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I’m on record here stating that, as a life long republican, I would have voted for a middle of the road, sane and mature democrat over Trump in this election. I will not vote for Kamala. No way. But the dems decided to anoint her and not have a primary. So guys like me have no choice. And I guarantee there are lots of people just like me. I'll be voting for Trump all day every day over Kamala.

I'd take those odds. The dude is probably Biff anyway, he looks soft. But seriously, under our current system you either get to bang the bartender's wheelchair-bound grandma, or a dude. It would be a refreshing change to have "the 10" running for office.

Well…no one even voted for one of the candidates. You know, from the party protecting democracy.

Ranked choice voting would help to relieve the stranglehold the extreme candidates hold in the parties..

The problem I have with the right these days is they will continually complain that their party is hijacked by an incompetent buffoon… ..and then keep voting for that incompetent buffoon. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the only way the trump cult dies is if people stop coalescing around him. Sure his MAGA base will always be there. But every time a moderate Republican holds their nose and votes for him as the perceived lesser of two evils, it prolongs trump’s stranglehold on the party. Republicans are in a hostage situation entirely of their own making. Between Biden and Kamala weve had the two most beatable candidates in a generation. But somehow, in a move defying all the odds, the right is about to extend their losing streak from ‘20 and ‘22, to a 2024 3-peat. The left is so insane these days that if the right, dumped trump and their fringe abortion policy madness, they’d cakewalk into the white house for at least the next decade. But they won’t because the party is far more stubborn than strategic. For any moderate or center-right person looking for a viable Republican Party in the future, I think the best strategy this year is to vote 3rd party. Counterintuitive, but It would detract from trump’s legitimacy and force him into irrelevance sooner.

If only… the nuclear option would be to offer early release if said students aren’t in a training program by 6.9 months… IRR, Palace Chaise, IST, whatever… but I digress… While at the beginning, flying the mail by the AAC, went bad, Air Mail Scandal, having a small utility fleet owned by the AF and chartered specifically to support the Joint Force, Federal and State agencies in contingency and routinely… fly pax, cargo, mail, etc… regularly and on demand for that which doesn’t require a t-tail or Herc, pick an existing regional jet (175, 220, 72) and fly from strategic areas with concentrated gov customers who would use the service, send pilots there if an FTU isn’t available at a reasonable time from graduation, get about 600 hours time and rotate them out to their FTU… the money would come from divesting old iron that in reality is no more survivable than adapting a civilian aircraft to this role, an adapted aircraft still in production would be a helluva lot cheaper to operate and sustain

Open revolt form the ACC maintainers...they post some funny Shit.

Did you watch the debate? Did you read some transcript (below) on this topic? I would rather you say, neither one can articulate a single policy, and Trump really cannot articulate a single idea in a complete sentence. And platitudes, Trump can't finish a brain fart without saying someone or something is the best ever. When asked, “can you commit to prioritizing legislation to make child care affordable? And if so, what specific piece of legislation will you advance?”, here’s the transcript of his answer: And here's his answer last night to a question about his plans for health care:

Why are you guys even debating this? The 2 party system and our voting process isn’t going anywhere. It’s the superhighway to keeping those in the deep state in power.

Once again it's a misanalysis of how RCV is supposed to work. You can't apply the rules of a traditional election to an RCV election. People voted differently (for their first choice) specifically *because* they were voting ranked choice. However your scenario is perfectly illustrative, because if they didn't have RCV they would have just voted Trump in the first place to not "waste their vote," just like many of us are in this election. So we get Trump either way, but in your example because the minor candidates simply didn't have enough popularity (as minor candidates I'll add) to beat the candidate with the most support. This also ignores the fact that many of the examples as to why RCV doesn't work are incredibly contrived. That professor's article creates a series of ballot examples, but only provides three of the possible six voting combinations in a three candidate election. You also can't say that someone doesn't have "the most support" just because they didn't get the most first place rankings in an RCV election. Again, the entire purpose of an RCV election is to allow minor candidates, who are in fact the primary choice of a voter, to get the first position. But that doesn't equal the most support in RCV. In your example above, it is highly likely that Donald Trump would be the second place choice of a vast majority of conservative voters who simply prefer one of the minor candidates more. If Donald Trump doesn't get a single first place vote, but the entirety of the second place vote, he absolutely has more support than 4 other candidates splitting the first-place votes. The second example of gaming the system also assumes complete control over the vote. Which no one will have. It also assumes that problem is somehow not inherent to any voting system. But we have that now. Your last paragraph has no basis. She didn't receive any votes, and a candidate who receives no votes in rcv is not elected. There is no comparison between what the Democrats have done with Kamala and *any* voting system, because no voting system was used to select her. Yeah, a weighted system as suggested in the professor's article would be better. But it is completely impractical to expect a population to be able to understand that and do the necessary math. Rcv is a simple system that solves 95% of a complicated problem. The metric for whether or not it is successful is not if it is perfect, only if it is better than what we have. And that's easy.

Your GOP primary example.. is this: 49.5% Dxx 30% Txx 20.5% RTD There are zero RDT voters? Math in public, but you just need 0.6% RDT and Desantis wins. And.. if that’s not the case, it just indicates that DeSantis, in your example, is more extreme than Trump.

This thread is a great reminder of some words I received from a rather wealthy dude many moons ago. I don't have near enough time, money or energy to get my preferred candidates into office. So I prefer to spend my time, money and energy in figuring out how to legally pay as little tax as possible. How I do that may change from administration to administration, but there is always a way. It appears to be working for him and he's one of the happiest people I know lol.

It's not a unicorn. It's a different paradigm for weighing peoples' choices and preferences. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. The author of that Columbia article has chosen a very particular way in which to count votes. He successively eliminates candidates based on multiple rounds of who gets the least number of votes. That is not the only way to count votes in such a system. He certainly knows this fact, and that he neglects to address it, and show other ways of counting and perhaps different outcomes, betrays his bias against such a system. i.e. he's pulling the wool over his readers' eyes. Take his example which you provided: 4 CAB 4 CB 3 BAC ----------> 3 BC ----> C wins 2 ACB drop A 2 CB It's a totally contrived example. In the majority of cases, the extreme candidates will be represented on the "ends" of the choice spectrum - put differently, the middle candidate will in almost all cases be the same (for example, most people would vote 1. Trump, 2. Kennedy, 3. Harris OR 1 Harris, 2. Kennedy, 3. Trump). In the constructed example provided by the author, the middle candidate is A, A, and C - this is not a likely outcome in our currently hyper-polarized political reality. Even still, I'll take him at his word that such an odd outcome is possible: this contrived example still relies on and requires a unique counting scheme to result in a nonsensical outcome. Suffice it to say, there are multiple - better - ways of executing the counting system in a ranked-choice voting scheme which that article side-steps. Opponents point to issues like this usually because they have some predilection against it - it is very difficult to exercise fear-based politics in such a system. Understand though, there are more fair and optimal ways of weighing votes, eliminating candidates, and settling on a candidate who is satisfactory to the majority of voters - which is the ultimate test and purpose of a democracy (republic). Look at it this way: we currently have ranked-choice voting, it's just a 1 or a 0. I'd much rather have a choice between a 6 or an 8 at the end of the night...and that's the purpose of the ranked-choice scheme: to eliminate the other people at the bar from choosing who you have to bang at the end of the night. Under our current system, you either get to bang the 10, or are forced to bang a dude...

I don't think using the traditional primary election system as evidence of ranked-choice's faults makes much sense at all. The whole argument is that the traditional primary and election system is broken. Point in case, we have two absolutely ridiculous candidates, specifically because no one is willing to risk "throwing away their vote." Ranked choice voting allows you to vote for who you actually want. The example above is evidence of why rank choice voting works, not why it doesn't work. The only way A wins is to break every 3+ candidate election into a series of 2-way matchups. No one does that anywhere. There might be convincing arguments for the status quo, but that link isn't it.

But that's a dumb hypothetical. There is no two candidate election between A and C, or A and B. Why worry about what would have happened in the hypothetical election, that isn't in fact happening. In that example a got the fewest "top" votes, So they either would have lost in a three-way election, or been eliminated from the runoff. That's exactly how the system is supposed to work. And this dude is a professor?

You’re picking and choosing; conveniently forgetting the virtual end to ISIS, conservative Supreme Court justices, zero additional foreign entanglements, strong national economy, record low border crossings, low taxes (I did the math), and so on. I never said awesome or perfect policies. You asked what his policies were and there are plenty to chose from during his tenure

Do you read anything here? Stop arguing with your fantasy of a conservative voter and argue with the ones in front of you.

My class got two fighters. Not zero, but definitely not the everybody gets a fighter times. I got gay ass helos. Helos were fucking awesome.

Out there doing the lords work, killing RJ's!

The cycle just keeps repeating. My class got ZERO fighters...(except for the Guard Guys), and you will see it reflected in retention. In my class: #1 wanted a Bomber and got a KC-10 #2 was a previous Bomber Nav (and was actually on a hard crew with our T-38 Flt/CC), not the best pilot but he got a B-1 I was #3 and all my flight commander could say was "Sorry Bro" Banked

Revival on this thread? More insight on exactly what the mission set looks like for a HC-130J driver?

No. Sounds like we’re from different corners of the AF; once every 2 weeks flying sounds terrible, I’ll l give you that. But that is not what’s killing the AF. It’s all the other bullshit in conjunction with dickless leadership who doesn’t give a fuck about winning. Enough of that horseshit makes a guy move on. Period.

Sure more hours would be nice, but that doesn’t fix the pilot bail rate. It’s not lack of flying hours that’s pushing guys out the door.

Has it ever not been the FTUs? I feel like we are on a 15 year cycle with this subject. For the youngins here, back in 2009 they reduced T-38 students to two per class…..and they ended up with a massive shortage in the 2007/2008 year groups in CAF. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro