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Showing content with the highest reputation on 10/03/2020 in all areas

  1. Yes...and shockingly, got picked up 1 APZ with a 5/10 push line and P on the PRF. Sometimes there is justice in the system.
    9 points
  2. Or, you could be right-leaning like me and think that we are changing the climate, but still disavow the leftist attempts to over-regulate everything. 1. We are changing the climate. 2. We don't have to find or buy into the "political" solutions; we can (and probably will) find technical/engineering ones. In 90 minutes, more energy arrives on the planet than humans use in an entire year, from all sources. The form this debate takes is a complete side-show to me. There is this trope on the right where any admission that humans are affecting the planet means we have to go along with the green new deal, or whatever - we don't. There's also this group on the left that is blind to the source of most of human progress - technology, not politics. I scoff both frames.
    8 points
  3. For decades the government pushed the notion that, to be healthy and slim, we needed to avoid fat and intake carbs. Decades and an entire epidemic of obesity before we are finally starting, only now, to realize how wrong they were. Clean air ≠ Carbon dioxide reduction. The science of climate change, and all the incredibly complex measurements, studies, and theories about the effects, boils down to a single theory. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas of small impact, but it increases the major greenhouse gas (water vapor) such that we are seeing and will continue to see a temperature runaway directly caused by humans increasing the CO2. There is all sorts of research showing that the Earth is warming. Granted a lot of that research is not nearly as concrete as the narrative would have you believe. Take a look at the satellite data and compare it to the theory. Digging into the various generations of temperature records and seeing how lopsided the adjustments are is another eye-opening chore. But even if you take the historical temperature data, as presented by the proponents of the theory at face value, the most critical component, that mankind has caused it, is dependent entirely on a theory of carbon dioxide that is not supported by the long-range historical data (ice ages during periods of much higher CO2), and is almost impossible to test on any sort of scale that would prove it one way or the other. And on this shaky ground, the United States is supposed to reduce its carbon footprint in a manner that would utterly devastate our economy, and only have a single digit percent impact on the overall change in temperature. So even if you accept the temperature data at face value, and you accept the theory of carbon dioxide as an impactful greenhouse gas at face value, you also have to accept that the rest of the world, including the largest polluter (China), is going to follow our lead in a manner that will have an actual meaningful impact on the rate of warming. That's a terrible bet, and the billions and trillions of dollars that we put towards this endeavor are much better spent on protecting forests, cleaning the plastic island out of the ocean, reducing known pollutants from being put into the atmosphere (like the smog plague of the 70s), defending endangered species, or any other number of measurable and worthwhile environmental endeavors. That's the short version.
    4 points
  4. No applying necessary; you’ll get Enid automatically because they’ll PCS you there. They’ll pay you Enid BAH until the waiver goes through, then they’ll debit all the Enid rate all back out and pay you your home BAH rate for the previous months missed as a lump sum and then just pay you the new rate going forward. Kind of a PITA, so just make sure you’re prepped with some extra savings to ride the bumps. I don’t know how the Guard works since I went Reserves, so I can’t really answer how the waiver flows. I’d guess through your home unit, since they own you. You’ll be able to do zero with Finance at Vance, since they own no part of anyone not Active Duty.
    2 points
  5. Skeptic is better and I don't think it is pedantic. I think "denier" was very carefully and intentionally chosen. The chart posted shows a correlation, but not causation, and is actual evidence against your thesis that man is the cause of global cooling/warming/climate change/whatever-it-is-this-week-so-that-we're-not-wrong. If man were the chief cause of global climate change, it shouldn't have changed much before our industrial revolution. My point with the scientific method is simply that climate change cannot be truly tested and that virtually all predictions have been wrong. If I come up with a hypothesis , make a prediction, and that prediction does not come to pass, I have to re-evaluate either my data, methods, or my entire theory. Instead, climate scientists make predictions, are proven wrong, and then pretend their prediction never happened or just push the dates a couple years down the road. Yet they still want to cripple our economy and lifestyle to 'fix the problem'. IF climate change is primarily man-made, which I'm not convinced, then technology advances got us into this problem and technology advances will get us out. The way we advance is to continue a robust economy. Look at England prior to electricity. Moths were changing color because there was so much coal soot in the air. It was an environmental nightmare. Was it fixed by governmental regulations that you can't use your coal fired pot belly stove to cook and heat your house? No, it was fixed by electricity not governmental regulations. Like beer, a free capitalistic economy advancing technology is the cause of (if you are correct), and the solution to, our problems. On a related note, correlation is not causation: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
    2 points
  6. "Deny" is a loaded term in political arguments as often when it is used, it is used in the same context as Holocaust Deniers, thus giving the moral upper hand to the party that places the label. It is an irresponsible term to use for this reason as well as to say that I am "denying" something also implies that it has been proven. People who make a positive claim in an argument are the ones responsible for proving it. If I say Bigfoot exists and you say he doesn't, it is not your responsibility in the argument to search every square inch of the planet to prove he doesn't exist. It's my responsibility to prove he exists. As has been said above, the best possible argument is a loose correlation. Instead, people who believe humans are the cause assume that it is true based on the "science" when it is absolutely not science. The scientific method is the heart of science and it is impossible to apply to global warming. Additionally, every attempt to apply just a part of the scientific method by making predictions based on observations has failed every time. Remember Al Gore after Katrina when he said that Katrina was the start of a huge wave of super storms that will destroy our coasts over the next decade? The next decade had almost no significant hurricanes in the US. Same with professional scientists predicting the disappearance of glaciers in Glacier National Park. There were signs in the park predicting the disappearance of the glaciers by 2020. Those signs were quietly taken down last year and the glaciers are still there. This isn't science, this is politics pretending to be science.
    2 points
  7. Thanks for proving the point.
    2 points
  8. Last time we tried that was 2012. He lost to hostile media propagandists, a false narrative, and due to an accurate remark that was taken out of context.
    2 points
  9. I can't help you with Brandman, but here's some unsolicited advice from a has-been finding himself in a potentially tough spot. Get a degree employers will recognize and one that will be useful to you if/when you need it. I did like everyone else and wasted my time and money on an ERAU/Touro/Phoenix masters. Now I'm in a position where I would love to show an employer I can do stuff and I don't have a degree worth putting on a resume. I'd love to go back and tell my Capt self to spend a little extra time and get an MBA from a school everyone's heard of. ASU, Nebraska, FSU, Oklahoma State, CSU all have online MBAs. So you can't get a brick and mortar Harvard MBA. At least get something from a school an employer won't have to google (because they won't).
    2 points
  10. You know how when you train facial recognition AI with only people of one race, it can only detect reliably the people of that same race? All of these climate models developed off of limited data have the same problem; it’s trained off of high fidelity data from only a period with industrial humans. The historical data back to 800,000 years is highly based off of assumptions...that fit one hypothesis. You’re not using science, you’re practicing religion.
    1 point
  11. I remember speaking to climate scientists during non flying days while supporting Deep Freeze missions in Antarctica. I wanted to go directly to the source and pick their brains. I even visited a couple of their labs and offices to see exactly what they were doing down at McMurdo over the couple months that I was there. One of the things they said that stuck out most to me was how inaccurate their historical data was in regards to temperature readings and CO2 levels. Where on the planet were the readings taken? What specific type of instrument was used to take the readings? What time of the year were the readings taken? How was the data recorded decades ago? Who took the measurements and what are their motives? Frequency and consistency were the biggest concerns. These scientists were talking about data from just the last 5-7 decades...
    1 point
  12. Charts can be funny like that. https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/11/does-co2-correlate-with-temperature-history-a-look-at-multiple-timescales-in-the-context-of-the-shakun-et-al-paper/ Even if I knew nothing about the theory, models, or underlying data, the overwhelming and religious-like commitment to the cause by a whole bunch of politicians, actors, other non-scientists is enough to make me skeptical. But I do know more, and dang near every time a supporter of the theory posts a chart, there's something the chart is misrepresenting.
    1 point
  13. You're being pedantic, but if you wish to play the semantics game I am more than willing to call you a climate change skeptic. The implication in "denialism" is a significant deviation from the status quo as agreed upon by experts. If you tell me the Sun will rise tomorrow and I say it isn't, it would not be a stretch to call me a Sunrise denier, despite there being absurd but logically sound arguments I could make that challenge the sunrise. For example, I could claim you are assuming the invariability of the laws of physics in time, which have so far held true but are "unproven" to continue to the future. Science never claims the certainty of anything with 100%, there are always baked in assumptions that you could challenge ad nauseum. When science claims something is a fact, it is choosing not to consider breaks in underlying assumptions from extremely low probable events (such as a break in the immutability of the laws of modern physics). Bigfoot and climate change are a false equivalence in terms of probability of being truth given certain assumptions, as are the sun rising tomorrow and climate change, so I hope it's clear why your claim regarding responsibility of proof (while true in a general sense) does not apply to established scientific claims. It would not be useful to sit here and go through the science that "proves" humans are the primary factor in climate change, in the same way it wouldn't be for me to explain general relativity and stellar physics to "prove" that the Sun will rise tomorrow, so I encourage you to read the research beyond reactionary commentary on cherry picked predictive failures in previous decades. Again, you could always argue something hasn't been proved, but at some point science says we will accept the assumptions and claim it as being true, always being open to the possibility that it is falsified in the future. So no, science will never prove anything definitively, but human influence on climate change is past the point where it is debatable in a scientifically productive sense. Going back to the earlier example, the scientific method as taught in high school (which you seem to be referring to here) is also impossible to apply to definitively proving the rising of the Sun. The climate is a chaotic, but deterministic, system which is theoretically computable to perfect accuracy given enough information. At any point in the last 800,000 years you could have predicted a rise or fall in temperature following a rise/fall in C02 within 2 degrees 99% of the time with only this data. You could challenge this and say that it could be that the causal link is backwards and that it's temperature which affects C02 levels, so again I'll refer you to actually read the research to see how scientists isolate the causal link. The science is clear enough to make a statement on the primary influence of humans on climate change. The politics are what we choose to do about it. Maybe we are just a drop in the bucket and have no reason to do anything when China and India pollute so much more. Maybe the economic costs of the Paris Accords do not justify the future costs in damage. I am more than willing to engage with those arguments on a policy level, but fundamentally there is still a rejection of the notion that humans cause climate change which cannot be overlooked if we want to debate the politics of it.
    1 point
  14. Nothing a quick fax to the nearest base ops can’t fix.
    1 point
  15. How else do you expect them to close their IFR flight plan from a farmer’s field?
    1 point
  16. 5 year buckets aren't yet instituted, ask AFPC/A1...as far as I know continuation and twice passed over are still "things"...my data is from this week
    1 point
  17. It did make him an expert at skirting the constitution by trying to use executive powers only on a bunch of things, somehow gambling his party would never be out of power. Short term strategy, just like all the poor AF leaders. Also made him an expert at using emotions to convince people climate correlation is the same thing as causation. Lots of people on board with that one.
    1 point
  18. Yeah, that checks. I also heard that PIT was super easy as long as your previous airframe was turboprop, turbofan or jet powered. If not, then the washout rate is close to 96.69%. Also, the rules only apply to FAIPs. Previous MWS dudes/dudettes can do whatever they want. -9- Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
    1 point
  19. Ummm, if the Paris Accords were such a good thing, why didn't Obama submit it to the Senate as a legally binding agreement between the US and the other signatories? If it was such a good thing, the Senate should've approved it, or those voting it down should've suffered at the next election. It's how the rules are made and we play by those. Anything, except DACA apparently, that one President does, another President can undo. I also believe that we are more than meeting those expectations regarding emissions without having to pay literally billions to other countries. Pretty good results for us, and a sad for those grifters. Ummm, weren't we supposed to be underwater by now? Or all the polar bears waterlogged by now? Follow the money, who benefits from your carbon tax? Who gets the money? Ummm, weren't the "experts" calling for a new Ice Age about now back in the 1970s? Ummm, how did the Earth get out of the various Ice Ages? Waaaay back when the Earth was a literal iceball, how did it get past that? How did the climate cool to get into those states anyway? Climate change? Yep, the climate changes. Earth is gonna earth. To think that it cares one iota about the current life forms is pretty arrogant. But a great payday for somebody if we want to be suckers and pay "the price" to save the earth.
    1 point
  20. So did Ghandi, like all those preteen girls he was probably raping people love to not talk about.
    1 point
  21. Thank you. Remember the quiet, but epic, moments while enjoying that morning cup of coffee.
    1 point
  22. Call it a win; #3/9, P, "one more DP to give", and IDE in-correspondence complete
    1 point
  23. Got the call yesterday from my SR - selected. PRF: #6/10, P, IDE complete, IPZ
    1 point
  24. Welcome to the club. Been a member for over 14 years now. Haven't strayed far, but still miss it!
    1 point
  25. Congrats and thank you for your service!
    1 point
  26. Recently declassified photo we have in the squadron. 2020-09-09 14-57.pdf
    1 point
  27. Total military time is about 7,300 hours. 4,100 sorties.
    1 point
  28. Heard I didn’t make it. 1/1 IPZ, #2/6 Majors (behind a Lt Col (s)). I think that’s what did me In? With a P IDE complete in 2017 i had 5 oprs as a major and stratted as a major in 4 of them #1/4 Majors deployed and #6/25 Majors #22/150 Majors #7/160 Majors no strat #3/7 Majors lots of FGOY and FGOQ awards
    0 points
  29. Here's a recent article about the "Oath Keeper" movement, the Meal-Team-6 cosplay crowd that PYB was so fervently aligned with. I wonder if he's still wasting his retirement suing his HOA or his neighbors or whatever for their Facebook posts. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/right-wing-militias-civil-war/616473/
    -1 points
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