Lord Ratner

There is a lot of intentional, and frankly ignorant, binary comparisons being made where they are not appropriate. If someone breaks into your house and you shoot them, is that okay? If you leave a trail of $20 bills from the sidewalk into your house, then shoot the person who walks in picking them up, is that okay? In both cases you're shooting an intruder. Of course the pro-life crowd can do the exact same thing. If it's okay to kill a fetus, why isn't it okay to kill a 2-year-old? It's your kid, what's the difference? Either side can come up with an endless list of comparisons that are provocative on their surface but clearly absurd. That's all fine and well in a good faith philosophical exploration, but that's not what's happening here. There are two very different concepts being argued, the court-imposed "right" to abortion that is being overturned vs the morality of abortion, and the pro-choice side is frantically avoiding the former. I haven't yet seen a single constitutional or logically consistent argument for supporting Roe/Casey. The pro-choice crowd seems quite aware that they performed and end-run around our entire governmental system with those rulings. It's easy to look the other way when the violation favors your position. But it's bad for the country to do things that way. The pro-choice crowd is also going to have to realize at some point that they are simply not the majority of the human species. Take a quick look at the European laws and you'll see that the American system of abortion until this ruling has been wildly permissive and arguably barbaric in comparison Most people simply don't agree with third trimester abortions, and even the second term is questionable to many. I think the biggest fear of the ruling class is that this issue is actually going to die down with the overturning of Roe. Lots of money, and lots of votes in that fight. But the states are going to come to solutions that satisfy the majority of their citizens, meaning the majority of Americans are finally going to be relatively satisfied with whatever The New Normal becomes. Of course, the pro-choice crowd would do well to consider what the now-firmly-conservative supreme court would do if given the same power to create rights out of thin air that the 1973 SCOTUS felt entitled to...

You're not normally an idiot. What's going on?

😂🤣 True, but not the one we are paying to see in theaters.

Fantastic Beasts 3 was... Meh There's no central storyline and protagonist. They started (and are stuck with) the fantastic Beasts thing when what it really should be is the Dumbledore series. So now they have to shoe horn random magical animals into the story, which it suffers from. Goes to show what happens when a story is cooked up by a bunch of Hollywood writers instead of someone who's immersed in their fantasy world.

Love her podcast. Their "Friday special" covered the ruling, and they were very fair about the realities of the division and the point of having States decide.

And in fact when you put extreme limits on it, as done in Texas, the outrage fizzles pretty fast.

It's almost like the country is divided on the topic and localizing the issue allows for a more flexible and tailored solution.

And those rights all have a basis in common law. The ruling clearly shows that not to be the case with abortion. It's getting easy to tell who has and hasn't read the ruling.

Y'all are seriously struggling with the concept of representative democracy and a republic. What states are enacting laws that aren't supported by the population? How? All of these (mostly) stupid hypotheticals and comparisons, which I know you guys are smart enough to know the difference, are exactly what the legislature is supposed to decide. Miscarriage vs Abortion? Write the law. Confused about the line between preventing conception and aborting a fetus? Debate it and legislate. If you think the issue is so huge that a country-wide rule must be enacted... Guess what? There's a process for that too! If the issue was as obvious and settled as some of you are implying, we wouldn't still be fighting over it 50 years after Roe was decided. And if it's so important that it needs constitutional protection... Holy shit! There's a process for that too! Sometimes I wonder what constitution you guys pledged to defend.

I don't agree with it, but it's hardly absurd. It's always curious to me when people outright dismiss something that millions/billions of other humans believe.

Yep, you have to be pants-on-head retarded to think that conservatism or liberalism are somehow inversely connected to fascism. There are no shortage of both liberal and conservative authoritarian regimes. "Although fascist parties and movements differed significantly from one another, they had many characteristics in common, including extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy and political and cultural liberalism, a belief in natural social hierarchy and the rule of elites, and the desire to create a Volksgemeinschaft (German: “people’s community”), in which individual interests would be subordinated to the good of the nation." It takes no effort whatsoever to find the Republican Party and the Democratic Party in that definition.

In this case, if you haven't read the 50ish pages of the actual ruling, you are arguing without context. It's quite clear that many in this thread haven't read the ruling. Sure, this might have major political consequences for the Republicans, but I doubt it. Abortion is a popular issue in America precisely because it doesn't actually affect most people. Anyone notice that? The most divisive long-term issues are the ones that aren't a part of daily life? Yes, the abortion activists are going to lose their minds. And yes, some republican women are going to be upset with the ruling. But overwhelmingly those people weren't and aren't going to get an abortion. They are going to buy gas. They are going to watch their 401K and home value plummet. They do have kids in school. What people post on facebook and what they vote for are not the same. If you believe in the sanctity of the Supreme Court, Roe and Casey had to be overruled. Again, reading Scalia's ruling spells it out clearly. You want nationwide abortion? Pass a fucking law. 50 years after Roe and the country is still bitterly divided, if that's not an issue best left to the actual machinery of democracy, what is? Since Roe the progressives have dedicated the bulk of their energy to trick-fucking the government into regulating and adjudicating their agenda into reality instead of legislating it into existence. It's wrong, and as someone pointed out, when you force a bunch of unpopular stuff onto the population against their will (as exercised through voting on legislation and electing representatives to write legislation), they tend to react unpredictably and violently. Roe was an assault on our entire system, and the 50-year experiment proved that it doesn't even work. This is a good ruling. I hope to see the process work as intended once again. Relevant disclaimers: Personal view: Abortion should only be allowed for cases of rape or dire risk to the mother's health. Human life must be valued at a base level if we are to form any sort of consistent morality to abide by. Political view: Tie goes to the citizen. Abortion should be legal until either viability (as determined by the medical outcomes in the lowest 25% of the country) or through the second trimester. After that, only dire health risks. Views: Atheist, somewhere between conservative and libertarian. Here are some quotes from the ruling, but you need to read the fucking thing. The formatting is a mess. Read it. Seriously.

I'm not sure what your point here is, but the Bundy standoff in 2014 is one of the best examples of why the second amendment matters in modern history (the second being Waco). In the Bundy standoffs, BLM nonsense and executive rulemaking were challenged with the threat of violence. Had there been no guns everyone knows the Bundy's would have been rounded up in one day and the issue would have never made the spotlight. Instead. the constitutional right to have weapons offset the power of the government and introduced a limiting principal to the random rulemaking power of the BLM: are we willing to hurt people to enforce this rule. The government should always have to perform this calculus before making a rule or law. This was a case of the 2nd Amendment limiting the government without bloodshed. In the case of Waco, government overreach and zeal resulted in a horrifying loss of life. But the aftermath changed the way the government operates. This was a case of the 2nd Amendment limiting the government with bloodshed. In both cases, only the 2nd Amendment allowed for important limitations on government intervention. As far as Bundy, in 2016 he was arrested and charged, which curiously ended with this little nugget: So I'm not sure you're making the point you wish to make about Bundy. Jan 6th, however, was a mess. Inspired (though not legally incited) by Trump. If you're wondering why Republicans are so reluctant to care about it, you'd have to appreciate the years of double-standard-outrage the left has imposed on the right. A year earlier the left was literally cheering on rioters.

I'm actually skeptical. A lot of the people who give a shit about this issue live in states that are absolutely not going to change abortion access. There's also a 0% chance that abortion takes a meaningful position on the list of Americans concerns when the economy is doing poorly. Again, they didn't make abortion illegal, though some states certainly will, and the people in those states are already used to living in an abortion-hostile environment. While it may have been politically risky, it was absolutely the right thing to do legally. If you haven't taken the time to read the draft ruling, it's only about 40 to 50 pages of actual text, and Scalia did an excellent job laying out the sheer lunacy of both the Roe and Casey rulings. We need a greater return to states rights. The ideological differences in this country are growing, and you don't solve ideological differences by forcing one side to do what the other wants. That goes for both the left and the right.

Got to push back on you here. When the FED tried raising the interest rates back in 2017-2018, Trump lost his mind and was publicly excoriating Powell everyday as the stock market slid. I don't think there's a chance in hell that he would suddenly find God on sound fiscal policy, which was always a weakness for him. It is certainly possible that the inflation factor would change Trump's calculus, but we certainly have no evidence to suggest that. I also think Trump would have pushed for more stimulus, though not as much as the democrats. One of the biggest drivers of inflation in this economy was the direct payments to consumers from the government, and that part of stimulus I think Trump would have wholeheartedly endorsed. Agree on energy policy, agree on covid policy.

No. I rarely interact with them. Unlike the flight attendants, we don't need to be on the plane before they board / after they deplane. I was most surprised by how easy the entire airport process is. You almost never wait in line for security, passengers dive out of the way when they see you coming, and the cockpit door filters out most of the nonsense. Definitely something I didn't appreciate until working at a passenger carrier. But boxes are obviously much, much, much less hassle. The advantage of the pax carriers is volume of flying. More planes and more pilots and more flights means more permutations for schedule construction and manipulation. We also have dramatically less night flying. My first choice was UPS and my second choice was FedEx. I was already in training at American Airlines when UPS called, and by that time it had been clear that both my job and my wife's job we're going to take us to Dallas. That was enough for me to turn down the interviews and stick with American, because as I believed then (and know for sure now), my strategy only works well when you live in base. You really have to figure out what type of person you are, and that's going to determine what type of flying your best suited for. There are mission hackers, crew dogs, sightseers, people pleasers, authoritarians, loopholers, managers, unionists, teachers, etc. Each airline offers different opportunities for those types of people. I spend a lot of time at my airline teaching people my method (maximum ratio of pay:hours flown). It's a process and it takes time, and in many cases by the time I'm done explaining it, they are so put off from the idea that they seem pathologically compelled to explain to me why my system isn't actually that good. It's a curious response, but a lot of these guys unknowingly weight any work that isn't sitting in the cockpit as many, many times more onerous than actually flying. So while I usually only fly between 30 to 50% of what a regular line pilot flies in a month, because I spend 10 to 15 hours per month (in 1-5 minute blocks) working the various trading platforms, they view that 15 hours as much worse than the additional 50 hours they spend flying. And usually I'm making somewhere between 15-40% more pay. I mention all that to highlight the concept. Their personality is to do the job they're told to do, not spend years learning the nuances of their contract so that they can exploit it. So what type of military pilot were you? You can probably use that information as the third criteria in selecting an airline 1. Who offered you a job 2. Where can you live without commuting 3. What flying job fits your personality?

Cool, another French crew with very different opinions on which direction the plane should be moving...

It's 99% Boeing's fault. They sell the plane to foreign countries the same way Airbus does. Gear up auto pilot on. It's not the training and proficiency, it's the idiosyncracy of specific pilot groups who hand fly well beyond what is necessary that just happened to apply a software-based malfunction for a system that wasn't even taught to the pilots in a meaningful way. This wasn't just runaway trim, and there was no way prior to the crash to train for an malfunction we weren't taught about. My thoughts only.

The nose trim switch is override the MCAS, so the MCAS would begin trimming the nose down very quickly, but using the reverse direction would reverse the trim. Once you let go of the switch, it will resume trimming those down. After the fix, this system is now limited in how many times it will try to trim forward. The stab trim cutouts which is always work. However the control column trim cut out, which disables nose up trim when you push the yoke forward and disables nose down trim when you pull the yolk back, did not override the MCAS system. This is because the system was basically designed to prevent you from stalling the aircraft, so it would by necessity need to override the pilot pulling back. The system still does this after the fixes. Correct on the stab pressure locking out the trim wheel. Ironically, I didn't realize that 737 crews aren't trained on how to resolve this because the trim system is similar in the KC135, where I was taught how to deal with it. For runaway nose down trim, if you cut it out while massively out of trim, the solution is to have the pilot flying put their feet up on the console and pull back as hard as they can, with the assistance of the other pilot, and get the plane somewhere around 20° nose up. Then the pilot not flying releases the yoke, while the pilot flying allows the plane to enter a vomit comet Arc, somewhere between -1 and 1G. While the nose tracks down from 20° back to the horizon the other pilot furiously trims the plane nose up, and at the horizon both pilots get back on the yoke and pull it nose high again. Rinse and repeat until the pressure is neutralized and the wheel is once again usable.

Not true. The nose trim switch is fully functional during an mcas failure, however every time you release it it will fight you in the opposite direction (nose down). I believe anybody who regularly hand flies the 737 would instinctually use the trim switches while fighting the forward tendency of the mcas, until the other pilot realized that the trim was running away and disabled it. The big risk would be disabling the trim system after it already put in a ton of forward trim. But that is less likely for someone who instinctually trims away pressure on the yoke. The manual trim wheel does not work very well when there is a high amount of force on the yolk.

Because it was at least 99% Boeing's fault. That said, at least at American Airlines it is highly unlikely that emergency would have led to a crash. Our pilots are much more proficient at hand flying and do so for somewhere between 5000 to 25,000 ft each leg, mostly on climb out. But the system was designed in a phenomenally poor manner, with what appears to be no thought for what happens if something in that system were to break. That's what happens when you prioritize marketing over engineering, a problem within the American executive class that is not limited to Boeing.

Problem is it's now well established that the CDC withheld data from analysis. Complaining that the people are poorly informed while ensuring they remained poorly informed. There's only one reason you do that... To perpetuate a lie.

I think not. The polls are devastating, so they have to give on something. And apparently they are doubling down on homelessness, illegal immigration, trans nonsense, don't say gay, etc. So maybe they won't 🤷🏻‍♂️

We benefit from more options, not fewer. Thanks for dropping in. You'll have a tough time competing with Trident, but if you do in sure we'll see the testimonials here in a matter of weeks. Good luck to everyone, I suspect the housing market is going to look really ugly really soon.