I have no doubt that any amount of alcohol within 24h of doing a hop in the soup is playing with fire. But absolute abstention? I dunno.
As for flying in IMC, modern avionics makes that stuff much easier. Getting an instrument rating has become more of an effort in mastering procedural complexity than any relevant flying skill. I did my rating almost 40 years ago. It took a different mind-set with basic steam-punk instruments.
Nephew got his rating about three years ago and has about 700 hours, with about 150 on the gauges, but all done with the modern stuff that does the situational awareness thinking for you. We were shooting an RNAV in the soup last winter in my old bird with mostly old stuff in the panel. He never got stabilized and I had to take the bird and took a missed approach.
His comment was that it should be illegal to fly in IMC with that "old shit". Whatever. Never bothered me any. And I have a few beers per week, but never within 48h of screeching "clear prop".
I'll tell what should be illegal: my wife's pork tacos without beer.
Unless the ATIS specifically stated that you should expect a visual approach, the controller violated FARs and is part of a criminal conspiracy. Also, phrases and specific words that controllers are allowed and required to use are well documented. The transcript revealed the use of non-standard terms; which is very dangerous when a controller does not precisely communicate with a pilot using English as a non-primary language.
I am a licensed (private) pilot with an instrument rating. I fly a GA airplane aprox 150 hr/yr, mostly for business. Within the previous two years, FAA controllers have given me incorrect instructions in three seperate instances, twice while I was deep in the soup. The controllers failed to correct their errors even after my readback, then yelled at me when I wasn't going where they wanted me to go. Each time, I had a camera on the panel and the camera's audio connected to the ICS and radios.
The latest incident, the controller told me to call them after landing. I refused to talk to them without legal counsel, so they forwarded the incident to an Air Safety Investigator. My lawyer listened to the controller's many falsehoods, then listened to the investigator ask me questions. Then my lawyer talked to the investigator as follows:
lawyer - have you pulled the tapes?
FAA - yes, but I have not listened to them.
lawyer - do you think that the controller could have given him an incorrect vector?
FAA - not possible.
lawyer - please listen to this. [plays video on computer]
FAA - [after playing video] we cannot further discuss this. We will need [controller] to bring a union rep.
me - Why don't we send the video to the FBI. Isn't it a felony to lie to a federal investigator?
FAA - [quickly exits room]
Most enroute controllers are working six days a week. I do not care, so am I. Many, perhaps most, experienced controllers are making north of $200k. I am not.
Final note. When dealing with any level of authority, record everything. Put cameras in your home, in your vehicles, and on your body. The authorities, whether it be the local police or the feds, are not there to help. You will lose money and time and freedom if you cannot document their incompetence and malfeasance; and even then you may still go to jail.
Not quite anecdotal, but a very narrow range of subjects.
Sample of 19, all male, between 19 and 26, medium age 21. Approximately half were smokers. All had scored a class I or II PFT prior to deployment, had passed a physical, and were in good to excellent health.
Environment and Conditions = Aircraft carrier on gonzo station in the Indian Ocean. Period = 4.5 months. Working temperature range 24 to 35C, 50 to 100%RH. IMA mostly sedentary, sitting at avionics bench in air conditioned space. OMA mostly active, on flight deck or on hanger deck
Work level = 12 to 24 hr/day for OMA(this includes chow breaks). 10 to 20 hr/day for IMA. Both worked 7 days/week.
Food Intake - OMA people ate 3x to 5x per day where range of consumption not less than 3400 cal/day. High end of consumption range indeterminate, probably over 5700 cal/day. IMA people ate 3x/day, unless standing a mid-watch, where range of consumption was 3100 to 4200 cal/day.
About 30% of OMA subject did weights 3x to 5x per week. Essentially all IMA lifted 2x to 6x per week.
Results - all OMA people lost between 5% and 20% body mass by end of cruise. I lost approx 9%, but may not be representative because I spent approx 30% of time working in IMA.
IMA people weight gains ranged from 0% to 10%.
Source = Senior Chief Corpsman (paygrade E-8) that was collecting performance data on aviation maintenance personnel for unknown reasons.
Based on this small sample, I could conclude that both caloric intake and activity level are among the principle things that effect a weight loss or gain.
This is an edge case. Marines in particular, and the military members in general, will form a special bond that can seldom be duplicated elsewhere. And that has been my experience.
I was among a group of six that met at the schoolhouse after boot camp. We did not get sent to the same units, but we were all PCS'd to the same base. Two of us (not myself) made a career of the corps, and the others went to school after separation to get various STEM degrees; all four of us attended two schools within 60 km.
After graduation, our physical distance slowly increased with each new job, but we never stopped talking to each other and typically met in person one to five times per year. The singular spouse that accepted our special friendships and our strong sense of mutual loyalty to each other, is the marriage that endured over the last 35 years.
My wife is very special to me. She is the center of my immediate world. But these, now five, friends would have been there to pick me up if my wife had ever kicked me to the curb.
Epilogue. The five of us are now, at least, semi-retired. The other four are now single. Three of them are building another house on my property in which to live out the remainder of their time. They have accepted my wife is the sixth member and as a 'principle'. Our only recurring issue is which of the six will have to die alone.
I am not a great father. I am an uncle that 'helped' my wife raise a niece and nephew. Many consider my guardianship to have been, at best, poorly implemented.
I simply went along with whatever they had wanted to do. My wife was stuck with all the non-fun stuff. We climbed mountains, we hiked across deserts, we flew airplanes, we canoed rivers, we ate whatever we wanted and when we wanted (at least when the wife was not around), let them routinely skip school when the wife was not in town, taught them to use all of the power and hand tools in my shop, taught them to use all of the equipment on my electronics benches, took them to IPSC matches, took them to rock concerts (at least I did not allow any weed smoking). Took them to whatever R-rated movies they wanted. Read Heinlein, Asimov, Sprague de Camp, Le Guin, and other such stuff when they were young as bed-time fare. I shit you not, their favorite was 'A Brief History of Time' - not a chance that kids at 5 and 7 years of age understood that Hawking shit, but they liked it.
The boy got a fancy PhD and does stupid shit for stupid people that pay him obscene salaries. The girl got music and math degrees and teaches music and math in a New Mexico public school.
My wife says that they turned out ok in spite of my non-efforts, not because of them. She may be correct, I dunno.
0. I am mostly a hardware guy. Process automation, ATE, manufacturing, and product and process compliance. Banging out code ranges from 10% to 50% of each job.
1. My experience and skill set is not that common. Most EEs and MEs have eschewed this field because it has, outside of FAANG-type companies, paid less.
2. If you go the formal accreditation route, getting up to speed in EMC/Product Compliance/Corporate Conformity, depending on the industry sector, is approx 4 to 7 years.
3. Most of my original client contacts came from attending various IEEE Society symposiums. New business contacts are through former/current clients.
Regardless of Amazon's true long-term intent, The legalization of cannabis is not immune to the Law of Unintended Effects.
We are having serious problems in San Diego and Riverside counties in Southern California with non-permitted growers. Many are linked to Mexican cartels. Many tend to operate with pirated power and water. And all of the illegal growers have been bad for the local environment because of improper and excessive use of pesticides and fertilizers.
An illegal grower recently stood up a greenhouse, made of stolen materials, on a neighbor's property. When he stumbled onto the site, they threatened him and shot at him. The Sherrif's department would not respond to a 911 call so we called the local fire marshall. When fire people got threatened, the sherrif's dept decided they would respond. The county DA has not charge anyone with anything. It cost him several thousand USD to clean up the site.
We need to de-criminalize cannabis use. We need to be much more thoughtful about legalizing cannabis.
Many U.S. states have labor law that cover this. And any company that I have seen do anything similar to this has lost money to both the state and the claimant.
Typically, at least for at-will states, the employer simply terminates you without stating any reason. Very simple for the company and the employee at least gets unemployment pay.
Have been in the lab for last 14 hours (thinking that this will be my last contract before retirement) just watching stuff to be certain that all is ready to go for the client's first production shift, so some time to think about this..
1. A cousin in the old country that is a strident anti-vaxer.
2. An 80 year old guy about 2km down the road that, while reclusive, refused masks and vaccines.
3. My beloved wife - well educated at two of those 'progressive' east coast schools, took me three weeks to convince her to get vaccinated.
4. A long-time friend and colleague (we met on the USS Midway in the late 70s), that had a PhD in biology, died two months ago from cardiac arrest - I suspect that it was related to covid. He was black and distrusted governmental bodies.
The common thread for these four example cases is the confused 'data' and 'guidance' from organizations such as WHO, CDC, FDA, etc during the past 15-20 months. And last week, my wife showed me a table she built of contradictions from NGOs and internationals and national organizations. When looked at logically, I can see that some people (not necessarily the people that are the subject of the linked article) have a valid reason to doubt.
Final thought. I have a very rational neighbor that is both self-taught and well-educated (three university degrees). He confided to me recently that he distrusts the medical community and life scientists and social scientists. There are many reasonable people out there that have been shaken by the last 15 months such that they no longer know who or what to trust.
My siblings are not morbidly obese, but they have been overweight most of their adult lives. The people they hang out with personally and professionally are also overweight and many have the typical health problems that accompany the overweight demographic.
My wife and myself are not overweight and have never been. She was a tom-boy and a jock during high school and did intramural stuff in college. I was on high school track team and either walked or rode my bicycle - no car. While in the military, most of the people in my shop had to eat 4x per day to maintain our weight. Afterwards, during college, I lived on cheap beans and pasta or rice, and the occasional can of cheap tuna, and peanut butter sandwiches until I met my wife. She taught me how to cook and introduced me to much better stuff. So I did not eat 'correctly' until my early 30s.
Until the last two years, we had remained physically active and were never overweight. We have gained some weight but are not overweight and, other than the incident that severely curbed our physical activity, have had no significant health problems.
The pattern of life-long activity and a physical mind-set seems to be a common factor when you look at older healthy people (over 55) that were never overweight, regardless of food quantity and type consumption.
You either are lucky enough to have decent genetics and the willingness to start an active life well, or you go through life increasingly overweight with chronic health problems.
Is there some reason this person would have a special insight into the Afghan situation? Did he spend time over there in the military or state department? Has he worked as a staffer in the Congress? And how did he get accepted into the UC system with a 2.2 GPA?
As a friend and godfather to people that have served in the area while working for the DoD or the State Dept, and as someone that lost two friends in SE Asia, I have been trying to get my head around this mess.
My ideal political or social news commentator -> brutally and fearlessly honest, STEM background, a stint in public service overseas, and very familiar with inside the beltway but not an insider. Does such a person exist?
I oft wonder about my unique high school education of the early 1970s - a South Texas public school with a mix of working and professional class families. High percentage of hispanic and black, very few asians. History teachers that did not just teach dates and places but discussed causes and effects. Math teachers that did teach sterile rote methods. Science teachers that taught the future (both my chemistry and physics teachers emphasized the coming wave of computational power). Shop and automotive teachers that taught critical thinking and creative problem solving. Over 20% of my senior class took calculus. English teachers that taught us to read for meaning and to analyze literature and discussed stuff such as Stranger in a Strange Land. Almost half went to college and about 40% received scholarships.
The 21st century of public education does not seem capable of providing this experience. What the heck happened? Or was this a unique, one-time period?
HN is one of my most beloved sites. It also infuriates me; and this is not a bad thing. I do not mind the down-vote if the reason is apolitical and explained. [aside note: Gackle and Bell are interesting - they are worth 15 or 20 min looking at DDG links.] And 'Dang' responses seem to be sincere at their attempts to keep HN a viable and reasonable site for techies. While I think that a few of their responses border on hilariously ridiculous, they seem to be earnest.
My answer to your question is, other than HN, probably nothing else is reasonable.
While HN is mostly by and for coding peoples, it oft provides interesting discussions of engineering, science, and society. My remaining favorite discussion forums are densely technical and increasingly narrow in scope, so would not meet your requirements.
Please ycombinator, I most humbly beseech you, to never ever play UX du jour games.
My daily dose of HN may well be my last link to something resembling the product of a sane mind. Surely you do not want to send a helpless old man into to the abyss of insanity?
So many ways to learn. The the specific learning 'work-flow' varies for the task and the person in training. And note that Learning is Training, so regardless of the intellectual content of the learning program, there is some level of muscle-memory for most stuff.
In the middle of boot camp, all the madness stops for two weeks to focus on shooting a rifle (marksmanship is a religion in the USMC and some other military organizations); that is you live at the rifle range, and spend most of your time with marksmanship instructors (the DIs remain at the periphary). While there are lectures on interior and exterior ballistics and other related stuff, most of the first week at the range is hours of repetitive dry firing, where you pay attention to your body's form and function required to correctly pull the trigger. Your breathing sequence, your sight picture, your trigger pull become muscle memory. It becomes a zen thing. The second (live-fire) week on the range is very (mentally) stressful, so muscle memory attained in the first week is important because you have many other things to do and respond to during the indeterminate periods of live fire and eventual qualification(and if you do not qualify, you get re-cycled into another platoon or you get kicked to the curb).
Military technical schools tend to cover basic intro stuff using 'programmed' instruction; that is, self-taught, then subsequently tested by the instructor cadre. The tutorials must be approached methodically and incrementally. Never jump into the next session because you are bored. Most of the people that fail military tech schools fail the easy stuff because they do not have structure to their approach and do not have the discipline to operate independently. This also appears to be a common reason for people flunking out of the first two or three semesters of university.
Post-school house learning in the military (new systems, new techniques, updated systems, etc) is done independently by the first learners (NCOs) and is individually-based, with occasional help from the respective vendor's technical rep. I approached learning new avionics systems by first studying the spec, then reading the applied physics theory, then drawing block diagrams from the schematics for power and signal and control flows. So divide an conquer, then put the pieces back together to form the original system.
Learning new programming languages, after the 3d or 4th one, becomes routine. While it is ok to start with quick over-view of the language, the first hard study should be the syntax closely followed by structure declarations. For some languages, this is a good point to stop and look closely at low-level details for memory management and/or allocation techniques. After syntax, structure, and memory models become muscle memory, just dive head-first into solving a series of simple problems. Solving problems is the only way you will learn the libraries. The only language I did not functionally learn in a week or two was Rust. Rust was freaking hard for my aged mind, but it brought back the lost joys of my first two languages learned (Fortran and C).
Learning complex machine tools is similar. Get the basic muscle-memory stuff learned, then extend into the intellectualized stuff. Formal instruction, or pairing up with an experienced and skilled person, for welding and lathes should be done before you self-learn stuff. The same for computer security stuff - as you will probably hurt yourself if you go the independent-learning route for stuff such as penetration testing.
I will not apologize for being an American patriot, and for wanting a decrease of western malfeasance and marginal competence. But I do think that China gets it right much more often than not. Dan Wang's quoted article, and his other writings, emphasize China's ambivalence and distaste for the western (popular) concept of technology being internet and consumer-driven code. China cares more about the stuff designed by Qualcom, Keysight, Intel, TI, et al than the stuff ground out by FAANG.
And China's mind-set stems from collective knowledge of a millennia in the struggles and wars, where the long-term goals were to centralize and control and advance and be the ultimate winner.
Should Shatner's opinion matter? I dunno, but I tend to listen to people that have live long healthy productive lives and that have seen some stuff that I have yet to experience.
Being in my 60s, I have seen the 'before' and 'after' pics of a population about doubling over my lifetime. Many things have improved, many things are worse. Population stresses infrastructure, stresses societal behavior, increases competition for resources.
Agricultural technologies, increased energy production and associated efficiency technology, and communications systems have enabled humans to increase beyond their individual capabilities; otherwise the planet's natural processes and delimiters would have killed enough humans to stabilize.
I do not see "loads of people" working on population problems. I do see some people working on the problems caused by an excessive human population - but only those problems where there is a quick profit.
"The real reason everything is happening is there’s too many people.."
Bingo. I believe that excessive human population is the root cause of many global problems.
But what defines a "Star Trek Future" in the context of this question? The level of technology? The utopic society and healthy human relationships? Or just simply becoming a space-faring species?
I believe, and not necessarily because of environmental issues, that the species has much less than half of a millennia to be dominant, and much less than 100 years of the modicum of stability that we have had from 1946 to 2000.
Gen Z may never know 'stability' in either society or economy.
Walmart's self-serve system(s) appear to be the most reliable of the stores that we shop. B/C scanners for big stuff are wireless, keypads and touchscreens are functional and responsive, the scales read produce very fast and are more accurate than the local Vons/Stators/Ralphs (I have done several 'calibration' runs at all of the local markets), system latency is the least of all other stores, and when I screw up, an 'associate' quickly arrives to render a fix.
And that is about the only good experience to be had at walmart.
As for flying in IMC, modern avionics makes that stuff much easier. Getting an instrument rating has become more of an effort in mastering procedural complexity than any relevant flying skill. I did my rating almost 40 years ago. It took a different mind-set with basic steam-punk instruments.
Nephew got his rating about three years ago and has about 700 hours, with about 150 on the gauges, but all done with the modern stuff that does the situational awareness thinking for you. We were shooting an RNAV in the soup last winter in my old bird with mostly old stuff in the panel. He never got stabilized and I had to take the bird and took a missed approach.
His comment was that it should be illegal to fly in IMC with that "old shit". Whatever. Never bothered me any. And I have a few beers per week, but never within 48h of screeching "clear prop".
I'll tell what should be illegal: my wife's pork tacos without beer.