FLEA

I think we also vastly underestimate the VAST VAST VAST majority of people in society who just give zero fucks and really have more shit on their plate than taking the personal time to advocate for someone/something. I don't particularly like some of the injustices going on in society and I will definitely get vocal with 2 beers at a party, but you won't find me out there writing articles, picketing, or doing anything that otherwise distracts me from the 6 million obligations I have each week to make sure I can pay rent and not be homeless.

7m? That's impossible!

Over Montana? WTF Risk is he weighing?

Lol, lots of truth here.

Suffice to say, most companies paying hourly do not compensate you if you call in sick. Lots of people living pay check to pay check--simply cannot do this. To categorize an entire population of people as lazy or flakes I think is a mischaracterization of what is actually happening in our labor force.

I can't be the only one here who's been frowned upon for calling in sick on a non-flying day because some exercise ORI bullshit needed completed or other worthless task to green up a slide before a staff meeting the following day. That's in the military where we get unlimited capability to take quarters/sick leave. Imagine your attendance being a factor for weighing layoffs in a corporate life boat drill.

Am I the fool? They are the ones living highly on free medical care, social safety nets, 2 years unemployment benefits at 75% salary even if you leave your job voluntarily..... and we are the ones paying nearly 20% of our annual budget each year on defense and national security architecture to ensure their security while they lift their noses snobbishly at us and demean our culture, values and ideals. Not sure about you man but I didn't join the service to go spread the good message of "European" identity all over earth, and praise their values and ideals. I did it to show the good will and generosity of Americans.... within reason. Secondly..... Two WORLD wars. Key word there being WORLD. We tend to frame WW1 and WW2 as being primarily European affairs. They were not. In WW2 50% of the casualties in that war happened on the Asian continent. JAPAN attacked the US, not Germany. 8/10 of the largest world military powers are in the Pacific trade hemisphere. Only 2/10 are West European. Over 50% of the world's GDP is generated by just 5 Pacific region countries. 2/3 of every R&D dollar spent on new technology is spent in either Asia or North America. Am I missing the point here or are you? You are clinging to decades old ideology that generals who fought and won WW2 ingrained into our service--dogmas that are generations old without willingness to pivot or realize that the global playing field is changing, the rules are being rewrote, and the geographic center of Global Power is now as far away from Europe as you can get. Yes, Europe used to be the center of global power and dominance--largely because of colonialism. That was a 200 year hiccup in 5000 years of written history that said 80% of Global Wealth was in the hands of just two societies--India, and China--since agriculture began. If anything, WW2 and the prolonged Cold War was an indicator of their global relevance dyeing out.

Nikki Haley will announce candidacy tomorrow. 100 I would vote for her.

Maybe he works in the teacher's unions lol.

Some of us don't value that very high. And thinking Europe will ever get behind a US banner is laughable. They generally do not have high opinions of Americans or American culture.

The part you leave out though is we are still going to buy that extra Ford class aircraft carrier. I think thats where the contention comes in.

In most countries with multi party systems the parties are organized along a single issue. For example the Green party in Germany is solely focused on the environment. They will vote left or right of their chamber, doesn't matter, so matter as they vote for their environmental stances. What ends up happening is you still end up with two larger mega parties that tend to dominate most elections, however, they cannot obtain a quorum without the participation of the smaller single issue parties. So their party leaders approach the smaller party leaders and begin to negotiate stances to form coalitions. In this case, the CDU for instance, might say "hey vote with us on all these issues and we will guarantee these other issues important to you get brought to the floor." Its a completely different game and I'm not so sure better than what we have now.

Some really interesting stuff coming out of this community (war tourism) and some of the ups and downs of it. Was reading an article a few days ago about conflict in the Ukrainian armed forces/other volunteers--that some of these war tourist are woefully "underqualified" for the roles they are self assigning themselves. Not necessarily Navy SEALs, but the story was specifically about a firearms instructor who decided to self appoint himself as a combat medic for a QRF, ended up getting a dude killed after performing chest compressions at an inappropriate time. https://www.businessinsider.com/some-us-volunteers-ukraine-accuse-another-being-a-war-tourist-2023-1?amp

You need to take the course I offered you brother. Youre arguing outside of your depth. If you don't understand on a technical level how the crypto industry holds or records value, how it's distributed, what mining actually means on a technical level....you are going to struggle to understand why and how crypto currency works peer to peer. Crypto was deliberately created to circumvent financial services institutions following the 2008 bank collapse. The creator wanted people to be able to trade peer to peer without governments or banks involved he did a very good job of ensuring that the currency was protected from that.

Filthy_liar, if you have $15 I highly recommend this course on block chain and crypto. https://www.udemy.com/course/blockchain-and-bitcoin-fundamentals/ It's literally taught a 4th grader level so anyone can understand it and will crawl walk run you to being able to discuss why Bitcoin works the way it does at a very detailed level. Certainly more than most. With 90% of the worlds illicit trade going through Bitcoin it's worth at least having a base line understanding of how it functions, why it's valuable, and why states are relatively powerless to do much about it.

Also worth noting, nothing requires you to use an exchange to buy/sell/trade Bitcoin. You can download the Bitcoin software yourself and do it entirely peer to peer.

As I said, exchanges can be regulated, but the actual trade of crypto is by nature peer to peer and distributed therefore by design, and because of how blockchain works, it cannot be regulated. This is how North Korea continues to purchase and exchange crypto. The production of new Bitcoin is built into the algorithm and capped at 21M coins. Every 4 years the total coins possible to be mined is divided by 1/2. This is what's called the "halvening." And generally drives prices up as market adjust for reduced supply. But no intelligent regulator is determining number of coins.

You know I meant to make a post about this at some point but bravo, you got to it first. AI is the future gents. Get on board now or get left in the dirt. All of these higher ed teachers in the social sciences who are pushing back against students not writing their own papers are about to be out of jobs in 5-10 years.

Ok a few things. 1.) Generally sanctions don't alter Russian behavior. This is because they are a large producer of energy and a large producer of agriculture. No matter how hard you economically sanction them, no matter how much you isolate them from the global community, the lights stay on, the homes stay heated in winter, and food stays on the table. So this is not the same situation as say North Korea, that has to import petroleum and coal (illegally from China) and doesnt have enough fertile land for its population. Its hard to economically crush and oppress a population into submission when they can generally meet the baseline comfort needed for survival. Often times, sanctions have the opposite effect which is they entrench resolve in the population and shift blame for the crises on the sanctioning country. Its all mushy and unpredictable. 2.) Yes, block chain can technically side step SWIFT, but only in so much as you can find a party that trades in crypto. Crypto is not regulated, and cannot be regulated. Trading crypto for fiat currency though can be regulated. The effect of locking Russia out of SWIFT is that they can no longer exchange fiat currencies with European partners. However, they 100% could exchange crypto if they could find an exchange willing to purchase Ruble. Laws like the Bank Security Act make that very difficult though as all banks that have any sort of connection to the US are required to adopt internal controls that monitor AML transactions. What's more problematic is that Russia, China, Iran, and a few other countries have now been trading interculturally in their own currencies. For example, Russia sells product to China in Yuan now. 3.) The wider effect this is having on the Russian population is people no longer see Putin as the icon of stability he used to be. Putin was incredibly popular pre-war. Like, 70% approval rating popular. (Our last two POTUS can't even get above 45%) Those polls conducted by the Levada institute are conducted with enough human ethical integrity that those numbers were pretty trustworthy. However, there are enormous indicators that public opinion may be on shaky ground. The flight of nearly 100,000 men from Russia during the September draft recall is pretty insightful. Putin called them "good-riddance" and order their Russian passports be confiscated if every they tried to return to Russia. He was happy to have them exiled. Its hard to say if that means the people that remain are a solid base or if opinion as a whole is on unstable ground.

Also press should be mandated to report financial contributions for stories they run. You might not know this but companies often pay news organizations to write stories or do segments on their products/service disguised as "news." Same goes for political campaigns that do the exact same thing. Lastly, a significant amount of primary education needs focused on teaching people that news media is not a reliable source of information in any capacity. There's a reason its not citable in academia but we need to be more explicit at telling youth and teens that media isn't there for your benefit to consume information--its there for the benefit of other entities who want to advertise products/services or push policy efforts. The legitimate news stories that are featured on news are often just there to keep the entire image of media as a trustworthy source afloat and make it impossible to distinguish biased/bent stories. But by and large a journalist does not have a noble job--their job is to make revenue for their network. Same as any other private sector entity. Why we place so much trust in them is beyond me.

Not all ops squadrons. AWACS squadrons for instance will be nearly half enlisted. MQ-9s are just shy of half. The big difference though is quality. Enlisted aircrew FOUGHT hard to get there because they disliked working on a flight line in 120 degree heat and love telling ladies at the local club that they're practically like pilots when they show their flight suit photos. So they usually work hard to not fuck it up although you still get your occasional special cases. This was something I needed a non flying officer to mentor me on when I went to an org and had a handful of non-flyers. Gave them way too much leash and often regretted it. To clarify my earlier remarks, telling ROTC cadets to not trust their SNCOs, ended the discussion by telling them to not blindly trust their SNCOs. Definitely get their advice and inputs but you know who else is charged with mentoring CGOs in official guidance? The squadron commander. When things don't pass the smell test, flight commanders shouldn't feel a pressure to not approach the squadron commander for inputs because they should "ask their SNCOs." Definitely ask them first, but as we say in aircrew, "trust but verify."

I'm confused was Prosuper your wife or your chief?

I spoke at an ROTC career night recently. I got dropped jaws from the cadre when I told the cadets that I would never recommend a 2Lt "just trust" their SNCO's. I know SOOOOOO many Lt's that got burned because they "trusted the SNCO's." That advice is given under the pretense that you are going to put a Lt in an organization that is baseline successful and not dysfunctional. I know a 1Lt 13M who was given a flight command in a flight that was in a separate facility from the rest of the squadron and completely lacked discipline and decorum. Her flight chief convinced her it was "ok, that it "wasn't a training environment anymore" and things didn't have to be "exact." Not how her commander felt when they failed a surprise SAV for multiple safety related violations. She was fired and issued discipline for dereliction. No one cared that her E-8 or whatever mentored her to do that.

100%! Get connected with your VFW, legion or any other organization that is veteran related and appeals to you. For me it was SVA because I decided to do more schooling after the military. But ANYONE in the veteran space will know this stuff and will share it with their community regularly.

While everyone is sharing here: Also be sure to look at the new presumed eligibility guidelines published under the PACT Act. https://www.benefits.va.gov/BENEFITS/factsheets/serviceconnected/presumption.pdf Lots of conditions we all probably just associate with aging are now presumed related to burn pit or other types of exposures.