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Lord Ratner

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  1. Lord Ratner
    Mostly false parallels here. It is absolutely wrong that he's being criticized. He is a federal official that has *nothing* to do with the power crisis in Texas, and other than getting an emergency declared, which he did, he's useless. When exactly would you like our politicians to spend time with their families? When they're needed most, or when they are not? Ted Cruz is not the leader of Texas. If Abbott had run away to Mexico we'd have a very different conversation. Dodging a deployment? That's your parallel? Do better. No one had to be there in Ted's absence, hell the reduced power usage from his family leaving marginally *helps* the crisis. Generals telling people to quit? What on Earth does that have to do with anything? Acting like "giving the appearance of working" is somehow a virtue is *exactly* the problem I'm identifying. If you want a military analogy that actually applies, how about the generals that expect their staff to stay at the office till 8pm even when they could get some of that work done at home, with their families? How do we feel about that? Saying that "symbolism matters" implies that *all* symbolism matters. It does not. A graduation ceremony recognizes a particular accomplishment of individuals to the people who care. If I forced you to go to my cousin's graduation, would the symbolism matter to you then? We can and should expect our leaders to be where they are needed, when they are needed. We should stop pretending like our government officials are supposed to be superhuman public servants. For the people, *by* the people. Regular citizens engaging in the practice of self governance. We need to stop holding them to a higher standard than we hold ourselves to. This is just a case of people not liking the person first, and finding reasons second. It was nonsense when conservatives did it to Obama for golfing, it's nonsense now.
  2. Lord Ratner
    It's not hypocrisy if you're not doing something that you said others shouldn't be doing. California has had rolling blackouts for decades, as far back as I can remember. Texas had them once during a once in a generation storm. Not much of a parallel. Words matter. And I actually just listened to Crenshaw's podcast on the power crisis. The fact that wind turbines freeze is not the problem. The fact that they get preferential selling priority on the grid is. For all the ceaseless babbling about renewable energies and the green new deal, no one on the left seems interested in discussing exactly how renewable energy would have made the Texas power crisis better. Spoiler alert, it wouldn't.
  3. Lord Ratner
    Like I said, if we value symbolic gestures, we get symbolic leadership. If we value leaders who chose symbolic acts over their families, what hope do we have of getting politicians who place value on the American family? You don't have to give weight to a bad argument just because the opposition is making it. He does not "deserve" irrational criticism. If the only problem with what Ted did is optics, then there's no problem at all.
  4. Lord Ratner
    My civics lessons are a bit old, but what would a federal-level politician do when his state has a problem with power generation? In what universe does this fall to a Senator to deal with? If you have irrational expectations, you will get irrational politicians. If you value gestures over practicality, you will get politicians who specialize in the former and fail in the latter. Our representatives represent us, often quite a bit more accurately than we'd like to admit.
  5. Lord Ratner
    It seems insane that I have to say this, but YES. It's a fucking kid. If we don't even expect the cops to take that level of risk, then we have no standards at all.
  6. Lord Ratner
    I'm with you on Castile, for clarity. It's the perfect example of a failure of policing, and why we need better training and better funding for the cops. But it is not representative of American policing as a whole.
  7. Lord Ratner
    I have faith in the country that enslaved black people, imprisoned japanese people, and wiped out the Native Americans, and a military that played with prisoners at Abu Ghraib and killed civilians at My Lai because I'm capable of recognizing failures without using them disproportionately to characterize the entire system. The perpetual insistence in characterizing "the system" as broken when it is by far a successful and predictable system, with notable deviations, when compared to the rest of the world, is troubling. Just another case of anecdote over statistics.
  8. Lord Ratner
    I have been dropping my schedule to zero (I'm LGA based) for about 2 years now. I've been here for three. Like all airlines, the more time you are willing to invest into learning the system and the contract, the better able you are to make it work for you. I can't even count how many guys I've explained my system to, guys who claim they want to be able to drop more of their schedule, and after walking them through it they tell me it sounds like too much work. And it's true, it's certainly more work than just filling out your preferences for the month, and getting a schedule to fly. But as I said, on an okay month I fly 50 hours and get paid for 90. To do that I spend about 20 minutes on my monthly bid, and about 15 minutes a day from the 18th to the 28th working the trading systems to dump my schedule. Then let's say 10 minutes a day during the month keeping an eye out for trips to fit. I'm no mathematician, but I think I'm still ahead doing that. There's a joke here, American Airlines pilots only hate two things. The wAAy things have always been, and change. The airline is never going to make it easy for guys to have an empty schedule. In their mind that's exactly what reserve is for, and the trade-off is that you don't get to pick what you fly. Ultimately I'm glad that more people aren't willing to take the time to learn to do what I do. Most of them are much more senior than me if they were all running the same hustle, I wouldn't be able to. There's no right or wrong answer on commuting, but it is a simple discussion. You don't get to do any of the things I'm talking about as a commuter. The best you can hope for is to drop your schedule to zero at your assigned base, and pick up regular trips at the base you live closer to. That's an improvement, but it's still a grind. Often it seems like the conversation comes down to a military spouse wanting to live by his or her family after a decade or two of following the member around the world. I try to explain that they're making a choice between who they're going to see more, their family or their spouse. I guess if you're only going to do it for 11 or so years before you have to retire maybe the numbers balance out. It's often hard to convey to someone just how different the job is between commuting and not commuting. It's way more than just driving to work. It's more nights at home. Less stress. Exponentially more opportunities for easy money. Flexibility for how you balance work and family life. I was always able to conceptually understand that before I was a commuter, but after even just a year of finishing a trip and immediately transitioning into "how the hell am I going to get home" mode, hoping someone else didn't have the jump seat, hoping that a passenger wouldn't show up, watching my commuter flights get canceled due to weather, it wears on you. But anyways, yes it's possible, and no it's not a pandemic thing.
  9. Lord Ratner
    Counterpoint, there are *lots* of hustles depending on how much you are willing to learn. I dump my whole schedule before the month starts. Zero hours, zero pay. I then pick up day-of or next day trips as they come up due to sick calls, weather diverts, maintenance, etc. There are all sorts of trips that come up like this, but unlike regularly scheduled trips, these can be *very* inefficient for the company. As an example, I just grabbed a trip leaving tomorrow after dinner. One leg to Tulsa (1:07 hours, includes taxi), overnight, one leg back to DFW (1:25). That's 2:32 hours of on-the-clock time, but 10:30 hours of pay due to our minimum-pay-per-day provisions. 18 hours from the time I get to the airport to the time I'm back in my car driving home. That's all I fly (mostly). One out, overnight, one back, legs of 2:15 or less. So when I get paid for 90 hours of work per month, I only worked 30-50 of those hours. Now, you gotta live at the mega base to pull that extreme off, but my point is, you have options. And the biggest point, repeated over and over and over here, is that living in base *vastly* improves those options. On my third year at AA, during a pandemic, I made (not perfect math): $179k pay + $23k 401k = $202k That's for 300 hours of actual flying on a *non-reserve* schedule, meaning I only fly the days I want and the trips I want. Away from home ~8-9 nights a month, no holidays, no Friday/Saturday night trips (unless the wife wants to come along). The more you put into it, the more you get.
  10. Lord Ratner
    There's one part that the company never wants you to discuss. Nothing stops them from buying as many regional jets as they want and flying them under mainline. The battle between labor and the airlines is a fascinating one for sure.
  11. Lord Ratner
    If you can't see why my opinion is better than yours, we have nothing to talk about. Well... Bye. The others have already covered the errors of your post, but one more I'll add: The race riots were far from organic, and they were not born from the George Floyd murder (murder, not racist murder). They were a continuation of social unrest where protests and riots spring up everytime a black American was killed by the police (or non-black person) in circumstances that were murky enough to exploit. Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, George Floyd, just to name some big ones. Remember Hands Up Don't Shoot? Was that *blatant* fantasy an organic response as well? What's hilarious in your response is almost perfectly timed support of my allegation. Me: The false depiction of a looming apocalypse is exactly the fear mongering tactic politicians are using to generate donations and votes. The side effect is it's making us hate our neighbors You: If you don't understand how the latter [i.e. your side's social unrest] is far more dangerous to our country than the former [my side's social unrest], we don't have a lot left to talk about.
  12. Lord Ratner
    Military units dissenting, journalists being silenced, prominent figures disappearing, protestors meeting firing lines, businesses and property being seized based on political affiliation or identity group... Guys, we aren't close. ~5,000 idiots stormed the Capitol, and were only successful because the police response to rioting was dialed back as a result of the race riot optics. They (aggregate, not a couple here and there) didn't intend to kill people, because of they did there wouldn't be 5 deaths, there would be hundreds. You can even see in the video how they basically walk around the cops. Let's have some consistency. Either the race riots over the summer were worse, and much more representative of us going over the edge, or neither riot represented "barely missing." I think the latter. It's amazing to me how many people on both sides I talk to that think we're right on the edge, yet all of you are sitting on your asses doing nothing. If I truly believed that police were systemically killing black people in our society, or I believed that our Democratic processes were being stolen from us, I'd be taking to the street with my guns as well. I think perhaps the intellectual class has gotten so used to talking in riddles that we've all forgotten how to speak literally. We are literally not close to the edge. Yes, Trump incited a riot. And it was a shameful moment in our history, perhaps one of the most shameful. That doesn't mean it represented an immediate threat to the Constitution or our way of life.
  13. Lord Ratner
    Just disallow US companies from accepting crypto as payment. I don't think it'll be difficult for them to do. Making it go away? Super hard, maybe impossible. But making it too inconvenient to use for practical purposes (like it is now), much easier. It can be a store of value like gold, but if crypto replaces the USD, it'll be a blockchain that the .gov controls, can add or remove coins at will, control the mining fees, and ultimately centralize the mining operation. It's just too far of a reach for me to believe they would allow for the decentralization of money. And the "how" would be the easy part.
  14. Lord Ratner
    Agreed, but I suspect once we come even remotely close to crypto being accepted as currency, the govt will step in. There's a 0% chance the governments of the world relinquish their ability to manipulate the currency. I think any belief to the contrary requires ignoring the last 50 years of fiscal policy.
  15. Lord Ratner
    No, I sure don't. And I've never once claimed that Antifa had us close to collapse. Nor the race riots. Anyone who claims we are close to the edge for *any* reason is simply wrong. There were no tanks rolling on the capitol, no politicians arrested, no process undone. Congress was back in session in a matter of hours. Despite the fact that our political betters have convinced most of their constituencies that the other half of the country is a threat to their existence, it's never been a better time to be alive, and that applies to all demographics. The false depiction of a looming apocalypse is exactly the fear mongering tactic politicians are using to generate donations and votes. The side effect of it's making us hate our neighbors. Long term it may be a self fulfilling prophecy, but in the short term we are nowhere close to catastrophe.
  16. Lord Ratner
    I decided I was going to get into Bitcoin when it was around 12k after the crash, but didn't end up pulling the trigger before it went parabolic. I do think there's a long-term proposition for Bitcoin, analogous to gold and silver. I don't think it's ever going to replace currency because governments are never going to allow their currencies to be replaced, but you're not allowed to spend gold and silver at the grocery store either. I happen to have a fancy new graphics card, so I'm mining etherium (ether), but that's only like 10 bucks a day. I still intend to buy into crypto on a meaningful level, but I just can't make any sort of justification for either of them at their current levels. I think it's going to come down to whether or not you believe there's a market correction on the horizon. If there is, then cash is the only safe haven. Take a look at March and look at what happened to the usual places to hide your money when the stock market goes bad. All of them were down. The market is so heavily leveraged right now that when a real correction occurs, it seems like everybody is forced to sell everything in order to cover their bets. And considering how decimated both silver and crypto were during the last downturn, I would not be surprised to see a similar phenomenon. Granted I don't think it will go back down to 5,000. Also, I would seriously look at Kraken as your exchange. Much more flexibility, much better terms, and the most interesting vision of the way forward. I believe they're somewhat close to getting the first no kidding crypto bank opened up in Wyoming, which will allow for a level of flexibility and exchange between regular and cryptocurrencies that has not existed before.
  17. Lord Ratner
    Well, I did just say she's the (D) version of Trump... So that was kinda the point.
  18. Lord Ratner
    She'll be popular due to a failure of our institutions to protect the American Dream for regular citizens, rise because she is willing to say politically unpopular things that alienate her from the establishment but ingratiate her with her base, use social media to bypass the usual structures and speak directly to her followers, lack any sort of real understanding of the system she wishes to change, continually say things that are factually wrong, not offer a face-saving route for her opposition to side with her, and ultimately fizzle out because she can't make the transition from activist to diplomat and appeal to a broad spectrum of voters.
  19. Lord Ratner
    At some point people will realize she's the (D) version of Trump. I suspect her political fortunes will be similar.
  20. Lord Ratner
    Barely missed? His own vice president shot him down. He lost in every court his legal team entered. It's amazing how we always seem to be on the precipice of catastrophe, yet never fall over the edge. Perhaps we're not as close as our emotions, and political puppeteers, lead us to believe.
  21. Lord Ratner
    I know, right? I was actually beginning to wonder if this was another Chang-level epic trolling, but I don't think so.
  22. Lord Ratner
    Bias and racism are not synonyms. If you are a police officer and the overwhelming balance of interactions you have with criminals are of a certain skin color, as a human you are going to develop a bias. That does not make you racist. We know this because minority police are subject to the exact same bias. Remember how stupid we all thought it was when TSA was patting down elderly white women in wheelchairs? This is a problem to be solved, but any solution is immediately precluded by calling the participants evil, which racism very much is. I think well meaning liberals gravitate towards this narrative because it is a much easier solution. With racism, you just go after the racists. People and policy, find and destroy. But the real solution is probably going to involve the breakdown of the black family unit, and the incarceration of young black men for decades. Nothing about that is going to be quick or easy. Or cheap. Affirmative action in colleges is another example of this phenomenon. The easy answer was to just twist the numbers to get more black people in college. But in many ways black people have paid the price of that ill-conceived solution. The real answer was always to fix black education at the elementary school level, and work up from there. But the results from that endeavor would not be seen for decades, whereas changing college admissions only takes four years to yield hypothetical results. Perception is not reality, but it guides how we act. The more we scream about systemic racism, despite the hard evidence, the more people will believe it. Just like election fraud. I find it almost amusing how each side sees the riots of the other side as inconceivable. I don't. I think the riots were unjustified and certainly immoral based on evidence, but I'm not surprised that they happened. a bunch of well-meaning citizens made the foolish mistake of taking what their politicians and media figures said as truth. What would you do if you legitimately believed that our democratic election process was being stolen from us? I hope that you would have your guns ready and march on the capitol. Likewise if you believed that the police were intentionally killing scores of black people without cause, based only on the fact that they were black, I would hope that you would take to the streets. I would.
  23. Lord Ratner
    Another stupid comment designed to make you feel better about your virtue. My station in life is completely unaffected by policing and black people. But I have an ethical interest in the matter. Misguided progressive policy, often based on gross misinterpretations of cause and effect, have a historical and frightening way of creating the problem they claim existed the whole time before failing to solve it. We all have an interest in preventing this.
  24. Lord Ratner
    Actually, they are both bullshit, that's exactly what I'm saying. You have a neat way of selectively picking which talking points "represent" a particular side, while conveniently ignoring the others. The fact of the matter is that overwhelmingly what was claimed during the race riots was bullshit. It's not even worth the time to pull up the nearly endless list of prominent leftists making claims as to the fatal nature of black people interacting with the police. But never numbers. When your cause can't be quantified in any way without discrediting the cause then the problem is the cause itself. These riots weren't about getting pulled over more, or getting side eye from a convenience store owner, or gang violence, hell they weren't even about the very real issues of incarceration impacting the ability of black communities to dig out of a very deep hole. Overwhelmingly they were about police brutality towards black people. And the most prominent cases, used as evidence of a systemic attack on black bodies, were misrepresented in ways that discredit the entire argument. And it was merely a continuation of the same lie, with different names and different cases fed into the narrative. Michael brown, trayvon martin, and now George Floyd. The bad old days of overt American racism are over. They have been for a while. The Civil Rights movement never required the mental gymnastics we see today to justify their protests, and yes, riots. It was plain to see for everyone, and because of such they were triumphant. The difficulties with race in 2021, and specifically within the black community, are much more difficult to address. There is no boogeyman, no villain to unify against. Not whiteness, not the police, not the system. But if I were to apply your logic to it then in fact the capital riots weren't about Trump or election theft, they were very legitimate protests against widespread yet nearly impossible to document election fraud, and just because a few crazies went a little too far, that shouldn't get in the way of the very legitimate and well-documented cause that they are supporting. There is no mortal threat to the black population in the United States from any element of the government, least of all the police. Minimize that claim all you like, but the rest of us don't need to be moralized over taking an argument at face value. One that was made over and over and over for a few years now. There was also no stolen election. Trump lost because Trump is a fucking moron, that's it. Yeah there are plenty of videos unequivocally proving voter fraud, but they are hundreds of votes out of over a hundred million. Neither statistic justifies the response, thus making the riots, on both sides, bullshit. It's completely chicken shit to tell everybody who disagrees with your narrative that they're just defending whiteness. I'm a fucking cuban jew, for Christ's sakes. You think I have a lot of cred in the white supremacist community? You can call out a lie for what it is without having an affinity for your own skin color.
  25. Lord Ratner
    So we can at least agree that the BLM race riots started in May were based on a lie and fueled by lies, and directly in conflict with the reality of society in 2020. Just like the Capitol riots were based on a lie and fueled by lies, and directly in conflict with the reality of the 2020 election. So why is it then, when it's the best time to be alive, including if you're a black man or woman in America, do people on both sides of the political spectrum feel like the situation is so dire that they must literally set fire to the streets? I suspect it's because of the people we are meant to rely on to tell us the truth, politicians, scientists, media figures, and intellectuals, have decided that winning is more important than honesty. It used to be that Republicans were always on their back foot in this game, because there was a line they didn't seem willing to cross. The Trump era has put an end to that. It seems like the only differentiation between Republicans and Democrats anymore is which lies they fight over.
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