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dashundchen | on: SpaceX engineers brought on at FAA after probationary employees were fired
Excellent reporting by Wired. I've been impressed by the depth of their coverage in the past year.

This is outright corruption. These ghouls don't even attempt to hide the conflicts of interest.

Musk is hiring employees from his own company SpaceX, using a backdoor to avoid vetting, to an agency that regulates his own company, to change critical safety systems. After the secretary of that department outright lied about what's happening.

Meanwhile contracts continue to be awarded to SpaceX with no attempt from Musk to recuse himself or separate the conflict of interest.

> By the time these posts were made, though, according to sources who were granted anonymity because they fear retaliation, SpaceX engineers were already being onboarded at the agency under Schedule A, a special authority that allows government managers to “hire persons with disabilities without requiring them to compete for the job,” according to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

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insane_dreamer | parent | next
> special authority that allows government managers to “hire persons with disabilities

Just to add to the irony, that type of authority is exactly the type of "DEI" practice that Elon/Trump is railing against as "corrupt/Marxist".

Piling on corruption under the guise of rooting out corruption. It's an old trick used by dictators in other countries.

titzer | root | parent | next
It is 100% Orwellian doublespeak. It should be a five alarm fire, but cowed media outlets are incapable of calling it out for some reason. Probably because they are terrified of the consequences. Preemptive surrender. Dark times ahead.
yujzgzc | root | parent | next
The outcome of "calling it out" for 8 years straight is a comeback with popular vote win. So I think it's reasonable to change a strategy that has failed so miserably for so long.
sho_hn | root | parent | next
Indeed. The problem is that the voting base has been carefully groomed for many years to distrust independent journalism, and "calling out" anything is just perceived as partisan and not to be trusted.
ziddoap | root | parent | next
>So I think it's reasonable to change a strategy that has failed so miserably

I'm not sure how a strategy of "ignore it and don't mention it" is going to perform better than "call it out"...

yujzgzc | root | parent
A working theory would be that people do not believe that there can be bad consequences until they get burned more, so things will need to get worse for a specific set of people. It's the strategy of falling to the bottom of the pool so you can push on the floor to kick yourself back up. But if you've got other ideas go for it.
Glyptodon | root | parent | next
That's not how I would describe the overall behavior of the media for the last 8 years.

Though obviously a large amount of people don't believe anything except what they want to hear.

viraptor | root | parent | next
I have no idea what you're saying here. For years I've been seeing people posting links to articles with either the headline or some paragraph marked up to spell out what it's trying to say. Articles using passive voice and avoiding the conclusion were common for a very long time now - as much as I appreciate listing facts rather than freaking out about results in articles, often they just fail to call a spade a spade.
sidibe | root | parent
The only strategy that works apparently is to let them screw up the country so badly people believe it.
actionfromafar | root | parent | next
I wonder what will happen then. In Russia it doesn't matter what anyone believes. But maybe the US population is different?
titzer | root | parent
America has a long history of not holding its political leaders accountable when they screw up massively. Gaslighting, obstruction, projection are pretty powerful tools.
smashah | root | parent
From the transparency of the comments, it's clear many people are in denial about this. The media enjoy the circus, even if it's on fire.
dandanua | root | parent
Like they care at all about using anything else that gives them more power and control. They will use all the freedom created by the previous generations of Americans to reduce as much freedom for others as they can. Fascists do fascists things.
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