Types fast, thinks slow
this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2025
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why even fly? Just jump up high in San Francisco, and wait for the earth to revolve beneath you before coming back down and landing in Houston. Houston, no problem.
See this is why Trump needs to cut the FAA and its wasteful spending!
/s
We don't live in a Meritocracy, not even close.
It's a Charismacracy; those who can out-popular the others wins.
High school level behavior
There is a lot of weird American behavior that starts at school:-
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Pledge of allegiance
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Class president
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Homecoming queen
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Student car parks
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Bag scanning and security
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Active shooter drills
It's not even out popular others, its if you have the money, you just buy yourself the merit. You win because of you family name. You can buy your way into the best schools, and quite possibly pay others to do your work, or just flat out pay for better grades, I mean who in their right mind is going to flunk the child a major school benefactor?
More like "He who pops from the right (read: sufficiently wealthy) vagina wins!"
True meritocracy had never been implemented in any human society larger than a small village.
It had been partially implemented in several places/times
What we have today is a partially implemented one in middle management, technocrats and engineers.
Where out of touch upper management and owners are the rule. But if I look at any successful company I will find the tech and middle management running it day to day
We're so close to just having the workers run their own affairs, the table is set we just have to make everyone realize the actual owners are useless and do nothing
And more than just realizing that, we need to find a realistic path to take that power away from them.
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For those wondering why it did fly that way, it was a whole thing on Twitter: weather, fly zones, mostly.
https://www.thepoke.com/2025/02/26/elon-musk-said-planes-fly-straight-line-owned-into-economy-class/
Obviously the permanent main character on Twitter popped up to assert that planes must go straight despite flying in a private jet constantly that doesn't do that, and after a few hours the original guy said he asked the pilot when they landed (20 min ahead of schedule) and the pilot told him it was to avoid turbulence, which is likely what they say when a full answer seems like it'll just go over folks heads.
There’s also the Great Circle flight paths. Essentially, because the earth is round, it’s actually a shorter distance to fly in an “arc” (when looking at a flat map). In the below picture, the upper curved line is actually shorter than the lower straight line:
Here’s another image which demonstrates why the curved line looks longer on a flat map:
And because of how map projections work, this applies to virtually any flight path that isn’t directly north/south… Just like the one in OP’s photo.
The path in the post has nothing to do with the great circle. The shortest path is very similar to how it appears on the Mercator projection (actually slightly bent in the other direction) because SF and Houston are fairly close and in a position where Mercator distortions are less pronounced.
Also, a line is the shortest path when the 2 points are both on the Equator (where the projection distortion is zero)
Worth pointing out too, that the air isn't "flat" either, you can have headwinds, tailwinds, and turbulence that will affect the shortest and most economical path.
It’s also good to mention that the projection shown in the tweet wasn’t Mercator either, it was a globe rendered via Apple Maps.
Elon Musk "rocket scientist"
There's also the fact that the earth is an oblate spheroid and great circles are the shortest distance between two points on that shape. (Though this may not apply for short flights like this.)
And it doesn't apply because it would be curved upwards
Musk's DOGE let data leak, erased data from a goverment db by misstake, fired important figure working with nuke programs, Ebola and more in front of the whole fucking world.
Can you imagine a bigger fuck up?
For now I assume that the whole thing is working out well for Mr. Musk. By now he has probably weakened the specific agencies that were a thorn in his side sufficiently he'll earn back the few hundred million it cost him to buy that position.
So he's not an idiot, but he's a problem.
Yes, the person who hired Musk
Ah, but he didn't hire him, he just made him an advisor. Hiring him would required oversight that would have given others a chance to give a firm "Fuck No".
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Y'all, this has nothing to do with the curvature of the Earth. There are mountains and multiple no-fly zones that would be crossed if they flew in a straight line.
It's still presented in an anti-intellectual "just asking questions" format though.
Further we are all just internet jabronis. It isn't literally our job to know this stuff. Knowing this stuff is kind of literally this guys job. Knowing the things you just described is kind of the whole "logistics" thing.
Whatever the reasons for the path are, we accept that qualified people know what they are doing. In asking this question, he is showing how unqualified he is.
I worked for almost 40 years at a company that made rocket engines. For the first couple decades (and all the time prior to my starting there), the head of the company was someone who came up through the ranks. They were very knowledgeable about rocket engines, or at least very knowledgeable at the aspect that they worked on (there are a lot of specialties involved), and somewhat knowledgeable about the others.
But as the company traded hands, we ended up with CEOs or GMs that knew nothing about rockets and instead were just focused on the business aspects of it. Some of them were smart people, but they wouldn't have cared if the company was making spoons or skateboards. From my vantage point, the company really went downhill when that happened, but I don't think it's uncommon these days.
So I wouldn't be surprised if this guy knows nothing about logistics.
Doesn't know anything about logistics and just stupid. Asking this question, for an average person is fine but for a logistics company CEO to post this on social media is just plain stupidity.
Thank you for articulating why exactly I felt this way about the post. I couldn't quite get to that point myself.
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They neither teach nor require smart at management schools.
You can be the dumbest mother fucker the Earth has ever produced and you will still easily be able get a business degree from any greasy college of your choice.
It's wild to me that consumting has become such a massive industry in the last 20 years. It's all just a bunch of kids freah out of college with zero experience in anything practical telling you to cut costs, raises prices, and do light crime. Why do companies pay millions when the CEO's dumbass son could have just told them the same thing?
CYA and possibly liability reasons. "I didn't make the bad decision, I was following the advice of the consultants."
But also there are times you actually do need advice from experts. Not all consultants are bad. But yeah, a lot of it is just CYA stuff.
"Consumpting" is an impressively opaque typo, for being one letter off.
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America's just fat. Big ol' lump sticking out of the disc. The turtle under us is getting arthritis.
He should ask Luigi for a detailed description of fly-zones, fuel consumption vs altitude and terrain, and air traffic (timing) to a lesser extent.
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It has been my experience that the closer you get to the CEO position the more a person believes "I don't have to know how to do the task, I just have to employ someone who does!"
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I'm confused. People are saying this is due to earths curvature, but this is in the northern hemisphere so shorter paths should be more northern, not more southern.
See this map of the actual shortest distance line (purple) for those two points. The image OP's question seems much more reasonable given this information?
Planes don't fly great circle routes though, there's overfly fees, weather, mountains, ETOPS and just plain politics... This route looks ordinary compared to some international routes, eg Helsinki to Singapore where you dodge Russia and Ukraine for politics, taking you way below the great circle route, then Turkey for overfly fees and Iran for politics, taking you almost back up to the great circle route, before dipping down again to avoid the Himalayas
dodge Russia and Ukraine for politics
I'd have thought the primary reason for avoiding those two is to avoid being misidentified as an enemy missile and shot down, no?
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The question is very reasonable - and the answer far from obvious as evident from the wrong one being uprooted in this thread. To be clear: I don’t know the answer either, only that you’re right about the curve going the wrong way.
What’s more worrying is the CEO of a global logistics company asking it - and on a public forum rather than of his employees.
It’s akin to a school director standing in the schoolyard during recess and asking why his teachers aren’t in the classroom teaching at that moment.
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