Pooter
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Posts posted by Pooter
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On 12/31/2022 at 8:08 AM, Chuck17 said:
I think this is a bit of an oversimplification of the issue. Operations of any large bureaucracy - particularly those that don’t work for profit - are remarkably similar in their shifting-wind policies and tolerance of ridiculousness, inefficiency, etc.
But again, this shift is no surprise to anyone who’s watched things change over the last 20 years. If you’re caught in the middle, it sucks. Maybe this change is the last change. Maybe the long safe play is to just get one. I dunno.
I copy on voting with your feet/not taking the bonus/not staying/etc. The USAF hasn’t demonstrated it’s serious about retaining pilots yet IMHO. Having seen the impacts of things like this at both the squadron and the staff levels, I’ll tell you each camp is convinced they’re in the right (that there’s a crisis/that there’s no crisis in retention)… Which contributes to fluctuating policies such as masters degrees…
I was part of the “gotta have a masters or you won’t get promoted” cohort in the early 2000s. Got the first one via sacrifice of weekends to AMU in 2011. Enjoyed it for the most part but it was a time suck, even for a book nerd like me.
Got sent to IDE and got another (had the opportunity to write about something of high interest, ended up publishing…)
Got picked up for ASG and got another.
Got picked up for SDE and got another.
…. But what’s one do with four masters degrees? Retire and write? TBD.
I appreciate the opportunity, but can’t argue in good faith that it’s an experience everyone should have.
Chuck
I get that from a 30,000 foot view at the end of a solid career it's easy to say "take it easy, these things go back and forth, what do you expect from a big organization."
And I understand this was probably easy to predict for a 20+ year old hat. But there are people up for their majors board this year who have been under the masked policy since they were a butterbar and probably didn't even know the significance of the policy the last time it was changed in 2015. Now they have 3 days notice.
Legitimate question here. The vast majority of O-5s and up, including you, have at least one masters if not more from various IDE/SDE programs. So it's clear the Air Force has ample opportunities built in for continuing education of people on the command track.
So why the emphasis on getting a check the box degree beforehand? Does basket weaving from AMU improve the member or the Air Force in any way? The masters time suck pulls valuable time from CGOs who should be reaching their peak tactical proficiency level in their careers. So if the Air Force will get them a masters later anyway, what's the point?
*this question assumes tactical proficiency is something to be valued.-
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13 minutes ago, Danger41 said:
Damn, i unintentionally timed that perfectly. Got to the almighty BAC+ as a Captain then AAD was masked, so haven’t touched it after making O-4 and O-5. Unmasked but already have the line number so kiss my uneducated ass!
You know what would be even better timing? Working for a healthy organization that didn't constantly flip flop on decisions and undermine its people.
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1 hour ago, the g-man said:
Exactly. I think part of it is that they can see retroactively who has masters and who doesn’t and they are pissed how many o4 selects don’t have it and they slugged through getting a check the box degree to be eligible to go to ACSC in-res just to get ANOTHER check the box degree and they are mad that the rest of us chose more time with family/primary duties than some Liberty University bsGod forbid people spend their time focused on tactical proficiency.
It's sad because I joined the Air Force because the patriotism, camaraderie, and mission resonated with me. The longer I stay in the more the Air Force pulls me away from those things.
FWIW, this masters policy affects me zero percent. I have a masters, made major last year and have no plans to stick around 1 second past my 10 year adsc. But it's the latest in a litany of tone deaf policies that have nothing to do with winning the war that we look increasingly likely to lose, while also leaving a sour taste in everyone's mouth.
The HAF level leadership has been so bad for the last 5-10 years that if I wasn't an ardent subscriber of Occam's razor, I'd suspect sabotage.
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1 hour ago, Chuck17 said:
Anyone who is surprised or feels betrayed by this development hasn’t been paying attention.
Sorry gents, as soon as they rolled out the “masking” umpty years ago there were plenty of old heads who said not to trust that things wouldn’t change once again. The USAF is fickle.
It’s not a shock.
Do your school. Or don’t. It’ll work out either way. The USAF payed for FOUR - count’em - 4x masters degrees for me. I (still) only need one, and even that is arguable.
YMMV.
Chuck
What if I told you throwing up our hands and just saying the USAF "is fickle" is precisely the kind of leadership that got us in a huge retention problem in the first place.
We're all well aware AF policy swings back and forth like a pendulum, but it doesn't have to be that way. I'm glad you can put up with it and had what sounds like a really solid career. But I (and the vast majority of my year group) don't plan on sticking around long enough to find out how many useless masters the Air Force will give us after for some reason requiring you already have one.
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Could they have rolled this out gradually, with a year or two notice? Of course they could have. But no. Happy new year, get fucked, policy effective in 3 days.
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If republicans were coordinated, or proactive, or serious in any way about winning an election ever again.. this would be the moment to strongly distance from trump.
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10 hours ago, Sua Sponte said:
Now show me on the map with a near peer threat where you're going to park that sweet sweet boat out of anti ship missile range but also where the F-35s are in striking distance.
I'll wait
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10 hours ago, Lockjaw said:
You are aware that the CDC itself stated that 10 Randomized Controlled Trials from 1946-2018 found no significant reduction in influenza transmission with the use of face masks?
And yet the CDC now says masks are effective. Maybe they have new data? Could it possibly be related to the fact that the material in n95 masks wasn't invented until the 1990s so your data from last century is basically ballwash? Or do you just selectively believe the CDC when it suits you.
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Glad the dude is okay.
On a totally separate note, vtol fighters are completely asinine and shouldn't exist. A UPT sim instructor of mine was a former harrier driver and they regarded ejection as almost an inevitability. You either have ejected or you will.
Not to mention making an aircraft vtol capable robs it of so much tactical capability, and in the specific case of the F-35 it needlessly complicated the worldwide acquisition process for a tiny tiny fraction of the jets going to our marines. Glad we made the entire fleet less capable to accommodate your stupid lift fan.
/endrant
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1 hour ago, HU&W said:
Well, this sure seems evolutionary, not revolutionary.
You know what would be revolutionary though.. if we actually buy the number of them we said we will
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Hell yeah it was anticlimactic. A single nose on camera angle angle with intentionally weird lighting to obscure any detail whatsoever.. cmon guys. It's not some giant mystery the ass end is gonna be a cranked kite configuration with heat diffusing exhaust.
The windows also looked super weird and matte finish almost like parts of it were still in mock-up form and not the final flying design. The whole over the top grandeur for a single camera angle after dusk came across kindof desperate to me. "Sorry guys we know we were supposed to have flown this thing already but as a consolation prize we'll pull it 6.9 feet out of a dimly lit hangar and show you a front view real quick.. and the whole thing kinda looks like unpainted plastic.. but we promise it'll totally be amazing."
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1 hour ago, Sim said:
“a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye.” is a conspiracy theory?
Man somebody should pay you to curate a list of batshit alt-right obscure no name "news" sites. The links you come up with make newsmax and oan look reputable by comparison.
Why didn't Paul Pelosi "run away" from his attacker? Must be some giant conspiracy.. or perhaps.. and hear me out on this one because it's pretty wild.. he didn't scamper away because he's eighty-fucking-two years old
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4 minutes ago, FourFans130 said:
Have you ever been a unit that went from oppressive leadership to excellent leadership? Did it perfectly improve overnight, or was there a transition period? Of course there's going to be speedbumps. Go lookup how many spacex rockets blew up or crashed before the first one worked...even a little. Purchasing Twitter wasn't an impulse buy, but a strategic move. Hell it might have been REAL virtue signaling. I'm pretty sure Musk knows what he's doing. What none of us have right now is the "aha" information from the behind the scenes. Just wait.
I hear you man, and I really do support what Elon is trying to do. I don't think twitter was an impulse buy either. But that doesn't mean the guy in charge hasn't behaved impulsively since.
Exhibit A: tweeting conspiracy nonsense about Paul Pelosi hours after a brutal attack.
Don't get me wrong, the media line that the attacker was some "ultra maga" dude was ballwash from the start too. But where in the social media CEO handbook does it say you should inject yourself into the public discourse by mean tweeting at an assault victim? Is this just a natural part of the transition period to excellent leadership?
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30 minutes ago, uhhello said:
Lots of billionaires in here with vast experience running social media companies too. It's awesome. So much knowledge and insight as to how many workers are required and what needs to be done to sustain/grow the company.
Doesn't take a billionaire investor galaxy brain to tell that things aren't going swimmingly over at twitter right now. But you keep telling yourself Elon is playing 4D chess as he posts pictures of handguns on his nightstand as twitter valuation tanks, they roll-out and then immediately retract features, and 14 of the top 50 largest advertisers on the platform pull chocks.
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Even before twitter valuations tanked Elon offered hugely over market value to buy the company. I don't think making money in the short term on twitter was ever part of the plan.
He's spoken at length numerous times about how he's a free speech absolutist and how important it is for humanity to have a public square that isn't hampered by censorship. I think Elon genuinely cares about turning twitter into that and he's okay with ad revenue/profits suffering in the near term at the expense of a long-term vision.
But @nsplayrhas a point. The dude needs to get out of his own way. Shitposting 24/7 and rolling out (and then retracting) half-baked features while simultaneously firing 75% of the employees is not how you make sustainable, thoughtful changes in a social media company. Twitter does need to make *some* money, and the CEO acting like an erratic scatterbrained douche isn't helping keep advertisers around.
Would the left have tried to de-platform and de-app store twitter regardless of Elon's strategy? Of course. Their new (actually old) move is to simply claim everything they don't like is a dangerous existential threat, and the simple fact that someone who believes in free speech now runs twitter is "dangerous" to them.
So maybe it's good Elon came in guns blazing with middle fingers in all directions if the left was going to act the same way regardless. I just hope the near term financial turmoil of twitter isn't enough to compromise the platform in the long run.
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1 hour ago, filthy_liar said:
Fair enough and well put. My hyperbolic post is the result of some pent up hostility, some Blanton's single barrel, and access to the internet. Won't be the last.
Zero point zero effect is like you said nonsense, but I'm still not convinced it had all that much of an effect. Anecdotal - I got covid about a month after my second vaccine dose, after having skated past it for about 2 years and yes I was one of those people on the beaches every holiday.
Your last sentence is the most important.
😂 been there. I share the hostility you have mainly for the mandates which look increasingly stupid as time goes on.
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17 hours ago, filthy_liar said:
What a collossal bucket of America's response to covid turned out to be. Stores emptied. Stores closed. Goya beans the only thing available on the grocery store shelf. Ammo shortage. Gun prices through the roof. Vaccine touted as "just get on board, it will make this all go away." "Wear your mask. Social distance." I realize a lot of you didn't see it because you can't, but a shitload of people didn't get the vaccine, and those that did well, that didn't really stop the spread. A shitload of people either didn't wear a mask or half assed it. And a shitload of people didn't social distance. If any of you went to the coast during memorial day or the 4th in 2020, 21 and 22 you can attest. So at the end of the day zero point zero of that shit had any effect. Good god there are a shitload of brainwashed idiots in America.
A little bit of devils advocate here..
It's very difficult to measure something that never happened i.e. the community spread that never occurred as a result of precautions. So saying "zero point zero" of this had any effect is just nonsense.
We all logically know that precautions have an effect and the more strictly you adhere to them, the more effective they are. If you went full bubble boy and had no contact with anyone for the past two years, you likely would not have caught covid. We know respirators are better than n95s which are better than surgical masks which are better than cloth masks etc...
So quality and level of adherence to precautions absolutely has an effect. But that isn't the takeaway here. And "precautions didn't do shit" is probably the dumbest takeaway possible.
Maybe the takeaway here is precautions come with a cost which should be weighed against the risk. And since everyone weighs risks and costs differently it should *generally* be left up to the individual.
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29 minutes ago, Biff_T said:
Soccer isn't for everyone. Just like I'm not into butt stuff. Lol.
FIFA is corrupt. That's how a shit hole like Qatar gets to host it. Nobody in the world of soccer was happy about it.
As far as the draws. Even when you draw in certain tournaments you get a point for the group. It's part of the strategy. Sometimes all you need is a draw.
The USA must win against Iran to get out of the group stage. That's going to be a game with a few goals hopefully.
caveat: I actually love soccer and played it my whole life.
But In a tournament at the highest level where fans paid thousands of dollars to fly across the world and attend probably once in their life.. a draw is not acceptable. Especially a scoreless draw.
Make those players run for 5 hours for all I care. That could even be it's own strategy. Don't want your team to get torched in a 5 hour slog? Cool. Do literally anything.
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Two draws so far.. riveting stuff.
The only interesting thing to come out of this World Cup has been watching woke western world soccer fans collectively realize Qatar is an ethical dumpster fire.. and then promptly turn a blind eye to it.
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20 minutes ago, brabus said:
As a conservative, I 100% agree with Pooter. The quality GOP candidates handed ass. The low quality candidates lost embarrassingly. Quality matters, even McConnell said it, of all people.
The GOP is run by old people who appeal to…old people. It’s time for conservatives under 50 (hell I’ll take under 60), to take control of this shitshow (especially at local levels) and actually bring policies and plans to the people that they care about/want. There are millions of conservatives out there who I believe offer substantially better ideas than their Dem counterparts, but those individuals need to step up and lead - time for Grandpa and Grandma to step back and let those of us who don’t live in 1950 take a swing at the plate.
Honestly I don't even know if it's an age thing. Some of the up and coming young stars of the right are the most pro trump, radical nuts out there. Same on the left where the young generation of thought leaders in the squad are pushing their party to the extreme. Crazy comes in all ages and I agree with @Prozac that the first party to figure out how not to be batshit insane will do very well.
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19 hours ago, bfargin said:
A little mean .... but still spot on and funny.
Funny.. til you reflect for one second and remember Republican candidate quality is such hot dumpster fire garbage that they just lost to the stroke victim they're mocking.
Whoopsie! Maybe next time conservatives can find a candidate whose batshit crazy factor is low enough to beat the guy that literally can't string together an English sentence.
Some of us have been saying (for a few years now) the way forward for republicans is to ditch trump, 2020 denial, and going nuts on social issues. Didn't need a blown midterm election to figure that one out.
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1 hour ago, Danger41 said:
This X 1000. I flew Draco with tons of folks from T-38 and T-1 backgrounds. There were bunches of T-1 folks that had the hands, SA, and fighting spirit to do single pilot employment. I know that these 46 dudes could handle this and it’s not the death sentence it’s being made out to be.
No one is arguing that it's a death sentence or that it's impossible to do. I have 100% confidence I could hand fly a kc-46 ILS to a safe landing, alone, after probably one familiarization sim. That is not the point.
The first point is the 46 was never designed with a single pilot in mind. To my knowledge the u-2, and all the jets draco flies were. So that's not a valid counterexample.
But the larger point here is that CRM improvements in large crewed aircraft have done wonders for safety over the last 50-100 years, to the point that there hasn't been a hull loss for a major American airline in almost 2 decades. But we are about to throw that down the drain to solve a problem that doesn't exist. On top of that, we are talking about a ~$300 million strategic asset, of which we only have around 50 currently built. How many mishaps can we afford?
My worry is not these one-off experimental flights and whether or not the concept is possible. Of course it's possible. But now that the single pilot ops precedent has been set, it's only a matter of time before it becomes normalized, then expected, then mandated so generals can green up their manning slides. And when we start flying like this regularly, the accidents will follow.
It's funny the people that actually buy the war contingency line. Got a bridge to sell you. I'm genuinely trying to concoct a wartime scenario in my head where we are magically super flush on -46 airframes with no one to fly them 🤷🏻♂️🤷🏻♂️
/endrant
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5 hours ago, brabus said:
Oh my god, the horror, surely there aren’t tens of thousands of pilots who have done this for decades and are currently doing it now, without any automation at all.
not in aircraft that were designed for a crew of two pilots to operate...
I get it, IFR approaches are boring admin that shithot fighter pilots don't even talk about because it's so trivially easy.
But if you've attended safety briefs you probably also know that admin kills more shithot fighter pilots than any other phase of flight.
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The part I struggle to understand is the -46 community is airframe limited.. not pilot limited.
This whole thing is a (bad) solution in search of a problem. We got generals concocting weird scenarios in their heads where the AF is somehow super flush on FMC Peggy's with no one to fly them.
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Promotion and PRF Information
in General Discussion
Posted
I don't dispute legit masters degrees are important once you get to a certain level and are working on strategy/policy/doctrine type things.
But we already have an IDE/SDE pipeline specifically designed to get people masters degrees and prep them for high level policy making so why the fuck do we need people to have a miscellaneous masters beforehand??
A degree mill masters doesn't do anything for anyone. It doesn't make you a better leader, tactician, or strategist. And it robs time from your primary duty and family life.
But it does give the Air Force one invaluable data point. It helps big AF identify the individuals willing to jump through their ass for a better chance of promotion. And that's their favorite kind of person because they're more likely to stick around no matter how bad the treatment.