nsplayr

Yea, that’s what I was implying when I said it was all a mess. There’s zero capacity to train 18Xers to manned even if we wanted to right now. For my situation (age/rank/TAFMS/etc.) it would be a tough ask to go to full-up UPT and then IQT/MQT for a new platform if god forbid my Guard unit had to change missions/platforms again. Then again like you said, a lot of dudes would love it and relish the additional hours. My argument is that if you can take someone off the street and make them an 11X in ~6 months, surely you can take an 18X and make them an 11X faster than that, and the AF should invest the resources necessary to make that happen at some point before sunsetting the MQ-9 with no clear replacement.

I’m not sure that anyone can answer those valid questions. The AF at this point should stop making 18X and send everyone to UPT 2.5, but the whole thing is a mess. They also need to rapidly develop a 18X -> 11X TX course of some kind. I don’t have my instrument or commercial but have friends in the squadron who have gone out and got theirs. I don’t know the latest on what the GOCO companies are looking for but then again they’ve drawn down quite a bit lately and all of our guys who were out doing that are back at the orders trough.

Has there been any progress on seeing an entire month’s or flight pay for just attending drill for DSGs? I thought that was part of the last NDAA but maybe it was only talked about. I’ve been on full-time orders for a bit so I haven’t kept track super closely. My going assumption is that it’s the law but DFAS somehow can’t execute it so…fuck us apparently 🤷‍♂️

Not saying the GOP is particularly complicit, this one truly is "both sides." Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) is leading the charge for a new bill that I think would help. I'd love to see all federal elected public officials (including the President/VP/Cabinet) and state/territory governors required to fully release tax returns, disclose investments, and place those investments into a blind trust until they are out of office. Clearly the benefits of and temptation to trade on insider information are overwhelming.

Yes I think it will pass. Many conservatives advocate for increased defense spending and the defense budget increased every year under Trump and in fact the vast majority of years since WWII. The only sustained downturn was 2011-2015 and that deal was (oddly, stupidly) bipartisan in nature.

I am super in favor of banning Congressional members from trading individual stocks. I’d be happy to see the GOP House pass something to that effect next Congress and I’d encourage Democrats to continue supporting that idea. I won’t hold my breath though! 😅 CHIPS is still really good and I look forward to the US being the world leader in microchip manufacturing in the future.

Yes, 100% agree with this. Masks help stop the spread of a lot of respiratory illnesses…it’s partly why they’ve been worn in medical settings for decades! Everything @FLEA said above is totally reasonable. Then again there are people like this who seem to think people voluntarily choosing to wear masks makes them Nazis 🙄 I don’t wear a mask except where required (many but not all medical facilities it seems like) and rarely see others wearing masks in Tennessee…but if folks want to by all means go for it! It does not affect me in any way whatsoever and I make no real judgements either way. People that don’t share that mentality at this point I think are clearly in the wrong.

Signed the legislation that brought all that critical chip manufacturing to the USA though…😎 The CHIPS and Science act is really a good law and I’m glad it got done. Thanks to the 14 Republican Senators who came on in for the big win as well as all 50 Dems obv.

🤣 yes definitely.

💯 to this specifically. Someone else on here who is right-leaning said their red-lines for supporting a candidate were (sic) "transing teens, CRT in the military, and vaccine mandates." Lol, my man, those are incredibly niche issues if you ask me and really small potatoes in terms of your big-ticket items. My top policies when looking for Democratic candidates in a primary in particular, and at general election candidates overall, are continued broad & deep economic growth, accelerating the transition to clean American-made energy and related technologies, maintaining the U.S. as a leader in international affairs with both hard & soft power, and making our healthcare system work both better and cheaper for all Americans. IMHO comparable topics on the right might be keeping taxes & regulations low and streamlined, reforming/limiting immigration and ensuring tight border security, reducing the national debt, and maintaining a strong and generously-funded military. So much of this culture war BS is just so small and inconsequential compared to the issues above and I can't bring myself to give more than half a shit about any of it. And yes people on the left do it too...needless focus on race over any other topic, trying to push non-mainstream gender and sexual norms on society at large, etc. etc. None of us should be wasting so much of our breathe on this small-ball and I'd happily go back to the days of debating about the tax & spending plans of Mitt Romney vs Barack Obama, which trust me I heavily overindulged in 😅

Because we disagree on the facts of what happened, just like many on the right do with Russian election interference in 2016. State actors, parties, corporate interests, lobbying groups, etc. have always influenced American elections...it's what you do in a democracy! Ideally you limit foreign interference almost entirely and you try to keep domestic political wrangling to a manageable level and within understood and reasonable rules. Good people can disagree what those are, e.g. dark money, campaign finance reform, fairness doctrine, foreign ownership of media companies, etc. Tech companies and especially social media companies do hold a lot of power over the collective conversation, not unlike traditional media. There should be standards of acceptable conduct, I totally agree on that. Is what Twitter did a gross violation of standards of acceptable conduct? I'm not nearly as sure as you are. The Hunter laptop story was widely reported and available freely and openly to anyone who cared to type www.nypost.com into their browser windows. The government in no way suppressed The New York Post or banned people from reading their reporting, reposting it, talking about it, or developing their own stories based on their reporting. Look at China especially or Iran or Russia for examples of true state repression of information, it's many orders of magnitude different than what you see here or in other Western capitalist democratic societies. Both campaigns in 2020 made requests to social media companies (legacy media companies) when they believed stories published about their candidate were misleading, unfair or false. Sometimes the media and tech companies put out corrections or disclaimers or retractions and sometimes they did not. I do not agree that "the Twitter files" is some smoking gun bombshell. This story about Hunter and his laptop has been around now for more than two years, and no made-up GOP polling (e.g. MRC) should convince you that the story has more legs than it has received in the open information environment. Their "polling methodology" of saying that oh if only people had known about this story (faints back onto a strategically placed couch), Trump would have gotten 300+ EVs is incredibly laughable. We don't need to speculate about a past event, it happened! We know the results for real, not just for make-believe! The GOP talked quite a bit about Hunter and his laptop at the end of the campaign and Joe Biden still won the 2020 Presidential election. It wasn't the October Surprise some were hoping for and I'm sorry that didn't work out for y'all the way Hillary's emails did - better luck next time. That's how patriotic Americans who are all working more or less toward the same goals (being a strong, prosperous American nation that is a key leader in a peaceful and cooperative world) can approach this topic. 🇺🇸

This is great news, it advances US soccer and helps us develop even better teams in the future. Both the men’s and women’s teams agreed to this plan and I’m happy the USMNT advanced and secured that bag. I hope they go even further…I believe that we will win! With the USWNT being back-to-back champions already, it’s awesome that the US soccer federations can use this prize money to both keep building up the men’s team while also maintain that excellence on the women’s side. Hopefully USWNT can 3-peat next year 🇺🇸

I don’t have any special insight but this is extremely googleable: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2022/11/28/musk-says-apple-cutting-twitter-ads-here-are-the-other-companies-rethinking-their-ties/amp/ And FWIW I don’t know how much it matters or really care who advertises where or how (or if) Twitter makes money. If Elon wants to own it as a hobby and pay a much smaller payroll from his personal funds and call it a day, cool, go for it.

🤷‍♂️ I don’t think anyone here is making any of those arguments. I would drive a Tesla or go to space on a SpaceX rocket, and I use Twitter every day. Certainly not canceling Elon or his companies! I just think he is a quirky guy with big Recently Divorced Energy that is just stepping on rakes and wasting his time and money with Twitter when he could be doing better stuff. I also don’t support empowering bigots and Nazis to post their vile trash, but I guess then again he owns Twitter and I don’t, so do as you like. The real free speech story of this year is in China and Iran, not on any US internet sites or apps. The off-hand remark about “looking into Musk” is silly like you said, he already is launching NSA satellites with his other company!

Look I don’t hate Elon or endorse a lot of the online leftist nonsense, but to say that overpaying ~10x for a social media company, becoming the main character of its discourse every single day, and then shitposting your way through it while having to sell other valuable assets just to cover your new loans is winning…ok. I don’t think Twitter is immanently dying but I also don’t think it’s all that important in the lives of everyday people either! I would much rather have Elon focus on SpaceX and Tesla where legit great stuff is happening and where he’s done a lot of good. I mean to each his own but… Jumping face first into the pile of shit that is online social media moderation discourse just doesn’t seem fun or profitable or worth spending your time given the other options on the table for the richest man in the world.

Yea it's all cost-benefit analysis and that can be hard to do in real time, at massive national scale, when there's no centralized power to act, etc. Every Monday morning QB who thinks they could have done so much better and also convinced ~330m people to actually do what they recommended is almost certainly kidding themselves. Policy is hard and we should have an effective debrief so we can do better next sortie. Shit, ask China how their zero-COVID policy is going right now, and their government already exerts WAY more control of their population than ours! All the hyperbolic responses of both the extremely, weirdly cautions public health folks and the hardcore anti-vax, anti-government folks are missing the mark IMHO. Implementing smart, risk-aware precautions is pretty much always a good idea and both individuals and governments at all levels should absolutely be empowered to do that. At this point though, few anti-COVID measures make sense beyond whatever people want to do voluntarily and encouraging folks to get the vaccines, both against COVID, the flu, RSV, all the things. Each of those is a total bitch...RSV recently worked its way methodically through my entire household and it really sucked for my new baby even though it was fairly mild for the rest of us. Again, China is super heavy handed on their lockdowns but weirdly only like 25% of their elderly folks are vaccinated against COVID...that's a really stupid policy and the exact opposite of what they should be doing, and people there are starting to get pissed. I'm excited about work that's being done on a pan-flu vaccine building on some of the advances we learned making the COVID vaccines, it will be great to have more weapons against all the respiratory viruses out there. Despite what a lot of folks here believe, the COVID vaccines were developed super fast and were very effective at preventing COVID deaths, which is great! Hats off to Warp Speed and the people behind those vaccines. The takeaway from this pandemic absolutely should not be that "precautions didn't make a difference" because like @Pooter said, measuring the counterfactual of "what if we did absolutely nothing" is really hard. There will likely be more pandemics in my lifetime, and I plan on doing the best cost-benefit analysis I can in order to balance staying safe, alive and disease-free with living a free and fun life that's a big part of why being an American is awesome.

Elon is fantastic at what he's good at (launching cool shit into space, promoting cool EVs) and incredibly bad at what he's bad at (running a social media company, being a good dad, being funny, etc.) He has massive Recently Divorced Energy right now and he's just trying to shitpost his way through it after likely unwisely blowing $44b on a bird app worth at best 25% of that, which is not a recommended tactic to say the least. Hey guys, someone who is good at money, is selling $4b of your shares in a great company at the 52-week low a good financial move?? 😆 But I'd still drive a Tesla no questions asked, and FWIW I currently drive a VW EV that's also fantastic! My all-electric Nazi sled will be taking no questions at this time thank you very much. And I use Twitter every day 😅 More people gotta separate the art from the artist if ya know what I mean. Look, just because R. Kelly pissed on all those girls doesn't mean I have to give up listening to "Ignition (Remix)," that song is still a jam. You can build a thousand bridges and they won't call you a bridge-builder, but you suck just one dick...

I pretty much agree with this. 8 makes the most sense to me. I guess they wanna do the byes for the top 4 so they don’t get knocked off on a flukey way early…but byes can also be strange and a team that keeps playing and keeps winning has momentum over a team that’s sat idle for too long.

Max chaos: somehow Purdue, KState, Utah and LSU win their conferences. Just for the lolz. Whatever scenario gets us to an expanded playoff faster gets my vote. There have been lots of good teams and wild upsets this year, it would be super fun to let the top 12 duke it out. Shit, I want March Madness but for college football. Shut up and take my money!

Utah somehow hit the 4-way parlay to fall backwards into the PAC-12 championship game. Them winning that is the only hope OSU has of making the playoff over USC. Lucky for them Utah already beat the Trojans once this year so I say LFG do it again 💪 I guess TCU could lose the Big 12 championship game, but even though they’re kinda fake I don’t think that’ll happen…OSU also badly needs Michigan and Georgia to win out as well so as to not introduce more 1-loss non-conference champ options.

At this point not hiring people over the COVID vaccine seems dumb. Everyone either already got the disease or the vaccine or both or is magic…either way NBD. BUT, it’s also dumb to punish felons to a lifetime of drudgery and poverty after they have served their sentence. I’m fully on board with hiring rehabilitated felons at a wide variety of jobs if they can meet the requirements anyone else would need to meet.

Just to be clear, I in no way support a 20 year pilot ADSC, I’m just saying that’s the ultimate way to assure retention - not letting people leave from day 1.

20 year pilot commitment would be the nuclear option but I guarantee a lot of young & dumb dudes would sign it for a chance to fly mil jets. Probably not enough, but we already don’t have enough. I hope they figure out another way!

I mean it’s not objectively fast, but it drives fast/fun. Kinda like your mom…she’s not actually hot but it all pretty much feels the same on the inside 😁

Fantastic advice right here. I still drive and love my 2010 4-door stick shift GTI. I’ve also slept in it, cross-country PCS’d in it, and brought home 2x kiddos from the hospital in it. 27 mpg for the highway commute, but fun enough to throw around the back roads on the weekend a little bit. And it didn’t cost me an arm and a leg as a 1Lt back in the day which is the key here. Now after having promoted a few times and enjoyed no car payment for ~8.5 years, I can more realistically lust after a R1S or Taycan or whatever my heart desires next.