mcpackieh

"War on __" doesn't imply an irrational war on __

I'm not sure I buy that. I think the reputation of soldiers varies greatly with the public perception of the wars they fought. Soldiers are highly regarded when they're seen to be fighting some great evil, but at other times soldiers are considered to be fools or even among the lowest strata of society (particularly before the modern era.)

WW2 veterans receive near universal praise, but in the Vietnam era there were widespread (probably heavily exaggerated if not fabricated) reports of soldiers being spat on because a whole lot of people didn't think America's military adventurism was really in defense of America. Of course those who felt that the war was necessary in the fight against communism to defend the American way of life had a more positive view of the same soldiers. In more recent wars with all volunteer soldiers I think the reputation of soldiers is just as polarized although usually the negative side doesn't go further than cool sniffs and sneers; the spitting was probably all apocryphal in the first place. Certainly you won't see me going around thanking Iraq vets for their service; they signed up for a stupid war and I'm not going to thank them for making that mistake. I won't look down on a soldier who got drafted, but those soldiers who signed up for the travel, job experience, college education, etc are essentially mercenaries anyway.

We need to have severe penalties for negligent DMCA takedowns, not just willfully malicious ones. Including disbarment and possibly imprisonment for any lawyers involved. Taking down pages about NASA rocketry because they shared a name with a social media model was probably an accident, but it's an inexcusable accident that never should have happened. These kind of accidents wouldn't happen so often if the people issuing takedowns were forced to have skin in the game.

It's well respected in the sense that when you're at a dinner party and tell people that you're a school teacher everybody says "Oh how nice! that's such an important job. You must love working with the kids, right? So rewarding to be able to make a difference"

Contrast when you tell somebody you're a lawyer or lobbyist, some people will be impressed but other people will get a bit uncomfortable and try to change the subject or start telling "lawyer jokes".

What did the lawyer name his daughter? Sue!

The fact that nobody was injured in the previous incident is fortunate for anybody who might have been injured then, but doesn't diminish the importance of addressing whatever flaw caused the explosion. Considering that we're talking about a lot of liquid helium being improperly vented, the next time something goes wrong it could end up asphyxiating a hundred people.

Just because nobody was in the danger zone the first time it exploded doesn't mean you should count on nobody being in the danger zone the second or third time it might explode. This is the reason work site safety officers yell at people to report all near-miss incidents, not only the accidents that get people hurt. If something went wrong and nobody got hurt by chance coincidence, it might happen again when people are actually near it. Therefore a near miss incident needs to be addressed with the same seriousness as an accident that actually caused injury.

> Tell us how you really feel. :)

Anybody who says that deserves a prompt smack. I told you how I feel you smarmy parasitic prick.

You nose detects it and your brain reacts to it; it's odor. Just because you don't consciously perceive it doesn't mean it isn't odor. If it isn't odor then there isn't any other good word for it.

You've rightly hedged with "sometimes", the article on the other hand is very whiggish and seems to incline that any perception of decline at any time in any place is a cognitive bias and not representative of reality. What about in the UK during and in the years after WW2, when rationing continued and in some cases got even worse even after the war ended and average body weights were dropping? Where people who perceived a decline there and then operating under delusions and believing things which weren't true? Do their experiences at the time not count because a generation later things started to recover? Or maybe their experiences don't count because the decline of the British empire was actually a good thing from certain points of view and anybody who saw it as a decline had an invalid opinion?

Or maybe because technology seems to march inexorably onward, decline in other aspects of life are wholly negated and therefore anybody who perceives any decline is wrong. If rent and groceries now account for a larger portion of an average worker's spending but ipads got twice as fast, does that mean that people who perceive a decline are objectively wrong?