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Comment by projectileboy | Hacker News Reader

The US has developed a strong culture of believing that government is always the problem and government workers are always lazy and overpaid. And so cutting funding to these kinds of services becomes an easy sell. The problem is our society depends on these government employees. It’s no different than nursing, teaching, and many other professions - disparage it enough and eventually you’ll succeed in making no one interested.

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Why do you think we have developed that culture? In my case it's because I know two people who have worked for the government or deal with it daily for their job, and they have told me that. And their low opinion of government is corroborated by my one experience dealing with the government.

None of this was with ATC, but my point is that this attitude you complain about is just a reflection of reality.

Thank you for your three anecdotes; we'll add them to the bucket.

Isn't this basically just some sort of weird selection effect? Similar to how people are more incentivized to leave a negative review when they're mad at a business, vs. a positive review when they had a good - or even just a "it was fine" - experience?

Let's say you are interviewing a candidate, and you have had one interaction with him, which was negative, and you know two other people who have worked with him extensively, and they say he is a bad employee. Are you going to say, well, my interaction was a one off, and those two people who worked with him could be wrong and that is selection bias, and hire him anyway, or are you going to take a pass? Why should I be so much more generous with the government?

Because the government isn't a single person you're hiring.

If I had three bad experiences at the DMV, that tells me very little about my possible future experience with my town councilmembers, or my local librarian, or my senator, or an air traffic controller.

“ The problem is our society depends on these government employees.”

Maybe I missed something, but has anyone cut funding to a single program in the history of tracking government spending? Especially the FAA?

That's called an earned reputation.

It’s a strategy by politicians that want to cut services so they can further lower tax on the rich.

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