Lord Ratner

Breadth should come from a diverse selection of experts working together. The Air Force has instead built a system that produces a homogenous selection of generalists working together. Small wonder the solutions often look the same, and function poorly.

This should be fun. Elaborate please.

Well that man might be the hero we need but don't deserve. He's hitting his stride now, and like he was saying two years ago, this is where he'll implode if he's not as strong as the impossible situation he's been called to demands.

It's a good sign, but as Rubin says, it'll get much worse before it gets better

¿puɐʇsɹǝpun oʇ noʎ ɹoɟ ɹǝᴉsɐǝ ʇᴉ ǝʞɐɯ sᴉɥʇ sǝop

First rule of sarcasm, if your audience doesn't like you, they will always interpret it literally.

Actual lol

Saw this on Imgur in a dump of random memes

These crusades always hurt the normal women the most.

I like Mattis. Good American. But anyone who wants us to stay in Syria has to go. Full stop. Best case scenario, Assad reasserts control over the entirety of Syria and it goes back to a country that stays quiet and causes few problems. It boils down to a fundamental difference in philosophy. Mattis is on the W Bush, Max Boot, Neocon view that America needs to intervene in however many countries it takes to convert the world to globalist democracy. The only problem with this philosophy is that it hasn't worked since WWII. Trump does not have the intellectual nuance to elucidate this point, but he seems to understand it somewhat instinctually. Mattis is ten times the man Trump wishes he could be, but he's wrong, and if he can't change his views on our foreign strategy, he needed to go. We need to get out of Syria before it loses the one centralized figure capable of maintaining control (Assad). That is, unless you think Iraq and Libya are models to be recreated elsewhere...

In short, yes, I think we'd have those things, or some other mixture of perks. You think the highly skilled employees at Amazon and Google are languishing away under harsh work conditions because they have no union? When your talent is free to leave to better compensating employers, you need to compensate better. Unions make it easy for many to do nothing and reap the benefits of the few that bust their ass negotiating, but it also traps us at a certain company, and delays improvements until the contract is up for negotiation. It's a logical fallacy to assume we only have the things we do because of a union. That doesn't mean there aren't benefits, but way too many things are attributed to unions in the airlines in my opinion. We're not grocery baggers. Our skill set is in high demand and limited in supply.

Exactly

Why would that be surprising? Like so many things, unions have outlived their utility. They were great in the era of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Now? Not so much. But I have no choice in the matter, all airlines are union, so I will do what I can to keep mine functional. I'm against socialism too, but I joined the military. The more you develop your beliefs, the harder it is to adhere to them in an imperfect world. Agreed though, this is a very good conversation.

What were some of his reasons?

Shack. I'm new to this industry, but I'm already amazed by how many pilots are almost pathologically against anything that improves the company efficiency and bottom line. Coupled with the common union belief that more union members = better, no matter what. Yeah, I'd like to do less work for more pay. But I'd also like to have this job for 32ish years without getting furloughed. Some of the old guys talk about the way it used to be as though it didn't have anything to do with the collapse of the entire industry. Yeah, PBS is good for the company. But it's also good for the pilots. Those two don't have to be mutually exclusive. I'd rather have my time off and QoL provided by simple contractual language rather than through conflicts and loopholes. Hopefully we get that in the upcoming negotiations. And before someone calls me anti-union (I am), I'm a volunteer in mine. It's the way it is, so I will do my best to support it. But unions are also why our 30-year captains can only look at Delta's profit sharing with a longing gaze instead of jump ship and reap the benefits. Everything has a cost.

Because while the 365 was the best example of the problem, it was not the actual problem. A better way of putting it might be: "I'm not willing to commit to an undetermined yet assuredly significant time away from my family, for a cause that is no longer obviously patriotic, led by people who are not concerned with minimizing that time away, compensated in a way that does not recognize dissimilar contributions, in an organization that prioritizes the bureaucratic process over the operational skill set. The 365 was just a bold, underlined version of that statement I think, but plenty of tanker pilots trapped in 2-on 2-off Qatari hell will tell you it still exists in smaller dose deployments

I stand by PBS being great. Most of the arguments against it are contractual, or just flat out misunderstandings and what PBS actually does. But at it's core, PBS offers the ability to build your dream schedule, so long as you have the seniority. You can't do that in a system where the lines are predetermined. Trading, dropping, and picking up trips to manipulate a schedule from line-bidding are contractual elements (that we also have under a PBS system) to account for the shortcomings of a line-based bidding process. PBS certainly does provide the company with the ability to more tightly manage manning, but the contract, rather than conflict bidding and other technicalities are where we should be securing our QOL protections. When I was getting out of the military a whole bunch of people kept telling me about PBS and how I should avoid it at all costs. Now looking back, I realize those people were at Southwest FedEx and UPS. I think United too before they switched over. They knew about as much as I did about it. Now that I'm here, all I do is fly with guys who were line bidders for 20 years and only recently switched over to PBS once American did. I would say about 75% or more of them prefer PBS. If you take the time, learn the system, and create a very nuanced standing bid, you don't even need to do anything month-to-month. Again, seniority allowing. There are many things at American that need to be fixed, probably even more than the other airlines right now. But PBS does not preclude those fixes from happening. And on a more mercenary note, PBS is generally a benefit to the new guys, because let's face it, the old guys as a group aren't too keen on learning new systems. That leaves a lot of opportunities for us to get sequences that we would not otherwise have the seniority to hold.

Agreed. Though the ability to select exact sequences doesn't exist in other products. I'd like to see 12ish layers. I'm not optimistic about coverage days getting fixed. Still better than line bidding

PBS is great. The only guys at AA who don't like it are mostly the same ones who refused to learn it.

That was great!

Hard to imagine anything is easier than the American interview

United has called people as far as 2 years out, then told them to give hiring a call at the 6 month point to schedule the interview

I don't see it happening. The people in America who care about the deficit don't care as much as the people who care about their welfare. The idealistic liberals don't believe that debt is a bad thing, and the career liberals know it gets them votes. The idealistic conservatives can't build a group with enough balls to do something, and the career conservatives are largely indistinguishable from their liberal counterparts. And I'll place money on the federal government buying out the ~$1.5 trillion in student debt sometime in the next 5ish years. There's no way for a significant portion of the millennial generation to pay off the $100k+ they took on as teenagers, and the economy cannot function if an entire generation can't buy new cars, houses, vacations, etc. Buckle up

Exactly. I've said it before: the globalism experiment, and it is very much still an experiment, yielded unanticipated results in the form of dispossessed workers almost 40 years after the experiments began. The positive results from the experiment (incredible profits) were immediate, and so vast we could afford to have the most progressive tax structure in the Western world. Now that we are seeing the other side of the coin, abandoning the idea that everyone, even those with low incomes should contribute to the government as a form of buy-in was a big mistake. We won't fix this passively. It's probably going to take a rather extreme event, much bigger than 9/11. And the slithery Democrats who created a massive dependant underclass out of minority communities will join the slithery Republicans who convinced the middle class that globalism was a slam dunk with no downsides, disappearing into the fog as everyone else is left to figure it out.