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I think the point is nobody knows. But we do know the touted numbers aren’t accurate. To what degree of inaccuracy is unknown (at least I haven’t seen anything objective/credible). But with so much fuckery going on, it’s logical to be skeptical. I think a few people have made good “middle ground” points (paraphrasing…) that it’s not accurate to say COVID is simply the “common cold,” but it’s far from what the fear mongers have sold (in a desire to compel compliance, build power, and change society to suit their desires).

You see that , I always tell kids who want to get a degree to be a English major.

In no universe is this statement true. Deaths due to COVID or dying with COVID is undifferentiated in our tracking, which to be clear, is a feature for the PTB, not a bug. It has allowed them to propagate a narrative to justify all manner of policy-making that would be otherwise impossible. It's a bad bug that takes advantage of comorbidity. Now that Omicron is on the set, it's only a matter of time before the inevitable happens - that being the left in this country wakes up and admits the game is over. The new variant (and its derivatives) will be endemic, forever. It's breaking through three shots, masking, and everything else. Even they are going to have to wake up and realize that all the restrictions they're trying to implement are futile.

It makes you a better officer I know that much. People can gripe on it as much as they want but the truth is, not many Generals out there engineering aircraft systems and designing parts. Rather, most of them are incredibly smart on the geopolitical nuances of several regions where a background in anthropology, sociology, criminal justice, etc.... Introduced them to abstract concepts used to identify cultural friction with a high probability to lead to violence. Point is, for the AF, a degree is a no brainer. For the airlines, I'm not certain. But up until now I suppose the hiring environment allowed them to be very picky. That said, let's not pretend military pilots were handed a golden platter. The military choice was open to everyone bar a few with medical issues and it wasn't picked for some reason are another. Perhaps they simply weren't competitive, I don't know. Realize though, a significant population of pilots in the military still accrue student loan debt. I had $50K entering the AF. Additionally most military pilots are not multi engine fixed wing pilots leaving the military. The majority are Army/Navy rotary dudes. And of course we could talk about the obvious as well, the implication that you could have to go to war for all of that training. So I would say holistically it's a fair trade off.

You’re right I’m not okay with the 98 percent survival rate. But fortunately by you’re own population numbers it’s actually 99.94 percent survivable worldwide and 99.75 percent survivable in the US. Spoiler alert, getting on your motorcycle has worse odds than that - so yeah I’m good with those numbers

Very few countries are morbidly obese like the US as well as those countries that are that obese don’t have any where close to the population we do. It’s an underlying problem that causes so many health issues that doesn’t help with recovering from a sickness. Let alone covid.

https://www.timestables.com/ If you scale the populations of Japan and South Korea to make them equivalent to the US, you would get deaths in those countries to be about 50,000 and 38,000, respectively (they're actually 18,600, and 6300). This is minuscule when compared to the "850,000 OMG" deaths in the USA. Like 20x more people are dying from this thing on this side of the Pacific because...because...why, again??? In statistics class, we call this an outlier, and it points to something significant going on. Why, WHY are there so many fewer deaths in those countries when compared to ours? Do you not find this curious? No wonderings at all?

Nope. Not good enough. We are not going to outrage over a dozen shootings of unarmed individuals resisting arrest and then decide to not outrage over a person who happens to be of the opposite political end also being killed in another likely unjustified shooting. That's not justice. Everyone needs to be treated equally under the law. Not just people from our preferred political demographic.

Say wut? LOL You're conflating subjects AND missing the macro point simultaneously. Ever heard of the Guard/Reserves? The AF flight lines are not all staffed by Zoomies , not in the least. More on that later. So let's detangle the conflated, by addressing the two distinct issues at hand: 1)Airlines attract civilian applicants who are willing to indebt themselves to that level based on the expectation of upper middle class incomes in early working age without the need to compete in white collar professional schools (civilian airliner piloting is grey collar work). If that expectation didn't exist, people wouldn't do it (aka if regional airline pay hell was the top end to that career choice). Period. Military applicants got d$ck to do with that. Go bark at the airlines, and spare us the socioeconomic shaming of those of us who worked our entire formative years trying to elbow our way into the AF pilot corps, which implies the AF commissioned officer corps by proxy. 2) The question about degrees wrt military pilots is not germane to your gripe about civilian costs. Whether you like it or not, the military has the outright accessions-discriminatory luxury of not relying on a degree-less warrant officer or enlisted corps, to staff their multi-million dollar turbofan/jets. Which means, they can have us elbow each other for a spot at AF UPT, by hook or by crook. That means college degrees, pink tutus and anything else in between, are going to be just another discriminator to get to a coveted UPT slot, good bad or indifferent. Your foot-stomping about degrees not being skillset-germane to aircraft flying is frankly banal and long ago stipulated. You're arguing about the world of what things should be, and not the world of what things are. BL, It's not about privilege-shaming military pilots for having played the game to gain access to military pilot training in order to cajole an expedited entry point to an airline career. A hypothetical itself which btw, is a hell of a presumption on your part, as there's a good chunk of us who never got into military flying for the sake of becoming airline pilots, nor who have a burning desire to leave the flying we enjoy in the military to go watch paint dry to the right of an FMS box on AT. Nevermind the many more who never touch an airliner in post mil life. Don't let BODN be your only barometer on what mil pilots want to do in civilian life. This place has long been established as a airline/guard-reserve transition/ sports kvetching echo chamber. Finally, you're also missing the mark by insinuating that everybody flying for the AF got their degree costs floated by a Service Academy or a ROTC scholarship. Seriously, wtf. Hate the game, not the playa. <--That would probably net you more ideological allies around here on your quest to put "poor/enlisted kids" on the decks of US airliners, than whatever class grievance you're peddling.

It is not true to quote his death rate statement? GTFOH. He said 98% survival rate NOT ME so I did the math. Not "MY" survival numbers. Does anyone actually ready on here? I guess not...so probably pointless to repost my statement "I am not in favor of masks, shutting down the economy, or mandatory vaccinations but I think we should stop the 98% survival rate BS and acknowledge there is a real impact" M2 - you are correct, we should nuke this thread.

You could always just look up 10 AF/A1M org box on global and ask. reserve vacancies only show when the billet is empty. There are a lot of billets than be overaged as long as there isn’t an over grade.

I will never understand the 98% survival rate statement. 340,000,000 Americans x .02 death rate = 6.8 million dead Americans, you are ok with that? We got lucky, so far it has killed 849,000 Americans and world-wide it has killed 5.5 MILLION People. I am not in favor of masks, shutting down the economy, or mandatory vaccinations but I think we should stop the 98% survival rate BS and acknowledge there is a real impact.

Just give the Ukrainians whatever they need to destroy the Russian pipeline that crosses their land, and commit to seizing the Nord Stream pipeline should the sovereignty of Ukraine be violated. Problem solved. The problem isn't *how* to deal with Russia, the problem is will power. The American Left has been dedicated to the intentional diminishment of American influence for over a decade now, because they view power as synonymous with tyranny. The rise in tensions with China and Russia are in direct conflict with their foundational philosophy that American power asymmetry is the *cause* of international turmoil. So they'll double down and (fail to) resolve the conflict by further reducing our power footprint. The left has been so busy rewriting history that they have completely forgotten it. In their minds, these aggressions are the product of American exceptionalism. Using our power to constrain Russia would, in their mind, just cause further aggression.

Technically you’d need approval from big blue to pick up a second job. and some airlines want you on no-shit terminal … but it’s been a while since I was in your place so I don’t know if that’s changed.

Several O-5 billets being changed to non-pilot AFSCs while I was in the process of applying for them . It was easier to take a job with a different pilot AFSC than my own.

@nsplayr: first, I didn't, and I'm not, writing off old people. COVID kills people. Duh. Also, COVID has not killed everyone that the PTB say it has. If you can't see the distinction, that's fine with me. I don't really care. But there it is for you in black and white if you care to read it. If you also think that counting people as COVID deaths has not been incentivized, then I don't have much for you. The point of this discussion in my view, is to discuss all things related to the COVID pandemic - that includes what is counted as a COVID death, because, news flash: the more people the PTB tally up as COVID deaths, the more money they get. A few of these things smell suspicious to a lot of people who are voluntarily engaging in this conversation. Some of those are Why it took the WHO so long to declare the outbreak a pandemic, considering it had met the book definition LONG before it was actually declared as one publicly. Why it was verboten to question the origin of the pandemic. Why shutting down borders in some cases is ok, but not in others. Why our death rate is apparently worse than many other countries. I could go on. In short, though, the point is that the political response to this mess has been undeniably, nakedly, political. What has been acceptable for one party has not been acceptable for another - for reasons which are clearly political. If you've got space in your queue for a podcast, I recommend this one with Bari Weiss (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bringing-sanity-to-the-omicron-chaos-three-doctors-weigh-in/id1570872415?i=1000547881659). It was excellent. I don't care to make this personal, but if someone is in a hospital getting treated for lung cancer and they get COVID, did they die of COVID? Maybe, but not in my opinion. What about someone who is obese? Did they die of COVID? Maybe, but not in my opinion. Probably need more detail in most cases. I'm certain we disagree on these points. But to be clear, I don't dispute that it's a bad disease. I dispute that it's as bad a disease as those who are benefiting from it being the worst thing ever are calling it. ~850K people are dead. Ok. There are a lot of people in that group who had underlying conditions for which COVID was the straw that broke the camel's back - it was not the root cause. Here's a couple (https://www.kmov.com/news/colorado-coroner-calling-out-how-state-classifies-covid-19-deaths/article_297e3550-4131-11eb-9f01-ffe3e11d0f46.html, https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/nypd-man-shot-officers-dies-coronavirus-70941694). It sucks people die. It sucks worse when their memories are dishonored by using them as pretext and justification to implement whatever policy goals they wanted anyway.

nuke conversations lol. Nobody is forcing anyone to participate in the conversation hahah. Daddy stop the bad people from talking bad😢

A bachelor’s degree isn’t required for the technical operation of a jet on the day of execution. Back when I was a crew aircraft guy, I was pretty sure a reasonably competent flight engineer could’ve chair flown the whole operation in his mind, so all that’s left is to teach him how to land and do AR. For more complex tactical jets, well many NATO nations seem to get by with 20 year old non-bachelors pilots, though their education system is different. Things begin to fall apart when you move farther left of execution and things get less “technical operator” and more “leadership and coordination.” Plenty of enlisted folks help with mission planning and design, but they’re not leading MPCs and deciding how we’re employing billions of dollars worth of jets in peacetime or how we’ll win or lose in wartime. Nor - when you look even farther left in the timeline - are they responsible for the organizing/training/equipping part where we decide how the next war will be fought and what capabilities we need to buy, test, and develop. Officers do that, and those officers must have tactical and technical street cred from the beginning to end of their careers. Should every CSAF know how to tactically kill people and also know what it’s like to almost be killed by you own jet? Absolutely. Absofuckinglutely. BL: Are there enlisted dudes that are capable of being trained to fly the hell out of the jet? Yes! But the mistake is keeping them enlisted (or making them warrants) rather than doing the right thing and paying them more by commissioning them. As for the college part - yes, it expands your thinking well beyond being a technical operator, which is the critical requirement for the left of execution stuff above.

So do tell us, with your obviously superior intellect and statistical analysis skills, how many Americans have died from Covid-19? Also, go with creds that prove you are qualified to determine the official numbers are pure propaganda. I’m sure they’re very impressive.

Either way, this falls squarely into the play stupid games, win stupid prizes column for me. Don't vandalize/break into a federal building (or any building for that matter) and your chances of getting shot tend to diminish rapidly.

But we’ve gotten so much out of it! And it’s clearly only brought us all closer together…

My point is that the colleges and flight schools have priced themselves out of getting kids from non-affluent families from ever getting a degree or PPL due to cost which totally shrinks the future pilot pool. During my time on active duty, I actually met pilots who hated flying. Time for the airlines to shell out some dollars and start their own UPT's.

It’s not about the degree itself. it’s about what it takes to get that piece of paper. Being able to manage time, commitment to long term goals, being “trainable,” etc. not saying that’s the only way to get or demonstrate desired qualities….but having a degree is a known quantity.

91% less deadly than a variant that had a 98%+ survival rate.

Unfortunately that website is about as useful as your local MPF at 1400L any given day of the week.