ViperMan

Do what @brabus said. The mil retirement is worth a lot, so if you can get it, I recommend it. It's inflation protected, not subject to 15.3% payroll tax, and as such is worth a substantial bit more than its apparent paper value.

Me either, but I don't understand this nitpick. These "soldiers" are making choices. You can feel sorry for them, but why feel guilty about having to kill them? They could desert, rebel, mutiny, shoot their commanders, all sorts of other options. Instead, they choose to conduct a war of aggression. I don't feel sorry for people who are taking the "easy way out" by choosing to kill innocent people. Would you allow one of these guys who "didn't have a choice" kill your family? I know you know the answer.

How long have you been in the AF? You should know this doesn't mean shit.

Don't need to know anything about Putin. And yet, they had a choice. I'm sure it was a bad one, but they had a choice. You don't not shoot someone who is conducting a home invasion because "they didn't have a choice." Please.

These soldiers can blame Putin all they want (and so can we) - and he does deserve blame - but at the end of the day, you are responsible for your actions, and if you decide to make war against innocent people, then you've made your bed and can lie in it for all I care. All these troops had a choice. It may have been a shitty choice, but they made a choice to conduct a war of aggression and to invade a sovereign nation without justification.

Exactly like that.

Anybody got a line on a part-time technician job(s)? Either real or in the works? Anyone ever heard of such a thing? Want to keep my military affiliation post-retirement, but on my terms.

You know how the USA Women's soccer team gets better? They play 15-year-old boys' teams. And they get smoked by them.

More people would take you seriously if you could offer a coherent theory that explains all manner of differences in gendered choices people make when selecting career fields. You think that women are kept out of becoming pilots due to...barriers? Okay. What are they? And if those are barriers keeping women out, then how about you explain why there are other career fields that have drastically worse gender gaps than piloting does. Don't think 95/5 can just happen? Ok. How about 98.8/1.2? How about 99.7/.3? What about 99.2/.8??? That's all unnatural according to you. Your view doesn't explain anything. You assume a conclusion and then point to data to support your argument. Problem is, your argument doesn't account for any of the (worse) differences below, and has no actual hope of addressing or explaining them. You need to explain why piloting at 95/5 is anomalous, but yet these other outliers are not. I'll wait. No. The simple answer is being a pilot appeals to more to men, and has other some other attendant difficulties that make it tougher on women - such as being away on the road for days and weeks at a time - but that has nothing to do with discrimination. Here's a fact: any women who wanted to be a pilot as bad as I did is a pilot. Some who wanted it less than I did are still pilots. Most who wanted it way less than that aren't. Nothing is stopping anyone from doing this job, or any other job listed below, except themselves. Men and women are different and that's ok. We evolved different strengths in order to be a more adaptable species. It's really quite simple.

Dude, just take the W and a deep breath. Non-response / misdirection is stealth acquiescence. You won.

One additional benefit of having a Roth IRA even if you are a "high" earner is that it becomes a vehicle you can use to take extreme risk if you choose to. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to purchase bonds in your Roth IRA. It could make a whole lot of sense to invest in something with unlimited upside...

Do you sincerely think this war would still be raging if Russia could win? Like, for real? Dude, come on. No. This "war" is now about Putin's pride and him being able to save face. Russia ain't winning shit. Flip the script. 1991. It's taken us a year and a month and we're still not all the way to Baghdad. We've lost a 100,000 troops. Untold more have been maimed. Would you still think our victory was right around the corner if the shoe was on the other foot? It sounds like you would be quite the cheer leader. Victory is right around the corner! Get real. Putin has lost. I mean holy shit, it hasn't even devolved into a state of insurgency yet. Putin doesn't have a guaranteed victory. It is far more likely that this war ends in a stalemate ala the Korean War.

All I can say to the DOE is "duh." The rest will come around in due time. You'll see we become "more confident" in our assessment of the lab leak theory as tensions continue to rise with China. This, in and of itself, will indicate exactly why it was dismissed as conspiracy at the very beginning.

WTF did anyone expect? I mean this administration's primary selection criteria to choose people to run something is what color skin they have, what type of genitals they've got, or what type of hole they shove their 8ick in. Note: Use of the term '"they" in the above is in the old sense of the word. Not the newfangled and imposed genderless nonsense it is now sometimes used to denote.

I'm pretty sure all officers and higher up Es are due single billets...notwithstanding deployment.

@FourFans130 and @jice, I was being intentionally a little provocative. I agree the rest of the constitution matters, but I do think the 2nd amendment is categorically unique. It speaks to the primacy of violence. Which at the end of the day, underpins every system man has created.

No American troops are engaged. Soooooooo, what's your point? You're worried about things that aren't happening? Sometimes, country's foreign policy goals happen to align, that doesn't mean they are dictating our foreign policy. By the way, back in the 90s, we guaranteed Ukraine's security in exchange for them giving up their nuclear arsenal - which was the 3rd largest in the world (bigger than China's). Here's a liberal source for you to brush up on: https://www.npr.org/2022/02/21/1082124528/ukraine-russia-putin-invasion So yeah, in some (real) sense, we owe them. Just like some other country would owe us...you know, if we agreed to give up all of our nuclear weapons in exchange for security...but you know, who cares about promises at the end of the day. Amirite?

Foolish war is an oxymoron. We're already there.

The naivete of some here is completely incredible. Who the F cares if we blew it up?!? Russia is the aggressor! Do you seriously think that we're just going to let Russia run roughshod over Pax Americana because a couple aging douchbags got their feelings hurt they're not empire they convinced themselves they deserve to be while chugging vodka? Grow up. Some shit doesn't smell right upon first whiff, but makes sense when you accept that bad shit happens in war. We're not above that, nor should we be. We're not about to let Russia undo the last 70 years of history and us being in the right. If we did do it, we out-maneuvered them. You should be happy and proud you have people in our government capable of such foresight with the balls to execute on a bold plan. If Russia did it, then you should be glad they're such unbelievable idiots. If Ukraine did it, that's the price Russia pays for invading it's neighbor without just cause. Stop listening to pundits who have zero skin in the game who cast moral aspersions in realms they wouldn't dare set foot in. I say again: you don't know what happened and you never will. It doesn't matter which source you read on the internet. Pick your side.

In fairness, she looked that way without the juxtaposition.

2nd amendment is the only one that actually matters. It's the only one with a meaningful "fuck you."

Best part was the safety cone sword vs. the chair hammer. Our weapons have become less deadly - but more embarrassing - to be smashed by. We're basically the same people we've been for thousands of years.

I just have to say, the previous pages' back-and-forth is pure comedy gold. I want to see the fight, and the follow-up hug fest afterwards!

Kinda like when Ross Perot kicked off the whole Clinton era back in the 90s. Never would have had an entire generation of bullshit without that guy. I liked him and have usually been a third-party/protest voter, but now I see the cost to such people. Without a different type of voting system in place, we're doomed to two candidates - especially with the way our politics currently operates.

Tell me you don't know the first thing about crypto without telling me you don't know the first thing about crypto... Bruh, the entire basis for the blockchain is to be a distributed, peer-to-peer, value-exchange system. It may be that more "action" is taking place in the exchanges, but that's like the fact that there is more action in the futures markets for soybeans. None of the soybeans traded in Chicago ever make it there, but I assure you there are soybeans that would still exist if the CME was shutdown. Think of it like that. The CME plays the role of the exchanges in the cyrpto market, but the actual blockchain (the bottom line behind crypto) are the soybeans growing in everyone's own backyard.