God that was stressful to watch.

I say incorrectly secured in the exact fashion that it means. If the gun owner had taken care of their weapon and either made it inaccessible or unusable, then the incidents would not have happened. For instance, in the Sandy Hook shooting, the mother knew her son was mentally unstable and did not properly secure her weapons. This led to her death, followed by many others.

Gun safety means you treat your gun as a deadly weapon, and you secure it so that someone who should not have access to it cannot get it. If you don't, then bad things happen.

We do not have an obsession or addiction to guns, we have a right to them. Like it or not, we are not like other countries and never have been. This defines us and also creates uniquely difficult situations if we do not pay the proper respect to those rights. You can make thinly veiled comments about me being an addict or substance abuser if you like, I prefer to think that I am a citizen of a country unlike any other to this date in history. If that pisses you off, so be it.

I would also like to note that while I have been extremely civil and logical to this point, I have been constantly subjected to comments that try to loop me in with the radical gun nuts. I cannot stress enough that I am not, that I do think we need further gun control. It's as if people can't field a valid argument and feel the need to paint me as such instead, ignoring my repeated comments to the contrary.

I'll still push for it; I was half-joking when I told them that anyway.

I am still in the field, just not clearing the mines. I work with the communities to educate them on the dangers and to identify the suspected locations of mines and explosives. My teams and I are the eyes and ears of the operation, the clearance guys are just the grunts.

I've already seen my fair share of UXO. Even had a guy bring a mortar to a risk education session as we were discussing how you shouldn't touch or move them; that was fun.

So far, not as stressful as I imagined. What I hear from the clearance guys is that it's actually a pretty boring job. Accidents are very rare if you do it right. In order to keep the risk to basically zero, it is a very slow, deliberate, and methodical process. So, basically, they wear heavy gear, sweat all day, and move through an area with a fine-toothed comb.

Probably still worth a shot to see the training regime etc and whether it could be adapted to local species.

Kudos by the way, even though you're not working in the field, must be a hell of a high stress job.

It's cool and funny, relax and no stressing

Ah, this is totally in keeping with current theories. You're supposed to commend them for working hard to achieve goals (stressing the "you did good by working hard to achieve that, and you got the result you wanted" angle). Hard work is therefore more important than the actual achievement. When I was a kid, it was the "you're smart and you can do whatever you want if you put your mind to it" angle. I guess I turned out okay, but what that really says is "if you didn't succeed, it must be because you weren't good enough or smart enough" or even worse, the vaguer concept of "not having properly your mind to it" as though to get something done, all you need to do is *really* decide to do it. Looking back at my life through that filter, I can see that in lots of scenarios where I didn't live up to my potential it was because I was stuck in a deadlock situation because this notion of the requirement to fully commit myself to a thing in order to do it, which just made me anxious and avoid challenges.

I don't have any kids yet, but I'd go with the style in this video over the own style I was subjected to (with the best of intentions). Of course, by the time I have kids the paradigm will probably have changed again and we'll probably be back to whuppings and public humiliation or something.

Well, that was a good personal psychological session for today in response to an old video. I feel so much better. Where's my valium?

Ok, maybe a pilot can correct me here, but that's not necessarily a violent or high stress manoeuvre. Pretty much all planes are able to do these tricks (including large passenger jets), they just aren't often flown that way. As long as they have enough air speed and engine power to not slow too much and stall out mid way through then there only needs to be a relatively small increase in load on the wings to do this.

The Vulcan is a very cool plane though. I live just down the road from where they used to keep the last flying one. A beautiful plane.

I thought the video made a good point, but rather different from the one I assumed it was going for before watching.

As I was finishing up my senior year of High School after 4 years of taking crap for being a nerd etc., a friend/acquaintance of mine was starting her freshman year. She got picked on also, probably worse than I had had it. She made it through 1 semester before dropping out. Then she got a part time job for a half-year, took night classes at the local community college, and got her GED.

At the time, I thought she was making a terrible decision by not sticking it out and trying to get through High School the usual way -- 4 years of hell. But then, the next year she ended up at the same University where I was, both as Uni-freshmen, and she handled the much more mature University environment just fine.

It ended up completely turning the tables for me, to the point that I thought that her path of dropping out -> GED -> Uni was actually objectively superior to my suffering through the more traditional path.

So, that's what I thought "don't stay in school" was going to refer to.


But the actual message is good as well. The best classes that I had in Middle and High School were more practical things. But oddly enough, the best examples of that for me were my math classes. I had the same teacher for Geometry, Algebra 2, Pre-Calc, and Calculus (AP, so equivalent to Calc 1 at a University). He stressed the real-life applications of advanced mathematics by doing lots of word problems, and only teaching topics that he could point to concrete, real-world applications for. And by letting us use calculators for everything as long as we could explain WHY specific operations were needed to answer the questions.


...So, long-winded response boiled down:
I like the message. More practical stuff in school is better. And feel free to drop out -- especially if doing so is just a shortcut to further education at a University, Vo-Tech, or whatever.

SPIEGEL: It would surely have been a deterrence for other sources. But most of the journalists insist on being independent and objective. They also like to stress that they are not political activists.

Assange: All they show is that they are activists for the way things are.

Even after being locked in a hole for years, Julian is as sharp as ever. It's been almost 6 years since I met him at the 26C3... maybe he'll be out by the time 40C3 comes around.

I understand the sentiment and don't hold it against you, but you are absolutely incorrect.

I can't stress enough that this is exactly what an actual Asperger's self-harm breakdown looks like. I was shocked at how exactly I recognized her every action and facial expression.

Please cease all doubts about the legitimacy of this video for her sake and everyone else who suffers from or loves someone with Asperger's.

One thing at a time.

Eric Garner did not choke to death. He was choked. It did not kill him.

Garner died because his body was stressed from resisting arrest and his pre-existing conditon caused a failure.

If he had not resisted arrest, he would still be alive.

Try to stay on topic.

No other profession has the kind of power and interaction with society that police officers do. When cops abuse that power and goof around on the job, it has major effects on peoples lives.

So yes, damn straight they need to be criticized and even generalized because this shit happens way too often and there isn't usually evidence left behind to tell the whole story.

If your fellow officers would stop acting like power hungry douchebags, then they wouldn't receive so much scrutiny from the public...you know, the people that pay your salaries.

Let's make sure this is clear...this isn't the actions of one or two officers that were having an abnormally stressful day. This was an entire department abusing their authority. Sorry, "the actions of a few" defense goes out the window when you have an entire team acting the way they were.

I expect it has more to do with being regularly placed in dangerous and stressful situations, for which it the only viable long-term solution is the preemptive application of force. That brutalizes people, as in renders them brutal. How could it do anything else? It seems like everything else would follow from that, which in turn seems to follow from horrible policy decisions from there on up.

Are some laws not unjust in and of themselves? Not that I disagree with you at all newtboy, in fact I don't. But I do not agree that we should follow all laws to their original intents. (And yes, when you say law enforcement should always follow the law, which you have, you create a culture where others believe it, even if you understand the nuance.)

Now here is the crux. I kind of do see Gorilia's point to some degree but not in the same madness. If a cop goes home and gets his dick sucked by his wife (or girlfriend or mistress)--on lunch--he could be fired. On lunch...on his fucking time off that is required to be given to him by law... This also applies to other things. An officer was making muscles for a kid in a courtroom (in a non-disruptive manner) and the judge dismissed him from working the courthouse ever again. Just for making a kid smile...

The list goes on and on about stupid protocols that law enforcement has to face that are utterly stressful and ridiculous...