Similar law in Norway IIRC. The idea is essentially to put you (the soldier) in the situation where being threatened with punishment for disobeying the order is weighted up against the threat of punishment for obeying an unlawful order. Basically, if you’re given an order you honestly believe is illegal, it’s a lot easier to stand by a decision to face the consequences of disobeying it if you know that following the order can lead to the same, or worse, consequences.
I will never forget the time I posted a question about why something wasn’t working as I expected, with a minimal example (≈ 10 lines of python, no external libraries) and a description of the expected behaviour and observed behaviour.
The first three-ish replies I got were instant comments that this in fact does work like I would expect, and that the observed behaviour I described wasn’t what the code would produce. A day later, some highly-rated user made a friendly note that I had a typo that just happened to trigger this very unexpected error.
Basically, I was thrashed by the first replies, when the people replying hadn’t even run the code. It felt extremely good to be able to reply to them that they were asshats for saying that the code didn’t do what I said it did when they hadn’t even run it.
here you go
I trusted the upvotes, and dared to click. It’s a safe, informative piece on the topic at hand that I recommend reading.
I think the point is that the military, I assume in most countries, can accept a completely different risk picture for soldiers that society at large can accept for civilians. Thus, the military can viably mandate a vaccine that causes severe side effects in e.g. 1/1000 cases, given that the alternative (a serious disease spreading in the ranks) is worse.
Remember that by far most military casualties have historically been due to disease and other conditions not directly related to the enemies weapons. The militaries primary job is to remain combat effective, even if it means mandating a vaccine that is known to cause casualties. This kind of approach would never be acceptable for civilian society at large, where society is deemed responsible for protecting every individual. The military isn’t. It’s primarily responsible for protecting the civilian society, even at the cost of exposing soldiers to high risk scenarios.
This depends a lot on the labor job. I worked construction/landscaping for a couple years, and pretty much no two days were the same. You were basically always trying to solve some small or large practical problem.
Having an education as an engineer, and working as a researcher now, I have to say that I really enjoyed my time doing manual labour.
most skills are out of date within 5 years of leaving school
What kind of “skills” are you talking about and what kind of job are you doing if you require re-education after five years?? I honestly can’t imagine an education/job where you can’t remain up to date throughout your career, not to mention grow in your role.
Export to PNG -> redact PNG.
Ain’t nothing hiding behind those (0,0,0) pixels.
Oh, that would absolutely be great!
However, it’s worth noting that the common field medic is a far less qualified surgeon/doctor than the typical doctor in training that’s doing surgery at an ER under supervision. A field medics job is to pack wounds, apply chest seals, and do other critical life-saving work, while possibly under fire, so that the wounded survive until they get to a place where actual ER doctors can treat them.
As such, you need to give them some form of live training at doing those things, without requiring the resources it would take to train them to a point where it’s responsible to let them work on civilians at an ER under supervision. Basically, field medics work in the interim where you definitely need them in the field (significantly more qualified at saving lives than the common soldier), while you very likely don’t want them working on civilians in an ER (significantly less qualified than actual trauma surgeons).
ER doctors and surgeons have the privilege of being able to watch live surgeries during training, and doing their first live surgeries with safe supervision. The first time a field medic is trying to save a life in a live situation, it’s rather likely that they don’t have any supervisor on hand, and that someone is actively trying to kill them.
Just out of interest: Don’t you have any “catch-all” word for military personnel? Where I’m from the equivalent of “soldier” it typically used to mean “unspecified military personnel”.
I heard we recently developed an extremely effective jammer that completely disables communications and navigation equipment in the target aircraft. It’s called an AMRAAM, and I really hope a russian jet over NATO airspace eats one soon.
The fundamental difference to me, which makes me not see “a website with extensive docs and a download button” as marketing, is whether you need to seek it out or not.
If I need to seek it out myself, it’s not marketing, it’s simply “providing solid information” and “making your product accessible”, which is a whole different ballgame from “shoving your shit into peoples face in the hope that they’ll give you money”.
I think there’s a substantial difference between “supplying information about a product without shoving it in people’s face”, and what most people associate with “marketing”.
If a company putting up neutral, verifiable information about their product on their own webpage where I can find it by searching for something I’m looking for after reflexively scrolling past the ads counts as marketing, then yes, I “fall for marketing” all the time. However, what I typically associate with “marketing” involves me somehow being fed information about a product without seeking it out. Usually when that happens, I’ll actively look somewhere else.
Shame on you! If those poor kids facists could read they would be very upset!
“Not a marketing company” as in their business model is not centred around shoving ads in your face for money is how I read it.
Oh absolutely. As with all other infrastructure, there is a cost to be paid. However, when you look at an average to small river, even routing 10 % of the water via an osmosis plant before passing it to the sea is an absolutely massive volume. There’s also the point that you don’t want to build these things in large, meandering, flat river deltas. You want a large salinity gradient, which means relatively small, fast-running fresh water meeting the ocean more “suddenly” than what you get in a classical river delta is the optimal source here.
Because osmotic power has enormous potential in the sense that millions of cubic meters of fresh water is running into oceans all over the world every minute. If we’re able to get even a low-efficiency method of using the salinity gradient to generate power working then every place a river meets the sea is essentially an unlimited (albeit low-yield) power source.
This is tech that doesn’t rely on elevation (like hydropower) or weather conditions (like wind/solar) it’s stable and in principle possible to set up at pretty much any river outlet, which is great!
Exactly this. The whole premise of the tax system is based around the historically correct idea that you need to physically move goods in order to sell them, or physically be somewhere to sell services.
Companies like google are making buckets of money all over the world, and don’t need to tax a dime most places, because they have no physical presence there. This makes it pretty much impossible to compete with the international behemoths, because they have access to a munch of tax-free revenue, while a startup will typically be centred around wherever they’re based, where they also need to pay taxes.
It’s not deflection, it’s exactly their point. In a healthy economy, inflation is low but positive, and the same or lower than the general increase in wages.
The US (and a bunch of other places) are currently having a hard time because inflation outran wage increases. In many countries, this is back under control (wages are now outpacing inflation) and we’re pretty quickly catching back up.
Part of the major problem in the US is the complete lack of regulation and unionisation. When we had similar inflation in Norway, our wage increases nearly matched the inflation, and the past two years, the wage increases have been very high compared to inflation in order to “recover”. When you don’t have any system in place to enforce this kind of response to inflation, it just leads to the owning class getting a larger share of the pie (what has happened in the US).
I’m know little about the details around how it works in the US, but I think saying
Is a bit of an oversimplification. The point is that if a soldier will face consequences for disobeying an order, but no consequences for obeying an unlawful one, they have no dilemma (outside their own morals) when faced with an order they believe is illegal. Furthermore, they can be coerced into doing things they know is wrong and illegal. By putting this into law, you force the soldier to face the dilemma that if they truly believe an order is illegal, they can be punished for following it. That gives a much stronger incentive to actually stand your ground when ordered to do something that makes you think “there’s no way in hell that this can be legal”. It also removes or diminishes an officers power to coerce soldiers to do something they know is wrong and illegal.
Regarding
there’s probably some minor cultural differences between armies here, but by and large you’re probably mostly right. However, I don’t think it’s right in extreme (think, genocide) circumstances. A lot of these laws came in place post-WWII, and are formulated with the knowledge in mind that soldiers can and have been ordered to execute civilians and shoot at unarmed protesters. I’ve been a soldier myself, and would definitely question an order to open fire on unarmed civilians. I hope most other soldiers would do the same.