As yes, it was the female pilots who made MCAS and forgot to put the bolts on the door...

Like, I get that people have always been dumb, but man are they loud and aggressive about it these days

The left and the right live in completely separate bubbles. You may not be aware of this story, but the right is.

See https://www.faa.gov/pwdp . The Federal Aviation Administration has set a target of hiring people with "severe intellectual disability".

> The Secretary of Transportation has set a hiring goal of three (3) percent per fiscal year for individuals with targeted (severe) disabilities.

> Targeted disabilities are those disabilities that the federal government, as a matter of policy, has identified for special emphasis in recruitment and hiring. The targeted disabilities are:

    Hearing (total deafness in both ears)
    Vision (Blind)
    Missing Extremities
    Partial Paralysis
    Complete Paralysis, Epilepsy
    Severe intellectual disability
    Psychiatric disability
    Dwarfism

Edit: If you're into podcasts, listen to this (partial) episode of Blocked and Reported about a different FAA scandal about flight controllers training (the tests were changed to promote trainees who hate science and love risk): https://www.blockedandreported.org/p/premium-the-faas-bizarr...

By posting this policy you're implying it's obviously a problem... mark me down as undisturbed that there's a light thumb on the scale in favor of hiring blind/deaf/etc/etc/etc employees for what I'm going to reasonably presume are overwhelmingly office jobs sitting at a computer. To the extent they're even getting hired at all.

Of course the disabilities you'd primarily draw attention to would be instead "severe intellectual disability" and "psychiatric disability," I imagine. This program doesn't remove the qualifications for jobs: blind people are not flying planes. People with severe intellectual disabilities are not inspecting them.

Speaking of left/right divides, it seems to me that taking these kinds of policies at or beyond face value is another one of those. The anti-DEI crowd has also decried Boeing having a target to hire more black employees, a policy from 2021 that's resulted in the share of black employees rising from 6.4% to... 7.1%. Definitely a smoking gun. I can go on Twitter to hear about how that 0.7% combines with the lower IQ of HBCU graduates to explain the company's problems.

Surely the FAA has plenty of roles where people with those disabilities could work. It's not like they are trying to add a deaf person to be ATC communication coordinator or a paraplegic to be an emergency firefighter.

You're wrong about the left and right being in bubbles. I read commentary, thinkpieces, and yellow rubbish from both. This isn't the first time I've seen mention of that hiring goal, but I will note that comments like yours are typically the setup for a motte & bailey. But let's assume good faith.

Tell me. Of the targeted disabilities you have listed, which do you think employers should discriminate against, when it does not interfere with a qualified candidate's bona fide job requirements?

> maybe spurred on by the fact that the pilots of the Alaska flight were both women? Not that the pilots did anything wrong in that incident, of course.

Witchcraft!

(But yeah, blaming the _pilot_ for the door plug falling out seems particularly perverse.)