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The competency crisis rages on. Boeing's planes fall out of the sky. The Secret Service forgets to check the nearby roof. Anti-virus software bricks your computer. These sorts of incidents have always happened, but it's hard to deny that they have gotten more frequent.
I could be wrong, but the number of fatal Boeing crashes or lesser incidents is not an outlier compared to past incidents and other manufactures before all the media scrutiny. Anyone remember the 737 rudder jams during the 90s? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_rudder_issues#:~:text=During%20the%201990s%2C%20a%20series,board%2C%20157%20people%20in%20total.
It was a different model and hardly got similar media attention despite two major accidents with lots of fatalities close together
The Boeing issue was somwhat unique in that it was arguably the result of a vulnerability that had been purposefully introduced.
A conscious choice was made to change the emergancy autopilot disconnect from a physical switch to a software one and also to exempt certain autopilot functions from said disconnect switch thus invalidating the existing pilot checklist procedure for bad air data.
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I'm always skeptical but never dismissive of such common sense. It could be recency bias and the availability heuristic at work.
I am starting to think there's the opposite of that kind of bias at play. 'Instinct distrust bias'?
I don't know what to call it, but it certainly feels like a lot of people turn very 'skeptical' when an aspect of their supported or preferred worldview is poked at in some way. The most obvious example of this would be mass immigration and the rise of housing prices. Implying a causal connection simply isn't a part of the program. Yet instinct would tell us it's the most obvious and important part of the entire problem in most if not all western countries.
Ditto depressed wages, rise of "the gig economy", etc...
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Pick me! I’ll deny it!
I have zero reason to believe capability has gotten worse by any reasonable metric. Maybe—just maybe—that’s propped up by technology even as competency has tanked? But if so, I think there should be better evidence than black swans.
Compare complaints about the land boats of old. Why can’t we buy sweet Caddys anymore? I dunno, because they were death traps in an accident.
I’m still trying to find that Onion skit about accidentally invading the wrong Middle Eastern country.
I agree that our competence probably hasn’t declined that much. But our systems are much more integrated with a lot more single points of failure. I doubt that bad updates were ever that unusual. But it wasn’t quite the same as it would have been in 1990 when there were dozens of different OS and virus software combinations and so on. One company doing one update would have only affected the few companies that had the wrong combination of systems that got a bad update. Now the combination of cloudflare and Windows is common enough that one bad update takes out thousands of computers in thousands of companies.
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Well, I think it has more to do with fuel efficiency standards. They were also death traps, or not as perfectly safe as possible, but rounding off all the edges for aerodynamic efficiency gives all calls a sameness that's striking when compared to older designs.
You can build a land boat that's as safe as you like, but it's not going to meet fuel efficiency standards unless it's classified as a truck somehow. This also relates to the rise of SUVs: they're not-sedans, and so they don't have the same standards.
I remember a video about the old standard of round headlights. Super convenient for everything except aerodynamics. There was an awkward transition where companies tried to put the aero shell around their legally-mandated headlights, but that was unnecessary after the regulation got removed. Wish I could find it again.
Was it this?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=c2J91UG6Fn8?feature=shared
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Boeing used to be better. I believe the Secret Service was as well. But anti-virus software, and the companies which make it, have always sucked.
Ehh I'm going to press X to doubt on the Secret service.
John F. Kennedy got Killed (I'll admit Trump would have been killed by Lee Harvey Oswald too)
Gerald Ford had 2 assasination attempts on him both of which he got lucky and survived but both were even crazier than Trumps
and just looking through wikipedia the list is just so long and full of examples that it beggars the question if Trump was even remotely unusual.
Boeing I'll grant you though, I think a part of it is that every corporation has its ups and downs and we have 1 down for Boeing right now, but remember the ford pinto? Boeing's issues are nowhere near as bad.
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