ViperMan

Interesting. I assumed they were required by statute so there was something publicly releasable so the US taxpayer got to have some sort of insight into where their tax dollars just went.

Welp. I guess it's started.

Thanks for the context.

Chef's kiss on this phrase. Perfection. Poetic. Catch-22. i.e. "We're doing this. So fuck you."

Ok, so I don't know the entire evolution of the _UPT timeline. I went circa '07 but already had my PPL, so I guess that meant I went around the time of IFT, but I didn't have to do it. In my mind USAF pilot training has basically been: UPT (60s, 70s, 80s). (S)UPT (90s, 00s) - with some variation or another of intro to flying in some sort of prop airplane (may or may not have attained a PPL)...if my memory serves, I think people were given like 25 hours in a prop to see if they could do at least that. Then, I get fuzzy. Was it IPT? with UPT 2.0, UPT Next, FUPT now? Seems like there was a schmorgasborg of choose your own adventures during the last 5-7 years. Which iteration of legacy is being referred to. If it's UPT and SUPT of old, then they are certainly off base.

Yeah, this is concerning. "In the new model, pilots will earn a private pilot certificate, instrument, and multi-engine ratings in approximately 120 flying hours within a maximum of 139 calendar days. Pilots then complete military specific flight training, earning wings after 108 days—55 hours in the T-6A and 50 hours in simulators. Leard explained, 'Prior to implementing this new program, our fundamental challenge was getting enough flying hours in the T-6A to meet our goal. This new program ultimately provides our pilots with more flight time than the legacy system while exposing them to a greater number of aviation competencies.'" There's a lot in that little snippet that I'm not even sure is factually true. I graduated UPT (technically SUPT) with over 200 hours - most of them were in the T-38. These guys are going to graduate with 175 hours with most of them in some combination of Cessnas and Pilatuses? Hmmm. Not sure they're getting more flight time. Certainly they're not getting more relevant flight time. Maybe he was referring to the T-1 track? Can't speak to what the T-1 guys graduated SUPT with, hours-wise. Does anyone know approximately? My top concern is that this just seems to be trading quality for quantity. Instead of wings with a star on top, can we begin issuing wings with an asterisk? Also, I would like the statement "exposing them to a greater number of aviation competencies" to be substantiated. I doubt this is true. And if it is, what competency did we just discover in the year of our lord 2025 to which I have not been exposed?

Things continue to go well for Russia...they are truly in the midst of finding out. ~ $2B in lost or damaged assets. ~ 1000 miles from the front lines in one case. More than 2000 miles in another. Four bases struck. I'm told this is what winning looks like for them? Victory must be right around the corner. This is a major boon for them. https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/ukraine-attacks-russian-nuclear-capable-bombers-siberia-2025-06-01/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/06/01/russia-ukraine-zelensky-putin-war-latest-news5291/ https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/ukraine-stages-major-attack-russian-aircraft-with-drones-security-official-says-2025-06-01/

No. It was not. 2020 (COVID) riots. Race riots. George Floyd. Kenosha shootings. The Jan 6th "coup" (lol). CHOP/CHAZ. All those things were sanctioned by democrats in power. There was no corollary to any of that on the right. There was no equivalent behavior to those examples promulgated by the right wing. What we saw during 2016-2021 was left-wing hysteria driven, encouraged, and applauded by people in power. By people in our government. By people in our corporate media. I'm not denying the Glenn Becks and the Alex Jonses on the "right", but why the right wing was fixated on "issues" hadn't had anything to do with the RW media. It had everything to do with reality.

Well. Go ahead...we can read the AIBs, which are not safety privileged. Which ones?

If it doesn't require SECDEF energy, then it doesn't require my energy / attention. Fair enough? Get rid of all the DEI nonsense. I never want to here another peep about it. I'd rather have a competent CSSs and finance shops than read another email from the CSAF or SECDEF about some eye-roll BS.

I sense an important point here. What is it?

At bare minimum it'd be easy to say to the pharmaceutical companies they cannot charge the US more than the lowest price they sell their drug for in any other country. Not a price control. Just a balancing of the scales and an evening out of the "markets." Wanna sell your drug for .15/pill in Zimbabwe? Cool with us. That's our price too. The differential price structure is what's fucked. It allows triangulation of the American taxpayer via the mechanism of Medicare, Medicade, and all our other socialized healthcare. I get to work everyday and pay a lot of taxes at the threat of gunpoint for the privilege of lining these massive drug companies' pockets so they can deliver "healthcare." If anyone thought this was a free market, they were consuming mushrooms.

Bruh. Don't miss the point. The point of these tariffs isn't ultimately to bring our friends and allies to the bargaining table to ensure Americans get fair deals, m'kay. They are being imposed solely for the purpose of increasing the cost of living in America...because. At least that's what Hakeem Jeffries would have me believe if I thought he had a single brain cell in his noggin.

This is precisely the point. Ask any modern liberal (leftist), mutatis mutandis, and they will not be able to answer this question - i.e. they cannot provide a general or abstract answer. Nay, they will not even engage with the argument on that level. It is literal proof of an uninformed argument and an unconsidered position. All you will get is some variation of he's stupid and/or colored orange.

I don't know what they did or didn't send over Signal, so couch this in terms of hypotheticals. *IF* actual plans were sent over signal, that's every bit as bad as Hilary's email server. It's sloppy as F and warrants resignations, and criminal charges. If we're gonna hang out to dry airmen who flex on whatever video game crew they play with by sending secret info, we sure as hell are gonna do the same if the SECDEF is being a sloppy MF. That said, it's very likely this is more of the same blue-haired hyperventilating ala "January 6th was a coup d'etat."

To be more clear: we need to throttle peoples' disposable income - especially people on the dole. Yes, that means welfare, Social Security, Medicare, Medicade, student loan forgiveness. It will mean people losing homes, being displaced from communities they can't afford to live in, schools they can't afford to attend, getting fired from their make-work jobs, etc. The core problem that needs to be addressed is people spending money they didn't earn. Unless we remove other peoples' money from the people's pockets who didn't earn it, we won't solve a single thing. Doesn't matter what you make the tax rate. At this point, the only way forward to to redesign the incentive structure in an attempt to systematically begin to dismantle all the bad decisions that have collectively led us to this point.

This guy gets it. Yep. The other dimension here is that increased demand for housing - through artificially increasing the population - places downward pressure on wages. This effect is across ALL jobs. ALL careers. Not just menial, day-labor type employment. So not only does the cost of available housing increase, the amount of work required to net yourself housing goes up also, driving a further divide. For everyone. We (still) haven't fully flushed out the recession from 2008, and all these present effects are still downstream from that and now all the COVID spending too. Banks withheld housing after the crash, lest they really get caught holding the bag. Post 2008, banks stopped foreclosing on certain delinquent mortgages. In 2019, some people saw this coming: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-bubble-era-home-mortgages-are-a-disaster-waiting-to-happen-2019-02-25 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-bubble-era-mortgage-trick-could-smash-major-us-housing-markets-2019-03-18 In 2024 some of these mortgages are now coming back to bite: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/zombie-mortgages-debt-haunt-homeowners/ All that cash which should have been collected from people who "spent" that money on housing found its way into other parts of the economy, instead. Personally, I don't have any questions on why the price of stuff is so high. We injected fake dollars into the system during the run-up to 2008, and we did it again during COVID. When you mainline billions upon trillions of dollars into the economy without concurrent economic productivity to absorb those dollars, you get what we have now. It's simple arithmetic. It sucks that there will be pain, but we're not choosing this course presently. We made this choice a long, long time ago, and much like global warming, much of it is baked in at this point. We kicked the can in '08. We kicked it again in '20. We're eventually going to have to pay the piper, and the sooner, the better. @Negatory, I think you're mistaking a desire for austerity, with folks' acceptance that the cure is going to be painful.

I also want to pile on with a reminder that the very year groups they force-shaped during that phase in 2011 or whenever it exactly was, they then began to offer TERA to the people who would have been otherwise eligible for retirement (albeit a reduced one). That's like being at 18 or 19 years of service and getting let go because they don't want to pay you your retirement / pension. Thanks for your service. See ya later. https://www.stripes.com/news/2013-07-26/air-force-offers-early-retirement-option-in-certain-career-fields-1836037.html1 https://www.afpc.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/856683/officers-enlisted-members-offered-early-retirement/

This, most assuredly, is not what people are complaining about in that thread. That whole discussion is about self-imposed flagellation in one way or another. This is totally different. It's a one-off requirement to finally deal with some of the massive, obvious bloat that has become endemic in our government - which has really become a massive jobs program. It's not so much that the ends justify the means. It's more the structure of our government bloat, and the way things don't function properly necessitating the means. I know we don't agree. This is just different perspective. It boils down to a fundamental disagreement we have about finances. You think we can just grow our way out of this. I understand that our position in the world is made ever more fragile as we dilute the reserve currency of the world. It's not pretty, but we've gotten ourselves into a mess where we have no choice but to face down some pretty tough times. It's sad. I wish it wasn't the case. But it's where we are. One way or another, dramatic cuts were coming. I'd prefer that data be masked... Edit to add: Also, dude, with that ratio of dicks to gallons of piss, there had to be some real horse-penises in there.

The shallow point from that previous post was in reference to gearhog’s superficial acknowledgment that Russia was at fault. I know he doesn’t actually assign blame to Russia, just as he wouldn’t assign blame to anything else that was inevitable. His use of the term “inevitable” and retort to US “provocation” does all the lifting required to absolve Russia of blame and place it on the US/Ukraine. "It was our fault for approaching Russia. They warned us. The war is our fault." It’s a similar argument to yours, which is because something is predictable, or because someone told you they were going to do something, they are no longer accountable for their actions. That's a strange moral calculus...but I digress. Your analysis is shallow because it doesn’t incorporate certain facts about the world. Namely, the three separate treaties (at least) Russia is violating by invading Ukraine. People on this board have made counter arguments or arguments that subsume facts you present which strengthen your argument (i.e. secret Russian warnings about NATO expansion eastward). In other words, they are arguing in good faith. You haven’t done the same. *See your own post from a couple pages back where you said you’d look at those treaties. Either you did and you decided to continue to ignore those facts, or you didn’t because you’re so ideologically bound to your argument that you don’t think it’s worth your time. Either way, it makes your argument shallow since you’re picking and choosing certain facts while sticking your head in the sand regarding others. Basically, your whole argument is weaponized ignorance. Your second tactic is a variation on the same theme. Avoidance. *See where you just tried to change the subject to Taiwan, again. I bet another dollar you (still) won’t acknowledge or talk about the violation of those treaties in any meaningful way. So far I’m 1 for 1. Going forward, I predict you’ll continue using one of those two strategies. Maybe after a post or two, but you’ll return to changing the subject to Taiwan or beating the drum about secret memos that predicted this would happen.

Do birds fly? Do airplanes fly? Do fish swim? Do submarines swim? Do boats swim? Would you blame a shark for biting you? How about an apple for falling on your head? In short, the question is ill-formed. Dog's don't have responsibility. Or am I to believe you'd charge a dog with the crime of biting and afford him a trial by a jury of his peers? Yeah, you put the dog down, but you don't blame the dog. You blame yourself for allowing a situation to develop wherein something inevitable was going to happen. The metaphor breaks down because the words and concepts don't transfer. Yes, the dog bit someone. The dog did it. But the dog is not responsible in the same sense as you or I are for its actions. Look up the definition of responsibility. It doesn't mean only that somebody (or some thing) took an action. Responsibility is a concept that applies to entities which posses knowledge of right and wrong and then make a choice. It can't be applied to instinct-driven creatures ruled only by fear and hunger. FFS, let's at least agree on that. Anyway, let's not get wrapped up about the metaphor. It's a distraction from the core point @gearhog tried to make, which was that Russia's attack was both inevitable and blameworthy. Exqueeze me? Baking powder? That's like blaming an apple for falling off a tree. The concepts of blame and inevitability don't go together. They can't co-exist. He stripped them of their agency while simultaneously faulting them for their actions. You can't do both of those things. He absolves them of their responsibility and agency by placing the blame on the US because we "provoked" them and then calls their resultant actions inevitable. It's blame transfer. Yeah, the dog metaphor is imperfect, but the underlying point was contradictory without reliance on the metaphor. It's these sorts of paradoxes in other peoples' positions which illustrate how shallow their analysis is.

The implicit contradiction in this post is delicious. The part where you simultaneously assign blame to Russia, and then only a few words later remove all agency from them by likening them to a dog is my favorite. I wrote two extremely thoughtful responses to you ages ago that included them all. There a link to one a couple posts back. That one contains a link the the previous. Say it. Say Russia is wrong.