Out of Pod Experience

Or jumped over the fence and split

Actually I meant more government involvement, though that said I live in a socialist country in the first place and its working out pretty well so far

Point in context, Government pays me to go to university, I pay it back through taxes with an increased earning capacity earlier than if I had to pay out of my own pocket. Everybody wins

And yes, monetize the debt, let the banks go bankrupt and impose capital controls to prevent outflow, perhaps also using the Swedish model of a "bad" bank to soak up toxic assets and wind them down and back to the Exchequer.

I totally agree. It was an accident. A very stupid accident but one, nonetheless.

We did not press charges. The regretful thing is that the kid who actually shot my brother will live with this for the rest of his life. His parents have since divorced. It has destroyed their family. That makes me sad.

In this case, the accident WAS preventable. There are several things that would have stopped this including locking the damn gun up (it was in the parent's dresser drawer), leaving the gun unloaded (there had been burglaries in their neighborhood and he loaded it for home defense), and continued reinforcement of the idea of gun safety. [/rant]

You are correct though, it has nothing to do with a sociopath "going off".

The above describes tens of thousands of families. Hell, parts of it describe parts of *my* childhood. Where are the tens of thousands of murderers? Why am *I* not a murderer?

This kid is a far-outlier of a particularly sad and horrible sort.

I think there are cultural differences going on here.

The "ban" on politics around here forces us to treat these cases if kids accidentally shooting each other as... ACCIDENTS. Which they certainly are. A loaded gun left unattended is like an nu-barricaded swimming pool with toddlers around, or an unlocked car on a hill with kids around, or a bucket with water in it in the presence of an infant.

Yes, accidents - something a mature society can handle in concept. These things happen.

But if we want to go with the "just save one life" approach, we'd have to put everybody in padded cells and build robots to deliver the food (lest someone hired for that task slip on a grape).


But for the cultural differences, well, I grew up in the Northeast of the USA, the so-called "New England" states, named by the people who... settled.... um... took the land from the natives. (Frankly I think the natives had better names for everything).

The Northeast is a strange place. Basically, kids are raised like veal cows. They hardly do anything. There's no resources or logistics for it. Since the late 1980s, "helicopter parenting' became all the rage. That's when kids started wearing helmets to ride tricycles. Back in the 70s, we didn't wear helmets. Some of us ended up in the hospital because of it. Nobody died.


When I went to basic training, guys around me, shaved heads and all, had all kinds of scars on them. Everybody had a shaved head, and everybody showered together. No it's not ghey, it's the military.

But It was very noticeable how the guys from what is normally referred to as "flyover country" (all those uber-special people from the northeast and the west coast, the world revolving around them and all, refer to the rest of America is flyover country because all they know of it is what they see while cruising at 37000 feet in a plane) had scars. Lots of scars.


Guys who had accidents - motorcycle accidents, bike accidents, go-kart accidents, hunting accidents, martial arts accidents, bonfire accidents (3rd degree burns leave some interesting scars) and of course the guys from Detroit had scars on their heads. There was one fellow who had a scar all around the inside of his hairline - went through a windshield and the doctors had to scalp him to get the glass bits out.



In America we say that there are two phrases comprising not-so-famous last words of people who manage to get themselves killed.

"Hold my beer"
"Watch this'.


Youtube "Fail Compilations" are loaded with such scenes.

Problem is, we have this "raised like veal" crowd of the northeast who live in fear of people and accidents, holed up in their homes behind triple-locked doors watching CNN and FOX and living in fear of everything. These are the people saying "there should be a law!" whenever some kid gets run over while chasing an ice cream truck, or just about any accident or mishap you can think of. For most of the northeast (having grown up there), it's "Eat, sleep, crap, work" and do little else. Maybe they'll have a little boat they take out a few times a year or they might have an old muscle car in a garage somewhere that they are too busy (proudly) being a slave (making someone else rich) to find time to restore.

Yet in flyover country, you got kids raised on horseback, motorcycles, around guns, on boats. Yeah things happen. I remember a captain from Miami who learned SCUBA like this: when he was 10, his uncle wanted him to help raise a sunken yacht and install lift bags, and so his uncle put a tank on him, stuck a regulator in his mouth, put a mask on him and said "Whatever you do, don't stop breathing or you will get the bends".

And that was that.

Is one culture better than the other? I don't know. On the one hand, the "safety first and always while living in fear of everything" crowd is doing much damage to the liberty of everybody else, sending congressional and senatorial representatives to Mordor to haunt the rest of the country with this live in fear of everything worst case scenario mentality. As Fred Reed once said, :



I am glad to come from the generation that played dodgeball. And yes, the ginger kid with the thick glasses always got primaried.

Most of them grew up to be tough and successful people as I recall.


The rest of the country pretty much lives without fear of what "somebody somewhere is doing". They don't have much fear at all, and during my military service, I knew a lot of fellows who fell off mountains, broke horses (trained them - here I though for a while they "broke" the horse by insulting it until it got a low self-esteem), got bitten by snakes and gators, got shot in the arm or leg or "took an arrow in the knee".

I envied them not for their mishaps, but because they grew up on farms where they had the resources and logistics to have real activities that meant something, far better than what we had in the northeast, where all we could do it "play in the yard" and little more, preparing to be adult-sized children with no real experience. Just down the road where I live now (not in the Northeast) there's a sailplane club with teenagers certed for solo flight.

Yet things don't get better because here I am being glad I didn't have to wear a helmet just to ride the bike down the street, unlike now.

I agree with all of this.

Here's my 2p. tldr; let your kids bloody live!

Being from the UK i have no experience of this heathen dodgeball but we used to play a game called British Bulldog or fox and hounds which was pretty much "Chase Billy and if you catch him pile on him until the teacher catches up and leave no visible marks." It made a man out of you imo. For the hounds it taught team work and how through group effort you could achieve goals and also get away with things, and for the nimble, skinny lads it taught you to run like hell and become good at hiding / eluding. Valuable skills in later life when wanting to evade the wife im sure.

Those two games are long gone now alas. Killed off by dogooders who generally are all champagne socialists to a tee.

When i did my basic training our instructor asked us the dummy question of "who knows how to fight?" The wannabe bruce lees didnt last long but later on during drills it clearly showed who knew the rules of war; that is put the other guy down hard, fast and make sure he isnt getting up. Youre not there to win marks. Those whod actually lived their lives didnt moan at the bruises, the soreness or the occasional black eye or split lip.

The best thing about growing up in the countryside is the freedom to be a real kid. Every summer was spent swimming, surfing, sailing, diving for seafood to cook up on a fire on the beach. We didnt worry about things that might make us sick, you cooked the mussels etc until they burst then you knew they were good. I never wore a helmet when i rode my bicycle. I fell out of trees, got more cuts than i can remember. When i got my motorbike it wasnt long before i fell, but i got back up. Broken bones came and healed. Scars faded but the lessons learnt.

All in all i worry about the "yoof" of today. They have never truly lived and are expected to take over eventually.

That said the human race is in reasonably good hands.. the Chinese dont seem to coddle their kids and neither do the Indians to my understanding. Maybe social Darwinism will kill off the namby pambies and life can get better.

What makes it more sad is im only 27 and ive lived more in that time than most UK kids will in their entire life.

We tried bulldogs once and 3 people were suspended.

We never did anything physical again, gym was only for the people who were doing competitive sports. Even then, only the ones who could realistically compete were allowed to try out. I remember being asked to stop trying out for things early on (I was a late bloomer, no balls dropping or testosterone surge till I was 15). Do this day I have never broken a bone and the outcome of all this is me wanting to bring back national service and do the UOTC. Try sharpening sticks or starting a fire. ditto to sports.

Can't help but feel I missed out on something at some point, not from a rich background. Point in context I flew in a plane for the first time last summer. My god it was beautiful. Next on the list is the Milky Way.

I'm considered right wing and alarmist for saying we live in a bubble and are well fed surrounded by nations of people that want a taste of glory, that its delusional to think we have the right to a life of this quality because we were born into it. Most people in my experience want to believe simultaneously that the West rules the world for their benefit, and that the West is evil because of capitalism. They want to be given money for the sake of it, not for reason but because they have no vision to work past it, uncaring that they are screwing things up long term.

I feel like I'm surrounded by idiots half the time, and delusional special pansies the other half.

Aye, hence why I have a half dozen children's books written in Mandarin and took the optional modules.

And trying to figure out how to get involved in space is tricky, I'm hoping it isn't one of those professions where you need to know someone on the inside to get into.

Well its a long ways off, still doing the Undergrad for another 2 years. I'd hit myself if I didn't ask, but were PhD's given any kind of advantage in the applications over Masters? I'm in one of those periods of life I think where I bug everyone for as much information on this as I can, mums an ex Hippie and Eve taught me most of my business acumen.

Point taken, never thought of that.