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Yeah, I got some stories............ First, I’ll say (in my opinion) the FO’s job is to be a tolerant chameleon, when necessary, which is usually infrequent. When I was an FO, I did that pretty well. I’m not suggesting a Captain gets to bring all levels of crazy, non-standard BS to the trip. However, some of the stories of conflict I’ve heard are just as much the FO’s fault for being unwilling (as opposed to unable) to flex and just get along. The one thing you never do is take your issues to management. You don’t put a fellow pilot’s job on the line over a dispute of any kind. The first option is man to man, face to face. If you can’t solve it that way, then the next stop is professional standards with the union. Ratting someone out to the company is really bad form. The bottom line is, if you’re an FO, let shit go and chill. The entertainment value of some of these guys is top notch. You’ll miss out if you bail too early. I never kept a “list”. I usually heard about these guys after I flew with them. Then I’d usually be asking, why didn’t someone warn me about this guy? Trust me, they were all on everyone’s list if they had one. After 23 years of doing this, I’ve got some doozies. I’ll start with “The Most Interesting Captain in the World” Standard 2-week around the world 777 trip at FedEx. At some point in the first few days, Captain Fantastic informs me that at some point in the late 1990’s, he had the lead role as the Phantom in the Phantom of the Opera on Broadway. Before he could begin his performances, he “blew his vocal cords out”, needed surgery and lost the part. I know it may seem stupid in hindsight, but I had no reason to question this and wasn’t in the frame of mind to wave the BS flag. In fact, the first instinct I had was thinking my kids (all musical theater performers) were going to be excited to hear that I flew with someone who was almost on Broadway. Of course, I asked if FedEx had agreed to give him a leave of absence to do this since that’s kind of a full-time job with multiple shows daily. He explained all that away and we moved on. The next one was, as a high school student, he discovered some DNA thing that had the potential to cure cancer. He didn’t have a PhD after his name, so no one took him seriously and he didn’t get any credit. I don’t know shit about DNA and it was early in the trip so I was still in “gee whiz, that’s pretty interesting” mode. The days continued and I heard about him getting the Arch Bishop of his church fired over a sermon topic, being a studio musician for various famous performers (this guy’ s cool, that guy’s an asshole, etc.) and his 80’s band that toured with and opened for Journey. They had a record deal but their drummer quit to get married and it fell through. I asked about the band name, etc. and did some online research but no joy. But it was the 80’s and they didn’t make it, so why would the interwebs have anything? Still semi-clueless and not being much of a talker myself, I’m just plugging along – warning bells haven’t started yet. As a side note, one day he starts going off about the full body scanners in use around the world. His doctor has warned him in the strongest terms never to accept them since we would be scanned so much more often than the average traveler. No shit – less than 24-hours later, we’re going through security in Osaka at o-dark-thirty and they try to make us go through one of those things. Amazing. I’ve been through KIX hundreds of times over that last 15 years and never – not once – have I every had to go through anything other than the normal metal detector for crews. Of course, it’s an absolute shit-show. This guy is getting badge numbers and asking for supervisors and threatening job loss – the whole shooting match. Of course, the Japs are sucking air through clenched teeth, avoiding eye contact and in full disengage mode trying to deal with the cray-cray American. They eventually plug in the normal machine; we walk through that and go on our way. He had big plans to write the whole thing up and maybe he did. I never heard a thing about it after that. There used to be a well-known interview process at Delta involving a psychiatric evaluation. From what I understand, the doctor doing the interviews eventually took his own life. Apparently, back in the day, Captain Fantastic threw his hat in the ring with Delta and got interviewed. His ability to parry and counter this psychiatrist’s questions during the evaluation were so clever and unnerving that the doctor eventually gave up in complete frustration. It was not long after this interview that the poor chap did himself in. Yes folks, our Captain was in fact, fully responsible for the death of the Delta doctor. By this point in the trip, I was a bit numb to the whole thing and it had been so much that I wasn’t really paying that much attention anymore. But I wouldn’t say the lightbulb had come on over my head quite yet. I know – I’m a dumbass. I am a music fan though and while we were waiting for an ATC delay in Shenzhen, we got talking again. We’re sitting #1 by the runway waiting to be released and somehow Jim Croce’s name comes up. You know – the guy who sang “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown”. Yeah – I know some of you don’t know it. Fucking youngsters. Google it. It’s 70’s folk/pop music. But the point is, that our Captain decides to tell me that “I used to play with Jim”. Now my radar finally comes out of test and I’m starting to really scan. I saw our hero’s birthday on the Gen Dec multiple times that trip. The most amazing Captain was born in 1961. I knew Croce died in a plane crash in the early 70’s so I looked it up when I got to my room that night. 1973. Mutherfucker!! So, you played with ole’ Jim when you were 12, huh? Yup – he got me. I guess I try to take people at face value. But I gotta say, if I was still an FO, I’d fly with him again just for the entertainment value. I’d love to be able to egg him on and see how far I could get him to go. Point being, not all the crazies are worth avoiding. Think of all the stories you’d miss out on.

San Francisco is a tragedy. You're either wildly ignorant about what's happening or intentionally misrepresenting it.

Funny you should post that. Years ago, I'm at Carlos Murphys West in Tucson for a 4th of July soiree. I'm with another A-10 dude and somehow we end up taking to this liberal couple. When they find out we are Hawg drivers, the liberal chick says, "How can you gun down women and children." Well, if ever a softball question was tossed my way, that was it. Just like the movie quote, I replied "It's easy, you just don't lead them as much." The shocked looks on their faces was absolutely priceless. We also ended up drinking with a midget wrestler who was the regional distributor for Coors but that's another story.

Your spew is difficult to keep pace with - I'll give you that. In fact, I have a feeling you might be having fun with GPT-3 (https://openai.com/api/)? Aaaaaannnnnnnywaaaayyyyy. The part that is MMT is the idea that deficit spending is 'free'. A Stony Brook economics professor, Stephanie Kelton, wrote a (terrible) book about it called The Deficit Myth, in which she spells out a lot of the theory that you promulgate in this thread. In a sentence, the idea is that the government can spend and spend and spend and all will be ok. The implicit assumption that is taken for granted, is that this only works for so long, and is additionally propped up by the fact that we hold the world's reserve currency. Money is a key factor that helps the economy function, but productivity is the core of the economic system. Elon Musk, though you dismissed him without refuting him, sufficiently understands and stated that money's function is to allow goods and services to be transferred through its medium, and to transfer spending across time and space. You seem to be wrapping yourself up about a relic of the modern financial system - not every dollar in existence has a physical bill. Nor has anyone you're speaking to asserted such. My objection is not about money being printed - when there is productivity, there needs to be money in order to facilitate transaction. The problem becomes when there is no productivity, misdirected productivity, or even negative productivity. The phraseology "printing money" refers specifically to those situations wherein the government has exhausted all sources of revenue, determines they need more, and goes to the federal reserve for a "loan." That, by definition, is spending without productivity, and is thus inflationary. It creates demand where there was no supply (i.e. no supply of previous labor). Private banks are different for a number of important reasons. 1. They cannot initiate unlimited loans. 2. They cannot (do not) provide a loans without collateral. 3. Private banks can become insolvent and go bankrupt. The Fed is precisely to opposite of each of those factors. Home mortgages are not unproductive. Your mortgage (if you have one) provides you "housing services" each and every month - ultimately providing you housing for an indeterminate amount of time if you succeed in paying it all the way off. Look up imputed income. You'll gain an understanding about just how productive a mortgage can be. Lastly, I think people do consider that inflation. Who doesn't think the stock market and housing are at all time highs because there's a dearth of money rushing around in the system? For real. I have one question for you. What is your purpose?

And that's the just the " women" but I'm not a biologist so I might be wrong.

do you mean the home of the Stanley Cup champions Colorado Avalanche? put some respeck on the name 🍻

Anyone seen Rainman? Bueller, er, Rainman? Raaiinnmmmaannn?

Meanwhile, the enlisted force have blitzkrieged with shaving/religion/IDGAF waivers and are all wearing beards these days.

I loved AIS and took a lot of good lessons from it back to the community (mainly cold weather altimeter corrections and MAJCOM approved procedures for austere ops). Just like most courses in the AF in that you’ll get out of it what you put into it.

She's a US Congresswoman. Policies she puts forward affect me as a US citizen. I'm in the community she has influence over - the US.

Awkward FO- “Parking checklist complete. Good flying with ya, maybe I’ll see you on another trip soon!” CA - “Yeah, about that. Here’s my employee number. Do me a favor would ya…”

Ding ding. And we have a winner

You keep saying things that are ridiculous. Millions of people are complaining that housing prices are inflated. Others like myself complain that the Fed doesn't consider them in calculations of inflation. OER is a joke, but then again, the Fed is a joke, so it fits. You are intentionally being obtuse. It's funny, because you speak a language that academics use when they are intentionally avoiding an attack on their thesis. Hyper focus on semantics and definitional disagreements instead of the concepts, which are obvious. If they aren't obvious to you, then you simply aren't smart enough for the conversation you're attempting to have. That might be why you sound like a bot, btw. Using a vocabulary based on pattern matching and imitation rather than understanding. We're seeing the same nonsensical arguments with the CRT and trans issues. Suddenly the definition of racism and gender aren't what they've been for thousands of years, and anyone who doesn't accept these new definitions are the idiots, not the clowns who decided to unilaterally redefine them to support their bankrupt ideology. Sounds like they new definition of money. A couple points on things you missed, before I'm completely bored with this circle jerk. All money creation is always inflationary. But in a healthy system the "created" money that is loaned out and inflationary is offset by "destroyed" money that is paid to the loan and deflationary. The private system usually maintains this balance, because failing to do so would lead to insolvency and dissolution. But here comes the Fed, buying private securities from the banks (MBS are a great example) which distorts the lending calculus and encourages bad lending that will never be paid back. The Fed will cause massive deflation if it meaningfully reduces the balance sheet, but no one expects that to happen considering the government would lose it's ability to deficit spend without a guaranteed buyer of low-interest bonds. No, because money ≠ productivity, and that fact you think ViperMan (or I) was suggesting that is the clearest indication that you are incapable of keeping up with the conversation. Productivity is the most reduced form of what any two participants in a system are exchanging when they use money (any form) as a method of exchange. Ultimately, money is a claim on human effort, and different humans have different prices for their effort. In your example above, money is (obviously) not created. The discovery of additional, previously unavailable human effort through the increase in productivity from Ctrl+Z Ctrl+V is deflationary, as the money supply is unchanged, but the available product has increased. It also explains why the Fed's reckless money "printing" binge has been able to persist for so long. The world has been increasing productivity exponentially over the past 20 years thanks largely to the Internet, but also to automation and globalization of manufacturing and services labor. That deflationary explosion in additional available human effort (productivity) had been offset by a clueless fed that was simultaneously increasing it's "money-printing" operations exponentially in pursuit of their arbitrary and idiotic target of 2% inflation. They openly admitted for years that they didn't know why their stimulus wasn't having an inflationary effect, yet they intentionally omitted the wild inflation of housing and equities, and completely missed the huge deflation of globalization. So they just kept printing. Then COVID hit and the deflation spigot slammed shut. Human productivity plummeted and spending did not. Boom, record setting inflation in one year. And if you actually use the housing-inclusive formula that was used in the 80s for CPI then inflation right now is the highest in American history. Ever. Thanks to Russia and China, the globalization experiment is dead, so we now lack the intense deflationary pressure we relied on to obscure the effects of irresponsible money-printing. The Fed claims to be fighting inflation, but until they reach a policy rate that impedes government deficit spending, we aren't going to escape inflation. Here's the best quote I've ever heard from someone we've been taking seriously for years, Jerome Powell. This was one month ago! "We understand better how little we understand about inflation.” But these are the people who are going to fix this? That's the system we're in, where the central authority for managing inflation literally doesn't understand it. We simply have too much debt in the system. Corporate, personal, and government, and too much of it was spent on unproductive endeavors. We either let inflation rage for a few years (5-10 I suspect) with ~0 growth or we tackle inflation and let the housing, equities, and debt markets collapse by about 50-75 percent. All that assumes we find Jesus on responsible spending which, to the howling of the Keynesians and MMT hacks, will look similar to smart personal financial actions: Don't spend more than you make, and only take it debt you can pay off. But what we're probably going to get is more academics arguing that money isn't actually real and banks can just create money and the Fed doesn't actually print money and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. A theory is not valid because the detractors cannot convince the supporters of it's realize fallacy. Theories are by default invalid until validated by outcomes. Our financial system has been constructed around the theory that debt doesn't matter at a macro level, and now the theory is collapsing, as it was always doomed to.

It’s one of the things I miss about Tokyo. You’ll not see a single homeless person, let alone feces, anywhere in the streets. It’s considered culturally shameful. The result is one of the cleanest and kept cities on the planet. Meanwhile in America, homelessness and laziness is not only actively encouraged by a certain sect of our elected officials, it is embraced and enabled.

God love em! 😇

Anecdotal, but I was in Portland two weeks ago. Our copilot who was meeting us for dinner got spit on and chased by a homeless person. It was like playing frogger dodging all the tents and literal human pieces of shit to get back to our hotel. Also, literally just got back from SFO today and it wasn't as bad as Portland, but still tons of homeless everywhere and very dirty (granted, that might be the normal). Met up with one of my E's for dinner who moved there and he told me he sold his car so it would no longer be broken into (among other reasons). Ironically, my rental car got broken into last year at Fisherman's Wharf and all my personnel belongings taken (to avoid victim blaming: they were in the trunk, nothing in plain sight).

Last time they raised the age going into a recession, it set back the profession by 5 years. Those who would have retired can sit at the top of the seniority list longer, or more likely, collect long term disability for another couple of years. It will also allow the regional pipeline to catch up. For everyone else, they stay put for two more years, either in seat, at the regionals, or still in the military. Will continue to discourage entry into the profession when it goes another 2 years without hiring. It's perfect kind of legislation these days, where it has the appearance of helping, while making it worse in the long run.

Yeah, I did.

This is the fundamental flaw in the entire ideology. If this was true we'd have no inflation. But we did have inflation, and that inflation will destabilize the societal faith in the system, which is a prerequisite to the functioning of the system. If faith in the system is lost, the system is lost. Watch what happens when the bond market decides to ignore. Money is a proxy for human output, period. If you increase the amount of money without also increasing the output (growth), you will eventually get inflation. The entire system of modern economic has been constructed to deny or disprove this reality, yet here we are. Between the Yen, the Eurozone bond divergence, and our own inflation, any suggestion that MMT or Keynesian economics are valid theories should be laughed out of the room. For my whole life the economists like Krugman have been trying to convince us that the laws of personal finance don't apply to macroeconomic systems. It's bullshit. The only difference is the time it takes to fall apart.

Dude I get why people think you're a bot. What part of my response was sensitive? That's a pretty wild assessment from someone who had to go back and delete an emotional attack. Protesting at times? What alternate reality do you live in? Spend five seconds on YouTube and find the BLM protestors screaming at cops. Or how about the *two* attempted murders now of conservative political figures (Kavanaugh and the Republican NY governor candidate). If you have a point, you're not making it well.

People like this are allowed to vote…

This is what happens when we cater to the kids who got beat up on the playground...they're now running HR. Since my move to the left seat, I've thankfully only ran into one FO that I was glad we only had one, short leg together. She was a SJW type who clearly hated old, white men (good thing I'm not 40 yet lol). A vast majority of the pilots out there are great to chat with, but there are the occasional odd balls that you're ready to be done with.

How gunship guys eat popsicles...

Mudhens living up to the stereotype. Navy had Top Gun 1&2 and we get this...

Father of the year award potential for this crew.

I’ve seen a bunch of folks talking that if anyone does this single pilot KC-46 thing, they need to be black balled from all the airlines. These are the same people that bitch about toxic leadership and all the other talkings points 24/7. I find it highly ironic that black balling a guy for something he’s ordered to do about the most toxic thing I’ve ever heard.

BTW This topic deserves its own thread. Huggy, On a good day from point A to point B, one could probably fly a KC-46 with a single pilot and a boom operator. But why? I’ve flown tankers for close to 20 years now. Air refueling missions range from the mundane C-17 training mission or two ship F-15 CAP to complex Missions where you have multiple tankers talking to each other, ATC or C2 and to the receivers that may or may not be showing up at the same time/when they are supposed to and may or may not be as English proficient as we would like. When you have multiple tankers and multiple receivers you need everyone listening up on the 3-4 radios and dividing the duties. It’s a lot, especially when there’s external factors like a retrograde, TIC, etc. A jump seater or an extra boom is a welcome addition in these scenarios due to task saturation. Someone (maybe in another thread) also alluded to some of the additional capes (datalink, etc.) and the discussion that ensued tried to delineate if these detracted from the mission or enhanced the mission. IMHO, they are designed to enhance the core competency of air refueling when utilized properly but, if we are not careful they can easily distract the crew or the squadron from the fundamental mission of a tanker. In an emergency/non-normal situation as well, there’s a lot to accomplish. In our sims, we train with two pilots and the sim instructor plays the boom or we bring one in. Are we bringing a boom into every sim now since they will now have to train for every EP? Will they be running pilot checklists while the only pilot maintains aircraft control? I guess flight engineers used to (never flew with one but I know they were integrated up front) so now the boom does it? I’m ok with that, I implicitly trust the booms but again, why not just have two pilots with the boom backing us up. Maybe I don’t have the big picture. I’m all for innovation but besides possibly ferrying aircraft in a wartime situation to either survive them or get them to a frontline unit where other pilots are executing a near peer fight and we need all hands on deck I can see no good reason to try and fly a 767 with one pilot. I see this as a distraction from the mission and not an enhancement to the mission.

dear all, anyone selling a Breitling limited edition? VR M

Ok, just to be clear, the listed policies that you disagree with do not have any personal impact on you. Do you want to prevent someone who lives at a distance from you from creating policies relevant to their community, in other words, impose your will upon them?

Which ideas, can you list a few? When you say 'The economy will tank in 5 years', can you be specific about what that means? Ex: unemployment is 8-9%, stagnant or decreasing [real] wages, increasing reliance on imports, reduced mortality and birth rates, ?

YES, homelessness in democratically controlled regions, such as California and Washington State, and large cities like SF, Portland, and Seattle have serious problems with inequality, employment, and asset prices. This is what [economic] liberalism produces. We are seeing the conclusion of 40 years of liberal [economic] policy pursued by both parties.

Ok, we're approaching our target I think. Taxpayer money, government spending beyond its means. Inflation, energy reliance/inflation. Remember, I live in the EU, so I don't really care what domestic policies AOC (or anyone else) is proposing, it doesn't affect me. What I am trying to figure out is why people in the US are shouting the equivalent of 'Your my fav big booty Latina' over and over to one another, rather than holding a useful dialogue and trying to form a team. What are the real differences that are dividing people? Can you get a cross-dressing faggot and a gun-toting redneck onto the same team? What policies would that team be based on? Can a decentralized framework of 'live and let live given large open undeveloped geographic space' work? Or is it that we need to purge a large group of people in fire first, and there really is no alternative? This leads us to prices--and we should really be over in the Finance thread, but I'll leave it here for now. First off, oil companies love high oil prices. US shale oil requires higher unit prices than almost anyone else, because the oil is more costly to extract. If you reduce oil prices below their costs, they close those wells. Generally, you need prices to be stable, and the Fed just gave the Dept of Energy to ability to act as 'shock absorber' via the futures market, guaranteeing future prices for oil producers. This ensures wells stay open and are less subject to speculative attack from outsiders like OPEC. Regarding Europe--remember that the US produces too much oil for its domestic market, and part of the conflict in Ukraine is about pushing the EU from Russian oil onto US natural gas. In other words, the US needs markets to sell its oil products, or the price of domestic oil crashes and the gov must absorb huge amounts via stockpiles (assuming it wants to keep domestic wells open). EU energy independence is bad for the US. More importantly however, is that energy transition to other sources (whatever they may be) requires energy. So exisiting energy production isn't going anywhere. What is going to have to change is the total level of consumption--we need to shift energy use from what we do now towards producing more energy sources that don't create GHG. If you don't think climate change is a thing, then you can ignore this (YOLO) and spend on something else. If you don't want the gov to spend on anything at all, do that. But this bring us to the actual topic at the heart of disagreement I think: HOW DO WE PAY FOR THINGS. And people get really worked up about this. But bankers don't. Bankers know they can always fund anything so long as the resources are available for purchase.