I forget what I was thinking about the other day but it was something along the lines of: say your area or tower is super busy, down the tubes, but you guys manage to pull it out and separate everybody and the world keeps turning. This tells management that it's possible to run those numbers with that short of staff, so there is no need to staff more. Same goes in training, you don't have trainees working 5 or 6 aircraft, you want to see what they can do with 15-20 aircraft, so you constantly put them in situations that force them to become as efficient as possible. It's a negative feedback loop where we ultimately make better and better controllers (at least that's the hope) because they have to be prepared to work that amount of traffic when staffing dictates it. It's always worst-case scenario training which manifests into just normal everyday traffic training, it's really a trip.