Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed
thepointsguy.com
thepointsguy.com
>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.
> 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...
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.
> Don't forget all of the future losses by losing the trust of both the customers and the employees.
> 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.
> You can see how this is a problem, right?
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...
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.
That's their MO.
> 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...
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.
The airline is saying it's something to do with weather, but somehow they're the only airline effected.
Everybody online seems to the think it's some sort of labor strike, but the union denies this and nobody can find anywhere where people are planning this.
And yet thousands of people are stuck in airports all over the country right now.
It just seems like something is going on, and that everybody is lying about it. Can't say I've ever really seen anything like this, and it genuinely freaks me out.
> It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
I'm not sure I can think of a precedent for being so willing to eject that many people from the workforce in such a way.
This is a disingenuous way to frame it.
The current govt is anti-Nazi, but it's never tried to mandate that all employees found to be Nazis must be fired.
The reason vaccines are an issue of employment (only at larger employers, by the way) is that unvaccinated people endanger their coworkers.
People have a right to be unvaccinated, and the rest of us have a right to protect ourselves from them.
This isn't based on risk assessment, this is based on ideology. There are situations developing where someone who is less likely to transmit COVID is being fired while someone more likely to transmit the disease is kept on - and everyone involved in the process knows it.
There is no reason for a vaccinated person to view an unvaccinated person as a threat.
* Vaccinated people do still spread the infection, albeit to a smaller degree
* Some people cannot be vaccinated, and for others it's less effective
For the above reasons, it's beneficial to me and society at large if as many people as possible are vaccinated.
Nothing is, but my risk from COVID post vaccination is less than other society risks we accept as normal risks of living in a free society, for example my risk of dying in an auto accident is many times greater than my risk from COVID post vaccination
>> Vaccinated people do still spread the infection, albeit to a smaller degree
I am not sure how this statement is relative to question on if an unvaccinated person poses a risk to me to the point where we must violate their body autonomy for forcibly inject them with a medication against their will
>>Some people cannot be vaccinated, and for others it's less effective
While true, this means those people should take additional risk mitigation, this however is NOT a justification for vaccine mandates, not in my view. These people should wear N95 Masks, take extra pro cations and be extra vigilant about social distancing and/or going to large public events.
>>For the above reasons, it's beneficial to me and society at large if as many people as possible are vaccinated.
Sure, but that is not what is being debated. The question is do those reasons justify the use of force,threats, and ultimately government violence to forcibly inject people.
I say no.
Your are correct that I do not find the small risk vaccinated person's have from an unvaccinated person to be at a level to justify mandates as reasonable
"Not allowing" - how are you going to "not allow" without using force of some sort?
Despite all these measures you are still going to be exposed to the coronavirus. Just like the every flu that we've dealt with for the last however many thousand years. This rigmarole is just upsetting people for no real gain to you.
Our media and so-called health leaders have dramatically oversold the value of these vaccines. Yes, they can help with the severity of reaction when you are exposed but they aren't some defensive bubble.
And I think that's the real issue here - being exposed to the virus and each persons reaction and risks carried in that reaction to the exposure are two different things, but they are lumped together - which shouldn't be.
No you don t. You took a vaccine that s supposed to protect you. You don t have any right to impose it through mandates on others. This is hiding malicious intent behind "what about the children" argument. You got your shot, you re protected and under no threat, move on with your life and leave people and their rights alone.
If your vaccinated and have the protection, what's the real issue?
If you want to go down the whole "protection" rabbit hole - and ostensibly I'm going to assume you mean protection from exposure to the virus, then the vaccinated are far more of a problem. An unvaccinated person can not shed (spread) the virus unless they are symptomatic - ie. have a fever. Checking for a fever is trivial to do in a non-invasive way.
Vaccinated people can not only be carrying but shedding (spreading) the virus while showing zero symptoms. So the only way to tell if a vaccinated person is a potential super spreader is through testing - that is neither as quick or easy as just taking someone's fever.
An utter 180 from your position. If anyone is concerned about protection from exposure, you would be looking at protection from the vaccinated - not the unvaccinated!
These mandates will only cause people to dig in their position to become martyrs. It's bad policy, and its not helpful. We need more carrots than sticks here.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28824370
Edit: deleted link to tweet, comment below points out that it was from a suspect Twitter account.
Think about it for two seconds, if that really happened, there would be hundreds of witnesses, everybody would be talking about the flight number, there would be cell phone videos and corporate social media responses. None of those things exist, so either everybody on the plane, the airport, and all their friends and relatives are in on the conspiracy except this one bot account, or they're making shit up to stir up conservatives, which is what they've done all day every day since joining the site in January 2017.
The White House thinks they can force unilateral changes to the union contracts.
If the unions admitted to what was going on, the White House would have more legal authority to intervene more directly with the unions.
It's so strange. Do people really prefer to push an agenda here rather than understand the nuance and truth of what is going on?
Well, yes. Contracts can't override Federal regulation. "Sign this contract exempting you from OHSA protections" won't (generally) fly, right?
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/07/us/politics/biden-vaccine...
> Experts said that legal challenges to the rule were all but assured, but precedent is most likely on Mr. Biden’s side. In the past 20 years, “every standard that has been challenged in court has been upheld by federal judges,” David Michaels, a professor at the George Washington University School of Public Health who was a head of OSHA during the Obama administration, said in an interview.
> OSHA also has the authority to quickly issue a rule, known as an emergency temporary standard, if it can show that workers are exposed to grave danger and that the rule is necessary to address it. The rule must also be feasible for employers to enforce.
At the state level, there's plenty of legal precedent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobson_v._Massachusetts
Social media has optimized the process of finding groups of people that think just exactly like you do. The fact that you are listening to one specific echo chamber that feels this way does not tell you that the entire industry feels this way.
Consider the following counter-example: United Airlines also has a vaccine mandate, and got well over 99% compliance.
But how many employees left UA along the way?
Hell the president was bragging that was exactly how they got to those percentages over the weekend.
Just make COVID-19 vaccination a requirement to pass your medical, and be done with all this hand-wringing.
Of course, zero pushback on this nonsense idea
In favor of Pfizer for that age group. Not in favor of "don't get the vaccine".
”A review of available clinical information, including death certificates, autopsy, and medical records, has not established a causal link to COVID-19 vaccines”
I can find 10 credible news reports of healthy individuals that died within 48 hours of receiving the vaccine in a minute of searching, so we know that the number 0 is complete nonsense.
Since the CDC numbers are comically wrong, we have to go to the next best source. The CDC itself is creating vaccine hesitancy by lying and misrepresenting statistics, which leads people to wonder what else they are lying about. Just the idea that they report adverse reaction rates based on number of doses administered, and not the number of vaccinated people, intentionally cuts the effective incident rate per person in half since two doses are required. That calls into question everything else they do. Nobody cares if it’s the first or second dose that kills or injures them. So the next best source is VAERS.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/ad...
> The nationwide cancellations came as the airline announced Monday that the company will now require employees to get the COVID-19 vaccinated by Dec. 8.
> Some customers said they were told the cancellations are a direct result of the vaccine mandate.
> “I asked them specifically 'is this about weather' – because if it’s about weather, they can deny compensation. They said 'no, it’s not about weather.' I said 'is this about maintenance?' They said 'no, it’s not about maintenance.' I said then 'what is the problem?'" passenger Ron Frank said. “They said this is all because of the vaccine mandate. They said we had a massive walkout. They also said that air traffic control had a massive walkout because of the vaccine mandate. But to couch 1,000 cancelations because of a thunderstorm somewhere is not believable.”
I was, at first, very skeptical that so many people would walk out of the their jobs in a seemingly organized way, until I heard about the PTO angle of the story.
I work at a company with “unlimited PTO” (because business leaders learned that they pay less with “unlimited” than they do with accrued). But in previous jobs, it was very common to accrue PTO (up to 2 to 3 weeks worth). Most employees would find it hard to get coverage or approval for taking time off, so their PTO would accrue until it maxed out. Anytime I was going to leave a job where I had banked PTO, I would take my time off, and then resign when I came back because if you leave with accrued PTO, they would pay it out, taxed as supplemental income, which is at a higher rate.
3 weeks is a common max accrual for folks that have worked somewhere longer than a year or two, and looking at the calendar, we’re almost exactly 3 weeks from November.
These workers are getting (PTO) paid to strike, plus they’re not breaking any rules, or committing to resigning (or being terminated due to COVID policy), yet. Three weeks to take a much needed break, speak their values, and not miss a check? Now that sounds more like human behavior.
If employees are using PTO by claiming they're sick (assuming there's no separate "sick days" they would normally use), Southwest might have recourse to deny paying PTO but whether or not they will is another question.
This doesn't make any sense at all. If a vaccine-mandate induced ATC walkout was the cause, all air carriers would be disrupted, not just Southwest.
I suspect this is someone pitching his own views about a situation he doesn't know the true cause of.
Jacksonville FL, for example is a major SW hub, and was completely shut down. Similar issues exist in two other major SW hubs - Houston and Phoenix.
Also, not all other airlines have mandated vaccinations. ...and those that have aren't in heavily anti-vax cities.
if its internal mismanagement then they do, as always follow the money.....
Then again, I think it's technically illegal for members of the airline industry to actively strike. So maybe this is how it's done for plausible deniability sake.
COVID vaccine shenanigans with a large chunk of the workforce near retirement age and just saying "fuck your mandate, I'll retire early" is just the cherry on top.
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.
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.
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.
You got 2x (or whatever) the salary until then.
That should give you plenty of time to catch up.
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.
Currently anybody is employed anyways if one knows
how to use a keyboard. I don't think that is ending
anytime soon.
Are you talking about the hardware or software? It's worth considering that Lindy's Law [1] might apply here.
* 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.
"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.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/06/bailout-c...
https://www.dallasnews.com/business/airlines/2021/04/09/pay-...
Matt Levine covered this last year [1]. The basic gist of it was that the CEO is focused on the shareholders, and the best use of the money was on stock buybacks. Spending money on improving customer or labor relationships wouldn't have helped during the start of the pandemic when all the airlines were stuck in the same boat unable to fly planes, and the cash used by e.g. American Airlines for buybacks in the past 7 years to increase the stock value 113% would have only bought them 4 months of operating expenses. The most long-term value for shareholders was created through the buybacks, and the government being willing to prop the businesses up during downturns reduces the risk exposure from this strategy.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-17/the-go...
I'm reading a book right now called "The Power of Nothing to Lose" which explores the primary and second order effects of individuals and companies being put into situations where they literally have nothing to lose. It's been an interesting read so far - recommended.
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]
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.txnd.35...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_Compensation_Regulation
> If your flight is cancelled and you choose to cancel your trip as a result, you are entitled to a refund for the unused transportation – even for non-refundable tickets. You are also entitled to a refund for any bag fee that you paid, and any extras you may have purchased, such as a seat assignment.
From https://www.transportation.gov/individuals/aviation-consumer....
Though compensation for delays, not so much.
>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.
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.
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.
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...
Consumers who are looking for someone to blame for this, should look in the mirror: those people who pick the cheapest picket at Expedia just by "sort by cheapest first", are the main culprits. Airline industry is in the pathetic state it is due to irrational, irresponsible penny-pinching by consumers.
There are no ways to fix it unless you roll back deregulation and mandate fixed ticket prices as they used to be, which is of course impossible. Airlines who don't save on everything not leaving any buffers for anything, will simply go bust.
That said, airlines are between the sword and a hard place, and I expect it's going to get much, much worse as climate regulation kicks in the next few months. If you want to fly to some remote country for tourism, do it as soon as possible.
Given how cheap tickets today are, there so much that could be improved for the small and really non-decisive increases in prices (compared to the rest of average trip costs say hotel, taxi to/from airport, etc)! It's not that expensive to turn the modern day economy class experience - which is a truly an insult to human dignity - into something quite pleasant - in the structure of overall trip price it will be barely noticeable. But that won't happen because people pick entirely by PRICE alone. This is irrational and sad.
Compare with restaurants for example. There's also a ton of competition there, they go bust very frequently and have also very thin margins. But they don't try to compete ONLY in price, there is a great variety and customer experience is on average quite acceptable. Even closer point of comparison is hotels. There's nothing wrong going on with the hotels, while they are also a terribly competitive industry.
I also changed to this flight yesterday at 3 pm. Had to check several times over a few hours before I could find a suitable flight.
This flight is full.
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...
Saying "737" is actually 12 generations of the same aircraft.
Wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737) says: 737-100 -> 737-900, plus 737-MAX 7/8/9. Note: All have actually flown with commercial airlines and paying customers. (MAX 10: Not yet.)
Further, from the Wiki page for Southwest Airlines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_fleet), first sentence in section after intro/summary: <<Southwest Airlines began revenue flights on June 18, 1971 using three Boeing 737-200 aircraft...>>
Deeper: <<On August 29, 2017, Southwest Airlines took delivery of its first Boeing 737 MAX 8, the first airline in North America to do so. The airline was also the first in North America to operate the aircraft on a scheduled revenue passenger flight on October 1, 2017.>>
Assuming both of these Wiki sources are correct, that means over 50 years, Southwest Airlines has flown 11 different generations of the 737.
Current fleet on Wiki says: 737-800, -900, MAX 7 & 8.
There seems to be a lot of reluctance to get the vaccine among the young, at-will employed despite the downside of being out of work if they test positive.
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.
He says even low wage workers are in short supply and are working lots of overtime. He also says previously laid off pilots are backlogged in training to bring them back into working.
He also says the vaccine mandate is a problem. Browne is fully vaccinated and has no objections. He thinks no rational pilot will give up their salary over this. But, his analysis is that the vaccine mandate is an extra irritant in a fragile situation.
This is a nuanced and detailed analysis, but I'm not sure that is a entirely correct. Other airlines with similar pilot issues are not failing this way. Why just Southwest?
> 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...
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.’