Lord Ratner

Because the political discussions here don't matter. They are mostly people who enjoy the pursuit of knowledge and the mental exercise of defending and dissecting ideas. Civility is maintained through the shared experience of military service and the occasional necessary banning. It's not worth engaging with someone in that context who isn't going to converse honestly. The goal is to be right, not to win. What you do when your point is defeated is very different between those opposing goals.

It's just a test to see if you are willing to lie to support your party. A Republican version of this test might be: "Do you believe Donald Trump knew he was keeping Classified documents that he wasn't supposed to have." Avoiding the question isn't exactly failing the test, but it is a warning sign.

Yes, but this is why free trade is better than "impeded" trade. I don't think many people are arguing that we are better off if everyone applies tariffs to all trade. But what has been missed is what happens in an imbalanced trade regime. No, I don't mean one country buying more than the other. I mean when one country imposes trade barriers on another that is otherwise not reciprocating the barriers, the imbalance can create long-term outflows that have delayed effects far more detrimental than the tariff itself. I recall Yaron Brook making a libertarian argument that almost single-handedly broke my identity as a libertarian. He said if there are two shoe stores in a shopping center, and one is doing business the normal way, but the other has a rich uncle that is subsidizing the shop, allowing them to sell shoes at a much lower price, why should you care? You just get the better price which is better for you. That's it. "The market" will sort out the shoe stores, either by bankrupting the rich uncle or killing the "fair" shoe store, and the survivor will set prices at market rate. Two problems. First, this is anticompetitive behavior that even the US gets touchy with, for good reason. You can see this with Microsoft today. When a new cool product comes out, Microsoft makes a shitty version and includes it in their inescapable Office bundle knowing companies will not spend more for the better product if they are already getting a weaker version "for free." They wait until the new company collapses, then they raise the price of the bundle to account for the addition of the shitty version. In the short term, yeah, the customer got a deal. But in the long term "the market" suffocated a new product in the womb because a behemoth had the capital to crush them, *not* compete with a better product. This is bad. But more importantly, we aren't a shoe shop. We are a nation, and I *do* care if my nation (or specific industries within) are driven into insolvency by unfair competition. We do not have the option of losing. There is a lot (most) of international trade that is a great deal for us. But in many cases countries are using the Rich Uncle of government to undercut the US. Obviously China, and once they have a stranglehold on an industry, surprise surprise, up go the prices. We absolutely should punish nations that subsidize their industry. Not with the goal of ending them, but in a manner that ensures they cannot undercut our businesses through the practice. "Reciprocal," if you will.

Very wise words. And you don't need to be a dinosaur like cleared hot to see the effect 🤣😂. I was talking to a flight attendant recently going through one of the flight schools that shove you into the airlines as quickly as possible. I was stunned to hear that during her PPL training they regularly used the autopilot to get from the base airport to the outfields. Of course I then found out that her instructor was 22 years old that had been flying for a grand total of 2 years. There is going to be a wave of automation babies like we haven't seen in the long time. This same instructor by the way told the flight attendant that PAPIs know what the closest airplane is and then display glideslope information specific to that aircraft, and airplanes behind shouldn't look at the papis until they are number one for landing. Yeah, we've all believed dumb things, but this is pretty wild for someone who's supposed to be teaching students how to fly instruments.

This is entirely dependent on *how* the US tariff policy ends up being implemented. It's pretty obvious right now that much of the current tariffs are designed to strong arm countries into trade agreements that are more favorable to the US. I have no objection to that, and until we see what the next move is from the Trump admin, I can't say if they will be effective or not. Israel dropped all tariffs immediately. That's a clear indicator that they can be very effective as a weapon. Let's see how the "retaliatory" tariff against Israel is modified in response. The second factor is using tariffs as a tool to lower taxes on Americans. I believe it was Bessent who mentioned eliminating all income taxes under $150k and replacing them with tariffs. Doing this eliminates the inflationary nature of global tariffs (targeted tariffs are minimally inflationary) as the spending power of the people is increased by the reduction in income tax. It's also a less progressive tax scheme, which I support. *But* that also requires a coherent long term strategy. I don't expect to see that until the retaliatory tariff regime has fully played out, and with Trump you only get a coherent strategy on very few topics. Immigration, for example. International trade imbalances have annoyed him forever, so it's possible we will have something a bit firmer than normal, but the Trump-haters won't see it because they fundamentally can't ignore what he says and watch what he does. That's not a dig, it's just reality. I've been harping on the failure of globalist trade on these forums for years now, so to me this is all rather exciting. But anyone using the world's biggest speculative stock market bubble as an indicator of *anything* is in lala land. Valuations (from February) are above the pre-great-depression peak depending on which measures you use, and somehow that was right *after* a global pandemic that stopped business for 1-2 years. Come on, we all know that doesn't make sense. It took $12+ TRILLION of government deficit spending to keep things moving, just in the US. And if you go back a little further we still have $6 trillion of magical printed Fed money since the GFC. Tariffs may be the needle that pops the bubble, but there was always going to be a needle.

Arguing with a stranger on the Internet is one thing. Arguing with a stranger who just posts other people's arguments from Twitter is pointless and boring. This website is interesting because it's a relatively small number of people engaging in discussion over a wide range of topics. You are able to build and recall personalities for the different posters here because of it. But when someone just posts a Twitter post, crosses their arms, and says "what about what this person said," now it's not a semi-personal discussion, it's the exact type of anonymous, non-continuous bickering on the internet that has turned so many people into basket cases and rageaholics. I don't care that he's a regular poster, he has become value-add of zero since his goal morphed from trying to prove his point to trying to win by showing how many random blue check Twitter posters agree with him. He can take that shit to Twitter if that's his interest. There are actually interesting people here who want to debate their point of view. He's not one anymore.

The stock market is overvalued by *at least* 33%. If you factor in the ridiculous earnings expectations, 50% would be completely acceptable. So using the market as a gauge of how good or bad tariffs are is absurd. We have been overdue for an economic reckoning based on the irresponsible fiscal and monetary decisions of *both* parties since the GFC. Unfortunately, the tariffs will be blamed for it because people don't think I'm terms of decades, but in days. The world has been living off our system for a long, long time. Hopefully that ends now. Everyone is acting like the world can just stop doing business with the US, but deep down we know that's not true. If we put a tariff on Canada, it hurts us a little. If Canada puts a tariff on us, it hurts us a little. But both actions are devastating to the Canadian economy which is heavily reliant on both selling to and buying from the US. Same for many other nations. The reason you hear such shrill screaming from countries like Canada is that they know if America (as a populace, not just the President) realizes how much we've been funding the growth of everyone else, and that we could have been talking a cut of that action with only minimal pain... Well that represents an existential threat to the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too method of government the West has been living on. If everyone else suddenly has to fund a functional military, and fund their massive social welfare programs, *and* engage in fair reciprocal trade with the US.... They're done. They will bend the knee so long as the anti-American Americans don't trick we-the-people into backing their failed globalist cosmopolitan utopia. Edit: A great example is Qatar Airways. They don't tariff our airlines, but they sure do subsidize theirs. Let's slap some equalizing tariffs on those tickets and see what happens to their traffic.

TL;DR congrats dude.

At American Airlines every time we hit the enunciator panel, we say "6 and 6" to indicate checking that all six Amber lights on each panel illuminated. I think this is the absolute dumbest thing imaginable, and has directly led to legitimate Master caution lights being punched out by accident due to the habit pattern of immediately pushing the master caution button after checking the panel. I've had to change my habit patterns because I do this too. I no longer check for six lights other than during the initial PreFlight when I am checking all the other lights. Now I tap the enunciator panel for half a second, and look at the master caution light itself to see if it remained illuminated. I've got training in May so I'm going to see if there's any appetite amongst the chick airmen for a change here, because it doesn't make sense to be checking all of your lights a bunch of times per flight, but AA is notoriously averse to change.

Funny how some of the coolest machines ever created by man are still somehow not quite cool enough for the egomaniacs. A few extra degrees of pitch or a few extra knots are indiscernible from the ground, yet have cost so many lives.

If it takes you two days to install a washer (instead of an hour) then you probably are an airline pilot 😂🤣. I'll take the two day trip *and* install the washer better than the minimum-wage delivery guy Lowe's sends.

Trust me, it's not his credibility that's in question.

You're flailing.

I wonder if he uses the same venmo that the rest of us use, where the first thing it asks you when you set up your account is to have access to your contacts to sync them. Sure would be some lazy journalism if they didn't check to make sure that's why his phone contacts all appeared in his venmo like the rest of us. Sure would be lazy of the commentariat to run with it without thinking...

This is one of the reasons why I balk at the idea of firing anybody who breaks the classification rules at the highest levels. Yeah, they would take a hammer to an E-3 or an O-4 who did this. But maybe the solution to that isn't to take a hammer to Hillary Clinton or Pete hegseth, maybe the solution is to stop hammering the junior violators in the idiotic hope that it will set the example for everyone else. The example always comes from the top. If we were in a no-shit war with serious consequences, I guarantee you people (not just Democrats) would be after Hegseth's head. We had a great example of this during the unrelated incident of covid. You can't make something more of a threat than it is. The way people respond to it will be a better gauge of how serious the matter is. People knew covid wasn't slaughtering millions of people in the street, and so they acted like a really bad cold was going around. The old and the fat were much more concerned about wearing a mask than the young and the healthy, because those groups experienced a different hazard level. And that's exactly what was happening. As long as the houthis or the Iranians didn't find out about these plans right before they happened, it really wasn't a very big deal to keep it a secret. And even if they had, it would have just fucked up a military operation with a near zero threat of loss to American Life. If this was operation overlord or the Manhattan project, you would see a level of seriousness that we are not going to see under the current conditions.

Does it work as well as signal? That's a real question, I have no idea and never used any of that stuff when I was in. If it does, then smack them on the dick and start enforcing this shit. Unfortunately we're at the point where it is culturally ingrained to use unmonitored communication networks and treat classified like a nothing burger. That's going to be very difficult to root out, especially when each team is only interested in punishing the other side.

You've obviously never been to a shopping mall in Minneapolis.

I guess we'll have to endure the trickle of "new" members who never had anything to say about military aviation on the military aviation forum suddenly finding their voice now that their political world is crumbling around them. That and the fake accounts doing a weak job of mimicking the General Chang troll-job from long ago. I say just ban them. Anyways, obviously the .gov needs to pull it's head out of the sand and develop a SIPR app for high ranking members. It's pretty easy for a captain or low level staffer to go home and simply wait until they are back at work to play around with classified information, but once you hit a certain level there is no "off-duty time." Rather than pretend like everything is going to be discussed in a secure environment, just make a signal app clone for the government and you won't have to worry about some journalist being added to the chat. Keep it at Secret and below, ideally, but either way stop pretending like politicians are going to follow rules set up for a world before wireless.

I answered your questions and addressed your points. Every single one. Any lack of substance is your inability to make a point to respond to 🤷🏻‍♂️. Anyways, this is boring now. Next crisis please.

Off topic? You don't really read much here do you? Is this just somewhere you feel less helpless, because you can say the things you wish you could shout at your coworkers? It's gonna be ok. Promise.

Bud, this isn't that complicated. And you can't just throw quid pro quo around like it's some sort of all-covering Boogeyman. If I pay you to build me a fence, that's a quid pro quo. If instead of giving you money I decide to offer you flying lessons, that's still a quid pro quo. You don't have to like it, but the government is well within its rights to include a certain amount of charity work in exchange for a contract. As long as the law firm has the option to say no, which all the articles you're citing have plenty of examples of law firms that are refusing, then it's not extortion. Where was all the righteous indignation from these law firms when the government was requiring vendors to have a certain number of women or minorities as founders or executives? Suspiciously silent. I have every confidence that a law firm as prestigious as Weiss can survive without federal cheese. And if they can't, like so many other vendors that are about to be DOGE'd, they will adapt or die. This firm chose, voluntarily, to accept the president's offer. His quid pro quo, if you will. 😂 Of course it's not good for the country, but it's just fun watching the progressives roll around on the ground like they're on fire now that their own tactics of the last couple decades are being used against them. They got so comfortable with this one-sided game that they forgot how to lose, and the meltdown has been spectacular.

"No thank you sir, we are not willing to work pro bono as part of a contract with the federal government." That's the Wonder of living in a free country, you can say no. All the other progressive law firms are furious that they didn't do exactly that to save their DEI agendas. Again, Twitter is not a good news source.

Extortion? That's a cute new analysis of the government's responsibility to give money to a company. They weren't threatening jail. They were threatening to cancel contracts. The dude was elected to annihilate dei, secure the border, and/government waste. And to end the conflicting Ukraine. Doesn't matter whether or not you or I agree with those goals, that's what the American people elected him for. But by all means, keep it up. Like I said this is just going to keep Trump's approval ratings higher for longer. Absolutely no Americans would have cared about this specific issue if the Democrats weren't pulling their air out trying to oppose every single thing he does. But think of the law firms!!

Fake news. Literally. There is: Hilarious. I'm sorry, does the federal government have an obligation to pay for the services of a law firm... just because? They were not "targeted" by the executive order, the executive decided to end a services agreement with them based on their actions. Then they changed their actions in order to satisfy their customer, the government, and now they have their customer back. It might be less stressful for you if you tried getting your news from somewhere other than Twitter.

Agreed, up to the point where we start talking about "even one mistake is too many." It's just not a realistic standard. Anybody who is on a tenuously secure legal status in this country should be making sure their legal documentation is in order. Again, I'd love for it to be a smoother, cleaner, more reliable process. But that's sort of wishful thinking is why nothing's been done. Perfect is the enemy of good enough.