Lord Ratner

The first one is stupid. The second we lower restrictions, of course the number of cases will rise until we have herd immunity. Then what? Lockdown again? The second one is the whole point. We locked down so the medical system could beef up and prepare for the flood. They should be ready by now. In many states they absolutely are.

Uh, have you ever met a nurse? Break break Are we ready to stop pretending like this thing is a threat to healthy people? We flattened the curve, forestalled the infections long enough to get ventilators and hospital beds ready. There's no cure or vaccine coming soon, so let's just stop pretending like the world stays paused for however long that will take. We are going to open up, and more old/unhealthy people are going to die. That was never, ever going to be avoided. We didn't flatten the curve to keep people from getting sick forever, we did it to make sure there would be a bed for them when it happened. We're there now, so let's stop ****ing around. The world doesn't stop just because a disease exists. We had to adapt our medical system to this new reality, and that required social distancing. We're close enough to go back to living again.

This is my suspicion. When you read about the stories (like the choir that got hit hard), this thing is super, super, super contagious. And there's zero chance it wasn't already here in the US by December, probably November. So how the hell could it be isolated? I don't think it can. More likely, a ton of us got it and never knew, and the early deaths (Nov - Feb) simply weren't diagnosed, since everyone in the governments of the world were in denial mode. Once it really kicked off, and millions were infected, the low death rate (let's say .1%) still yields scary numbers. But it will also burn out quicker, since there are far fewer people left to be infected than we thought. The social distancing was necessary and a bit late. The CDC lying about the effectiveness of masks in a stupid attempt to stop panic buying was a huge, huge fuck up. But we are probably a lot closer to opening everything up, but keeping the six foot spacing and masks on for the summer. The next hurdle is when the economy catches up. There will be way more fallout from this than a one-month recession followed by a rally. Great opportunity to invest if you don't lose your job.

This is great news. If we find out that *way more* people are infected than we thought, then it's not as deadly, and the curve is a lot flatter than originally suggested.

There is a zero percent chance the mortality rate of this thing is 3%. We have crappy data on the actual number of deaths, and effectively no data of the number of asymptomatic/resolved cases. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2009316 13% of a semi-random sample were infected without symptoms. Extrapolate that out and NYC alone has one million asymptomatic cases, or five times what the entire state is reporting. That means at the epicenter in the US the death rate is 1% or lower. Everywhere else will be even better. This thing is going to be about as fatal as the flu (my guess), but it's much more contagious than the flu, and everyone is getting it all at once. We definitely needed to do something to mitigate the risk. But we did nothing, then we did too much. Face masks for everyone who goes out in public, six feet social distancing, including tables at restaurants, no public gathering like concerts and sporting events, and keep the high-risk people at home. That probably would have been enough, but we panicked and didn't allow the social distancing measures to take effect before locking everything down. TJ Maxx, where no one gets within 6 feet of each other usually, is closed while grocery stores, where people are all over each other, are open. We did not have to erase 3 months of wealth creation, but we did. At least it will be a great time to invest or get a mortgage, if I don't get furloughed. But worse, because the "experts" were too afraid to admit they just didn't know (death rate of 3.4%), because they felt the need to bend the truth to influence behavior ("masks don't really help, so let the health professionals have them"), we will leave this crisis with yet another reason for many people to not trust trained professionals, and to not trust science. Pity. Another one added to the list. Global warming, global cooling, acid rain, peak oil, overpopulation, nuclear holocaust, zika, Y2K, the food pyramid, satanic cults, COVID-19.

I think for now that's correct, but as the speed of these automated weapons increases, the human authority will become the primary weakness. Of course it could just end up being the next Doomsday weapons, so the only use is to destroy other AI weapons. I dunno, but whatever it's going to look like, it won't be what we're expecting. Also, just as we can't foresee how AI will change the military landscape, we can't see how AI will learn to trick other AI. That's a whole 'nother can of worms.

Of course not. But there are miles of difference between what we have now and what is possible with visible-spectrum AI. If a fighter could launch a full sized decoy with a perfectly matching IR and radar signature, it would be useless. Tricking a learning algorithm is a different beast. Besides, that already-existing tech didn't blow any minds in the Syria A/A kill.

You guys are lacking a bit of vision. I've played around a bit with some of the "AI" visual recognition stuff. If you keep up with self driving cars, you know they've got an incredible ability to identify objects in an object-saturated environment. Spoiler-alert, we've been teaching them for free. Every time you have to "prove you're a human" to get into a website or complete a form, you're actually doing free work. Moving your mouse is what proves you're not a bot. Clicking pictures of stop signs, businesses, and traffic lights is just you teaching the AI how to filter out those objects. Remember the wavy words you had to type out? Those were words in books that the scanner couldn't read because of how the spine of the book warped them. You helped Google in their digital library effort. Remember the blurry 3 and 4 digit numbers? Looked a lot like the numbers on the sides of houses and buildings didn't they? You were helping Google maps figure out the actual location of addresses that their algorithm couldn't read from the street view pictures. How hard do you think it will be for an AI to figure out what type of plane it is looking at? Will it be able to visually notice the difference between an F-35 and a flare against a nice blue and white sky? How's the F-35's visible-spectrum stealth capabilities? Cameras are cheap, and AI is getting cheaper. The new computer to power Tesla's full self driving program is a few thousand bucks. Think they can squeeze that into a missile? I just hope we have the leadership to develop it first. I'll take Elon over our military acquisition complex any day. I think he's proven us wrong enough times to listen to. Or do we think pilot training and ACSC was harder than creating a self-landing reusable rocket, industry-changing luxury electric vehicle, or online payment system for the masses?

Can any of the Delta guys comment on the proposed changes to the retirement plan? I hear rumors that it's a wealth transfer from Junior to senior, but rumors aren't usually accurate.

And you're being an idiot. Stop talking. Whatever happened, it looks like crew did well. I hope they made it.

Hard to draw a comparison to a commuter as I'm participating in a rather niche strategy, but I can give an example of something I'm able to do that a commuter could not. When we talk about pay at AA, we have something called PROJ, or credit. It includes hours flown, sick time, vacation time, training hours, time spent deadheading, etc. So when I have a 90 hour month, I am referring to credit, not actual hours flown. Now, short version, we have a contract provision that makes it so a trip must pay an average of 5:15 per day. So no matter how much you work, a two day trip must pay at least 10:30, a three day must pay at least 15:45, so on and so forth. The computer that builds trips does a good job making sure you fly at least those values, so they aren't giving you "free" money. However, when something goes wrong and they have to build a trip to fill uncovered legs (due to sick calls, weather events, broken planes, etc), they ignore the optimization aspect. So as an example, they might need to fill the 22:30 flight from DFW to OKC, which is 45 minutes. There's no way to get back home since that's the last night, so they will fly you back the next day (as a passenger). That's a two day trip, 45 minutes flying and 45 minutes deadheading, or 1:30 of work. But because of the contract, that trip must pay 10:30. I take my schedule every month and trade away the whole thing, down to zero. Then I sit around and wait for sequences like the above (though they are usually more like 2 hours out, overnight, and 2 hours back), and fly those for the month. This way I can get 50% or more of my PROJ/credit to be "soft" time that is contractual, instead of from actually flying. The catch is that I usually get the call for trips like that 3-6 hours before takeoff time, so commuting would preclude me from doing that. I actually fly less than some of our reserve pilots. and get paid more. I also choose the days off I want. I'll have the income figures totaled in March.

Simple math. I'll assume the other woman was equal to that horrible picture of the judge. 1 x Threesome{3,3} > 0 x Threesome{a,b}

Just a friendly update, our most recent vacancy bid just came out and the most Junior Group 2 (737, A32x) Captain slot awarded was hired in May of 2017. And it's not an anomaly, the seniority ranges for the various positions dropped about 1,000 (out of 15,000) across the board. In March I'll put together some info on how much I've made in the first two years with AA, and how much flying it took to get there. I probably work the system harder than most, but the year 3 plan is to make ~$185k while flying fewer than 500 hours actual stick time. Disclaimer: can't pull these numbers off as a commuter.

You're welcome

She must have gotten it from a toilet seat...

The problem is with our social conception of dating. As I said earlier in this thread: "Think about how many people you know. Then think about how many of them are good friends. Then think about how many of those are best friends. The friend you can go on a month long backpacking trip with and not get annoyed with or tired of once. Pretty rare, huh? Now add sexual compatibility to that. If you find your forever-mate after 3 months and a few tinder dates, you'd better be buying lottery tickets too..." Yet despite this incredibly difficult task, conventional wisdom and Hollywood teach us all sorts of things that are contrary to reality such as: - The helpless male who just needed the right woman to see his inner Casanova. - You have to fight for what's important? Why should the most important friendship be fought for when all my other friendships were not? - Going to counseling. If you have kids, go to counseling. If you don't, find someone who likes who you are, and you want to please without the guidance of a third party. - The entire tradition and industry behind weddings. A ceremony where the town walked 300 meters from their home to see a couple 17 year olds get married and give them the basics required to start a family because they literally have nothing. Now it's a parade where you spend a small fortune, you get some appliances you don't need in exchange for feeding mediocre food to the guests who wasted some vacation time to attend an event that, despite being indistinguishable from any other wedding and repeated thousands of times per day, stresses the newlyweds out for a year getting ready for it. It's all a sham. Go on lots of dates. If you don't leave the first date positively captivated by the person, ask yourself why you would choose that specific human to spend five or more decades with. And if you got laid, don't trust your gut.

Trump is a piece of shit. He'll never be 10% of the man Mattis is, nor will he ever know what honor or courage is like Mattis does. But Mattis, like the others, has been wrong on the Middle East, and no amount of personal character will make up for the fact they are fundamentally wrong. In some sort of strange way we have ended up with two camps. The Bush/Generals/McCain camp, where personal conduct is dignified and policy is catastrophic, and the Trump camp, where personal conduct is alarming and shameful, but the policy is somehow pretty solid. Not sure why we can't have both, but you'd have to ask the electorate [emoji2369]

Let's. Hear. The. Story.

I think Gabbard would be a slam dunk. Woman, minority, attractive, and military service. She doesn't appear to have lied to get where she is (Clinton, Warren, Harris), she isn't advocating for the most dangerous political philosophy in human history (Bernie, Warren), she doesn't act like your creepy/drunk Uncle (Biden, Booker), and she's not completely inexperienced with national politics (Buttigeg). But if she's a third party candidate, Trump wins in a landslide.

I agree with you, but decisions made in DC still have an impact. I'm looking 20 or 30 years out. Socialism never looks bad when it's implemented. But after the money runs out, and well after the geniuses who promoted it are gone, it's always a calamity. We have candidates legitimately trying to normalize the concept of wealth confiscation for the common good. Right now, just the billionaires. But do you really think the voting masses will just give up their new entitlements once they run out of billionaires to squeeze?

I think everything is way worse than we thought. If Trump wins, the nation should mourn. America deserves better. If Warren or Sanders win, the nation as we know it could die. I'm flummoxed. Trump has been giving them opportunity after opportunity to beat him next year, and each time they find a way to be more politically and philosophically toxic. And if Trump does win, which I think he might, I'm not sure how Democrats go on. RBG gets replaced by Amy Barrett, another woman loses to the (perceived) ultimate misogynist, and the country continues to fragment. It's ugly

I watched the speech. It was stupid, but exactly the type of stupid I expect from an exploited child. I doubt she even wrote it. What kind of people convince a bunch of kids they are going to die in a decade or two from something that's barely supported by the data? You know these very adults don't actually believe their own BS, because they aren't throwing themselves into the gears to save the world. She rode a boat to get to the speech; the adults all took cars and planes. That's enough to tell you who's a true believer and who's just virtue signaling.

If you want the most polished counter argument to the climate change dogma, look up the Manhattan Contrarian. The amount of manipulation to the data sets is so egregious it brings the entire theory into question. And where the hell did you guys get the idea she sailed across the Atlantic on her own? That didn't make you pause?

She's a child. Blame the adults using her.

Is there anything more basic than a stubborn old man, losing his marbles to old age, alienating his entire family and friends over the chance for some decades-younger tail?