Stroke Survivor | Former SoCal ring announcer | Joshi Wrestling Enthusiast | Pop Culture Sponge | Gen X Beardo | #Wakamaniac | Banner by @jimmygabagool
San Recto, California
Joined February 2025
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Luke retweeted
So let me get this straight.
2021: Biden's infrastructure law puts $5B into FAA air traffic control facilities. That means towers and buildings. It doesn't replace the decades-old copper-and-switches network that connects them.
2023: The FAA hires Verizon for $2.4B to build that replacement network. Two years later it still isn't running. Project 2025 calls for spinning air traffic control out of the FAA and privatizing it if possible.
2025: DOGE fires about 400 FAA staff, including maintenance mechanics at 18 air traffic control facilities that were already short on technicians. Musk pushes Starlink to replace Verizon. Newark's radar and radios keep going dark because of old copper wire and untested telecom links. Congress puts $12.5B toward the fix and calls it a down payment.
June 2026: Air Space Intelligence wins a 12-year FAA contract worth up to $875.9M to build SMART, an AI air traffic management system. Months earlier, ASI's PAC donated to the campaign of Duffy's son-in-law. The award was competitive. ASI's Air Force deal was sole-source.
November 10: SMART goes live at all 22 Air Route Traffic Control Centers, about 50 days after its first launch over Washington. The controllers' union says it wasn't involved in the rollout.
November 13: An update hits the private network that links every center. The network reboots and crashes, the old equipment chokes, and controllers get bad data. The result is the third nationwide ground stop in US history: more than four hours, nearly 8,000 cancellations and 10,000+ delays.
Officials blame old equipment. ASI and Duffy say SMART had nothing to do with it. DHS says it can't rule anything out. Nobody has said what the update was or who approved it. And an earlier review had already warned that this network was no longer supported and that one failure could cut off an entire region.
Anyone who has shipped software into legacy infrastructure knows the appropriate playbook:
⭐️ Map every dependency.
⭐️ Test against real failure modes.
⭐️ Run old and new in parallel.
⭐️ Roll out in stages.
⭐️ Change one major thing at a time.
⭐️ Keep a rollback you've actually tested.
⭐️ Keep the operators in the room.
I suspect a lot of newer engineers raised on vibecoding have never learned this. Prompting gets something new on screen fast, but it won't teach you how a decades-old network reacts to an update at 4pm on a Friday.
Speed is not the metric. In aviation, reliability and accountability have to be built in from day one. Bring back the adults in the room.
Luke retweeted
Fun Fact: Once upon a time there was a U.S. congressman named Sean Duffy who voted AGAINST updating air traffic control systems.
Luke retweeted
This Australian's reply to Trump's rant about “NATO not being there for America” is perfect.
"Mate. You run a country with 600,000 homeless people sleeping on the street tonight. A country where 40% of adults can't cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money. A country where insulin costs more than a car payment and people are rationing it to survive.
A country where medical debt is the number 1 cause of bankruptcy. A country where women are dying in hospital car parks because doctors are too scared of abortion laws to treat a miscarriage.
You lock up more of your own citizens than any nation on earth. More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea. The land of the free has 2 million people in cages, and a quarter of them haven't even been convicted of anything. They're just too poor to make bail.
Your life expectancy is going backwards. You're the only developed nation where that's happening. Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba's. Your kids do active shooter drills between maths and English while you sell the gunmaker's stock to your mates.
Your minimum wage hasn't moved in 15 years. You've got teachers working 2 jobs and veterans sleeping under bridges and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that didn't attack you.
And you’ve got a convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, paedophile protecting, porn star shagging, insurrectionist, running the biggest dumpster fire war campaign since the Taliban in Afghanistan thanked you very much for losing again.
And you're calling Greenland poorly run?
Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world. Nobody goes bankrupt there because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because their insurance said no.
'NATO wasn't there when we needed them." When exactly was that, champ? September 11? Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU.
Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU. Australia wasn't even in NATO and we still showed up. For 20 years.
And you pulled out at 2am without telling anyone and left them to deal with the mess.
So maybe before you start calling other countries poorly run, have a look at your own backyard, you spray-tanned aluminium siding salesman. The only thing poorly run in this picture is your fucking mouth."
This was published by Annalise B Winterborne on TikTok.
#DemsUnited
ALT The orange idiot aka Trump
Luke retweeted
JD Vance thinks you should have to speak English to receive care at a hospital. Wait until he hears about neonatal intensive care units.
The audacity of those babies expecting care when they don’t even speak the language.
Luke retweeted
Please don't plant these around Data Centers 😆
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Planting Japanese knotweed or running bamboo near data centres can also harm local ecosystems. Both can spread and displace native plants.
agriculture.vic.gov.au/biosecurity/we…
weeds.dpi.nsw.gov.au/Weed?id=114
"See the TURTLE of enormous girth!
On his shell he holds the earth.
His thought is slow but always kind;
He holds us all within his mind.
On his back all vows are made;
He sees the truth but mayn’t aid.
He loves the land and loves the sea,
And even loves a child like me.”
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Jumped on the trend.
Made a tier list template for Joshi Rookies... Maybe I'll do a video on it or something 👀
tiermaker.com/create/joshi-w…
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The best thing to come out of this debacle was the classic "Napster Bad" flash cartoons.
youtube.com/watch?v=fS6udST6…
In May 2000, Metallica's Lars Ulrich delivered 13 boxes to Napster's office. Inside were the screen names of 335,435 users who had shared the band's songs for free.
Napster agreed to block them. To many, it looked like Metallica against its own fans.
In the video below, Ulrich explains why he did it. "Napster hijacked our music without asking."
It started with a leak. Unfinished versions of "I Disappear," a song for Mission: Impossible 2, were already playing on US radio. The band traced them to Napster.
On April 13, 2000, Metallica sued. In 48 hours, Ulrich said, over 300,000 users made 1.4 million free downloads of its music.
Napster said it stored no songs and only connected users. Fans called it sharing.
Ulrich rejected the word. "If I share a sandwich with you, I'm left with half a sandwich."
That September, Napster's founder, Shawn Fanning, walked onstage at the MTV Video Music Awards in a Metallica T-shirt. He said he had borrowed it from a friend.
Metallica and Napster settled in July 2001. That same month, Napster's free service went dark.
In 2003, Apple opened the iTunes Store at 99 cents a song.
Thirteen years later, Ulrich put it this way: "It's not about money. It's about control." He knows how he will be remembered: "It'll be in the first five sentences of my obituary."
So was Metallica protecting its music, or turning on its own fans?
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Luke retweeted
I don’t think you have a dog in this fight but if you did you would have shot it.
I’ll take @ellalangleymsic over Kacey Musgraves any day.
And if I’m choosin’ Texas, I’ll take Ken Paxton over James Talarico.
