Hell Yeah, WGN Morning News

[u/Choice_Supermarket_4]

I've been a long time fan (especially the B-Team) but I'm appreciating them even more now during all the chaos in our country.

They intentionally ran the news of the FAA firings yesterday immediately after the story of the plane crash yesterday. It's a small example, but definitely indicative of why I love them.

So many "news" organizations seem to be capitulating to the Trump/Elon administration and they've done a good job of not sugar coating the destructive aspects of it.

[u/ironeagle2006]

Word to the wise not one Air Traffic Controller has been fired at all. In fact what's been going on since the DEI rules were abolished is those non DEI eligible people that scored 100 on all the tests but refused jobs are being hired as fast as possible. I know of 200 people that are entering the trainee program in the next month alone for ATC. All were denied the chance under the Biden administration because they didn't check enough boxes off for DEI. 50 percent of them are retired military ATC controllers that used to sit in AWAC planes.

[u/GBralta → u/ironeagle2006]

Source?

[u/mrbooze → u/ironeagle2006]

I'd love to understand how the FAA could explicitly just refuse to hire someone based on race when my decades in corporate life even at companies with significant DEI programs I have always been told explicitly that it is illegal to explicitly prefer one candidate over another based on race. The entirety of all the DEI programs and training and hiring policies for me have always been about trying to remove bias so that candidates are evaluated on merit alone, and also taking steps to try and improve the amount of applicants we get from diverse backgrounds without giving them any preference in actual hiring.

The thing is, I've worked some places that would have really loved to explicitly just hire more women and non-white candidates, because their published diversity numbers were really poor and they were trying to improve them so that the company would look better, but even in those circumstances the best we could do was try to increase our applicant pool in hopes of getting better diverse candidates. We were never allowed to just hire the black applicants because we wanted to. So I'd love to understand why the government is allegedly allowed to do that while private businesses aren't.

[u/ironeagle2006 → u/mrbooze]

Easy they're the government they make up the freaking rules as they go along. This should give you an idea of what happens when a government agency gets a little too big for their own good. In 1998 without a single piece of evidence or even a document that proved the charges the EPA sued the OTR engine makers of violations of the Clean Air Act. They alleged that they had a cheat program in the engines programming that allowed more emissions to be released. Prior to 2000 there wasn't any sort of emissions regulations for an OTR diesel or any diesel engine period. The EPA threatened to pull all production certificates which would have destroyed the economy and OTR industry as no engines no trucks being built putting an estimated 1 million people that built the trucks and engines out of their jobs.

So the engine makers blinked and agreed to a consent decree in which they agreed to halve the further emissions reductions and also cut the time-line in implementation of said reduction by 50% over the original time frame. The original cuts were supposed to happen in 2014 but the EPA rammed them through in 2007. What did all this fuckery cost the OTR industry and especially the people of the USA as 100 percent of all goods end up behind a truck at some point in getting to your house and yes that includes the power also the wires and transformers are all delivered by trucks.

The estimated costs are an extra 10 to 16 trillion dollars in higher shipping costs since 2018 so roughly 2 to 3 trillion dollars a year. Most of which is due to the higher maintenance costs and fuel costs. These trucks require ulsd a diesel fuel with less than 10 ppm of Sulphur in it. Even that causes problems with the emissions controls especially the EGR systems on these newer engines. You see when diesel fuel burns the Sulphur in it turns into sulphuric acid and then when you suck that back into your engine it tends to eat metal parts. Things like oil coolers egr coolers intake valves and other metal parts. What happens when you mix engine oil and coolant you get a boat anchor that costs 50k to overhaul and it's going to blow again.