The cops are the cops. Regular local law enforcement. Their jurisdiction is their local county/city.
Then you have the state investigators. Basically the *BI. Like the FBI, but on the state level. They only deal with major crime, but only on a state level.
Then you get the FBI. Major crime, federal level.
CIA only deal with you dirty foreigners.
NSA doesn't exist. Duh.
The Marshall's deal with escaped prisoners.
Homeland security is a republican pork project. There are cities in kansas that got more "terror" money than major cities that might actually get attacked. Don't confuse them with an actual agency.
ATF and DEA and such are basically the enforcement arm of regulatory agencies. They have very narrow interests.
Most of these organizations are very hierarchical. Police, State investigators, Federal investigators. Police, DEA. Police, ATF. Police, State Investigators. I once did a big seminar on whether or not it'd make sense to fold (for example) the ATF into the FBI, and when it comes down to it, it just doesn't make sense. They don't do the same stuff.
Yea, even if they did create a new agency, the simple reality is that most of the staff would be drawn from the NSA anyway. If you're going to reform the NSA, just do it, don't just add another player with roughly the same mission to make the turf battles even worse.
The thing that turns me off more than anything else is people who walk around with an unpleasant look on their face all the time. It's like a subtle mirror of the soul. If someone, no matter how pretty otherwise, walks around 24/7 with that borderline bitchy sneer grafted to their face...Yech.
It definitely does matter how crazy you are in the long term, however. I ran competitively for 7 years, and topped 15 miles a day for 3 of those years. Doesn't take much to to make me feel good when I'm running (and I have wicked knee problems now, so I'm not in any kind of great shape).
Still it's always going to be work. Due to my knee issues, I need a lot of warm up and cool down, and I tend to feel like crap in the mornings, or whenever it rains.
It definitely helps to enjoy it. I still love to run and cycle.
Personally, once my heart rate gets up I feel great. I spend my whole exercise cycle thinking, "Jesus, why don't I do this 3 times a day?" Then I hit the cool-down period, and all the pain catches up, and I stagger around for an hour or so wondering if I'm going to die.
I don't do weights though. It's only cardio that makes me feel good. And even there, I have to be moving. Riding an exercise bike is a chore. The only "stationary" cardio I can do for any period of time is jumping rope, because it's entertaining.
I'm a bit weird. The more beautiful I think a girl is, the less inclined I am to talk to her...Not because I'm intimidated, but because I worry that she'll open her mouth and say something moronic, and that'll spoil it.
If it is now possible to remove Norton without reinstalling the OS, then that's a big improvement. Regardless, I'm not a fan. It still hogs cycles at weird intervals. If I haven't downloaded anything, and I'm not running a scan, then W.T.F is it doing?
No need to make exercise fun. Exercise is like sex, when you're doing it your body is spewing dopamine, endorphins, and bodily fluids in all directions. If you're doing it right, it feels great.
The trick is getting yourself to start exercising in the first place. A sufficiently addictive game would be a good incentive. The best incentive I ever had was a girl in my neighborhood who ran at roughly the same time every day in nothing but skimpy spandex.
Speaking of silly analogies. Programming languages are not natural languages.
If you learn Spanish, it's still going to be Spanish in 10 years. No one is going to look at your CV and say, "Well, I see Spanish, but I don't see Spanish.net, or Spanish#. Haven't you kept your skills up to date?"
Programming languages constantly change and evolve, and they don't do it like a natural language does. It's this arbitrary decision from the linguistic gods, "Thou shalt not use command()" and from then on, if you break that rule, you will be smote!
When the '90's rolled around and the web started blowing up, the whole industry was dumped on its head. Languages like java and vb became huge overnight, and that's where the jobs went. If you only knew COBOL or RPG, you were screwed. Maybe you could hold on to a legacy maintenance position, but that was it.
Learning general principles is vastly more useful than teaching someone syntax that could change at any time for a language that may not be popular in 5 years.
Coding has absolutely nothing to do with specific programming languages. Class programming assignments have almost nothing to do with real world applications.
If you teach the language, then you're teaching someone to be obsolete. It's pointless. It's like teaching someone to use Office: to function in the real world, you're going to have to learn new stuff every few years to meet real world goals. Even old languages like Fortran have evolved dramatically over the years.
The university I went to had a campus that had been nuclear hardened in the long long ago, when they thought the bombs could be dropping at any time. Going inside the buildings was like walking into a faraday cage, and everyone left their phones on the windowsills in an attempt to get signal.
Under the campus everything was connected by utility tunnels, with power, water, and data lines everywhere, but still more than large enough for a person to walk easily.
People always used to make nuclear waste jokes about the place, because the snow melted off the grass VERY quickly in places. Exploring underneath, it was easy to see why: there were all kinds of rooms, probably once intended to be shelters, but now relegated to bizarre student organization storage. Very cool.
I wish I'd brought a camera, or spent more time down there when I still had the keys. (Of course I didn't have the keys when I LIVED on that campus, and could have used those tunnels, nooooo, I got them later when there was little need to have them.)
The point everyone misses with Python is that Python was designed to play very nicely with external libraries. Python isn't as fast as C at some things, and isn't as fast as Fortran at some things, but is much easier to develop in than either, and can incorporate libraries in both of those languages.
...if somebody studies astronomy and will have to work with old legacy Forth code, he should better be taught to program in Forth at university...
This is exactly the wrong reason to teach any programming language. You teach a language to teach programming concepts and methodologies, and so you use languages that emphasize the concepts you want to teach.
You don't teach a language so someone will know it later. That makes no sense at all.
The plus of teaching Python is that it's a badass OOP language with clean and simple syntax. It's an excellent language for conveying object oriented methodologies.
You learned Lisp and Prolog? I learned Scheme and Prolog. Wasn't because anyone thought I'd ever actually professionally program in those langauges, it's because they represent different paradigms, and, as a student, I learned something from seeing the different types of programming languages.
After you've mastered the basics, you go out in the world, and use the right tool for the job. For all that you argue against fanboyisms, you commit a few of them yourself. Keep an open mind.
Just in case someone here...by some freak chance...doesn't know that RedTube is basically YouTube for Porn, don't clicky the linky if you're at work...y.
See, this is why you can't trust free speech and open information. One minute it's saving kittens, and then next minute it's BITING YOU IN THE ASS! I can has truth plz? kthnxbye!
Always nice to see the Chinese circumventing the Great Firewall. There is no way you'll get good information if all you get is government information.
I agree as far as "They treat us like crap when everything is working perfectly." I've been in places where everything worked smoothly, and we were treated like garbage, and I've been in places where nothing worked, and we were treated like kings.
I don't find that communication helps much, but it may just be my situation. I miss deadlines constantly because I have a job that is (in theory) equal parts deadline-driven code generation, and crisis-driven maintenance and administration. When a crisis pops up, everything gets a little later, and thanks to cutbacks, I'm in charge of way more than 1 person can effectively maintain (5 years ago it was 8 people, now it's me), so there are always fires that need to be put out, and there is very little time for the original code which is technically still part of my job.
To add insult to injury, about 70% of my work is done remotely, so all the people who work where I happen to have my desk have this mistaken idea that I work for them and that, since they don't have any current problems, I should be working on their code requests.
I don't know. I'm on the edge of adopting world class BOFHdom in self-defense. Last week I dropped 40 hours (in 2 days) on a site that wasn't even technically mine because their me equivalent was in the hospital in critical condition, and they had had a massive systems crash at the same time.
The level of sniping and whining and posturing I put up with from the other whiney bitches at my other sites for their ridiculous bullshit problems almost drove me over the edge, despite the worshipful gratitude of the people I was helping.
I just wanted you to know where I was coming from before I disagreed with you.
The funny thing about it is how people are affected differently by different levels of emotional trauma. I've known people whose whole lives were shattered by their parents going through what I'd consider to be a reasonably amicable divorce.
So trauma is weird. Some people shake it off, other people...not so much. I'm always sympathetic with people who can't take it. I get that.
I'm not really sympathetic with people who dish it out, however. I don't know if this guy has a family or not. He was pretty young, around the age I was when I had my first kid. If he did have a family, I have nothing but contempt for him. If he was having trouble getting over his family members committing suicide, then what possible fucking rationale could he have passing that on to the rest of his family?
Gotta feel bad for his fricking father: that guy had his wife and two of his kids kill themselves. Of course, who's to say that's not misplaced sympathy? The guy could be the reason they all offed themselves.
I don't know. I guess, in my head, I view suicide when you have loved ones and/or dependents to be SO prickish, that frankly, they're probably better off without him. If it were my brother/son/father, I'd be so fucking angry...Not. Even. Words. I can't imagine the level of pissed off I'd feel if my kid offed himself after something stupid like a business crash...THAT?! That is worth your life? Jesus.
I agree to an extent. The funny thing is always when people try to justify holding on to their death-stress job where they never see their family by saying, "I'm doing it for my family." I actually think that's a cop out; you're doing it for yourself because you want to see yourself as the sort of person who provides lifestyle X to your family.
Again, that's a problem. Families are tough. They get by. Justifying your self-destruction in the name of their social status is no better than justifying it for your own.
On the other hand, I know a guy (who at that time was married with a kid) who recently ditched a great job for no particular reason so he could do what he wanted to do, and I think that's pretty prickish.
True, hardcore existentialism is all kinds of prickish. It doesn't believe in marriage or any of that crap. Pure nihilistic self-actualization. In many ways the philosophy was a response to the Nazi movement: an attempt to explain how a whole group of basically decent people could get caught up in such a horror. Answer: they followed the herd. They did what they had to do to support themselves and their families.
So acting like a prick is definitely preferable to that sort of herd-insanity, but yea, it doesn't really translate perfectly to "I hate my job" angst.
The respectable option there would be to dedicate your life to helping those people you hurt, not to just kill yourself. That's too clean.
Either way, it's a lack of personal responsibilty. In a way, I don't blame them. This stuff happens every few decades like clockwork. Economy starts booming, banks convince the government to loosen "outdated" regulations, they invest unwisely, the bottom drops out, everyone recriminates, and then the government passes a lot of regulations. Repeat.
It's that whole "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it" thing.
Nah. The economy is overplayed because it sells papers. The death of media itself is overplayed, which is the hilarious part, for some of the same reasons, but also, as you suggest, because they think about it all the time.
*Works for "The Media" **Not worried about the economy
I had my father die in front of me. It was...graphic. I pulled the plug on my mother's life support. I lived through a number of abusive step parents. I actually got shot by one of them...Now that's fucking abusive!
I got married, and a year after I married my wife, her father died. And then her mother not even a year later. Neither one was especially clean.
I'm like the fucking angel of death. It's not even funny.
And I still think life can be sweet. It's a perspective thing. There is nothing more fragile than life. Death? Death is a cowards way out. All the people, all the fucking people who would kill for just one...more...moment. And I'm supposed to be sympathetic with someone who actually had a choice? I don't think so.
I don't feel he deserves sympathy or disdain. He killed himself; his death was his own desired outcome. Why would I be sympathetic?
And as for disdain, I'd have felt disdain for him right now if he was alive for his epic fuckup. Not much point in feeling it for him when he's dead.
I don't know why you immediately assume it wasn't rational, especially given that there is no evidence in the articles that he had any particular mental issues, other than the fact that he apparently thought he was "an anti-christ" and wanted to "kill god."
People make bad decisions all the time. This guy made plenty of decisions when he was alive that, in retrospect, were bad decisions. But certainly they must have seemed rational to him. As far as you know he made a rational (by his standards) decision to end his life. Hell, clearly he was a theist, so corporeal suicide wouldn't be the end, as far as his beliefs go.
The core premise of Existentialism is very simple: most people spend their entire lives lying to themselves, and living in a world of imaginary restrictions. It's herd behaviour.
If you build your self-image on something outside of your self you are giving up your right to self-determination. Other people are making your decisions, and deciding how your life is going to be. Your boss can decide, on a whim, how you get to feel about yourself.
The whole problem is that we get trapped in this societal notion of how it's supposed to be, of all the things that we have to do. You have to realize that all those obligations are things you put on yourself. There is nothing you can't walk away from.
Depressing ass philosophy, right? But its still useful. I got stuck in a bitch session with my boss a couple of weeks ago which basically boiled down to, "I'm pissed that the stuff that corporate assigned to you over my head has taken precedence over this thing I wanted you to do."
And in the middle of it, I unclipped my badge and tossed it on my desk, and looked him in the eye. And he shut his mouth, turned around and didn't bother me again for the rest of the week. He could fire me, no problem, but he feared those consequences more than I did, and he knew it.
When you define the boundaries of yourself, and you understand that your choice governs your life, and you know it profoundly, there is a freedom in that that scares the shit out of people who let their lives be defined by others.
Killing yourself pretty much removes your right to a lot of sympathy. Lot of people are talking about "honor" like killing yourself is the honorable way out, but really it's not. The honorable way out is working in the ruins to try and rectify your mistakes, not quitting when the road gets hard.
Normally I hate fuzzy continental philosophy, but this is the time to trot out the existentialism.
All that shit is meaningless. House, car, job, social standing, everything. Your family matters, your life matters. You get too hung up on that material bullshit, to the point where you take your own life rather than alter your social circumstances? That's pathetic.
Yea, its a step. A huge change. But there could be anything on the other side of that door, things you never even knew you wanted because you were so blinded by what you had and what you thought you had to have.
Don't get blinded by the habits of your life to the point where you think your job and the lifestyle it supports is worth more than your life. The only thing constraining your choices is you, and the fear of unknown consequences.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes...But no.
The cops are the cops. Regular local law enforcement. Their jurisdiction is their local county/city.
Then you have the state investigators. Basically the *BI. Like the FBI, but on the state level. They only deal with major crime, but only on a state level.
Then you get the FBI. Major crime, federal level.
CIA only deal with you dirty foreigners.
NSA doesn't exist. Duh.
The Marshall's deal with escaped prisoners.
Homeland security is a republican pork project. There are cities in kansas that got more "terror" money than major cities that might actually get attacked. Don't confuse them with an actual agency.
ATF and DEA and such are basically the enforcement arm of regulatory agencies. They have very narrow interests.
Most of these organizations are very hierarchical. Police, State investigators, Federal investigators. Police, DEA. Police, ATF. Police, State Investigators. I once did a big seminar on whether or not it'd make sense to fold (for example) the ATF into the FBI, and when it comes down to it, it just doesn't make sense. They don't do the same stuff.
That's about it.
Yea, even if they did create a new agency, the simple reality is that most of the staff would be drawn from the NSA anyway. If you're going to reform the NSA, just do it, don't just add another player with roughly the same mission to make the turf battles even worse.
Meh. An oral fixation is an oral fixation ;)
The thing that turns me off more than anything else is people who walk around with an unpleasant look on their face all the time. It's like a subtle mirror of the soul. If someone, no matter how pretty otherwise, walks around 24/7 with that borderline bitchy sneer grafted to their face...Yech.
No need to be defensive. Everyone is different.
It definitely does matter how crazy you are in the long term, however. I ran competitively for 7 years, and topped 15 miles a day for 3 of those years. Doesn't take much to to make me feel good when I'm running (and I have wicked knee problems now, so I'm not in any kind of great shape).
Still it's always going to be work. Due to my knee issues, I need a lot of warm up and cool down, and I tend to feel like crap in the mornings, or whenever it rains.
It definitely helps to enjoy it. I still love to run and cycle.
Personally, once my heart rate gets up I feel great. I spend my whole exercise cycle thinking, "Jesus, why don't I do this 3 times a day?" Then I hit the cool-down period, and all the pain catches up, and I stagger around for an hour or so wondering if I'm going to die.
I don't do weights though. It's only cardio that makes me feel good. And even there, I have to be moving. Riding an exercise bike is a chore. The only "stationary" cardio I can do for any period of time is jumping rope, because it's entertaining.
I'm a bit weird. The more beautiful I think a girl is, the less inclined I am to talk to her...Not because I'm intimidated, but because I worry that she'll open her mouth and say something moronic, and that'll spoil it.
I assume you mean, "Remove it from the box."
If it is now possible to remove Norton without reinstalling the OS, then that's a big improvement. Regardless, I'm not a fan. It still hogs cycles at weird intervals. If I haven't downloaded anything, and I'm not running a scan, then W.T.F is it doing?
No need to make exercise fun. Exercise is like sex, when you're doing it your body is spewing dopamine, endorphins, and bodily fluids in all directions. If you're doing it right, it feels great.
The trick is getting yourself to start exercising in the first place. A sufficiently addictive game would be a good incentive. The best incentive I ever had was a girl in my neighborhood who ran at roughly the same time every day in nothing but skimpy spandex.
Speaking of silly analogies. Programming languages are not natural languages.
If you learn Spanish, it's still going to be Spanish in 10 years. No one is going to look at your CV and say, "Well, I see Spanish, but I don't see Spanish.net, or Spanish#. Haven't you kept your skills up to date?"
Programming languages constantly change and evolve, and they don't do it like a natural language does. It's this arbitrary decision from the linguistic gods, "Thou shalt not use command()" and from then on, if you break that rule, you will be smote!
When the '90's rolled around and the web started blowing up, the whole industry was dumped on its head. Languages like java and vb became huge overnight, and that's where the jobs went. If you only knew COBOL or RPG, you were screwed. Maybe you could hold on to a legacy maintenance position, but that was it.
Learning general principles is vastly more useful than teaching someone syntax that could change at any time for a language that may not be popular in 5 years.
Coding has absolutely nothing to do with specific programming languages. Class programming assignments have almost nothing to do with real world applications.
If you teach the language, then you're teaching someone to be obsolete. It's pointless. It's like teaching someone to use Office: to function in the real world, you're going to have to learn new stuff every few years to meet real world goals. Even old languages like Fortran have evolved dramatically over the years.
The university I went to had a campus that had been nuclear hardened in the long long ago, when they thought the bombs could be dropping at any time. Going inside the buildings was like walking into a faraday cage, and everyone left their phones on the windowsills in an attempt to get signal.
Under the campus everything was connected by utility tunnels, with power, water, and data lines everywhere, but still more than large enough for a person to walk easily.
People always used to make nuclear waste jokes about the place, because the snow melted off the grass VERY quickly in places. Exploring underneath, it was easy to see why: there were all kinds of rooms, probably once intended to be shelters, but now relegated to bizarre student organization storage. Very cool.
I wish I'd brought a camera, or spent more time down there when I still had the keys. (Of course I didn't have the keys when I LIVED on that campus, and could have used those tunnels, nooooo, I got them later when there was little need to have them.)
The point everyone misses with Python is that Python was designed to play very nicely with external libraries. Python isn't as fast as C at some things, and isn't as fast as Fortran at some things, but is much easier to develop in than either, and can incorporate libraries in both of those languages.
You can eat your cake and have it to.
...if somebody studies astronomy and will have to work with old legacy Forth code, he should better be taught to program in Forth at university...
This is exactly the wrong reason to teach any programming language. You teach a language to teach programming concepts and methodologies, and so you use languages that emphasize the concepts you want to teach.
You don't teach a language so someone will know it later. That makes no sense at all.
The plus of teaching Python is that it's a badass OOP language with clean and simple syntax. It's an excellent language for conveying object oriented methodologies.
You learned Lisp and Prolog? I learned Scheme and Prolog. Wasn't because anyone thought I'd ever actually professionally program in those langauges, it's because they represent different paradigms, and, as a student, I learned something from seeing the different types of programming languages.
After you've mastered the basics, you go out in the world, and use the right tool for the job. For all that you argue against fanboyisms, you commit a few of them yourself. Keep an open mind.
Just in case someone here...by some freak chance...doesn't know that RedTube is basically YouTube for Porn, don't clicky the linky if you're at work...y.
See, this is why you can't trust free speech and open information. One minute it's saving kittens, and then next minute it's BITING YOU IN THE ASS! I can has truth plz? kthnxbye!
Always nice to see the Chinese circumventing the Great Firewall. There is no way you'll get good information if all you get is government information.
I agree as far as "They treat us like crap when everything is working perfectly." I've been in places where everything worked smoothly, and we were treated like garbage, and I've been in places where nothing worked, and we were treated like kings.
I don't find that communication helps much, but it may just be my situation. I miss deadlines constantly because I have a job that is (in theory) equal parts deadline-driven code generation, and crisis-driven maintenance and administration. When a crisis pops up, everything gets a little later, and thanks to cutbacks, I'm in charge of way more than 1 person can effectively maintain (5 years ago it was 8 people, now it's me), so there are always fires that need to be put out, and there is very little time for the original code which is technically still part of my job.
To add insult to injury, about 70% of my work is done remotely, so all the people who work where I happen to have my desk have this mistaken idea that I work for them and that, since they don't have any current problems, I should be working on their code requests.
I don't know. I'm on the edge of adopting world class BOFHdom in self-defense. Last week I dropped 40 hours (in 2 days) on a site that wasn't even technically mine because their me equivalent was in the hospital in critical condition, and they had had a massive systems crash at the same time.
The level of sniping and whining and posturing I put up with from the other whiney bitches at my other sites for their ridiculous bullshit problems almost drove me over the edge, despite the worshipful gratitude of the people I was helping.
I just wanted you to know where I was coming from before I disagreed with you.
The funny thing about it is how people are affected differently by different levels of emotional trauma. I've known people whose whole lives were shattered by their parents going through what I'd consider to be a reasonably amicable divorce.
So trauma is weird. Some people shake it off, other people...not so much. I'm always sympathetic with people who can't take it. I get that.
I'm not really sympathetic with people who dish it out, however. I don't know if this guy has a family or not. He was pretty young, around the age I was when I had my first kid. If he did have a family, I have nothing but contempt for him. If he was having trouble getting over his family members committing suicide, then what possible fucking rationale could he have passing that on to the rest of his family?
Gotta feel bad for his fricking father: that guy had his wife and two of his kids kill themselves. Of course, who's to say that's not misplaced sympathy? The guy could be the reason they all offed themselves.
I don't know. I guess, in my head, I view suicide when you have loved ones and/or dependents to be SO prickish, that frankly, they're probably better off without him. If it were my brother/son/father, I'd be so fucking angry...Not. Even. Words. I can't imagine the level of pissed off I'd feel if my kid offed himself after something stupid like a business crash...THAT?! That is worth your life? Jesus.
I agree to an extent. The funny thing is always when people try to justify holding on to their death-stress job where they never see their family by saying, "I'm doing it for my family." I actually think that's a cop out; you're doing it for yourself because you want to see yourself as the sort of person who provides lifestyle X to your family.
Again, that's a problem. Families are tough. They get by. Justifying your self-destruction in the name of their social status is no better than justifying it for your own.
On the other hand, I know a guy (who at that time was married with a kid) who recently ditched a great job for no particular reason so he could do what he wanted to do, and I think that's pretty prickish.
True, hardcore existentialism is all kinds of prickish. It doesn't believe in marriage or any of that crap. Pure nihilistic self-actualization. In many ways the philosophy was a response to the Nazi movement: an attempt to explain how a whole group of basically decent people could get caught up in such a horror. Answer: they followed the herd. They did what they had to do to support themselves and their families.
So acting like a prick is definitely preferable to that sort of herd-insanity, but yea, it doesn't really translate perfectly to "I hate my job" angst.
The respectable option there would be to dedicate your life to helping those people you hurt, not to just kill yourself. That's too clean.
Either way, it's a lack of personal responsibilty. In a way, I don't blame them. This stuff happens every few decades like clockwork. Economy starts booming, banks convince the government to loosen "outdated" regulations, they invest unwisely, the bottom drops out, everyone recriminates, and then the government passes a lot of regulations. Repeat.
It's that whole "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it" thing.
Nah. The economy is overplayed because it sells papers. The death of media itself is overplayed, which is the hilarious part, for some of the same reasons, but also, as you suggest, because they think about it all the time.
*Works for "The Media"
**Not worried about the economy
I'm sorry for your loss.
I had my father die in front of me. It was...graphic. I pulled the plug on my mother's life support. I lived through a number of abusive step parents. I actually got shot by one of them...Now that's fucking abusive!
I got married, and a year after I married my wife, her father died. And then her mother not even a year later. Neither one was especially clean.
I'm like the fucking angel of death. It's not even funny.
And I still think life can be sweet. It's a perspective thing. There is nothing more fragile than life. Death? Death is a cowards way out. All the people, all the fucking people who would kill for just one...more...moment. And I'm supposed to be sympathetic with someone who actually had a choice? I don't think so.
I don't feel he deserves sympathy or disdain. He killed himself; his death was his own desired outcome. Why would I be sympathetic?
And as for disdain, I'd have felt disdain for him right now if he was alive for his epic fuckup. Not much point in feeling it for him when he's dead.
I don't know why you immediately assume it wasn't rational, especially given that there is no evidence in the articles that he had any particular mental issues, other than the fact that he apparently thought he was "an anti-christ" and wanted to "kill god."
People make bad decisions all the time. This guy made plenty of decisions when he was alive that, in retrospect, were bad decisions. But certainly they must have seemed rational to him. As far as you know he made a rational (by his standards) decision to end his life. Hell, clearly he was a theist, so corporeal suicide wouldn't be the end, as far as his beliefs go.
The core premise of Existentialism is very simple: most people spend their entire lives lying to themselves, and living in a world of imaginary restrictions. It's herd behaviour.
If you build your self-image on something outside of your self you are giving up your right to self-determination. Other people are making your decisions, and deciding how your life is going to be. Your boss can decide, on a whim, how you get to feel about yourself.
The whole problem is that we get trapped in this societal notion of how it's supposed to be, of all the things that we have to do. You have to realize that all those obligations are things you put on yourself. There is nothing you can't walk away from.
Depressing ass philosophy, right? But its still useful. I got stuck in a bitch session with my boss a couple of weeks ago which basically boiled down to, "I'm pissed that the stuff that corporate assigned to you over my head has taken precedence over this thing I wanted you to do."
And in the middle of it, I unclipped my badge and tossed it on my desk, and looked him in the eye. And he shut his mouth, turned around and didn't bother me again for the rest of the week. He could fire me, no problem, but he feared those consequences more than I did, and he knew it.
When you define the boundaries of yourself, and you understand that your choice governs your life, and you know it profoundly, there is a freedom in that that scares the shit out of people who let their lives be defined by others.
Killing yourself pretty much removes your right to a lot of sympathy. Lot of people are talking about "honor" like killing yourself is the honorable way out, but really it's not. The honorable way out is working in the ruins to try and rectify your mistakes, not quitting when the road gets hard.
Normally I hate fuzzy continental philosophy, but this is the time to trot out the existentialism.
All that shit is meaningless. House, car, job, social standing, everything. Your family matters, your life matters. You get too hung up on that material bullshit, to the point where you take your own life rather than alter your social circumstances? That's pathetic.
Yea, its a step. A huge change. But there could be anything on the other side of that door, things you never even knew you wanted because you were so blinded by what you had and what you thought you had to have.
Don't get blinded by the habits of your life to the point where you think your job and the lifestyle it supports is worth more than your life. The only thing constraining your choices is you, and the fear of unknown consequences.