jazzdude

Congress changed the rules/law. The AF is just complying with the law. Congress is probably fed up with embarrassments in the senior ranks, and thinks making adverse information available to boards will fix that. Funny thing is, most of those wayward senior leaders likely never had any formal documentation on poor behavior at any point in their careers, so it's moot.

My rough math when I was making the choice between the 2 showed BRS ahead for the first 7 years of retirement, then falling behind the legacy system for the rest of time, based on 5% annual return from the market (very conservative return). The big takeaway was I also need outside investments, since just legacy high 3 or BRS (at the minimum matching) just provides a comfortable retirement, but isn't going to buy toys and travel.

The board is holding onto power, and doing the very thing they accuse white men of doing. How ironic. Then again, being a crappy person cuts across racial, gender, and social lines, so I guess I'm not too surprised. I agree with you-so much of racial issues are local community issues, and that's where the change/progress needs to be made.

Does that 401k matching also include a defined benefit and retirement healthcare in the retirement benefits package? It's about the whole retirement package, not just one aspect. There are great retirement plans out there in the civilian world (UPS seems to have a great one with both 401k contributions and pension) GI bill transfer to a kid is also valuable; essentially puts one kid fully through college with very little to no debt without the need for scholarships or grants. Though I suppose if you have a kid before you have 6 years in service, you'll have the transfer commitment complete when your UPT commitment expires. If you have your first kid later in life, well, you can't transfer the benefit without incurring some extra commitment of you want the transfer benefit. Sure, BRS sucks compared to high-3 IF you make it to 20 and retire. BRS is fine if you're a going enlisted person only doing one enlistment compared to the old system. If you're somewhere between, then you at least get a small retirement benefit (I'd bet smaller than most big businesses will match) to keep the pension as a carrot for retention.

Not a test pilot, but here's an option for you: AFIT has a distance learning systems engineering master's degree, and one of the specialty tracks is test and evaluation. There's also a non thesis option as well. On the plus side, AFIT doesn't charge tuition anymore for AD for their distance learning courses, so you'll only need to pay for textbooks. But you'll need to take the GRE to apply to AFIT (I think TA still covers the GRE). ETA: doing the AFIT degree doesn't incur any ADSC. I thought the program was pretty good. They also have certificate programs as well, which are basically just the specialization classes from the masters. https://www.afit.edu/ AFIT-DL programs https://www.afit.edu/DL/page.cfm?page=622

You have to do both. AF needs to do exit interviews of a pilots leaving (all would be great), and take that information to build a model. And then continue to do exit interviews to assess the model and correct it if needed. Or even better, survey why pilots leave AND why they stay (maybe every year when you your flight records review, or every other year, or at "critical" points in your career) You need a model, because it's difficult to sort through reams of responses to figure out what's wrong. And even if you can extract data from it, it's frigidly to determine what factors are correlations versus causal. And without a model, it gets near impossible to see how two or more factors interact to create new correlations or causal interacting factors. Problem is that the AF isn't really doing the surveys, so their model may not be accurate. Or maybe it is reasonably accurate, but they don't take action for one reason or another (limited budget, statutory requirements, or don't care). Maybe the retention model shows that given the limits on the AF, they can't fix pilot retention and can only slow the bleeding, and the only viable solution is to increase pilot production and accept the situation for the next 10 years.

Not all polls are scientific/rigorous or representative of the population at large. But there are many statistical and experiment design techniques to increase how well a poll represents the population. And they are based on probabilities, and reality can fall at the extremes of those fancy bell curves. Election polls build a model for the election results itself. But the model is only as good as the data put into it (garbage in, garbage out), and you have to keep in mind rule #1 of modeling: all models are wrong, but some are useful. The trick is making sure the poll is useful. Many exit polls really are just entertainment, they aren't rigorous polls. The other thing that gets people in trouble is using a descriptive model to do predictions-they are designed differently, and models tend to break down quickly when you extrapolate if they weren't designed to do that. And finally, yes, in a sense you're right: the only way to find the truth regarding an issue in a population is to ask every person, and no statistical model is the "truth". That's a fact. And it's the underlying principle behind a direct democracy. But it's very hard to do that in a realistic or timely manner, and an exact truth may not be needed when an approximate truth is acceptable or sufficient. But even our government is not set up like that-it's too difficult to scale up direct votes on a national level. So we select representatives to do most of our voting for us. Our representatives are nothing but a small sample of our population, selected in a particular way (geographical representation), and in theory they represent the opinions of the population at large. So a democratic republic attempts to model the "will of the people" through electing a democratically selected sample of the population to decide issues. That's why things like gerrymandering are so dangerous, it games the model to produce a biased outcome. It's also why political parties are so dangerous, as the representatives may decide (and increasingly seem to) represent their party's interests instead of their constituency (which is defined geographically, not politically).

Well, we're about to find out if Biden believes in an events based timeline, or a campaign promise schedule based timeline. I think any loss of support from teachers unions will be more than made up from elsewhere. Plus, it's not like the Republicans will treat the teachers unions any better after the next election anyways.

Loose/open vs tight/closed cultures goes the other way than what you're thinking. You could have a strong sense of self worth and be in a tight culture/closed society; those aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. Here's a couple pretty decent articles on it: https://behavioralscientist.org/tight-and-loose-cultures-a-conversation-with-michele-gelfand/ https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/loose-vs-tight-societies A tight cultures tends to resist change. It has stronger ("tighter") social norms that it holds to be important, and punished those who break those rules. Life's good if you buy into the cultural norms, but sucks if you have different views, even if they are logical or could be justified. The benefit though is you have a strong social connection and baseline, so it's very easy to identify threats to your culture and respond to those threats quickly (the society already has buy in to respond, whether it's tacit or overt approval). Some examples of tight cultures would be Pakistan, China, and Japan. A loose culture tends to tolerate or accept change. It has weaker ("looser") social norms, and it's more tolerant of social rules being broken. So generally, the culture is more accepting of outside ideas. Great for creativity, invention, and innovation. But since there's less consensus on right and wrong, it makes it very hard for that society to identify threats to the society. Examples of loose cultures include the US, Australia, and NZ. That's not to say one is "better" than the other, but there's trades that are made within a society. Think of it as multiple sliding scales on different issues. Plus, open societies/loose cultures can respond to threats quickly. For example, US response to 9/11 was pretty much instantly unifying with a fairly rapid response.

I agree it wasn't a "barely missed," but it shows some significant assumptions in our elections that need to be (or continue to be) addressed. We were arguably much closer to a "bad" election back in 2000 with the Florida recounts. Though some good came out of that, with an emphasis on better voting systems that helped prevent a repeat of that on a potential larger scale in 2020. Could you imagine the debate on hanging chads in 2020 instead of having electronic and paper records of votes? What Trump attempted to do was attack elections in key states, and hope something would stick. If a few stuck, it opens up the (unlikely) chance even more elections are bad, and casts doubt on the election. Fortunately, his campaign didn't have a lot of funding to sustain a legal fight (don't have to win, but just have to keep it in court), and the places they challenged had improved their voting systems to fend off spurious lawsuits. Hell, a politician doesn't even have to win in court; they just have to fuel enough discontent and doubt in their base for them to take action, maybe drastically. Trump arguably inspired (or convinced, depending on your political leaning) a bunch of people to storm the Capitol to stop the election certification. Fortunately, those people were just idiots and loosely organized, and didn't appear to really be executing a coup. It could've been a lot worse had there been a concerted effort to attack senators or representatives. So yeah, we're not at the precipice of catastrophe, but that doesn't mean everything is okay. Many of the Trump claims were refuted due to investments in improved voting technologies, but that's not a static fight. A bunch of fired up citizens stormed the Capitol when Congress was in session and had control of the building, if only for a short while. We need to continue to improve our election security, to include ballots (paper, electronic, absentee), voter registration, voter verification, and election certification and certification. There's also some ugliness in our system that needs to be addressed, such as gerrymandering. ("Both parties do it" is an insufficient/inadequate answer) We also need to address the "what if" of having a bad election, since right now it looks like the assumption is "it's not likely so we don't have a rule for it." Not an immediately pressing issue, but an important one. We already added one amendment to handle Presidential succession, so I don't think it's far fetched to address what happens with a invalid election (not just to address political shenanigans, but also for natural or man made disasters on election day).

It's death by a thousand paper cuts. So long as China or Russia doesn't do anything egregious that directly impacts the US, they can move slowly towards their end goals. Just like Germany did just prior to WW2 before they invaded Poland. Even then, we didn't get involved in directly WW2 until after Pearl Harbor. We don't have a strong response to them because we don't have the national will to do so, which stems from how our society is set up. Loose vs tight cultures is an interesting theory that can explain some of our struggles. Loose cultures tend to accept or tolerate more deviations from social norms. The benefit of this is it fosters and accelerates creativity and invention (leading to economic and standard of life improvements), but the downside is it makes it harder to recognize and unite against threats to that society. (This is also IMHO one of the underlying/fundamental conflicts between conservatism and liberalism within US politics) As crappy as this is going to sound: in addition to forward capability and rapid initial responses, forward bases/troops provide justification for US involvement if they are attacked, or worse, lost. For example, I don't think we'd really do anything militarily if China invaded Taiwan (aside from upping posture within PACOM), except strongly protest the action in media and at the UN, and economic sanctions. However, if there was a USN vessel sunk in the crossfire, it'd likely be used as a rallying point for direct military intervention (ala Gulf of Tonkin).

Man, the things I wish LT me knew at the time... Though the Florida panhandle is on the potential retirement locations list for when I get there (and high up on my assignment dream sheet), so hopefully the pandemic doesn't kill that tradition.

Looks like NV is trying to foster innovation in planned communities, namely, smart cities leveraging technology to improve life. Google tried a similar experiment that ultimately was cancelled: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/05/13/9-things-we-lost-when-google-canceled-its-smart-cities-project-in-toronto/?sh=7aea8c3e35bf It's an interesting concept, but there's a lot of room for things to go wrong. Probably the worst assumptions are that tech companies understand people and governance. The concept in if itself isn't bad. But allowing the developer to also act as the local government is dangerous. It'd be like a bad HOA suddenly getting direct legal power to act as a government

Only went there for lunch when I was in the area... Too far of a hike from Whiting, and if you're going to make the drive in a Friday night as an LT, might as well go elsewhere in town. Sounds like I missed out. Maybe next assignment...

Used to be pretty standard at o-clubs, best parking spot was the 2LT spot. Though it wasn't entirely free to park there...

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/base-intruder-makes-aboard-military-aircraft-unit-charge/story?id=75713268 I thought the red line on the ramp was impenetrable...#yolo

I took the implied meaning as an election whose results were declared invalid. That outcome would be by far much worse than a "Trump win." Dems and many on the left seem to think this would've been the worst election outcome, but it's not; an election being tampered with is the worst outcome, regardless of who won. I don't think we have any real precedence on what to do if the presidential election was declared invalid, especially if it was declared invalid late (like in December or January, since lawsuits take time). Does the incumbent stay in power? Do they (president and VP) step down while the election is redone, and have the speaker of the house fill in until it's certified? Though the latter doesn't make sense either because they would've also been on the same ballot as a representative, so would also be declared invalid. So it wipes out the House as well. I guess you'd still have 2/3 of the Senate. And leading up to that, how would communities redo the election to avoid being tampered with a second time in a relevant time period? How does mail in or absentee voting work if you're trying to redo the election quickly? Or do military members and dependents overseas just lose their right to vote for an election? That can also sway a redo election. Finally, it would destroy our moral credibility in international politics if we can't hold open and fair elections, especially when we have held ourselves up as the champions of democracy. So we'd also lose at least some of our ability to influence other nations based on our ideology. I'm sure China or Russia would be more than happy to use our failed election to increase their influence in the world.

What if, in my example, the citizens of south Dakota doesn't want their backyard to be used for nuclear waste storage? Or to have consideration (funding) for maintaining the site? What if they have concerns about safety, or believe the waste site hurts their economy? Since they're taking waste from other states, should they get extra funding as a "thank you" to fund initiatives for their citizens? In a direct democracy, their voice could be effectively silenced by the majority a thousand miles away, and that majority wouldn't even have to debate any of the concerns-just up straight skip to the vote because the votes would be there. National policy (set by executive branch) is one thing. States are free to do their own thing. Of course, the federal government (executive) can encourage cooperation through slowing funding. But if other states are concerned about individual states doing things that affect them, it needs to be more than just policy. It needs to be law. And since multiple states could be affected, it should be handled at the federal level. So in your second example, I'd agree with you. Though the issue you point out has implications outside the state. Pollution affects others, and energy resources are critical to national security, not to mention our economy. So it makes sense to have laws and policy at the national level. We also do it for other things we value as a nation-look at our national parks program and federally protected wildlife areas, or our airspace. Another good example is minimum wage. There's a federal standard, but some states have set a higher minimum wage, and some counties or cities even above that. As long as the state or local governments don't break federal laws, they can make it more restrictive. If someone believes in raising the minimum wage, they should be lobbying at all levels. And the local level would likely be the most responsive, as we see with minimum wage. I agree with that smart, nationalized decisions can be good. But we are a very (physically) large and diverse nation, so things that work in the New York may not work in Oklahoma or Oregon or. This makes it challenging to take a one size fits all approach, because that leaves a lot of people unhappy. Putting power in states lets power reside much closer to the local area, and be more responsive for the residents.

Nothing really gets stone walled-Texas can enact whatever programs it wants for Texans pretty much on its own if it was important enough to them. And Texas has the resources to do so if it wanted to. States don't have to wait for federal funding or laws, especially the bigger states whose economies rival other nations. For example, if universal healthcare was so important to Californians, they could implement it without federal funding. It would likely raise their state taxes, but there's nothing federally that bans them from implementing it. If it's a good idea, other states will do so, and maybe eventually other states will get on board and vote at the national level. And California has done things like that in the past (like for car emissions standards). Smaller states will have trouble doing things unilaterally; they likely have a much smaller economy, so it's harder to implement government programs if they want to; they have to lobby for outside help from other states. Without the Senate, big states can screw over small states, as well as the people within those states. For example, federal funding for programs (from federal taxes levied on individuals and businesses) could be diverted from small states into big states, and the small states would have no recourse due to their small population. Or big states could decide "nuclear power is great, let's do it, but where should we put the waste?" and vote to put it in say South Dakota, because SD wouldn't have enough representatives to block that vote. You do see this issue within states as well, with the conflict between urban centers and rural areas. So the even dividing down to states isn't perfect. But it helps protect minorities (not just race/ethnicity in this context, but rural vs urban, big vs small businesses, industrialization vs environmentalism, etc) within the population. Otherwise, democracies (both direct and representative) can devolve into mob rule or a significant consolidation of power once a majority realizes it can vote for things that only benefits then.

Credit bureaus are a tough nut to crack. Their customer isn't you as the individual, but lenders. Their business is telling lenders how risky lending to you is, and their formula doing so it's the core of their recommendations. Sure, you should have visibility to make sure facts are correct (accounts, addresses, etc). But the formula that spits out your credit score is proprietary to the credit bureau, and it's what keeps them in business (providing good recommendations to lenders). So there's no way to have transparency without destroying the business. You don't *have* to have a credit score to get a loan; there's no real requirement for a lender to check, though it's likely in the lender's financial interests to do so. The problem with the government getting in the credit reporting business is then the government gets deep in the lending business (has that worked out well for government backed education loans?), especially if commercial credit bureaus are eliminated or forced to use a certain formula. What happens when a lender uses a government backed credit score, and an individual defaults on the loan? Is the government responsible for backing part or all of the loan because it endorsed the individual (through issuing a credit score), especially if the government score differs significantly from a commercial credit score? Or if the government formula ignores certain indicators based on fairness/equality, lenders may choose to increase interest rates across the board (to avoid perceptions of unfairness) to cover loans that may default.

Military skews conservative, and conservatives seem to skew towards being skeptical of the rapid vaccine development. I'd bet more of the military (and dependents) declining the vaccine is along the lines of "don't be the first to volunteer" and taking a wait and see approach. Plus there's say least some level of distrust of the military and vaccines (early 2000's anthrax shots, gulf war syndrome), which probably also contributes to the wait and see approach. Military also tends to run younger, and may feel since they are young they can just power through if they get sick, and the evidence so far seems to favor that (barring underlying conditions). I'm sure many of us felt pretty invincible in our twenties. So I wouldn't say they are anti-vaxxers, but cautious (maybe overly so) regarding a new vaccine using new methodologies. I'd wager there'd be less concern if the vaccine was a more traditional dead virus vaccine.

Yes. Because that protects smaller states from getting railroaded by larger, more populated states. It's the whole point behind having the Senate at all. More emphasis should be put on states providing for their citizens (both in terms of services, and taxation to pay for those services). Want more social services? Move to NY or California. Want something else? There's probably a state that will suit you. Otherwise, what's the point of having states? Or state governments? The issue is that we've allowed political parties to become too powerful, and allowed them to drive political discourse, rather than states and local representatives.

The hard part about fighting Russia (or China for that matter) is that we assume they will fight is the way we like to fight. Our strength comes from tactical prowess, with a heavy emphasis on technologically advanced weapons. But those are expensive, and highly skilled tactical units are expensive to train and retain, meaning we can afford fewer units. This means we can be in fewer places at once, and any loss will have a disproportionately bigger impact. Sure, maybe the Russians don't have the best equipment, or the best tactical level units. But like Lawman said, operationally, they are very responsive. So they are playing to their strengths. Plus their investment in EW and Cyber seems to be paying dividends at their operational and strategic levels of fighting. So they seem to be able to achieve effects in Syria for much less cost than what we're investing. It seems like a lesson we are too stubborn or proud to learn since WW2: our enemy may not fight the way we fight, or think the way we think, and we have to adjust our strategy to counter their way of fighting/thinking.

Definitely interesting, though it sounds like just some extra data was required on specifically Indians. It seems like certain races/ethnicities are more susceptible to COVID. It'll be interesting to see if that ends up being a biological/genetic issue, or a socioeconomic issue.

This right here is the crux of the problem, and I don't know what the solution is (besides a radical reform on campaign financing, because that's the biggest tool the parties have to get politicians to vote the party line). Those senators should be voting for the interests of their state and the people they represent, and not to represent a political party. That's probably too idealistic to be practical though. That's not to say there isn't a reason for political parties to exist (helps facilitate support for bills through trades and agreements between similarly minded politicians), but the parties have gotten powerful enough to set the agenda, rather than be a means for individual states to achieve their agendas (which is the point of having the Senate the way we have it set up with equal representation from each state).