This is what happens when we treat public infrastructure like a tech platform... always on, low overhead, minimal headcount. My own diverted flight was just one minor data point in a much larger pattern of problems. The FAA's equipment now fails approximately 700 times weekly. Controllers work 10-hour shifts, six days straight. There's a backlog of replacement parts for components nobody manufactures anymore.
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When systems that were designed for resilience are optimized instead for efficiency, they break.
Two tangents from that post: Kayfabe is a word from pro wrestling, meaning the portrayal of staged events as real, which has become normal in the world of politics.
And an article about the psychology of the resentful right, Weak Men Create Hard Times:
Who goes out of their way to spend hours each day posting slurs on the internet? Who obsesses over harmless cultural artifacts like a silly TikTok dance? The guy who does this (and it's almost always a guy) is not someone who is succeeding in his own life.
What this article fails to understand is the insanity of the whole project of modernity, which is too big a subject for this post, but I'm not going to judge anyone for being a loser, where winning is about conforming to a human-made world that is going farther and farther from human nature. Trumpers aren't wrong to want a simpler world, they're just unable to imagine less complexity without more domination. The author quotes Francis Fukuyama:
]]>Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.