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Hacker News Hacker News[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confidence_and_supply
The paralysis of the political system in the US is either a feature or a bug depending on your point of view i suppose, but no question that it is entirely dysfunctional that a government can continue existing if it can't pass a budget.
You see this in education, infrastructure, public health, scientific research, housing, and energy. All foundational systems of a society, which compound the value of everything else, but they aren't immediate profit centers so kick the ball down the road.
It is an attitude problem first and foremost; and I'm not sure how you fix that.
PS - This also impacts private enterprise, like corporations. Enshittify their current offerings for the next quarter bump but ruin their brand reputation/long-term viability.
Denver does, however, so I wonder why there is no wait at DEN and hundreds of minutes at Houston/Atlanta/JFK ?
From memory: on the human side airports are understaffed, there are no young controllers in the pipeline, attrition is high, and the less people are available the higher the burnout rate, which creates a vicious cycle. On the technical side, airports are unmaintained, systems are obsolete and crumbling.
John Oliver makes the case that most of the issue is that the FAA is financed through discretionary spending so e.g. it's subject to shut downs and can't do long term planning.
> The ICE deployment is a particularly extreme example of what the political scientist Steven M. Teles has dubbed “kludgeocracy,” in which the government reaches for short-term, improvised solutions while resisting real reform. “‘Clumsy but temporarily effective,’” Teles has written, “also describes much of American public policy. For any particular problem we have arrived at the most gerry-rigged, opaque and complicated response.” The U.S. aviation system has been held together by such patches for years, but the kludges may finally be failing.
- deregulation of airlines in the 1980s led to rampant consolidation of routes and SPOF hubs that only work for revenue purposes and offer no real resilience in traffic planning. over-subscription of flights and lack of any real competition compounds this issue.
- climate change and global warming increasingly exacerbate severe weather conditions that ground aircraft and incur delays or cancellations in an already fragile system
- reagan-era policy hostile toward air traffic control labor unions that once checked the excesses of capital resulted in understaffing issues for more than two decades later. poor regulation of working hours, outmoded systems, and wage stagnation has further stressed the ATC system.
- the partial government shutdown has caused massive delays and cancellations of flights as the artifice of security theater begins to break down under its own political morass.
the solution is reform and regulation through policy change and investment. this is not possible in late stage capitalism (Streeck, 2016.)
This is quite amazing
These same people are commonly off by orders of magnitude when predicting the magnitude of these same events.
The author of this article won the "Toner Prize for Excellence in National Political Reporting". I'm going to infer from this, that he's better at political reporting, than he is at predicting the future of an entire industry.
And if he is truly convinced of this outcome, he should be shorting the airlines. (I'm gonna guess he hasn't done that).
(edit: syntax)