Oh maybe we should do this more carefully
Inside the Explosive Meeting Where Trump Officials Clashed With Elon Musk
Aka King Kong v Godzilla v all of us.
Cabinet officials almost uniformly like the concept of what Mr. Musk set out to do — reducing waste, fraud and abuse in government — but have been frustrated by the chain saw approach to upending the government and the lack of consistent coordination.
“Chain saw approach” is too mild. It’s more like carpet bombing.
In a post on social media after the meeting, Mr. Trump said the next phase of his plan to cut the federal work force would be conducted with a “scalpel” rather than a “hatchet” — a clear reference to Mr. Musk’s scorched-earth approach.
Derp. That’s like burning down 75% of Manhattan and then deciding to burn it down more politely. Musk’s approach was obviously destructive and childishly sloppy reckless dangerous bad. Obviously from the very beginning.
Just moments before the blowup with Mr. Rubio, Mr. Musk and the transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, went back and forth about the state of the Federal Aviation Administration’s equipment for tracking airplanes and what kind of fix was needed. Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, jumped in to support Mr. Musk.
Mr. Duffy said the young staff of Mr. Musk’s team was trying to lay off air traffic controllers. What am I supposed to do? Mr. Duffy said. I have multiple plane crashes to deal with now, and your people want me to fire air traffic controllers?
Oh so they’ve noticed that firing air traffic controllers has its downsides? All too literally?
At another point, Mr. Musk insisted that people hired under diversity, equity and inclusion programs were working in control towers. Mr. Duffy pushed back and Mr. Musk did not add details, but said during the longer back and forth that Mr. Duffy had his phone number and should call him if he had any issues to raise.
The exchange ended with Mr. Trump telling Mr. Duffy that he had to hire people from M.I.T. as air traffic controllers. These air traffic controllers need to be “geniuses,” he said.
And then they all made mudpies and threw them around the room.
People from M.I.T. do not want to be ATCs… The whole problem was that the specialized pipeline was sabotaged by people concerned more with equity than churning out qualified controllers. The exam was replaced with a weird personality survey that the “right” sort of candidate was often given the answers to.
It’s gonna be hard to fix that considering the drain in interested persons but really don’t need “geniuses” to do the work.
Actually, we do need geniuses to run Air Traffic Control, but a different type of genius to those endlessly churned out by MIT.
Some years back I worked with an ex ATC who retired due to stress and burnout. Their workload is extreme and stressful, often dealing with multiple aircraft simultaneously, being pressured by pilots who were themselves pressured by management to adhere to timetables. Meal breaks and even toilet breaks can be delayed due to the need to keep going until a handover can be managed.
He found selling Life Insurance on commission only to be a much more relaxing job.
There’s no way that Musk has not taken advantage of all that personal data he was given access to. Musk’s cabinet
rivalcolleagues surely must know that he likely has dossiers on all of them by this point, right? And whatever dark secrets that Trump was trying to hide when he refused to release his tax returns, Musk must now know. We’ll see if opposition to Musk quietly evaporates or not. Publicly he might threaten to fund primary challengers to remove critics, but that’s a big “what if” if someone suddenly decides to grow a backbone and stand on principle. A quiet phonecall, or a not-so-cryptic note is so much cheaper and quicker.There are some things money can’t buy — for everything else, there’s Mastercard.
Genius is one of those things. Genius is born, not made.
Exactly. Highly trained and educated people will do just fine. Also they need to be willing and serious about their work. There are a lot of perfectly average people that would fill the requirements.
Or people whose uncles went to or taught at MIT, right?
Because “genius” is a single innate (and heritable) ability that applies across all fields and is much more important than actual training and experience. Apparently.
Like twiliter, I’m pretty sure we don’t want “geniuses” as air traffic controllers. Geniuses tend to day-dream (it’s part of the job description) something you absolutely don’t want air traffic controllers doing. Intelligence, mental discipline, sense of responsibility (basically all the things Trump doesn’t have) you want, but genius, no – neither the Trump sort nor the real sort.
Also what’s wrong with burning down 75% of Manhattan. Something similar worked quite well for Nero I believe.
As for genius, there are places doing a better job of turning out geniuses than MIT. MIT turns out a lot of engineering types. They seem like geniuses to a lot of people because they are abnormally good at math. That isn’t genius, it’s technique. Genius requires something more. As Francis Boyle said, geniuses tend to daydream. They also tend to read a wide variety of things, which description doesn’t fit any engineer I have ever known-which is a lot.
Where are they churning out geniuses? I’m not talking about simply removing ignorance. Sign me up! :P
(DaVinci was quite an engineer, btw.)
They aren’t really “churning out” geniuses anywhere; that was just phrasing. But there are a lot of places that nurture geniuses, and MIT is only one of those. I don’t imagine it’s even the best.
Yes, Leonardo was quite an engineer, but that was a long time ago, when people were trained more broadly. I think it’s safe to say that most, if not all, of the graduates of MIT are not a Leonardo DaVinci.
By the way, not to be a pedant, but it’s more accurate to call him Leonardo, because DaVinci is more of a place indicator than a name.
Thanks ikn, I’ll call him Leonardo henceforth. :)
Heh. I was going to say that, but didn’t. Weirdly enough I can remember my mother correcting me on it when I was a child – such an odd thing to stick in the memory. Another was the pronunciation of “library” – DO NOT omit the middle R – it’s library, not liberry. I even remember that we were crossing Nassau Street heading back to the car. It’s not easy pronouncing the middle R in library but by god I’ve done it every single time since.
There should be a novelty book of random things our parents told us that we remember to this day.
As an MIT alum, I don’t agree with characterizing the school as exclusively about engineering. It is a full-featured university, albeit one more strongly focused on STEM subjects. It is possibly the only school that requires music majors and literature majors to take calculus and physics, but there are nonetheless music majors and literature majors.
#12 one my mother always got miffed by, besides library, was February, not Febuary. I am diligent about both words.
Same. Both were a taboo. The result of course is a lifetime of wincing.
My mother’s birthday is in February so I am very diligent :^) never really had a problem with library though.