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Translation: Banks are in trouble, the economy is in trouble, and Trump wants to artificially prop up the economy long enough to get reelected. He's attempting to make it sound as if it's for exports, but it's really to save the financial system. He's concerned. If the Fed prints money to buy bad loans or other poor performing securities to rescue banks, it's called QE. If you or I print money to buy anything, it's called counterfeiting. The Fed is dumping a fuck-ton of money into the economy and with low/negative interest rates, it is forcing banks to lend it essentially free instead of parking it somewhere. Big money is currently hoarding cash/liquid assets because they currently think it's better to take a hit on inflation than loan defaults and/or big market losses coming down the pike. That could be why there is no money in the repo (repurchase agreement) market, but I'm no expert. It's akin to a bank walking into a pawn shop and saying they need $10,000 to give out in loans that they will repay tomorrow with interest, and using a brand new corvette as collateral. They pawn shop (lending bank) says, "That's a fantastic deal, but we have no money to give you." Things are in danger of coming to halt until the Fed shows up at the pawn shop and hands over a warm stack of freshly printed $100 bills just to keep all interested parties' businesses from tanking. This new money will take a minute to circulate through the financial system, and when it starts hitting the pockets of the average wage-earner, the price of everything will soar. The purchasing power of your nest egg in the bank falls dramatically. The average person will have less discretionary spending because they'll be spending earnings on the ballooning prices of milk, bread, utilities, healthcare, car payments, student loan payments, credit card payments, and mortgages. When money gets tight and cards are maxed, less consumer goods are purchased and loan payments slow. Borrowers default and it's 2007-8 again, but with multiple bubbles. Your savings and cash accounts are devalued, and your retirement/401K is crushed. Tax revenue shrinks while the Federal Government continues to spend $1 Trillion more (and growing) per year than it receives. The only question is: "How long?"

Yeah, lowering taxes and interest rates along with the current actions being taken by the fed should not happen during a period of economic growth. They should be saved to provide a boost to the economy when we go into a recession. It has also made it difficult to judge the true health of the economy. Yes, it is growing. But we basically provided a small stimulus package to a healthy economy, so it has covered up any obvious warning signs or consequences that could have been created by the trade war/tariffs/anything else. I worry that we are going to be in trouble when the next recession hits and those moves are off the table.

For those who prefer a picture. We spent about a year and a half trying to normalize monetary policy in this country, the markets tanked and the Fed cowards reversed course and slashed interest rates. And when that wasn't enough to get the stock market back to all time highs they decided to blow out the balance sheet again. In 3 short months plowing in so much liquidity they undid what took over a year and a half to sell off. But Jerome Powell assures us this isn't quantitative easing, nope definitely not QE4 going on, nothing to see here the markets are fine.

What happens when the Dets are left to be run by mostly non-rated bubbas. As a rated bubba, my cadets come in not necessarily wanting to be rated but then I convert them! Moohahaha!

E-mail notifications for thread subscriptions no longer appear to be coming through. Doesn't appear to be related to spam folder settings (no BaseOps/FlyingSquadron emails showing up there in my Gmail). In case it helps, the last notification I received on my subscribed thread was on December 4th and there were new posts starting on December 6th which didn't seem to generate e-mail notifications. Issue replicated by @M2 in this thread.

This is a very good point. However, the food industry has been living in a sheltered economy for a long time, with illegal immigrants working as insanely cheap labor, and farm act subsidies keeping the market costs for certain crops over-competitive internationally. Corn in particular, ever since GWB’s wonderful ethanol idea, has been the definition of a boondoggle. That ear of corn in Walmart should be at least triple the price, but due to insane subsidies and cheap labor it remains that low. Not to even get started on how the blended fuels are worse for engines... Ted Cruz, even with his dad having assassinated JFK, was right when he stood in Iowa and told the corn farmers to their faces that those subsidies need to end.

Except a lot of farmers. Many of them are directly feeling the ramifications of our current trade policies. But then the government bails them out of a problem they created with billions of dollars they don't have and expect to be thanked. All the way, the government is ignoring the fact that some of the markets farmers have lost will not be coming back. At least the auto industry repaid their bailout, most with interest. The emergency farm subsidies are money that shouldn't have been necessary to begin with.

If you were to seek an enhancement now, your IFC I exam would be invalidated and you'd have to re-accomplish the eye portion after a six month mandatory wait. You also are not allowed to get refractive surgery during pilot training. If you don't have the six months to spare, my recommendation is to simply wear glasses and when you hit a point in your career when time allows, do the enhancement then. Note that as a trained aircrew member the six months is no longer required to return to fly. You can begin flying after refractive surgery when your eyes have healed and the vision is stable. Typically a couple months after PRK and one or two after LASIK. If you get it done in the AF, the enhancement is free.

Wubby is fantastic.

Wouldn’t call it “chopping block” but my buddy got picked up by Great Falls as a nav and they said they’re highly likely to get Js soon and send him to UPT

Roger that, I agree philosophically requirements identification/definition should be independent of resource consideration but practically you have to consider them simultaneously or you wind up with white elephants. I phrased that question wrong I think and refining the idea behind it I think it more accurate to ask "If we buy/develop this/that system because we believe it serves the missions we believe we should be focused on, does it displace, replace any existing systems or is it complimentary? If complimentary, how do we resource it?" Just buy it AF This thread needs some airplane porn

I hear what you're saying and there is a point to doing things in sims vs. the proverbial 10k an hour KC-135R pattern ride to win the battle on training beans Just my two old fart cents, we had it right in the 80's for heavies. Flew as required the big MDS for ops, tng and such. Flew the ACE jets for training and proficiency (Tweet, 38s). For budgetary sanity, for the heavies, give them an economical trainer and replace just 10-20% of their training hours and get some Vitamin G once in a while. I can only speak for myself but I would have traded 50 training hours for 100 hours in a modern aero aircraft when at homeplate and not burining dinos over the desert. I like the GameBird https://talkbusiness.net/2017/09/faa-certifies-gamebird-aerobatic-airplane-to-be-built-in-bentonville/ Close visual formation, aerobatics, VFR by clock map ground, etc... not that those specific skills are applicable to their MWS but the fundamentals to them build strong pilots (multi-tasking, quick cross check, thinking ahead, etc...) After 20 years of flying heavies and sometimes flying GA, I can tell I'm in better pilot after a period of keeping those basic pilot muscles strong in a plane without George, autothrottles, TCAS, etc...

I’ll somewhat reverse what I said earlier based off an experience I had today. Student cross-country. He shows up with a beautiful VFR plan. Amazingly marked VFR chart. Even wants to pick up an IFR for some instrument approaches after. He briefs me that at 1100L the weather will be SKC, 9999 RVR. The problem is it was 1050L and it was still misty and overcast less than a thousand. The epiphany I had is that if we teach the students based off 1s and 0s in a sim and cut out too much flying, all we’re going to get is really good canned environment pilots. I know correlation doesn’t equal causation, but I have started to notice a severe lack of common sense amongst my T-6 students, and part of that is probably because we are taking away their opportunities to see real world flying.

I think the thing that's most shocking about this is the collective "meh" that's coming from the breaking of this story. It doesn't seem like anyone in government, military, civilian etc really cares. We'll just keep spending money and lives in a war that we know is unwinnable because we can't bring ourselves to admit that we've lost.

Pawnman, I'm a rated bubba ROTC Det CC so been here done this with the flight records, physicals, etc. Hasn't been too bad actually as long as the HARM office is ok and mine is at Wright Patt so you should be good to go. I even got a two year bonus while in the seat here and doing exactly the same thing I would have done anyway. If I remember correctly, your Det has a good set up of simulators so you'll be a great asset there. PM me for more deets.

Bruh ...this is glaringly obvious this is the Air Force's way of pursuing a "diversity" (our state sponsored religion) initiative and pushing for more female pilots, without explicitly accepting more females over men, which it can't do. The AF times even understands this, and it wrote an article noting as much. While I admire their ingenuity, I loathe their cause. Clown country, and ever increasingly clown AF.