jice

The royalties may mean actual money… everything else is budget dust to budget dust. The lease bond is returned after conclusion of the lease, unless there’s an issue—then it becomes budget dust on the insurer’s books. Probably won’t make gas cheaper, but once the dust settles it likely won’t have a meaningful impact. Except, as bus driver pointed out: Incentivizing extracting the same product in places where the Public has less of a stake. This is a nothingburger.

Science, obviously.

Thanks. No questions; cleared off. Anybody *with SA* on the actual advantages to designation as a FIS? (as opposed to a fighter squadron or aggressor squadron that conducts air defense missions, which was a relatively regular occurrence). Put another way: what follows with the name change in terms of budgets, manning, etc.? Why FIS rather than Fighter Squadron (wrt resourcing, etc.)?

More local than the DAF re-org… https://theaviationist.com/2024/04/04/u-s-air-force-18th-aggressor-squadron-redesignated-as-18th-fighter-interceptor-squadron/ Neato. Anyone with SA able to explain the ‘why?’

Neat fact: the President doesn’t require a security investigation or formal clearance while in office.

One of the coolest jets around. Slight correction: remain on loan to NASA from the USAF. No danger of them coming back though; it’s manned and therefore cannot possibly be useful for recce in the modern world. /s

At that Army General: Tell me you think dozens of miles at a time in a poorly contested EMS without saying you think dozens of miles at a time in a poorly contested EMS.

Gotta figure out some way to pay for the $50k bonuses we tricked a bunch of 27-year-old-second-assignment-no-ground-duties bros into taking. Anybody have previous years’ increments handy?

Not a professional; consult one… Not directly. The payout will be withheld as a bonus, but remember: it’s taxed the same as any normal income. If that withholding is at a significantly higher rate than the rest of your income (unlikely, I’d guess), you COULD adjust to “flatten” that bubble over the rest of the year to hit 0(ish). Consult a pro & don’t dork up the math. Not worth the pain or risk of messing it up without realizing it… IMHO.

Maybe not as dumb as it looks… It’s Southwest. Open seating; those seats go unfilled anyway 97% of the time, since you can’t physically put somebody there and nobody’s going to insist on lifting a love handle to take their seat. I guarantee you that fat, cheap people aren’t buying two seats en masse with southwest now. This way they can charge a fee to process the refund (or keep the cash in exchange for travel credit) and they get to put the cash to work between purchase and refund. At an airline committed to open seating, this is how you create a surcharge while winning a PR victory in the community you’re extracting dollars from

Yeah man, I think that’s obvious. I’m saying it’s a complicated topic that people have been trying to figure out for thousands and thousands of years. I’m not able to add anything… We’re all about 60 lifetimes of reading behind as is. For the purpose of this discussion, re: ‘will to fight’ it’s the folks who have the credible and enforceable authority to order forces to fight on behalf of a state. Also for the purposes of this discussion, it obviously varies by how you bound things in time (among a billion other ways to frame). For example, in our system the ‘will of the state’ comes down to exactly one human at a singular point in the first few minutes of a full-scale nuclear exchange… but you can zoom out from there to all the factors that put the button in his hand, and farther to the system in which that button exists, ad infinitum.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_(polity) I’m sure we’ll settle this over the next few days by blaming team D or team R, but “what is a state” is a worthwhile recurring rabbit hole.

Yes. Yes. The people who say that are conflating a state’s intent to fight with the consequences of the policies it uses to do so. Those are related concepts but not the same, regardless of form of government.

Is there something I’m missing that makes the Ukrainian draft unethical/illegal? Or are they just drafting people because… Russia invaded them (again)? Or, in insanity land… you’re right, that greatest generation had no spine because conscription provided 10 million personnel.

Which demographic are you talking about?