Lord Ratner
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Posts posted by Lord Ratner
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1 hour ago, HeloDude said:
Pretty sure we can have that without being the world’s policeman and massive defense spending every year. And I would argue that we have less liberty and freedom in this country this bigger our government gets (and yes, thar includes defense spending).
Sure we can, and yes we do. I was addressing the words he chose to use, not the ones you might have used instead.
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12 hours ago, DSG said:
The ideological zealotry of the American elite, however, is uniquely insufferable and dangerous.
You just keep saying absurd things. Uniquely dangerous? Insufferable?
How many of our citizens have we slaughtered on the shrine of Americanism? Where is our Stalinist purge?
The suffering of the American people at the hands of our politicians, regardless of how incompetent, is only unique in how minimal it has been
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2 hours ago, DSG said:
Abroad, America has little moral leg to stand on, to put it mildly.
And which countries are the icons of morality in your mind?
Especially considering you just said this, pardon me for considering this statement a bit ironic.
2 hours ago, DSG said:“Ethics and morality” are made up.
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I guess it could be a little different for a general, but for an Article 32 judge to recommend against court martial, you must have absolutely zero evidence against the defendant, and possibly some particularly incriminating evidence against the alleged victim.
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4 minutes ago, ClearedHot said:
I have a bunch of rental properties and am constantly getting dumped to "reduce exposure". Going through that process and dumping USAA I found AutoOwners actually has great service, rates and ratings. I use them for our auto insurance, a couple of rental properties and have a big liability policy to umbrella my LLC. It sure feels like USAA is circling the drain.
I haven't been able to put my finger on it exactly, but I suspect it has to do with artificially low interest rates. In that environment, where retained profits do not make any money, it seems like all businesses eventually create an obsession with growth-at-all-costs, and we get the strange business world we have now. Unfortunately it's such a complicated issue that most people are simply looking at it and saying that capitalism has broken. They have a point, but I am afraid of the solutions when you think that business, rather than government intervention, is the root cause.
USAAcould have remained a military only company and done quite nicely in perpetuity. But that would have meant little to no growth.
You can see the same thing with all the private equity nonsense in the hospital and retirement home world. There's going to be a reckoning from all of this, and it's not going to be pretty.
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19 hours ago, Bergman said:
Don’t forget “Life isn’t fair”.
Rule 1: Timing is everythingRule 2: Life isn’t fair
Rule 3: There is no justice
Honorable Mention: Never trust a shoe clerk
This is incorrect. "There is no justice" and "life isn't fair" are the same thing.
Timing is everything
It's better to be lucky than good
There is no justice.
The real core values of the air force and life in general.
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1 hour ago, DSG said:
The psychology of emotional investment in this conflict is as bizarre to me as professional sports enthusiasm, but far more perverse.
It shouldn't be. You are no doubt emotionally attached to other things that people find bizarre. It's basic human nature.
Just look at bashi, perhaps the most emotional person on this entire forum, he's just emotionally attached to the other side of the argument.
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13 hours ago, HeloDude said:
So Hawaiian and Alaskan won’t get to merge? Honest question as I’m pretty ignorant on the subject.
I haven't been following it closely, but this administration is against mergers. As far as I've seen, strong economies induce liberals leadership, and modern liberalism distrusts business. So without huge concessions, I'd be surprised. It's not just airlines, the Adobe/Figma merger was blocked for no logical reason. So we'll just have to see
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The thing about self hosting is that once you realize what's possible, you tend to want it. If money isn't a driving factor, get a TrueNas Scale box.
It's got a great interface, it's easy to add modules to it, and most importantly, there's a large community of users so you can Google answers to problems you have. I would set it up as RAID5/Z-1.
The downside with truenas is that you have to buy all your drives at the same time and they all have to match. Some of the other solutions allow you to add random drives as you go, but it's less efficient.
If you're truly going to self-host your own backups, you will need a second box at a second location to clone your data to. All the raid drives in the world won't stop a fire from annihilating your data if it's stored it one location.
Use the simple box from Synology or similar as the off-site backup.
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How technically oriented are you? Comfortable with Linux?
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13 hours ago, uhhello said:
It's funny how soft his voice gets when he's answering questions he'd rather not answer.
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The government will only allow airlines to merge in bankruptcy. You have the dumbest executives in business running the airlines and the dumbest people in the West running the governments. Don't expect anything to make sense.
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21 hours ago, HossHarris said:
The lack of pictures here is disappointing. My how things have changed.
(get off my lawn)
You think the winner of Miss America in this era is based on looks?
There's a minimum physical threshold, sure, but after that it's just another organization run by out-of-touch elites desperate to show their "peers" how virtuous they are by "dismantling" their organizations as sacrifices to the non-binary gods of wokism.
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2 hours ago, bfargin said:
I love how crappy the news is in vetting information. They keep reporting that she is the first AF member to ever compete in Miss America when this thread provides proof that statement is not true. Do news agencies even bother with legitimate fact checking, or is that job relegated to making sure nobody ever (news, social media, politics) says anything against leftist dogma?
Why? They are an advertising business, and the first outlet to drop the story gets the most traffic from the algorithms, and thus, the most ad money.
The incentive structure for online news completely explains the abysmal quality.
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8 hours ago, Chuck17 said:
Standing by for another round of O6 command selection in which no less than a half-dozen-newly-selected wing commanders and vice wing commanders will by mystified (and somehow pissed) that they popped for a UPT O6 command because they were FAIPs once.
Happens every time (somehow)...
Chuck
How is that not the dream job?
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On 1/10/2024 at 7:11 PM, Smokin said:
Don't forget that the Ryan Air airport is up to 2 HOURS from the city named on the ticket. Made the mistake of flying Ryan Air to "Oslo". Two hour bus ride from the airport and we finally got to actual Oslo.
Yup. I got burned by that in Venice.
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On 1/5/2024 at 9:00 AM, pilotfish01 said:
Internal struggle? It just sounds like you, and he, have issues with trying to punish women just for existing. You both should probably get some help on why you hate them and can't provide leadership when you can't control them. Even so, the AF and DoD are better off with people in that mindset not in leadership positions. Or really in at all. Your bigotry is old and worn out.
Tell me you've never had children without telling me you've never had children.
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7 hours ago, ClearedHot said:
This will be interesting...
I doubt anything is going to come from that. The new policy did not specifically single out firearms, it used the standard catch-all of "shaft." And it has absolutely nothing to do with consumer text messaging.
Sure, it's possible, but until they start fining gun companies for sending out legal 2A promotional material, it's probably going to end up being much ado about nothing.
We seen to be entering a (much welcomed) era where businesses are trying to distance themselves from political topics. Buds Light and Disney are serving as the cautionary tales. I hope it continues.
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5 hours ago, Danger41 said:
What I see coming out of USAFA is a bunch of cynical weirdos that seem to have gotten an accelerated education on bitching about everything, knowing the levers to pull for career advancement, and (in a sad amount of grads) a lack of warrior spirit that I can only assume isn’t inculcated at the Zoo*.
And you think ROTC is spitting out anything different? Nonsense.
I taught pilots from every commissioning source. They were all fucking morons with the exception of one group, the prior-enlisted.
Maturity, confidence, and wisdom come from experience, and experience requires independence. The prior-e's weren't smarter. Most were actually dumber, and well aware of it, but they knew how to make decisions on their own and act in a professional, non-college non-frat non-dorm environment. That's why they got picked over the other enlisted who didn't mature as well or as much. The academy kids knew how to study in a way that made pilot training easier, but that only gets you into the jet. Good hands were agnostic of the commissioning source.
Once the zoomies and ROTC dorks had a little unsupervised life under their belts, the groups were mostly indistinguishable. But I suspect the academy sets the example that ROTC lives up to. I mean the programs themselves, not the cadets in them. After all, we never sent Zoomies to the ROTC programs (that I know of), but they sure did send them to us.
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4 hours ago, ThisGuy said:
Fired by the new AFLCMC commander who had an official taking command ceremony a couple weeks ago. I'm at W-P and this is interesting.
Sent from my SM-N960U using Baseops Network mobile app
Do we get to hear the interesting part?
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3 hours ago, FourFans said:
Why do we have UPT? Just take civilian pilots with commercial licenses and go straight to the FTU. After a couple years you won't notice the difference.
And why do we have ivy league schools anyway? It's not like you can't become a doctor or a lawyer online. Just do that instead.
Having trained UPT 2.0 students, the answer is clear: You don't realize what you have until you don't have it anymore.
If you want a high quality product, you create competition and a set a high bar. That's what every elite university does, or should do.
Judging that process by the vocal minority of arrogant asshats it creates is not how you measure the quality of the process.
Yes, military academies need to improve (and get rid of the social experimentation bullshit). So does EVERY university. If you can't understand the reason for having a process that's competitive and pursues creation of elite levels of education, university level R&D, and leadership, you're seriously missing the point.
Zero hit the nail on the head. We need USAFA and the other Academies to live up to what they're supposed to do: create and cultivate high quality mission focused military leaders. I think they still do that to a degree, although they've noticeably strayed into social activism. That means they need to course correct, not cease to exist.
The academy didn't stray, society did. It will continue to stray until Something Very Bad happens that reminds society of the importance of serious thinking. If we win that struggle, we will have another century of seriousness and success.
Rinse and repeat.
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7 hours ago, bfargin said:
YGTBSM ... allow almost the total number of American war deaths (from all of the wars we've fought to date - 1Mil vs ~1.3Mil) to save Guam?
7 hours ago, ViperStud said:and Hawaii,
7 hours ago, bfargin said:ceding them both
This doesn't have to be that hard.
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2 hours ago, ViperStud said:
Source?
It is a fairly reliable claim. Very early on there was at least talk of a negotiated truce before everything got really ugly. Whether or not that ever would have happened is speculation we will never know.
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3 hours ago, BashiChuni said:
Disagree. But nice dig.
Sorry dude, you communicate like a frustrated toddler. If I had to bet on who's just the random person on the forum, and not an educated officer with leadership experience, you are probably my top guess.
And considering we have Biff here now, that's saying something 🤣😂.
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Russian Ukraine shenanigans
in General Discussion
Posted
Yeah, and that sucks. Believe me, the immigration crisis is infuriating. But you think it's better in Europe? Asia? South America?
Something can suck and still be the best. It's a sad indictment on where we are, but it's reality.