Lord Ratner

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.

Lol, I don't know what you think my core argument is, but I've said multiple times that multiple things can be true at once. I have no idea what your second paragraph is supposed to convey. You think Congress cares about safety? Now who's naive? I also never said something is right because it's always been that way. I said that groups can create norms and rules as long as they are consistently applied. You joining that system indicates a moral endorsement of the act. Otherwise you are participating in an immoral system for profit, which makes you immoral. Of course you can disagree with the system you are a part of, but there is a big difference between disagreeing with something and believing it to be immoral. You have made the claim that it is immoral: Again, your arguments border on hyperlibertarianism. The reason libertarians have never and will never have any real power in any real society is because absolute adherence to individual freedom falls apart immediately upon contact with reality. The same group of people that will complain about the government setting an age limitation will complain at the amount of money the government would be required to spend to do cognitive testing on every pilot of every age. I used to consider myself libertarian until I realized it is the political manifestation of backseat driving. This whole conversation reeks of it.

I think you are intelligent enough to have the conversation you want to have, but you are simply too self-righteous to listen. In either case, until you are capable of holding two thoughts at the same time, I don't need to write another manifesto just repeating myself. There is a safety justification that is backed up by decades of cognitive research, as well as insurance actuarial tables as pointed out above. 65 might or might not be the correct number. There is also a concept of group-based norms and expectations, which can be equally or unequally applied. In this case, the forced retirement is equally applied, which plays a huge part in determining whether or not the group norm is moral. Finally there is the concept of averaging and thresholding, which again, insurance companies (and the government, and schools, and churches, and people in general) have been doing for centuries because it is simply not practical to test all of the variables that one might want to consider individually for every restriction. If you can't get to there, we just aren't going to get anywhere.

Ah, there we go. No point in continuing with you. Armed drug dealers? I think the murder-only threshold is too high. Contrary to popular belief, people who have just broken traffic laws don't often flee a traffic stop like that. I can happily engage with the idea that the terrible attempt at a pit maneuver should not have occurred, and the cops should have simply followed the suspects until they tired themselves out. Of course then if that truck had rammed into a bus full of orphans without police intervention, the police would still be blamed. In almost every one of the videos I've watched, the expired tags are why the crook is pulled over, not why they subsequently flee. There's usually an associated warrant. Either way, hard for the cops to know at the moment.

We're repeating ourselves at this point, but this specifically shows why there's no point here in continuing the loop. You fundamentally believe that this is somehow immoral, and I fundamentally believe you are wrong. Further, being practical is just a part of life. The best answer would be to cognitively test every pilot before every flight. That's obviously too much. The worst answer would be to pick the age at which cognitive ability is at its highest on average, probably somewhere in the '30s, and then fire all pilots older than that. That is obviously extreme on the other end. Picking somewhere in the middle is what it means to work in a functional system with limited resources. Besides all of that, I have already said multiple times that if you remove all of the safety issues I still have no issue with the restriction. You do not have a moral, legal, fundamental right to work wherever you want, whenever you want, for however long you want. That exists in no religious or philosophical text. This is the same argument that hyperlibertarians make against homeowners associations. But the second word is the giveaway. It is just one of many associations that we enter into voluntarily, because groups have aligned interests and values. And just because one person doesn't like what the group has determined as a group, does not make it immoral, because the individual does not have moral superiority over a group when that group is a voluntary association created by many individuals. We have a bunch of people in our Union whining that the union isn't representing their interests because they want to work past 65. And they keep throwing DFR around because the union isn't advocating for their specific individual interest. Yet when the union does polling, the membership overwhelmingly supports age 65 as a restriction. The union has no obligation to advocate for your specific interests beyond its duty to represent you in disciplinary proceedings.

Does something happen after 8 minutes that changes the story? I'm not sure how you watched that and thought the cops were the idiots in the situation.

One reason I like appendix carry. With a claw and/or wedge you can get away with a lot, as long as the shirt is long enough. Even thin fabrics are workable if they have a pattern to hide any printing. But it's always an inconvenience. I've got a hybrid leather/kydex coming to try, because I don't love the feeling of the slide and optic pressing into my skin, but I love the positive "click" you get from kydex.

Push what through? You mean keep things the same. I'm also unclear about "no data." Are you suggesting that the entire body of cognitive research in regards to age is somehow false? Even if you are completely unfamiliar with the research, surely you have existed, right? You've actually met old people? The suggestion that there's no "fact, reason, or real logic" to say that cognitive ability declines with age is completely absurd. The distinction doesn't fall apart at all. Everyone turns 65, unless they happened to die earlier. Everyone. And every single one of those people had the exact same amount of time on Earth up until the point they turned 65. That you would think there is a comparison between racial discrimination and age discrimination shows a complete lack of moral nuance. It's not about social ick. Again, if you somehow believe that there is no cognitive effect to aging, then I suppose you can get a little closer to a discriminatory argument. But there is, factually. There is not, however, any evidence that having darker skin makes you a shittier pilot. These two are so different that I'm shocked I have to write this much about it. The age at which you can drink, vote, own a gun, serve in the military. The age in which you can be in the House of Representatives. The age which you can be a Senator. The age that you can be President. The age that you are allowed to draw social security. The age that you get a better rate on car insurance. The age that you get discounts at movies. The age that allows you to move into certain communities (55+). I think you fundamentally fail to understand what group-based means. Rather than screening millions of people, you find a statistical point where it will apply to the majority of the demographic. I don't know what this "10 people taking a vision test at a time" nonsense is, but it doesn't apply to anything that we are talking about. It's the "appropriate framing" because it supports your point 🤣. The definition of lawful is that it is done by the government in accordance with that government's rules. That's what "law" is. That's exactly what's happening here, so this isn't a legal issue. You can argue it's a constitutional issue, But that argument has failed under the system and as such is definitionally not a constitutional issue. That only leaves the moral issue, which brings it back to my framing, not yours. You believe you have a moral right to work in a certain job until you die. I do not. Also an incomplete analysis. Because the check ride system does not screen for all issues. For example, it does not screen for heart issues. We have another test for that. Just like with a cognitive test, the more responsibility you put on the check ride, the more complicated it needs to be. And at least at my airline, check rides are not even remotely complicated. They are cookie cutter, scripted, rehearsed, and unbelievably babied. But you can do that because we have a whole bunch of other processes in place that act as filters. One of those being the age filter. You can get rid of the age filter and make the check ride filter more robust, but just like with having cognitive testing, a lot of people aren't going to like the results of that. It is also simply more complicated. Again it is one thing to argue that 65 is not the correct age. But calling it "bad" discrimination is disingenuous. It's denying the reality that old people lose their marbles. Discrimination in the literal sense is not bad. We do it for all sorts of things. What you discriminate, and how you discriminate is what determines if it is right or wrong. This rule does not exist because people don't like old people. Even if you accept at face value that it has nothing to do with safety, which I do not, and it is purely about job progression, even that is being fairly applied to all participants, and as such is not immoral. Another factor that determines morality is the presence of choice. You absolutely have a choice to participate in a unionized flying job that has equally applied age restrictions, or you could work elsewhere that does not.

No, it's not at all what I said. You have two options dealing with this type of thing. An individual test, or a group-based average. Both can work, and both can allow certain cases to slip through the cracks. But let's get rid of the outrage. You have no god-given right to continue doing a specific job until you croak, even if we did want to have an individualized test. The military does it too. You (whoever) entered the career knowing there was a time limit, just as everybody did, so you were not misinformed or ill-advised. You joined anyways. And you benefited greatly from the limit, so the system wasn't so odious when it was to your benefit that you felt the need to pursue a different career in protest. Even if we had a test to capture when cognition declines to a point of concern, unless we're going to take it before every flight, you're still going to have a window where someone is unsafe. The vast, vast majority of pilots are still safe at 65, which is what makes it a good number. Pushing it up to the point where there's a reasonable expectation of cognitive failure is just setting yourself up to have cognitive failure-induced accidents. But to be crystal clear, I am 100% okay with it being age discrimination. Because that's a b.s. category of discrimination. Banning black pilots would be abhorrent because not all pilots are black and the ones who are have it as an immutable characteristic with no fundamental effect on flying. Same for female pilots, or gay pilots. But we are all going to turn 65 if we make it that long, so it's not discrimination in the racist or sexist sense. Just like not letting kids drink or vote isn't age discrimination in the moral sense.

Good luck. This is a much harder question than what gun to carry. First you have to decide where you want to conceal it, then you have to get a good belt that you like, then you just have to try different holsters to see what feels right. I only carry appendix, so I can answer questions about that.

AI Pilot leaves Air Force for Southwest Airlines

I get the question all the time. I'm at about 15% in the right seat, and I think I'd be around 70 in the left. I easily make as much or a little more than a same seniority Captain stuck on reserve, and fly less. A line Captain will make more than me, but the difference in schedule is dramatic. I probably average 30 hours of flight time a month and get paid 90 to 120 hours. I regularly eat dinner at home, put my kids to sleep, then go fly 1 hour away and I'm back before my wife gets home from work. I'm rarely away from home more than one night in a row, and if I am it's because the trip pays a bunch and still doesn't have much flying to it (e.g. a 30 hour layover for premium pay). I fly only the days I want, no weekends or holidays unless I choose, as many vacations whenever I want. I do have the luxury of a wife who makes six figures as well, but even if she didn't it would be hard to give up on this schedule when I can just wait another five or so years to upgrade, then do it as a captain.