Their recruiting offices were set up directly across the street from my daughter’s high school right next to the Burger King where all the seniors went to lunch.
Shady as fuck
They also exclusively target lower to middle class areas because rich people have options, and the capitalist oligarchy love that poverty to cannon fodder pipeline.
Which is conveniently the real reason they are trying to ban abortion. Because poor kids without options are easy to recruit as cannon fodder
So is the alternative to kill people in the womb based on the possibility they might end up joining the army at some point in their lives?
They target a lot of wealthier neighborhoods as well. Lot of failsons that can’t get into a good college because of their shit grades, but a couple years in the army as an NCO means they can get into a decent school afterwards.
Army recruiters in your school that somehow use social media to contact you?
Institutionalised creepiness.
Can’t you get paid to become an officer with a good non-combat role in the US? Sure being cannon fodder sucks but becoming an engineer or a doctor at their expense can be a decent upstart.
Not everyone can be an officer. They’re basically upper management in the military; there’s way more enlisted than officers, and the officers are held to such high standards, it’s hard to qualify to become one.
Source: I spent 20 years as an enlisted guy in the US Air Force. Considered going officer, but there was way too much politics and regulation involved. Screw that. Just let me do my job and go home at the end of the day.
I worked as an IT guy in the Air Force. I was always far removed from battles, and I joined right before the 2003 Iraq War kicked off. Serving in the military isn’t bad, as long as you pick the right career field. Army and Marines abuse the hell out of their people. They treat them like govt property and they always get the worst of everything. The Navy and Air Force actually take care of their guys, though.
You can’t go to officer schools out of high school if you have good grades/pass an entrance exam? Mad.
That’s what ROTC pretty much does. You need to have relevant education in something the military wants, then they pay for your education, and do some prep work for you to do well in officer candidate school.
In the UK, the colloquially named Chair Force had some NCO’s go through who stuck out their term in a field that had lots of factors that transferred across to civilian employment. Top of the tree was air traffic controllers - certain branches of the RAF’s ATC capability was based at Swanwick anyway so if they ever went to the National Air Traffic Service, a lot of the time they could pick up their stuff from their desk on their last Friday, and move it across the room to another desk for when they came back in new clothes on Monday morning.
Vets are another field that is great to get into if you want your fees paid for, but most of those are officer grades, same deal as pilots. The clerks are generally well trained too - those who used to “fly a desk” as they put it, went on to be good accountants and heath and safety ninjas.
Certainly for the UK, the military gave the option to poorer backgrounds to get expensive qualifications while not generally going near theatres or on deployments.
The Navy and Air Force actually take care of their guys
As an ex-USN carrier type, there’s a common phrase used in the fleet: choose your rate (MOS), choose your fate.
My carrier, the Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72), was (and probably still is) among the shittiest commands a sailor could be assigned to, and during the five years I spent aboard it as an E-5, I saw just about the very worst it had to offer. Deck Department got brutalized, and so did the nukes in the Reactor Department and the snipes in Engineering. The AZ’s (Aviation Administration) had it fairly good, all things considered.
The ship was bad enough that I EAOS’d from the fleet off of it, and never looked back.
The fleet can very easily be just as horrifying as the Army and the USMC, just in different ways. Luck is not always the lady.
Time’s are tough all over, I joined the Air Force and one time the made me stay in a 2 star hotel, and when I deployed there was only one ice cream shop.
That’s like applying to McDonald’s as a burger flipper, hoping to become a ceo
Well in my head it isn’t crazy, you can join the royal military school of Belgium with a high school diploma and get a degree while being paid, fed and hosted. It isn’t great fun and they’re pretty strict, and you have to serve them for five years (or sometimes more) afterwards, but it’s a pretty good deal if you don’t want to spend a lot of money on prolonged studies like becoming a surgeon.
There are ethical reasons not to though. You would still support a hyper aggressive military that constantly attacks other countries and kills innocents all over the world.
When I was in high school, during the last 3 months of the school year … I forget if they were the Army or the Marines, but they had a table with a display and two guys in the hallway right outside the cafeteria.
That waa back when the coolest phone you could have was a Motorola Razr and computers still had mice with rubber balls instead of lasers… MySpace era. So they just set up in the most highly foot trafficked area of the school.
Same, except it was one guy and the coolest phone you could get was a Nokia brick. It was a super poor school so no one had one.
I very much remember wanting to get the limited edition phone that they actually made, an actual working phone that was pretty darn close to the one the characters used in the 2nd and 3rd Matrix movies, haha.
/Then I would be cool/ rofl.
EDIT: Remember when people would actually clip songs or sounds and had to manually make them your ring or msg tone?
Nowadays everyone just pays for them.
You can still do a custom tone and what not, without paying, at least on android, but nobody seems to do that anymore.
You can do it on iPhone too, and I still do. Yeah, I know, I’m antiquated.
I like to set my default ringtone to silence, and then give known contacts a real sound for calls AND texts. I’ve been doing this for about ten years and the peace of it is fantastic. I didn’t wait for Apple to do it for me, I just created a 2 second .wav of silence and then jumped through the hoops to get it on the phone as a ringtone and then set it to default. The very few times I’ve missed a first time contact that I actually wanted to hear from is nothing compared to the mountains of unwanted shit I’ve missed.
But there’s a catch. Now, whenever I blow away the OS of an old device, I have to manually re-import my SilentRing.m4r since the devices are all still connected to my Apple ID – it doesn’t matter that my iPhone ring is silent if my iPad starts ringing anyway, lol.
Easy enough to do, though. I think Apple gives you the option of a default silent ring in the OS now, but for anyone who is using an older iOS or just wants to try it:
https://www.howtogeek.com/248489/how-to-add-custom-ringtones-to-your-iphone/
the first Razr came out in 2004. Facebook, the thing that killed MySpace, required a coledge.edu email until 2006. Apple was still selling the Puck mouse in 2000, and Logitech introduced the first laser-powered mouse the MX 1000 in 2004. The death of myspace the track ball mouse and the heyday of the Razr phone all defiantly overlapped in the mid 2000s.
You are technically correct but id say optical mice were not exactly common generally in non collegiate school settings, or general consumer or general office use surpassing the popularity of the older mice till the late 00s, though of course there will be exceptions basically depending on how wealthy an area is.
It’s creepy that they’re allowed to text children without their express consent. Assuming that this is a real text exchange and that OOP didn’t wilfully give the recruiter their number earlier.
Not really any better. Soliciting (presumably) high school students via their phone or via social media is fucked up.
Point being the text exchange doesn’t require consent, as the profiles are publicly accessible. Nothing to do with whether it’s right/wrong.
So they’re old enough to decide to join the military but not old enough to handle receiving an unsolicited message on social media?
Yup. I graduated high school at 17 and they were after me those last two years, at least. I was told I could have any job I wanted in the Navy due to my test scores. It was flattering and tempting.
I guess they probably do now because like 90% of high school grads have or did something that makes them ineligible to join and if they want more recruits they need to get students to not do things that make them ineligible and that might mean reaching out more than six months before they’re old enough to join.
You can join the military before you can drink. This country doesn’t make sense.
It’s not about “handling” anything. Not sure how you inferred that from my post.
Are you okay with army recruiters having your child’s cell phone number without their express consent?
When I was in high school our home phone number was published in the phone book and military recruiters called it a few times when I was getting close to finishing high school.
I’m not giving my kid a cell phone if I think them having it would endanger them. If unsolicited phone calls endanger them they shouldn’t have a cell phone. They should know what information shouldn’t be given out to strangers over the phone, on a call or via message. They should know how to block numbers and recognize calls that are best left to voicemail, &c.
When I was a senior in high school back in the 2000’s I got multiple cold calls from Army recruiters. I have no doubt that they’ve moved on to texting, and that this is legitimate.
Yep. Cold calls, emails, texts, whatever they could get their hands on all through my senior year in high school and at least my first two years of college. Not to mention their tables in the high school cafeteria, at robotics competitions, my engineering university’s job fairs. Don’t remember how I got them off my back, I might have just aged out of their main target cohort, but my mom likes to talk about how she told them she was pregnant (because she was lol) and they never contacted her again. Do with that information what you will.