Lord Ratner

Why do you clowns insist on creating some false aggregate of positions to create the perfect conservative bogey man to debate instead of the people actually here in the discussion? You wanna balance the budget? Freeze all distribution programs at their nominal levels immediately. Let inflation solve the rest. Cut Medicare of for anything but stabilization and pain management after 80 years old. Fix Medicaid so that some retarded homeless junkie can't use emergency rooms for free while everyone with a job and insurance has to pay a fortune for after-hours care. Reform all benefits programs to *once again* require working age adults to work or starve. Strip the military acquisitions process of all special interests. No more buying pens from the blind just because. Remove all tax benefits for capital gains on publicly traded and private equity assets. It's income, you pay income tax on it. Stop securing home loans and student loans at the federal level and stop the rocket ship of rising home and education prices. Means-test VA disability benefits. For every $3 above $100,000 you make you lose $1 of your benefit. Obviously you aren't financially suffering from your disability. None of this is going to happen right now because everybody is hooked on the drug of free shit. What's going to happen is at some point we are going to get into a bloody messy war, a bunch of our kids are going to get fucking slaughtered by the Chinese or the Russians or the Europeans or the Africans or whoever the fuck we end up fighting, and all of a sudden people will get very serious again. You'll spend your savings on war bonds that you know are going to depreciate in value because what other choice do you have when it's directly funding the survival of your children in some God forsaken warzone? It will suck for a lot of people with pink hair and custom pronouns as the society exits the war with a newfound sense of homogeneity and community responsibility. Being your "authentic self" will be wiped away by the same judgemental fury of the surviving servicemen who will shun and shame those who believe the society owes them a payout or a tax shelter. Both the ultra rich and the ultra lazy will find themselves with fewer allies than ever. Until then, chill out, have a beer, and be happy that we don't die of paper cuts or colds. This has all happened before and it will all happen again.

*After*

Pilot recruiting contact.

If the OG had delegated that authority to the MSG deputy, then yes. Can we all stop pretending like Elon just started doing this with a Gmail account? The president of the United States, who everyone in the government reports to, decided to do this. Like every other corporate "force reduction," he has delegated that work to someone else. Doesn't the wing Commander have to sign all officer OPRs anyway? Do this many people really believe that the government owes someone a job?

Rumor mill is that American Airlines is halting new hire classes after March 4th. Edit: so far nothing confirms this rumor (2/25)

Might be time to take another break from BO.net. This is obviously a very emotional issue for you based on your wife's job and you aren't going to get anything but frustration hearing the rest of us bloviate about it. Best of luck to you and your wife.

Yeah Bud, considering the "means" don't involve rape and murder, asset forfeiture, internment camps, or racial segregation, these ends are justified by these means. Save the pearl clutching for a real violation of rights.

I know this may seem strange to someone who's been in the government for a long time, but everything you're describing is just "life in the private sector." That's not to say this email or some of the other things they're doing are master classes in administrative procedure, but it's hard to disagree with the underlying goal when people complain about having to work on a weekend to read an email. Our government is bloated and inefficient. That means to fix it, there will be fewer people with .gov jobs. I hope that's not your wife, but it's going to be someone's wife. If you have friends in corporate America you should ask them about "unpaid" weekends and surprise layoffs. This has been very tame in comparison.

That really sucks for you. And I mean that, a lot of really good people who've done a lot of really good work are going to go through this shitty process. Unfortunately there's no alternative. We have spent decades pretending like we are going to get things cleaned up, and in those decades the only thing that has happened is that things have gotten worse. We have gotten to the "shit or get off the pot" phase, and as much as I hate to see people like you in jeopardy, I am more concerned about my kids and their kids and their kids. We are on the unsustainable path that becomes more catastrophic the longer we are on it. Donald Trump is the most emblematic of this phenomenon. I truly wish we had someone better to lead us through this process, but he is the president specifically because everyone 'better' failed us. So now we're here.

Doesn't matter what you believe, what makes sense, or what the history is. You will never have men and women working together and not fucking. Ever. Add power/status disparities and the problem will only be intensified.

Promote soonest!

Am I required to comment on your every thought? I'm not nearly as interested in staffing or FOIA. The government spends more money, has more employees, and does more things than it ever has. Funny how people act like it's always operating right at the minimum. But we did less before, we can (and should) do less again.

Good. Mail in voting is absurd, outside of it's original intent, and should not be conflated with early-voting, which is a good thing. Military and out-of-state only.

Depends on how you are interpreting it. I can see a lot of people hyperventilating by claiming that this is some sort of attempt to bypass the judiciary, but there's no good evidence of that. This seems to be a memo declaring that within the executive branch, interpretations will be made at the highest level. Everything about that is a good thing.

Sales tax for all taxation as the baseline. This allows for removing sales tax on targeted items as tax relief for those who make less and therefore spend a higher percentage of their income on essentials. It also means workers never have to do taxes ever again. Tax fraud is harder because taxes are collected *from* the taxed by a business who does not want to go to jail for tax fraud. This would have to be done by constitutional amendment. Make the amendment such that the tax is only adjustable to 0%. No intermediate tax levels to favor this industry or that. Limit exemptions to a fixed level, let's say a max of $5,000 (just an example). If the item or service costs more than that, the rest is taxed. The exceptions are solely for helping low-income Americans, but everyone gets the same exemptions. Income tax was always a stupid and complicated solution.

https://thefga.org/research/universal-work-requirements/ It used to be the case. It is not the case now.

You believe that reducing taxes is "giving" money to the taxed and "taking" from the untaxed? Hot take, but very honest. Okay, then what do we do? Right now the system you believe in is running 2 trillion dollar per year deficits. This is during one of the most financially successful times in American history. We are running deficits (deficit/GDP) that have not been seen since WWII. If we keep interest rates where they are, the deficit will rise another trillion dollars as our interest payments spin out of control. If we lower interest rates we risk reigniting inflation. So what do we do with this broadly popular concept of spending more money than we have on everyone just because they like it? How much of my money do I deserve to keep, and do you believe the bottom 50% of the country with no net federal income tax liability should be contributing anything towards this massive shortfall that funds their "general welfare?"

Turning with an engine out for non-terrain considerations. Aircraft with less than 500' vertical separation on final. Modified landing data for the shorter runway. That shit doesn't fly at other airfields. That's the deviance. Only a few select "special" places is it allowed. That's the normalization. The helo flying high is just "deviance."

This has always been the answer. Don't worry, I don't think it will be much longer before we have it.

@nsplayer I'm against cutting taxes until we clean up spending. I'm also against raising them. But they do need to be standardized and lowered soon after getting debt levels down. We need a constitutional amendment that absolutely nothing can be funded for longer than ten years, and all funding must be a specific dollar amount. No future adjustments for inflation, no COLA, no fixed percentages, no per capita budget, nothing. Every single program and expense gets a fixed dollar amount in the budget, and can't exceed 10 years of funding. Right now it takes an act of God to get a program defunded. It should take an act of God to get the program funded. Yes this includes SSI and Medicare/Medicaid. You will always have rot and bloat and ancient politicians rape the future to fund their bullshit, but it should be just as easy for the next generation of politicians to turn off the spigot.

I'm no fan of the f-35, but I think this downplays how much the government itself is responsible for what a shit show that program is. It wasn't Lockheed who demanded a VSTOL version in the same basic chassis. And it wasn't Boeing who signed off on the ridiculous digital boom pod on the kc-46. The problem is a bunch of generals and bureaucrats who have never existed in the business world putting insane wish lists together and just assuming that it all happens somehow. And that ignores changing the requirements halfway through the program, or never mentioning that one of the primary requirements is that the plane looks cool, so you start doing all sorts of mental gymnastics to pick the airplane that you just want to win. And we need to start locking people in prison for the rest of their lives if they abuse these programs for personal gain. No more getting a job at the contractor whose product you selected, and that includes your family. Basically, let's continue the "fix the government" crusade first, then we can worry about which airplanes we buy.

All that talk about hyperbole then you throw this bullshit out. 😂🤣 No you wouldn't. Just admit that. It's a valid position, even if I disagree.

Truly? You said that you, a progressive who voted for a progressive candidate who pitched Donald Trump as the literal end to American democracy, would somehow be more mad if you were a Republican who voted for the Republican president who immediately started doing what he campaigned on doing. And you didn't see how that comment is bananas-dumb? Donald Trump is wiping out the bureaucrats that used administrivia and procedure to thwart and outlast his first administration. He's bringing in experts on efficiency and modernization to slash departments that shouldn't exist in the first place. He's purging an ideology that destroyed our academic institutions and violated the very core principals the country was founded on. I know why you're mad about all of these things, but if you're so delusional to think any of this would make a conservative mad, you clearly do live in a mental bubble with no grasp at all on how other people in this country think. That wouldn't be particularly remarkable except for you've been in a primarily conservative organization for what, two decades? The only thing I'm mad about right now is that we had to wait for a reality TV star with a gold toilet and plastic wife to do what conservative presidents should have been doing for the last 30 years.

This is the dumbest thing you've ever said, and that's quite a threshold.

If that's how it shakes out, I agree. But I think Trump is inclined towards something different, and he hinted at it a couple times when he said they'd have to give something back, maybe a lot, maybe a little. But he understands totalitarianism and saving face, so he's not going to lay out a what the final resolution looks like. My guess is that Putin will announce some amount of territory being returned to the Ukrainians, and then that idiot bashi will be here trying to convince everybody that it was Putin's idea to do so 😂🤣