Alternatively: We can remember for you, whole-Dick

Disagree. You and so many others throw around the word communism as if it is a specific type, rather than a general type. Not only that, communism and capitalism as not mutually exclusive. We have communism in capitalist societies and there was capitalism inside the USSR’s communism.

We have fully functioning communes within the USA. Those are communists living happily inside a communist community, with communist leadership, and communist ideals, all as a sub community within normal American cities. And it is successful.

The US has communism/socialism even within its own government. We have communist firefighters. There was a time all fire brigades were private and sold memberships and private insurance. It was communism that made it a public service. Even the socialist healthcare in the military was not always that way. Up until the Civil War it was private healthcare and the medics were for the battlefield only. All after care was out of pocket. Even for a time after the Civil War large amounts were not covered by the military.

And even looking at the previous poster’s comment about not seeing true communism- that is a category- are they referring to Lennonist communism? Maoist? Marxist? It’s like saying all capitalist governments are the same, as if the EU and the US, and Nigeria are all the same types of government.

I knew it looked photoshopped but wanted it to be real, so I looked up the isbn. Sadly, it is not this book. Weirdly, it is a different scifi book that sounds half decent and actually won an award.

Brute Orbits by Goerge Zebrowski. He was (just died in Dec of 2024) a scifi machine and churned out several of the star trek books as well as a shit load of original works all through the 70’s till about 2000. And this one happens to be one of his highest rated works.

Also in this rabbit hole: he worked/lived with (possible partner of?) Pamela Sargent who wrote Earthseed. A huge scifi book for those who are into it.

Not sure. I have typically just done a Google search and refound the link under the same domain but with a different sub routing.

I have a wiki editor account primarily for updating links on pages. I have also done a handful of minor edits on some obscure pages in my field, but primarily use it to update links and references. Link rot is the worst and I wish more people would help out with it.

An encyclopedia is not a source. I don’t think you fully grasp what any academic paper’s source is. It must be a first-hand account or direct evidence. It is the research paper you mention, not the wiki article the paper was mentioned on. The problem isn’t teachers afraid of technology. You can’t use print versions of encyclopedia Britannica as a source either. Part of education is also knowing how follow academic rigor. Remembering and understanding are only the first two steps in the process. Applying (writing the paper) is the third step. But if you fail to understand primary sources and how to conduct academic research, then you will never be able to truly progress beyond that (leading to: analyze, evaluate, and create)

I mean- this is where the training gets more practical, hands on, and graphic. I also don’t remember every detail, this was back in '08.

We were at a contractor school compound with shitload acreage and fields. this was set up in one of their fields. All the hogs are unloaded, drugged up, high as a kite, and on tables with a saline drip line in them for the drugs. It is all set up while we are going through the initial breifings. At no point in any time is any hog awake or aware of anything. Ever.

After the formal briefings, we start off easy with some demonstrations with a knife and cutting a leg artery and showing you what real arterial bleeding versus venous bleeding looks like with the color, the squirt, the vain retreat, then make you pressure it off then apply a tourniquet. Then they will do this on all 4 legs with everyone (groups of 4 to a pig and instructor) taking a leg. Then you start training on things like quick clot or celluclot or the other clotting agents out there to see and feel the difference and time it and all that stuff. This is where you also learn first hand how bad of a product quickclot is and to avoid it when you can (it gets to high Temps and burns both you and the patient. It was also the first generation of applied clotting agents). Then we would look at shallow cuts versus deep cuts and dressing them. IF the pig was still alive then the shooting starts and you start packing wounds.

By this point, normally your first pig has died, but they were also very clear about the value of the pigs life and that they were going to make you use up every bit you can before taking on another pig. If you can stabilize a pig, you must. If you took to long and your pig died they would get pissed because you are not just wasting resources, but you are wasting training for you and those around you, but you are also wasting a pigs life. But it was also expected to happen, you can only cut open and shoot a pig and patch it up so many times.

After your pig has died, then they go into autopsy mode and cut it open. You see not just entry and exit wounds, but also physically feel the cavity. They also cut into your clotting and show you how deep the clotting agents go and why you have to do certain things with them and avoid some areas of the body. We also looked at artery retreat from the inside so you can actually visualize how much it will retreat if done improperly. There was probably more, but I remember spending hours on just the first pig. They were sure to get every bit of training possible out of it before moving you and your team to the next pig.

The next pig, and several more after it, were all for hands on experience with more wound packing in different areas and calibers. Started with pistol, then upped to rifle (both M4 and AK47) then went to a shotgun. Most everyone was able to keep the same pug alive for all the gunshots. Then they introduce puncture wounds with a knife sticking out if it or something else. Then for the training they would keep shooting it or stabbing it again and you would just keep patching it again until it died.

Keep in mind, we were still being evaluated while doing this and getting critiques. If they felt like you were too stressed out while getting yelled at and trying to keep you pig alive, they would just ask you to step back and observe. They also pulled one or two people for them letting their pigs die too fast and basically said ‘you can only watch.’

Then things kick into high gear and it was clear why this is done at a contractor school and not at a base. It was the ‘combat care’ portion of training. So they have you start about 100 meters out and shoot your pig and do ‘something else’. You have no idea what the something else is until you get there. One time it was a hatchet to the stomach, one time it was a metal pole through it. So you have to run up with your full kit on and have half the team (2 guys) pull security while you and a partner do the first aid. You have to have your system down by now. You have to know the order to check things and you have to do it fast. All the while one instructor is yelling at you for every fuck up like he is Gordon Ramsey watching you fuck up boiling water, and you have another instructor with a gun shooting the ground a couple feet away from you and dropping firecrackers next to you. They after about a minute or two they start yelling at you to relocate (and drop in some mortar sims near by) and you have to aid and litter transport your pig around while all this continues around you. Anything you left on the ground is gone, and you just run with this pig keeping it alive till you are completely smoked. If they think you have sufficiently stableized it, they shoot it again and make you keep going.

All in all, it was a full day of just that. Our group went through maybe 20 or 30 pigs for a group of about 30 or 40 guys. Don’t remember exactly, it’s been a while. Honestly though, it was amazing training. I still remember a lot of the trauma training only because I was able to do it rather than just read about it and answer some test questions. It was the best trauma training anyone could ask for in the military, short of working on actual people. During my tour we were living next to a level two field hospital and helped out all the time (always short staffed). Even the docs commented on how good we were for not being real medics.

Feel free to ask any follow up questions.

I got the chance to do this training as a non-medic through a private military contractor company, paid for by my unit, for my first deployment to Afghanistan. We were part of the pilot program for the TCCC (trauma combat casualty care) training (the same program went into effect years later, but HEAVILY watered down on training requirements). The ‘live tissue lab’ was only after about two weeks of intense classroom training with testing after and required scores to progress after every few days. It was taught by a few prior air force PJ’S and some trauma surgeons. It was the equivalent of all the trauma training medics get without the drug portions (since we are not medics, we are not allowed to push drugs).

On the day of the live tissue lab there was an ethics briefing along with a veterinarian briefing telling us all the do’s and dont’s and when to alert him or one of the techs. Basically, they are all hogs that were bought off slaughter farms but did not meet standards for food consumption and were going to get killed anyways but not used (think sick/diseased or possible deformity or injuries). The pigs are drugged up with everything you can imagine and completely disassociate. Part of the briefing from the vet was the signs to look for if the drugs were wearing off and when to grab them to drug them up more. The training went through hands on portions of everything we saw in class and real use of all the products and techniques we were trained on. It was to this day the best trauma training I have ever been through, seen, or heard of.

There are many people that want to argue about the ethics of it, and having been through it I actually side with the training. There was one guy in our unit that got hit with an indirect missile strike on base and was saved by one of the guys who went through the training and was only able to save him because of what he learned and his experience he went through. That training unquestionably saves lives.

$300/month (at the beginning of the month) invested over 30 years, compounded annually at 6% = $198,290.40

If you kept that going for a full 50 years, the last 20 years of interest really starts to ramp up and gives you a final value of $1,084,402.22

If instead, you ONLY paid the mortgage for 30 years, then invest the full mortgage payment of $2,648 into the investment account for the next 20 years (a total of 50 years out. Same end point) you would have an investment account worth $1,215,042.49

So, even in your scenario it is still a loss to take a 50 year over the 30 year, and the 300$ difference is negligible. If $300 was the difference of someone being able to afford groceries or not for the month, then they should not have qualified for a $2,648/mo mortgage.

Not to intentionally interclude, but perclude and reclude seem to have seclude from english.

We do not wish to exclude the population because it would preclude comparative analysis, but we wish to disclude them from this study in order to conclude the initial hypothesis.

Not going to lie, this sounds like a fun game.

Good thing we don’t pay some 6-8% in taxes for universal single payer healthcare like some socialist country! Take that communists! I feel so American to pay 25% of my paycheck to a private company. God bless capitalism!

They kill them on the sea with no trial and no evidence, and congress doesn’t stop them. So they push it to killing on the land with no trial or evidence, and congress doesn’t stop them. Then they will kill them in the US without trial or evidence, and congress won’t stop them. Then claim that everyone who makes problems for trump is actually a narcoterrorist and needs to be killed without trial or evidence.

Also a good reference. Lol. I forgot about this one.

(Movie 43- in case you were wondering if this was real)

I would argue that both are bad game/story design. Unless the skill is a plot point, it should not change the chance encounters in the world your players are in. Both of these examples are meta-gaming. The NPCs of the world didn’t know the player characters had that ability, and should not change their actions until it is known to them.

I had one DM who was huge on meta-gaming, and at first I thought it was just some peev of his, but honestly after a while and understanding it better- it made a better experience. It now makes me annoyed to see it used and I better understand his rants…

At the peak of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars the national guard and reserve (but mostly guard) made up over 75% of the troops deployed. More national guard units saw more combat than active duty units simply by sheer numbers. I did 8 years and 4 months in the guard and over half that time I was activated for two tours to Afghanistan. I did more overseas time than my active duty time equivalent. National guard units were also consistently being placed in shittier places than active duty units because the active duty commanders didn’t want difficult deployments to potentially get in the way of future promotions. So the guard also took the brunt of the casualties. My first tour was in the second worst area in the country at the time and out of all the US troops (we were with the Polish), all but one was national guard. We set the regional record for longest continuous direct fire firefight at the time and a Polish truck set the record for the largest IED hit (aprox. 550 lbs, all died).

The longest continuous deployment during the Global War on Terrorism was also done by a guard unit. The 34th BCT did 22 months in Iraq.

To say the guard only helps old people and with hurricanes is beyond an understatement. We provided the bulk of the boots on the ground and did the job and big army literally couldn’t do.

Those chambers are normally only done around 2 or 2.5 atmosphere, 3 tops. Not enough to kill anyone if it cracked. A small pop and rushing sound at most depending on the crack size.

Look up TASS news. That is all.