Understand that everyone suffers from some degree of this and the world up to this point was still built on procrastination. “If it wasn’t for the last minute, nothing would get done”
Guns are cool. You should give them a try, I recommend at an outdoor range too. America is one of the last countries with a liberal mindset (in the true definition) that allows private ownership to exist. Like driving fast, flying or diving, there are few pleasures in life that match firing guns outdoors.
I went to the army and spent many days at an outdoor range shooting at targets with an automatic rifle. I was a pretty solid shooter and earned some medals. Yet I fail to see where is the "cool" part. Shooting is just another skill you practice in order to kill.
Thank you for your opinion and service. I too served and was privileged be trained during relative peace time but also had the liberal budget thanks to the GWOT. Our country doesn’t really give out medals for just shooting, but my competence and appreciation in marksmanship is owed to the wonderful cadre I had teaching me, and their passion in marksmanship in addition to the weapon system.
I’m not going to deny your point on killing. That is one application of firearms, also a powerful one, but I don’t feel that’s a reason to absolutely prohibit them for the common folk. As we’re both on HN I’m sure you also don’t “get” why folks just love some things like I do.
For me it’s the history, appreciation of the engineering, and my now civilian hobbies of hunting and competition shooting. They are one of many things that bring me joy that I would hate to lose in my healthy years.
Military training will suck the fun out of pretty much anything. I've been on both sides and can honestly say I enjoy shooting a .22 with my kids way more than an automatic weapon in the Army.
And it doesn't have to be about killing. We play shooting like people play darts. Hit the target for fun.
This is so true. Non-military friends talk about going to the gun ranges in Vegas where they can shoot M249s for absurd prices. All I can think about when I hear these stories is being on a broiling hot range in Oklahoma in the middle of July and having to go through cases of 5.56 because we sure as heck aren't going to go through the hassle of trying to turn unused ammo back in.
Classical liberals generally support equality, limited government power, civil liberties, democracy, and free markets. Today they're sometimes described as libertarians, whereas modern liberals have morphed into intolerant authoritarians.
As a Canadian who never grew up with standardized testing, and also graduating with an IB cohort (from a public school) whom none of them actually went to the US (just took their boosted canadian grade equivalents or went somewheres in europe), I really fail to see how this could be that bad of a thing. The first year, or semester even is a great filter that cuts a significant amount of folks where school isn't for them.
I can also see this as a move like china did to kill tutorial services to give kids back their teen years. In a land where school is so expensive I think its worth it to spend summers working a job (and all the merits that come with that) to better prep for possibly the biggest financial decision ever for a still developing brain.
It's one of the worst aspects of some (not all) Canadian universities that they use the first or second year as a way to filter students out and the impact it has on students is rather devastating in terms of lost opportunity.
Almost 20 years ago I went to the University of Toronto's computer science program which is notorious for this practice and can see first hand the effect that this practice has on friends of mine even decades later. It's not just a matter of filtering students out, the issue is that there is a strict cut-off point that is unknown to people in advance, so you have students investing one to two years pursuing a program and then having those years go to waste because they're below the cut-off. It's basically a system that traps students with aspirations of going into one program and then when most of them fail due to uncertain admissions guidelines, those students end up with a great deal of pressure to continue studying at the university but under a less prestigious or financially sound program.
The result of this system speaks for itself, with the building used by the computer science department being the site of 3-4 suicides per year (which I am admittedly speculating is due to people not hitting the admissions cut-off).
Whatever one's opinion of standardized testing may be, the Canadian model of accepting as many students as possible into a program and then kicking them out or shoving them into a different program on the basis of rather volatile and uncertain criteria is not the one to go by.
I believe this is a more of a UofT practice rather than a general Canadian practice? As a Waterloo grad CS grad once you were in the program, you were in. I I agree it's really cruel to students to have this kind of 1st/2nd year cut off system though.
In the US private universities do not use the first 1-2 years as filters deliberately. It’s common to see 4 year graduation rates above 90% especially for schools like Harvard
I am also Canadian. Was not a fan of the lack of standardized testing because I was very aware that many schools (and not mine) was in the practice of inflating grades to help their students’ acceptance and scholarship applications.
This is one problem that standardized testing aims to solve — how does a university compare a student with 95% avg from one school and 85% from another?
Your point about schools filtering students who are not able to cut it is moot. Do you think standards won't (or haven't already) change to keep as many students as possible? Universities want money, the more students the better. The idea that this change happens in isolation shows a lack of systemic thinking.
I don’t relate to the active destruction part but I enjoy looking at the twisted metals and frames of car wrecks and the like. For me it’s the reconstruction of the aftermath
