it, probably because businesses believe it's illegal to do so.
What an ignorant comment. Commercial suppliers are fully aware that there are no price gouging laws. They choose not to boost prices when stock runs low because they don't want to burn relationships with long standing customers.
Also as a practical matter the software they're running simply doesn't have the feature to dynamically change prices based on inventory and lead time. So someone would have to manually update all the parts prices, then lower them again later. Not worth the hassle.
Any major business is going to have an army of lawyers to look into any potential business practice. It would be trivial for them to shoot off an email to legal asking, "can we jack up the prices of our parts based on inventory levels?"
The answer might be affirmative, but that doesn't mean that doing so is a good business move. If you were in charge of sourcing at a company, and a supplier pulled that shit on you, you'd be finding a replacement supplier rightquick. If a supply will gouge you for this reason, you can be sure they will be looking for other reasons in the future.
TL;DR: price gouging, even if legal, is bad optics.
Over the last decades, capitalism was not regulated very much and, as a result, companies cut costs - and one of the easiest ways to do so is to cut resiliency measures like having a standby plane and crew at every major airport to cover for delays, technical problems or staff calling in sick.
Nowadays, no one runs with any sort of buffer if that isn't explicitly demanded by government or other regulations... and when the shit hits the proverbial fan, it hits hard as a result.
if you remove all checks and balances, all forms of redundancy and run the system at 99% capacity.. even a simple unforeseen event can disrupt everything and grind it to halt.
Just imagine that most businesses are equivalent to running your whole stack on a single, self hosted at home, RPI. Including the git repository, and no backups.
Think about how difficult systems engineering is. Then realize that everything is systems engineering. But, very few people making decisions are systems engineers.
Ad-hoc heuristic decision making + political in-fighting can get you off the ground, but it can't keep you reliably airborne.
It's spectacular to see LUV devolving from one of the best managed and employee oriented airline company to this. It's not an outstanding incident though, the company was on the downward trajectory from, I would say, end of 2017. Sooner or later every US airline company declares bankruptcy, LUV so far has escaped it. But one would bet it will happen this year (unlikely) or next year.
Overall, it's operational fragility. Back in 2017 or 2018 there was engine failure, that started inspection of all planes, that triggered massive flights cancellation, revenue drops and calls for reconsidering their seating policy and baggage fees. Who would forget that SW had to park their fleet after that Boeing catastrophe and investigation. Gary Kelly spending too much time lobbying instead of improving company efficiency. 2020 was almost a catastrophe for the company has it not been for billions in cash injections, subsidies and loans from federal government. Another one is, SW used to be quite unusually employee oriented for an airline company. This has changed in last 3-4 years based on their negotiations with pilots and flight attendants unions, which does reflect on company's performance.
> Not official evidence but just asked a close friend who used to work at SW for over 20 years. They texted their former SW union rep (non-pilot union) and they responded that they have >600 flight attendants without hotel rooms tonight due to the unexpected cancellations. They say the story/reasons they are given for the cancellations are constantly changing but they personally think it is a pilot sick out. They may be wrong but non-pilot SW employees think that’s what’s going on.
> As to why this airline and why now, an RT article mentions that-‘SouthWest Airlines became one of the last major US air carriers to introduce a vaccine mandate for its employees last Monday after the company was reportedly pressured by White House coronavirus adviser Jeffrey Zients to comply with President Joe Biden’s vaccination order. Some 56,000 SouthWest employees have until December 8 to get vaccinated if they want to keep their jobs.’
It's in the politically incorrect, non-mainstream news/social media boards. But going to those is... a choice in itself, a choice that should not be taken wisely. It's the choice to begin to pull back the curtain-- to pull back the wool.
Southwest's pilot union sued the company over its Covid-19 vaccine mandate a few days ago[1], this is clearly related. The media isn't reporting this because the media owners don't want the masses hearing about others beginning to revolt against the draconian and illogical vaccine mandates (i.e. Why wouldn't a naturally derived antibody test be allowed in place of a vaccine, considering that's the whole point of getting a vaccine?).
The pilots saw what happened to healthcare workers who didn't immediately push back on mandates, so they are playing it differently. And if you don't support employees demanding medical freedom because they see through the corruption taking place, you don't need to fly on airplanes.
Thanks for the real story. I always scoot all the way to the bottom of the page to the lowest rated comments and start reading there to get the real story on any non-technical HN thread.
You and I are free to speculate as are lower quality publications less concerned with their reputation but the timing is insufficiently persuasive by itself and what we ought to want from journalism is sound investigation and factual reporting even if this necessarily lags speculation.
It might come to pass that the speculation turns out to be correct and people shall be free to call out the news for not calling it like it is but if it turns out wrong the same folks would be quick to call out the "fake news" I'd rather they be careful and I'd rather you interpreted such care charitably.
> if you don't support employees demanding medical freedom because they see through the corruption taking place, you don't need to fly on airplanes.
In place of arguing on the internet or at least in addition to I would suggest that I simply lobby my government to take away their medical freedom in service of protecting my life and my families lives. A minority of individuals may disagree but if the alternative is poverty almost all of them will ultimately take the measures that will ultimately protect them, their families, and mine.
We will win but ultimately so will they because they wont be in a hospital room suffocating on a ventilator. Seems like the definition of a win win.
I don't see why an argument needs to be made for it? Being anti-vaccine is anti-public safety and an active attempt to undermine the stability of the country and society. It should be viewed as terroristic.
> Source tells me “some controllers getting vaccinated and the mandatory (48) rest period required after controllers get the vaccine” led to staffing shortage at Jax ATC in Hilliard that resulted in mass flight delays/cancellations in Florida on Friday night.
> ... The Federal Air Surgeon determined that FAA medical certificate holders may not act as pilot in command, or in any other capacity as a required flightcrew member, for 48 hours after each dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines. The Federal Air Surgeon made this determination after evaluation of available medical information about these COVID-19 vaccines and potential side effects, https://www.faa.gov/coronavirus/guidance_resources/vaccine_f...
Instead of bizarre excuses, why wouldn’t SWA just say that employees called in sick in large enough numbers to disrupt operations? What is their reasoning for covering this up if it’s true?
Because it's illegal. Under the Railway Labor Act they have to exhaust all their other set options before they can initiate a strike or walkout, and even then only if it's considered a "major" disagreement. Minor disagreements cannot be striked over, full stop.
How difficult is Cobol to learn compared to other languages? I admit I had a bias against it when I was watching Dave Plummer’s software drag race between it, C++, and Fortran[1] but I was absolutely blown away at it being faster than the Fortran implementation, and about 50% slower than the C++ one. For something so verbose, I wasn’t expecting it to compile to such efficient machine code.
Verbosity is almost more helpful for optimization in a way, in the sense that C code ends up being fast because it's simpler than C is harder to optimize.
As for COBOL, isn't one of the issues that it's super complicated and not specified properly until recently?
Back in the day it was mostly very verbose but extremely fast. Cobol was designed for batch processing on use cases like accounting systems. We used it on signal processing apps, which had a lot of data, mostly on tape. It could rip through data stored on high-density mag tape--it was able to process data at the speed of the device.
I love stories like this. It's so much harder to push our hardware to "the speed of the device" anymore, and hearing stories about others doing that is cool.
You could tell if you screwed something up performance-wise, because the tape would have to reposition and reread if your program was not ready to read blocks coming of the device. With IBM 6250 BPI drives this meant it would overshoot massively, rewind a bunch of tape, and then have another run at it. [0] It was painful to watch and not super good for the mag tape either.
The old movies that show tape drives sort of stuttering back and forth reflect slow program performance. That's not really how they looked for most of the things I worked on.
I publicly spoke up at work about mandates being illegal, immoral and an affront to decent society. Especially, when there are alternatives we can provide (such as testing daily).
I made a post and shared it across multiple locations in the company.
As a people manager, I knew the risks.
My post was up only 10 min before being taken down.
Eventually, internal HR contacted me and told me they'd "take appropriate action" if I kept talking about it.
What they didn't expect is someone screenshot it and sent it around the company. I received hundreds of messages of support and I know many sent in messages on the side. Myself and many of the top people in the company wrote letters to their people leaders, CEO, board, HR, etc.
A week later they finally surveyed the company on their thoughts about the vaccines, A week after that the mandates were put on hold.
The majority of people don't believe others should lose their jobs over vaccine mandates. That likely is much higher (or lower) depending on industry or region.
At the end of the day, this is expected. Polling indicated "70 percent of unvaccinated Americans would quit their job over exemption-less vaccine mandate"
Good for you. I believe the mandates are absolute fascism, of the kind everyone always warns about. The DNC is intent on starting a civil war it seems.
I stumbled recently on an interesting chart. Have not doublecheck the math, but comes from FinancialTimes, so I expect it to be credible. Bottom line, you need to vaccinate between 800 (60+yo) and 25,000 (<18yo) people to save 1 hospitalization over a 4 week period, given that we take current numbers for vaccine efficacy against infection at face value, and assume there will be no further declines as time passes.
As a manager, you represent the org and it policies. If you want to speak against it, give a notice (or ask to be demoted to non-managerial role) and then do so.
Let me guess, and next somebody started slow-clapping and people started joining in until there was a thunderous ovation? Anything else you want to add to your fanfic?
In the cafeteria later that day, the elusive hottie Karen from accounting, that only dated the jocks, walked past the table and said "Hi Mandatethis we should go out some time" while handing over a pice of paper with her snapchat and a big lipstick kiss next to it.
Pilots should lose their medical certificate for 5 years if they refuse the vaccine. That way they’re not shopping between carriers for ones least likely to enforce the mandate, incentivizing carriers to loosen their stance as a way to accelerate hiring. However, the carriers should be required to compensate any pilot who has a medical issue due to the vaccine which results in a loss of medical certification.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 294 ms ] threadhttps://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-09/southwest...
> Online speculation that Southwest’s new vaccine mandate has led pilots to stage a sickout is being denied by the union representing Southwest pilots.
>That follows reporting on social media that some of the issues the airline is suffering could be related to that issue. A spokesperson for the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association (SWAPA) told the Arizona Republic it was not aware of any work stoppage and wouldn’t condone it anyway.
>SWAPA, however, has authorized its members to demonstrate against the mandate.
sounds like there is a vaccine mandate-related sickout going on, but it's officially unofficial. I don't know why that would be the case; there's no law against airline pilots doing such. Maybe the union doesn't want to be denounced for being allegedly "anti-science"?
That's dumb, and it makes no sense. But if it did, then everyone would want to know what the hell is wrong with the people at Southwest. Since it's not, the question is what the hell is wrong with the systems at Southwest.
Given that the people who are ostensibly striking have yet to say anything, I think that no one is striking or walking out.
edit: this is as close to a source as I've seen for the claim that there's striking workers: https://twitter.com/jackposobiec/status/1447259256001019906
https://twitter.com/FAANews/status/1447358177935245315
And it does seem to be Southwest-specific:
https://flightaware.com/live/cancelled/
SWA is my favorite airline, but their story doesn't add up here.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/airline-news/2021/10/1...
https://www.wtsp.com/article/news/local/flight-delays-cancel...
Aren't flights being cancelled? I guess people are just not showing up or something? I asked that question because if there isn't a protest then what? Something is being covered up, at least.
The informational content of that tweet, or if you regard it as more than mere uninteresting noise, is an entirely different and more subjective matter.
> Pilots had to sleep at the airport because all the hotels were full. Since they weren't staying in beds or whatever, it didn't count as "crew rest" so all the crews were illegal.
https://old.reddit.com/r/ATC/comments/q5a7hq/southwest_airli...
No idea if it's true or not though, and/or if that's the actual reason.
> "The ones [cancellations] that showed up on Saturday they said were because of crew hours," said Stewart, noting airline flight crews are mandated to rest after so many hours on duty.
https://www.jacksonville.com/story/news/2021/10/10/flights-c...
EDIT: Thanks for adding a source!
PS. Apply for the southwest card!
It's in the air though, so I'll reserve judgement until we have more info.
To the contrary, the southwest pilots union (SWAPA) is explicitly saying these delays are not caused by vaccine protests, despite their continued opposition to the mandate.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/graisondangor/2021/10/10/southw...
I suspect it would be a far better alternative than what happens if it turns out the union was used to organize a walk-out, although I don't know what the ramifications of breaking those laws are (criminal charges? union disbandment?)
It's also illegal to do a walkout, so they did a "sick out"
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/urgent-a-southwest-airli...
Oh, and for folks talking about a pilot protest against vaccine mandates, that theory is discussed at length toward the end of the article.
(EDIT: which would match the union statement /u/hnburnsy quotes: but what was a minor temporary event for other carriers devastated Southwest Airlines because our operation has become brittle and subject to massive failures under the slightest pressure. Our operation and our frontline employees have endured continuous and unending disruptions since the first time our airline made headlines in early June due to widespread IT failures.)
Here’s an article from the AP that mentions the “point-to-point route network” as a contributing factor in terms of a cascading failure: https://apnews.com/article/lifestyle-business-travel-8abd4e0...
I did see in the Dallas Morning News that SWA had schedule the most flights today since the start of the Covid.
>Dallas-based Southwest planned more than 3,600 flights on Sunday, the most of any day since the COVID-19 pandemic began, but nearly one-third of those were canceled.
https://www.dallasnews.com/business/airlines/2021/10/10/sout...
> There are false claims of job actions by Southwest Pilots currently gaining traction on social media and making their way into mainstream news. I can say with certainty that there are no work slowdowns or sickouts either related to the recent mandatory vaccine mandate or otherwise. Under the RLA, our Union is forbidden from taking job action to resolve labor disputes under these circumstances. SWAPA has not authorized, and will not condone, any job action.
These numbers come from the US DOT ontime database. You can access the data in ClickHouse at https://github.demo.trial.altinity.cloud:8443 (user=demo, password=demo). This is a public instance running on Altinity.Cloud.
All I get is a white screen with the word "Ok"
https://github.demo.trial.altinity.cloud:8443/play?user=demo
For instructions on use, check out the following blog article.
https://altinity.com/blog/connecting-to-altinity-cloud-with-...
That's why their life in years is usually significantly lower than medium/long-haul multi-aisle aircraft, which often get converted to freighters after retirement, since the main thing that matters is number of pressurisation cycles ( and fuel efficiency, but it's whole different story).
That's what planes are for - to use them. They are not museum pieces to be preserved.
Another airline in the region, Aloha Air, did suffer an inflight fatality in 1988 when the fuselage ruptured. The cause was apparently poor maintenance. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.txnd.35...
I have a relative who works for a large credit card processor running on mainframe systems and I hear over and over again that they're all retiring and unable to fill the newly opened roles. This problem is compounded by the fact that their offshore contracting firms are cutting back on providing COBOL resources because there's a lot more money in supplying java/.net/etc. devs. The work culture there sounds so unsustainable and yet they're one of the largest payment processors in the country. If they were have widespread stability issues like this, things could get interesting.
So we will go ahead and “invest” several man years and god knows how much money into a platform everybody agrees we should get off of.
It's much better to leave it broken and build a new system with 105% functionality so you can take credit for the whole 105%.
And typically, optimists that we are, it seems like completely reimplementing the original functionality will be "trivial" compared to merely trying to understand how the existing solution works.
The way the survivorship bias works out, this is generally a strength, not a weakness.
You want to get good money, you learn how stuff works under the hood and get familiar with your predecessor architectures, emulate them if you need to.
e.g. https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252446965/Lidl-dumps-500...
Furthermore,
> they're held together with a fragile weave of scripts, hacks, unsupported hardware and outdated knowledge
Swapping out COBOL for typescript and mainframes for linux boxes and a pile of YAML is not going to change any of that. People can and will build garbage with any set of tools you give them. Not ever software problem is like use-after-free where you can fix it forever with a sufficiently clever piece of tech.
It can be, depending on the system and who's complaining about it. Sometimes a fragile, buggy, mess of a legacy system is actually fragile and buggy, with failures causing downtime or lost business, and creaky processes slowing new development to a crawl. Sometimes it's just a system that has an unfamiliar or slightly less ergonomic developer experience, that uses older technologies that some developers don't want to learn. You have to look past the complaints and judge for yourself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
These systems are in place and will continue to be maintained simply because they've stood the test of time.
There’s huge demand for developers on modern systems. Seriously, how much are you going to pay a developer to do mainframe COBOL - and is that developer going to produce commensurate value, really able to hold together a crumbling antique infrastructure?
I didn’t intend to imply that the problem could be solved by an army of people fresh out of boot camps with no senior level supervision.
I'm also realizing now that just because you "would consider it extremely daunting" does not necessarily mean that you don't think you could be a net positive contributor.
Suppose you accept 1.5x or 2x or even 3x your annual salary to take a COBOL job. Nice... for now.
What happens in 2, 5, or 10 years when this COBOL gig ends?
Now your skills have withered or disappeared and you're 2, 5, or 10 years behind when it comes to "modern" technologies where 99.9% of the job opportunities are.
In a sense, that COBOL job is a gamble. You are gambling that you can ride that sucker until retirement.
Of course there are other possibilities. You could sock most of that extra $$$ away and spend a year retraining yourself, or something, if/when that COBOL job ends. Or whatever.
What happens in 1 or 2 years when the current hottest new full-stack, mvc, reactive 3.0 whatever is old and tired and you have to learn the new thing? You learn the new thing.
I meant, "when this COBOL gig ends", not "when this COBOL ends" which is what I initially typed.
I agree that COBOL will outlive a lot of these modern flash-in-the-pan frameworks.
However, the number of COBOL jobs will dwindle over time, and if I took a theoretical COBOL job today it's not clear to me that I would be particularly employable if/when that job ended. Particularly if I am unable/unwilling to relocate as I suspect COBOL jobs may be much less likely to be remote.
Whereas, in comparison, if one stays current in Ruby/Python/JS/.NET/Java then one's prospects would remain strong for the forseeable future. "Staying current" on the tech treadmill is of course its own special hell, but it is probably the safer road.
OK, but how employable are you at that point?It's going to take some significant effort to catch back up.
Perhaps more crucially, your resume is not going to be appealing to potential employers. If they're looking for hotshots in the latest framework, do you think they're going to look kindly upon a candidate who's spent the last X years working with COBOL?
There are ways to address that, such as getting up to speed in Trendy Framework XYZ and making some portfolio pieces, open source contributions, etc. But, that's not always a smooth road.
>It's going to take some significant effort to catch back up.
You got 2x (or whatever) the salary until then. That should give you plenty of time to catch up. Currently anybody is employed anyways if one knows how to use a keyboard. I don't think that is ending anytime soon.
Let's say you take a cushy COBOL job for X years and then spend Y years on your own "catching up."
At that point you're pretty proficient in whatever the trendy thing is at that time.
But what do recruiters see? They see, "this person hasn't worked with anything modern in X+Y years, and hasn't even had a job in Y years"
It can be overcome, but... not ideal.
It might still be that way in X+Y years. It might not.Are you talking about the hardware or software? It's worth considering that Lindy's Law [1] might apply here.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
* https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/aug/28/many-hsbc-cust... (I believe this one was caused by firing greybeards who understood a certain very complicated batch processing system and offshoring to undertrained staff in India who then make a mistake and basically brough the entire system down as a knock-on effect)
* https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/nov/19/tsb-it-melt... (Insufficiently tested software upgrade although to be fair this was a major upgrade)
* https://scottishfinancialnews.com/article/rbs-it-failure-pre... (Not sure on root cause. Other interesting stats at the bottom of the article regarding failure counts)
Now, in all these cases I believe the outages lasted a few days at least where people had limited or no access to bank accounts, salaries not paid on time, incorrectly charged overdraft fees, automated payments not happening etc.
It can probably be argued what is "core" here and as far as I know no money actually disappeared into the ether but, in the UK at least, I am not sure I would be so confident in my declaration of Rock Solid software.
If the software isn't extendable or changeable then it isn't 'working fine', because if you can't offer internet banking or do FATCA reporting you go out of business or get shut down.
I did code-level support for a large internal data management system for the federal reserve bank in the mid aughts. I'm not really interested in disclosing the specific bland but critically important data we moved/managed. It involved a giant amalgam of legacy commercial AIX and HP-UX software with some newer Java stuff in a Websphere environment. It was all duct-tape-and-bubble-gummed together with huge ksh88 scripts that were in constant development by devs and support people like me who'd just ssh into production systems to make changes. None of the internal software had dev/test systems, there was definitely no code review, and there was no version control. Yep. The system on a whole required constant monitoring and intervention to keep it plodding along. We did periodically see data loss that was unrecoverable from a technological standpoint but recovered with physical media kept around from their necessarily belt-and-suspenders business practices and tons of available staff for data entry. I reckon tens-of-thousands of folks outside the bank would have been affected per incident.
But compared to, say, tens of thousands of investment transactions for pension and retirement funds evaporating, disbursements to a hospital's operations budget being delayed, sending confidential historical balance records in bulk to a large corporate customer's competitor, having an online investment system down during a period of extreme market volatility, or even large-scale customer data breaches, then yes. 'Money missing from a bank account' is in every significant way a comparatively minor problem probably fixable with a phone call and a couple hours of investigation on the bank's part, even with a significant sum of money. The bank would almost certainly catch it themselves during an automated audit. It's exactly the sort of problem that bookkeeping organizations are designed to mitigate and root out if they do happen.
The others could affect many, many more people's lives for much longer— potentially permanently.
- took a trip to the neighboring country, my friend tried to take out money from an ATM; first two transactions failed, third succeeded (at the atm). In the bank though, all "succeeded", and money were gone (first 2 eventually were reversed with manual intervention).
- I sold a house (in a remote mountain village), buyer sent 8100EUR from Germany, 78xy.z EUR made it to my personal bank account. Apparently due to multiple currency exchanges, but this is a SEPA transfer between two accounts both denominated in EUR, this was absolutely not supposed to happen and nobody was able to articulate exactly "why it happened" (or even exactly what happened). For this one the buyer decided to just eat the loss and sent me an additional 300EUR.
Operationally, Facebook is a vastly harder problem.
I wouldn't mind taking a 250$ an hour position with on the job training.
Odds are they're getting outbid by easier jobs. If I can write Javascript for 130k or COBOL for 130, I'm doing JS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_(computer_system)
"Our operation and our frontline employees have endured continuous and unending disruptions since the first time our airline made headlines in early June due to widespread IT failures."
That's what makes it misdirection, mentioning an issue from June, and very specifically not talking about a current IT issue. If there were a current issue, they would have called it out. The union has also been pretty clear in other statements that operational issues over the past few months were due to staffing shortages, not IT.
The entire problem is that they don't pay well for what is supposedly a rare resource. And nobody wants to learn a dead language for peanuts.
Offer 500k/yr, and me and about 100 million other people will be learning COBOL starting tomorrow.
By that logic, there isn't a shortage of anything if you have enough money.
The problem is now you have a bunch of D-level cobol coders without any experience, domain knowledge, etc
Which is where we are with most Java dev shops.
Right? So don’t wait too long because all of those who can pass this knowledge will be gone!
But everyone knows it’s a dead end. So yeah they need to pay very well to get the fixed they need.
The real issue here, is during bad weather and understaffed ATC, for some reason the airforce decided to do some training in airspace used by commercial flights. This military training part in the article is mentioned quickly, then completely ignored.
This was the US Military causing delays, cancellations, and people getting stuck overnight at airports. This was the US Military causing huge operational and financial issues for one of the most customer-friendly airlines out there. And the did this while eating up millions of dollars that are taken out of our paychecks - that they used to screw us. Time for congress to remove the funds that allowed them to conduct this training at a time when it caused problems for the general population paying their salaries.
> “The problems weren’t concentrated in just one particular region. The cancelations affected the entire Southwest network. People living in cities where Southwest has a big operation, like Phoenix, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and where I am in the San Francisco Bay Area, saw cancelations in the double-digits.”
if Chicago O'hare is shut down, United is done for the day in half the country, because half its planes are stuck at O'hare. if Chicago Midway is shut down, only Southwest is screwed. if Atlanta shuts down, only Delta is screwed.
Yes, I'm sure there are other cities that also had planes. Like Phoenix. Except the plane that was supposed to land in Phoenix is stuck in Florida. Or the pilot piloting the plane already in Phoenix is stuck in Florida.
Planes go from one city to another. If you introduce a blockage along the way, you've now taken that plane, or a crew out of commission.
>Online speculation that Southwest’s new vaccine mandate has led pilots to stage a sickout is being denied by the union representing Southwest pilots.
>That follows reporting on social media that some of the issues the airline is suffering could be related to that issue. A spokesperson for the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association (SWAPA) told the Arizona Republic it was not aware of any work stoppage and wouldn’t condone it anyway.
>SWAPA, however, has authorized its members to demonstrate against the mandate.
sounds like there is a vaccine mandate-related sickout going on, and the union is unofficially encouraging it but doesn't want to be seen as doing so. I don't know why that would be the case; there's no law against airline employees doing an industrial action. Maybe the union doesn't want to be denounced for being allegedly "anti-science"?
Not as brutal as Reagan breaking the ATC union, but supporting a common carrier in a time of crisis. I don’t believe a federal case has been heard yet where the vaccine mandate or terminating those refusing it has been found unlawful.
Just curious, is this just hyperbole or do you have an actual example?
ETA: I mean the "older than humankind itself" part. Like what does that mean in this context?
Then you fight him.
Yeah just have them switch to a completely different type of aircraft without getting trained or checked out at all, this will definitely fix the problem in short order.
I don’t disagree it’s your right to decline a vaccine, but it’s also your employer’s right to mandate it and terminate you if you decline it. I’m unsure why these are controversial points or are heated conversations; this is the natural conclusion of everyone exercising their rights. This isn’t even novel; vaccine requirements have been standard for some time (hepatitis, measles, etc) in schools and workplaces.
I ask because I am genuinely curious as someone willingly vaccinated.
Public support for vaccine mandates for employment stands at about 60%. Let's see how that number holds up when they find themselves without plane flights and hospital beds.
"This isn't even novel" is such blatant gaslighting it's hardly even worth addressing. Aside from hospital employees and soldiers no one in this country has ever had to demonstrate vaccination to their employer for anything -- and certainly not with vaccines with the paucity of long-term study and godawful side effect profiles that characterize the Covid vaccines.
If the argument is “mandates are wrong”, we’ve had them for over 150 years. If the argument is it’s not safe, its FDA approved and has been administered over a billion times.
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/vaccine-mandates-in-s...
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/imz-managers/guides-pubs/downlo...
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/hcp/imz/child-adolesc...
EDIT: @LurkingPenguin: While this is a good point, the data shows that vaccination protects against an intense infection resulting in the need of ICU and ventilation care (protection having been infected by COVID and recovering from previously does not).
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e3.htm
Schools also never mandated flu shots, which are a much closer analog to the Covid vaccines both in terms of effectiveness (imperfect, leaky, marginal reduction of transmission at best, wearing off over time) and seriousness of the underlying disease than measles or hepatitis.
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/09/covid-origins-gain-of-fu...
Their analysis is incredibly shallow, for example comparing Portugal or Iceland (high vaccination rate, mostly open, lots of COVID cases) to Vietnam (low vaccination rate, completely locked down at the time the analysis was done, not many COVID cases). You can't make any inference about the vaccine / caseload relationship when you ignore the fact that one country is completely open and the other had such a strict lockdown that people were struggling to get food.
A discussion published in the European Journal of Epidemiology. It doesn't just look at those two countries; its statistical analysis covers 68 countries and 2947 US counties. You don't think that if the vaccine were effective at preventing spread, there should be at least some evidence of this effect when comparing vaccination rate and spread across different regions?
Even in a largely vaccinated population, if you do widespread community testing you will find a lot of asymptomatic cases. If you don't do widespread community testing you won't. So you can have wildly different caseloads in two highly-vaccinated populations, yet no meaningful medical difference in the outcomes (since, as we know, vaccination is an effective prevention against serious illness and death).
The results of the other article I linked, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-021-00808-7, showing that vaccination does not reduce viral load, supports this notion.
Could you please share a meaningful study that comes to this conclusion and does not ignore all potential confounding factors? (I don't mean it in a confrontational way; I'm genuinely curious since I only managed to find heavily confounded data)
When I look at the pfizer 6 month study (not peer reviewed) I do not see that.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261159v...
When I look at Scotlands data I do not see that.
https://publichealthscotland.scot/media/9475/21-09-29-covid1...
Same with the UK.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Same with Israel
https://datadashboard.health.gov.il/COVID-19/general
Every dataset I look says the opposite so I would love to see the peer reviewed study that takes into account all potential confounding factors that led you to your conclusion.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y
For example, individuals who have had a laboratory-confirmed measles infection or can otherwise prove immunity do not need to be vaccinated against measles according to the CDC[1].
Over 44 million Americans have already had a laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection and the science indicates that people who have recovered from infection have significant protection not inferior and perhaps superior to vaccine-based immunity[2].
The vast majority of people who have had a laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection in the US can prove it as easily as people who have been vaccinated can prove they were vaccinated.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/measles/about/faqs.html
[2] https://www.science.org/content/article/having-sars-cov-2-on...
Can you provide some references regarding the side effect profiles of these vaccines being any worse than a typical vaccine? Genuinely interested, as from casual observation it doesn't seem to be the case.
The associated talk is here: https://rumble.com/vnbv86-winning-the-war-against-therapeuti...
VAERS data is public. They even provide machine-parsable format.
> “Many of these types of claims that we hear are actually a misrepresentation of the VAERS data,” Vasudevan said.
> The pace of reporting has picked up: In North Carolina alone, roughly 70,000 reports have come in related to the COVID vaccines — more than triple the total back in May, when CBS 17 explained what the database does — and does not — tell you.
> “It is reasonable to expect that reports on VAERS increase whenever there is a new vaccine on the market,” Vasudevan said. “And that’s definitely what we are seeing with COVID.”
> What the system makes perfectly clear: It does not establish a cause-and-effect relationship between any vaccine and those side effects. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explicitly says the reports “may include incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental and unverified information.”
> Among the reported side effects of the COVID vaccines in North Carolina: Yawning, fractures, a foot deformity, and wisdom tooth removal.
> She estimates that 85 percent of the reports on VAERS are “either completely unrelated to vaccinations, or about events that pose little to no concern.”
https://www.cbs17.com/community/health/coronavirus/fact-chec...
If not, what is? From what I've heard, the similar systems abroad are seeing the same kind of stuff. Are they trash too? What accounts for the system being polluted at such a higher level during the last two years?
If we don't have a working system that would warn us about vaccine adverse reactions, that's not evidence that the vaccines are safe, it's just failure to keep track of something very important.
> It does not establish a cause-and-effect relationship between any vaccine and those side effects.
It's not supposed to. The system is supposed to warn us about problems which kick off investigations.
And I agree, the USA should probably have better reporting systems!
Some other countries do, some of them have much better data quality than VAERS, and genuine analysis of them still agrees that the vaccines have a good safety profile. To just select a few English-language systems:
UK: https://coronavirus-yellowcard.mhra.gov.uk
Australia: https://www.ncirs.org.au/our-work/ausvaxsafety
Canada: https://cps.ca/impact
Some more background from McGill University: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/covid-19-critical-thinking...
I don't believe any significant number of employers genuinely want to terminate employees who don't have it. They are being coerced into doing it by the Biden administration, which has actively proclaimed its desire and intention to do just that. This isn't the natural conclusion of free individuals exercising their rights, this is top-down authoritarianism.
If "public support is robust", then why are they actively suppressing news about the cause of this issue? Regardless of what you or I think, it sure seems like whoever is doing these things thinks that we're a hair's breadth away from large-scale rebellion and they don't dare let anyone know why this action was really done or how successful it has been.
> so far those actions have been adjudicated as lawful
This feels more like a dismissive dunk than an attempt at understanding, compassion, or logical argument. It says, we have the power to force you to do it, nobody cares what you think, so shut up and do as you're told or we're going to smash you and nobody will care. The only "rights" being exercised here are the self-proclaimed "rights" of the elite to jam any policy they want down everyone's throat and destroy them using aggressive force if they object or resist.
I am also willingly vaccinated. But I see that these vaccines are clearly much less effective than we were told and have more significant side-effects than anyone is willing to admit. I am against mandating them for anyone who doesn't decide they want one without coercion, and I am becoming increasingly appalled at how many of my fellow citizens are embracing authoritarian measures.
You didn't address AndrewBissell's point. As others have pointed out, there just aren't enough military pilots who are rated today to fly even a small fraction of Southwest's fleet. Further, assigning a large number of active-duty aviators to gain certification to fly 737s would massively disrupt the US's military posture. This is fact, no matter how "creative" the Biden administration may try to be. (And don't even try to bring up federalizing ANG/Reserve pilots. Most of them are already pilots at other airlines!)
Southwest’s fleet is all 737s; is this really a different type from the C-40?
A fairly high percentage of airline pilots are also part time pilots in the National Guard or Reserves, so they may be simultaneously rated for a certain airliner type as well as a military aircraft. But that doesn't really help for this situation.
There's 91 P-8s [2] in USN service, but still not really enough to make up the shortfall. 165 737NGs delivered in military configurations worldwide, according to [3].
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_C-40_Clipper
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_fleet#Curre...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_United_States_m...
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_Next_Generation#Ord...
This isn't just a case of paperwork, either. A pilot can't safely operate a completely different type without training. Even if you expedite it, it's likely that resolving the industrial action will take less time.
For practical purposes employers can't afford to pay near 50% more for the least reasonable employees, the government isn't incentivized to do so to make it easier not to vaccinate when this is really a poor substitute insofar as public health, and only the minority of employees can afford this.
In effect the end result of a practical testing alternative is to pretend we are giving them a choice while in fact giving them little choice.
I and a lot of others don't accept any reasonable chance that you are going to kill me or my family members at work today.
Even the best of choices at this juncture will leave you at some risk even if you are young healthy and hale and far less risk if you choose to vaccinate. Describing it as a weak patch to bad health just belies reality.
For many who make up much of the dead the best route to safety lies in both they and people like you choosing to vaccinate so you don't infect and kill them. I have bad asthma. I cannot just "do some sports" and eat some leafy greens to ameliorate that risk. Worse my wife has an autoimmune disorder that requires her to take immuno suppressive medication. The best data so far suggests that if she were to get infected despite vaccination her chance of mortality would be on the order of 1 in 8 with some cardiovascular or lung damage being likely inevitable because she wont know to stop taking the weekly meds that stomp on her immune system until the virus already has a foothold.
She is hardly alone. There are millions of people like her in addition to 54 million 65+. People who by and large can't afford to live in a bubble. It just impossible for a large portion of the population to isolate. I have little choice but to do an in person job that might expose me to someone who thinks like yourself and have their sniffles scar my lungs that don't work that great to start with or end my wife's life whereas if we could get people like yourself to understand the unmitigatable risk others face we could drastically reduce that risk by taking a risk that in the scheme of things is no riskier than driving to work this morning and just getting a shot.
These tests could be made available at scale and cheaply, as is the case in many European countries, but we have chosen not to do that. This is a mistake we can fix, but it's agonizing how late we are - I was pushing my congresspeople to unblock it in January or February.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWDGNrOqQfQ
Correction, as was the case in many European countries. Freely available tests in e.g. Germany ended today, as the cost of a vaccine shot is cheaper than that of a rapid test while tests need to be repeated every 24h.
No, they could not, not without a wholesale reworking of the entire FAA. Pilots are trained and certified on individual airplanes; even highly experienced pilots need retraining in order to safely fly a new aircraft. Shoving a bunch of military pilots into 737s is both highly illegal, and would probably result in some plane crashes.
I can’t speak to any material differences between the P-8 and the civilian 737, but legally this still seems problematic. The DoD isn’t required to type certify their aircraft, and it doesn’t look like the P-8 or the C-40 (also a 737) are type certified as a 737, which means their pilots probably can’t legally fly a 737 civilian model. I could be wrong though, the FAA’s website is hard to navigate.
Additionally with many similar aircraft and oy one class of service, substituting equipment is much easier for Southwest than traditional carriers.
More flights than pilots.
Like when your PM brings in work from the previous sprint, to the current, fully loaded sprint.
And, tbf, i got it as i hit the 'equals' sign.
Just FYI, the CDC says that about 42% of American adults are classified as "obese".
covid mortalities are not a 1:1 mapping with obese/not obese.
Do you have a source for this claim other than "just google it"?
https://www.wfae.org/health/2021-09-30/novant-says-9-of-10-c...
>SWA has claimed that the immediate causes of this weekend’s meltdown were staffing at Jacksonville Center and weather in the southeast U.S., but what was a minor temporary event for other carriers devastated Southwest Airlines because our operation has become brittle and subject to massive failures under the slightest pressure. Our operation and our frontline employees have endured continuous and unending disruptions since the first time our airline made headlines in early June due to widespread IT failures. Our Pilots are tired and frustrated because our operation is running on empty due to a lack of support from the Company.
https://www.swapa.org/news/2021/swa-in-the-news/
> There are false claims of job actions by Southwest Pilots currently gaining traction on social media and making their way into mainstream news. I can say with certainty that there are no work slowdowns or sickouts either related to the recent mandatory vaccine mandate or otherwise. Under the RLA, our Union is forbidden from taking job action to resolve labor disputes under these circumstances. SWAPA has not authorized, and will not condone, any job action.
>...our Union is forbidden from taking job action to resolve labor disputes under these circumstances...
They couldn't admit it if that's what they're doing. They'd have to deny it either way. Even an "unofficial" unorganized sick out.
On the other hand- if a pilot knew he was getting fired in two weeks for not getting vaccinated, and he happened to have two weeks sick pay, well then the company policy did all the "organizing" that needed to be done.
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/urgent-a-southwest-airli...
In reality, a lot of pilots can just message each other on the side and say "f-it". Idk how many it takes to take down the system, but I suspect even 20% out sick could cause a cascading failure.
What I suspect is actually happening is much larger.
Pilots either "sit reserve" or "hold a line" based on seniority/airframe and to a lesser degree rank (ie a pilot may choose to sit reserve as a captain when they could be a line holder as an FO). Line holders have a set schedule that they bid on (again based on seniority). If someone calls in sick, misses a flight, or if a flight goes unscheduled, scheduling contacts a pilot that is sitting reserve who then fills in the missing position.
When sitting reserve they get paid to hang out near the airport. Pilots are typically based out of some airport, reserve pilots need to be able to get to their airport within a set amount of time after being called (iirc 2 hours).
It's not that there aren't real reserve pilots, it's that there are exactly the number of backups that there needs to be under normal circumstances. Airlines don't like paying people to sit around and they've got scheduling down to a science. I think I was in high school the last time my dad sat reserve. It felt like he had to fly almost every time (but not every time!) he was on reserve.
So, as I said, no redundancy for abnormal circumstances. If they are sitting on a reserve roster, but nearly always fly, then those aren't really a reserve pool. One or two extra people calling in sick and there won't be backups available.
> Employee exodus could 'cripple' Washington ferry system as dozens of sailings canceled again Friday
> 'The new norm': Washington ferry workers call out sick in protest of COVID-19 vaccine mandate
https://www.king5.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/washin...
Which is the reason why the union can't explicitly say it's because of the vaccine mandate. Once a company begins demanding injections in exchange for the right to keep your livelihood, previously agreed upon "forbidden labor actions" are null and void. I support them to shut down the entire country....and I have a feeling this is just the beginning.
(Not to mention an actual "FDA approved" vaccine isn't even available in the United States...they deceived you.[1][2])
[1]: https://covidblog.oregon.gov/approval-versus-emergency-use-a... [2]: https://www.foxnews.com/media/ron-johnson-no-fda-approved-co...
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-appr...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccination_policy_in_the_Unit...
What are your thoughts on there not being a vaccine mandate for the White House, Congress, the CDC, the FDA, and the NIH?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/08/30/false-cla...
> Indeed, contrary to the claims of Malone and others, the Comirnaty vaccine has the same liability protection as the vaccine approved under the EUA. That’s because of a law known as the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP Act).
> In early 2020, after the coronavirus emerged, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar invoked the PREP Act to “provide liability immunity for activities related to medical countermeasures against covid-19.” So that covers all vaccines that might be produced to combat the coronavirus, whether fully authorized or not.
> “The liability protections afforded under the PREP Act are tied to the declared public health emergency and not whether the vaccine is sold under an EUA,” Castillo said. “Therefore, both Comirnaty and the Pfizer-BioNTech covid-19 vaccine receive the same liability protections as medical countermeasures against covid-19.”
Approval was never going to change the liability status. That's not the point of FDA approval.
Since there is still skepticism from the other commenters too, if the union was lying could someone explain their motives?
Like what benefit does would the union have to provide confidence to the nature of the disruption? Or to cover for their pilots/employees?
Otherwise their statement being the truth is cool too
Southwest it seems reached it before others.
https://hbr.org/1992/01/the-balanced-scorecard-measures-that...
I somehow notice a lot of this lately, in many different areas. I wonder if there isn't a common cause behind those. Is it just covid or something bigger?
If "the price we pay" is a day or two of one airline (not any of the others) grounding most of its fleet, most likely due to a controversial internal HR policy, it's an exceptionally low price.
This is the thing with markets: whatever optimization you make, you won't reap the fruits of it for long. Someone - either competitors or adjacent third parties - will show up to suck out your margin, leaving you mostly as you were, but locking that optimization in as a permanent fixture in the industry. This means that when companies over-optimize, shoot past the optimum "value to profits" ratio and aim for higher margins still, they make the industry permanently (well, until next collapse) worse for everyone.
As opposed to...? tons of cargo and millions of people are being moved around everywhere, welcome to the modern world. The US commercial flight industry sucks in the grand scheme of things mostly due to a lack of competition. Flying in the US is expensive compared to Europe/Asia.
In the past this wasn't as big as an issue because the risk was spread out amongst a multitude of small to medium size corporations. But again, over the last few decades corporations have become mega-conglomerates through buyouts and mergers/etc... Too big to fail. All the eggs in fewer baskets. Again, in an attempt to keep growing, because in our current economic system and the culture promoted in it (partially by MBA's) is the idea that if your company isn't growing it's dying. And even if it's growing, if it's not growing by a large enough amount it is failing...
So you could have a 1,000 person corporations stabley making 100 million in revenue. Providing good benefits and salaries to all. But if its not growing, then it is viewed as failing ... It's truly an absurd mindset and culture.
The COO may have been there 30 years, and may lack an MBA, but increasingly it is this type of CxO that has been reyling upon MBAs and other consultants (operations research) to restructure the organization into an optimized-but-fragile state.
It is the rare old-hand that can standup to younguns talking tech and math, subjects he does not feel comfortable with.
money, responsibility, prestige
> that reward a certain style of business
profitable, growing, innovative
These trite rules get repeated so often they become like The Mandalorian "This is the way".
I think every industry is full of this kind of nonsense. Some closer to home examples : everything needs to be in the cloud; immutability is good; use 3rd party SaaS services for everything; code comments are bad; ...
OTOH didn't Facebook just demonstrate why building everything in-house is dangerous?
You are lowering you cost but by doing so, you are increasing your risk.
Furthermore, by using external saas, some business will have a tendency to get rid of some IT people to "really" save on cost which means you'll lose manpower for when something happens.
Software development has changed in the last decade and now everybody knows that they have to take failure into account when building software. Chaos Monkey opened the eyes of a lot of It people.
There should be some "MBA" level chaos monkey solution.
You have to accept some risk, and it's often hard to compare risks on the business side vs risks on the technical side.
Finance never did produce, it's whole purpose is to extract.
Run a gasoline engine to lean and it will start to heat and stutter...
As for the growth, in a peaceful society you can grow as much as the amount of people you supply, so without war there will probably no other way than saying goodbye to growth.
When things have been built to last, there is a lot of "fat" that can be cut - for a while.
The numbers will always look better - until they don't.
When the music stops, the "lean" "financial engineers" will be long gone, and those still there will have not the slightest clue how to re-start a culture of serious product/service development or robust operations, and the corp falls into a death spiral.
If you are a trader, you DGAF.
If you are an investor, watch for numbers improving without product and operations improving, and new markets being opened.
The "religion" of profit maximization and cost minimization has a price - it's NOT GLOBALLY OPTIMAL OVER TIME for the survival of the organization (profits, anti-fragility, etc.) nor for the larger system of a national or global economy.
Mathematically, flat, non-cycle economic systems are IMPOSSIBLE. You can never achieve it WITHOUT introducing systemic instability because you are eliminating ALL the information REQUIRED to maintain feedback control and you are removing agility of the system. Once the error signal goes to zero, the system is 100% out of control! It's open loop. Then any "environmental" change can tip the entire system over where that could be a competitor, other nation or "act of God" disruption.
And this is what happens when you profit maximize/cost minimize to its ultimate limit. And on the way to that extreme, you are increasingly make the system more brittle and the probabilities of failure increase.
Re having all people being "productive", the reality of things like Price's Law also make reliability worse as an organization (corporation, government, etc.) grows.
Price's Law says that the number of people who actually do most of the work is proportional to the square root of the organization size. In the case of supply chains, most of the people who are "assuring system reliability" actually aren't and generally are incapable of doing so anyway. It's a reality due to network effects (adverse ones but the same dynamic as the good ones - you can't control or differentiate the two).
Note you can take it to the other extreme: not worrying about profits is just as bad if not worse. Socialism/Collectivism doesn't work either for similar reasons actually.
Something has changed in the last 10 years - the last five in particular. I obtained my frequent flyer number from them in 1985 and have flown them hundreds, if not thousands of time so yeah, I have a LOT of experience to draw from.
A great overview of how they have optimized to the extreme to their detriment is by Juan Browne: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO39nIcuPhQ
If HK were still alive I sincerely doubt they would be operating the way they are today :(
Luckily I'm getting ready to move back to the west coast and shouldn't have to fly regularly again - thank god!
He stepped down just a few years before his death, in 2019.
A colorful character and legendary driver of the culture at Southwest.
I’ve only seen this in wealth generation instruments. Outside of those, I haven’t seen much of the “culture“ you’re referring to. In that framing, I think it makes sense and is anything but absurd.
The company is dual purpose at this point: part original mission (airline) part communal investment. Being a great airline that is comfortable with its current market definition isn’t sufficient for its second purpose. The commune’s investment expects growth in the abstract sense. They aren’t interested in Airlines, they’re interested in purchasing a piece of future growth.
Your Vanguard mutual fund’s performance depends on exponential growth - healthy retirement strategies live primarily off of growth, not principal, during the retirement phase. Maintaining value (~+2% on paper growth) doesn’t earn your company a place in society’s communal pool of assets.
Aye, I think that’s the point I’m making. Earning reports are for public companies. The company is part of society’s communal wealth if it’s publishing a quarterly earning report. Check out the companies not posting quarterly earning reports - because they aren’t publicly traded - and not building towards a public offering; I don’t think you’d find this same “culture.”
In your scenarios, the public communally purchased shares of future growth, priced in against the stated goals - and the public’s confidence the company would reach those goals.
What other outcome would you expect? If you think this is the market being irrational, you -personally- can buy at the “failure” price. If you’re right, you’ll do well over a long time horizon.
Nothing wrong with making an effort to lean out an organization, which is simply meant to make it more efficient and more competitive. It's not specifically just cutting staff, it's a lot of things. The trick is to not confuse leaning out with cannibalization. Like Musk says, if you aren't having to add stuff back in, then you aren't deleting enough.
The airline industry is under insane pressure given the environment, and this stuff is bound to happen. Safety may even be unintentionally sacrificed. This space is far from thermodynamically sound right now. If somebody has an easy answer for it, that would be some fat consulting stacks for the BTC fund.
I'll counter your generalization with my own: F250's are hammered with middle-management baggage. MM makes shitty decisions, and still causes tons of wait states. Having consulted for five F500's now, my observation so far is that the 250-500 range are much more incentivized to do what it takes to become more competitive. OTOH, the F20's I've consulted for severely need some waves of boomer (my gen) retirements.
BTW, the general reason M&A activity increases is because the associated market space has contraction pressure on it. What else are you supposed to do? The beginning of the end for markets, governments, empires. That's just the way us humans do things.
There's a decent summary of the book (and the general problem) in the 2012 Time article "Driven off the Road by MBAs"[2] as well.
[1] - https://www.amazon.com/Car-Guys-vs-Bean-Counters-ebook/dp/B0...
[2] - http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2081930...
This type of event is the obvious possible downside that is well known when you structure a company this way. It’s not that events like this aren’t expected, it’s that prepping for them costs more than the loss from not being able to absorb them.
Don't forget all of the future losses by losing the trust of both the customers and the employees.
> it’s that prepping for them costs more than the loss from not being able to absorb them
This assumes that they can absorb these losses.
You can see how this is a problem, right? This essentially means the market is not working as it should - instead of improving quality of service, it makes people absorb the bad experience, ad infinitum. The market is not able to deliver feedback to the companies, who instead rely on some degree of "capacity for suck" in their customers, and the fact that there's a new sucker born every minute - by the time they burn out a cohort of their clients, a new population of naive, hopeful people shows up to replace them.
Actually the market works just fine: it transfers price pressures efficiently across all participants - including human beings. It's society that doesn't work anymore, because it has now lost any meaning of 'value' beyond monetary terms for most of the population. Most consumers now cannot choose not to minimize expenditure: either because they cannot afford it, or because they simply don't know how to look at experiences through a lens different from "what is the price".
Leaving aside flying private--which is a whole different magnitude of cost--consumers can absolutely choose to pay more to insulate themselves from much of the unpleasantness of flying. Doesn't help much when flights are canceled or delayed of course but you have Pre-Check, airline lounges, business class seating, etc. which do generally improve the experience.
But, yes, society in the aggregate does not value the better experience at what it would cost to deliver--certainly not to the point of effectively excluding a significant segment of the population from routine flying but, in the process, making it a more pleasant experience for others.
It's the market working exactly as intended.
If people want cheap flights, they will keep flying southwest and deal with the occasional problems that come with dancing on a razors edge.
So, from a purely rational perspective, if the company makes $100m profit over 10 years then gets "sick", well, job done - you just start another one and carry on. Money doesn't care for future consequences; if anything, inflation puts pressure on disposing of profits quickly while postponing losses (and risk), even if doing so will eventually kill the company.
Extreme "financialization" of our ways of production has given us great rates of efficiency and innovation, at the expense of long-term stability.
This is a purely financial take, not necessarily a purely rational one. I say that because it's pretty easy to dismiss all the human aspect of a company dying, all the suffering it creates as something to not be taken "rationally" but what it actually means is to push the human-factor into the statistics field and be done with it.
I don't agree with this worldview.
Companies shouldn’t exist for the sake of longevity.
The human element doesn’t matter at all? Their workers are fed up.
This tunnel visioning on financial metrics is so superficial and narrow that it makes me angry. A company is a community of interacting, real people, not a video game.
Failure to maintain altitude above ground level and failure to maintain solvency are in many ways equivalent.
Both domains involve taking risks, but with severe consequences when either risks are miscalculated or ground truths change. Financial bets can be hedged in ways flight profiles often cannot be, and Southwest are credited for doing this (with fuel purchase futures notably), but there's a sense in which businesses are arbitraging latent risks for present profits in ways which can prove catastrophic. (Venture start-ups are particularly prone to this IMO.)
Southwest's single-airframe fleet affords efficiencies, but also risks should faults arise with that airframe or subsystems of it (as with the 737 MAX scenario).
It's usually not a problem for a business to incur a short term operating loss.
It's not quite as simple as cash-on-hand, turnover, or profitability. Start-ups without revenues or net profits may be solvent if investment capital is available, premised on future profitability or a viable exit strategy. But it's fairly strongly related.
Airworthiness is more an overall assessment of risk.
A substantially compromised aircraft, with expert piloting and favourable weather, can still land successfully.
A fully-airworthy aircraft experiencing CFIT won't. Nor will one flown into unanticipated adverse conditions such as violent weather, volcanic ash, or wind shear.
And of course, a sufficiently crippled craft cannot be landed successfully no matter what.
(An additional case is of a landing with partial survival of passengers and crew. We'll omit that.)
Airworthiness increases he probability of a successful flight. It's neither strictly necessary, nor sufficient. It is part of the overall risk assessment, effectively a creditworthiness rating.
An airworthiness certificate is a specific certification of such airworthiness.
* they operate literally one type of aircraft, and therefore only have to train their crew once, keep the specific set of parts, etc.
* they optimize the hell out of making sure their planes are in use carrying paying passengers for the maximum amount of time
* they fly a vast network of point to point using secondary airports, as opposed to coordinating at massive hubs
These are all things that would make recovering from a massive widespread disruption very hard, and Southwest has been doing it better and longer than anybody else.
Southwest had plenty of older 737s as well, but the new MAX planes both fly farther and have more seats, so while the grounding was in effect Southwest was essentially paying to keep the things on the ground while scrambling to reconfigure their flight network, and it affected them the most.
> why you’d prioritize that over the aircraft’s ability to stay in the air.
This is an egregious misunderstanding. There was nothing wrong with the purpose of the the MCAS system nor the concept of it. What went wrong was its failure to follow the dual path design, and do a proper failure analysis of its design. There was a further problem with some pilots not understanding how to deal with stab trim runaway.
These problems have since been corrected, and MCAS is still on the 737MAX.
If the pilots followed runaway trim procedure, which is how the MCAS failure manifested, they would have been fine. In fact, that's what the other unmentioned crew of a 737MAX did that survived MCAS malfunction and landed without incident.
Boeing issued an Emergency Airworthiness Directive about the procedure, which the Egyptian Air pilots didn't follow, either.
They could’ve made a small sized aircraft that had commonality with the 787 rather than the 737.
If plane going from A -> B is late it cannot become flight B -> C. If crew for this plane are stuck in the ground long enough, they have to wait til the next day to fly as they‘re only allowed to be awake and work for so long.
Distributed systems can also be more complex to re-converge after a major disruption.
I'd imagine it's non-trivial to re-plan a network, given equipment and crew limitations.
And as context, we're talking about 24 hours later, now?
In the event of widespread disruption, planes will not make it to their next airport to become a different flight, nor will their crew. Crew can also only be awake and working for a limit of time, so if the disruption causes a crew to go over that limit they are not going out until the next day, etc.
With cloud computing, it‘s a bit different because which host you‘re using in a region doesn‘t really matter, but for airline a specific plane with specific people need to be in a specific time and place.
While Southwest remains my favorite airline.
At the higher end, it certainly isn't necessarily the best any more, but I do think that's mostly because Southwest has kept to its two free checked bags, whereas the major carriers now make significant revenues from checked bag fees.
> The pilot emailed following the first Southwest post today (and provided his SWA ID to prove his identity). He asked that I paraphrase the email.
> Essentially, the union cannot organize or even acknowledge the sickout, because doing so would make it an illegal job action. Years ago, Southwest and its pilots had a rough negotiation, and the union would not even let the pilots internally discuss the possibility of working-to-rule (which would have slowed Southwest to a crawl).
> But at the moment the pilots don’t even have to talk to each other about what they’re doing. The anger internally - not just among pilots but other Southwest workers - is enormous. The tough prior negotiations notwithstanding, Southwest has a history of decent labor relations, and workers believe the company should stand up for them against the mandate. Telling pilots in particular to comply or face termination has backfired.
[1] https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/urgent-a-southwest-airli...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUXGB5FzhPc
The downvote button should be removed. Either upvote or don't.
It can not be that high skilled professionals oppose having their body autonomy revoked... it can not be that "my body my choice" should extend to more medical choices than 1...
no no. this can not be allowed
Before the vaccine was widely available you may have had a case but once you become vaccinated your risk level drops to well below other risks we already accept as part of having a free society.
I cannot have murder, child porn, or heroin use be a part of my religious ceremonies. I cannot have libel be a part of my free speech and expression. I cannot be Typhoid Mary and spread disease around. I cannot open a restaurant that skips hand washing. I cannot go to public school unvaccinated for measles and a number of other diseases in most states. I cannot drive drunk, despite research showing doing so actually improves my chances of surviving an accident (https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/odds-favo...).
Immunocompromised people exist. Tens of millions of children aren't yet eligible for the vaccines. I'm inclined to consider their individual freedoms not to be needlessly infected by a pandemic disease as important, too.
Care to address that or do you just want to keep building strawmen?
Again, this is fairly key. A large portion of the country is not yet eligible for the vaccines at this time.
> That is a very weak rebuttal
That is a very weak rebuttal.
1. Vaccinated people still spread covid, Vaccination primary effect makes a person asymptomatic, this has been proven.
2. "Large portion" is false, it is children under 12, who have a lower chance of serious illness than a vaccinated person. That said if you as a parent feel that risk to do high then you as a parent can take measures to ensure you children only come in contact with vaccinated person, this however does not mean you can impose that desire via government. To be clear I am fine with parents advocating business require vaccinations of their own business policy, I am not fine with government telling a Bar that is for adults they also must require vaccinations. Government mandates bad, private business choices good.
Vaccinated people still spread COVID, but they're less likely to. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/vaccinated-people...
"When infected with the delta variant, a given contact was 65 percent less likely to test positive if the person from whom the exposure occurred was fully vaccinated with two doses of the Pfizer vaccine. With AstraZeneca, a given contact was 36 percent less likely to test positive if the person from whom the exposure occurred was fully vaccinated."
> "Large portion" is false, it is children under 12
That's about 50 million Americans, a number I consider fairly large. https://www.statista.com/statistics/457786/number-of-childre...
Firstly, NBC? They're not exactly going to give you a balanced view, are they. Anyway. The article is about an academic study. Those are near worthless: even theoretical studies with 100% external validity frequently come out too late to be informative. The real world data is what matters here. Perhaps someone who was literally just jabbed spreads it less, but if the protection lasts three months it's irrelevant and misleading to make a temporally unbounded claim "vaccinated people are less likely to spread COVID".
The fact that fetal cells are used in testing has been public for a long time.
This article dates back to last December, for example: https://www.nebraskamed.com/COVID/you-asked-we-answered-do-t... (and here's me citing it two months ago, in case you want to claim a ninja-edit "last week": https://www.reddit.com/r/bestoflegaladvice/comments/p6f6yl/l...)
The “it’s the vaccine mandates!” argument has to figure out a way to explain why all the other airlines weren’t similarly affected when they instituted theirs.
Alex Berenson is… not a reputable source. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/pandemics-...
https://thefederalist.com/2020/09/07/atlantic-editor-concede...
https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/16/im-at-a-loss-for-words-...
https://dailycaller.com/2019/05/02/washington-post-atlantic-...
https://web.archive.org/web/20190911050141/https://www.daily...
https://archive.ph/MWN6K/again?url=https://www.theatlantic.c...
And many other examples.
OTOH, Derek Thompson predicted in 2017 that Bitcoin is overpriced at $16K, so maybe he knows something we don't?
Considering all of the other household items that are also commonly tested using fetal cell lines (including acetaminophen, aspirin, ibuprofen, albuterol, pseudoephidrine), the analogy doesn't apply.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/09/hospital-staff-must-...
As an example, here's a 2018 study on Tylenol using the HEK 293 line: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29273526/
I don't appreciate this YouTube channel doing what they are doing, it is pouring fuel on a giant nothingburger.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HEK_293_cells
That's their MO.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Veritas
> Wikipedia can be a great tool for learning and researching information. However, as with all reference works, Wikipedia is not considered to be a reliable source as not everything in Wikipedia is accurate, comprehensive, or unbiased.
So, there's also that to consider.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Researching_with_Wik...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Veritas#References
Here's a Nature Communications paper on HEK293 containing a brief history with an impact factor ~13. https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms5767
Above 10 is considered of significant worth.
If that's not good enough for you, stick to whatever it is you're good at, and stop citing trash.
Previously, if there was a shortage of say plane brake discs, the wholesaler would jack the price up 10x for the last 3 sets. That would lead to one of the 4 customers who wanted to buy them to say "nah, it's too expensive, we don't need it that badly".
The person who wouldn't get a set was probably the guy restocking the spare parts shelf, while the people who really really needed those parts right now so a plane can takeoff got them.
In todays world, it's illegal to jack the price, one customer buys all the cheap stock (one to use, 2 as spares cos they heard about a shortage), and now 2 planes can't take off.
The same happens for thousands of other products all across the world. The end result is the people who really need goods can't get them, while others sit on piles of stock 'lucky we bought some just before they ran out!'. Endgame: The economy grinds to a halt over tiny shortages everywhere.
The proper solution is to allow and encourage price gouging again, and have a PR campaign to explain to the public how changing this law really is in their interests, even if it appears on the surface that paying $100 for a flashlight in an emergency can't be good for anyone.
Price gouging laws are exclusively a local and state matter, and only apply at the retail level. Although there have been proposals for price-gouging laws at the federal level, none have been enacted. State laws don't generally apply to B2B interactions.
Any goods wholesaler I know of goes straight from "in stock, the price is X" to "out of stock, even if you offer a million $ you can't have any". Nobody auto-increases prices as stock runs low.
Perhaps it isn't illegal to do so, but nobody does it, probably because businesses believe it's illegal to do so.
Also as a practical matter the software they're running simply doesn't have the feature to dynamically change prices based on inventory and lead time. So someone would have to manually update all the parts prices, then lower them again later. Not worth the hassle.
The answer might be affirmative, but that doesn't mean that doing so is a good business move. If you were in charge of sourcing at a company, and a supplier pulled that shit on you, you'd be finding a replacement supplier rightquick. If a supply will gouge you for this reason, you can be sure they will be looking for other reasons in the future.
TL;DR: price gouging, even if legal, is bad optics.
Vaccine mandates. All the staff have walked off the job rather than be jabbed.
Nowadays, no one runs with any sort of buffer if that isn't explicitly demanded by government or other regulations... and when the shit hits the proverbial fan, it hits hard as a result.
Just imagine that most businesses are equivalent to running your whole stack on a single, self hosted at home, RPI. Including the git repository, and no backups.
Ad-hoc heuristic decision making + political in-fighting can get you off the ground, but it can't keep you reliably airborne.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/10/did-labor-action-ove...
> Not official evidence but just asked a close friend who used to work at SW for over 20 years. They texted their former SW union rep (non-pilot union) and they responded that they have >600 flight attendants without hotel rooms tonight due to the unexpected cancellations. They say the story/reasons they are given for the cancellations are constantly changing but they personally think it is a pilot sick out. They may be wrong but non-pilot SW employees think that’s what’s going on.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/10/did-labor-action-ove...
> As to why this airline and why now, an RT article mentions that-‘SouthWest Airlines became one of the last major US air carriers to introduce a vaccine mandate for its employees last Monday after the company was reportedly pressured by White House coronavirus adviser Jeffrey Zients to comply with President Joe Biden’s vaccination order. Some 56,000 SouthWest employees have until December 8 to get vaccinated if they want to keep their jobs.’
The pilots saw what happened to healthcare workers who didn't immediately push back on mandates, so they are playing it differently. And if you don't support employees demanding medical freedom because they see through the corruption taking place, you don't need to fly on airplanes.
[1]: https://news.yahoo.com/southwest-airlines-cancels-1-800-2326...
It might come to pass that the speculation turns out to be correct and people shall be free to call out the news for not calling it like it is but if it turns out wrong the same folks would be quick to call out the "fake news" I'd rather they be careful and I'd rather you interpreted such care charitably.
> if you don't support employees demanding medical freedom because they see through the corruption taking place, you don't need to fly on airplanes.
In place of arguing on the internet or at least in addition to I would suggest that I simply lobby my government to take away their medical freedom in service of protecting my life and my families lives. A minority of individuals may disagree but if the alternative is poverty almost all of them will ultimately take the measures that will ultimately protect them, their families, and mine.
We will win but ultimately so will they because they wont be in a hospital room suffocating on a ventilator. Seems like the definition of a win win.
> Source tells me “some controllers getting vaccinated and the mandatory (48) rest period required after controllers get the vaccine” led to staffing shortage at Jax ATC in Hilliard that resulted in mass flight delays/cancellations in Florida on Friday night.
> ... The Federal Air Surgeon determined that FAA medical certificate holders may not act as pilot in command, or in any other capacity as a required flightcrew member, for 48 hours after each dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines. The Federal Air Surgeon made this determination after evaluation of available medical information about these COVID-19 vaccines and potential side effects, https://www.faa.gov/coronavirus/guidance_resources/vaccine_f...
[1] https://youtu.be/yYcHWGxtRQo
Verbosity is almost more helpful for optimization in a way, in the sense that C code ends up being fast because it's simpler than C is harder to optimize.
As for COBOL, isn't one of the issues that it's super complicated and not specified properly until recently?
(I did COBOL apps in the early 1980s.)
The old movies that show tape drives sort of stuttering back and forth reflect slow program performance. That's not really how they looked for most of the things I worked on.
[0] https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_342...
I publicly spoke up at work about mandates being illegal, immoral and an affront to decent society. Especially, when there are alternatives we can provide (such as testing daily).
I made a post and shared it across multiple locations in the company.
As a people manager, I knew the risks.
My post was up only 10 min before being taken down.
Eventually, internal HR contacted me and told me they'd "take appropriate action" if I kept talking about it.
What they didn't expect is someone screenshot it and sent it around the company. I received hundreds of messages of support and I know many sent in messages on the side. Myself and many of the top people in the company wrote letters to their people leaders, CEO, board, HR, etc.
A week later they finally surveyed the company on their thoughts about the vaccines, A week after that the mandates were put on hold.
The majority of people don't believe others should lose their jobs over vaccine mandates. That likely is much higher (or lower) depending on industry or region.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/sixty-five-percent-o...
At the end of the day, this is expected. Polling indicated "70 percent of unvaccinated Americans would quit their job over exemption-less vaccine mandate"
https://theweek.com/vaccines/1004545/poll-70-percent-of-peop...
If this push continues, we may well all starve.
I stumbled recently on an interesting chart. Have not doublecheck the math, but comes from FinancialTimes, so I expect it to be credible. Bottom line, you need to vaccinate between 800 (60+yo) and 25,000 (<18yo) people to save 1 hospitalization over a 4 week period, given that we take current numbers for vaccine efficacy against infection at face value, and assume there will be no further declines as time passes.
https://www.ft.com/content/3439145a-80a4-47ad-9ceb-54a0cb707...