Today I Learned
What did you learn today? Share it with us!
We learn something new every day. This is a community dedicated to informing each other and helping to spread knowledge.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must begin with TIL. Linking to a source of info is optional, but highly recommended as it helps to spark discussion.
** Posts must be about an actual fact that you have learned, but it doesn't matter if you learned it today. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.**
Rule 2- Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-TIL posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-TIL posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
Partnered Communities
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
Community Moderation
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
view the rest of the comments
Its not just the commissary. The entire way the military works is functional communism. Housing is assigned by rank, is available to anyone currently in contract, as well as healthcare and obviously, work. Pay is rated by rank and not by position, a Physician assistant gets the same rank pay as a Lt working command staff in any other unit. There is no capitalism in the DoD at all not even under their procurement systems.
Is there really a rank in communism? Who decides the details of a rank?
Dawg, I dont know man…. To each according to their needs is kinda hard to subscribe to before the definition of a post-scarcity society, considering we all have the same needs generally speaking. To use Stalinist USSR as an example work was assigned according to ability, and in some cases who you were or who you knew. Someone had to work the party lines and admin to assign this stuff based on “something”
Edit: i know this example isnt real communism
in communism, 'class is abolished. The ability to earn more than other workers is almost nonexistent.' Therefore i'd argue that a rank or housing and pay by rank, are very counterproductive.
Stalinist just means authoritarian to me. There was no equality
The U.S. Military currently has a lot of problems with housing, feeding, and providing healthcare for service members. Check out USAG's hawaii barracks for example. There's a large number of lawsuits against the living conditions of family-housing. Dining Facilities that are intended and required to feed service members simply don't.
Until recently Service Members couldn't do anything if there was medical malpractice against them (and there was a LOT). And the act allowing medical malpractice suits was not retroactive, meaning everybody who served before 2020 was simply fucked.
Commissaries are (usually) genuinely good though. No complaints.
Understand that the government provided living conditions are not as good as you may be imagining.
Anyways here's my personal anecdotes to bitch about: Goodfellow AFB many years ago. Sewage was leaking into the barracks' (already shitty) Concho water pipes making it unsafe to drink and bathe. Lasted weeks. The water pipe above my room in particular was dripping onto our fridge and smelled like shit. I made a dumb fuckin gummy-bear funnel that diverted the leak into our sink because every single god damn person I asked to fix this problem said it wasn't their issue.
and here's the barracks room I was issued at my first duty station (that's all mold):
So, just like communism? Only half joking here.
Alright Airman, I, no We in your command staff have heard you! We want to do better…./s
Hawaii barracks has been complained about by everyone since…forever I think. The contaminated drinking water on bases is endemic. Moldy old barracks aside the family living conditions were always bad and only get worse with age and wear. I didnt mean to imply that anything was good about it, and the complaints definitely outweigh the compliments on military living with or without family accommodations. There is a lot of room for improvement, whats killer is that all the wrong people are acutely aware of the glaring issues.
Base pay may be the same, but there are several incentive pays available for various duties. Flight pay, sea pay, jump pay, hazardous duty pay, etc.
I knew someone would point out “hazard pay”. It is not really common, but if youre gonna split hairs; what about BAQ/BAH? The pay differential isnt any more significant than shift differentials. There is a difference between flight crew and ground crew in aviation and they get different hours and pay, but the base rate is absolutely the same by rank.
I was agreeing with you, just pointing out that there is some variation depending on the duties assigned.
No disagreement implied! I was attempting to ignore the smaller rules to avoid confusion, but I knew someone would point it out. Much love, brother!
No worries man. Text can be hard to interpret tone sometimes. Right back at you friend.
lol.. yeah that 225 dollars…
Not only that, but government owned housing is assigned not based on pay, rank, or whatever, but size of household. So an E-7 with no kids gets a 2 bedroom and an E-3 with three kids gets a four bedroom (depending on age/gender of the kids). So according to need.
Uhh - that would be a 'bourgeois right', going Marx's 'Critique of the Gotha Programme'. Very much the opposite intended outcome.
Honestly I would compare it to group project eugenics because of the strict processing and selection of who can join. Cant be disabled, have to have all your arms and legs, picky even about eyesight. They might be picking the poor but theyre also grabbing the healthiest of the poor.
I mean yeah, not that there are any wars that we should be fighting anyway, but it'd be really fucked up to drop a guy in a wheelchair into a war zone.
You can't become a bus driver if you're blind either.
Some jobs simply can't be accommodated for, hopefully we one day can have technology progresses to that point, but this critique of the military seems off to me