JS

Good points, HOSS. When asked what has improved, my first thoughts were digital signatures on papers, uniforms, and boots. But now that you mention it there are a lot of improvements with regards to our secondary tertiary reason for existing - operations: - C-130E/H -----> C-130J - C-141 ------> C-17 - C-5A/B/C ------> C-5M - KC-135 --------> Block 40 - NVG ops standard for C-130 crews and a bunch of C-17 crews And perhaps the biggest inpromement on the ops side of the house during the above changes: - Fewer navs and FEs

So I guess this thread is the "does the PT test suck or not." Anyway, another two improvements that I have seen in my years here: - Utility uniforms that don't have to be pressed, ironed, and starched. - Boots that don't have to be shined.

Serious tip.

I used to have an article that I used for a paper that discussed this. I think it was from the Economist, 2005 timeframe, but I can't find it. Anyway, the article went through, in great detail, how intertwined the economies of pre-WWII Germany and Japan were with the rest of Europe and the US. It was really a stunning article that I had no idea about in all my WWII readings. I can't recall the exact numbers, because they were in 1930s millions, but the overall percentage of Germany and Japan's economy that was based on international trade with the US and Western Europe was staggering pre-WWII. In my list of 10 reasons why China does not want war with the US, the intertwined economies would probably rank 10th. Still a factor, but definitely overshadowed by regime survival, quest for resources, power, and respect, bravado, cultural clashes and bad history with Japan, etc.

Hmmm. Read my post again, and I addressed most of those issues except for the fact that CAPM has lost some luster after the 2008 fall, mainly because risk was underestimated and misunderstood, just like Taleb specifically spelled out in The Black Swan (required reading for those who post in this thread, by the way). Those 15 columns were not columns for the equities (I think we had 30 equities), but they were for the various parameters we were tracking and calculating. Some of that math going on in the background between the 15 columns I mentioned was covariance. And when I mentioned diversifying among different industries, I believe we had come columns of math in the spreadsheet looking at Standard Industry Codes (SIC), and how each digit of the SIC code represented a certain amount of specificity within an industry. The farther apart the SIC digits were, the more different the industries were. That being said, most people have no idea what diversification across industry sectors is all about. For example, is a portfolio with an oil stock, retail stock, financial stock, and manufacturing stock more diverse than a portfolio with a technology stock, a healthcare stock, a defense stock, and a mining stock???? There is a lot of tricky math and analysis that goes into determining how different (or how similar) these industries are. People will buy stocks in what may seem like diverse industries - retail, technology, and oil for example - only to find out that all three move in the same direction as the market. In other words, as the economy gets better, people shop more, buy more ipads, and burn more gas. So are those three industries really diverse? The above professor I mentioned wrote his dissertation on how SIC codes interact with each in terms of how diverse/similar industries are from one another, and how that affects mergers and acquisitions (the more similar the SIC codes were, the better the merger did). Again, knowing what I know has time and again reinforced the notion of how much I don't know about what is going on with a typical investment portfolio in terms of the math of risk, diversification, returns, fundamentals, etc. At least I can speak the language and understand the basics, but I still leave my investing to my mutual fund managers and ETF managers.

- Digital pubs. - Personal webmail, facebook, and youtube at work, so we can keep up with our civilian peers in the low productivity at work category. On the Reserve side, since I got in about 10 years ago: - No more special cards limiting guard/reserve use of the commissary to once a month or whatever, and no more ID cards that even say reserve or guard on it, so we can get all the same military discounts. Ha. - Tricare Reserve Select - Reduced Retirement Program

Sorry to clog up the thread, but one more thought on this. I recently read an article about stocks that had high prices (like Berkshire Hathaway). The thinking of keeping those stock prices high is to prevent day-traders, amateurs, and greedy/corrupt hedge fund managers from doing their high-speed micro trading to take advantage of slithers of variance in the stock price. In other words, higher stock prices typically encourage people to hold on to the stock for the long run, hence why Warren Buffet has ensured that his stock never split and that only serious buy and hold investors can own it. This is the philosophy he believes in - to have investors, well, invest in his company to help it grow, as opposed to a bunch of amateur buying and dumping low cost stocks. That being said, all other things (ratios, metrics, etc) being equal, a higher priced equity might actually be a better investment for the long run due to the lower volume of trading (due to it's higher price) and the above Warren Buffet strategy. After all, if diversity was based on owning a higher quantity of different stocks at a lower price, wouldn't a portfolio of penny stocks be very well diversified? Usually the opposite is true. Just another thing to think about.

And remember, any time something seems to work for you, it might be more luck than skill. Most individuals don't have the knowledge to calculate and mitigate their portfolio risk. I recommend The Black Swan, or any of Taleb's other books, like Fooled by Randomness, in order to really try and wrap your mind around risk and how we not only usually grossly and dangerously underestimate it, but how it affects things like individual investments. This is one of those few books that literally changed the way I view the world - everything from stocks all the way to war and football game outcomes. Things are not what they seem, and beware of the "hundred year storm" every 15 years. I remember in an MBA class on investements, we worked for about half of the semester building a very detailed and robust Excel file with a portfolio of about 30 stocks. I can't remember off hand, but there were like 15 or more columns in the spreadsheet with all kinds math going on to demonstrate how overall risk and portfolio risk works. The takeaway was something along the lines of this: if you have 3 low risk (beta = .5 for example) stocks and 3 high risk (beta = 2, for example) stocks, your overall portfolio risk is higher than if you have 15 low risk and 15 high risk stocks of the same .5 Beta and 2 Beta mix. Something to do with more data points modelling the broader market or something. Why do you think that all professional mutual funds have dozens of holdings? Edit: and don't forget to diversify among different industries as well. Along those lines, my strategy, knowing what I know (MBA, short stint as a financial advisor with all the FINRA tests under my belt), my strategy is to invest my money in a fund that matches my risk tolerance. I may think I know everything, but I know I don't know as much as a dude who does this shit all day long. Fund managers should be taking into account the concepts that I have mentioned (beta, P/E, ratios), and more. Just my strategy.

This is good knowledge, generally speaking, most pros consider a PE of 10 as "cheap," versus a PE of 25+ being expensive. Of course, there are companies with high PEs that are still solid and vice versa. But stock price, market cap, gross revenues, and earnings do not have much to do with whether or not a stock is a "cheap" to buy or not.

Very true. Not true. Diversity is not based on having an equal amount of shares of different stocks. Diversity is based on diversifying risk, and has to do with things like Beta, Alpha, risk-free return, modern portfolio theory, and all the other standard metrics like P/E, EPS, etc. That's why this individual investing stuff is not for the faint of heart of for amateurs. If you were to actually have a professional mathematically crunch the numbers of your portfolio and come up with an overall Beta or other metric for risk, you will likely have much less diversification than you think by doing it on your own.

Does it still suck in every aspect, just like it did years ago when I went? My favorite memories are probably all of the lining up at the dining hall to try and hit your TOT +/- like 1 minute, or whatever it was. And getting smoked by instructors all along the walk through the quad and while trying to eat. Good thing I was a quick eater, but one dude on my flight was not, and he literally lost like 10 pounds in the first two weeks (due to some of the exercise too, I am sure, but he never came close to finishing a meal).

Nah, I wouldn't say that 90% of douches - there are plenty of good dude, big picture EPs. But I would say, maybe one out of every four is looking at things in the wrong way. As a potential next in line EP, I had a conversation a while back with our chief of stan-eval, who is a good friend. I told him that there was pretty much no way I was going to Q3 someone, or even downgrade them unless it was to begin the long process to get someone thrown out. Stupid mistakes can be debriefed without marring up the FEFs, and a checkride is meant to be a binary 1 or 0 that shows whether or not you can safely fly or not. There's a reason why checkrides are not graded on a 1-100 scale, but it seems like guys in my community like to nitpick stupid shit for downgrades and seem to go out of their way to find reasons to Q3 people. And that's different from the commander directed Q3s we were talking about. I think that was covered in another thread called "stan-eval shenanigans" here. Needless to say, arguing with the chief of stan eval is like, well, arguing with your evaluator. So, for the time being, my name went to the bottom of the list of potential EPs, which is underneath the garbage can in the stan-eval office. Ha.

Well at least you finally saw the light and crossed over from the dark side. Question - is it a big deal to get an AFCM instead of the MSM while on active duty? It seems like most Reserve guys in my squadron not only don't know what these medals are and what their pecking order is, but they also don't give a shit. While doing A&D, I would try to give away AFCMs and MSMs like candy, and half of the time the members were oblivious to what they even were. Unless they were coming up for their majors or LtCol board, then they needed a "current" medal in the past year or so - those are the only two times a medal matters. We just seem to have much more important things to worry about in the Guard and Reserve, like how many double pay days we could log and how much we were going to berate out active duty counterparts for stupid shit like "leave coordination" paperwork as we all were walking out the door for an undetermined amount of "leave." Just catching up with some old posts on this thread, but these lines very accurately describe my AMC community from what I have seen. For the most part, we relentlessly make fun of "WIC-ens" as freaks or overachievers who get little or no respect, while Evaluators seem to be more god-like and the pinnacle for a career. An old wise evaluator once told me that the power to Q3 as an evaluator is like an axe that you should bury in the back yard in some odd place where you have to write down the directions for how to find the axe again. This way if you ever need it, you not only have to find and read the directions, but you have to work hard to dig it up and use it. He's the best EP I have ever known in my decade plus in the AF. Then there are the other countless douche EPs out there who walk up and down the hallway with their axe swinging from their arms, and walk into every daily flight by tapping on the briefing room door with their axe, like a jailhouse guard rattles his billy club on the metal bars of each cell block. I have even heard countless doucher EPs jokingly (sort of) say about how they would Q3 guys if they didn't allow them to fly a leg or didn't stay in such and such's favorite hotel on a TDY. IMO, one shouldn't even joke about using the axe like that. But that is definitely the mindset of the EP and Q3 in my neck of the woods.

Just wanted to bump this recommendation up because I finally read it, after buying it on amazon about two years ago. Very good book - B-52s, Linebacker II, and SAC. Enough said again.

Another great thing about the tweet. No back seat, and only 1 G meter (and only 1 of a lot of critical things).

Ha ha. As long as you pressed reset on that old school G-meter, nothing from a student solo could be "downloaded." Great little jet. Kind of makes you scratch your head when you hear about kids getting hooked on solo rides several hours after landing in the T-6 or the new T-38. I'm not saying I ever pulled more than 6.67 Gs and didn't report it, I just figured it would avoid any questions or funny looks after having the G-meter stuck at 6 Gs from a pattern only sortie.

I don't think I follow you. First off, the funding fee is 2.15% for active duty, or 2.4% for reserve/guard right now. So on a $220K loan, that is about $5K if you average the active duty and guard/reserve rates. And let's just keep it straight - that is money that is purely pissed away, as a penalty for not having 20% equity, similar to PMI. It doesn't build you equity or anything like that, nor is it part of the regular closing costs, nor is it an "investment;" it's the cost of doing business this way. I also agree with your 5-year outlook on the numbers being much more realistic than a 30-year outlook. Anytime a slimy mortgage salesman starts talking about the 10s or 100s of thousands you are going to save over the 30-year life of the loan, you know they are trying to deceive you with unrealistically large numbers. But back to the numbers. I think Smokin's point was that if he borrowed at 3% and got 6% return in the market, he would be better off in the long run and in the short run after his break-even point of recouping the funding fee. Not to mention that his 3% loan is actually cheaper than 3% when you take into account the tax breaks. His assumption is he would make 6-8% in the stock market, which is the historical average. Not sure why you ran the numbers only making 3.25% return on a cash investment. With regards to the 20% down-payment on your $220K loan example, with the 100% financing option: 3% interest paid on the $44K potential down payment that you didn't make, after 5 years = approximately $7K 6% market return on the $44K potential down payment that you didn't make, after 5 years = approximately $15K So if you finance 100% with the VA loan and get 6% returns in the market over 5 years, your net return is about $8K, which will cost you the $5K in VA funding fees to take this route. So I guess you can say that your "net, net" return in this example is really only about $3K, after you take into account the funding fees. I think this is what smokin meant when he said he would be "happy to pay a few thousand extra for the above math."

True. One can't follow Ramsey blindly - he is for the masses and for those who are weak minded, bad at math,and in that 50% of the crowd that are of below average intelligence. If you look at the past posts on the investment thread, I was one of the main guys bashing him because of his bad math. But then I actually listened to a few of his podcasts. I do cringe when he tells folks to pay off that 1% car loan or that 3% student loan instead of investing the extra cash at market rates, I have found that his overall point is to live beneath your means. He also repeatedly admits that his math is not optimal, but "studies have shown" that when you don't have debt, or focus on lowering your standard of living, you psychologically do better financially and have a higher standard of living. In other words, I would like to think I have more discipline than the average Joe and took out my 30 year loan with the lower payment so I could invest the rest, versus taking out a 15-year loan like he prescribes. The math is in my favor, but human nature and psychology is in his favor. He doesn't harp on the numbers too much, but in all of his conversations he reverts back to living beneath your means to get a net positive worth - drive an older car, don't eat out or go on vacation until the student loans are paid off, etc. But he does actually cut a lot of slack with regards to home loans, because he knows they are generally speaking an investment that will go up in value. Along those lines - 1) You are right about borrowing at 3.5% and putting it in the market to make historically more - around 6-8%. That's where I disagree with Ramsey, but I will say that the money that I am saving from my smaller mortgage payment that is supposed to be invested tends to go toward "emergencies," which Ramsey addresses as things that can make your dream of home ownership turn into a nightmare. Again, you are right with this math, but just think about the average idiot who measures affordability by the size of the monthly payment instead of the actual cost of borrowing and paying interest over the lifetime of that loan. Don't forget to take into account the other costs of home ownership too. 2) You have to take into account how much money it is going to cost you to save that much money and then make more in the stock market. There is a breakeven point, and as long as you calculated it, the funding fees versus the spread between market returns and the cost of your loan should make you money in the end. Again, not for the faint of heart, for those bad at math, or for those of us who have lived through multiple "once in a century" crises where home prices don't rise and the stock market does not give you 6-8% in the long run. 3. The two mortgages I did, the VA was higher. It's lower than conventional now, but that is not really enough data points to come to a firm conclusion. One more thing, by having 100% debt in the house, your margin for error is small in the case that the home value drops at all. If that happens, then you have to cough up cash in order to get out of the house when you sell. If you really want to have a good discussion, look into why Ramsey thinks car loans are bad - because cars are consumable, will always go down in value, and are never an "investment." He changed the way I look at car loans.

True. Good point. But it will allow you to save up for the 20% equity faster, and ultimately get rid of the penalties of paying PMI (conventional) or the higher rate (FHA). But, Ramsey would strongly prescribe that you should simply rent until you had enough cash to put down the 20% before taking out any of the major three types of loans. We all know that military people are of a higher quality people than everyone else , but that does not make us exempt from the laws of math and the stupidity of excessive debt that most American's get into.

Dave Ramsey had a short piece on VA loans not that long ago. He rates them as #3 out of the three types - conventional, FHA, and then VA, in that order. His logic was (and I actually agree with him here) is that: 1. They are setting you up to do something you should not do - putting down no down payment and thus taking on 20% more debt than you would if you had a conventional on a home that was 20% less expensive. More debt is bad, according to Dave. And in this case, I sort of agree with him, because you will be paying interest on that extra 20% of debt for 30 years. 2. They charge very high origination fees and closing costs - by far the highest of the three major types of loan. 3. They don't offer better rates. Although I have criticized him on here in the past, I think his main point in his anti-debt rants are that we should strive to live beneath our means. He hates the VA loan because it enables us to live at, or slightly beyond our means with regards to the amount of home that we can afford to consume. I am not casting stones - I took out a loan with 100% equity on my first home (traditional, with a higher rate to compensate for the lack of 20% down), but when I refinanced, I pulled a ton of money out of savings to get my 20% equity and thus avoid PMI, higher rates, VA origination fees, or whatever other ways they want to hide the penalty fees of not having 20% down. Remember - don't judge a home loan by the monthly payment or by whether or not the bank is doing you a "favor" by rolling the closing costs into the loan for you. Those are still real costs - thousands of dollars more, in the case of the VA loan origination fees - that you have to pay back, dollar for dollar (plus interest). So it is actually a great disservice to roll the extra fees and closing costs into the loan/monthly payment, because you wind up paying even more at the end. My strategy was to get the 20% down and then shop hard for the lowest closing costs. Monthly payment was low on my list of priorities because I know it is just a manipulation tool for them to try and get you to live beyond your means and buy more house than you can afford.

Or you could do a manday or double TP at home for the same pay. Touch choice on that one.

That's my plan if, God forbid, I am ever in this type of shitty situation and get royally screwed by the institution.

I assume you meant "pinging." If it was as easy as simple stall recognition, I guess we could just erase this whole thread - nothing more to see here and nothing to learn from. Well, I will try and briefly summarize why we are "pinging," based on what I read in those two open source articles from Time and the AF Times: 1. MC-12 dudes are trained on a plane that is physically and aerodynamically different than the MC-12, and stall training is sub-par, to say the least. 2. Most MC-12 dudes, like these MC-12 dudes, are usually very low time guys in the MC-12 due to the quick turnover in the community thanks to the assignment system, or whatever. 3. A lot of the MC-12 guys have tons of jet time, and little or no turboprop time - kind of like these guys. Stalls in a jet are different from stalls in a prop. 4. The mission of this plane is to essentially be in a constant turn for hours at a time. Sometimes they even have to climb while in such a turn. Some times the pilots even have to add max power, without proper training or experience as to the effects that P-factor can have in the direction that the plane is already turning; usually this is the first time guys are experiencing this type of situation - especially former turbojet guys. 5. There is a trend of several MC-12 incidents related to this deadly mix of factors - including non-fatal ones like where they pulled the plane out of like a 10G dive only a few hundred feet above the deck, causing significant damage to the airframe. 6. Dudes have left for MC-12 deployments and competed their tours without ever having seen any safety reports, or having any discussions on these trends or incidents . No matter whose is at fault for the lack of information dissemination - the individual pilots, the local safety weenies, the Chief of Safety, the USAF Safety Center, nsplayr, Vertigo, or Obama or whoever - it is a major fucking FAIL that this information is not being disseminated efficiently when these incidents should be pretty easily preventable. 7. People are dying and millions of dollars worth of aircraft are being destroyed. So, that's why I am pinging.

Yeah, that's odd. I read it this morning in the Defense News Early Bird brief email thingy, and the link from that email brought me to the article without asking for that login information. Now when I click on the same link in the same email, it brings me to the login screen asking for a subscription to AF Times, which I don't have either. Oh, well, for anyone with a subscription to AF Times, it was a good article with lots of good details on the crash.

A pretty good summary of the incident put out by the Air Force Safety Center Times: https://www.airforcetimes.com/article/20131106/NEWS/311060014/Tragedy-strikes-twice