FaceDeer

They do have guards on the sides, so it’s not completely out in the open.

Hopefully politics won’t get involved in the final report like it did in the EgyptAir case.

Or someone was lying.

A suicide like this has happened before. It even involved the fuel being shut off.

hanlon’s razor and all that

The fuel switches have been very carefully designed to take “stupidity” out of the equation.

It’s going to be hard to conclude for sure that this was suicide without some form of note or other evidence we don’t have yet, but really, at some point the effort it takes to come up with alternatives is going to start looking silly.

so it doesn’t appear one was trying to force it off or anything.

I don’t think it indicates that given how the flight was already doomed at that point. The damage was done.

Ooh, I used to mod Luanti a lot. Wonder if any of my old work is on this server. Is it just straight Mineclonia?

Surely someone committing suicide and taking hundreds of people with him in the process wouldn’t lie about it.

I watched a very comprehensive and professional video by Captain Steeeve on this subject earlier today. He didn’t outright literally say that one of the pilots deliberately downed the plane, but it was very clear that he thought that was the only explanation that really made sense here. Why do you say it sounds like they “did not mean to do so”? The switches are designed to not be movable without considerable deliberation and intent, you can’t just bump these with your knee and switch them off. And both pilots were plenty experienced enough to know that you don’t turn those switches off at that point in the flight.

An equally-true headline: “At last, a promising use for AI agents: debugging smart contract code.” The availability of this tool should make smart contracts more secure in the future, and cryptocurrency more reliable as a result.

Indeed. This sort of thing goes way back - the term “barbarian” was literally a result of Romans making fun of how non-Roman languages sounded to them (they used the onomatopoeia of “Bar Bar” to represent what they thought foreign languages sounded to them). Dismiss their language as meaningless gibber and you dismiss their thoughts as meaningless too.

Yeah, this looks just plain awesome. Grocery stores are so bland and samey, it’d be nice if they had more creative decor like this.

Saying a black person is “well spoken” is such a common slight in the US, as if it should be surprising somehow that they’re not all speaking Jive or Hip-hop or whatever. If people insult African-Americans like that what hope do Liberians have?

For example, there’s this class that military helicopter pilots take as part of training for surviving water landings.

This is nothing remotely like the scenario OP is talking about.

If they’ve read enough about the subject then they’ll realize that they’re not drowning. You don’t drown simply from being in water, the actions required to let you float with your face in the air is almost trivial. Knowing what those actions are is enough to get you to the “okay, now how do I go somewhere?” Step.

The point of this post is to ask whether reading about techniques is enough to “at least, be able to swim enough to reach the steep end and save themselves from drowning.”

And yes, yes it is. It’s not going to make you a good swimmer but it will certainly allow you to accomplish that.

Someone who is able to walk around and control their breathing already has those prerequisite motor skills.

Yeah, this is more of a camp. A camp where they can concentrate a specific sub-population of people into.

Don’t know if there’s a specific word for that.

All these “absolutely not” responses are silly, IMO. I speak as someone who’s quite a good swimmer. Practical experience is important to get good, certainly. But if your main objective is simply to not sink and to have a basic ability to propel yourself, I think that’s stuff you can manage quite easily starting from pure book learning. The “not sink” part is key, because that will give you the time to actually experience what it’s like moving around in the water and clarify what that book learning told you.

You probably don’t need 6 months of study, at that point your time would be better spent finding an actual pool. The sorts of basics I’m talking about here that would be useful is stuff like how to float with your face in the air so you can breathe, and once you’ve got that part down how to efficiently kick your legs to propel you rather than just flailing around uselessly. Learn those key tidbits, drill on just that, and then if you find yourself unexpectedly tossed in water you’ll know what to do to not die and get yourself back to the edge.

Reading will nevertheless help. It’s not going to give you perfect form on your breast stroke, but that’s not what OP is going for here. He wants to not die if he suddenly finds himself in deep water. There’s plenty of benefit from reading about how to go about not dying under those sorts of circumstances.

Yeah. I consider Trump the “blow everything up” candidate, he got a lot of support from people who were just so generically desperate that they wanted to vote for whoever seemed like they were going to majorly change something, somehow. It almost didn’t matter what Trump did as long as he smashed the existing order while doing it.

I’m not trying to argue for or against this position. As I said all I’m doing is explaining a misrepresentation of the position that people are holding, namely that “a machine that can’t think straight will do it for us.”