Pooter

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

You know what would be revolutionary though.. if we actually buy the number of them we said we will

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."

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

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?

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.

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.

😂 been there. I share the hostility you have mainly for the mandates which look increasingly stupid as time goes on.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

It all depends on student ability. I don't know how you can say that no student should PA without knowing their background as well as their performance. I agree with you that we are watering down the standard but from where I sit, the quality drop is happening at the bottom end of the ability spectrum.. not the top. For every PA I've seen in the last 5 years I'll show you 10 students who were reinstated from a CR who shouldn't have been.

Heartily disagree. Course training standards exist for each block, and if a student can consistently meet or exceed CTS they should PA to the end of that block. I've seen tons of gradesheets for above average students where it's firewall MIF or better for the 3-4 straight rides approaching the end of block or a checkride. Do those 3-4 Firewall mif rides provide more experience which will yield a slightly better product at the end of UPT? Of course. More time under your ass will always be a good thing. But this idea that there's a certain number of sorties written in stone that it takes to make a pilot is just not true. Some people are going to need more, some people are going to need less, and some people will never get it no matter how many rides you give them. But if you force everyone to do the same number of sorties regardless of ability, you're literally doing no child left behind but with airplanes.

Global strike actually had an initiative going to develop a syllabus for 12B to 11X since the WSO/Nav positions are going away. Similar to an 18x you have a lot of experience there to leverage and anecdotally CSOs excel in legacy pilot training. But from what I understand Gen Willis in his infinite wisdom took personal issue with the proposed syllabus not having originated from AETC, so it didn't go anywhere.

Yeah it was t-6's and lol I don't think you're ever getting those back