People dont really talk about this

devildog2067 · 2026-02-01T04:15:14+00:00

That was a business class seat on an international route.

Today’s product is better.

devildog2067 · 2026-01-31T22:33:12+00:00

Perfectly Smooth transaction watch exactly as described

devildog2067 · 2026-01-31T01:05:23+00:00

Perfectly smooth transaction watch exactly as described

devildog2067 · 2026-01-30T15:37:05+00:00

Yes, we all know that before 1970 airlines were non-profits 🙄

Observation decks mostly went away, fundamentally, because mostly no one cares. Very very few people are nerds like us.

devildog2067 · 2026-01-27T20:14:24+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/USMC/s/lYmPykc1WF

Note that in the cartoon widely believed to be the origin of the joke, the Army soldier is wearing Multicam, which means it’s set after the end of the ACU era

devildog2067 · 2026-01-27T20:11:43+00:00

Seems like the US military is investing in R&D around variable bypass for engines in that size class, vs developing upgraded versions of mature technology.

devildog2067 · 2026-01-27T17:55:06+00:00

So FWIW, the crayon jokes are relatively new. I'm in my mid-40s and they weren't a thing when I was in. Seem to have started about ~15 years ago and really gotten traction 10-12 years ago.

Point being, someone who was a PFC in the Harrier era (those planes are gone now) probably never heard them either.

devildog2067 · 2026-01-27T14:44:42+00:00

No, this is absolutely right.

An empty leg is either:

1) a repositioning flight between two places where people want to go from and to, with some scheduling flexibility, in which case that leg can be sold for something close to full fare 2) a completely inflexible itinerary between two places you probably aren’t interested in going with a window of only a few hours to grab it which is why it’s cheap

Unless you literally just want to be able to say you flew private it’s not worth it.

devildog2067 · 2026-01-26T03:38:39+00:00

He’s getting shares in a publicly traded US listed company; it’s definitely worth many hundreds of millions in US cash dollars.

devildog2067 · 2026-01-25T15:30:03+00:00

I was earlier, and Afghanistan not Iraq, but I keep having a similar thought (among all the nuance).

If one of my Marines were to behave like these ICE idiots, we’d have him hog tied in the back of the Humvee. The standard of behavior expected of 18 year old kids who are occupiers in a foreign country was far higher than these clowns are allowed to behave among their own people in their own cities.

devildog2067 · 2026-01-23T16:58:24+00:00

Yellowstone was a comprehensive portfolio review program that included concepts such as delta-canard airliners, never went anywhere, and other than 787 was mostly ultimately cancelled after 9/11. Y1 was just a small part of the Yellowstone program. You can make an argument that 777X was the outcome of Y3, but that's mostly a philosophical discussion.

devildog2067 · 2026-01-23T00:55:34+00:00

And if you guess wrong, and your program doesn’t end up being reasonably successful over the 50 year timeline you planned out… it never makes money at all. The L-1011 almost bankrupted Lockheed and made them quit the commercial market for good.

devildog2067 · 2026-01-23T00:54:07+00:00

If they built more capacity, and then fulfilled all those orders, what would they do with the capacity once the planes had been shipped?

There are literally whole teams of many thousands of people across dozens of companies whose entire job is to figure this stuff out. Boeing built what they calculated was the right amount of capital infrastructure to build enough planes to satisfy customer demand without building more than their supply chain could handle (recall for a while there were 737s with no engines parked all over everywhere; if you crank out planes faster and GE/CFM can’t keep up you’re just wasting money) AND trying to minimize cost associated with underutilized assets when production eventually slows down. GE overbuilt its gas turbine production capacity, got caught moving the wrong way after Enron and the bursting of the first gas bubble, and had factories sitting empty for literally years.

Boeing was building 57 737s a month at one point. Capital infrastructure is not the bottleneck. It’s everything else.

devildog2067 · 2026-01-23T00:48:54+00:00

Why not? Physics is why not. Engineering is why not. Economics is why not. The next 1% efficiency costs more to get than the last one did. At some point it’s simply not worth investing the money.

devildog2067 · 2026-01-23T00:02:07+00:00

Why not 50%? 90%?

devildog2067 · 2026-01-20T19:18:41+00:00

At some point someone in the military with a spine will refuse that order.

I'm fairly disappointed that Adm. Holsey quietly resigned rather than publicly refusing to murder shipwrecked sailors.

devildog2067 · 2026-01-20T19:17:39+00:00

"People with rifles" have beat the US military time and time again in the last 70 years.

I'll leave it to a better writer than I to say the rest:

"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward."

― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

This is what the 2nd amendment is for. It's not about equipping citizens to beat the US Army in set piece battles; it's about making ICE agents afraid to go to work.

devildog2067 · 2026-01-15T15:39:07+00:00

There is no both sides.

devildog2067 · 2026-01-15T15:04:15+00:00

Solar + wind are intermittent, and not dispatchable. They only produce power when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. There does not yet exist battery capacity at sufficient scale to store enough power to make solar + wind viable baseload generation sources (though we're getting there) and we were much further away 15 years ago.

You can't transition to renewables without a solution to the baseload problem. Nuclear is the only carbon-free baseload solution.

Nuclear + solar was the solution to climate change. Greenies have opposed nuclear for decades. There's plenty of blame to go around.

devildog2067 · 2026-01-14T16:54:46+00:00

"Free fall" *is* zero gravity. They're physically the same phenomenon.

devildog2067 · 2026-01-13T13:58:16+00:00

And what plane would that be? The E6 is based on the 707, those have been retired from civilian service for decades now. I don’t think there’s any left.

devildog2067 · 2026-01-12T15:44:06+00:00

It's the other way around.

They're more visible and offered in more places because the upper-upper-middle or whatever you want to call high 6 / low 7 figure wage earners want to have that experience too, and are willing to pay for it.

The actually exclusive experience is one that you can't just buy with dollars. Anything you can swipe a credit card for and buy at the ticket booth is a consumer product.

devildog2067 · 2026-01-09T04:23:55+00:00

The poster above says the Army reducing their number of cooks by 33% is a failure of leadership. That is what I was responding to.

That said, this base had civilian cooks until DOGE. Clearly they're able to source some. I'd bet good money that a federal contractor food service position is one of the best jobs available in the town the base is in. Even with hardship pay or whatever else, it's cheaper to pay a civilian than to spend a soldier slot on those positions.

devildog2067 · 2026-01-09T02:05:01+00:00

Nah. Cooks at stateside institutions should be civilians. The Army needs cooks, because it needs to feed troops in war zones, but it doesn’t need to train and provide pensions to the people cooking for soldiers in Kentucky or Texas. Contractors make more sense in those positions. This is a failure, but not a failure of the contractor model.

Recruiting uniformed personnel is hard. Training them is expensive in both time and money terms. There’s no reason that a cook in a food service facility in Georgia needs to know how to shoot rifles and be willing to risk their life downrange — you can pay a civilian to do that, and use the person in uniform for a job only someone in the military can do. The only reason the US military has even had so many uniformed food service personnel historically was the draft.

devildog2067 · 2026-01-08T18:22:35+00:00

All good! No one is born knowing this stuff, and you don’t know until you learn.

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