jazzdude

Where are the lawsuits/legal cases challenging the mandates? We are a very litigious society, if it's clearly illegal and not within the powers granted to executives, it should be a straightforward legal case. It's not illegal just because you don't like it or agree with it, or doesn't match your interpretation of the law. Non-compliance with established laws is what makes something illegal, and the arbiter of legalality lies within our judicial branches.

There are cultural differences, yes. And yes, there are physical and societal differences in countries. But it's hard to argue that their response was not effective at controlling the pandemic, allowing them to live a pretty much normal life. But yes, there are tradeoffs that happen culturally. We do have some unique challenges, but so does every other country. It doesn't mean we can't learn lessons from other countries. As a pilot, I can learn safety lessons from accidents that occurred in vastly different aircraft than what I fly, extract the core lessons from the accident, and then apply it to operating my jet. Why can't we do that as a nation? Why do we have to be like the over zealous safety officer that says we don't need to know about accidents in other jets because they are different than what we fly? Maybe we need to re-examine what we value and why, and the consequences of the values we choose to hold. This doesn't necessarily mean we have to change, but we do have to accept the consequences of our choices, and we can make those conscious choices instead of just accepting that things are just the way they've always been. As an aside, Hong Kong did have some significant protests in the last year, so I don't think they are as compliant to authority as some make them out to be, especially when their values are challenged.

I hate that car analogy for Covid. A better analogy for wearing a mask, social distancing, and isolating/quarantining when needed would be traffic lights, lane markings, and a ban on driving drunk. Ignoring these precautions can have impacts on others beyond their control, and they are things we've agreed to do as a society in the interest of overall safety. You don't *have* to stop at a red light, though you may not always make it safely through the intersection (I'm looking at you, SC drivers who run the light 3-5 seconds after it changes). Though I guess getting the vaccine could be analogous to wearing your seatbelt (positive action by an individual for their own safety) and having a good immune response would be like airbags in your car (great if you have them, and arguably eliminates the need for seatbelts as long as you're in a protected seat during a collision).

Bad cash flow, not meeting expenses/debts payments due to local/state restrictions? Likely going to have to close indefinitely or permanently? Many are likely going to fail, unfortunately their timing was bad and luck ran out. It sucks for the businesses, but the second failure is that there's no/limited safety net for individuals to help them get back on their feet and back out into the workforce. The dirty part of pure capitalism is that while there is great opportunity to become rich, there's also a great risk of failing miserably, and there may be factors you just can't control. That mom & pop small business could also fail if one of the owners were to get sick (due to interactions with a public that doesn't mask/distance/quarantine appropriately) and run any lengthy complications or hospital stay. A larger small business could have the same outcome if several employees get sick and are out (and poor sick leave policies may encourage workers to come in sick and get more workers sick). Either way, there's risks, and there's no "right" answer, despite what the pundits say. Some business may be more capable of adapting to the new environment and rules, and others not so much. But there's going to be winners and losers no matter what the pandemic response is (and government doing nothing/absence of action is a decision). A 4-6 week hard shut down/lockdown early on followed by forced quarantine when entering US borders might've stopped the pandemic from spreading early on. Doing nothing and hoping for herd immunity may have just gotten the whole thing over quickly at the cost of some potential extra deaths due to capacity issues. But in either scenario, there are going to be winners and losers, businesses that adapt and succeed, or can't and fail. So the question becomes: what is more important, businesses or individuals? Should taxpayer money go to businesses to keep them open, or to individuals to assist them meeting basic needs (food/shelter) so they can be able to work in the future? The two are intertwined, businesses provide jobs to individuals, and together it contributed to the economy. But without healthy individuals to work, businesses can't stay afloat. And they need individuals to sell their goods and services to. We all have our own interests, and we advocate for them. In a sense, it's great that we can debate what or response as a community or as a country should be, and why I take the time to respond on this message board. The downside is that takes time, and time is not always on our side. The hard part of the pandemic is it's a slow motion train wreck, versus a much shorter, discrete catastrophic event. We as a country seem to do decently with response to discrete events, but anything that takes any real effort over a length of time where consequences are in the future and we start falling apart. It's possible we just did too little too late, and now we're just along for the ride and trying to mitigate or delay the damage that's coming. It feels like for the most part our response has been largely for show-mandates to show government is doing *something*, though not really enforced or enacted in a way to make the desired effect. Part of it has been poor messaging (the initial "the general public doesn't need a mask" in order to ensure healthcare workers had access to masks given limited supply probably did irreparable harm to getting people to wear masks later, though people can be irrational and hoard supplies far in excess of what they need). Though partial credit for the healthcare system not getting overrun, though NY went through its challenges and now LA is facing similar challenges with capacity. It's hard to say what things would've liked like if we did nothing, but Sweden's response probably could be used as an analogy for estimating what the impact could've been.

This assumes that people can voluntarily isolate at home if they feel at risk. A good portion of our country lives paycheck to paycheck, so their choice is to quarantine and lose their job (assuming the vaccine is immediately available to them, it still takes 6+ weeks to develop immunity), or go to work and put themselves at risk. That's not a real choice. It's a choice between fulfilling immediate needs (food and shelter) or expose themselves to risks they cannot control (where there's people they have to interact with who don't care to mitigate the risks). Taiwan, Hong Kong, New Zealand, and Australia to name a few countries all seem to be doing well with aggressive measures and showing they work in practice, if you actually enforce those measures and people comply with the measures. Contrast this with the US lockdowns being "there's a lockdown in effect, so don't go out unless you absolutely have to, or if you want to, or whatever. It's not actually going to be enforced" and then being surprised when the lockdown doesn't have a huge effect in our cities. The other practical evidence masks and isolation/quarantine works is that there hasn't been an explosion of covid cases originating from hospitals. So hospital staff wearing masks (and I'll grant you that the higher risk staff in close contact are likely using n95 masks), segregating Covid patients from other patients, and limiting access helps significantly slow the spread within hospitals. Along similar lines, the other piece missing from just pointing at mask mandates and Covid cases is what the actual compliance is. I'd rather kill business than people. Businesses will eventually come back once we get through this. Look at any other major natural disaster (hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes): communities rebuild, and businesses rebuild after completely being destroyed. If we take care of our people, they can rebuild their businesses and our economy. And are lockdowns killing people? Or is it our country's lack of safety net and ability to respond adequately to a pandemic? Do the pandemic restrictions suck? Yeah, absolutely. But it's still not as bad as any deployment I've been on. Does wearing a mask suck? Kinda, but I think wearing my David Clark headset over a 16-24 hour FDP sucks worse.

It'll be interesting to see how the AF museum displays hold up to this guidance

The hard part is determining what is the appropriate civilian counterpart. For a mobility pilot/AC, is it the UPS 777 Captain (legacy airline)? The Atlas Air 767 Captain (ACMI carrier, roughly same cargo capacity as a C-17, similar schedules as an AMC line flyer)? Jet Blue A320 Captain ("lower tier" major airline, similar size to C-130)? Should our helo pilots get paid what helo pilots get paid on the outside (aka peanuts)? What happens when someone moved onto a staff job? Do they take a pay cut from pilot to get paid as a low-mid level manager? Should your initial UPT commitment be compensated at the regional airline level (argument here is that if you pursued a purely civilian airline career, you'd likely spend 5-15 years at a regional, so that level of compensation could be seen as "fair")? What about AF engineers? They are paid way less than their civilian counterparts, and have no bonuses or incentives outside of basic pay/bah/eyc. I know I had an engineering job offer out of college that my AF pay didn't match until I pinned on major, including accounting for my additional flight pay. Realistically, the AF will never win the pay battle against the airlines (short of when, not if, airlines go through tough times and furlough). Even military doctors could probably make more on the outside, especially working in a big city. But at some point, serving our nation is it's own reward to some degree, and it's not all about the cash in the bank account. Same goes for people who elect to work for a non profit vs a for profit company.

Interesting argument, I'll take the bait. Forget airframes-should a flight commander be compensated more than a line pilot or line instructor since they are in a supervisory position? Should flight commanders be the most experienced person available in the organization (say a major or an extra Lt Col in a sq) since they are already being compensated more for their leadership potential, or should it be filled by someone younger to check a career advancement box? (For an organization that likes to say it's a meritocracy, we do a lot of things that don't really fit in a true meritocracy, but I digress) Should instructors make more than copilots? What if the copilot was a cross flow instructor/evaluator from a different airframe? Is getting passed over for major because you just flew the line and didn't do SOS or a master's the same as a civilian not getting a promotion to a supervisory job because they didn't take on extra responsibilities in their current job to improve their company or take night classes to get a degree the company wants at that level? Lastly and most importantly, a C-17 pilot clearly should make at least twice what a C-130 pilot makes: twice the cargo at twice the speed! (I'd say 4 times the pay, but sometimes the gear is not down before landing or the cargo/pax arrives at the wrong destination...so deductions were made)

This is the way

Partially agree. I'll admit I don't know too much about cyber, but with the little I do know, it does make sense for them to be a separate service (and not a department under any existing branch). And generals do tend to focus mostly within the scope of their authority, and assume that someone else is handling issues outside their scope (like cyber). That being said, that alone would not solve our cyber problem as it relates to protecting our information and ability to communicate; every service and every other federal agency needs to secure their data and networks. DISA fills the role now of enforcing standards within DoD, but it doesn't seem to have the teeth to force service to comply now (compliance mandates seems to always be stretched over several years). There probably needs to be a federal agency that enforces standards across the federal government, and I'm not sure if DoD is necessarily the right agency to be the lead. And all this ignores reliance on common/shared commercial infrastructure (phone lines, commercial internet connections, power, etc). Though the US did make a good case to prevent US telecom companies (and some allied nations as well) from installing/using Huawei 5G technologies in their communications network as they modernize their networks. The scariest thing about cyber is that it removes one advantage we've taken for granted: we're pretty well isolated by two large oceans, so an enemy executing kinetic effects against our homeland is difficult (though not impossible as we saw with the 9/11 attacks). Sure, ICBMs have been around for a while, though with those comes the baggage of not knowing if it's a nuclear or conventional attack, which significantly raises the likelihood of a nuclear retaliatory response. But as we're starting to see (or at least recently acknowledged publicly) that safety provided by distance disappears in the cyber domain, and an active posture is required to secure the cyber domain.

"Oh, and we're not going to give you any extra money for it, figure it out..."

On one hand, I tend to agree with your sentiment here, at least on face value. On the other hand, I see Negatory's points as well, many of which I think are valid shots that need to be addressed. TL;DR: What responsibility do companies have to their employees, and to the society they operate in? Here's a few questions that come to mind for me, and it's all shades of gray to me. Are employees people to be invested in to help the company grow, or an expense to be minimized? What is a fair wage to pay an employee: the value they bring to the company, or the minimum you can pay them while minimizing turnover and associated costs (or can you just ignore turnover costs)? How much profit is ethical for a company to make? (A contracting officer could give you what the government's answer here as it relates to federal contracts) How much profit is ethical for a company to make when it pays low wages that causes a good portion of their workers to require government assistance, transferring the burden of wages to society (aka funded by taxpayer money)? Does the size of the company change this answer, and where do we draw that line (mom & pop restaurant with a 2-3 extra employees vs Walmart or Amazon)? Are corporate taxes an unfair expense on job creators (that money could instead be left at the company, where it would trickle down to the lower earning front line workers), or are they the cost of maintaining the greater economic system the companies operate in? Things along the lines of ensuring a fair market (like preventing/persecuting insider trading or preventing monopolies, water rights, land usage, etc), ensuring consumer protection (FDA, OSHA, enforcing public safety standards), or common infrastructure that enables many businesses (roads, ATC, etc). Companies benefit from the environment our government creates (to include foreign trade policies, taxes/tariffs, infrastructure, education, etc), but maintaining that environment costs money. What if the AF tomorrow said "we're no longer paying flight pay during your initial UPT commitment?" Would that impact recruiting pilots? I'd bet probably not-there's still plenty of kids willing to sign at 11+ years of their life to fly a jet. Would it change retention? Again, I'd bet probably not, especially if some of the AF's flight pay savings were added to beef up the pilot bonus. Those that are career minded would still likely stay, as a government pension and healthcare access for life are still attractive items to get people to stay in until 20 (same incentive as our non-rated peers for staying in to retirement). We'd still have a competitive compensation package for pretty much anything besides working at a major airline (TA, GI Bill, GI Bill transfer, tax benefits associated with allowances). But cutting flight pay would send a pretty clear signal that pilots aren't valued in the AF. Fortunately, the AF doesn't have a profit motivation to drive down flight pay. Though DoD is looking to reduce personnel costs elsewhere (restructuring retirement with BRS, transitioning the military healthcare system to focus on military and push dependents out onto the market). And we've lived though decades of doing more with less (maintaining high ops tempo while shrinking the end strength), which gave us a small taste of some of the economic forces our general public deals with. While people out in the civilian world may not have a legal commitment like an ADSC to their employer, they may be stuck due to financial commitments, such as repaying student loans or rent/mortgage. Sure, sometimes they can take some personal blame (state school vs private, choice of degree, bigger house than needed, family planning, etc), but circumstances can lock them into keeping a job where they can barely make payments, since quitting or trying to job hop may not be practical (restarting at a lower wage that doesn't cover the bills). And this ignores any medical issues or emergencies that may happen that can wipe out any savings/retirement unless you're employee has a good/great health plan. (And if you've never shopped the open market for personally procured health insurance, it's stupid expensive, easily $450/mo for an individual on a "silver plan", and you'd still likely be bankrupted if you have a major illness or significant emergency). It's easy to point fingers at people who are struggling, but the truisms in an AF career apply to life in general: better lucky than good, life's not fair, and there is no justice. Then again, government is a reflection of what our society values, and can move to make things more "fair", it's just that what is "fair" is open to debate and should be debated vs solely black and white arguments.

I would posit that the issue is less generals understanding the details of cyber (that's why they have their staffs), and more that a lot of cyber fixes really amount to maintaining and improving comms infrastructure. Upgrading our comms backend, maintaining servers, securing accounts and access, and maintaining and securing our networks all costs money. And it's much less sexy than a shiny F-35/KC-46/new weapons/etc. After all, we are the Air Force, and we should focus on airpower, not keeping email and SharePoint or share drives up and running...even though a lot of how we fight and execute C2 relies on those capabilities. Every dollar spent improving our IT to be more cyber resilient (much less on any true cyber capabilities) is a dollar not spent on another program. And it has to be sold at multiple levels: within the AF, DoD, and Congress. And if someone at any of those levels above AF doesn't see the value in the investment, then the AF loses that money. Maintaining infrastructure isn't sexy, and that creates a challenge in actually funding the changes that need to be made.

I hope masks partially stay. Got a cold/flu and need/want to go out? Wear a mask and keep your crud to yourself. But hopefully we'll get to not having/needing everyone wear a mask out in the next several months.

There's a limit, but it changes with societal expectations and how people who are disadvantaged perceive their situation. If those at the bottom feel exploited and that their situation is desperate, they may resort to other means to close the gap. Unionization, protests, strikes, or perhaps violence against management and company assets. Or it could be as simple as quitting and moving to another field/company where they feel better appreciated/compensated for their efforts if that option is available (not like we don't see that with AF pilots jumping ship for the airlines...and we've never seen pilots that leave be denegrated by leadership as unpatriotic...) Is some of that illegal? Sure, but if people are desperate, they'll do desperate things, and it's not unprecedented. How history looks back on their actions depends on who wins-the line between freedom fighter and terrorist is a very thin line. We're not there yet in the US, though it feels like we're moving that way.

AD O-4 on the pilot bonus and a wife that works as an RN pushed us over the top. That said, I think you're right. If you're either not on the bonus, or aren't married to someone pulling in a good paycheck, you'd probably be eligible as an officer for the stimulus checks (or at least a portion of it).

If a military operation is vital to our national interests, then it should be paid for. Actually, scratch that. Any thing our nation wants to do should have a plan to fund the initiative

Throw in the resources available online (videos, how-to blogs/websites, etc), and I think many people could figure out many skills that are taken for granted pretty quickly if they were put in a position to need those skills. Assuming internet is still available when those skills are needed...But even then, people can be pretty creative and resourceful.

ID verification at delivery only verifies delivery (in theory), not that that individual was the one that actually voted. How do you verify military mail? I know I've accidently opened mail that wasn't mine-same name/location, different person. I've also had certified/insured packages delivered to wrong addresses. Fortunately, I had my contact info in the packages and the person (stranger) that received/signed for them was kind enough to contact me and let me know they received my package meant for me. And yes, all the delivery information was correct in the package, just had a bad postal worker (not an isolated incident in my neighborhood with misdelivered or damaged packages). Who becomes a trusted agent to verify identity? USPS? What about FEDEX/UPS? And I take issue with "the gov can afford it." Budgets are tight, and this would be a new requirement, so who pays for it? What level of government funds this? And yes, cutting other programs is a means to pay, but requires debate on what gets cut. But likely will be a tax increase to fund the capability.

Yeah, signature verification is probably well that can be done for absentee. My state allows you to download a ballot to mail in, and has a code on the ballot that I assumes serializes/identifies that ballot as unique, and helps block anyone from attempting to vote multiple times. Moving towards electronic voting will eventually need to happen, and then you can add things like chip and PIN (or at least PIN) identify verification.

Absolutely agree. Something needs to be done, but it requires investment (and maintaining follow-on support) in our voting infrastructure, and we as a nation don't like to maintain infrastructure. This should be a bipartisan effort

Your timeline is wrong. Best case is about 1.5 years for the next representative race. And that ignores any local ballots before then. There's more to it than just federal presidential elections, though that gets the most attention. A lot of the arguments for voter ID centers around citizenship, which drives the need for an ID that validates citizenship, i.e a RealID license/identity card. Plus, it took what, like 10 years or so to transition to RealID for air travel, which is arguably a luxury. And like you mentioned, it doesn't solve mail in vote identity verification.

BLUF, requiring voter IDs doesn't fully solve the problem, or may not even address the problem if voting isn't done in person. How do you verify the identity and eligibility of an absentee/mail in voter? Or a military voter voting from overseas? They can't show ID at the time of voting. How often does a person's identity and eligibility need to be verified? For the eligibility piece, I'm primarily focused on where a person lives to establish what district they are in, though stopping felons who lost their right to vote is important. Assuming citizenship is verified on initial voter registration some way. If an in person verification is required on a periodic basis, how do you handle someone that can't make the verification? For example, out of state military members. IDs can be faked, which means polling places can't just visually check an ID, they'd need a scanning system/database that verifies the ID, which drives up the cost and infrastructure for elections. Not a showstopper, but something that has to be planned for (who funds and at what level of government?) What is an acceptable voter ID? In state driver's licence/identify card with current address only? Temporary issue drivers license showing current address? Does a military ID or US passport suffice (doesn't show eligible address)? If I lose my ID, can I still get a provisional ballot (best case is accidental loss, worst case is stolen by someone wanting to prevent me from voting)? 2 factor authentication seems to be the standard now for anything that touches the internet, so an ID would need to be paired with another authentication, likely a PIN. And the infrastructure to maintain authentication and user support. Another idea would be to use biometrics to verify identity, but that opens up debate on government collection on biometrics.

Probably too much, and would be a good place to start scrounging money from (extend the time between office furniture refreshes to achieve cost savings). Though I feel the TV phenomena was units just trying to spend money to spend money at the end of the year vs letting it get pooled at the group/wing (or finding more useful things to buy)

If we get out of Afghanistan/Iraq, it frees up money, but also reduces ops tempo, and eliminates many "bad deal" deployments and 365s. Would that alone be enough to increase retention without increasing the bonus, as those have been significant drivers for pilots separating? Though airline hiring plays a role in retention as well. I'm sure that money would quickly be spent on modernization efforts to pivot to prepare for a high end fight with China or Russia.