Lord Ratner

Trump took the bait on the debates, so I wouldn't count on anything but a complete Biden-fest

That was painful to watch. Ironic that the video is comparing one mentally impaired president to another. All the shit that Reagan got, yet he was the image of perfect health compared to what Biden has become.

🍺

Wait, a human can have multiple views on a variety of topics and other humans can agree with a subset of those views without endorsing all of them? Do better

This is going to happen in every job, everywhere, forever. Especially with men their early and mid twenties, but by no means limited to it. We will always fight it, and most of us will behave, but biologically adult women (post-pubescence) are always going to get biologically adult men to act in accordance with a few million years of biological pressures.

Cops need to understand the the risk of death is not a hazard of the job to be mitigated at all costs. Sometimes death is the job. The military has understood this forever, it's the entire concept of "service." At some point the combination of bad training, low staffing, and low resources created a mindset that cops should be held to the same standard as the rest of the population. I think that's silly. If a cop sees someone with a gun, there's no acceptable excuse for killing that person unless they are actively using that weapon against the officers or bystanders. Just holding one isn't enough. Neither is waving it around, if the cops are the only ones at risk. And if somebody is in their own home, and there's no evidence that they are already committing a violent crime, cops shouldn't even have their hands on their guns. The entire paradigm needs to change.

If I had to guess a time, it'll be next year, but the more relevant metric will be whenever the next economic downturn happens. Traffic and consumer spending are at very high levels. If they normalize or retract, we will go from a pilot deficit to a pilot surplus very quickly. We've already basically returned the industry to the adequately staffed level, but as someone said, age 65 remaining in place will help mitigate. Again you have to view it from the context of the people running these companies. It's not Jeff bezos and Elon musk, it's a bunch of accountants who got to where they were by aping the people above them. Now they all just ape each other until something changes. So they all started hiring massively until suddenly they didn't need to. No forecasting went into it, the forecast was "whatever happens today is what we need to plan for for the next 10 years." When one company furloughs you'll see all the others follow suit because "cost savings" will become the Wall Street mantra during a contraction. AA furloughed. It wasn't a long furlough since the government stepped back in, but it happened in September of 2020.

Third lesson, install a camera. They are dirt cheap.

Yup. That was insane. You are allowed to have a gun in your house. I hope that cop spends a long time in prison. He baited that kid to a horrific death.

He's a hack, always has been a hack, got fired for being a hack, and will continue to be a hack. It's funny how short the lifespan is becoming for these pundits.

I generally don't recommend anyone do auto updates. If the service is working fine, updating it might not get you anything, and a lot of updates have "breaking changes" which required direct intervention to keep things running. If your system is capable of snapshotting, then getting in the habit of doing that before any updates or changes can make life a lot easier. Anyone who's looking to go down the rabbit hole of advanced home servers, strongly recommend proxmox.

Jail. It drives me crazy that we put cops in jail for shitty situations like the George Floyd case, but cases like this slip by, especially if there isn't a race angle to sensationalize.

Oh I don't think the companies are going anywhere, but furloughs are about saving money. It'll be simple math for the airlines: if the passenger traffic falls, they will cut pilots to maintain the same productivity levels. There won't be another "employee bailout" because the government is still dealing with the incredible waste and fraud from the PPP loans. I hope I'm wrong.

I think the pilots hired today are going to be furloughed. I don't think it's going to be a 12-year furlough like the last ones during the bankruptcies and mergers, but still. That said, it is 100% better to be furloughed than not hired at all. Any airline. If you are furloughed you can do anything you want, non-flying and the airline will eventually bring you back and retrain you. Staying current is irrelevant. Then once you are recurrent you can go get hired wherever you want to apply to, and you are a much more desirable candidate. Not being hired at all means you have to stay current *and* compete with the backlog of aspiring airline pilots when the interviews start again. Remember these people are fools. They were convinced air travel would *never* recover from COVID-19, then they started talking about "winning" the pandemic recovery. Then they furloughed (at AA). Then they announced the biggest hiring wave in airline history. Now they are all cutting hiring projections, if not outright halting it. These clowns just blow with the wind, and so do our careers.

Right, and the rest of it is spent on marketing to the members to get them to spend more on classes and gear and swag and seminars. It's not what I'm looking for. Commercials are fine, I get that you need more customers, but I don't need a magazine subscription from my insurance company. Spend it on defending clients.

That's the first video I found, I have no idea who that guy is. But all the gun podcasters I follow have talked about it a bunch.

They have a couple recent documented cases of dropping clients for very shaky reasons. I'm also not crazy about how much swag and marketing they do to the members. It feels more like an NRA membership than an insurance plan. I follow a couple of 2A lawyers, and neither are fond of USCCA anymore. CcwSafe has a good rate for veterans and the Law of Self Defense guy likes them (Andrew Branca).

I have no doubt they will repeat the play, but many plays only work once. It'll have to be at least 50 years before that trick can be pulled again. People just won't do it this time. Caveat: if the disease is actually more dangerous than a new strain of flu, for example if it kills children instead of old people, the masks will go on in a heartbeat.

Yeah, but still dramatically better than having nothing. Personally I'm switching from USCCA to CCWSafe once my subscription expires next year. I like the law of self-defense guy, and he endorses CCW safe. Anyone shopping for this type of insurance should consider one that also covers civil litigation coverage.

One of the many great things about Texas. That said, strongly, strongly, strongly recommend anyone in Texas get their license to carry and some sort of "shooter's insurance." USCCA, CCWSafe, Bear, whatever. The license to carry gives you more rights and protections than constitutional carry. It also simplifies where you can and can't go substantially.

I wish I didn't agree with you

Irrelevant. Your argument is still that highly unreliable profit sharing is a basis for not contributing. But profit sharing has only been high enough to make your point remotely relevant for a few years of the past 20 years, and only at Delta, only after the most recent contract pay rates, only for captains, and only with record level profits. I looked it up, Delta only got 10.3% this year. So a captain making 600k (which is not all qualifying income anyways) is *still* not going to max the 401k. So what is your point? Ignore the profit sharing and you are at the simple math of the Compensation limit. Your point is dumb. I'm sorry, but there's no other way to characterize what you wrote.

Sorry, but this is the dumbest thing I've read today, and Biff has been posting (love ya, biff 🤣) So now you're argument is that profit sharing at 17%, ignoring that profit sharing is *wildly* unstable, is enough to rely on to max the 401k? I think Delta got 16% last time (which AA and United were not remotely close to), which is the highest in the industry. For an FO making 300k that's $8,160 more in the 401k, which still doesn't max it out. I may have missed the knock out, but you just handed me the TKO. Thanks. You were simply wrong. That's fine, but don't give anyone advice.

I haven't redone it for the new contracts, but you would hit the 401K income cap before you would max out your 401k. If you don't contribute, it was literally impossible to hit the max. But this does nicely demonstrate just how financially weak a lot of the pilots are. I've had to correct many people on that misconception. Edit: I looked it up, and the annual compensation limit for 2024 is $345,000. At 17% that limits the company contribution to $58,650. Well below the $69,000 cap ($76,500 if over 50).

I have always wanted to get the statistics on how many airline pilots make zero contributions, and just rely on what the company puts in. Seems crazy to me, but at this point I bet it's at it's at least half.