joe1234

Well, landing distance kind of opens up certain types of missions. Also, epic post bucky. We need brofessors like you to educate future bromosapiens in he-bro culture.

Actions coming with consequences is a two way street, bro. Everyone's a tough guy until it's time to pay the price for it. I'm pretty sure I'm going to catch some sh*t for this, but if you're going to be a man and defend your woman, then take your punishment like a man. Life lesson; if you can't take the punishment, then don't act like a f*cking chivalrous knight in shining armor. The second the pilot laid his hands on the other guy, he became completely responsible for whatever injuries were inflicted intentional or unintentional, which was even further aggravated by the fact that he left the scene and kept partying. Did the groper deserve it? I would say so. But that's what cops and private security (bouncers) are for. I hope defending his girl's honor was worth the legal fees, possible jail time, and whatever his superiors do to his career. Hopefully he'll learn a little bit of wisdom from this experience.

If you think the battery charges will be the end of it, you're sorely mistaken. This guy is completely vulnerable to a lawsuit from the guy who got pushed. Medical bills, reckless endangerment, and mental hardship are all things I can see him getting sued for. I hope he knows the name of a good lawyer because he's in for a long legal battle. Moral of the story, every action has a consequence, no matter how good of a person you are or what your intent was.

go to a hotel and be a valet. easy job, and lots of tips.

So what you're saying is, when you walk into a squadron on the first day, you have to stab the first person you see, or else risk becoming somebody's bitch. Just kidding. Good advice.

Ignorant? Whining? His point is completely valid. This conversation is strictly academic since nobody here has the power to change any of this. Getting married and having kids means that you give up your freedom to live in a house with 3 other guys and save your money. This is a choice you consciously make; people don't just suddenly wake up one day married with children. A guy who decides to stay single, have roommates, and pocket his BAH is someone who has decided to be smart with his money. This isn't "unfair", it's called "living within your means" (a foreign concept, yes, I know). Bursting at the seams with 3br with a family of 4? Come on, give me a break, people do far more with far less -- do you seriously think that you can't make ends meet without that extra money? Maybe you live in a nicer neighborhood than you would otherwise be able to afford. Perhaps you have a bigger house with more rooms. Maybe you have a plasma TV in every room, a nice car, and more creature comforts than you normally would without a subsidy. But these are choices that you make -- having a family, nicer neighborhoods, bigger houses, cooler electronics. You're saying that you deserve a handout because you chose a more expensive lifestyle. People don't get more money because they decide to drive a more expensive car, or wear expensive clothes. But since you decided to start a family, you should be paid more because of it? Hell, you already get tax breaks for owning a house, filing jointly, and having children. Take the money, be happy you get it, but don't sit there and f-cking insult the intelligence of single people by saying you're actually entitled to it.

Sorry for trying to start a discussion in a forum entitled "General Discussion". Anyway, L-Unit, I think you hit it right on the head as far as troop transport. It just wouldn't make sense to take the pilot out of the equation for minimizing risks when there's other people on there anyway. If a UAV goes down, or even an unmanned cargo-only transport, only money is lost. Once you add human lives to the equation, there's literally no benefit whatsoever to making it an unmanned platform.

An unmanned transport? It would have to be something extremely small and light, like the size of a U-Haul trailer. The whole point of the UAV is to overcome the limitations of having human pilots in the cockpit. But for transporting goods, it's kind of a moot point since the aircraft would have to be large and heavy just to move around the cargo, and no remotely-piloted aircraft will ever haul around other human beings. I could see an unmanned transport if it's something used for, say, emergency resupply to a location so heavily surrounded by the enemy that it would be too unsafe to fly in a C-130 or C-27. But, that would be more of a niche for spec ops, if anything.

I hereby invoke Occam's razor: the reason why we have woodland patterns on our uniforms is because America is primarily a woodland environment. If someone were to invade us stateside, desert BDU's would be pretty useless for 90% of the country, wouldn't it?

Wow, insecure much? Nobody was even talking about you.

Whenever I see that someone here "has played a varsity sport", it's always something odd or low-exposure like lacrosse or crew. Or maybe something like track or swimming at a really small school. Now that's fine and dandy, and I'm not knocking it at all, but just because something isn't officially sanctioned by the NCAA doesn't make it any less competitive. Things like club teams, intramurals or even regular pick-up games are every bit as effective. I'd be more interested to see how many people were part of a Division I major conference football/basketball/baseball team.

Well, I'd wager that mx guys have much more pride in heritage than your average mission support guy. When you work 9-4 (2 hour lunch included) with training days every wednesday, you're not exactly sacrificing for the mission. But if you're turning jets 14 hours a day 6-7 days a week, because everyone is counting on you, then it's much more significant. The way I look at it is, if planes stop flying because you're not working, then the job can't get done without you. I mean, if the Comm squadron took the week off, are we going to be scrambling to replace them? How bout contracting? Med group? Services?

Dude, it's a tanker squadron, not the courtyard at Riker's Island.

Wow, thanks for sharing that video. I ended up sending it to some family members (and I never, ever send emails like that).

You know, reading this post was interesting. So you're worried about playing 2nd fiddle? I mean, is your primary motivation here penis envy? You say you like the tactical nature of WSO, but you apparently have a problem with limited command opportunties and not being in charge of the jet. You say you became an officer to lead, but you picked one of the few officer jobs that offers the least capacity for leadership (as opposed to a Mx guy who's in charge of a 100-man flight). It seems to me that you need to figure out what your priorities are, because many of them are conflicting. You obviously understand the risks and ramifications of either decision, and you'll have to live with it for the rest of your life because you really don't get anymore shots at it. The best thing you can do is research your options and find out what you really want from your Air Force career based on your priorities. Once you understand what your priorities are, then the decision is easier because you just simply pick the most compatible choice. Oh yeah, and type A personalities are not laid back. That goes against the very definition of a type A personality.

Well, the main difference is that you're on pavement, not dirt. Also, the bikes are built very differently. In the dirt, you don't really have to worry about high speed cornering, emergency moves in traffic, people pulling out in front of you, etc, etc. The weight, suspension, seat height, and tires are also very different. Also, if you gun the throttle on a Ninja 250, it won't launch you into outer space like a 600cc supersport would. If a Ninja 250 seems too small, then go for a Ninja 500 or a Suzuki GS500. I'm just saying -- get a few months under your belt before you make the leap to a supersport. Once you're able to master a smaller displacement parallel twin bike, you'll be able to corner, do panic breaking, and whatever. Then, when you move up to a 600cc supersport with the skill and confidence to push it to its limits safely and skillfully.

Seconding the fact that some "streetfighters" are wrecked bikes with the fairings taken off. But sometimes they're not. Anyway back to the question at hand -- I'll be perfectly honest with you. Since you obviously don't have that much experience with riding motorcycles, one of two things are going to happen to you. 1) You'll wreck the bike, get scared, sell it and never ride again. Hopefully you won't get injured, though. 2) You'll somehow manage to survive for more than 3 months, and you'll be a horrible rider because you're too afraid of its power. You'll never learn how to ride it properly, nor push the bike to its true capabilities because you lack the experience. In short, you'll be a typical squid. Streetbikes behave completely different than dirtbikes, and cruisers don't have anywhere near the power of an inline-four race replica sportbike like the ZX-6R. The thing accelerates 0-60 in 3.6 seconds. Understand that means that you'd be riding around, inadvertently twist the throttle, and go from 30 to 75 before you even realize what happened. I'll tell you what I, and the people I talk to about riding, always say: buy a cheap, used standard bike like a GS500E, Ninja 250, or Ninja 500. Yes, it's "just" a 250, but they're incredibly inexpensive, and you can sell them for as much, if not more, than what you bought them for 6 months later. To put it in terms you may understand, imagine if some guy with 25 hours in a Cessna came up to you and asked you if it was a good idea to solo a T-38. Except the roles are reversed. Or ignore what I'm saying and get the sportbike. It's your life.

Oh, don't forget the fact that you can just plagarize the absolute living hell out of anything you see. It's not like OPR/EPR's are copyrighted. If you find a guy's OPR that has gone through your current rater and senior rater, steal a few bullets and just replace the information so that it applies to you (obviously you can't lie and say you did something you didn't do). Also, sift through e-mails you've received and/or sent. That's a really good way to gather bullets and save some time. I was able to come up with like 20 bullets in an hour plagarizing and sifting through e-mails this way.

You might have to just bite the bullet and pay taxes now. You can claim to live in whatever state you want, but when the IRS comes after you, you better have your ass covered legally. Ignorance of the law doesn't hold up in court.

I had kind of touched on this in the other thread, but I think I can spout off my opinion in a better context. About ROE: we do not exist in a vacuum. America as a country consists of more than just its military. As such, things which may seem ridiculous to us, such as, say, not bombing a funeral, is probably perfectly sensible to another part. I think the problem that we as military members have is forgetting this. Everyone's an armchair president. Anyway, when I think about the GWOT, I try to take an objective look at both sides. On one side you have the strongest nation in the world with vast resources and a determined and effective military. On the other side, you have a loose network of extremists, fierce determination, yet a total lack of resources. Their primary strength is their ability to life "off the grid" and have a decentralized structure of control. After all, if we knew we could bomb the leadership and "sever the head off the body", it would have been done 5 years ago. I believe that our enemy is a lot smarter than we give them credit for. They know that we abide by treaties and agreements like the Geneva conventions. They know that we can't do certain things because while it brings us one step forward in the GWOT, it takes us two steps backwards in other matters, be it diplomatic relations or domestic support. They also know that despite our ability to place bombs precisely anywhere we want, this precision is completely useless if we don't know who or what to target. And much like the NVA, they realize that the biggest weakness of our military is the will of the American people. Because if the civilians don't support us being there, especially in an election year, we're getting yanked out of there faster than you can say "fall of Saigon". Unlike Vietnam, however, the majority of the voting public still supports us being there -- although this November may tell a different story. So having set all this up, I believe it's good to take the fight to the terrorists and all, but I'm really doubting the long-term effectiveness of it. Terrorists will always exist, and will always regenerate. It's like trying to cut 10 acres of lawn with a push mower. By the time you're done going through it all, the area where you started has already grown back. There's no real measuring stick to see if what we're doing is truly working other than "have we been attacked at home lately?", and even using that is specious reasoning. Here's my concern though: what happens when a far greater and imminent threat comes along that requires more of our attention? Nukes in Iran? Nukes in South Korea? Or any host of possible conflicts. [ 27. September 2006, 21:16: Message edited by: joe1234 ]

You know, I must have seen this at least a dozen times where some guy with a wife and a kid wants to know what airframe to pick that will allow him to take his weekly pottery and couples gardening class, spend time with his kids, and get a degree -- and then there's the inevitable outcry that happens from the old guys. I think that in 2006, as compared with 1986, the line between military life and civilian life is really really blurred. It's almost as if we're just "civilians with really interesting jobs", compared to how it was in the thick of the Cold War. Add the fact that "military" atmosphere is being slowly replaced with a "corporate" atmosphere, and you start attracting people whose priorities don't lie primarily with winning a war, it's inevitable. I guess a better way to put what I'm thinking is...compare the officer's clubs today to the ones back in the day. That's kind of what's happening to the Air Force as a whole. Honestly, the best way I can think of to fix it is proactive mentorship. It sucks to hear old guys talk about working hard and playing hard, when we have to work hard and play nice. Just one man's opinion.

I challenge someone, the next time they go there, to just be completely over the top with various violations. My hypothesis is that it will be so flagrant that everyone will be too shocked to even comment.

Okay, I singled out this quote to point out a disturbing trend in this day and age. Far too much disclosure about things that should be kept private. Want an example? A good one is myspace (god how I hate that site). People will post all kinds of details about their life on there, sometimes flirting with OPSEC. Everybody and their brother has a cheap digital camera and takes pictures where they shouldn't be taken and posts them on websites. Let's not be naive and think that things like the actions in this picture don't happen very often. They do, but nobody knows about it, which is the point. If I get drunk in a bar somewhere around my friends (not frequented by mil), I don't need to have 40 pictures snapped and forwarded to my unit and entire chain of command. Exercise discretion for the love of God. Every time you put up a pic like that, you're offering it up to distorted perceptions that lack the proper context necessary to intepret it. I sort of feel the same way about UPT journals. There are some things in life that you need to discover for yourself and not broadcast to the masses. I'm also disturbed at the trend of terrible web design, but that's a whole different thread.

ouch.

If anyone doesn't mind me asking....can someone give a real world of having good SA? Everyone keeps talking about it, but it's hard to visualize without a frame of reference.