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Comment by irq11 | Hacker News Reader

It wasn’t inevitable; if it happened solely because Trump made them do it (edit: the article now seems to contradict this, but did not when I wrote the comment) it’s truly a red-letter day for rationality and evidence-based reasoning.

The conversation around this subject has degraded to irrational hysteria, but really: do you think Trump knows anything about airline safety? Is this really how we want the system to work?

Today it’s an airplane model, but tomorrow it’s banning travel from Africa because of an emerging disease, or capitulating to anti-vaxxers because of a news story.

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The headline is bad; it appears Trump acted in response to a letter requesting the action from Boeing.

Yeah, the article seems to be changing with new information.

If Boeing requested it, it’s obviously a different thing, but it wasn’t clear at the time I wrote the comment, and the original comment was phrased conditionally anyway.

>do you think Trump knows a damned thing about airline safety?

Given his recent tweeting, he sure seems to think he does.

I mean.. the guy did own and operate an airline at one point. So it's a little silly to say he knows nothing about it, no matter how much you don't like the guy.

He's the POTUS and still thinks the Chinese are paying the American tariffs. I wouldn't give him so much credit.

It’s almost literally true that he owned said company at a single point in time. His airline had a trajectory not unlike a 737-m.

I mean, he also claimed that newer airplanes are less safe than older airplanes. Which seems pretty absurd given that crashes have been trending down for sometime.

https://theweek.com/speedreads/828609/trump-claims-old-simpl...

> I mean.. the guy did own and operate an airline at one point. So it's a little silly to say he knows nothing about it

Given the way that worked out, his having owned and operated an airline is certainly evidence that he had money, but not evidence that he knows much about even the business side, much less any other aspect other than the "being a passenger" side, of aviation.

Trump certainly wouldn't have been the only person to end up owning an airline that was more the money than the brains behind the operation...

Based on transcripts of him talking to airline industry executives[1] in the past, I'd say he actually knows less than nothing: i.e. he doesn't know what he doesn't know, much like the pointy haired guy who's too insistent he wants you to get the robots that write the computer programs to make a blockchain for cybersecurity to read your explanation of the bug.

[1]https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-pres...

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