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It sounds as if you're saying visiting the local park or Harris Teeter for groceries is tantamount to murder. That's why I say I don't like the direction this has taken.

I also have an immunocompromised family member, and of course I’m concerned. But, he doesn’t leave the house except for his doc appointments or a walk where he remains well clear of others and doesn’t touch any surfaces. I don’t expect others to curtail their liberties and economic/mental welfare over questionable data and my attachment to an individual (who I love very much)...nobody going to business X or playing in the park will have any direct affect on him, unless he stops giving a shit and starts frequenting the same places while touching surfaces and wiping his hands on his face. In which case, that’s on him, not the other people. God forbid emotional people for one second put this kind of reaction toward auto deaths or heart disease (which are encased by substantially more accurate/valid data). Are we cool with all of our cars being taken away and being told what and how much we’re allowed to eat? Because those two things would save millions of lives, yet we’re not rabble rousing about that. To close the loop on the analogy, I could choose to never travel by road to decrease my chance of death, just as people can choose to self quarantine if they don’t want to be around others. But that’s my choice in a free society, nobody else should be required to curb their liberty from 0600-0630 since that’s when I’ll be driving to work, as I selfishly demand everyone else needs to stay off the road so I’m not threatened with possible vehicular death. Yes, it’s as illogical and anti-liberty as it sounds...

I've been off my property maybe 4 times in the last month. (Airline trips have cancelled). I'm taking it seriously, but I really don't like where this is headed. This is what I'm seeing more and more: 1. "My assessment of the risk is more accurate than your assessment of the risk." 2. "The level of risk I'm willing to accept is more appropriate than the level of risk you're willing to accept." All that is fine. Those are debates that can be had and while there will never be a consensus, we might be able to educate, change a few minds, find some middle ground, and go about living our lives the way we choose. The disturbing part is where we allow this to happen: 3. "I have assessed the risk, determined the appropriate risk mitigation strategy, and am unilaterally imposing it on you." The Governors of Kentucky and Michigan immediately spring to mind. I never would have thought so many Americans would enthusiastically cede this much power and control over our daily lives as we've seen the last month. Maybe this will blow over, and we'll go right back to Dec 2019. Or maybe we will end up with National immunization credentials, pandemic cell phone tracking, digital health records, digital currency Federal Reserve bank accounts, online voting, etc. Tin foil hat? Maybe. But it's all been proposed. "Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty." - Jefferson.

Got two full freezers, one for pork and the other for beef that we raised here on our place. We make our own bacon, corned beef and pastrami, plus we render the pork fat to make lard. Wife still buys chicken though, however we are getting enough eggs from ours for our needs. Where was I going with this....oh yeah I don't think our pork has the virus. Edit, picture of bacon

Owning an airplane (bought my first one 11 years ago) is a heartbreaking yet awesome experience. If you have the means, go do it - you only live once. I had a Glasair 1 that I used to fly to work everyday for 2 years. After my Mc-dozen deployment and AD jettison to the ANG, I bought a Bonanza 36 and have had that for 8.5 years. We flew it a ton for a while, then had good years and slow years. My kid is 2 now and she loves flying which is awesome. It's been a total gamechanger for the extended family visits; even before the kid but now it really is. I honestly didn't think I'd ever sell this one. I'm thinking about selling. But just to buy something else. I'm retiring this year and moving back to Idaho next spring and want something a little more back country friendly. 180/185 is the goal, but I'm kicking around all kinds of options. Financially it'll never make sense in the long run; do it because you want to be an airplane family. Drop the cash, don't ever keep track of what it's costing you and go fly every time you feel like it. (My .02 )

That sucks about having an immuno-compromised wife and forgive my ignorance but what’s stopping her from quarantining herself, while the rest of the world gets on with life? Sent from my iPhone using Baseops Network mobile app

I don't know shit about shit, but here's my valuable interpretation: The reactor crew is highly trained, specialized, and not easy to replace. As they began to get sick and incapacitated with the virus, the Navy had a 5 billion dollar aircraft carrier with a nuclear reactor potentially stuck in the middle of the Pacific that no one else was qualified to operate. The ship medical staff estimated there would be 50 deaths on the ship if they didn't quarantine/evacuate. The senior officers aboard the ship all conferred and wanted to sign the letter to the Navy leadership, but were denied by Crozier and he took all the responsibility .

This is the state that elected Rashida Talib, you surprised?

DC update: 2020 UPT Board update: Aspiring Fighter Pilots, first off thank you to the 121+1 of you who applied, we understand the time requirement and take each application very seriously. Current events have changed the timeline. Applications will be reviewed by May and candidates who advance to the next events should be notified in June. We know this create challenges for some of you and we did not consider the modification lightly. Thank you again to all who applied. I hope to see you on my wing soon. GP! Correct MD is on schedule just no meet and greet. Also correct they have all previously submitted apps on file. Stay safe ya’ll!

First assignment was in Alaska, and I was in same Squadron with Kevin and Julie. He was just a great dude; this is heartbreaking for their family. Certainly makes the entire pandemic feels a little closer to home...

No it doesn’t. But I’m also not saying you’re wrong about what’s going on in DC, I’m not there and you are. However, the majority of what people are talking about is state power. The federal government has far less control in stuff like this than people think, welcome to a federalist system. It makes a lot of sense that governors should make these types of decisions for their states, because as you highlighted, situations vary drastically between areas. Also, New Yorkers actually have liberty too, as much as that bums out some Americans (not saying you’re one of them).

If the symptoms of this pandemic keep changing, isn’t it worth at least considering adjusting the dosage of medicine we’re taking? The response from the “no” camp seems to be some form of, “STFU and be thankful you aren’t dead, idiot.” How can we have accurate data on ANY of these rates when we can’t test everyone? Plenty of deaths are being nudged under COVID-19, increasing the death count. Plenty of potentially infected people aren’t being tested. Completely healthy people and people showing only a few symptoms. That decreases the infections count. I’m not too bright but our admitted inability to accurately count the numerator and denominator seems like a gaping hole in our approach.

Since this is getting heated let's all crack a beer and talk about something we can all agree on; like how that fucking bitch Carol Baskins killed her husband!

The data isn't off by a factor of two. In the only parameter that we can control, it's been off by roughly 5%. Pretty damn good when estimating how 325 million people and a novel virus are going to behave. Given the logarithmic dynamics, that manifests itself in large death deltas, but the meaningful parameter is actually quite accurate. A page back you've got a dude presenting numbers of other cause mortality to suggest that this thing hasn't been a big deal. Never mind that he's comparing annual flu deaths to 1 month worth of this. Yes at this instant, after the 'draconian' measures, after the economy was shut down, after the schools were closed, it's been manageable. Without those things the same models that have proven themselves to be accurate to within 5% of reality would predict that we'd be about 14 days away from a week in which 10% of the U.S. population would be infected. New infections, not total. 30 million infections over the course of a week at a time when the healthcare system would have already been crippled. You'd have people dying of appendicitis in the parking lots of hospitals. Do you think Lowe's garden center and your local Applebee's would be turning record profits in that environment? Or would they have voluntarily closed up shop given that half of their workforce was out sick and 0% of their customer base was willing to venture outside? If you could trust people to handle things intelligently on an individual basis then you wouldn't need to shut down toy stores or close off non-essential sections of essential businesses. But given that you get a reasonable portion of the population complaining to the people who saved their lives that they don't see people dying in the street an therefore it was never a big deal, it's hard to have faith that they'd handle it intelligently. As a result, you get the default position to just shut it down, because a large portion of the population can't operate on nuance.

Well we’re #11 on the list of deaths per million, so our healthcare system is doing better than 9 other first world countries (some of whom are 2x and 3x our death rate and are “beacons of socialized medicine”), plus Iran. We’re likely also doing better than several other countries who’s reporting is questionable (China, DPRK, etc.) Now I’m not saying our system is perfect or even “awesome,” but it’s certainly doesn’t “suck.” Healthcare workers are being laid off and temporary hospitals are not being used/torn down, all while leaders around the world walk back their doom-and-gloom predictions. The data simply doesn’t support many of the draconian measures, notably the ones crushing the world economies. It certainly supports measured responses like quarantine for high risk individuals (or those who cannot avoid contact with them), isolation for those who are sick, social distancing, etc. It doesn’t support Lowe’s closing the garden center or shutting down John’s toy store (where people could still shop while maintaining social distancing). It doesn’t support telling people they can’t ride their bike outside, go for a walk, or take a drive. The level of police power were seeing does not match the numbers (especially when considering the margin of error in the models). Anecdotally, our governor has made every decision based off data that has been wrong by a factor of 2, since day one through this week...a solid month+ of decisions based on wildly inaccurate data. He’s not alone. Edit: This a holistic perspective, I acknowledge if you break this down granularly, some places are far more affected than others. But that doesn’t change the overarching reaction as a country/world towards this thing.

I'll be calling HindSight when I get a little closer to pulling the trigger. Today, I went out to fly the Cub... my first flight since 7 March... and after I flew, I was walking around the ramp with a good bud (who owns the Cub, a Stearman, and a PT-22 and has a ton of GA experience), and we saw a nice Swift taxi out. I say "You've flown the Swift. What did you think?" He says "Good... but you can get in an RV-?, go faster, have better support, do it for cheaper, and have more fun." One data point. For you U-2 guys that know Mountain, we saw him land just a few minutes after that in his RV-6, and went and looked it over. His was finished in '92 (IIRC), and it was a beautiful airplane. He's had it two years, it is is first airplane, and he is a very happy owner. FWIW, we have quite a few U-2 Drivers with airplanes in the Beale area at this time.

I'm driving with the daughter not too long ago, she states that she's in charge of music for the ride, and tries to plug in her device, but hits the CD/XM button. I have 5x "mix tape" CDs in there from eons ago and we start hearing some ZZ Top. What starts out as "What's this?" finally ends with me trying to explain what a 10-12 song mix tape is/was. When we got got home, I had to show her the clip from High Fidelity on rules for making a mix tape. PS, for the next song, The Cranberries "Zombie" she goes, ooooh, I know this one, its by (some unknown name), but why is a girl singing it? Tried to explain why too many artists these days take a song, slow it down, and sing it all raspy and moody. Then gave her the Cranberries CD to listen, but she wondered how she was going to listen to them on her device. MP3s I answered. I tried to explain those. In the end, I concluded I'm a dinosaur, but when the XM satellite blows up, and Spotify and Pandora go offline, I have thousands of MP3s, CDs, and old cassettes to keep me company. "Like that'll ever happen" she says. I asked when was the last time she had coffee in a Starbucks!

It's not just that it's their right to do the bad things; it's also their right to have someone else pay for it (be it their employer via health insurance, the government, or the hospital).

I was in the 61st with Julie. Very sad time for their family. The GoFuneMe that was setup received over $100K in donations for their family.

Interestingly enough, this conversation isn't just limited to this forum. I offer the attached for your bathroom reading: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2007637

As a former Compass pilot, I approve this message.

Strategically, the pilots are wanting to hold the line based on their past bankruptcy experiences. Any compromise on pay and benefits now, and a Federal bankruptcy judge will use that compromise as a starting point for new terms and conditions later. It's better to go into bankruptcy from a strong position than a weak one.

Basically the argument is that no self-quarantine is going to be perfect. There will always be breaches. The social distancing / economic shutdown is intended to spread these breaches over a long period, so that when a vulnerable person does get it, they're not showing up to a hospital already overwhelmed by other sick, vulnerable people.

Buddy of mine was laid off by Compass, got the call today from Atlas for the 747.

No. You're talking about infection and death numbers. I'm talking about transmission rate. It's the only metric that matters because it's the only one that we can control. A small error in predicted transmission rate results in huge differences in infection/death numbers due to the logarithmic dynamics. The error in predicted transmission rate, yes in your state too, is relatively small. It's why you get the NIAID director saying we could see 200k dead and a week later the estimate is revised to 1/3rd of that. It's not because they're alarmist or NWO puppets trying to enslave you. It's because it's that sensitive. Knowing that, the takeaway should be how lucky we are that the transmission rate didn't turn out a few percent higher than predicted. It should be a realization of how close to disaster we came (not suggesting it's over), despite there being no tangible evidence to indicate it. Not that the governor is making haphazard decisions based on bogus data.

Hey, it's VFR!

Lol, who talks like that? Lame.

I think Carole’s first husband is still alive and living off-the-grid in Central America with the $15M in gold and silver he “stashed” in various locations down there.

If it makes you feel any better, all pilot union forums are more or less the same across airlines and time periods. Management sucks. Scheduling sucks. Hotels suck. Dispatchers suck. etc. They all said similar things prior to the current crisis, and always will in the future. Everyone talks a big game on the forum, but everyone still shows up to drive the bus for a company they think they could run better. Pay your dues. Vote. Know the contract. When it comes time to picket, go show your face. Want me to wear a special union lanyard? Fine. Whatever happens in the industry is going to happen independent of what is said on the forums. I occasionally go months without checking the forum. When I do, I might glean a tiny fraction of usable information, but the rest is noise.

15,000 families in a city of 1.5 million want food assistance, not necessarily need. It's like when Florida has the National Guard passing out MREs and bags of ice during a hurricane; people will line up for hours for free stuff even though the Publix right behind the distribution site is open and stocked.

They’re so underwhelmed that some are shutting down and laying off employees for lack of business. No ‘nonessential’ medical services combined with no coronavirus patients means the doctors are out of business too.

Yep they are finite, but our system is staffed and equipped for the likely amount of use that occurs each year. If we increase from that just in case, we’ll have a lot of expensive waste that will increase costs. Healthcare is already expensive. It’s not just “muh economy”. It’s easy for us with a steady paycheck to say that. Go checkout how many people are at the Food-banks this week; I read that something like 15K families in San Antonio alone. 15,000 families in one city need food assistance. People die from mal-nourishment too, or become weak and vulnerable to a disease they otherwise could have fought. Isolate the vulnerable and get the less vulnerable doing something productive. Also, let’s take a look at incentives to get people out of the vulnerable camp. Can’t do much about age and some pre-existing conditions.. but a population of people with poor health due to lack of preventative care and poor choices is pretty dumb. It’s also America though, so freedom.

And that’s just the thing.. resources are finite. We can’t shut down the economy for every virus or disease that emerges in the world. We need to find ways to continue to live and operate as safely as possible... and that probably involves isolating the most vulnerable and getting the least vulnerable back to work ASAP.

FTFY. Not a distinction without difference to this 3-time sucker of the certified captive audience game. 😄 I liken my relationship with certified rules as Michael and the office fax machine in Office space...

That guys numbers on available cargo loads were obviously limited to his experience on google. I would love to see the mission profile that has an Osprey lifting 20k anywhere in Afghanistan from the months of April-Oct with enough fuel to go anywhere outside the pattern. There is a reason nobody has come up with a “heavy lift” tilt rotor design that works. It’s because tilt rotor ACLs are more drastically effected by negative environmental performance due to the effective lift generated by the disk. That’s why the 53 and 47 are still projected out well into the middle of the century. You want to buy something to make a big impact in the log train? Let’s get more small robust/spartan interior Intra-theatre transport planes. Give us a plane big enough in cube space and forgiving enough on CG to put 2-3 randomly loaded pallets on with minimal effort to JI and move. That’s the reason the Army uses rotary wing to move stuff all the time at the cost of more blade hours and maintenance. It’s because when 2x ISUs and a dozen dudes need to go from KAF to JAF and I don’t have 3-4 days to wait to do it. Col wants that stuff up there now, and I’ve got 47Fs that can move it... unfortunately that means I take 2 chinooks doing a job to move 1/2 of a chinooks worth of stuff. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Nothing make or break. Just updates on the board being pushed back a couple months and another updating the poc email.

Look, I'm all for liberty like the next guy. However, where do we draw the line? I have the right to survive and protect my family. Should that right for my potentially-immunocompromised wife be infringed upon because some jackass wants to play disc golf with his buddies in the park down the way while coughing all over the place as he conducts a shelf check at Harris Teeter on the way there? This shit lives for days when it leaves your body; you may not even know you're touching a contaminated surface. The concept of letting local officials create local policy works, except we live in an open border society and there's no vector control. So without a uniformity on restrictions in order to limit the amount of movement of infected persons (who may not even know they're infected, it seems), hope of allowing this thing to die off wanes in the name of not letting the gubment take my rights. If I don't like the fact that Location X has strict disease containment measures, I can just hop in the family roadster and go down to Location Y where I can do whatever I want without regard to what harm I am causing to others. Every location has countless examples of people completely ignoring restrictions and infecting others (to include flippantly trying to spread the disease, in some extreme cases). No one I know wants to cede their liberties. But there are enough people out there who are literally killing others because they don't have the self control or sense of community to protect those they share a locality with by staying inside.

Your privilege is showing