Lord Ratner

It was free (actually you get paid) and you could be a *very* unpopular cadet with leadership and still get a pilot slot. And for people like me with problems self-motivating for academics, you don't have the freedom to skip class or slack off. That's about it. Otherwise, USAFA --> Active Duty : ROTC --> Guard/Reserve.

So... It takes *a lot* longer to fill up, and you have to modify your route to accommodate EV charging? Doesn't meet the threshold for "full of shit"

There's a problem in what you just said, and it's *exactly* what the professional DC people want you to do. (But I agree with your point, obviously) There is no longer any connection between the political class and the voter, including on the right. We are now in the phase where we-the-people need to figure that out. "The left" cannot encompass the activists, journalists, professors, politicians, and voters. It's too broad, and intentionally so. Their power comes from making us hate our neighbors. If we can't talk to each other, we won't realize we have far, far, far more in common with our opposing-side neighbor/coworker/friends/etc than we do with the people we're voting for. The left love their polls, yet no polls on transgender sentiment. American voters overwhelmingly agree that men shouldn't play women's sports, and kids shouldn't take puberty blockers without parental consent. The Democrats (professionals, not voters) are trying to are trying to convince their constituency that conservatives hate transgender people and wish them misery and harm. That way the liberal voters don't have to vote for conversion surgery for five-year-olds, they can just vote "against bigotry." This is the same strategy employed in the BLM fight today.

Yikes

You haven't figured out that good dude ≠ good leader? The system is designed to select for exactly this type of action. Every single step of the process. There's only one option: quit. Your country doesn't need you right now. And when it does, these careerist clowns will be the first to go.

By a logical standard? No. By the standard we have established through other disasters in other states? Yes. The most important reason Texas (and all other states) shouldn't get disaster aid is that it diminishes the concept of and support for States rights. Rights fine with responsibilities, yet we are in an era of anti-responsibility.

The only reason Cuomo is in the news at all is because competing progressives (DeBlasio, mainly) smell blood and want his job.

Huh? Is my sarcasm detector inop or did you suddenly become an idiot?

That's all well and good, except the most regulated parts the the country still have grid failures. This is where conservatives start talking themselves into knots. Do I want my power costs to go up so I can avoid a blackout every one or two decades? No thanks. I'll spend a few hundred bucks on a generator. Obviously ERCOT fucked up. But the measure of a fuck up is not how far it is from the perfect hypothetical. It's how far it is from other functioning systems. By that measure, not much to see here. We don't need government regulation to weather proof a nuclear reactor sensor that government wouldn't have caught beforehand anyways. That sensor will never freeze again, no red tape required. The beautiful thing about government is they can blame failures (that government also failed to recognize) on a lack of government. Then they claim the addition of government, not the usual process of identifying a new problem and solving it, was what prevented a reoccurrence.

Mostly false parallels here. It is absolutely wrong that he's being criticized. He is a federal official that has *nothing* to do with the power crisis in Texas, and other than getting an emergency declared, which he did, he's useless. When exactly would you like our politicians to spend time with their families? When they're needed most, or when they are not? Ted Cruz is not the leader of Texas. If Abbott had run away to Mexico we'd have a very different conversation. Dodging a deployment? That's your parallel? Do better. No one had to be there in Ted's absence, hell the reduced power usage from his family leaving marginally *helps* the crisis. Generals telling people to quit? What on Earth does that have to do with anything? Acting like "giving the appearance of working" is somehow a virtue is *exactly* the problem I'm identifying. If you want a military analogy that actually applies, how about the generals that expect their staff to stay at the office till 8pm even when they could get some of that work done at home, with their families? How do we feel about that? Saying that "symbolism matters" implies that *all* symbolism matters. It does not. A graduation ceremony recognizes a particular accomplishment of individuals to the people who care. If I forced you to go to my cousin's graduation, would the symbolism matter to you then? We can and should expect our leaders to be where they are needed, when they are needed. We should stop pretending like our government officials are supposed to be superhuman public servants. For the people, *by* the people. Regular citizens engaging in the practice of self governance. We need to stop holding them to a higher standard than we hold ourselves to. This is just a case of people not liking the person first, and finding reasons second. It was nonsense when conservatives did it to Obama for golfing, it's nonsense now.

It's not hypocrisy if you're not doing something that you said others shouldn't be doing. California has had rolling blackouts for decades, as far back as I can remember. Texas had them once during a once in a generation storm. Not much of a parallel. Words matter. And I actually just listened to Crenshaw's podcast on the power crisis. The fact that wind turbines freeze is not the problem. The fact that they get preferential selling priority on the grid is. For all the ceaseless babbling about renewable energies and the green new deal, no one on the left seems interested in discussing exactly how renewable energy would have made the Texas power crisis better. Spoiler alert, it wouldn't.

Like I said, if we value symbolic gestures, we get symbolic leadership. If we value leaders who chose symbolic acts over their families, what hope do we have of getting politicians who place value on the American family? You don't have to give weight to a bad argument just because the opposition is making it. He does not "deserve" irrational criticism. If the only problem with what Ted did is optics, then there's no problem at all.

My civics lessons are a bit old, but what would a federal-level politician do when his state has a problem with power generation? In what universe does this fall to a Senator to deal with? If you have irrational expectations, you will get irrational politicians. If you value gestures over practicality, you will get politicians who specialize in the former and fail in the latter. Our representatives represent us, often quite a bit more accurately than we'd like to admit.

It seems insane that I have to say this, but YES. It's a fucking kid. If we don't even expect the cops to take that level of risk, then we have no standards at all.

I'm with you on Castile, for clarity. It's the perfect example of a failure of policing, and why we need better training and better funding for the cops. But it is not representative of American policing as a whole.

I have faith in the country that enslaved black people, imprisoned japanese people, and wiped out the Native Americans, and a military that played with prisoners at Abu Ghraib and killed civilians at My Lai because I'm capable of recognizing failures without using them disproportionately to characterize the entire system. The perpetual insistence in characterizing "the system" as broken when it is by far a successful and predictable system, with notable deviations, when compared to the rest of the world, is troubling. Just another case of anecdote over statistics.

I have been dropping my schedule to zero (I'm LGA based) for about 2 years now. I've been here for three. Like all airlines, the more time you are willing to invest into learning the system and the contract, the better able you are to make it work for you. I can't even count how many guys I've explained my system to, guys who claim they want to be able to drop more of their schedule, and after walking them through it they tell me it sounds like too much work. And it's true, it's certainly more work than just filling out your preferences for the month, and getting a schedule to fly. But as I said, on an okay month I fly 50 hours and get paid for 90. To do that I spend about 20 minutes on my monthly bid, and about 15 minutes a day from the 18th to the 28th working the trading systems to dump my schedule. Then let's say 10 minutes a day during the month keeping an eye out for trips to fit. I'm no mathematician, but I think I'm still ahead doing that. There's a joke here, American Airlines pilots only hate two things. The wAAy things have always been, and change. The airline is never going to make it easy for guys to have an empty schedule. In their mind that's exactly what reserve is for, and the trade-off is that you don't get to pick what you fly. Ultimately I'm glad that more people aren't willing to take the time to learn to do what I do. Most of them are much more senior than me if they were all running the same hustle, I wouldn't be able to. There's no right or wrong answer on commuting, but it is a simple discussion. You don't get to do any of the things I'm talking about as a commuter. The best you can hope for is to drop your schedule to zero at your assigned base, and pick up regular trips at the base you live closer to. That's an improvement, but it's still a grind. Often it seems like the conversation comes down to a military spouse wanting to live by his or her family after a decade or two of following the member around the world. I try to explain that they're making a choice between who they're going to see more, their family or their spouse. I guess if you're only going to do it for 11 or so years before you have to retire maybe the numbers balance out. It's often hard to convey to someone just how different the job is between commuting and not commuting. It's way more than just driving to work. It's more nights at home. Less stress. Exponentially more opportunities for easy money. Flexibility for how you balance work and family life. I was always able to conceptually understand that before I was a commuter, but after even just a year of finishing a trip and immediately transitioning into "how the hell am I going to get home" mode, hoping someone else didn't have the jump seat, hoping that a passenger wouldn't show up, watching my commuter flights get canceled due to weather, it wears on you. But anyways, yes it's possible, and no it's not a pandemic thing.

Counterpoint, there are *lots* of hustles depending on how much you are willing to learn. I dump my whole schedule before the month starts. Zero hours, zero pay. I then pick up day-of or next day trips as they come up due to sick calls, weather diverts, maintenance, etc. There are all sorts of trips that come up like this, but unlike regularly scheduled trips, these can be *very* inefficient for the company. As an example, I just grabbed a trip leaving tomorrow after dinner. One leg to Tulsa (1:07 hours, includes taxi), overnight, one leg back to DFW (1:25). That's 2:32 hours of on-the-clock time, but 10:30 hours of pay due to our minimum-pay-per-day provisions. 18 hours from the time I get to the airport to the time I'm back in my car driving home. That's all I fly (mostly). One out, overnight, one back, legs of 2:15 or less. So when I get paid for 90 hours of work per month, I only worked 30-50 of those hours. Now, you gotta live at the mega base to pull that extreme off, but my point is, you have options. And the biggest point, repeated over and over and over here, is that living in base *vastly* improves those options. On my third year at AA, during a pandemic, I made (not perfect math): $179k pay + $23k 401k = $202k That's for 300 hours of actual flying on a *non-reserve* schedule, meaning I only fly the days I want and the trips I want. Away from home ~8-9 nights a month, no holidays, no Friday/Saturday night trips (unless the wife wants to come along). The more you put into it, the more you get.

There's one part that the company never wants you to discuss. Nothing stops them from buying as many regional jets as they want and flying them under mainline. The battle between labor and the airlines is a fascinating one for sure.

If you can't see why my opinion is better than yours, we have nothing to talk about. Well... Bye. The others have already covered the errors of your post, but one more I'll add: The race riots were far from organic, and they were not born from the George Floyd murder (murder, not racist murder). They were a continuation of social unrest where protests and riots spring up everytime a black American was killed by the police (or non-black person) in circumstances that were murky enough to exploit. Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, George Floyd, just to name some big ones. Remember Hands Up Don't Shoot? Was that *blatant* fantasy an organic response as well? What's hilarious in your response is almost perfectly timed support of my allegation. Me: The false depiction of a looming apocalypse is exactly the fear mongering tactic politicians are using to generate donations and votes. The side effect is it's making us hate our neighbors You: If you don't understand how the latter [i.e. your side's social unrest] is far more dangerous to our country than the former [my side's social unrest], we don't have a lot left to talk about.

Military units dissenting, journalists being silenced, prominent figures disappearing, protestors meeting firing lines, businesses and property being seized based on political affiliation or identity group... Guys, we aren't close. ~5,000 idiots stormed the Capitol, and were only successful because the police response to rioting was dialed back as a result of the race riot optics. They (aggregate, not a couple here and there) didn't intend to kill people, because of they did there wouldn't be 5 deaths, there would be hundreds. You can even see in the video how they basically walk around the cops. Let's have some consistency. Either the race riots over the summer were worse, and much more representative of us going over the edge, or neither riot represented "barely missing." I think the latter. It's amazing to me how many people on both sides I talk to that think we're right on the edge, yet all of you are sitting on your asses doing nothing. If I truly believed that police were systemically killing black people in our society, or I believed that our Democratic processes were being stolen from us, I'd be taking to the street with my guns as well. I think perhaps the intellectual class has gotten so used to talking in riddles that we've all forgotten how to speak literally. We are literally not close to the edge. Yes, Trump incited a riot. And it was a shameful moment in our history, perhaps one of the most shameful. That doesn't mean it represented an immediate threat to the Constitution or our way of life.

Just disallow US companies from accepting crypto as payment. I don't think it'll be difficult for them to do. Making it go away? Super hard, maybe impossible. But making it too inconvenient to use for practical purposes (like it is now), much easier. It can be a store of value like gold, but if crypto replaces the USD, it'll be a blockchain that the .gov controls, can add or remove coins at will, control the mining fees, and ultimately centralize the mining operation. It's just too far of a reach for me to believe they would allow for the decentralization of money. And the "how" would be the easy part.

Agreed, but I suspect once we come even remotely close to crypto being accepted as currency, the govt will step in. There's a 0% chance the governments of the world relinquish their ability to manipulate the currency. I think any belief to the contrary requires ignoring the last 50 years of fiscal policy.

No, I sure don't. And I've never once claimed that Antifa had us close to collapse. Nor the race riots. Anyone who claims we are close to the edge for *any* reason is simply wrong. There were no tanks rolling on the capitol, no politicians arrested, no process undone. Congress was back in session in a matter of hours. Despite the fact that our political betters have convinced most of their constituencies that the other half of the country is a threat to their existence, it's never been a better time to be alive, and that applies to all demographics. The false depiction of a looming apocalypse is exactly the fear mongering tactic politicians are using to generate donations and votes. The side effect of it's making us hate our neighbors. Long term it may be a self fulfilling prophecy, but in the short term we are nowhere close to catastrophe.

I decided I was going to get into Bitcoin when it was around 12k after the crash, but didn't end up pulling the trigger before it went parabolic. I do think there's a long-term proposition for Bitcoin, analogous to gold and silver. I don't think it's ever going to replace currency because governments are never going to allow their currencies to be replaced, but you're not allowed to spend gold and silver at the grocery store either. I happen to have a fancy new graphics card, so I'm mining etherium (ether), but that's only like 10 bucks a day. I still intend to buy into crypto on a meaningful level, but I just can't make any sort of justification for either of them at their current levels. I think it's going to come down to whether or not you believe there's a market correction on the horizon. If there is, then cash is the only safe haven. Take a look at March and look at what happened to the usual places to hide your money when the stock market goes bad. All of them were down. The market is so heavily leveraged right now that when a real correction occurs, it seems like everybody is forced to sell everything in order to cover their bets. And considering how decimated both silver and crypto were during the last downturn, I would not be surprised to see a similar phenomenon. Granted I don't think it will go back down to 5,000. Also, I would seriously look at Kraken as your exchange. Much more flexibility, much better terms, and the most interesting vision of the way forward. I believe they're somewhat close to getting the first no kidding crypto bank opened up in Wyoming, which will allow for a level of flexibility and exchange between regular and cryptocurrencies that has not existed before.