nsplayr

I am! ABO: always be optimistic. Seriously, I truly believe based on everything I’ve read that the Russian military will be utterly spent and a large and unrecoverable % of their young male population will be dead to the point where it will take them a more than a generation to recover. Their losses in Ukraine are unfathomable by modern US standards, and our population is 2.3x bigger. Potentially up to 100K men killed already, Jesus H. Christ. They’ve managed to double our entire Vietnam War casualties in less than a year, again, with a much smaller total population. Let alone the amount military equipment that has been destroyed there, which is tremendous. The US has had approximately 0% of our military equipment destroyed in Ukraine, and we have a much larger defense industrial base able to resupply the expendable that are being used by the Ukrainians with our assistance. Good luck Russia, hopefully Putin falls out a window, they retreat from this ill fated expedition, and real reform & economic modernization happens.

😅😂🤣 Lolol ok I give up

^^ so what you’re saying is that nuclear weapons are very dangerous and we should be worried when a larger number of belligerent tyrants and/or unstable shitholes control them…and also you’re questioning if Russia is a threat?? 🤷‍♂️

Well the earned amount of leave under the new policy is 12 weeks for dads (all numbers here are dad-centric, no offense to the moms out there). I am sympathetic to commanders that say that is much harder to swallow than 10 days (my first baby) or 3 weeks (recent policy) that previous AFIs have directed, that’s valid. BUT, the law says 12 weeks and active duty has done it fairly seamlessly from what I’ve heard so #NoExcuses. We can’t just fail to follow the law because it’s inconvenient, and if the bean counters need to add slightly more days/dollars to the unit funding algorithm to account for this change in the law, so be it, make the change and move on. There’s already a buffer built in for illness/injury, bereavement leave, personal leave that accrues and is taken, and the old baby leave policy.

Well they were much more so before they voluntarily destroyed a large chunk of their armed forces and young male population attempting in vain to annex a neighboring country that decided instead, “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.” 🇺🇦 But if you don't actually think a leader like Putin with the energy and military power of a country like Russia was a threat to the U.S. in any way and that we shouldn't happily assist them with stepping on every rake and landmine in Ukraine for pennies on the dollar...I don't know what to tell ya. $48B to Ukraine out of $6.3T in federal expenditures in 2022 is 0.7%. To help significantly kneecap one of our biggest geopolitical opponents. It would be a bargain at 10x the cost! Literally, if we could kneecap the Chinese military and oppressive CCP leadership in the same way and essentially guaranteed unfettered US & allied global dominance for a generation + for $1T and zero American lives lost, I would sign the check myself.

Imma be good, I have rooftop solar that can't be turned off or denied by any government entity short of them physically assaulting my castle through what I anticipate would be voluminous and effective fires. 😎 Every libertarian who hates the government and wants to be self-sufficient should invest in rooftop solar, wind (if you have space), rain collection & purification (and/or a well) and farming (if you have the space). I, as a normie suburban Dem, have started doing what I can in the location I'm at even while I work for and don't inherently fear or hate the government. I encourage everyone else of all stripes to do the same. On the issue you raised, gas stoves are indeed very likely poisoning your family and causing significant excess childhood asthma specifically, but I also believe bans rarely work. Shit, look how long it took to get lead out of paint and gas after we knew it was highly toxic. We literally nerfed half the country a handful of IQ points across the entire population due to lead gas until we wised up...oops! Instead of a ban that won't pass and won't work even if it did, I'd rather see induction technology just get so good and so cheap that eventually people largely stop using gas stoves. This happens all the time and it's fine. People still have horses and that's great, but not everyone has to shovel shit out of the road anymore and travel at ~5-10mph across our vast country, and I for one support that! I currently have a gas stove and like it, but will replace it with induction probably later this year. Partly because I have solar and thus can't lose access to electricity like I could theoretically lose access to gas, partly because I like new tech and inventions, and partly because I have young kids at home that I'd rather not poison quite so much if I can help it. YMMV. I will keep my gas grill on the patio because when you're outdoors, feel free to light stuff on fire mostly at will, air quality issues are mitigated by the wind and the open spaces on the big ole blue marble we're all living on.

Dude this kind of shit infuriates me. Congress passed a law, it's signed by the President, it directs the DoD to do X,Y, or Z. The DoD then fails to take any action, can't update AFIs in a timely fashion, provides vague or no business rule guidance or policy memos, and then just fucking gets away with it sometimes for YEARS. If I were a Congressman I would unscrew heads and start shitting down necks until the law was implemented. This same thing has happened with the 2021 NDAA expanded baby leave on the Guard side. I've literally been told I (and quite a few other guys in my unit) fall into an "unfortunate Catch-22" that prevents us from taking the leave...it's shenanigans. We had babies (well, our wives did, thanks dear!), we earned the leave, but we can't take it, what kind of fuckery is that? Our local-level commanders are pissed and sympathetic, but they are hamstrung by MAJCOM and NGB nonners who are saying it can't be done. An officer's job, IMHO, is to receive intent from his/her superiors all the way up to the NCA, and then apply his/her knowledge, skills, leadership, creativity and ingenuity in order to meet that intent with appropriate effects on the battlefield, however that is defined for your career field. Somehow every single one (ok, to be fair, 99.69%) of our personnelists and finance officers seems to have missed that very important lesson from their commissioning source and subsequent PME. As a group, they are pedantic, lawyerly, miserly bean counter shoe clerks who treat every single dollar as if it's coming out of their own personal wallet and scour every single potentially beneficial personnel policy for loopholes and ways they can fuck people over rather than implementing the intent of the policy as written. /rant off

Yea actually they do, ask your security officer. Intent matters, cooperation or lack-thereof with an investigation matters, and deception matters. Not that you wouldn't get in trouble no matter what, but your intent, cooperation and any deception do matter a great deal in terms of how much trouble you'd find yourself in. I have seen a dude who accidentally had a SCI document in his bag and had to deal with it. It was discovered by him and he reported it promptly, taking that doc out of an approved storage location was completely unintentional, there were mitigating circumstances, and he never lied about any aspect of the situation and fully cooperated with the security folks investigating it. AFAIK he continued flying and serving relatively unimpaired until I PCS'd and lost track of him. Obviously the scope is different for high level officials, and there does seem to be a systematic problem that's plagued quite a few folks of all stripes, but again, the things I highlighted do, in fact, matter!

Was it a whoop band around your wrist or an oura ring? Oura is approved in our SCIF already along with a handful of other devices. Did you do tracked metrics in lieu of the annual fitness assessment or just in addition? A fitness tracker would work well for RPA specifically, we literally have a gym in the room adjacent to one of our GCSs haha, no excuses! I’m interested on the details of what y’all did particularly if it was in lieu of the annual PT test. My CC is interested and I’m trynna make it happen. Accelerate change or lose right? May the odds ever be in our favor…

Humm…quick math says max waist for a 5’10” person is 38”. And I know a handful of people fatter than that and shorter than me 😅 What I wanna see is what I’ve heard the Space Nerds…er Force are doing with a wearable and tracked metrics year-round in lieu of a once a year test. Some people may not like that and I wouldn’t want to see it as a mandatory program, but I’d love to try that out sometime. If anyone knows an AF squadron that has figured out a waiver or experiment among those lines holla at me!

If I were a betting man I'd bet that he'll either get drafted or quickly signed as an undrafted free agent shortly after the draft. Cheap backup who's got that dawg in him quite literally. Not unlike Taylor Heinicke, who's last season in college before being signed was a not-notable 6-6 at Old Dominion. Not a fantastic or really even a starting NFL QB, but talented and motivated enough to earn a roster spot for a handful of years. Scrappy and a proven winner. Plus ole SBIV won 2x national championships for the #1 team in the country who can recruit damn near any 5-star QB they could dream of...that ain't nothing.

While I support the neat psychological trick of The Missile Gap in order to motivate our industry/leaders/people to stay sharp, I just don't actually believe in it myself. There are indeed some areas where we are not dominant, or not as dominant as we used to be, or not or even ahead at all right now. I do work in a SCIF every day and have the benefit of a great cadre of intel professionals as colleagues as well as my own ability to read. But when taken as a whole, again, there is absolutely zero chance a rational person would rather be Russia/China/etc. than the USA if this were all just a big game of Risk. For all the doomsaying and whining/bitching/complaining that happens around here on every imaginable subject, I like to highlight the positive once in a while...so sue me. America is great, the future is bright, hug your wife & your kids, bang your mistresses, and drink every last drop of good whiskey 🇺🇸

And Russia/China famously have no corruption, waste or bureaucracy 😅 As much as it sucks to see some Lockheed bean counter nonner get a fat paycheck knowing that the product could be better, capitalism still produces waaay less waste than bribing every party official from the manufacturing shop foreman up to the General Secretary. Remember it's all relative, like some of y'all's marriages down there in lower Alabama. Are we more or less corrupt/bureaucratic/wasteful than our likely opponents? Can we generate reliable combat power more often or less often than them? Can we bring coordinated fires and effects to bear in more or less key places than them? Can we communicate better up and down the chain or worse? Etc. etc. As always during my entire lifespan, I'm putting us ahead in almost every category. No sane person would look at the world's balance of power, be it economic, military, cultural, technological, etc. and choose to be anyone other than the United States. "America! America. God shed his grace on thee."

Yea, between charging to 100% every time and driving around for about ~1K miles in a month, the range estimator has seems very accurate and linear. More so than the gas gauge on my proviso vehicle haha! Like I said, I think the BMS software is improved.

We have the best funded, most capable military in the world and are allied with most of the other powerful players. Russia, a primary antagonist, is actively destroying their military as we speak due to extremely poor policy choices and battlefield performance, which is great news for us. China has a fragile and IMHO inferior political system, a worrying short- to medium-term economic outlook due to awful COVID policies, and a massive demographic problem that will take decades to unwind. DoD topline numbers are the highest they’ve ever been, even while being a lower % of GDP, which I see as a good thing. Because we are so much wealthier than in the past and also in comparison to our adversaries, we can significantly outclass them even while enjoying more bread & butter to go along with all those beans & bullets. Dems are almost 100% united behind supporting Ukraine’s democratic government and independence from a belligerent and invading neighbor. The GOP has some very notable fissures on the issue and some members who want to, IMHO, hang Ukraine out to dry and capitulate to Putin. The last DoD budget was historically high and well above even what the DoD itself asked for, and that was with trifecta Dem control. Now with a GOP House there’s talk of looming cuts. Some old assumptions about where the parties stand on robust defense spending and strong international relations may need to be reassessed if y’all haven’t updated yours recently. 🇺🇸🇺🇦 I for one welcome a coalition between mainstream Dems and Republicans to box out the mostly hapless left-wing tankies and the MAGA flavored right-wing isolationists, who unfortunately make up a sizable chunk of the GOP right now. They’re both wrong and America needs to remain strong and active on the international scene UFN.

Haven’t seen anything in the owners manual or forums about needing to recalibrate the battery management system in my LFP Tesla car. I don’t even think there’s an option to do so. The manual just says to charge up to 100% once per week and recommends you charge to 100% whenever you want, including daily. It seems like they’re figured out the software a bit better and apparently it maintains fairly solid range guesstimations all the way down. I’ve only driven mine down to 11% but it seemed fairly linear/predictable. I did hear stories of older S and X Models have some unexpected dying at low but non-zero states of charge, but that was years ago and also using NMC batteries regardless. For home storage it’s probably even less important to have a gnat’s ass accurate % remaining number because in a lot of applications if your battery is empty you just seamlessly switch to pulling from the grid, but I’m betting the issue can be solved entirely with wherever BMS software Tesla has in their newer LFP cars.

You don’t see it because like you said, you agree with what she says. But as a Dem I will tell you she is not one, hasn’t been one in a long time, and so the “D” next to her name (until recently) means absolutely nothing. It she does get paid a lot by Fox News and etc. to play a role and she does it very effectively!

Y'all know this is what Tulsi's grift is too, right? I will hand it to her, she is nice to look at...but this is her exact playbook and it has paid off handsomely.

I can't understand WTF you're talking about here after all that whiskey, and a 45+ minute youtube video of two unknown dudes talking is below my line. Do you have a TL;DR once you're sober? Cheers!

🚩🚩🚩 all around

God bless that young man, what a patriot 🫡🇺🇸 The SCIF pocket is also an unusual but approved method for transporting classified. Just gotta double-bag it, so stuff it in your underwear inside of your flight suit and Lady Liberty will remain tucked in and secure at home 😅

Quick point for you meme makers out there: American Military University based in West Virginia, founded in 1991, and a for-profit, is the online “you get out what you put in” military degree factory. Not terrible but not amazing. It is what it is. Whereas American University is a nice, private, non-profit traditional brick-and-mortar university in Washington, DC, founded in 1893, and known for students studying international relations and public administration. I have degrees from both so I’m highly qualified and educated to speak on this specific topic 😅

Not a UM or OSU fan, but the origin joke with that same punchline is much funnier 😅

I do, yea, primarily because there's a ton of effort/money/brainpower being thrown at the problem as we speak and a lot of it is coming back to the US in terms of manufacturing. Leave it to the good ole U.S. of A. to pull off a huge technological W just in time, it's kind of our speciality. I also think that in addition to the normalish cost reduction curve of any mass consumer technology, home storage in particular will get cheaper even quicker precisely because there are more and more EVs on the road. As some of the first wave of EVs get retired, those battery packs that are no longer ideal for driving are perfect for home storage where space and weight isn't nearly as big of a concern. I would freaking love to get an old 85kWh Tesla battery pack from like a 2012 Model S and throw it in my garage for pennies on the dollar compared to their new batteries. Also newer chemistries developed to help mitigate some of the fire/degradation concerns with NMC batteries will help costs for everyone. As more LFP comes on line, relatively safe and still-capable older NMC packs that have been in use for years should drop in cost even more as consumers with the $$ will start choosing LFP and similar better chemistry batteries for bougie installations and bargain hunters can benefit. Yep, you're spot on all-around pretty much. I don't have a generator but have considered it as an additional layer of backup/safety to my power setup. We have natural gas central heat and an existing stub-out for my grill on the porch. It wouldn't be terribly expensive to fork that stub out and put a natural gas-fed small generator on the back porch as well for exactly what you mentioned, charging our batteries in the event of an extended outage that happens during cloudy/stormy winter days where my solar won't be able to produce much of anything. I will probably spend money on rain water collection/storage/pumping next, but more power security is still on my list even though I'm in a great place with solar + storage now. I had no time, desire or skills right now for a big solar + battery DIY, but if I ever bought an off-grid cabin in the mountains, which I'd love to own one day, I will probably take the time to learn and do it myself out there in the woods. This youtube channel has a great DIY solar storage container project that I enjoyed watching a lot: https://www.ambitionstrikes.com/offgridpower Also correct...the global implications of China keeping COVID near zero for years with extremely draconian lockdowns, failing to vaccinate it's elderly and vulnerable populations, and now doing a complete 180 and just letting the virus rip is going to result in a ton of death and economic destruction. I'm glad a lot of solar/battery/chip manufacturing is coming back to the US, but it's not gonna happen fast enough to buffer the turmoil out of China in the near future unfortunately. Check out that Homegrid Stack'd battery if anyone wants a more DIY setup, it looked really legit. It is a newer company though and I was more wary about their warranty...a 20 year warranty from a 2 year old company doesn't mean a whole lot IMHO but the technology looked very legit and it seemed pretty simple to install and even easier to expand in small increments in the future.

I don't think I'm involved in this trains vs planes discussion at all, but I love you too man 😘