PCrudy retweeted
The best thing for the country is a divided Congress that will prevent anyone from doing anything.
Because both parties are utter garbage. Nobody deserves much power these days.
PCrudy retweeted
In my humble non-Navy opinion; the names Enterprise, Yorktown, Lexington, Saratoga, Hornet, Wasp, Ranger, and Independence should be in permanent rotation for the carriers.
PCrudy retweeted
Not to be a dick or anything but Freddy got to see gorgeous country and then witness comeback wins by the CU Buffs and Denver Broncos on back to back days so there's a pretty decent chance Colorado becomes his favorite state and he moves here and we become friends.
PCrudy retweeted
In the mid-nineties, George W. Bush and Karl Rove ended 100 years of Democrat rule in Texas. Fast forward to today and they are anathema to the current Texas GOP. We’ll see if today’s Texas GOP can do what those guys did and keep the Democrats out of power.
PCrudy retweeted
Reagan's three-legged-stool coalition of anticommunists, social conservatives, and free market advocates was most important for the leg it left out, namely, racist paleocons. We need to somehow get back to that state where all they do is stew impotently, at home in neither party.
PCrudy retweeted
This is generally correct.
The US health insurance system bundles a few things that shouldn't be bundled, which makes the market highly inefficient and price insensitive:
1. actual catastrophic insurance (the only part that is really insurance)
2. prepaid health plan for routine care (highly inefficient as you note)
3. negotiated discounts (despite these negotiated prices being much higher than they would be in a competitive market, as per your leaky faucet analogy, the actual rack rates are even more insane than the insurance company negotiated prices, so even if you are a very wealthy person, it generally makes sense to go thru a health plan to avoid the rack rate)
A proper insurance system would offer only #1 (analogous to actual catastrophic house & car insurance). #2 shouldn't be offered; instead end users should directly bear the cost of routine care (as they do for their houses & cars) which would ensure price transparency and competition. And this in turn would obviate #3.
The US version of health insurance isn’t “insurance.”
It’s a prepaid health payment plan. Which simply makes it so routine care is paid for by third parties.
Imagine if you ran all your routine home maintenance through your homeowners insurance.
That leaky faucet would be five times more expensive than if you just paid cash.
Why? The plumber wouldn’t just be able to charge you at the point of sale. He’d need to employ a whole billing department. Since someone else was paying, he wouldn’t even bother showing you the price. You’d shop purely on non-price factors, like show nice his website is and how shiny his truck is. So his prices would gradually creep up. Why not? Someone else is paying.
Which means now you’d need prior authorization to get the faucet fixed. The plumber might try to say you need a fancy new faucet with touchless controls and a built in purifier. Insurance says you can only have one of those old turn handle ones where hot and cold have separate nozzles. They only care about cost and not quality (except it being good enough to avoid an other leaky faucet soon). You care about quality but not cost.
Just getting a leaky faucet repaired has now become an expensive, bureaucratic nightmare.
Of course, if you suggest people pay cash for leaky faucets there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth. “Do you even know how much a plumber is these days? A leaky faucet costs $300,000!“
And, obviously, someone would bring up the fact that you can’t negotiate with a plumber if there is a burst pipe at 2am on christmas day and your house is being flooded. So how could you ever expect people to shop for plumbers. Thats just ridiculous.
Also, if you dont make someone else pay to have that leaky faucet fixed, there might be water damage in the future and it will cost MORE to fix.
So we should just fund all plumbers through the government. Running water is a right, after all. There certainly won’t be any difficulty getting a plumber once they all have to get government approval to do anything to fix your house, right? Anyone will be able to get a plumber at any time and they’ll do all the things necessary to keep your house working perfectly.
If it sounds stupid for plumbers it sounds stupid for doctors, too.
PCrudy retweeted
Connected everything in your home, like where you talk to your fridge and your toaster tells you the weather, is going to get way less popular. All that software, how secure do you think it is? Yeah. Just buy an oven or a fridge that does fridge and oven things. Everything else is just an attack vector.
PCrudy retweeted
Writing this in my personal capacity, but I have been flying these types of aircraft for more than 20 years, with over 8,000 hours, and have reasonable familiarity with how the charter world operates. I feel compelled to post after seeing commentary about the Lear 60 crash, from missile strikes to DEI to critiquing this poor woman’s final radio calls.
That last part is what I find most troubling. She was the second-in-command (SIC), and while she was empowered to point out mistakes as part of good crew resource management, she was doing her job, communicating with ATC right to the end in a terrifying situation. She likely knew before many of those calls that she was going to die. I have heard final calls from friends, from military pilots with thousands of hours in fighter aircraft, and they are just as heartbreaking because they know the end is approaching.
I understand the public interest given the footage and audio. But you do not know the aircraft’s maintenance history, whether there was a structural failure, if any failure was induced by turbulence, overspeed, or overcontrol, or everything happening in that cockpit. I am sure weather will be part of the investigation, but beyond that, it is speculation. The charter industry routinely hires commercial pilots very early in their careers to gain experience alongside an ATP-qualified captain before they move up to the airlines. She would still have the appropriate training, qualifications, and checkouts by an FAA examiner or designee.
Let people investigate, learn, and share the facts. Be respectful to those who perished and the families who carry their memories. God bless them and their loved ones.
PCrudy retweeted
It’s a damning indictment of the modern Democratic Party that she’s getting trashed and isolated for insisting on condemning antisemitism, and Democrats are instead rallying behind a guy who does apologia for Islamist terrorism and campaigns with literal Commies
PCrudy retweeted
If it’s true Jack Poso was a Qatari asset it will be so perfect because he’s the face of the fake “America First” movement and good friend of Vance.
PCrudy retweeted
The Russian goal was to annex “Novorossiya” as a baseline, establish a puppet government in Kyiv even more under their boot than Yanukovych and then probably immediately wheel into Moldova. This is something we know from Russian statements and actions, as well as Lukashenko’s helpful press conference.
They would have hoped that the rapid seizure of urban centers across the country, including the capital, as well as the encirclement and destruction of Ukraine’s most capable units in the Donbas, would have led to a complete capitulation of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, which they hoped would demobilize or be confined to their bases. With that surrender, they wanted to then install leaders and commanders loyal to to their puppet in Kyiv and watched by GRU/FSB minders to keep an eye on the west and exert control that way.
While in control, they planned to carry out a widespread disappearance campaign targeting Ukrainian political, intellectual and cultural figures. This is something that they’ve conducted in the territories they occupy now.
PCrudy retweeted
So much of this platform is a foreign influence campaign it’s insane.
The sad thing is how many right wingers fall for it.
PCrudy retweeted
>man who caused global ram crisis
>complains he can’t get more
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says it’s “quite terrible” that people have so much DRAM sitting in their own PCs instead of being used in data centers.
“Everyone have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer. And be used 5% of the time,”
He argues that cloud data centers should make better use of limited memory supplies instead of people running AI models locally.
PCrudy retweeted
Local schoolchildren from the neighborhood were not allowed to attend the White House Halloween Event this year.
Only the children of White House staffers were allowed to attend.
One of Trump’s 'Little Green Men' sent in their kid dressed as a little green man.
PCrudy retweeted
I have to agree with the below. This wasn’t a mistaken camouflage. That is a specific patch. There is a hammer and sickle on that kid’s hat. We have a literal traitor in the White House right now.
In today's Whitehouse on a Halloween party we a kid wearing a russian military uniform with a modern russian tank forces patch featuring Armata tank.
This is a carefully crafted political message by someone in Trump's inner circle.
This isn't a coincidence.
Troops wearing this patch are currently pillaging and raping Ukrainian children, while their supporters and enablers sends their kids to celebrate Halloween with the USA president.
PCrudy retweeted
Reportedly the children of senior White House adviser and Temu Nosferatu Stephen Miller.
In today's Whitehouse on a Halloween party we a kid wearing a russian military uniform with a modern russian tank forces patch featuring Armata tank.
This is a carefully crafted political message by someone in Trump's inner circle.
This isn't a coincidence.
Troops wearing this patch are currently pillaging and raping Ukrainian children, while their supporters and enablers sends their kids to celebrate Halloween with the USA president.