TXSG8R

I started a LV business 3 years ago, RNC but starting to do some small CNC. I think we have been impacted the worst wrt supply side because just about everything we use has a chip in it. First wave the big issue was manufacturing and logistics. Now it’s chips and still logistics. We go through 6+ month waits for items like AVRs through some of the biggest distributors. What little supply that is making it into the country is being fed to retail, but even that is drying up with the chip constraints. I talked to some vendors at an expo a couple of weeks ago and they told me that they used to pay $3k per shipping container out of China. That price is now $25k, and doesn’t include the price hikes/delays at the port, and on trucks to ferry stuff to the warehouse, etc. All of our vendors have given us a 7-10% price increase. One thing we didn’t see until last month were the material increase impacts to customers. We had a customer back out of a $20k job because his lumber prices went up $60k, pool went up $35k, metal went up $40k, yada yada. This market is 75% VA loans and most of these guys don’t go into a house with any real savings since they can get a million dollar loan and move in for a dollar. Most have a military retirement check, disability check (and a lot are 100% disabled so zero taxes), and most have a third income/retirement/pension. Guys base their build around what they can afford monthly and have very little wiggle room for changes because they have little in savings. This is the first house to get to trim out that ate this big materials increase, so I expect a few more customers to pull way back on LV hardware for houses we prewired this spring.

Yep, and it’s doubly maddening when you know this is arguably our most talented group of guys wrt to creativity and skill. There’s an argument to be made that they don’t play enough together and that will impact timing or recognition of runs, but that’s not what we are seeing. These guys have no concept of how to attack a defense as a group. Pulisic is being bracketed constantly, use that! If a team is going to sit deep, you need to play guys that can win over the top and mids and wings that can put in quality service. Should have gone double striker with Pepi and Pefok. You have to find ways to break tendencies and pull apart a defense. Greg isnt brave enough and is content in saying he put the best 11 on the field so he did his job. We have our golden generation, it is being squandered on an unimaginative coach.

Same shit as the gold cup, just absolutely no tactics for the final third. No service for Pefok to get on the end of. Dike had the same problem. If we aren’t going to play a true 9, at least have them play hold up, especially when you have CP to work off of. No bravery from the coaching, in tactics or subbing. Pepi still isn’t cap tied, and is probably rethinking his move to the USMNT.

I bet Greg really sucks at puzzles.

SIAP, but this is the kind of shit people in country were receiving. Americans that stuck around are 100% responsible for their predicament.

I don’t agree with denying care or testing, but triaging care and testing based on vaccination status (outside of medical reasons) or outright denial of covid also makes sense to me. If you’re an idiot that has refused to take the free, most effective preventatives like masking and vaccines, you go to the back of the line for testing and care. That’s not political, it’s a more effective use of limited resources. To extend that to your HIV example. Being gay doesn’t cause HIV infection. Unprotected sex does. If you have an idiot that advocates for refusing to wear condoms during an HIV pandemic, gay or not, and want to triage care based on that (assuming some equivalent strain on resources), I think that also makes sense.

One of our customers works at Darnell on Fort Hood. Spoke to him yesterday and he said they are still getting worse. Went from 6 open ORs to 3, and they are preparing to go down to 2 next week if cases keep increasing. They are also staged to take in patients from off base because the region is saturated (tents in a parking garage). He is an anesthetist and said they have been cross training to help reduce the burden on the ICU staff because they are at their limits.

Yea, it was pretty obvious these have been stripped out from the video. Ideally someone went to town on a couple of key members areas with a sawzall too to render the airframe useless too. One of the protocols for our C2 system was for the operators to carry WP thermite grenades in the event of a hard landing and inability to secure the airframe. They don't go boom, they just burn at 5k degrees. Great for rendering a rack of equipment useless in a hurry if you don't have time to zeroize everything. An even easier option would have been mercury paste. Burnish the airframe, apply paste, airframe ruined.

Those aren’t Army hooks. No clue what those are.

I guess I just don’t see how much it would have improved things, if any? We pushed out 120k+ people from HKIA and lost 13 marines in one suicide bombing incident. Even if we accept some pristine evac route from Kabul to Bagram that doesn’t diminish the volume of people getting there, I doubt we have any noticeable increase in flights. I also don’t see any way our security posture improves to avoid a suicide bombing like what happened at HKIA. If a bomber walks up to a checkpoint buried in a crowd, they will inflict casualties. At some point that checkpoint is manned by our people, whether it’s Bagram or HKIA.

DoD Contractors are starting to mandate vaccines to align with the pentagon policy. Going to be interesting to see how many principled stands crumble when facing the loss of that phat check. I know in the Fort Hood area the difference in pay between contract work on post and the stuff off post is 50-66% easily.

This is still a backwards way of thinking when it comes to this kind of enemy. There is no anthill we can drop a bomb on. There is no queen we can kill to collapse the colony. I’m not saying we don’t take action, but it’s a lot more difficult to execute. Afghanistan is pure fucking chaos, and all of our resources are focused on protecting that bubble in and around HKIA. Some training camp will get smoked at some point in the near future, or a house will get smart bombed because it was a meeting spot, and ISIS will reshuffle their cards and keep going.

Host country grants the visa, not the state dept. There is very little our govt can do to stop someone from traveling to a hostile country short of telling them they are on their own.

https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/were-trying-to-get-them-out-san-diego-students-stranded-in-afghanistan-expected-to-return-home-soon/2702761/ 7 of the 8 families had been evacuated as of Wednesday.

I think Biden’s response was authentic, he had a kid that served and he has genuine empathy and concern for people in uniform. It’s just hollow because of the nature of the enemy. There’s no headquarters to bomb. There no leadership to starve of money through sanctions. We will blow up a training camp full of brown people somewhere and say job done, but ISIS will just use that to recruit more people. There won’t be any real satisfaction or accomplishment from the response in the end.

I thought I read they were all Afghan that came to the US and got citizenship. They went back to visit family. Super shitty timing on their part.

The Taliban isn’t a culture, it’s a radical religious ideology. They exploit a war torn country that if all things were equal should probably be a bunch of smaller countries, or maybe Afghanistan should be smaller and a lot of the tribal areas should be folded into neighboring countries that are also exploiting Afghanistan. This isn’t something like the US where New England has one accent, and the south another. People from the north don’t even speak the same language as the south. It’s a country that has been undergoing a civil war for 40+ years.

See previous posts about the risk assessment culture within the DoD. There is no binary pass/fail when it comes to how these things are measured, regardless of how the media will attempt to frame them. It’s very likely we are ahead of expected casualties for this operation. Save your pitchforks for after the 31st.

Nope, someone has to make a very hard choice there. Best case scenario we drop pallets of cash somewhere in exchange for their lives, which someone will conveniently leak around the next election to claim that Biden supports the Taliban. Worst case scenario we have more soldiers lose their lives so an American that made a bad choice can live.

I think anyone familiar with this kind of mission expects casualties. The difference between the casualties while doing this kneel operation versus reestablishing our military presence and pushing the taliban back is easily in the hundreds of lives, if not thousands, and that doesn’t count the monetary costs of ramping back up to wartime footing. I doubt anyone in a position of authority trusts the Taliban, but you work with what you’ve got. Up until today it had resulted in over 80k evacuations with almost no loss of life.

You obviously missed the part of the presser where he said he has offered the pentagon anything they want for this mission and they have declined to increase our posture.

You may want to go brush up on asymmetric warfare. The Taliban is waiting us out because this is the easiest option for them to control the country. If it looks like we are sticking around they will definitely simultaneously melt into the population and start killing Americans at the same time. Them being on the run or not controlling population centers isn't a bug in their strategy, it’s a feature. They are smart enough to know they can’t line up and go toe to toe with the US military, so they will do all the dirty shit that makes them hard to kill without collateral damage, and/or exposing Americans to an increased risk to root them out. Our technology counts for very little when it comes down to trying fight guys that use IED, VBEDs, suicide bombers, etc and are willing to die while taking Americans with them. I say this as a guy that spent over 20 years working on that technology. We have spent a fuck ton of money on sensor fusion, data collating, predictive AI, ECM, etc, and none of that gives us much of an advantage over guys that hides in a crowd with a bomb strapped to their chest with a dead mans switch. The Taliban is very aware that they don’t have to win any battles, they just have to keep chipping away at the fringes and get the American public to sour on the body count and cost.

Biden just laid it out there, he accepted the advice of the pentagon to go with HKIA over Bagram.

No shit, now add 30 miles of that and expect people to find their way through.