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Why do you clowns insist on creating some false aggregate of positions to create the perfect conservative bogey man to debate instead of the people actually here in the discussion? You wanna balance the budget? Freeze all distribution programs at their nominal levels immediately. Let inflation solve the rest. Cut Medicare of for anything but stabilization and pain management after 80 years old. Fix Medicaid so that some retarded homeless junkie can't use emergency rooms for free while everyone with a job and insurance has to pay a fortune for after-hours care. Reform all benefits programs to *once again* require working age adults to work or starve. Strip the military acquisitions process of all special interests. No more buying pens from the blind just because. Remove all tax benefits for capital gains on publicly traded and private equity assets. It's income, you pay income tax on it. Stop securing home loans and student loans at the federal level and stop the rocket ship of rising home and education prices. Means-test VA disability benefits. For every $3 above $100,000 you make you lose $1 of your benefit. Obviously you aren't financially suffering from your disability. None of this is going to happen right now because everybody is hooked on the drug of free shit. What's going to happen is at some point we are going to get into a bloody messy war, a bunch of our kids are going to get fucking slaughtered by the Chinese or the Russians or the Europeans or the Africans or whoever the fuck we end up fighting, and all of a sudden people will get very serious again. You'll spend your savings on war bonds that you know are going to depreciate in value because what other choice do you have when it's directly funding the survival of your children in some God forsaken warzone? It will suck for a lot of people with pink hair and custom pronouns as the society exits the war with a newfound sense of homogeneity and community responsibility. Being your "authentic self" will be wiped away by the same judgemental fury of the surviving servicemen who will shun and shame those who believe the society owes them a payout or a tax shelter. Both the ultra rich and the ultra lazy will find themselves with fewer allies than ever. Until then, chill out, have a beer, and be happy that we don't die of paper cuts or colds. This has all happened before and it will all happen again.

I think the goal was to restore free speech, and yeah, it worked.

She was dibsable back in the day

Jane Fonda lost all of her credibility in a time before I was born, somewhere in North Vietnam.

No complaints when Trump fired the IGs.

What you were looking for was Darth Gayer

Where's the outcry about Jane Fonda throwing the universally recognized white nationalist neo-nazi hateful "ok" sign (defined as a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League five years ago)? If Musk had done this same thing, it would be headline news.

C'mon, this is pretty much the "bus full of nuns" scenario we've all received hundreds of time in the sim. Joking aside, great work by the crew. With all the other shit we worry about when landing at MDW, a biz jet crossing right into your rollout is never part of it.

NetJet...yikes! Nice save SWA!

Slight change of direction: near collision on runway at Midway. First 30 sec of this video is all you need to watch (and on mute): Don’t have time to listen to ATC audio. Good job on whoever recognized the issue and directed the SWA go around.

Understood. I have seen malfeasance by some of the bigs and I am happy when they get caught...reference Raytheon getting fined to the tune of $950M. I will always be in favor of stopping corruption, my concern is the universal belief that Industry is printing money off government contracts when in fact the norm is about 8% profit. I am very concerned when these sweeping changes don't account for the 2nd and 3rd order effects that actually REDUCE competition and lower the bar on what capabilities are delivered to the warfighter.

There is no such thing as a “trans”, just delusional people that need serious help pulling their craniums out of their rectums.

In recent years some have seen the impact and argued to fund some companies in order to maintain the industrial base. Kind of scary that there is only one U.S. company than can build submarines. Even more concerning when Virginia Class subs were on the list of 17 cut exclusions because they are so integral to INDOPACOM, especially in the Defense of Taiwan scenario. One way they government has tried to encourage innovations and growth is through (Modular Open System Architecture (MOSA), architectures where the government is not vendor locked to a single OEM software/hardware solution. Meaning, most new systems have MOSA from the start so if someone invents a new widget that increases capability, the government does not have to go back to the OEM and pay them to integrate it. It is supposed to be plug and play as long as they comply with ICDs.

Been checking my CDB multiple times a day for the past 2 weeks and still nothing, lol I'm hoping I get a date for MFS later this week...

Well she’s a democrat so it’s okay. Cmon bro! They couldn’t beat us in the election booth, they can’t beat us with logic, nothing left but this kind of crap. Anyone who has studied Noam Chomsky (avowed Marxist and mentor to She Clinton and Obama) understands the playbook.

The media claimed twitter was on the verge of failure “any day”. That didn’t happen. Twitter is very successful. Let Elon cook.

Headed to Pensacola for IPT.

I heard a passenger interview from an intercept once (not this one) & she was talking about how safe she felt once the fighter showed up. I don't think she understood what that presence indicates, but it's not passenger safety.

I approved this post... To the OP - Don't be surprised if you do not get many replies from this thread. Many folks likely would consider this a potential for gathering data they don't really want shared. To the usual suspects - go easy on this one.

That really sucks for you. And I mean that, a lot of really good people who've done a lot of really good work are going to go through this shitty process. Unfortunately there's no alternative. We have spent decades pretending like we are going to get things cleaned up, and in those decades the only thing that has happened is that things have gotten worse. We have gotten to the "shit or get off the pot" phase, and as much as I hate to see people like you in jeopardy, I am more concerned about my kids and their kids and their kids. We are on the unsustainable path that becomes more catastrophic the longer we are on it. Donald Trump is the most emblematic of this phenomenon. I truly wish we had someone better to lead us through this process, but he is the president specifically because everyone 'better' failed us. So now we're here.

Yup, a shit show for sure. But 100 times better than Harris; I remain pleased with my Trump vote.

Meanwhile at Hellfire/JDAM/Griffin/SDB suppliers…

Gen Brown banned Friday shirts which, while extremely unimportant, signaled the beginning of the asinine dress and appearance crackdown we are now in the midst of. I’m sure his firing has nothing to do with that and everything to do with the Trump admin’s anti-DEI posturing but I’m going to pretend it was causal as I crack another beer and laugh my ass off.

Put a bit of a dent in it last night celebrating.

I got my final LES today after retiring as an O-6 with just short of 27 years, all active duty. So, I was able to add up my lifetime totals, which I thought some of you might find interesting: Base Pay = $2,209,000 BAH = $634,000 BAS = $71,000 Language Pay = $165,000 COLA & Family Sep = $185,000 Lifetime compensation = $3,265,000 For what it’s worth, my net worth (TSP, IRA, stocks, bonds, CDs) is $2.3M. My wife is a homemaker and we just bought our first house, so this is all long-term investing and living beneath our means. Pension will come to $104,000 a year and I’ll likely get 100% VA disability for another $50,000 a year tax free. Anyway, I’m sitting pretty well and figured it might inspire some of you to stick with your plan.

Luckily, as you alluded, we don't use the national popular vote to determine the President...and looking at the electoral vote from the states, there was a clear majority (58%) in favor of Trump as #47. I also think you need to define who thought the election was an upset. Several polls have been exposed as heavily biasing to Democratic voters and didn't reflect reality.

I just came here for @ClearedHot’s reaction.

I'm also MFS complete, nothing populated in my CDB. This wait is worse than waiting for the results.

The VR and pilot training next stuff wasn't originally a problem in and of itself. If you added VR sims to the legacy UPT syllabus us old hats are familiar with, you would end up with a better product. Full stop. I'm all for trying to modernize sims/chairflying and I'm all for auditing the syllabus to make sure we aren't wasting time on things that don't matter operationally, like fingertip takeoffs and landings or serially hooking kids on ELPs. The problem arose when the brass started using the VR and PTN/UPT 2.5 syllabus cuts to mask the fact that they can't generate aircraft. That's when all the newfangled VR and syllabi basically became a trojan horse to cut hours while keeping slides green.

POW camp at SERE will be more fun if you do.

Y'all need to actually address the topic rather than all this e-pen** measuring.

Did somebody say Cold Stone? Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Can't wait to see the $ savings go up in flames as we add more FTU sim time & flight hours to get these dudes up to speed. Only gone cross country twice? Here's a c17 round the world fiesta. Never landed a multi engine aircraft? Here's an assault in the herk. Wonder many class As do we need before they realize the toner saved a lot of $ by breaking cheaper planes.

Further effects of the divestment, some GS [now former] toners at P-cola are scrambling for T-1 sim jobs at the garden varieties in order to get a touch n go to apply back to their own sim jobs down there. That's how saturated that market is, and how much location is an inducement for these AD retiree types. Some folks would bag groceries as long as the wife doesn't have to hear we gotta leave the redneck riviera. In fairness, I know Allegiant pilots in the same boat (vis a vis legacy 121 et al), so the dynamic is not unique. After all, it's why most people (HoH with dependents) get out of RegAF for, statistically speaking. On our end, not everybody wanted to flow to T-6s, T-6 PIT is more than 12 months backed up, it's a mess. Some sour faces across AFRC regarding the divestment (Toners were always the easiest to fill due to the airline job gateway it was), and people looking at having their AGRs invol-curtailed short. It's a mess for sure, yai morale and loss of experience. But fif gen and big pork programmes are capitalized, so it's all good. /s