Us Air Traffic Controllers Start Resigning as Shutdown Bites

Good faith could be assumed in some other countries, and those relationships could, subsuquently, be less vital. But that's not the political environment America has found itself in.

Imagine trying to explain to Trump that you can't destroy the filibuster because too many of your colleagues might lose an election. It's like telling a five year old that he can't have desert because he hasn't eaten the vegetables. He doesn't want to eat the vegetables, you are a bad person because rather than agreeing with him you're acting as if he's wrong, which is inconceivable.

Some of Trump's advisors may have the idea that they can rig the 2026 elections and so it won't matter. A big problem is that some of these advisors also assured senators that they'd locked down 2020 and that didn't go so well.

To Trump this seems irrelevant. Why should he care about Susan Collins? She's not even hot, and hasn't given him any cool trinkets. So what if she loses to some Democrat? They're both losers, Trump is the ultimate and his people have told him that over 600% of people support Trump, if she loses that's her fault.

So that's a problem, a recurring problem and so far this term the solution has generally been to ignore Trump's useless suggestions but not do anything he explicitly forbids. Trouble is, Trump doesn't care about the shutdown but the at-risk Republican senators do care.

AFAIK this kind of situation is a result of a novel interpretation by an AG of a much older law some time around 1980. I don't think it's ever been tested in court, and we'd operated for decades under the old interpretation before then.

Trump could just say "we're going back to the old interpretation" and at-minimum buy several months of runway while court challenges happened (if they even did). This would be among the least questionable "stretches" (to be very generous) of presidential power he'd exercised.

How is it not?

The budget requires 60 votes, not a simple majority. Thus it's up to the majority party to present a bill that will win 60 votes.

Some important stuff in major democracies is designed to require way more than simple majority.

In Italy, e.g. the president is elected by the parliament, but the quorum required is two thirds of votes.

This is very important because it forces all governments to find a suitable candidate that is as unbiased and trustable as possible by the overwhelming majority of the representatives.

While elections of the president can drag for very long, even for months, I can't but say we italians have been blessed with great presidents. Each one stepped up to represent italians and never political interests.

The shutdown is a temporary budget squabble in a stable democracy; a banal political stunt that has happened every few years for the past few decades.

Rome’s dysfunction meant civil wars, assassinations, generals seizing poWer, private armies, and uprising (in a fundamentally different society where, incidentally, over 25% of the population was slaves.)

There has been over 2000 years of history since Rome… when a the only analogy a person can come up with is some half-baked allusion to the Roman Empire/Republic it’s a good bet said person lacks a sense of history, knowledge of current events, and common sense.

Sorry to be harsh.

The tail isn’t wagging the dog anymore, the tail(s) are the dog at this point.

They've made a pretty unprecedented bet on unilateral party-line action and the legislative branch significantly deferring to the executive. I'm sure they're concerned about what the party looks like trying to transition back to a more normal way of doing business, especially given what their voters are now primed to expect. I agree this should not be existential, but I also don't understand congressional Republicans putting themselves in this situation in the first place, so clearly I'm not looking at the situation the same way they are.

What if you collect too much? The fund is subject to appropriations.

> financing their local ATC as they see fit

We already use mileage based overflight fees:

https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/international_aviation/overf...

US airlines made approximately zero total profit from 1990-2023.

> ...it's much more efficient than the alternatives

I guess this depends on the definition of efficient and for what measurement.

Efficiency by what metric? Energy per distance travelled? Energy per kilogram moved (per kilometer?)? Time? CO2 emissions?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport

* https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint

For distances <120 km, cars are often quicker than trains, and for >900km planes are, but in between trains are often quickest (assuming infrastructure is actually present).

For whom? Historically, aviation has not been a profitable industry over its lifetime[0]. The companies that still fly are basically just a combination of "survivorship bias" and "newbies still somehow subsidized".

We're looking at today's companies like you'd look at the half-season cast of Squid Game and thinking "this group seems to be thriving, I guess". That only works if you disregard everything that's happened before now and what will likely happen for the rest of the season.

[0]: https://aviationstrategy.aero/newsletter/Jun-2015/1/Airline-...

With bread, maybe I only like certain types of bread. Maybe I don't want bread. It makes sense for there to be a market with diverse offerings. If bread inputs get expensive maybe everyone pivots to eating potatoes.

In contrast if you want to fly out of a major city there's one major airport, and you need air traffic control. It's a uniform service that is required. The same sort of market structure is not really viable.

I read it as pajamas. And I bet you enjoy burgers with chips rather than fries.

But the point still stands.

While I agree that “pajamas” is the most common meaning of PJs, there is a certain socio-economic class in the US in which “PJs” is used far more often in speech to refer to private jets than pajamas.

I’m a “language guy”, and it was a new one to me when I started spending more time around people who were referring to, and often users of, PJs.

While the person you were responding to took a crass line, their linguistic intent was very clear to me.

American Democracy appears to be the same as second generation wealth: unappreciated until gone. Make Functional Governance Great Again. I wish it were not so.

We helped Europe and Asia rebuild after WWII instead of conquering them. To the extent that our previous enemies in Germany and Japan now have some of the strongest economies in the world.

There have certainly been wars, often with dubious justification or horrific results, but good luck finding any superpower in history that hasn't gotten into bad wars. Unlike the US, most of the time those other superpowers used war for territorial expansion, like Russia is doing in Ukraine today.

You can dream of your utopian world order all you want, but at some point you have to judge the US against the alternative instead of the almighty.

I worry more. I am certain, for all bad things the US did, the multipolar world will be much much worse. You think the other power players are better? No way.