nsplayr

Good luck @ViperStud, hopefully someone will have some common sense and let you do what makes the most sense for your family while still accomplishing the mission. When my daughter was born it was under the old policy (10 days of secondary caregiver leave) and OBTW it has to all be concurrent days and weekends also count. 🙄 So when my little one decided to show up to the world at 3pm on a Friday, that basically meant I just got the next M-F off and had to show up again the following work week...to fly standard flagpole training lines that could have been crewed by any ole jabroni in the squadron. Can't say that after only 4 days home from the hospital any of us had slept much at all or were thinking straight; if I had been more mature at the time I would have ORM'd my ass right out of those flights and told the shoe clerk scheduler to blow me but oh well, you live & learn. Looking back at it, it's the little things like that about Active Duty that piss you off more than any of the big things most people might think (800+ days TDY, getting shot at, etc.) People first and the mission will take care of itself. #GoGuard

Not a fan. Everyone who was tweaking over Jade Helm should be damn near ready to start the revolution over federal law enforcement without name tags or badges doing snatch-and-grabs from unmarked minivans on the streets of a US city against the wishes of the Governor, Mayor and Sheriff. The protest situation in Portland is not great, but I once again raise the idea that all parties need to de-escalate violence, not ramp it up with even more aggressive tactics. Good primer on some of the legal questions here. Also meme for the lolz to make my point more succinctly:

No worries mate, the GOP deficit hawks will be spreading their wings once again on exactly January 20th, 2021. *And I am not a deficit hawk regardless of the party in charge, just making a prediction that if we go Red to Blue at 1600 Penn they’ll be many who do change their tune right away

I mostly agree man, don’t get me wrong. I have a huge scar on my back that required a second surgery under anesthesia all stemming from a very straightforward dermatological procedure that the mil doc fucked up by the numbers. Then again I got LASIK for absolutely free (game-changer) and when we had a baby, it cost us exactly $6...they charged us for the meal that I ended up eating while my wife was in labor. So maybe I’m just an optimist haha but yea point taken, and all of my top 10 picks if I could magically have the US under a single new healthcare system have private care. But also like y’all are saying, I think Tricare Standard or Reserve Select are excellent models. Either no or manageable premiums, wide availability of docs that take it, very little paperwork, etc...I am unabashedly a fan of Tricare Standard and have found it to be vastly better than any of the options I’ve ever been offered from even sledge Fortune 500 civilian companies.

There is absolutely no way to prove or disprove the idea that achieving universal healthcare coverage in the United States would mean a certain delay in a cure for cancer. It's not even worth debating about because it's an unprovable hypothetical. My prefered healthcare systems for the US if I could waive a magic wand are maybe the Netherlands or Canada, which have different approaches but both work very well overall. I'm not a proponent of a UK-style system of public payer, public provider, although that's exactly the kind of healthcare that I had while on active duty and overall it worked great for me and my family. And discounting the long-term findings comparing healthcare systems published in a peer-reviewed journal (JAMA) with a Forbes article written by two guys is...insufficient. They even seem to hand-waive things that drag down American healthcare outcomes like obesity, suicides, teen pregnancies, etc. that are absolutely issues that can be addressed with more effective healthcare systems. The big problem with American healthcare is average outcome, not, "Do we provide great care for the wealthy?" because on that measure then yea, we're great. If I have the money or the right coverage I'm flying my ass to the Mayo or Cleveland clinics no matter where I live in the world. Unfortunately we don't have one system where everyone has that option, we have a mishmash of several systems and on average we spend more and get worse outcomes than most other developed nations. We could choose literally any other system to model off of and likely would be able to spend less, have better average outcomes, or both.

Are you familiar at all with the author of the article you linked to? Or the MLK speech Bacevich references throughout? What are your thoughts on the argument he’s making? Not the headline, which got you and the rest of us to click (mission accomplished), but his actual argument.

Did he...like twist his ankle while running some CAT5 or something? Get punched in the face by a TCN while on shitter cleaning escort duty? What did he do to earn this medal, wrong answers only.

I don't think that's a great comparison. The European Union has IVO 100 million more citizens than the US, and their total healthcare expenditures are much smaller than ours. And their average outcomes are better. So they're doing more "work" in providing healthcare to more people, but also spending less and the healthcare on average is better. There is some cost for innovation, but I'm not convinced at all that A) it's the primary driver of US healthcare spending, or B) that US citizens need to shoulder all of it. Throw on top of it that many of the biggest pharma companies are based abroad (think Roche, Sanofi, Novartis, and GSK, all top-10 in revenue and all based in Europe), the argument kinda doesn't works as well.

Yea damn I really wish we had that 🤔

What you're proposing as a certainty (universal healthcare in the US = delay in curing cancer) is such a bizarre, unprovable hypothetical / red herring argument that I don't even know how to comment properly. Re: what the rest of the (developed) world has...I mean better average outcomes and much, much lower costs no matter which model they use? That's what they have. Some countries are almost entirely private-market, job-based systems, some are fully public for both payers and providers, and there's nearly everything in between. Some have rationed care and some have almost on-demand services. Some countries with good average outcomes spend a lot (well, not compared to us but still, a lot more than average), and some with equally good average outcomes spend very little comparatively. What they all, literally all, have is better average outcomes and lower costs than we enjoy in the U.S. If having "better research" and being the world leader in healthcare innovation is somehow inextricably tied to failing to deliver good outcomes to all of our people, and I'd argue it's not, it's a bad trade off. Great books to read: The Healing of America and Which Country Has The World's Best Health Care? Also bravo to us all for making any and all political threads eventually circle back to the same issues we've been debating since approximately 1945. 🍺

Literally every single serious healthcare reform plan includes measures to reduce or control costs, including those that would achieve universal coverage, because as you said above, we can all agree that medical costs are high.

I bought a beater / old man car (2004 Buick Lesabre) and parked it on base for over a year when I was drilling at a unit > 1K miles from my home with the intention of also using it there while I attended IQT for 3-4 months. Plans changed, I changed units, and I never attended that training, but I sold the car for almost exactly what I paid so other than some minor repairs, gas and an oil change I wasn't out much money. YMMV but that was my plan at least. Later on with my new unit, I was TDY for ~9 months for training. For that I just drove my POV from my home to each of the training sites and that worked out well other than choosing to drive a V8 truck 50 miles per day 5 days a week in California when gas was like $4.25 a gallon haha. #ShouldHaveBoughtAPrius #NotReally Can you just bring a POV if it's a continuous 2-3 months? Not sure how far the initial haul is, but I drove from TN to TX, then CA, then all the way back. Since I was TDY Uncle Sam paid the milage and I had travel days allocated so it worked out fine. I had finance help me out with a cost comparison worksheet in DTS that showed that a rental car for > 100 days would cost a bazillion dollars so POV milage was by far advantageous to the government.

I'd rather smoke a "joint" while holding the rank of "Mr." than deal with any of the bullshit above haha.

How did you go from DP on your 1-below to just a regular P on IPZ? 🤷‍♂️ May the odds ever be in your favor I guess!

Growing up in AFSOC, I never knew exactly what the 23rd Air Force did. During my time at HRT it was activated in 2008, then inactivated in 2013 and I think literally nothing changed. Good job everyone; at least they fixed the glitch quickly on the bureaucratic time scale, which closely rivals the geologic time scale in most orgs.

I remember running a gentlemen’s 12:30 and literally lapping more than half of my fellow test takers. ?!?! How?? Top 5 finishers out of a group of ~25...all ops. Like you said, big surprise.

Not new but still funny. This kind of entertainment media...I say we keep this.

If you know of anyone on these board who supports looting and burning let me know, I'd love to admonish them. Trust me, stupid anarchists are not people I support. I replied to you because it was the only post I saw that seemed to raise the idea of further violence. By all means defend you and yours...but let's all take a step back and try to de-escalate rather than further inflame.

Yes, let's all not hurt each other. Let's not burn, let's not loot, let's not shoot, let's fucking try to come together and face the big challenges laid at our feet at this moment. Feel free to forward to any of your friends who plan on rioting - I don't know anyone who is.

Hey guys, friendly reminder that we shouldn't fantasize about killing our fellow citizens over political differences! I know Hamilton just came out on Disney + and ole Alexander and Aaron did have a famous duel, but let's not shoot each other regardless of what happens this November.

This was a good book I read as a young LT that makes you think about how our Constitution might be strengthened and modernized: https://www.amazon.com/More-Perfect-Constitution-Revised-Generation/dp/0802716830

https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/politics/505757-the-growing-need-for-a-modern-aircraft-platform-for-special

Reminds me of this quote from a book I'm reading right now: "I call it the democratization of discomfort. There were whole swaths of people uncomfortable all of the time. Now we're democratizing it. Now more people across different races and religions feel uncomfortable." - Jennifer Richeson, in Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein, p. 125.

No quibbles about keeping your manned flying logbooks fresh, but like I said before, I think the future is bright. I can easily envision a national airspace that has plenty of cargo aircraft flying as RPAs. Auto takeoff, fly an op mission with an e mission loaded, auto land, all monitored by RPA pilots or mission managers or whatever you wanna call it back in Memphis or Louisville. We’re in the baby steps phase where they’re doing some larger quad copters for local delivery, but we all know that much of the automation for airliner-sized RPAs already exists and I think cargo in particular will cut pilots (and associated life support necessities) from being on board their aircraft when they feel they can do safely and within the regulatory environment. I’m also very optimistic on the outlook for public safety agencies to use larger RPA-class aircraft for law enforcement and disaster response as that technology gets cheaper, easier to operate, and more acceptable to the FAA.

Damn, sucks to lose guys like this. Him him 🥃