scarecrowbob

Being older and having recently passed the NREMT, it was interesting watching the young folks who were my FTOs for my clinicals- it seems like a really good "first job", even if the pay is pretty bad (or maybe because of the pay).

I was very impressed with those folks, younger than my own kids (who I am impressed with as well, of course).

For my own part I taught at a university during my 20s and then dropped out to work in software- changing life around has been very helpful. I can relate to doing something difficult for a while and then moving on when you've figured it out and see that it might not be the path to where you want to go. I hope it left you better for having the experience.

I'm almost 50 and retired from tech a couple of years ago. I passed the NREMT test a little while ago.

I think that I could not do healthcare professionally if I wasn't old and had a lot of free time- it would have been thin pickings when I had a wife and kids. And a lot of the folks I work with have some deep, deep trauma and moral injuries from how poorly US healthcare treats 90% of the population.

But EMT-B is some of the lowest standards for getting into a position where I can help folks. Compared to a lot of the professional knowledge I have recieved, it's not super expensive or time consuming... like, $3k all in (including travel and supplies) and about 6 weeks of intensive study.

I am still considering what to do with that (I spent all day putting a cistern into my weird off-grid setup, so it's not like I don't have other work to be doing)>. But I have spent a lot of time with newer/beginner rock climbers and guiding is one thing. I did several days of music festival first-aid, and that was excellent and interesting. I do work at a free clinic and that's been very rewarding.

But I feel like I will have to try and get at least a couple of months of IFT or (preferably) 911 truck work to become as proficient as I'd like to be so that's what I am trying to find at the moment. But I am curious how that will go and what I will find.

Having parked on the side of it to go climbing on the other side of the river, I agree.

TBH, I find driving on I70 in full conditions to be much scarier because of the other traffic and the speeds.

Well, like I said, no. And to be clear, you're free to ignore that. But, of course, that's exactly what I wrote and you managed to miss that, so I suppose none of us are communicating very well.

I understand that the party line in the US is that the quality of life engendered by the ecocide of the earth makes up for the mass death that anthropogeenic climate change entails.

At the same time, I have a hard time thinking that the destruction of the environment is either necessary or natural. So the death caused by climate change also seems like a particular kind of massacre.

Where I was raised, it was a commonplace to think of the firebombings and nuclear incineration of vast amounts of civilian populations as regrettable but necessary and perhaps even a natural outcome of technological growth.

I hadn't really considered that position until your comment, but my rejoinder would be "perhaps the comparison is unfortunately apt and it is crass to ignore the death caused by climate change."

You can take that or leave my feedback, but your comment didn't come across as sarcasm to me until I read this comment.

Poes law or something.

I agree with your position, but it didn't read as sarcasm to me.

There are quite a few modalities of regulatory capture in this world- they are complex mechanisms. So you're correct about wanting to find other instances of that kind of thing happening, but those instances do exist. So it feels reasonable to me to suspect a strategy of developing regulatory capture.

Alcohol and cannibis producers enjoy regulatory moats from "sin" taxes, and I can't install a septic tank or get antibotics without someone who has a license.

And I couldn't buy and AR in Colorado without a Federal Firearms Licensed dealer who used to bitch about regulations to high heaven while they sell me just the serialized receiver for a weapon I would have bought online without those regulations.

Noting those instances doesn't mean I don't understand why they exist. I spend some time volunteering as a health care provider and am happy that people have some standards around that care even if those "moats" can't quite keep MAHA people from bufo-toxin-ing their unvaxed children.

At the same time, it's important to understand that professional organizations creating "standards" are still industry-oriented organizations and are motivated by those interests regardless of how much folks complain about higher-levels of regulation.

Yeah, I agree that is what usually would or should happen.

But the question is why it didn't happen. Because that is not what happened.

The answer is that it's flock, and that's the point you're "inexplicably" ignoring.

The lack of rigor doesn't seem "inexplicable" to me- the lack of rigor seems fairly well described in the comment you're replying to.

Can you give an account of the lack of rigor, or is it some kind of holy mystery?

Yeah, if things were different, people would react differently.

Well, you might want to revisit your beliefs on how folks' in the US experience their world.

There is certainly no excuse for bad behavior, and it is certainly the case that for many folks they absolutely know what they are doing.

If your point is that people are culpable for their bad behavior regardless of their claims about knowledge, then I agree.

At the same time most of the culture that raised me runs on people denying to themselves what they are doing, ranging from highly individualistic sublimations of the "fundamental attribution error" to renouncing culpability for their direct work at building the torment nexus.

The entirety of the mode of production here relies on ignoring how we exploit the people around us in almost every exchange so it's not at all surprising to me that, looking towards the OP, men in this culture commonly are able to hide their bad behaviors in layers of fantasy so deep that they aren't able to consciously understand how they are treating their lovers.

I don't know your context here, but if that kind of self-deception is news to you you might want to review the behavior of the people you're around (or your own), because either your threshold for bad behavior or your perceptions of peoples' capacity for self-delusion is perhaps a little low.

Yet here you are, blaming your dad for your personal shortcomings in worldview.

This: we live in a material world and "should" does not imply "is".

"Every human SHOULD have access to all human knowledge at their fingertips, and a personal assistant to help them navigate through it."

I agree.

I absolutely think that is not what all this compute power is for.

I do believe that all this statistical inference and generation, alongside the massive data collection apparatus we have built, is designed explicitly to completely lock down the possible actions for any person targeted by the folks who own these systems, and these systems aren't owned by "every human".

Quite the contrary- historically the folks who own those systems are pretty, uh, specific about what they man by "human". Those folks are so capricious about that concept of human they can't believe brown folks are human while their kids suspect the computers might be human.

Isn't it the case that it's not a CQ unless someone responds?

Like, the response is kind of important for either a CQ or a net... whereas if I broadcast a pirate radio I am doing what I am trying to do just by sending.

I am not a capitalist, but isn't that the kind of problem that capitalism would solve?

Wouldn't the landlords would just take a loss and sell the property to avoid penalties?

Cool, in what world is that a credible threat?

I love this, what a pleasant take./

I dislike AI because it represents the state's power to automatically surveil mass populations and automate everything from labor it's use of force in warfare.

Please, do go on about how the folks who find the aesthetic around that repugnant in a way that hand-drawn-chalkboards are the "real threat".

Hey now, these folks are -really enjoying- their highly contrived version of the events. How dare you limit their enjoyment by recontextualizing this into what most of my non-highly-online friends would view as the "normal" understanding.

As a person who went through and eventuall rejected the culture-jamming adbusters thoughts in the early 2000s, it's really hard for me to view a threat to share an ad as anything other than a "threat" to increase the "organic reach of the ad" or whatever "metric" that folks here would use.

I'm sympathetic to the problem that folks like Mark Fisher have laid out, in which (to paraphrase) "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism", and that indeed might be one way to understand my feeling.

I take your point; it makes sense.

"Regular folks" is doing a lot of work, though.

It may very well be the case that most of the material world which props up the idea of "regular folks" never was capital-R Real and insofar as the idea is a pleasant dream it is not a sustainable one.

Proximate to me, often "regular folks" entail white folks unproblematically living their lives around the norms of US hegemonic capital interests. When I hear Pat the Bunny sing "show me utopia, I will call it a jail" I understand the feeling. I was, afterall, raised by Christians who believed in David Byrne's picture of "Heaven" as a place where "nothing ever happens".

Those are the folks who have happily elected a few people to replace the Flock cameras here with Axon. Their vision of an ordered society is a bit chilling to me, despite the fact that they understand their project as both liberal and progressive.

As I understand it, deviations from those cultural norms are already "dystopic" to the "regular folks" I know- if we somehow lost our ability to transmute sand into computing power and dead plants into motive power and had to go back to living in the cliff side then we'd no longer really be human, despite the fact that their enchanted sand and holy oil is literally destroying the ecology of the entire planet.

This situation is, of course, already a distopia for the bands of Ute and Jicarilla Apache and Dine and Hopi and others living near me. And when I look at the kinds of technological survellience built into the material structures it feels easy enough to note that we already live in a dystopia. I have heard some specific dakota folks refer this situation to as post-apocalyptic and I am inclined to agree.

If we accept that we're already in a dystopia and, further, that much of the hegemonic culture's idea of a "utopia" has already been a holocaust for several other groups of people, then hoping for a "dystopia" in that sense might seem a bit more coherent.

I live near Durango, CO and this happened last week.

I remember walking over a hill into a rave in the Utah desert that we'd set up and thinking that it actually was the cyberpunk dystopia that I had been hoping for.

That kind of stuff is around but maybe not evenly distributed or legible to large demographics.

Unfortunately, so is the rest of the vicious horrorshow, equally illegible and equally uneven in distribution.

I love that "over-medicate" language (really). I will add that to my list of "things that are classy when rich people do them".

I always forget how geeked out these folks probably are and so I appreciate the reminder here.

About two days a month of my time is spent handing out bubbles and points to folks to get them to better manage their habits (in addition to other street medicine stuff). Stimulant culture is very foreign to my own chemistry, but yeah, the idea that most of these folks are just gakd up all the time certainly lines up with my experiences debraiding hobo feet.

I'm similarly not personally familiar with ketamine, but i've been doing first aid at festivals this year and understanding that most of the folks running the stuff in the US are on some spectrum of chemical impairment has been very helpful.

I don't miss drinking, but it was helpful in understanding the mindset at least.

If folks are interested in an ivy league business education but can't afford the tuition and life changes, I suggest that they can learn much of what it's like to be around a bunch of folks with poor impulse control and who are on a bunch of stimulants by volunteering with their local street medic group. The aesthetics are different but the general decision making processes seem very similar to me.

It took me quite a while to "get" the "Arby's" restaurant name.

Not me, but I've been thinking about it a bit lately, and what I believe is this:

the idea that we can have something that so deeply ingrained into my practice as a human just kind of tossed out there easily as if it's no thing at all,

with no real cultural context, no material situation in history, no connection to a place or a time, denuded of anything that would make mark it as art of a time or place, or even of a specific individual person much less of some localized scene, work created without any specific need being filled to be immediately and unconsciously forgotten.

In my life I have come to understand that almost all the things I -like- about music and my practices of it might seem so marginal to the work-in-itself as to be inconsequential:

this band played this song on this day this way because this person heard that guy play it, and then they played it in these clubs for a while, and it was recorded and someone over there liked it and that's why "Mighty Might Bosstones".

Like, for instance,

remembering the Slim Richey chainsaw statue in the Starlight bar in Terrlingua and recalling how he replaced Karen Abrahams in the Jitterbug Vipers and wishing that I'd gone and played that gig for $30 in Austin with her and Richie Bowden when I could have, and then thinking how I'll never get to play with Augie Myer or Jon Inmon either and then understanding that the JV are why Dr Sick of the some dumb throwback band brings coked up New Orleans musicians to a last-Sunday concert at the Kerrville Folk Festival, and knowing that the fact I have played on that stage and stage managed both those bands sutures me into a history and a community far larger that I can fully understand much less put into something intelligible to other folks who haven't stood with a giant family tree of musicians on stages smaller than drum risers.

The idea that you can make "music" totally a-historically, ex nihlo, and some folks would listen to it and not be able to taste the difference or even understand the weight of what they are saying when they say "this is that, this dumb shit is the same as what all yall do".

That's what I hate the most.

It's like they've invented zombies (in the 1932 film sense) and are proud of that instead of horrified, and I find it repulsive.

I sometimes wish I believed in god so I could say if this is the kind of disgust that believers feel when folks are casually sacrilegious.

You make the CSS and branding into a thing that folks are "discouraged" from distributing. That's most of the WP plugin and theme ecosystem, or was when I retired from it.

I'm thankfully about 4 years out of making a living un-fucking WP sites but one of the strangest things about the ecosystem is about "for-sale" GPL software.

It's felt somewhat unique to WP for sure, though maybe there are other examples where swaths of communities get big mad when people suggest distributing GPL software for free. I found it a little repellent, but lots of folks scraped together micro-scale businesses selling plugins and themes.

I believe I made a lot better living building stuff for clients and then not caring about what they did with the software, but hey, I'm not the boss of folks trying to make a living supporting a $10 lifetime membership to an image size selecting plugin.

Anyhow, my point is that there is at least a little nuance to be found when thinking about WP and open source software.

Yeah, that's pretty much how it works in the big bands I've played in- you need to be able to both read and improvise and know when to do either.

I very much can and do read for a lot of instruments. In some situations (I played cello in string quartets for a couple of years) deviation from the written notes is limited to phrasing and dynamics and if you're playing weddings, the form gets shoved around a lot (eg don't re-start the cannon when the bride's mother is cued up to walk).

In most of the situations I've played in over the last couple of years, reading more like a teacher running off of "lecture notes" and less like an actor performing Shakespere- deveation is not just expected but required.

However, my memory and ear isn't so good I can predict the future or play a melody or form I have not heard- being able to read an idea and play it is important in the places I play.

And that's my point: standard notation never really catches all the facts about music, even in classical situations. But it's still a lot easier for me personally to read than some weird grid or table (though I have had to play charts that were almost that bad).

Well, you do you... if you're putting piano rolls in front of the folks you're performing with and asking them to use that as a basis for a tune, then that's neat. I don't believe you are, but hey I have been wrong about lots of things.

I've been using DAWs since Logic was owned by E-Magic. Much my early 2000s was spent writing music on a piano roll in Fruity Loops.

The reason I prefer to read standard notation is precisely because I know what the other alternatives are- in reality, it's not "piano rolls" or tracker data, but simple memorization or, like, chord charts- which works fine in a lot of places.

If you don't understand what I mean, then fine, but you might find the world a more interesting place when folks tell you how they have different experiences.

To use a common phrase among directors, I can indeed "read not write" (if you know you know). Playing a notated part as-written is super common in a lot of places and I do that, but you might find it interesting to know that this notation isn't the only way that standard notation is used in the world.

As a human who plays a lot of instruments for money in front of people, it is far easier for me to read and understand directions written in standard notation than it is to decode whatever the fuck is going on with a piano roll or, god forbid, guitar tab.

It would be really hard for me to improvise a clarinet solo based on the melody line in that kind of notation, which is something I have to do pretty frequently in my old style jazz band using fake books.

I'm sympathetic to that view; I spent all evening writing electronic music by programming it into a sequencer and spent a lot of my early career (starting in about 1999) programming using a piano roll.

But "easier for what purpose"? It'd be really tough to read at a gig off a piano-roll.

It took a long time to become comfortable with the fact that standard notation is mostly a suggestion that doesn't contain the years of context I need to get through a big band gig on double bass... but once I realized that my ability to sight read got good enough that I stopped wishing there were some other kind of notation to read.