I was almost a police officer before I gave up on the whole thing to instead become a programmer. Trust me there are quotas even if they are not called that. It isn't necessarily true for every department everywhere but for State Highway Patrol divisions and self funded departments it's much more likely.
For the highway patrols it boils down to traffic enforcement and accidents being their entire job it is simply a matter of each officer needing to write a similiar numbers of tickets each week/month. That wouldn't be all that tiresome but if you have a couple cops that are just more inclined to hand out tickets rather than warnings then everyone else needs to write more in order to avoid looking like they are slacking off.
Then there are police departments that are entirely funded off of ticket revenues. If the officers don't write tickets they don't get paid. Near where I grew up there was actually a tiny little town that actually used their Police Department as a major source of revenue. That of course ended up bankrupting the town when they ticketed the wrong lawyer who destroyed them in a civil case when he realized they had lowered the speed limit for their stretch of a state highway in an illegal manner.
My biggest complaint about automated ticketing for most anything is that it does not stop the behaviour when it is happening. Instead it comes as a financial slap on the wrist in a week or so in the mail. In cases where a person can't handle the stack of fines this could be an overly punitive way of correcting their behaviour. And on the other hand their are plenty of people for whom those small fines are nothing to be worried about, and because there is no actual penalty other than the fine and they are allowed to continue their behaviour they can just keep doing it as long as they wish. Do we really need to exempt well heeled people even more from the rule of law in our country?
There is also of course the issue of where the money goes from these systems. Usually they are just being leased by the government with a large part of the fine going directly to some private corporation. I do not like the idea of privatising our law enforcement.
I agree that the electronic "proof" is pretty weak.
The police showing up numerous times just ahead of the event and giving warnings is fairly suspicious though.
Regardless I don't know that I care. I mean, I'd like the cops to be out doing something more productive than trying to ferret out noise disturbances before they happen. But what exactly would that more productive activity be, maybe handing out more revenue tickets or eating more donuts?
If you are deliberately planning to cause enough of a racket that your neighbors will call to complain you're an asshole straight up and the cops shutting you down and harassing you ahead of time is hardly worth the tears of anyone.
I'm pretty sure there are plenty of tutorials on youtube for how to assemble whatever gun you've printed. I'd be suprised if there weren't thousands of them for just AR15's. It's really not that complicated, buying all the parts and assembling the weapon yourself is a highly recommended way of getting a high quality AR for less money than the local gun store.
5 seconds to reload sounds very slow to me. I know I did reloads faster than that in a full prone position with crappy M16A2's that were only used on the range. That included having to roll over a bit to get at the magazine pouch. Doing a reload while standing or kneeling with an open magazine pouch should take 2 seconds or less. I'm not even well practiced I was only firing 100 rounds once every eighteen months.
Slow reloads have always been one of the things that annoy the hell out of me in video games that aim for any sort of realism. If me as a rank amateur can reload a weapon in a couple seconds why does the trained soldier I'm playing in the game take three times as long when they should have fast reloads down to a science.
Free climbing, base jumping and doing other high risky extreme sport activities are illegal in some parts because they do put others into danger or create unwarranted expense. For instance if a free climber is injured because they are not utilizing safety equipment and belayers and now require a rescue team to extract them. It is the same kind of thing as people who ignore evacuation orders for impending disasters, people that disregard firealarms.
I'm not necessarily against any of those sports and I can see reasons for not evacuating. But asserting that these activities bear no consequences or burden for others is false.
Of course the same also applies to gun ownership. By owning a gun I do increase the likelyhood that members of my family could be injured or killed with it. However the wife and I have made the decision that in our case the possible benefits for continuing to own firearms outweigh the risks of the same.
So long as our constitution gives us the right to persue happiness we should never have to prove why we should be allowed to do or own what we wish. It is up to the side attempting to strip those freedoms to prove the opposite. That goes for extreme sports as well as firearms in my opinion.
I remember seeing in the news a couple years ago where some major city like Chicago or something was having an issue with right on reds causing cameras to issue tickets incorrectly. Only the reason was that when the city plowed the snow from the main thourough fares it was piling up in the right hand turn lanes. Which meant that they were buried in 4 feet or more of snow. So instead people were turning right from the right most lane which otherwise would be a straight only. The cameras weren't smart enough to know the difference and apparently the cop who was supposed to be reviewing every infraction's photo wasn't either. So the city was issueing thousands of citations a day. And when it all came out in the public the City refused to relent and stop issuing the citations, instead they said each person needed to individually show up and contest their citations.
The government, and hell governments in general, have always picked winners and losers. Merely by representing such a huge potential spender the government picks winners and losers every time it awards a contract or chooses one product over another. How about educational loans, medicaid, medicare, aren't those all picking winners and losers? Sure they are, and they are all done with the intent to build our nation, it's all for the common good.
I oppose the bailouts in principle but in reality I can recognize that letting some of those institutions fail would have had worse consequences than bailing them out. A proper solution would also include breaking up the too big to fail enterprises so that they don't pose such a danger to our economy, but you are unlikely to see venture capitalists ever campaign for that. The market barons had they chance to fund Tesla and didn't, so the rest of us represented by the government did.
Honestly that's what most people do. Well not the spending $100,000 for a car. But buying far more car than they regularly need. How many people do you know that own SUV's and never drive them in conditions or terrain that warrant such a monstrosity? Or buy high performance cars that they never take to the track? If your plugin electric car gets 100 miles on a charge you can do a lot more than just hit the stores down the road anyways. The average driver goes less than 50 miles a day, I think it's actually like 37 miles a day or something like that. Sure there are a significant amount of people that need more range on a regular basis. But there are still huge numbers of people that don't and for them replacing their Internal Combustion Engine car with an electric makes very good economic sense.
Hell, I've considered replacing my daily driver with a Segway because my commute is so short and on low speed roads. I've tried biking and it was frankly too icky especially in the southern summer.
The original design or concept actually called for a small generator being part of the internals of the car, but they scrapped the idea to stick with the 100% electric concept. I agree that it's a good idea and have brought it up in discussions before. If plugin electrics continue to gain in popularity I expect we'll start to see third parties making aftermarket solutions like this. The mini trailer or platform that hangs on the trailer hitch appeals to me the most. I wouldn't even be surprised if there were places to just rent such a device so that you don't have to worry about the long term care for it.
Oh please spare us the tears. The government has around 2,110,221 Civil Servants. They earn an average salary of $76,358. That comes out to $161,132,255,118 a year. That is only 4.55% of the Federal budget. WOW, those government employees sure are hogging the spending all right. I'm pretty sure that excedes the efficiencies achieved in most private companies. Is there room for improvement, always, just like everyewhere else.
I won't even touch the complaints about the horrible injustice of venture capitalists having to pay taxes, or government helping to prop up the free market with subsidies.
I suppose it could be labeled as fraud in some way. But what it you actually filled out the application or whatever, forgetting some required tidbit, and then included the phone book just as a courtesy, you know as a free gift.
I think she understands cells in a very abstract way. She has illustrations and pictures of them in one of her favorite books, a childrens encyclopedia for the human body. It isn't necessary for her at this point to understand anything more than the abstracts for these things though to understand that damaged DNA can cause problems.
The language barrier I understand being skeptical of, but what is so complicated about the basic idea of how DNA functions? I know that I've already talked to my 3 1/2 year old daughter about it a couple of times. I'm not explaining the various ammio acids and how it is replicated and activated. But she's plenty smart enough to understand that it is a set of instructions for how tiny parts of her body called cells should develop and interact.
So I'm a little confused because normally your posts make a lot of sense to me. How is asking a co-worker their opinion on good topical books and googling the same significantly different, such that one is clearly good and the other clearly bad? In both cases the individual is seeking knowledge about a book to gain more knowledge. In fact knowing how internet searches are frequently modified by advertising money directly and things like google bombing, why would you hold it against a newbie if they asked a co-worker for a book reference?
I also feel that you are wrong to some degree on public schooling. Yes, it's primary purpose should be equiping the student with the skills and ability to learn more on their own. But they should also be exposing the students to a wide breadth of other topics which they might not encounter otherwise. How many people do you think got their start with computers through computer labs at school, because there wasn't one at home? In fact by schools introducing children to things outside of their current personal experience we end up with a culture that is the opposite of a bunch of factory animals.
A good school won't teach a student what to think, but how to think logically. For instance teaching the scientific method rather than just the rote facts about the theories we currently hold to be true. In the English classes I attended we focused on reading comprehension as well as grammar and such. Understanding what the author was trying to communicate was more important than whether or not the author was right. Not that I appreciated any of that at the time.
I also hope it's not a DOTA clone. The only tower defense game I can remember liking much recently was Dungeon Defenders, which i enjoyed because it had character progression.
Most people work in some job because it suites their sense of morality better doing something else with higher profits. For instance how many attractive women do you know that don't work as "Escorts". There are plenty of things other than direct pay which factor into a persons evaluation of whether or not to stay with a job.
The military, no matter which branch or job specialty, is not like any civilian equivilants. First, there is the always present threat of long term deployments to combat zones. Second, you can't quit and just walk away from your job, that would be a felony. Third, your boss doesn't just tell you what to do, he is ordering you to do it, refusing that order is possibly a felony. Fourth, in case it wasn't already evident they own you, almost literally. In my opinion considering all of the above and who knows what else that I've forgotten the marginally better than minimum wage pay is easily justified.
Walmart also hires people with asthma, heart abnormalities and a host of other disabilities I am sure. The military also requires at least a GED, and a relatively drug free past. There are all sorts of dumb restrictions including age for some branches. Some branches also will only take people within specific BMI's regardless of actual physical ability, and that has at times also related to people that were under weight. The military is far more restrictive in terms of who it will hire than most any other large employer.
I'm sorry your friends father was clearly dicked over, but how is that relevant to whether or not the healthcare disabled and retired veterans can recieve is often horrible and substandard? The military and VA have what healtcare systems they do simply becaue it was legislated into law at some point. If you don't like it then lobby and vote to remove it. At the same time if you think that civilian companies should provide the same type of benefits then vote with your dollars and feet, work for and buy from companies that do that, although you could persue this by legislative means also. I would justify the lifetime VA disability payments under the fact that it's a promise to a soldier that if they end up permanently injured, maimed, or disabled in anyway as a result of service they will be taken care of to some extent. All taxpayers have Social Security which fills a similiar role, though obviously not identical but neither are the working conditions.
I'll call bullshit on the largest part of the US military's spending being on staffing, link below. From there you can see that Operations and Maintanance easily beat out personnel costs. Operations and Maintanance do not include war spending, that's a seperate line item in newer budgets and a completely different spending bill previous to 2010.
I find it cute that you first complain that the recruits aren't up to snuff and then in the next breath condemn them for costing too much money. You can't have both and maintain current manning levels. You can get more picky about who you let in but if there isn't an increase in pay you can be damn sure you will start missing recruitment goals.
The pay for an E1 through E3 already pretty much is just a stipend. When I enlisted I took something like a 40% drop in pay. I did so because I wanted to serve my country and despite the horrible pay it appeared to offer more upward mobility than the job I already had. And don't forget that once you graduate from training a service member can be deployed to a hell hole like the middle east.
I have several friends who worked desk jockey jobs like me and ended up deployed to ride on convoys. I just count myself, and them, lucky that all my friends came back alive.
The only times the tax payer is going to end up on the hook for a soldiers medical bills for life is if they either end up severly disabled as a result of service related injuries or tough it out for 20+ years. And that free medical coverage is far from the best money can buy. One of the first things that I discovered when I seperated was that my military Dentists were pretty much incompetent as I had to spend several thousand dollars to fix the teeth they screwed up.
I don't doubt that there is probably bloat in the officer core especially at the higher ranks. But blaming the DoD's ills on the enlisted troops is insane, they have next to no pull when it comes to making command or spending decisions of any consequence. They are the ones with their balls in a sling every day out patroling in a hostile environment waiting for an IED to go off and shred said balls.
TLDR: Fuck you, you fucking slackass armchair general!
From experience I know that one of the largest employers in the USA actually gives you a much better shot at a job if you do include the same key phrases in your resume. The mass crush of resumes that come in for any job opening requires that the HR drones put everything through an automated filter or three. If your resume doesn't pass those filters nothing else matters because no one is going to read it.
It's more about a war just not being winnable by force more than anything else. I don't know that the military is getting beaten in Afghanistan so much as they just can not possibly win against a guerilla underground with enough popular support. So long as we try to maintain an occupation there we might as well be burning stacks of cash and throwing in the occasional soldier.
I think the issue of having to fight against ones relatives is a little over blown simply because very few military people end up stationed anywhere near where they grew up. On the other hand though our bases here in the states are usually tightly integrated with the communities around them. Most troops don't even live on post anymore. What percentage of the troops would simply not show up for duty if they knew they were going to be ordered to arms against the civilians they live among?
I knew a Fuqua in the chair force, it was always funny to answer a phone call when someone was calling for him. Another good one was Dyke, pronounced Dick, it was always amusing to watch people try and decide what would be the least offensive way to pronounce his name when they saw his name tag.
I had an instructor once who had a custom plate for his new corvette, PHSTFCKR or maybe it was PHSTFKR. Anyways he claimed that the first four characters were to be read as "fast", but we always contended it was actually "fist".
105 does sound a bit extreme but then again he did blackmail 350 people. The methods that he used and the medium really aren't all that relevant. I'm actually surprised that the maximum possible is such a small number. Even if the sentence for blackmail was only 6 months, those charges alone could add up to 175 years. Breaking into other peoples online accounts would just be gravy.
It's not necessarily the individual losses that are important here. It's the scale of the fraud that makes the dollar amounts so outrageous. The moral issue is the same whether they stole a little money from a lot of people or a lot of money from a few people.
Technically they may have been right. If I am not mistaken they only have to schedule a flight with the FAA if they intend to fly above certain altitudes.
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I was almost a police officer before I gave up on the whole thing to instead become a programmer. Trust me there are quotas even if they are not called that. It isn't necessarily true for every department everywhere but for State Highway Patrol divisions and self funded departments it's much more likely.
For the highway patrols it boils down to traffic enforcement and accidents being their entire job it is simply a matter of each officer needing to write a similiar numbers of tickets each week/month. That wouldn't be all that tiresome but if you have a couple cops that are just more inclined to hand out tickets rather than warnings then everyone else needs to write more in order to avoid looking like they are slacking off.
Then there are police departments that are entirely funded off of ticket revenues. If the officers don't write tickets they don't get paid. Near where I grew up there was actually a tiny little town that actually used their Police Department as a major source of revenue. That of course ended up bankrupting the town when they ticketed the wrong lawyer who destroyed them in a civil case when he realized they had lowered the speed limit for their stretch of a state highway in an illegal manner.
My biggest complaint about automated ticketing for most anything is that it does not stop the behaviour when it is happening. Instead it comes as a financial slap on the wrist in a week or so in the mail. In cases where a person can't handle the stack of fines this could be an overly punitive way of correcting their behaviour. And on the other hand their are plenty of people for whom those small fines are nothing to be worried about, and because there is no actual penalty other than the fine and they are allowed to continue their behaviour they can just keep doing it as long as they wish. Do we really need to exempt well heeled people even more from the rule of law in our country?
There is also of course the issue of where the money goes from these systems. Usually they are just being leased by the government with a large part of the fine going directly to some private corporation. I do not like the idea of privatising our law enforcement.
I agree that the electronic "proof" is pretty weak.
The police showing up numerous times just ahead of the event and giving warnings is fairly suspicious though.
Regardless I don't know that I care. I mean, I'd like the cops to be out doing something more productive than trying to ferret out noise disturbances before they happen. But what exactly would that more productive activity be, maybe handing out more revenue tickets or eating more donuts?
If you are deliberately planning to cause enough of a racket that your neighbors will call to complain you're an asshole straight up and the cops shutting you down and harassing you ahead of time is hardly worth the tears of anyone.
I'm pretty sure there are plenty of tutorials on youtube for how to assemble whatever gun you've printed. I'd be suprised if there weren't thousands of them for just AR15's. It's really not that complicated, buying all the parts and assembling the weapon yourself is a highly recommended way of getting a high quality AR for less money than the local gun store.
5 seconds to reload sounds very slow to me. I know I did reloads faster than that in a full prone position with crappy M16A2's that were only used on the range. That included having to roll over a bit to get at the magazine pouch. Doing a reload while standing or kneeling with an open magazine pouch should take 2 seconds or less. I'm not even well practiced I was only firing 100 rounds once every eighteen months.
Slow reloads have always been one of the things that annoy the hell out of me in video games that aim for any sort of realism. If me as a rank amateur can reload a weapon in a couple seconds why does the trained soldier I'm playing in the game take three times as long when they should have fast reloads down to a science.
Free climbing, base jumping and doing other high risky extreme sport activities are illegal in some parts because they do put others into danger or create unwarranted expense. For instance if a free climber is injured because they are not utilizing safety equipment and belayers and now require a rescue team to extract them. It is the same kind of thing as people who ignore evacuation orders for impending disasters, people that disregard firealarms.
I'm not necessarily against any of those sports and I can see reasons for not evacuating. But asserting that these activities bear no consequences or burden for others is false.
Of course the same also applies to gun ownership. By owning a gun I do increase the likelyhood that members of my family could be injured or killed with it. However the wife and I have made the decision that in our case the possible benefits for continuing to own firearms outweigh the risks of the same.
So long as our constitution gives us the right to persue happiness we should never have to prove why we should be allowed to do or own what we wish. It is up to the side attempting to strip those freedoms to prove the opposite. That goes for extreme sports as well as firearms in my opinion.
I remember seeing in the news a couple years ago where some major city like Chicago or something was having an issue with right on reds causing cameras to issue tickets incorrectly. Only the reason was that when the city plowed the snow from the main thourough fares it was piling up in the right hand turn lanes. Which meant that they were buried in 4 feet or more of snow. So instead people were turning right from the right most lane which otherwise would be a straight only. The cameras weren't smart enough to know the difference and apparently the cop who was supposed to be reviewing every infraction's photo wasn't either. So the city was issueing thousands of citations a day. And when it all came out in the public the City refused to relent and stop issuing the citations, instead they said each person needed to individually show up and contest their citations.
The government, and hell governments in general, have always picked winners and losers. Merely by representing such a huge potential spender the government picks winners and losers every time it awards a contract or chooses one product over another. How about educational loans, medicaid, medicare, aren't those all picking winners and losers? Sure they are, and they are all done with the intent to build our nation, it's all for the common good.
I oppose the bailouts in principle but in reality I can recognize that letting some of those institutions fail would have had worse consequences than bailing them out. A proper solution would also include breaking up the too big to fail enterprises so that they don't pose such a danger to our economy, but you are unlikely to see venture capitalists ever campaign for that. The market barons had they chance to fund Tesla and didn't, so the rest of us represented by the government did.
Honestly that's what most people do. Well not the spending $100,000 for a car. But buying far more car than they regularly need. How many people do you know that own SUV's and never drive them in conditions or terrain that warrant such a monstrosity? Or buy high performance cars that they never take to the track? If your plugin electric car gets 100 miles on a charge you can do a lot more than just hit the stores down the road anyways. The average driver goes less than 50 miles a day, I think it's actually like 37 miles a day or something like that. Sure there are a significant amount of people that need more range on a regular basis. But there are still huge numbers of people that don't and for them replacing their Internal Combustion Engine car with an electric makes very good economic sense.
Hell, I've considered replacing my daily driver with a Segway because my commute is so short and on low speed roads. I've tried biking and it was frankly too icky especially in the southern summer.
The original design or concept actually called for a small generator being part of the internals of the car, but they scrapped the idea to stick with the 100% electric concept. I agree that it's a good idea and have brought it up in discussions before. If plugin electrics continue to gain in popularity I expect we'll start to see third parties making aftermarket solutions like this. The mini trailer or platform that hangs on the trailer hitch appeals to me the most. I wouldn't even be surprised if there were places to just rent such a device so that you don't have to worry about the long term care for it.
Oh please spare us the tears. The government has around 2,110,221 Civil Servants. They earn an average salary of $76,358. That comes out to $161,132,255,118 a year. That is only 4.55% of the Federal budget. WOW, those government employees sure are hogging the spending all right. I'm pretty sure that excedes the efficiencies achieved in most private companies. Is there room for improvement, always, just like everyewhere else.
I won't even touch the complaints about the horrible injustice of venture capitalists having to pay taxes, or government helping to prop up the free market with subsidies.
I suppose it could be labeled as fraud in some way. But what it you actually filled out the application or whatever, forgetting some required tidbit, and then included the phone book just as a courtesy, you know as a free gift.
So lets start our own corporation which will collect undesired phone books and deliver them.
I think she understands cells in a very abstract way. She has illustrations and pictures of them in one of her favorite books, a childrens encyclopedia for the human body. It isn't necessary for her at this point to understand anything more than the abstracts for these things though to understand that damaged DNA can cause problems.
The language barrier I understand being skeptical of, but what is so complicated about the basic idea of how DNA functions? I know that I've already talked to my 3 1/2 year old daughter about it a couple of times. I'm not explaining the various ammio acids and how it is replicated and activated. But she's plenty smart enough to understand that it is a set of instructions for how tiny parts of her body called cells should develop and interact.
So I'm a little confused because normally your posts make a lot of sense to me. How is asking a co-worker their opinion on good topical books and googling the same significantly different, such that one is clearly good and the other clearly bad? In both cases the individual is seeking knowledge about a book to gain more knowledge. In fact knowing how internet searches are frequently modified by advertising money directly and things like google bombing, why would you hold it against a newbie if they asked a co-worker for a book reference?
I also feel that you are wrong to some degree on public schooling. Yes, it's primary purpose should be equiping the student with the skills and ability to learn more on their own. But they should also be exposing the students to a wide breadth of other topics which they might not encounter otherwise. How many people do you think got their start with computers through computer labs at school, because there wasn't one at home? In fact by schools introducing children to things outside of their current personal experience we end up with a culture that is the opposite of a bunch of factory animals.
A good school won't teach a student what to think, but how to think logically. For instance teaching the scientific method rather than just the rote facts about the theories we currently hold to be true. In the English classes I attended we focused on reading comprehension as well as grammar and such. Understanding what the author was trying to communicate was more important than whether or not the author was right. Not that I appreciated any of that at the time.
I also hope it's not a DOTA clone. The only tower defense game I can remember liking much recently was Dungeon Defenders, which i enjoyed because it had character progression.
Most people work in some job because it suites their sense of morality better doing something else with higher profits. For instance how many attractive women do you know that don't work as "Escorts". There are plenty of things other than direct pay which factor into a persons evaluation of whether or not to stay with a job.
The military, no matter which branch or job specialty, is not like any civilian equivilants. First, there is the always present threat of long term deployments to combat zones. Second, you can't quit and just walk away from your job, that would be a felony. Third, your boss doesn't just tell you what to do, he is ordering you to do it, refusing that order is possibly a felony. Fourth, in case it wasn't already evident they own you, almost literally. In my opinion considering all of the above and who knows what else that I've forgotten the marginally better than minimum wage pay is easily justified.
Walmart also hires people with asthma, heart abnormalities and a host of other disabilities I am sure. The military also requires at least a GED, and a relatively drug free past. There are all sorts of dumb restrictions including age for some branches. Some branches also will only take people within specific BMI's regardless of actual physical ability, and that has at times also related to people that were under weight. The military is far more restrictive in terms of who it will hire than most any other large employer.
I'm sorry your friends father was clearly dicked over, but how is that relevant to whether or not the healthcare disabled and retired veterans can recieve is often horrible and substandard? The military and VA have what healtcare systems they do simply becaue it was legislated into law at some point. If you don't like it then lobby and vote to remove it. At the same time if you think that civilian companies should provide the same type of benefits then vote with your dollars and feet, work for and buy from companies that do that, although you could persue this by legislative means also. I would justify the lifetime VA disability payments under the fact that it's a promise to a soldier that if they end up permanently injured, maimed, or disabled in anyway as a result of service they will be taken care of to some extent. All taxpayers have Social Security which fills a similiar role, though obviously not identical but neither are the working conditions.
I'll call bullshit on the largest part of the US military's spending being on staffing, link below. From there you can see that Operations and Maintanance easily beat out personnel costs. Operations and Maintanance do not include war spending, that's a seperate line item in newer budgets and a completely different spending bill previous to 2010.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States
I find it cute that you first complain that the recruits aren't up to snuff and then in the next breath condemn them for costing too much money. You can't have both and maintain current manning levels. You can get more picky about who you let in but if there isn't an increase in pay you can be damn sure you will start missing recruitment goals.
The pay for an E1 through E3 already pretty much is just a stipend. When I enlisted I took something like a 40% drop in pay. I did so because I wanted to serve my country and despite the horrible pay it appeared to offer more upward mobility than the job I already had. And don't forget that once you graduate from training a service member can be deployed to a hell hole like the middle east.
I have several friends who worked desk jockey jobs like me and ended up deployed to ride on convoys. I just count myself, and them, lucky that all my friends came back alive.
The only times the tax payer is going to end up on the hook for a soldiers medical bills for life is if they either end up severly disabled as a result of service related injuries or tough it out for 20+ years. And that free medical coverage is far from the best money can buy. One of the first things that I discovered when I seperated was that my military Dentists were pretty much incompetent as I had to spend several thousand dollars to fix the teeth they screwed up.
I don't doubt that there is probably bloat in the officer core especially at the higher ranks. But blaming the DoD's ills on the enlisted troops is insane, they have next to no pull when it comes to making command or spending decisions of any consequence. They are the ones with their balls in a sling every day out patroling in a hostile environment waiting for an IED to go off and shred said balls.
TLDR:
Fuck you, you fucking slackass armchair general!
From experience I know that one of the largest employers in the USA actually gives you a much better shot at a job if you do include the same key phrases in your resume. The mass crush of resumes that come in for any job opening requires that the HR drones put everything through an automated filter or three. If your resume doesn't pass those filters nothing else matters because no one is going to read it.
It's more about a war just not being winnable by force more than anything else. I don't know that the military is getting beaten in Afghanistan so much as they just can not possibly win against a guerilla underground with enough popular support. So long as we try to maintain an occupation there we might as well be burning stacks of cash and throwing in the occasional soldier.
I think the issue of having to fight against ones relatives is a little over blown simply because very few military people end up stationed anywhere near where they grew up. On the other hand though our bases here in the states are usually tightly integrated with the communities around them. Most troops don't even live on post anymore. What percentage of the troops would simply not show up for duty if they knew they were going to be ordered to arms against the civilians they live among?
I think that the very vulnerability you are trying to point out would be considered a large positive outcome of a war by some people.
I knew a Fuqua in the chair force, it was always funny to answer a phone call when someone was calling for him. Another good one was Dyke, pronounced Dick, it was always amusing to watch people try and decide what would be the least offensive way to pronounce his name when they saw his name tag.
I had an instructor once who had a custom plate for his new corvette, PHSTFCKR or maybe it was PHSTFKR. Anyways he claimed that the first four characters were to be read as "fast", but we always contended it was actually "fist".
105 does sound a bit extreme but then again he did blackmail 350 people. The methods that he used and the medium really aren't all that relevant. I'm actually surprised that the maximum possible is such a small number. Even if the sentence for blackmail was only 6 months, those charges alone could add up to 175 years. Breaking into other peoples online accounts would just be gravy.
It's not necessarily the individual losses that are important here. It's the scale of the fraud that makes the dollar amounts so outrageous. The moral issue is the same whether they stole a little money from a lot of people or a lot of money from a few people.
Technically they may have been right. If I am not mistaken they only have to schedule a flight with the FAA if they intend to fly above certain altitudes.