Two things can be true at once:

A) Diversity hiring is unrelated to the crash

B) There is a real scandal with hiring and the FAA

What I have read so far about this situation is outrageous. My understanding is that in 2014, Obama appointed a head of the FAA who wanted to diversify the workforce.

They introduced a biographical questionnaire which had rather arbitrary criteria for passing. It appears to have been explicitly designed to fail people that do not know the magical answers. The failure rate was 90%.

This is not the only example, but perhaps the most egregious questions: you are asked what your best subject was in highschool. If you answered science, you get 15 points (a substantial amount). No points for any other subject. Next, you're asked your best subject in college. If you answer history, you get 15 points. No points for any other subject.

Here is an alleged recreation of the test: https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/

There are supposedly voicemails in which they helped select candidates pass this biographical questionnaire by providing their preferred race/gendered candidates with the answers. I haven't been able to find a voice mail online, but Fox Business reported that these voicemails exist.

Per a 2016 Yahoo Finance article, an internal FAA report falsely cleared the employee of wrongdoing.

It's my understanding that there is currently a lawsuit making its way through the courts regarding this. It's also my understanding that some allege that the problems are not all resolved yet with hiring, despite the questionnaire being withdrawn in 2018. I'm not sure of the specifics of how there may still be problems with hiring and the FAA.

https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1752091831095939471

1. https://www.aspi.org.au/report/aspis-two-decade-critical-tec...

Even at current Chinese prices a re-backed grid is just a dream and a nightmare only those who do not know electricity could think it's doable, while it's perfectly possible converge to electricity as we have converged to IP, a single tech for nearly all, not the cheapest but the most universal, that on scale means doing more with less, or implementing the new deal, with self-consumption and small scale storage, so we can shift our loads (and we have very sensible economical incentives to do so) as much as possible augmenting the usage of electricity without augmenting the grid loads. Nights will demand more from the grid, but that's not an issue because most loads except in harsh winters that are more and more rare, happen during the day.

This is a logic, technically sound path toward the new deal. The California model is a logic, financial-capitalism sound way to implement the new deal which actually can't happen. Those who think the contrary simply do not understand the scale and the tech we have so far. We can't produce enough storage and using it for such grid-scale loads means breaking it very quickly, not 10 years of a classic LFP but 1-3 years maximum at a scale we can't sustain for more than few years with skyrocketing costs.

The giant want this because they need this to milk people as much as they can, but it's technically impossible and anyone who think the contrary will see what happen in few years if the trend will keep going like today, with more and more rolling blackouts and large stability issues to the point the EU will look like South Africa's grid now.