Reach for the Stars @antares@qoto.org

@jblxdesign It's complicated in these industries. When my arcade is short staffed we put up a job posting and can usually hire a gullible teenager in a few weeks. It takes 1 shift to deal with HR and then 3 more to train them.

Airline pilots need 1000 hours *in the air* before they can even be hired by an air carrier then 9 months of training before their first revenue flight and they are limited to a single type of plane (the reason Southwest only flies 737s)

Railroads have similarly long training for new engineers. The tricky bit with engineers is that they have to qualify on each section of track, and there are currency requirements. Hire too many engineers and it becomes impossible to keep them current on enough track. You end up with situations where a train from A to B is blocking the way from B to A but the only qualified engineer available to move the train out of the way is stuck on another train waiting for the first to get out of the way.

Just like Southwest is seeing people are holding up equipment and equipment is holding up people.

Yes, more people is the long term solution, but it is not like retail where we put up a sign saying "Starting at $18/hr" and have a bunch of new people in a few weeks.

If you are watching the #Southwest meltdown and thinking about the calamity that is caused by needing several days to reposition the system, just remember that the US freight railroad system is *far* more brittle. A rail strike that congress forestalled would have created a similar but much more extensive backlog that would have taken months to unravel. And in case you are thinking "well I don't travel by rail" just remember that something like three quarters of all retail goods do.

Shared with me by an Adjunct Professor:

> Christmas morning is the one time my family buys lotto tickets, for our Christmas stockings. As we scratched them off this morning....

> Prof: Wow. These are not random assortments of losing tickets. These are all **very** cleverly designed to be near misses. Probably someone who makes way more money than I do has invested a lot of time in designing a system that is set up to give you **just** enough hope that you want to keep playing, and don't perceive that the game is rigged and quit....

> Dad: Are you talking about the lotto, or about academia?

@Rasp Yes, Alt-F4 has always sent the same signal as pressing the X in the menu bar. If you enqueue this message 3 times and the program has not stopped or cleared the message, Windows will prompt you with the end program or wait for it to respond dialog. Of course if the program is consuming this message and just refusing to die, then you have to go to the process manager.

@elizabeth I regret to say that I've never made it to any of those cities. The metro areas I've lived in (SF Bay, LA, Sacramento, Bakersfield) all had this culture where people drove into their garages and never actually had anything to do with the people living around them. I can't speak from as much experience, but friends in New York, Chicago, Seattle, Denver, Washington DC. Tell the same story. Everyone is a stranger and no one is a friend you have not met yet. There are just too many people and no one take the time to connect with anyone else because why waist the emotional energy on someone when there are so so so many.

A city of a *billion* people. **Oh Hell No.**

Modern cities are the of their very nature dysfunctional communities. I live in a small one with only 2.3 million people and I would go back to a small town like the one I grew up in instantly if economics allowed.

This country bumkin likes places where people actually know their neighbors.

#JoinIn

@AkivaMCohen my instances already has them, and it's not the only one, but we are addressing a culture issue not a technical one.

@mtrkdjoyce for the folks who where here before the Musking of the Bird, it is like someone who joins your congregation having left a very toxic one, but then starts complaining that your church isn't upholding "biblical values" like their old one did.

I honestly don't think it is too much to ask us noobs to take 6 months or a year to get to know the place before we ask for changes.

Even though it is Christmas Eve it is still #caturday

So I've been here since April and it feels absolutely surreal to make [a post about the history of Mastodon][1] and have it get so much attention.

I remember when I left phone notifications on for Mastodon because 5 boosts in a month was a viral post, and there would be days or weeks between posting and a reply. That ended the day Musk walked into Twitter HQ.

I'm still a Noob in this space. I just came in the first wave. I hope all you pre-#TwitterMigration people know that I appreciate the community you built for us. #ThankYou

[1]: https://qoto.org/web/statuses/109565902003012711