Even on modern vessels, the helm of a ship is usually one person, who controls steering and the throttle. The rest of the crew is usually performing other functions - weapons, communications, making sure that power is being distributed properly, that engines/reactors/whatever aren’t overheating. All of these things…

There are still non-US carriers flying them, and you had to be flying overseas to get on one of these anyway. So go while there’s still time!

I’ve flown on a C5 - they’re amazingly huge. The inside is essentially a two-lane road down the middle of the aircraft, with another deck above it for the passengers.

Yep. But you can ask for fresh ones. It’ll annoy them, but they should do it.

Almost makes me want to remix the “Redneck” jokes.

Families were united my a**. Someone needs to school that dipsh*t about where the phrase “sold down the river” really came from. There’s so many heartbreaking stories about slave families being broken up because someone got sold off, and having to try and later find them and reunite after emancipation, like so: http://…

Same. I do miss the weather there though.. so perfect year round really. Course the cost of living there is insane, so without the military paying for it, not quite so easy. :)

I was Army a year or two before that. And yeah, it was crazy. There was a class a few rotations ahead of ours that took the DLPT and had like a 20% pass rate (never-mind washouts that didn’t make it that far). At that point it was a 63 week class (intended to go to 2/2/1+), though I heard they later upped it to…

Fellow DLI Korean grad, and yes. Also I want to say the washout rate in that class was really high, both in terms of failing out at some point in the course, or in final proficiency testing. My class lost something like 50% of its starting numbers, and we did comparatively well on that metric.

Learning written Korean wasn’t hard. The difficult part was more the grammar and vocabulary and such. I had an easy time learning it, but that was largely because I’d already been exposed to many similar rules due to having previously learned Japanese (which has similar sentence structure, topic markers, as well as…

Gross shortsightedness and extreme selfishness. They want the benefits of what others pay for, without having to pay for it themselves. People like this are the real leeches on society. I’ve got nothing against someone being successful and getting wealthy, but if society sets things up so you can succeed, you owe…

Racism is everywhere in the US, it just takes different forms. Jim Crow gets a lot of the attention and the history; and while not undeservedly, the more subtle things that went on outside the South deserve attention too. Racist housing policy (for instance) isn’t quite as visceral as church bombings, lynchings, to be…

It was in response to the comment about (almost always white) people complaining “why can’t they just speak perfect english” about people of color, generally in terms of immigrants. They, of course, are certainly “not racist” according to their own opinion - they just have racist attitudes.

Probably second after “Birth of a Nation”, but yeah.

English is hard - really really hard, especially when you consider the standard to be idiomatic colloquial American English with all its quirks and exceptions. It borrows from so many languages that the rules almost don’t exist, and even when they do there’s so many things that don’t work that way. Learning even hard…

“Sooner or later, the day comes when you can’t hide from the things that you’ve done anymore.” 

Yeah - I was lucky in that my brush with PTSD was both a mild case and for something not so nearly traumatizing as yours, but it was still years before I really was anything approaching “normal” in any sense around those triggers. I’m no expert by any means, but you might try looking into someone that specializes in…

Sounds pretty understandable to me, in terms of post-traumatic stress. Little things like that can trigger that fear reaction. The fact that it’s such an uncommon stimulus in your case, as opposed to something you deal with every day, means it’s nowhere near as likely or quick to go away, too (at least not short of…

I also imagine that modern manufacturing with 3d printing and additive methods makes this a lot cheaper to do, since you could potentially do it on demand even.

Or, you know, have the wrong skin color.