I also believe we need gun control, and do believe it will prevent many of these from happening again, but she should be taken to task a little for this:

No, it wouldn’t. You’d trade thousands of dead children for tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of dead adults and children. Attempting to do that would spark a revolution or a civil war.

Holy Cow! I thought you were joking but I never knew Airplane was such a close copy of Zero Hour...with some adjustments.

I know this! it’s a line from Zero Hour!

Sluggish, like a wet sponge.

The salary numbers work out to over 287,000k per employee. Obviously some are making much more while many make much less but goddamn that’s eye-popping.

Russia does have gen 4.5 fighters. The F-22 is necessary to keep ahead of those. So they developed it, built it, produced enough to provide a deterrent, and then stopped short of a full build. This was a good thing. The F-22 also wasn’t plagued by constant issues.

Oh, I know. It just seems prudent to correct factually incorrect information.

“So we spent $62,000,000,000 on the F-22 to fight an enemy that doesn’t exist, in numbers that weren’t needed, and exists primarily in a role that isn’t needed anymore?”

The F-22 and F-35 are not comparable planes.

Yeah, they’ve put in some useful upgrades but it still isn’t as versatile a spear-carrier as the BUFF and the parts of the jet that make it expensive and complex to maintain just can’t be swapped out. The swing-wing assembly and afterburning engines on their own are next-level complex compared to the B-52 (remember,…

Stripping out the interior of a B-52 is easy, the B-2, not so much.

The F-22 was fine. And yes, Northrop has a decent track record compared to Lockheed. Also the the Osprey was a novel design, as is the F-35, whereas the B-21 is a refinement of current technology.

Part of the motivation behind the B-21 program is to field a bomber with lower running costs, less maintenance, and higher uptime. The B-2 is a PITA to keep in the air.

Well, there’s a good article about this from yesterday over on The War Zone by Tyler that explains all of that quite well. Basically, the B-2's design is somewhat compromised due to many late-stage design requirement updates that forced the designers to sacrifice total stealth, increased the price and dramatically…

Because they fill different roles. Would you order a new batch of hammers to replace your nailguns just because they’re cheaper?

No, both have situations where they’re useful, and while there’s overlap, there’s enough specificity that a fully invested party will have both at their disposal.


In this case, the B-52 is…

For the same reason you don’t throw out your hammer when your power tools start wearing out. The B-52 is simple, cheap, and effective for its specific role. The others are far far more expensive to maintain because they are complex, and it’s more of a struggle to keep them updated since their role is specifically to…

Because we’re not retiring the B-52s any time soon. A new B-52 would be more expensive than the ones we have flying.

I think you might be taking this a tad too seriously.

The Office: The Trial of Toby... with Michael Scott showing up to see Toby finally get what’s coming to him, only to realize he can actually provide an alibi that’ll save Toby. Will he do the right thing?