I'm a soldier. We pretty much don't get sick days without some kind of surgery. And if I told my supervisor I was too tired to drive, he'd tell me to walk.
But I'm pretty sure there are more people than me that would pick coming to work tired over missing a day of work. Work puts a roof over your head...
I suspect laws will still prevent this for a long while, but I can think of two good situations to use automated drivers. The first is very long drives. In a few weeks I have to make a 24 hour drive. If I didn't have to stop to sleep, I could literally be home in 24 hours. Instead it will take much longer. The other case comes up more, since I'm stuck in a place with nonexistent public transportation. It can drive my drunken self home on weekends.
Even sober, long duration driving and driving at night (ie tired) result in a lot of crashes. Even if it has a failure rate, it will be better than most human driving anyway. I can think of times (when overworked of course) in broad daylight that I've fallen asleep at red lights. But I still have to get to work. I can't choose not to drive. This gives somebody like me the ability to get to work more safely, if not completely safely.
It isn't Vietnam. The culture is different. And you wouldn't want to touch a local if you had the chance. Most of locals don't exactly live up to our hygiene standards to say the least. Most prostitution is of our own soldiers. It depends on the level of discipline in the unit whether that will happen. But combat units usually don't have females. My company did have a few females that were medics and other odd jobs, but transferred them out to avoid problems. Definitely the right call.
What's funny is that there are some people who sign up because they like violence. And they never last. The don't have the self control you need to do the job.
I'm an army guy, so I have a different perspective. EVERYONE needs some entertainment/escape, but nobody's catching a ride to somewhere else for a friggin movie. That's why reel to reel doesn't make sense. The soldiers most in need don't have access to it. Soldiers usually have laptops. In Afghanistan, there are no copyright laws anyway. You can buy pirated movies through local shops by the truckload. They'll even let you bring back your pirated movies through customs as long as they are for personal use. ie, you can't have a bunch of copies of the same movie.
If you really want make a soldier happy, you have remember that they might be at a tiny outpost with a platoon of young men all deployment. They might not have seen a female for months. Yes, send porn.
If we went to war with Iran, I would very probably die in that war. That's the job I do. Sometimes wars are easy, sometimes not. But somebody has to be first. Most of the people doing the dying at this point in the game signed up during the war. We know what we signed up for.
What is there to be outraged about? That I'll die in a pointless war? I'm pretty sure I've already prepared for that when I signed up the first time. Or do you think the present dying is really meaningful? I don't know if it is. I'm pretty sure you're not in a position to make that call either.
Maybe our mothers should be outraged. Maybe it's the innocent Iranians. But their government plays the same game ours does. And they have elections just like us.
Drawing the distinction between different positions within the military would remove any doubt. I usually get 3-4 hours sleep during the week as an e-4 team leader in active army. 6-7 on the weekends.
I'm taking a class right now on a different post, thus stripping me of responsibility at my unit. I only work 8 hours a day, and only during the week. It's like I'm on vacation.
If you are talking about explosives, I would imagine it would introduce a number of safety issues. Aircraft experience a lot of extremes. Hot, cold, turbulence, and hard landings can all knock around explosives. Never mind all the fuel/oil and electronics around. I work with explosives with the army. The idea of working with or around an explosive mechanism that experiences wear and tear scares the crap out of me.
Sure it can be done, but making the process safe for maintenance crews would be expensive and a royal PIA.
But it depends on what you grow. Lots of types of crops take time to produce something meaningful. If you change the climate and destroy a region's ability to produce olives for example, they can't just pick up and move somewhere else in a day. You might be able to pick up and grow your wheat in Northern Canada, but you lose the market for it. That guy who grows olives eats bread. He can't buy that anymore because he no longer produces olives. He might starve. You might go broke.
Everything is connected, and climate change puts a massive stress on the system. The cost of adapting to the new climate each year or decade is like an extra tax for everyone in the world. Not every region pays the same tax. Not everyone will be able to afford their region's tax. And even if you can, you don't even get any roads or police in return.
Monkeys can be trained to detonate land mines. Morocco offered the US 2000 for that purpose during the initial Iraq war. The US refused. We'd rather use (human) combat engineers for that.
And you have whole families, school children, living in homeless shelters.
The ones in shelters are lucky. I don't know numbers, but a great deal of our homeless don't even have that because their local governments either don't see it as a priority or don't have the means to provide homeless shelters. That is why tent cities have sprung up in many parts of the country.
The clock is intended to measure trends over years, not individual events. The clock didn't move in response to the Cuban missile crisis. It happened too fast.
To be fair, Facebook makes it easier to get caught. All you have to do is stay logged in once by accident. If the cheater gets caught with any of the ones you listed, it can usually be explained with business. Getting caught on Facebook is just straightforward.
Also, facebook just looks bad sometimes, even when you haven't done anything wrong. I have an ex that likes all my posts. I haven't spoken to her in a year, but if I were married I can imagine that still creating some tension.
The m16/m4 isn't perfect. Direct impingement means its higher maintenance, but there is no good reason for it to jam if your are taking proper care of it. That brings me to my main point.
You can buy all the latest and greatest equipment in the world, but if you skimp on training it's all worthless. I'd rather have a squad with muskets that know how to fight than a squad with assault rifles that don't. I'm glad there is finally a reasonable discussion on the R&D side of the Defense budget. Every time budget cuts hit Defense it ends up resulting in lowered standard of living for soldiers, and far more importantly, scaled back training.
Nobody looks at the massive waste in R&D designing equipment that is often a step backwards (if it ever reaches the field) or more likely, gets so bogged down in bureaucracy that it is irrelevant to the battle by the time it's ready. It's hard to piss away billions of dollars in something relatively cheap like food, housing, and training. And yet these are the areas that get cut first as if everyone's been making out like bandits with all this gas we've been using for our vehicles and bullets fired on ranges.
And with all this money going to R&D how is that a weapon that truly needs redesign (MK-19) hasn't been replaced yet? How many times does this piece of garbage have to jam in combat before somebody drops the couple bucks to replace it? It isn't a fighter jet. Its a hunk of steel. We still use WWII.50 machine guns. As in we checked the serial numbers and we might be using the very same guns my Grandpa used in Normandy. They still work. We need to learn how to design things again.
ok. end of rant. I'm going to make an awesome rambling old person some day...
As an American, and I cannot stress enough, try not to get your hopes up. We'd fight this, but we don't have any real power over our government, and I'm pretty sure our country got hit by some kind of soviet "stupid ray" back in the '80s or so. That, or we fried our brains doing a lot of coke.
ID tags are covered by AR 600-8-14 (1992). It seems you are mostly right, that any religion can be specified, as the AR only shows examples of religions, and not a list of acceptable options. In the past, there was a designation for "Other" which was 'X' and "No preference" which was 'Y'. Now that it is spelled out the "other" option is gone, but you can put any religion on there. But it still must be a religion to stay within regulation.
Without a list of options, it should fall to the commander on what is acceptable on id tags. It does not specify what is considered a religion, but it still must be a religion after all. With that being said, putting jediism on your tags should only result in minimal grief from leadership. If I try to claim couchpotatoism as my religion, it's going to be a long road to fight for the right to wear it.
As the other comment pointed out Atheism was not allowed in their case. I guess you could argue atheism is a lack of religion rather than an actual religion. It still doesn't sit right that punishment was carried out though.
There are most certainly MMA nerds. If you ever take a class on that type of thing you'll probably meet them. They know every fight in the history of MMA and study the strategies used. I recently went to the video store and looked at the sports section. There were one or two boxing DVDs, a couple for other sports, and a whole rack of MMA fights. If you just want to see a guy get kicked in the face, I'm pretty sure you can find it on youtube. These people actually study it.
This is definitely along the right lines, but I think a key fact is missing from the cost to an army planning against the bunker busters. Money is a big factor, but it is also human effort. Iran doesn't have a massive intelligence community like the US or China. Right now, Iranian generals are sitting in a room thinking about how to maintain command and control during an invasion. They can't get to the next step of figuring out what to do with that command and control because this bomb just threw a giant wrench in the works without even being used. Winning a battle is done with planning, and if you can just keep screwing with the guys doing the planning they won't be able to give the proper focus to things that also need their attention.
They might find that this bomb doesn't change much in their strategy, but even if they do, they already wasted valuable resources on a new problem when their intelligence community no doubt already has its work cut out for them.
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I'm a soldier. We pretty much don't get sick days without some kind of surgery. And if I told my supervisor I was too tired to drive, he'd tell me to walk.
But I'm pretty sure there are more people than me that would pick coming to work tired over missing a day of work. Work puts a roof over your head...
I suspect laws will still prevent this for a long while, but I can think of two good situations to use automated drivers. The first is very long drives. In a few weeks I have to make a 24 hour drive. If I didn't have to stop to sleep, I could literally be home in 24 hours. Instead it will take much longer. The other case comes up more, since I'm stuck in a place with nonexistent public transportation. It can drive my drunken self home on weekends.
Even sober, long duration driving and driving at night (ie tired) result in a lot of crashes. Even if it has a failure rate, it will be better than most human driving anyway. I can think of times (when overworked of course) in broad daylight that I've fallen asleep at red lights. But I still have to get to work. I can't choose not to drive. This gives somebody like me the ability to get to work more safely, if not completely safely.
It isn't Vietnam. The culture is different. And you wouldn't want to touch a local if you had the chance. Most of locals don't exactly live up to our hygiene standards to say the least. Most prostitution is of our own soldiers. It depends on the level of discipline in the unit whether that will happen. But combat units usually don't have females. My company did have a few females that were medics and other odd jobs, but transferred them out to avoid problems. Definitely the right call.
What's funny is that there are some people who sign up because they like violence. And they never last. The don't have the self control you need to do the job.
I'm an army guy, so I have a different perspective. EVERYONE needs some entertainment/escape, but nobody's catching a ride to somewhere else for a friggin movie. That's why reel to reel doesn't make sense. The soldiers most in need don't have access to it. Soldiers usually have laptops. In Afghanistan, there are no copyright laws anyway. You can buy pirated movies through local shops by the truckload. They'll even let you bring back your pirated movies through customs as long as they are for personal use. ie, you can't have a bunch of copies of the same movie.
If you really want make a soldier happy, you have remember that they might be at a tiny outpost with a platoon of young men all deployment. They might not have seen a female for months. Yes, send porn.
I think you just did.
If we went to war with Iran, I would very probably die in that war. That's the job I do. Sometimes wars are easy, sometimes not. But somebody has to be first. Most of the people doing the dying at this point in the game signed up during the war. We know what we signed up for.
What is there to be outraged about? That I'll die in a pointless war? I'm pretty sure I've already prepared for that when I signed up the first time. Or do you think the present dying is really meaningful? I don't know if it is. I'm pretty sure you're not in a position to make that call either.
Maybe our mothers should be outraged. Maybe it's the innocent Iranians. But their government plays the same game ours does. And they have elections just like us.
Drawing the distinction between different positions within the military would remove any doubt. I usually get 3-4 hours sleep during the week as an e-4 team leader in active army. 6-7 on the weekends.
I'm taking a class right now on a different post, thus stripping me of responsibility at my unit. I only work 8 hours a day, and only during the week. It's like I'm on vacation.
If you believe a god causes disease as punishment, then the two go together seamlessly.
If you are talking about explosives, I would imagine it would introduce a number of safety issues. Aircraft experience a lot of extremes. Hot, cold, turbulence, and hard landings can all knock around explosives. Never mind all the fuel/oil and electronics around. I work with explosives with the army. The idea of working with or around an explosive mechanism that experiences wear and tear scares the crap out of me.
Sure it can be done, but making the process safe for maintenance crews would be expensive and a royal PIA.
But it depends on what you grow. Lots of types of crops take time to produce something meaningful. If you change the climate and destroy a region's ability to produce olives for example, they can't just pick up and move somewhere else in a day. You might be able to pick up and grow your wheat in Northern Canada, but you lose the market for it. That guy who grows olives eats bread. He can't buy that anymore because he no longer produces olives. He might starve. You might go broke.
Everything is connected, and climate change puts a massive stress on the system. The cost of adapting to the new climate each year or decade is like an extra tax for everyone in the world. Not every region pays the same tax. Not everyone will be able to afford their region's tax. And even if you can, you don't even get any roads or police in return.
Monkeys can be trained to detonate land mines. Morocco offered the US 2000 for that purpose during the initial Iraq war. The US refused. We'd rather use (human) combat engineers for that.
http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Security-Industry/2003/03/24/Morocco-offers-US-monkeys-to-detonate-mine/UPI-14431048506179/
And you have whole families, school children, living in homeless shelters.
The ones in shelters are lucky. I don't know numbers, but a great deal of our homeless don't even have that because their local governments either don't see it as a priority or don't have the means to provide homeless shelters. That is why tent cities have sprung up in many parts of the country.
http://www.businessinsider.com/lakewood-new-jersey-homeless-tent-city-2011-9?op=1
The clock is intended to measure trends over years, not individual events. The clock didn't move in response to the Cuban missile crisis. It happened too fast.
To be fair, Facebook makes it easier to get caught. All you have to do is stay logged in once by accident. If the cheater gets caught with any of the ones you listed, it can usually be explained with business. Getting caught on Facebook is just straightforward.
Also, facebook just looks bad sometimes, even when you haven't done anything wrong. I have an ex that likes all my posts. I haven't spoken to her in a year, but if I were married I can imagine that still creating some tension.
posting to undo moderation
posting to undo moderation...
Already been done: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zE5PGeh2K9k
The m16/m4 isn't perfect. Direct impingement means its higher maintenance, but there is no good reason for it to jam if your are taking proper care of it. That brings me to my main point.
.50 machine guns. As in we checked the serial numbers and we might be using the very same guns my Grandpa used in Normandy. They still work. We need to learn how to design things again.
You can buy all the latest and greatest equipment in the world, but if you skimp on training it's all worthless. I'd rather have a squad with muskets that know how to fight than a squad with assault rifles that don't. I'm glad there is finally a reasonable discussion on the R&D side of the Defense budget. Every time budget cuts hit Defense it ends up resulting in lowered standard of living for soldiers, and far more importantly, scaled back training.
Nobody looks at the massive waste in R&D designing equipment that is often a step backwards (if it ever reaches the field) or more likely, gets so bogged down in bureaucracy that it is irrelevant to the battle by the time it's ready. It's hard to piss away billions of dollars in something relatively cheap like food, housing, and training. And yet these are the areas that get cut first as if everyone's been making out like bandits with all this gas we've been using for our vehicles and bullets fired on ranges.
And with all this money going to R&D how is that a weapon that truly needs redesign (MK-19) hasn't been replaced yet? How many times does this piece of garbage have to jam in combat before somebody drops the couple bucks to replace it? It isn't a fighter jet. Its a hunk of steel. We still use WWII
ok. end of rant. I'm going to make an awesome rambling old person some day...
Dear mankind:
As an American, and I cannot stress enough, try not to get your hopes up. We'd fight this, but we don't have any real power over our government, and I'm pretty sure our country got hit by some kind of soviet "stupid ray" back in the '80s or so. That, or we fried our brains doing a lot of coke.
Good luck mankind!
But another kid in the school will still have a Dad this time next year.
ID tags are covered by AR 600-8-14 (1992). It seems you are mostly right, that any religion can be specified, as the AR only shows examples of religions, and not a list of acceptable options. In the past, there was a designation for "Other" which was 'X' and "No preference" which was 'Y'. Now that it is spelled out the "other" option is gone, but you can put any religion on there. But it still must be a religion to stay within regulation.
Without a list of options, it should fall to the commander on what is acceptable on id tags. It does not specify what is considered a religion, but it still must be a religion after all. With that being said, putting jediism on your tags should only result in minimal grief from leadership. If I try to claim couchpotatoism as my religion, it's going to be a long road to fight for the right to wear it.
As the other comment pointed out Atheism was not allowed in their case. I guess you could argue atheism is a lack of religion rather than an actual religion. It still doesn't sit right that punishment was carried out though.
You can put Jediism (or whatever the proper noun is) on military id tags. I've seen more than a few soldiers with it written on their tags.
There are most certainly MMA nerds. If you ever take a class on that type of thing you'll probably meet them. They know every fight in the history of MMA and study the strategies used. I recently went to the video store and looked at the sports section. There were one or two boxing DVDs, a couple for other sports, and a whole rack of MMA fights. If you just want to see a guy get kicked in the face, I'm pretty sure you can find it on youtube. These people actually study it.
This is definitely along the right lines, but I think a key fact is missing from the cost to an army planning against the bunker busters. Money is a big factor, but it is also human effort. Iran doesn't have a massive intelligence community like the US or China. Right now, Iranian generals are sitting in a room thinking about how to maintain command and control during an invasion. They can't get to the next step of figuring out what to do with that command and control because this bomb just threw a giant wrench in the works without even being used. Winning a battle is done with planning, and if you can just keep screwing with the guys doing the planning they won't be able to give the proper focus to things that also need their attention.
They might find that this bomb doesn't change much in their strategy, but even if they do, they already wasted valuable resources on a new problem when their intelligence community no doubt already has its work cut out for them.