nsplayr

Correct! They are not a big force in the country at large. I am way more involved in democratic politics than average and have never met someone who would describe those groups as one of their primary identities. I’m glad we agree.

This part I fully agree with!

My statement holds, I don’t know any of the people in the video. Anyone on the left calling for a civil war is a dangerous moron that no one should listen to…just like anyone on the right! Or the center. Theres not going to be a civil war, our politics is not substantially more radical than in the past, but we do need to actively stick together and move the country forward if we want our kids to enjoy the gift we were all given at birth (or naturalization) - a great country.

The library is very fun, gotta agree on that. We do have a ping pong table and an oculus video game setup in the bar though, so those were pretty convincing to a middle schooler.

No one I know left-of-center talks about a civil war 🤷‍♂️ Joe Biden, an old white man and long-time senator is president, and the GOP holds the house. Not seeing some insane liberal agenda washing over us anytime soon. jUsT aSkInG fOr InSaNiTy To StOp ok what do you mean by that?

This is the way. Congrats on winning at life 🍻

Thank you for bringing actual data. Also thank god were all safe from the Woke DEI nightmare that’s ruining civil aviation and compromising safety! /sarcasm Not a dig at you personally, just the general vibe where too many people take their desired biases and graft them into whatever the issue is.

The only people who talk about and wishcast a civil war are on the right. Law enforcement is not fomenting a civil war. You can’t just “Ooh, look what you made me do” into a civil war.

Ok Hercules, flying planes ain’t that hard 😂

Agreed 1000% on this. When she was a bit younger my oldest daughter told me she didn't know if she wanted to be a pilot because (sic) all the pilots are boys. She did think more about being a librarian because that's what my wife is and guess what, school librarians skew WAAY female. Now she's settled on psychologist - great, good luck with that - funny thing is that she's so far only met female psychologists so maybe she's still a strident sexist (as most kids are in my experience). 😅 I mean, if my kiddo doesn't want to be a pilot for other reasons that's fine, she's allowed to be wrong, but it should not be because she can't envision herself doing it and assumes there's a gendered component to the job just based on how the demographics are today. There is in fact no part of the MQ-9 GCS that you must operate with your penis, I'm continually disappointed to report... I had to work to introduce her to some women in my squadron because I'm selfish and want a little Guard baby legacy nipping at my old-man heels...problem is there are only 3 ladies who are pilots out of ~55 of us maybe? Not that any of my bros aren't talented and dedicated and deserving of the jobs and all of that, but can you see from a little girl's perspective how it looks? Great, so let's get with kids early and given them all access to good opportunities to succeed and then later on when we're selecting for competitive, highly-paid, highly-valued careers, people have a shot no matter what they look like or where they grew up. I think most people are on board with that in principle. The rub becomes when you look at the current situation for ATP pilots, that are 95/5 male and 86.9% white (this is a WAG) and see something that isn't the same selection pool as in the kindergarten class, you should absolutely want to look why and figure out if what we're doing right now is truly achieving the above-agreed upon ideal, and then if not, work toward fixing it. Major airline flight academies are a great way to start this IMHO - start with zero, train all or mostly in-house, funnel to the regionals and main lines when the puppies have met FAA mins and desired experience, train to succeed or cut loose along the way if it's not a good fit. There are tons of people not cut out to be airline pilots because they are dumb, indecisive, won't work hard, etc., 100%. But I firmly believe those undesirable traits are also fairly evenly spread amongst all genders, races, etc. just like the good qualities. Again, you don't just hire the black trans Romanian with zero flight hours when she shows up at an interview with Delta, I don't think anyone wants that, but you do work to disassemble the structures that lead to undesired unequal outcomes that are a symptom of poorly-distributed talent.

@Grabby As I’ve mentioned several times, there’s some imbalance that’s expected due to preferences. Is it 50/50, 60/40, 70/30, etc. I don’t know, don’t really care one way or the other. But it ain’t 95/5, especially for a lucrative and well respected career field. You have to see that something there is probably not ideally distributed. You have some low-performers in the 95% group who can and should be overlooked for very talented folks in the 5% group who haven’t been given a shot. Percentage wise there are more male elementary school teachers than female ATP pilots, and I can tell you for sure elementary education doesn’t pay for shit and is not high-status. It’s worth thinking about how we arrived at 95/5, what talented folks we’re missing out on because of that, and figuring out ways to move toward a better mix that actually maximizes talent in the long term. I personally know many extremely talented & valuable PhDs, JDs, MDs, etc. that would have never been in those career fields even one generation ago due to racial or gender norms of the time. It’s much better for everyone that we’ve moved beyond that today, and my point that hits close to home perhaps is that ATP pilots as a group are well behind the 8-ball in this regard.

I mean, more or less 😅 Simplified for simplicity’s sake. But yes, what I wrote is not the full story, there are many good books that tell it better.

It’s not that you should have quotas or some of the other excesses of modern DEI warriors. But just ask yourself if, given that talent is relatively evenly distributed (maybe you don’t believe this), what led to a certain career field still being 95/5 split in 2023? Is that a desirable end state? There was a time when basically all prestigious career fields were approx 100% male. Doctors, lawyers, surgeons, elected leaders, CEOs, etc. That’s no longer the case, and I say that’s for the better for everyone. Maybe you don’t believe that either. ATP pilots are a bit of an outlier still being so highly male, why is that? Like I mentioned, even some of the most stereotypically female careers (that pay way less) are more gender-balanced. Some imbalance is due to preferences and all else, but 95/5? Likely not. I actually, no-shit, believe that diversity across numerous dimensions makes us stronger and it’s ok if you don’t, but that’s the foundational belief for supporting programs that help bring underrepresented people into high-status, important fields. Trying to give voice however imperfectly to the other side of a lot of what’s posted here.

Yea I agree with almost all of this. It does make you wonder when there’s a highly desirable, lucrative and respected career that’s 95% one gender (or race or whatever), that’s not what you’d expect to naturally occur. Probably worth putting some effort to assess if that makes sense or if it is a societal effect that’s not actually helping make that career field better. Don’t hire people because of their race or gender or whatever or hire unqualified people, but open up your recruiting lenses and offer opportunities and push people who are underrepresented to apply. There are amazing, top 10% future pilots we’ll miss out on if you don’t do those things, and you’ll have to hire instead more center- or below-center-of-mass in-group folks just to fill the seats. I’ll say it again, there’s a brittleness to too much sameness. Fully agree that modern DEI stuff is usually insane so don’t put that evil on me Ricky Bobby.

I mean TBH if you have a relatively average town demographically and the pee-wee basketball league is like 75% black kids at age 5…yea you probably should encourage more white boys and girls to play! Never know when you’re gonna find the next Alex Caruso 😂 #WhiteMamba. Did you see Mac McClung win the dunk contest? VA white boy, represent! Same goes with super early pilot training or pipeline programs…you have not selected for any skill or experience at all at that point, and because I believe talent is evenly distributed, yea you should try to have a relatively representative group. Same story also for stuff like ROTC - you don’t want your Officer corps to be all male, all southern, all white, all middle class, etc. Those things are all fine (I am all four!) but there’s talent elsewhere too that you’d miss if you just let societies proclivities and stereotypes run rampant forever. There’s a brittleness that comes with too much sameness that can be hard to see when you are part of the in-group. Your current crop of ready & willing ATP holders in 2023, yea you hire who’s most qualified now when there’s severe need; don’t hire some random trans black Romanian or whatever with zero flight hours just because. This is your NBA red herring and why there’s no affirmative action for talentless white wanna-ballers like myself. But that’s not happening. Anyone saying we’re less safe in commercial aviation today because of DEI is full of shit unless they have very convincing receipts. Thinking long-term though, as the airline CEOs are / should be doing, you can do better when you home-grow people like the majors are starting to do with these fight academies. I have two daughters with zero flight hours each, but there’s absolutely no reason they should not envision themselves as ATP pilots when they grow up nor should there be a lack of great opportunities for them to pursue that if they so choose. Representation and opportunities do actually matter, especially in high-powered, high-status careers, and I hope to see more of both for my girls or other young people like them who are not well represented in cockpits today.

I’m just saying don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. The annoying CBTs, the intolerably weird seminars, etc., yea those aren’t helping. The DEI industrial complex is a thing and it pretty much sucks - 69% of them are a bunch of grifters of you ask me. BUT, there’s no reason the flight deck (or the boardroom or wherever else) has to be so radically skewed white and male, or female, or whatever else depending on the field. But for aviation it’s definitely white and male. IMHO talent is relatively evenly distributed by race, gender, etc., so if your institution is not, you are accepting more mediocrity than you should. If there are some no-shitter physical characteristics that are essential to screen for, ok. That doesn’t really exist for airline pilots, yet the group is 95% male and I’m sure very overly represented by white people as well. And while I’m sure the vast majority of current pilots are well meaning and we’ll qualified, you don’t just continue to accept an objectively weird situation with that kind of imbalance forever. Give more opportunities to folks who are underrepresented and you’ll find tons of excellent pilots, more than if you remained hemmed in by your very off-kilter, limited historical selection pool. That’s my opinion at least. It’s not hard quotas or interviewing people with freaking bags over their heads, it’s nuts seeking out talent broadly and nurturing opportunities for everyone. Feel free to disagree if you’d like.

Well half of the population is women, technically more than half of you consider all ages, so that makes sense! If you’re taking people literally off the street and making them pilots all in-house, you should at bare minimum expect to start with ~50% women, right?

I mean, I’m a normal liberal and I am ok with some of the milder DEI initiatives to give more opportunities to folks who have historically be underrepresented in fields like aviation or finance or whatever. You…are having weird dark fantasies about putting hoods on people and conducting super weird interviews. 🤷‍♂️ 95% of ATP holders are men for example…there’s just no believable explanation for how we arrived at that by chance or “merit” alone. There is some natural & mostly benign career sorting by gender and that’s ok, but it ain’t 95/5. Shit, 14% of nurses are men and 11% of elementary teachers are men…and yet women are only 5% of airline pilots, a career that’s much more lucrative and provides better benefits? My wife is/was an elementary teacher and you sure as heck don’t do that job for the money or prestige, let me tell you. Anyways, I digress. I don’t even really wanna debate any of this because I know y’all’s positions. I’m just here to say that as a normie liberal I think about race/sex/gender/DEI culture stuff WAY less than some of y’all on the right appear to. It’s not even in my top 20 list of things I care about, and there are way more people like me than terminally online lefty weirdos. So please just ignore them as much as you can, like I do.

It kind of makes sense Re: Juneteenth, although having both be an Independence Day is weird and confusing. Just using the word Juneteenth makes sense to me and if people don’t know they can learn. I had never heard of that word/concept until I was an adult…southern public school education and all. Lots of foreign holidays are random proper noun words rather than descriptive holidays like most of ours are. If people can understand Halloween they can understand Juneteenth. Emancipation didn’t equal independence, and that’s kind of the whole point of the holiday. Lincoln emancipated all of the American slaves on Jan 1 1863, yet not all were free until Jun 19 1865.

ChatGPT already works well for OPR bullets and I’m sure it’ll be good at the narrative format too! This man is a lifelong Guars Bum and invented time travel, bravo! 😆

Don’t count out simplicity. VTSAX and then spend those free brain bites on hand-building a wooden canoe or a kit bush plane or whatever. To each his own. While I think a lot about investing and spending and optimization and the psychology around all of it, I spend next to no time thinking about particular funds or trading or any of that. So many people I know spend TONS of time thinking about that stuff, especially trading, and I’m just not convinced the juice is worth the squeeze unless you really love the thrill of it. I also don’t really enjoy gambling or sports betting so maybe it’s just who I am and I get that people are different. Simple stock indices, simple bonds, some real estate, a mil pension eventually. More than sufficient for me at least to feel rich as hell.

I just meant in life, compared to all earners. Top 5% and up for potentially 20+ years, quite fantastic. Not meant to mean uncommon for legacy carrier airline pilots (or doctors or lawyers etc.)

Just to clear up a couple of things: 1. Having your last dollar in the 32% federal income tax bracket does not mean that every single one of your dollars is taxed at 32%. This is a good breakdown. 2. If indeed you're married and subject to the 32% federal income tax bracket, mazel tov, you're making a boat load of money. For married joint you'd pay $69,295, and then 32% of anything over $340,100. Even for an airline dude, making over $340,100 is fantastic pay. Notice that if you managed to make exactly $340,101, your federal income tax bill would be $69,295.32...i.e. ~20% of your income...the 32% only affects that very last dollar in this case. If you're single, then the limit is a lot lower, but the same principle applies. 3. If you're a a high-earning salaried employee like an airline pilot, it's pretty likely you'll be paying less on your retirement distributions than your current income, so traditional IRA/401K may be a better bet for your. YMMV. Lots of opinions on which is appropriate for every situation, and the decision somewhat depends on what you believe about future tax rates, which are not knowable with certainty. Some people even recommend tax treatment diversification i.e. some in traditional, some in Roth accounts, so you're not making the optimal choice but you're also not 100% making the suboptimal choice either. 4. My own thoughts are that Roth is superior if you have access to it (more complex if making a boat-load of money in income) unless you're going to take what money you save in taxes now and invest even more, in order to make up for the fact that you'll owe taxes (you hope at a lower rate) at a later date. Few people actually do this, although if you're a huge saver you might be savvy and disciplined enough to follow through every year. Roth is kind of a forced discipline, because you take your medicine (taxes) now, and when you withdraw decades in the future when you're fat/dumb/retired, you're in the clear. If you're even having these conversations though you're 100% on the right track to being wealthy and having the option to pass on a chunk of that wealth to your children or charitable causes of your choosing. Final piece of advice is to read this book (Die With Zero by Bill Perkins). BL: don't die with too much money wishing you had done more awesome stuff! Same goes with giving, either to your children or charity. Would your kids be better off with some of that money at age 30 rather than all of it at age 70+? Could your chosen charities use that money today instead of 50+ years from now? The book gave me a lot to think about. The problem of dying with too much isn't common, but it's probably is far too likely for the folks posting here (high-earners, disciplined, etc.).

Wow I haven’t heard those words literally in decades, but gawd damn if that ain’t rock solid truth 😂