Posts Tagged ‘NG36B’

Modern students suck

Posted: August 12, 2023 by navygrade36bureaucrat in Uncomfortable Truths
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One of my jobs involves teaching classes for an internationally recognized certification exam. I teach both in-person and online, and I enjoy teaching the materials and helping people prepare to pass the exam. For me, this certification opened up a lot of doors, connected me with a great network, and in general changed my career for the better. I’m pretty passionate about it, and I try to bring that passion and care to the class.

But man, sometimes, it is hard.

Over the past few years, I’ve noticed a decline in the care level people place on education. Now, to be fair, education is always a challenge, especially if we’re talking middle or high school education. Many of those kids just don’t want to be there. I don’t measure that engagement. I teach post-secondary classes. My adult students should, theoretically, want to be in class, and place some value on it.

It shocks me how little the modern student cares. As an instructor, I’m full of knowledge about the certification exam, yet most students ask few if any questions about the exam. I’ve then had students that failed the exam say “I wish you would have covered this aspect of the exam…” only to have me send them a link to their class video where I explicitly state “This aspect is really critical and you need to memorize it for the exam.”

In college, I had an electrical engineering instructor that used to work for NASA. He was the guy that designed the carbon dioxide filter for the Apollo 13 mission. If you saw the movie and remember where they made a square filter fit a round hole…yeah, that was him.

Most of the people in my class never asked him any questions. He never volunteered information about his time in NASA, and it wasn’t until the last week of class that I had the opportunity to ask him about his NASA experience. I learned so much in just that short time, and I’m glad I took that opportunity while in college.

We live in an era of information abundance, where gaining knowledge is simply a matter of applying yourself. Gone are the days where knowledge was kept under lock and key, only reserved for the powerful or rich. Yet this abundance has resulted in seemingly dumber students who are not ready to actually work. When you have mechanical engineering graduates who can’t make basic parts on a lathe, you have to wonder what that person did for 4 years in college.

I don’t think its a matter of education availability. The opportunities are there, and they’ve been there since I was a student all the way to today. But whether its laziness, lack of care, or something in the water, our modern students suck.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

Best shape in decades

Posted: August 5, 2023 by navygrade36bureaucrat in Afghanistan war
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Would you consider the title describes the U.S. Military right now?

No? Maybe the U.S. Army?

No?

Well, don’t tell Forbes that.

Now, I don’t have any beef with General McConville. He seems like a nice enough person. And according to RAND studies, while the military has been struggling to recruit new members, its actually doing well overall on retention numbers, meeting around 100% of its retention goals.

But best shape in decades? The military is a young person’s game, and the Army more so than most. Retention spiked during the COVID pandemic because the military basically suspended all the rules to desperately keep people in, and people that were getting out were looking at a terrible job market, so it was a win-win for everyone. Then the military went on the COVID vaccine witch-hunt, lost Afghanistan and in general lost its way.

The high retention you see now is not going to last. If you had 18 years in and fell under the old “20 or nothing” retirement, of course you’re going to stay in. But the retirement changed in 2018, so we’re now at the 5-year mark, and retention for servicemembers that enlisted under the new retirement is going to become a problem. The Army has made up the overall numbers by lowering physical fitness standards and failing less people in boot camp, but that won’t make a difference when there simply aren’t enough people in boot camp.

People will continue to blast Senator Tuberville for “depriving” the Army of Senate-confirmed leadership, but insisting that the Army and all the other services focus on killing our enemies instead of innocent babies is the only long-term fix. Maybe we’ll get lucky and more of the generals and admirals that lost our last wars will retire instead of hanging around. One could only hope.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

Navy looks to drain reserves to fill gaps

Posted: July 29, 2023 by navygrade36bureaucrat in war
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Your lawn requires maintenance. If you don’t put time and effort into filling your lawn with nice grass, it will eventually fill up with undesirable weeds. Nature abhors a vacuum, so its going to fill the lawn if you don’t. Similarly, the Navy is going to fill its manpower requirements one way or another. Between draining its DEP rolls, slow-rolling retirements, suspending body fat and physical fitness failures, and even suspending high year tenure, you’d think for just a minute that it all might work, that this nibbling around the edges of the problem (instead of addressing it directly) would bring in enough recruits.

Nope.

The Navy, still circling the drain, has now decided to start draining the reserves. Reservists are folks who typically served an initial enlistment and then decided to leave the military but retain a connection to the service. They muster one weekend a month and typically serve a two-week period during the year on active duty. In return they remain eligible for health care and get a cut-down retirement. It’s not a bad gig, but in the past most reservists were barely meeting standards and were thought of as a “break glass in case of emergency” manpower solution. The terrorist attacks on 9-11 changed that and resulted in a bit of a change so that reservists were more available for extended deployments.

Not surprisingly, the Navy is making it easier to tap into reserves and making it harder for people to fail out of the reserves. Let’s look at the following NAVADMINs:

NAVADMIN 158/23: POLICY FOR ACTIVATION AND EMPLOYMENT OF RESERVE COMPONENT FORCES IN FY24 AND BEYOND

NAVADMIN 160/23: SELECTED RESERVE ADVANCEMENT TO WARFIGHTING POSITIONS PROGRAM PHASE I

NAVADMIN 167/23: SEPTEMBER 2023 (CYCLE 260) ACTIVE-DUTY AND TRAINING AND ADMINISTRATION OF THE RESERVE (TAR) E-4 THROUGH E-6 ADVANCEMENT AND MODIFICATION TO SELECTED RESERVE E-4 ADVANCEMENT ANNOUNCEMENT (CYCLE 113)

NAVADMIN 158 references the a memo that basically says Navy Individual Augmentees (IAs) are eating the force alive, and lays out a plan to have Navy Reservists fill more of these billets, even if they are involuntarily activated…meaning they get told “Drop your civilian job and take this crappy military job.”

I am NOT a fan of IAs. These were initially brought out during the invasion of Afghanistan because the Army was short people, and the Navy said “We can send some people to Afghanistan to fill slots!” Seems like a good idea, until 20 years later we were STILL filling IAs. Meanwhile, Navy manpower went missing at key places like shipyards, support facilities and the like, so our Navy platforms suffered, our shore facilities rotted, and Sailor morale went into the toilet. Somehow in 20 years the Army couldn’t staff its own war? Color me skeptical…

So even after we lost Afghanistan, we’re STILL using IAs…and why this is true still boggles my mind. Naturally, it kills morale to go to one job then get yanked to go to another, especially one shore duty when you were promised some time with your family. So instead of killing active duty Sailors morale, we’ll kill Reservist Sailor morale.

NAVADMIN 160 tells us that if you’re an E-4 or E-5, you can take a Selected Reserve (SELRES) job one paygrade above, and after completion you get a permanent paygrade bump. Not bad, you might think. But lets be honest…why would a Sailor not make the next rank? Perhaps he just had bad timing. But more often, he or she was probably not all that great of a Sailor. So now, performance be damned, you get promoted if you take the right job.

NAVADMIN 167 basically makes it even easier to promote. If you’re an E-3 wanting to make E-4, all requirements have been removed, so long as your Commanding Officer says OK, you’ll make rank. High year tenure (where you get booted from the military if you haven’t made a certain rank by a certain number of years in the military) is suspended through 2024…and my guess is they’ll suspend it again. This NAVADMIN is basically making it easier than ever to stay in the Navy no matter how dumb or bad at your job you are.

The sad part is…this won’t work. The Navy continues to not address the morale issues brought on by a restrictive COVID-19 “vaccine” requirement, white supremacist training and the inability to do basic things like fix ships, have decent berthing and fight naval wars. Even Navy veterans like myself are telling our kids not to join. Until the Navy addresses the fundamental issues at hand, these short-sighted efforts will fail.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

On clouds, fires and data

Posted: July 22, 2023 by navygrade36bureaucrat in opinion/news, Uncomfortable Truths
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Because I run a business installing network equipment, security cameras and offline storage, my business phone number rings all the time with someone wanting me to sell their latest stuff. Most of the time its a cloud-based service, and I politely tell the person on the phone my clients aren’t interested in cloud based…anything. One person challenged me on this about a year ago, saying that I simply didn’t understand the technology.

Remember, I have a bachelors in electrical engineering, AND a masters in electrical engineering (with a 100+ page technical thesis), AND quite a few industry certifications, plus many, many years working in this field. To say I was insulted is an understatement. Rather than rage on the guy, I simply replied “All that cloud means is my data is on someone else’s computer, which gives someone else control of it, and my clientele don’t like that.”

Now, I still use cloud services for some storage and a lot of network access. It’s convenient and makes it possible to open the garage door while you’re on vacation so your neighbor can borrow your posthole digger. But I don’t depend on it. If the internet goes down tomorrow, I still have access to my data locally, still can see my security cameras, and still can operate my doors. False accusations can’t stop any of my stuff from working.

The one big thing that cloud services offer is security from fire. If your house burns down, you can still pull all your files from the cloud. And well, by the featured image, you can guess what happened.

My mom called me yesterday to tell me my dad’s shop caught on fire. Thankfully the firefighters got there in time to keep it from spreading to the rest of the house. But his shop is where all his business paperwork, business computer, Veteran’s Affairs paperwork, and plenty of other important items are stored. It’s a mess.

THANKFULLY, I had set them up with a QNAP Network Attached Storage (NAS) a while back. While I don’t know if my dad had scanned and backed everything up, most of his files are there. He lost at least two external hard drives and his computers, but the NAS is in a different part of their house and wasn’t affected by the fire.

The current theory (pending a complete investigation) is that a recent string of power surges damaged a power strip, causing it to smolder and then catch fire. My parent’s home lost a refrigerator, stove, microwave and other appliances after 3 days of surges and power loss affected their area due to ongoing storms. The NAS is plugged into a UPS with a monitoring cord, so it shuts down gracefully during extended power outages.

Which brings me to my main point: you should be thinking NOW about your data. If everything you have is in the cloud and the cloud company decides it hates you because you’re a conservative, or because the FBI thinks you’re a terrorist for being a traditional Catholic, or because you support Donald Trump, or because you opposed people brainwashing your children at public school, that company could wipe everything, or simply hold it hostage, like some kind of bitLocker scam. The cloud makes it deceptively easy to place yourself at the mercy of tech giants that want to keep you under their thumb. On top of that, you need to protect yourself from natural disasters as well, and the most common item that breaks is an external hard drive. It’s very easy to forget about the drive in a fire, or leave it somewhere where water can damage it.

My go-to setup is a local NAS hooked up to your robust home network with a VPN for remote access. You get the benefits of storing all your files in one spot and making it easy to access them from multiple devices, while also being able to remotely access them. If you needed to do it on the cheap side, it would cost about $500 dollars for the network and between $500 to $1000 for a NAS. You don’t have to be a tech person either, nowadays the network and storage solutions are well documented and the companies are typically more than happy to help you set it up. I am partial to Ubiquiti for networking gear and QNAP for storage, but there are a variety of companies you can use. You can even setup your device to backup to the cloud, but otherwise store your data locally, getting the best of all worlds. It’s more important that you think and plan accordingly now so that when these disasters happen, whether man-made or natural, your data isn’t affected.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

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