mlmp08 posted:

Certainly a cs degree isn't a bad career track at all, but I was mostly posting knowing full well that mortabis' easy six figure for fresh college grads would get walked back to "if you're qualified and actually getting paid that straight out of college is not the most common result, terms and conditions apply." If the key to landing a job as a twenty-two year old that puts you in the top quintile of American household income was a basic four year degree from any reasonable state school, cs would be way more popular.

Cyrano4747 posted:

I've also been reading a lot about really horrible quality control issues in a lot of Asian universities, especially when you get into the non-flagship regional universities; basically the Chinese and Indian equivalent of our land grant schools. Problems with people getting promoted through the programs and netting a degree on the other side without actually mastering the material to a level where they're of any use to the firms that want to hire them. With the ever-accelerating commoditization of education in the US I wouldn't be surprised if we don't get there in a few years myself, but that's another bitch for another subforum.

Sperglord Actual posted:

Now you're just making poo poo up.

Sperglord Actual posted:

Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the illustrious career of forums poster Mortabis. For the record, I got straight As in the compsci classes I took, but found writing code to be extremely stressful and decided I didn't want to end up bitter and frustrated like my dad. So I changed my major and went on to do other things.

Sperglord Actual posted:

I would name at least one major tech company that does, except my father still works there and is (probably rightly) very paranoid about his job security. I will say that his time there has involved an inordinate amount of fixing broken code sent in from said company's overseas branches.

Godholio posted:

It would probably take a year to actually get poo poo set up and get subcontracts cranking out the individual parts again. Lockmart says $200M up front to do it, so I'd plan on 400M.


If it was a decision based on the idea that "We don't need to plan for this much simultaneous warfare," I wouldn't necessarily mind (I would disagree, but I wouldn't be able to say "THIS IS loving STUPID" like I can now). But in this case, there was a clear A to B to C progression. It was a conscious decision based on a thought process that said "If we cut the number of assets we can't meet the current requirement so we'll change the requirement." It's the same thing as cutting flight hours then cutting the requirement to be be Combat Mission Ready qualified. Which I can neither confirm nor deny has actually loving happened.

2.5 was actually the requirement through the Cold War. If you recall, the US went from 0 to 2 really loving fast in 1942. Arguably more than two, just based on how the Pacific/Asian war was spread out. If you further recall, just fighting in CENTCOM stretched a lot of the military to the breaking point, and in some cases beyond. That was barely ONE major theater. And now we've got a resurgent rear end in a top hat Russia and a rapidly advancing China that's actively pursuing regional parity with the combined forces of the US and allies as well as loving blue water power projection. This is a dangerous time to be making half-century deep cuts in the only Western military left that's worth a poo poo.

movax posted:

He's talking more about the institutional knowledge stuck in the heads of the workers and engineers who worked on the assembly line for the first 187 + YF-22 that isn't documented anywhere. This problem exists across any corporation and any manufacturing sector, there is always a human factor.

MrChips posted:

Having said that, I imagine that it would be so expensive to restart F-22 production that it would probably make more sense to just build a new aircraft.

holocaust bloopers posted:

So let's say the production line kicks off. Who's gonna fly them? Pilots? Oh yea they need about a year or so of training to get sped up.

What about other airframes? They need pilots too. New ones take even longer to train.

Same for maintenance, tooling, space availability on existing airfields, gas, personnel to support the new Raptor personnel, etc.

200-400 million is just hilarious. The costs would be nearly billions.

Plinkey posted:

e: What you can't make this Radar run Matlab? How am I supposed to make it work!

PittTheElder posted:

Hey man, some of us despise MATLAB. I just can't deal with the whole 'every number is a double' typing. Trying to get it to read three byte 2's complement numbers expressed in hex took a whole day.

But MATLAB still makes better plots than any alternative I'm aware of, so I still use it almost every day.

Godholio posted:

It's probably nothing more than a well-dressed float. That's all it'll ever be used for.


Hacking doesn't take territory. Keep in mind that China has attempted more than once to move into Vietnam and made the US' biggest errors over there look brilliant in comparison. I can only think of two military successes China can point to in the past century: the Communists over the Kuomintang and knocking the UN on its rear end in Korea (of course, they were pushed back but initially it was a hell of a thing). Everything else has been really, really bad.

TasogareNoKagi posted:

How about an SSN carrying a DSRV into a combat situation because ~plot~?

Steeltalon posted:

Alaan posted:

At some point during Iraq/Afghanistan someone realized that an Apache is both faster than other choppers and has it's own guns and rockets for self protection. So for absolute OOOOOH poo poo scenarios they rigged up some mounts to lift people out on them.

Definitely not standard operating procedure though and I think it only happened for real a few times. Wounded guy goes in the gunner seat, gunner gets to ride the side for the trip of a lifetime in which he probably has no hearing afterwards.

Dietrich posted:

It seems to me that the Chinese armed forces are paper tigers who's only real capability lies in keeping their population in check and will seriously be strained now that China's 10% yr/yr growth has all but stalled out and the 900 million Chinese who got left off the economic improvement boat realize what's up but maybe that's just what I want to believe.

Baloogan posted:

And really the B-25 has the F-22 beat in the RCS category too.

Godholio posted:

Same basic reason complaining about the USPS losing money is loving stupid.

mlmp08 posted:

What's the free market solution to charging hamburger hill?

PittTheElder posted:

Because the USPS's job is to provide affordable postal service to everyone, regardless of geography. "Make money" is not among it's mandates, because it's a service.

mlmp08 posted:

In the military, unlike the private sector, you can go to jail or face other restrictions and remittances of basic freedoms and pay for not doing your job instead of just being fired or sued. This of course affects pay scales.

PittTheElder posted:

It's only stupid to the extent that it's kinda dated. It's not even close to the stupidest thing in the Constitution.

mlmp08 posted:

The military pays based on rank rather than position with a tiny handful of exceptions, such as combat pay, drill sergeant pay, language proficiency in very specific jobs, and other rare circumstances. This is hammered home from day one. Trying to balance special pay for every job deemed undesirable would be dumb, particularly when taking into account geographically undesirable locations. If the only thing motivating you is money never sign up, tia.

Vahakyla posted:

Is it now? Perhaps because it provides a service other than "make my cousin's company rich"?

The USPS delivers its service non-stop for affordable prices and good reliability. And is mandated by the constitution.
It's actually a pretty sweet federal agency.

stealie72 posted:

Yeah, there's no unpaid volunteers in the military. But if you want to see the gigantic difference between free market value for what the military does vs. actual compensation paid to members of the military for those jobs, look at the millions of words spent bemoaning how much contractors got paid for GWOT jobs.

There are, in effect, almost zero free-market forces within the military other than the very basic "I get paid if I join up."

Madurai posted:

Well, then they'd definitely have a lawsuit from Boeing, then.

Godholio posted:

Yeah, me too. I also dealt with him in person when I was in high school. He was awfully self-righteous for someone who got famous by completely loving up from start to finish (to include the shootdown itself).