Lord Ratner

Just stop fucking with college loans entirely. Like you said, supply and demand. If the government keeps destroying one side of the equation, we can't expect the other side to balance. If the world needs more xxxxx degrees, the market will incentivize those degrees. The problems with advanced education are entries caused by government intervention. The trend line is not good. 60% of college kids today are women. 60% of the workforce is not women. Another imbalance. If you want to make social change you have to get to the chosen minority as toddlers. If they fall behind as small kids then no amount of college loans, affirmative action, or fake degrees will make up for it. But fixing those problems would completely unravel the current social justice narrative that many people are making millions from, so don't expect it anytime soon.

Another fallacy in this line of reasoning is that all bottoms are equal. If you lack the timing and luck that are allegedly required to succeed in america, you still end up in a vastly better position than if you lack the timing or luck required in another country. And if you take one step up from the absolute bottom, you see an even bigger disparity. The second from the bottom quintile in America lead dramatically wealthier and more opportunistic lives than the second to the bottom quintile in European countries. And whereas our citizens in that quintile pay no taxes effectively, European lower and middle class workers pay quite a bit of taxes. So while this system isn't perfect when compared to a non-existent perfect system, it is thoroughly more beneficial to those at the bottom than other systems that do exist. There are only two valid comparisons. That which exists in other countries today, and that which existed in our country in the past. By both metrics, our citizens come out way ahead. Add in the opportunities for upward mobility, and the competition isn't even close. I do agree with the problems regarding college debt, housing prices, and wage stagnation. But the boom times of the 1950s did not come remotely close to the level of regulation and interference we have today. College debt can be directly traced to government backing student loans. That seemingly well-intentioned policy completely decimated a lot of millennial and gen z lives with astronomical debt as teenagers. And we effectively derailed the progress black Americans were making with a series of well-intentioned but ultimately catastrophic programs such as affirmative action. Decades of progress making up for a true evil, completely lost. And now no one on either side has a solution for the glaring racial problem that everyone sees but is uncomfortable verbalizing. The disconnect is that liberals generally see conservative resistance as some sort of lack of compassion. Incorrect. It's generally a realization that second and third order effects of seemingly innocuous (to liberals) government action can have quite devastating effects.

Agreed, except this was a completely foreseeable and realistic outcome. So when policy is developed to toss a hand grenade into the economy and the societal norms at large, a realistic possibility that a mutation will completely negate the monumental fist-fucking the policy exerts on society should be cause to perhaps view said-policy with skepticism. The vaccine is still life-saving, but saving your own life isn't (and shouldn't be) compulsory. The justifications for until-now unthinkable government intervention have been completely invalidated by Delta, but the damage done by furthering the political team sports will not be so easily erased. Let's see how long it takes the party of "follow the science" to acknowledge these studies and adapt their policies. I'm not holding my breath.

Name recognition and the aura of exclusivity. That way, when they eventually stop being a military-only bank, people will view it as a great opportunity to join an organization they weren't previously allowed into, but "always" knew about.

Which was my question 18 months ago when we decided to pause life for longer than the "two weeks to stop the spread." So we're waiting for a vaccine? What if they never make one? And if they do, what if it doesn't work? And if it does, what if the virus mutates? Seemed like shakey ground to nuke the economy on. But here we are, about to run out of government schemes to hide the effects of the past 18 months...

Wrong. 2011 vaccinated.

Again, valid until the vaccine came out. Now you can take free steps to protect yourself.

As long as smokers, obese people, and high-impact athletes are similarly excluded from coverage, you've got my vote.

That argument died when a highly effective vaccine was offered to the entire at-risk population free of charge.

Yeah, but if you don't get it more 80+ year-olds will die. Or maybe some kids? No no, some other unvaccinated people who have accepted the risk. Or the hospitals will overflow? I forget. At the end of the day I'm beginning to think this fell along predictable political lines because it's actually a fairly representative disease of conservative vs progressive ideology. Conservatives (today, in the past it was the classical liberals) accept the fallibility and irrationality of individualistic humans and construct a system that works around those constraints (e.g. capitalism, freedom of speech). Liberals disregard the clearly observable limitations of human nature in pursuit of a "perfect" solution, and willfully ignore all evidence of their strategy's failure well past the point of hopelessness (e.g. socialism, climate change, war on poverty). Same goes for the disease. Masks work (science), but mask mandates do not (human nature). Sure, a virus can't spread through a population that doesn't interact, but lockdowns are not in compliance with human nature either. And in further accordance with progressive ideology, when your plan based on centralized control fails, demonize people and pour obscene amounts of money on the problem.

What does that service cost?

All completely plausible. I will only quibble on one point, that politicians and generals are good at covering their ass. They are very good at not giving answers. But when it comes to what they do (when they think they are) behind closed doors, there I have to disagree with you. McChrystal (sp?), Patraeus, Mark Sanford, Larry Craig. Obama's "after the election" message to Putin, John Edwards... Do I need to go on? They absolutely, positively, always cover their ass. But that doesn't mean that they're always smart enough to know when they should. And honestly, at this point I think it's abundantly clear that there is a negative correlation between intelligence, competence, and vision, vs the drive to achieve the highest levels of political power.

Why would they wing someone right before administratively separating them? I'd be surprised.

Nearly everybody on this forum has used the words "if true" or some derivation, and no one said we should bypass his right to a fair trial. Your arguments don't require strawmen to be true. Further, there's no requirement to wait until the trial has been conducted to speculate, since none of us are going to be investigating him. Especially with politics. Politicians (and Milley is probably more of a politician than he is a soldier at this point) act very predictably. One thing they almost never do is allow a false story to float without an outright denial. Think Hunter Biden and his laptop. As I've said repeatedly, I don't trust Woodward as far as I can throw him. However if the journalist is famous as Bob Woodward makes a claim about a politician, and the politician doesn't issue a denial, it's time to pay close attention. There are also some fairly high profile rebukes coming out that I don't believe would occur without some behind the scenes validating. Christopher Miller is one such example. Honestly looking at Milley, a cartoon character of what a military General should be, I'm not at all surprised that he did it, and had the chutzpa to brag about it to a journalist. It seems like a lot of these "dissidents" from the conservative wing get a taste of media adulation for some "heroic" act against the great orange vulgarian and they quickly forget that they are still enemies to the left and will not be forgiven for their unacceptable wrong-think.

Remember that time Flynn communicated with a Russian government official as part of his upcoming duties and it spawned a 3 year investigation into Russian control of the executive branch? That said, I'm skeptical of anything Woodward says these days, but if anything even remotely approximating "I'll tell you if we are going to attack" was said, an example should be made. Prison would suffice.

Woodward jumped the shark a while ago. He'll bite on a juicy story from anyone if it'll give him a shadow of the high he got from Watergate.

Found General Chang

Actually there is missing data there. I'm going to use extremes to make the point, but you'll almost certainly find that it applies here. Those numbers don't show the cohorts of the overall population and vaccine status. So, simplified, 1500 deaths, 1000 vaccinated and 500 unvaccinated. But that's out of a population of 15000, where 1500 are unvaccinated and 13500 are vaccinated. 500/1500 = 33% mortality amongst the unvaccinated, 1000/13500 = 7% mortality amongst the vaccinated. And the follow-up to that would be that if the entire cohort were unvaccinated, you would have 5,000 deaths instead of 1500. Again, the percentages are simplified and exaggerated, but I believe you will find they apply to the data set.

Your analysis is about as small as the people you must be friends with. I've noticed no correlation between shit bags and vaccine status. What I have noticed on both sides are people that you would never guess of having a position suddenly having one. It's also hilarious hearing how many people are suddenly advanced medical professionals with nuanced perspective on the safety and efficacy of vaccines. Face it, you're pro vaccine because you were told to be. Just like me. Just like how you, I, and everyone else out there believes 95% of what we know because that's what we were told. It's a positive trait of the species to be able to transfer knowledge, but now that the knowledge transfer industry has accelerated to a pace we are completely unprepared for (thanks to internet and social media specifically), so all of the original gateways of information that for the most part kept everybody believing largely the same things (which were largely correct) are now defunct. And the gasoline poured on this fire were the bureaucrats and politicians. They haven't changed, they have always lied to influence our behavior, but now their lies are exposed in a way they have never experienced. And regardless of what side you're on, people respond to lies in a pretty predictable way. They stop trusting you. Sure, if the lie was something that you were already positioned to believe, then you are more inclined to let the lie slide. Think Republicans with Trump and liberals with Fauci. But the distrust spreads. So yeah, fall victim to all the human nature quirks and play directly into the hands of the politicians who are only interested in our money and our votes. If you disagree with me you're a shitbag, if you agree with me you're the enlightened. That should fix things. Disclaimer: I am fully and voluntarily vaccinated with the mRNA vaccine.

No, I'm mad because all reporting/interviews/personal interactions indicated that they have always been, and remain completely opposed to the withdrawal. So a more accurate and less patronizing rephrasing of your assessment would be: I'm mad that more generals didn't resign in protest because they didn't like the political decision that the elected president made. You know, the decision that has been the biggest foreign policy embarrassment in modern American history? That got more Americans killed in one day than in the past several years combined. Or are you aware of any flag officers who were advocating for a complete pull out?

This might be the worst post I've ever read here, only because of how insidiously dangerous this mindset is. Yeah, war is messy. But this war wasn't messy for over 2 years, and really it wasn't messy for quite a bit longer than that. This war was very very clean, to the point where you can't even really call it a war anymore. But it suddenly became very messy because of the idiotic desires of the president (and his predecessor) and the bureaucracy that enabled them to fuck this up. Under Trump a couple high-profile generals resigned because of this idiotic desire to return to isolationism. Where were the resignations under Biden? It is inconceivable that the military hierarchy did not know this was going to happen. Anyone who has been deployed there over the last two decades knew that this would happen if we left, so where are the high-profile resignations? Where are the generals falling on their swords in an attempt to prevent bloodshed? Instead we get an airstrike as a consolation prize, a wishful distraction by an administration that is fucked up so royally even an incredibly accommodating press can't help but push back on their lies. If you don't lose your job over a fuck up like this, then you are essentially advocating for a system that has no accountability.

Did the advertising on these forms just get a whole lot worse for anybody else? It seems like I have to click through five pop ups and banners now just to navigate to the next topic. I'm not sure I can browse the forums much longer like this, but I wanted to make sure it's not just my phone

This is the single biggest complication with liberal ideology (I'm not saying you are necessarily a liberal). Smart people who have a track record of making responsible choices that lead to successful outcomes look at the people around them, many of whom are in fact not nearly as smart, and despair the bad choices they make that often lead to worse outcomes. It eventually leads (with the best intentions) to restricting, discouraging, or outright banning the behavior. And without fail, the people who were meant to be helped by the ban find new and creative ways to self-destruct. That's just how humans are. For many, many people they only learn successful habits through failure. Even very smart, otherwise rational people. Taking away that failure opportunity only send them in another destructive direction, except now they are exacerbated by the rage of having some well-meaning prick tell them what the "must" do. There is a positive correlation between personal freedoms and national power and wealth. Paradoxically, short term complications lead to long term success.

Vaccines historically do not have effects that manifest more than 12 months after getting the shot. Mostly it's a matter of weeks. However identifying the pattern takes much longer, and constructing and executing the proper studies to validate the potential effects takes even longer. Years in fact. 10 years also ensures the bulk of the elected officials, appointees, and bureaucrats involved "at ground zero" are cycled out, allowing for a more dispassionate analysis of the necessity for a mandate.

At least 10 years of real-world data using voluntarily vaccinated as the sample. Then mandates must be proportional to the threat, so only mandates where they make sense. Hospitals and schools. Children when the disease actually threatens children. The severity of the disease is the true regulator of vaccination rates. If COVID-19 was killing people like SARS or MERS(10-30%), people would line up for the vaccine, just like they did in Feb/March when it came out and all the fat/old people who were most at risk went and got it. After 10 years of studying the vaccine effects, then you can make it mandatory as well as punish people on their insurance premiums if they won't get it. Disclaimer, I'm voluntarily vaccinated, so your stupid and hysterical arguments are not just ridiculous-sounding to the anti-vax crowd.