Sunday’s Forum

FILED UNDER: Open Forum
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is a Professor of Security Studies. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Comments

  1. James Joyner says:

    Sorry for the late add. Steven, who usually posts these, is on vacation, and I forgot about it because, well, Steven usually posts them.

    10
  2. Not the IT Dept. says:

    It seems that Trump is siding with Musk over H-1B visas. Apparently “I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program,” (NY Post interview) Of course, there are records of him saying exactly the opposite during the campaign and in his first term.

    Source: https://apnews.com/article/trump-maga-immigration-visas-musk-91ab17e141cc9764fb18b8bc862c84dc

    3
  3. Kathy says:

    Aviation is having a terrible year’s end. Now a 737-800 crashed in Korea, after doing a belly landing without any landing gear. Only two people survived.

    Speculation is rampant. I won’t engage in it, as is my practice. But will note neither speed brakes nor flaps are visible in the video (itself very heartbreaking). This is abd in two ways.

    One, without flaps to provide additional lift, the plane needs to come in faster for a landing; the higher speed being what provides the needed lift.

    Two, slowing down without wheels is difficult. The wheels have brakes, which are what slow down the plane most. In addition the drag provided by the flaps and speed brakes helps. So do the thrust reversers on the engines (one at least can be seen deployed in the video).

    If you look up videos of belly landings, or even missing only the nose gear, you’ll note the pilots attempt the slowest landing possible. They do this because slowing down will be harder, so the less speed on touchdown the better, This was not the case here.

    Why? Hopefully we’ll find out after the investigation.

    7
  4. MarkedMan says:

    @Not the IT Dept.: FWIW, I really doubt Trump employs many H1-B’s. That program is for highly educated, experienced workers. Trump no doubt uses a lot of visa holders (and illegal immigrants) for groundskeeping and maintenance, and in the summer probably staffs up the front desk with English speaking, college age “guest workers/trainees” from Eastern Europe.

    4
  5. MarkedMan says:

    @MarkedMan: As I thought. From the NYTimes:

    Mr. Trump appears to have only sparingly used the H-1B visa program, which allows skilled workers like software engineers to work in the United States for up to three years and can be extended to six years.

    Instead, he has been a frequent and longtime user of the similarly named, but starkly different, H-2B visa program, which is for unskilled workers like gardeners and housekeepers, as well as the H-2A program, which is for agricultural workers. Those visas allow a worker to remain in the country for 10 months. Federal data show Mr. Trump’s companies have received approval to employ over 1,000 workers through the two H-2 programs in the past 20 years.

    3
  6. Jen says:

    I’m shocked, shocked. Well, not *that* shocked.

    ‘Baby in a dumpster.’ A spate of abandoned newborns unsettles Texas.

    Critics say these cases are no coincidence in a state with one of the nation’s most restrictive abortion bans and near-bottom rankings on women’s health care.

    7
  7. Kathy says:

    @James Joyner:

    I was really hoping for an explanation involving a space warp, a wormhole, a time loop, the Bearimy, FTL experiments, the mutliverse, or at least a DeLorean.

    Oh, maybe next time.

    3
  8. Kathy says:

    A note on the Korean crash. While I was posting the above, I came upon a video from a 737 pilot, which shows the relevant checklists indicate not to use speed brakes or thrust reverses on a belly landing. Though it notes “unless stopping distance is critical.” It also instructs to sell full flaps.

    I’m linking to the video because it’s not speculation, but explanation about what has been seen on video and what is known thus far.

    4
  9. Bobert says:

    @MarkedMan:
    I’m so surprised that Trump would have his facts mixed up. /s

    3
  10. CSK says:

    @Bobert:

    Trump lies the way he breathes.

    4
  11. Jay L Gischer says:

    I just wanted to note that as a guy with a career in tech – in Silicon Valley – I am fairly sure that every American who can do the job we are hiring systems engineers to do has been hired. Their jobs are not being taken away.

    Granted, everyone wants to work as a software developer at Google. That doesn’t mean they can actually perform in the desired way.

    You can ask if that raising of the bar is arbitrary, which is a reasonable suspicion. If it were though, the people who get hired would find that they are bored with their job and get another one – at least those without an H1B would (and there are lots of those). So I doubt it. I think there are probably some firms where it is a tool of abuse – smaller and lesser-known startups.

    4
  12. Tony W says:

    @Jay L Gischer: The H1B is a symptom. The problem is that Republicans have decimated educational opportunities in the U.S.

    And this is deliberate. H1B holders have to renew every few years, any roots they put down are tentative, and employers hold MUCH more power over them than typical US employees. They can’t even change jobs in the US without getting a new sponsor and filing a lot of paperwork.

    Of course corporate America is on board with rounding up the tomato pickers and bringing in the H1B tech workers.

    The whole point of all this is to move middle-class money to the oligarchs.

    7
  13. Jay L Gischer says:

    @Tony W: Well, I’m not saying you’re wrong about Republican opposition to educational spending.

    AND, it has been clear to me since I was in 9th grade that Americans as a matter of popular culture don’t like math, and think it is a waste of time. Instead of curiosity, you will hear, “when am I ever gonna need that!?”

    5
  14. DK says:

    @Jay L Gischer:

    I am fairly sure that every American who can do the job we are hiring systems engineers to do has been hired. Their jobs are not being taken away.

    Seems suspicious we kept hearing of mass tech layoffs during the past decade — affecting well-schooled engineering grads too — while tech titans also tell us they have no option but to import immigrants for tech jobs. If there’s no contradiction here, Musk and his ilk should explain why.

    Are we to believe every laid off American engineer was incompetent and untrainable, not just more expensive? I don’t trust these corporations and their Scrooge McDuck leaders; if MAGA voters really are ready to get in that pool (I don’t buy it yet) then the left ought to warm the water for them.

    I think these oligarchs will do everything possible line their own pockets — with no regard for broader negative impact on individual workers and their families and communities. And that’s where state and federal labor (and visa) regulators should step in.

    FWIW, my buddies at Raytheon and Boeing –and then various Bay Area and NY tech gigs as we grew up and spread out — expressed irritation with their H1B colleagues way back in the Obama era. Since that chatter usually involved poking fun at accents and language barriers, I chalked it up to xenophobia/racism. I’ll have questions for the group chat, today. They are almost all Bernie-Buttigieg-style liberals, so I want their take on this.

    9
  15. MarkedMan says:

    @Bobert: I don’t think Trump has the intellectual capacity to understand the difference between the programs. He was never very bright and he has declined precipitously

    5
  16. MarkedMan says:

    @Jay L Gischer: I’ve hired a number of programmers in the past 5 years, and the applicants skew heavily towards visa holders. Of my two most recent hires, one was a visa holder from India and the other a US citizen, but naturalized from Nigeria. FWIW, the Nigerian is the better programmer but I attribute quite a bit of that to an American education from high school onwards. The Indian educational system produces plenty of smart people but with very little hands on experience, which is a real drawback for device development.

    1
  17. Kathy says:

    @MarkedMan:

    I don’t think Trump has the intellectual capacity

    Correct.

    3
  18. al Ameda says:

    @MarkedMan:

    Mr. Trump appears to have only sparingly used the H-1B visa program, which allows skilled workers like software engineers to work in the United States for up to three years and can be extended to six years.

    I’m unaware that Trump ever utilized ‘skilled workers …’

    4
  19. MarkedMan says:

    @Tony W: I’m as down on Republicans as anyone, but I can’t lay the lack of US programmers and Engineers at their feet. These are hard professions, and ones that humble you. You can’t talk or spin your way out of a bug, you have to find it. I think the majority of US raised students just aren’t that attracted to the fields and feel, correctly, that they can do just as well in another area. While engineers may found companies, that’s a tough row to hoe. I can’t think of any US C-level execs that spent any significant part of their career in Engineering or R&D. It’s mostly finance, marketing and operations.

    4
  20. just nutha says:

    @Jay L Gischer: I heard “when am I gonna need that” when I was a teacher. Only I was teaching technical writing/business communications–to engineering tech and admin assistant students. The curiosity factor appears exactly where Piaget and the gang predicted it does and ends at the level where we can expect that it will–when the goal becomes mastery beyond common societal expectations and toward discrete applications. “What am I going to use that for” [emphasis added] is really a pretty good question. “To become an engineer” is also a good answer, but only if the questioner can visualize the goal. (I, for one, never could.)

    Not that I think our curriculum designs and goals are particularly good, wise, or well thought out. But you need industrial policy to have better ones, and even having it is no guarantee of better results. Basic anti-intellectualism is an additional rabbit hole.

    2
  21. MarkedMan says:

    @DK: Engineering and R&D layoffs are usually about killing projects and programs. Since such efforts are always on the cost side of the balance sheet, and won’t translate into profits for years to come, it can make an Exec look good in the short term as they demonstrate toughness by slashing costs.

    Also, “Engineer” and “Programmer” are broad categories. For my whole career I’ve designed devices. The people who work for me are worth every penny, but they definitely won’t be worth that if they suddenly jumped to a different area.

    2
  22. Tony W says:

    @MarkedMan: I spent my entire career in IT as well, so I understand what you mean.

    I will say, however, that *somebody* is managing to educate their population to do this stuff. And there’s a reason the U.S. hasn’t been able to.

    Whether anti-intellectualism is a natural outgrowth of a puritanical-founded society, or it was seeded in the late 20th Century isn’t particularly interesting to me.

    What is interesting is what are we going to do about it.

    President-Elect Musk thinks we should surrender, and just hire foreign workers who, coincidentally, cost less and have less power. I think we should fight back and change the way we educate our citizens so that Americans have the intellectual power to compete.

    11
  23. Lucysfootball says:

    This sounds like something straight out of the nazi playbook:
    Ron Vitiello, former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, claimed President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed internment centers for immigrant families would be like a “really nice summer camp.”
    No, it’s not an article in The Onion.

    5
  24. Jay L Gischer says:

    @DK: Layoffs are a part of Silicon Valley life and they always have been. I have been laid off. It happens because the company founders or kills off a project. Typically severance packages are generous, and the engineers in question find new situations easily. This was not the case in 2002, where it was really bad here after the Internet bust. But it was bad for everyone, including H1B workers.

    Engineering is project-oriented by nature. Your job is to create something. When it is created, you need to find a new thing to create. When it is cancelled, you need to find a new thing to create. Sometimes that’s within the company – the old HP was famous for this – most of the time not. That’s just how it works here.

    I imagine this is how it works in the entertainment business, too. Though that should mean that engineers ought to have a union, but they don’t.

    2
  25. Gavin says:

    Make no mistake about it — US produces far more engineers than it needs. The “will” that is needed is to force people like Musk to pay the actual wage for Americans rather than cheat with H1B’s. Funny how they never use O-1 visas, which require the company to prove the person is actually Exceptional in the job requested. Instead they H1B for positions that aren’t even technical simply because they can.

    5
  26. Kathy says:

    @just nutha:

    For me, the question “when am I going to need/use that,” means the subject was difficult, tedious, boring, and above all I wasn’t any good at it.

    I never felt that way about quadratic and polynomial equations, for example, though they were hard, tedious, and boring, but I could solve them easily (is there a formula for polynomials? there is one for quadratics).

    I did feel that way about analytical geometry.

    1
  27. CSK says:

    Steve Bannon is yelling “scam by the oligarchs!”

    1
  28. Rob1 says:

    @Not the IT Dept.:

    Source: https://apnews.com/article/trump-maga-immigration-visas-musk-91ab17e141cc9764fb18b8bc862c84dc

    Trump appears to side with Musk, tech allies in debate over foreign workers roiling his supporters

    Roiling his supporters? Doh! This is exactly how oligarchies are supposed to work!

    3
  29. Rob1 says:

    @MarkedMan:

    Instead, he has been a frequent and longtime user of the similarly named, but starkly different, H-2B visa program, which is for unskilled workers like gardeners and housekeepers, as well as the H-2A program,

    Trump: Corinthians 1, 2 H-1B H-2A, I subscribe to them all. They’re really good stuff. My new Bible will have them all.

    4
  30. Rob1 says:

    @Tony W:

    I will say, however, that *somebody* is managing to educate their population to do this stuff.

    But it’s also a matter of numbers. One “somebody” has 4x the population of the U.S.

    2
  31. Michael Cain says:

    @Gavin:

    Make no mistake about it — US produces far more engineers than it needs.

    This argument has been going on for decades, especially with comparisons being made to China. I have always said the potential problem is not that China produces more engineering graduates than the US, it’s that China manages to find stable engineering jobs for so many more of their graduates.

    1
  32. MarkedMan says:

    @Rob1:

    Trump: Corinthians 1, 2 H-1B H-2A, I subscribe to them all.

    You win the Internet today!

    3
  33. MarkedMan says:

    @Michael Cain: The engineering employment situation in China is complex. State companies never fire anyone, but they don’t give poor performers raises. Given the inflation rate, it is not long before there are people making half the salary of the person next to them, or less.

    My impression was that “poor performance” could also include “failure to kiss up to the boss.

  34. just nutha says:

    @Kathy: I stayed with math all the way through Trigonometry. My reason was that you needed a Trigonometry grade on your high school transcript to go to a university. I’d come to the realization that I had no interest in being an engineer, accountant, actuary, etc. about 3 years before. I figured “math* isn’t hard, it’s labor intensive”** while I was teaching grammar as part of the freshman comp. curriculum I was teaching. While I was teaching in Korea, someone had figured out that something on the order of 5000 hours is spent acquiring a language–native or second–to reach effective fluency. I was 55 when I landed there. I wish I’d known this earlier in my teaching career.

    *and any number of other skills
    **which is where tedious and boring come into play, though not for everyone

  35. just nutha says:

    @Michael Cain: China also controls the wage rate as part of a command economy system. In market economies, wage rates are controlled by creating surpluses of qualified workers. And by bringing in immigrant labor for whom the lower wage will be more than the can earn at home.

    Only one of those systems is conducive to “find[ing] stable engineering jobs for so many more of their graduates.”

  36. MarkedMan says:

    Comment #9,528 on why generative AI is ruining the Internet.

    Every year on New Years Eve family and friends make predictions for the coming year. I’m the compiler and, eventually, the judge of the predictions. Turns out that we are in the “Google a question and a half dozen AI sites are instantly spawned saying anything to get you to click” phase.

    I asked a couple of people to check my answers and my daughter knew off the top of her head that Simon Biles hadn’t announced retirement. AI click bait begs to differ.

    FWIW, I googled the same question just now on a different computer, and the “Simon Biles announces retirement and baby” post is gone.

    1
  37. just nutha says:

    @MarkedMan: About a zillion years ago I encountered a study of “merit raise” systems. I never found it again, so I can’t provide a reference, but the results indicated that actual meritorious performance was hard to quantity, so many committees simply gave raises either randomly or according to which workers managers preferred.

    That “‘poor performance’ could also include ‘failure to kiss up to the boss'” may well be a cultural universal. As is finding a patron = material success. Read more Horatio Alger (and more critically).

    2
  38. Rob1 says:

    Here you go, a segue into an explanation for many things under our microscope.

    151 Million People Affected: New Study Reveals That Leaded Gas Permanently Damaged American Mental Health

    https://scitechdaily.com/151-million-people-affected-new-study-reveals-that-leaded-gas-permanently-damaged-american-mental-health/

    2
  39. MarkedMan says:

    @just nutha: I actually prefer what a couple of companies I worked for tried to do: reward excellence with bonuses and separate poor performers but strive to keep salaries towards industry average. I can vouch for the fact that people who made significantly more than anyone else in the department were tempting targets for a Reduction In Force. “What have you done for me lately?” became crucial when you had a choice between losing three workers with average salary or two with high ones.

  40. Mikey says:
  41. Mister Bluster says:
  42. gVOR10 says:

    @Tony W:

    The whole point of all this is to move middle-class money to the oligarchs.

    It’s struck me for some time that we are on an unsustainable path. The techbros, late stage capitalism, Republicans, whatever you want to call it, are on a twofold path. First, they wish to get rich with ways to extract more and more money from us. Second, they wish to ensure no money flows to us. At some point they will have drained their host, us, dry.

    7
  43. MarkedMan says:

    Jimmy Carter. If nothing else, beer. And, on a much more serious note, Guinea worm.

    6
  44. Kathy says:

    @just nutha:

    I’ll accept for you, and others, math is labor intensive and not hard. For me, it is very hard. I do understand it, that’s not the issue. I just get confused and stuck trying to actually do it.

    Even when there’s a formula, it’s not simple. Analytic geometry is all formulas (formulae?). I still had to take it twice, and only a teacher’s discretion to take a 63.9 grade and say “Ok, that’s close enough to a passing 7,” kept me from taking it three times.

    I did well at first, got worse when we reached the parabola, and got hopelessly lost when the problems involved rotating or moving coordinates around.

  45. Kathy says:

    @Mikey:

    He might not have been the best president, but unquestionably he was the best former president.

    8
  46. CSK says:

    @Kathy:

    Math always bored the hell out of me. All memorization of formulae. No room for speculation. 2+2 is always going to equal 4.

  47. Kathy says:

    @CSK:

    It actually equals five for very large values of 2 😀

    3
  48. Gustopher says:

    @just nutha:

    I heard “when am I gonna need that” when I was a teacher. Only I was teaching technical writing/business communications–to engineering tech and admin assistant students.

    Jesus Fucking Christ. The biggest difference between excellent software engineers and mediocre to poor ones is that the excellent ones can write and communicate their thoughts (and capture why design decisions are being made — was there a good reason, or were there N approaches, they all probably would work, and it was based on vibes?).

    By this metric I am above average, but that’s because the bar is very low. I ramble.

    If I ever get to design an interview process for engineers, there will be an essay portion. Not even technical. “What’s your favorite Transformers movie?” would be a perfectly fine topic*. Maybe LSAT essay questions (these are not about the law, btw, they present a scenario — where to place a restaurant given two possible locations or something — and require you to make a decision and explain reasoning)

    *: until very recently the correct answer was “none”. “Transformers: One”, released this year, is actually decent-to-good. It bombed at the box office. A lot of people thought it was a rerelease of the 2007 movie or 1986 movie.

    1
  49. Gustopher says:

    @CSK:

    Math always bored the hell out of me. All memorization of formulae. No room for speculation. 2+2 is always going to equal 4.

    I’m not going to say that you didn’t go far enough in math, but the creative stuff eventually kicks in. Complex numbers (7 + 3i, where i is the square root of -1, which doesn’t “really” exist, but if it did it would model a lot of electrical engineering problems surprisingly well), non-Euclidean geometries, countable vs. uncountable infinities…

    It’s not for everyone though, and you probably made the best choice for you by getting bored and never looking at it again.

    1
  50. Gustopher says:

    @MarkedMan:

    I can vouch for the fact that people who made significantly more than anyone else in the department were tempting targets for a Reduction In Force. “What have you done for me lately?” became crucial when you had a choice between losing three workers with average salary or two with high ones.

    While working for a company that later blew up the world economy, there was a pattern of not firing people for performance reasons, since there would eventually be another layoff, and the terrible employees were useful for that.

    They were referred to as ballast.

    This was the same company where my boss asked me if there was anything positive I could say about 4 coworkers, who he viewed as equally worthless. I had nothing, but did point out that one of them microwaved fish in the office on a regular basis. That one got the ax.

    This same boss made up a fake project for the other three to work on, where they had to use the hot new technology, so that when they inevitably got laid off it would look good on their resumes. So, decent guy. Sort of.

    This boss also explained something to me that sounds incredibly obvious, but which I never heard explained in a way that sank in: “if you incentivize bad behavior, you get bad behavior.” It was like I had been blind and could finally see. So many things made more sense.

    4
  51. Gustopher says:

    My comment about ballast employees reminded me of something. My first real job was at a consulting company, and they deliberately kept useless employees on staff, so they could sprinkle them across projects to increase billable hours.

    They paid those people less, but everyone was billed at the same rate, so my pay was subsidized by having useless people on the team.

    We weren’t in the business of creating software, we were in the business of creating billable hours. Software was just a surprisingly useful byproduct.

    4
  52. Bill Jempty says:

    @Mister Bluster:

    President Jimmy Carter got my second vote for President USA.

    I voted for John Anderson that year.

  53. just nutha says:

    @Kathy: What you’re describing is a flaw/sorting mechanism in how we teach. When I was taking courses, the measure was not as much whether you could perform the computation as much as whether you could do it from rote memory. To me, that’s a category error (I think, I can never keep the kinds of errors straight). If students are permitted to create useful to themselves guides and notes for sorting the confusing elements in a discipline, more students will complete more computations (or whatever product is desired) with more accuracy.

    Of course, if more students have more success, it will be harder to determine which student is “the best” and therefore deserving of the elite college placement, plum job, etc.

    My problems in math started when I couldn’t do the rote learning quizzes at the same pace as my peers and continued through making small computation errors that led to wrong answers. The again, not being “good at math” (or many other subjects for that matter) simply meant that you’d go sweep floors, pump gas, be a “tire monkey” or other things that still paid living wages in a nation where working poor could live on a single salary, tho not well, and a college student with a minimum wage job could afford to pay rent (frequently in a shared apartment), go to school, and eat.

    ETA: And houses in cities didn’t sell for mid 6-figure median prices (in the less desirable areas).

  54. just nutha says:

    @Gustopher: Yeah. That question always gobsmacked me, too. Even in the business communication classes, most of the students were going for something called a professional secretary certificate at the time.

  55. just nutha says:

    @Bill Jempty: I think Bluster is talking about Carter v. Ford, 1976. I voted for Ford. The only time I ever voted for either a Democrat or a Republican in a Presidential election. John Anderson in 80 could count, though, I guess.

  56. Ken_L says:

    Robert O’Brien claims that if America buys Greenland, “the king of Denmark becomes even wealthier.”

    Robert O’Brien was the last National Security Advisor in the first Trump administration and will reportedly serve in the next one.

    It seems Kash Patel’s The Plot against the King was not a children’s book as first thought, but a serious MAGA work of history.

    2
  57. dazedandconfused says:

    @Kathy:

    Here’s a vid of two experts completely forgetting Sully’s famous dual engine failure due to bird strikes.

    The immediate desire to return to the runway and land the wrong way strongly indicates a dual engine failure possibility. As the excellent vid you posted notes, it’s and extended procedure to get the gear to fall without hydraulics, and both engines windmilling would not have provided enough hydraulic power to drop the gear. Would have to have been done manually. Perhaps the highly stressed crew of this glider never got around to that, or, perhaps, they turned back for the airport and found themselves high and had to drop the nose down lest they over-fly the airport creating too much airspeed for the manual gear-drop process to function.

    We be guessin; of course, and the boxes will tell the tale.

  58. Mister Bluster says:

    @Bill Jempty:
    @just nutha:

    I should never assume anything. I thought that since the video was the 1977 inaugural parade when I wrote President Jimmy Carter got my second vote for President USA. it would be clear that I meant the 1976 general election. I thought about adding: My first vote for President USA was in 1972 for George McGovern. I could not vote in the 1968 election as I was two months shy of my 21st birthday. The legal voting age at the time.
    I voted for Jimmy Carter for a second time in 1980 in keeping with my single issue vote for the Democratic presidential candidate since a Democratic President would only appoint Supreme Court justices who would uphold Roe v Wade.

    1
  59. Rob1 says:

    @gVOR10:

    Second, they wish to ensure no money flows to us. At some point they will have drained their host, us, dry.

    The “great middle class expansion” of the 20th Century, has been good for the upper class owners of industry and commerce.

    Disrupting of our economic engine of consumption is counterproductive to all interests, including Musk’s. So, the endgame here defies straightforward unpacking.

    3
  60. Kathy says:

    @just nutha:

    The school where I learned analytic geometry, allowed students to bring in a list of the formulas used in the course, as well as calculators. So, no rote computation there.

    @dazedandconfused:

    I’ve heard nothing suggesting a dual engine failure.

    Now, I’m not sure abut this, but I’d assume the crucial systems in the event of dual engine loss which would be powered by batteries or the ram air turbine, would include flaps and gear.

  61. dazedandconfused says:

    @Kathy: Other than the pilot’s decision to attempt that landing in that bizarre configuration, neither have I.

  62. Kathy says:

    @dazedandconfused:

    That’s one reason I’d rather not speculate.

    BTW, there are a number of dead engine safe, or safeish, landings other than Sully’s. The Gimli Glider comes to mind, as well as Air Transat 236.

    These two ran out of fuel, which is vastly different from catastrophic all-engine failure. But neither had a problem operating crucial systems even so.

  63. Flat Earth Luddite says:

    @Kathy:
    @dazedandconfused:

    You can ask me for anything you like, except time*

    Speaking from personal experience, the more things go completely pear-shaped, and the more things you have to react to, well the more it all turns to complete s***.

    Ugh, the wait for the after-action and black box analysis is going to feel like an eternity.

    *Luddite’s aging little grey cells attribute this to one N. Bonaparte.

    1
  64. dazedandconfused says:

    @Kathy: Those incidents were planes running out of fuel at cruising altitude, giving them a lot of time. This plane was close the the ground. No pilot with an operating engine would chose to immediately head for a runway like that.