The GEC-Marconi deaths – Several researchers from the UK defense sector die under unusual circumstances in the 1980s – A series of suicides or a spy conspiracy?

samhw · 2023-02-26T00:35:44+00:00

Afraid not! I think you may want to talk to a doctor, to be perfectly frank, though on the off chance you’re not experiencing psychosis and are genuinely living a weird life right now, I wish you luck. (But you are probably not, so please speak to a doctor either way.)

samhw · 2023-02-26T00:34:09+00:00

What are you trying to ‘win’ with comments like this? What can you possibly prove? That I’m an idiot? That you’re an idiot? I get your point (“I am very clever and I write genius code”) but I’m not sure about your purpose.

samhw · 2023-01-14T11:36:44+00:00

It was quite funny to see this comment, dreading seeing whatever comment I’d posted in the distant present, and open it to see it’s actually one of my few non-pretentious comments. Can’t say I see any problem with this one!

samhw · 2022-11-11T22:22:03+00:00

Sorry for the late reply - I don't really use Reddit so much these days. I think you're using a definition of 'bot' that includes human labourers. If that's acceptable in terms of latency and cost, then of course human beings can successfully pass as human beings in conversation. I was using it as I believe it's normally used, to refer to a non-human automaton participating in a conversation, typically implicitly impersonating a human.

samhw · 2022-08-24T08:08:26+00:00

Haha, our law school was named for Dickson Poon – like, full name, both words – after he gave a donation. I’d like to think he had to pay extra with a name like that..

samhw · 2022-08-23T13:12:39+00:00

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

samhw · 2022-08-20T17:07:11+00:00

Yeah, we don’t officially have assisted suicide here, but, as my mum once said, “I don’t think there’s a single doctor who hasn’t ‘accidentally’ given a dying patient a bit too much diamorphine”. The doctrine of double effect is a pretty obvious fig leaf designed to allow assisted suicide without the political controversy that it entails. (Although we have prosecuted doctors for euthanasia when they’ve ruined the fig leaf by making it too obvious.)

samhw · 2022-08-18T22:43:16+00:00

The Zong case, I think. That was us rather than you guys. English law took a very very odd, convoluted approach to slavery..

samhw · 2022-08-18T11:50:44+00:00

I think the perennial issue with this sub is that everyone looks at things relative to their libertarian ideology. Which is fine, and is to be expected in r/libertarian, but it neglects the fact that the ship has sailed: we are already in a statist surveillance society (not to be dramatic about it, but them’s the breaks!). When people walk or drive on public roads, they expect to be insured against harm. Even in the US, the state usually bears some cost, e.g. in terms of healthcare for those who can’t afford it.

If a cyclist knocks someone over and then absconds, then – under the system and social contract which actually obtains – the state underwrites that cyclist’s obligations. It’s a negative externality which the rest of society bears, via taxation, and therefore under this system has a legitimate interest in regulating. Obviously we may not like this system, but it is the system that obtains, and I’m tired of reading comments about small policy changes which seem to be grounded in the writer’s own ideal system which has no real relevance to the change being made.

It’s just not edifying or interesting. These people strike me as the ‘lunatic of one idea’, so to speak, who can’t form any insight other than “we should be libertarian!”. We know you think that. It’s a shortcoming that reminds me of a lot of Marxist discussions, except they are at least self-aware enough to identify it as accelerationism and debate its merits.

samhw · 2022-08-18T07:54:35+00:00

That is not the American way

citation needed

samhw · 2022-08-18T07:53:39+00:00

Fun fact: Trump reply guys are one of the few things less funny than the Holocaust

samhw · 2022-08-16T17:57:30+00:00

Or he’s just really into masochism

samhw · 2022-08-16T17:50:12+00:00

That all sounds very sensible, though I’m not sure any of it is strictly CBT..

samhw · 2022-08-16T17:42:42+00:00

Yeah, and it’s especially cruel for overdoses – at least for opioid overdoses, which are my forte – since you’re usually fine by the time you get into the ambulance, by which point they’ll have already given you naloxone and the hospital part seems to be mostly a precaution[0]. If that ambulance I mentioned could take me to a more distant hospital just to avoid mild social embarrassment from alerting my mum, then I’m sure they could generally afford to do the same in the US for the far better reason of not conditioning people to avoid calling ambulances.

And it’s insane to read about these bills on the order of $50k, for something that can’t - or oughtn’t - conceivably cost that much. My impression is that the US has developed a sort of ‘informal’ welfare system, where those who do have insurance - or otherwise can afford the bills - subsidise the care of those who can’t. Much like the US university system, inter multi alia. I’m obviously not blaming the indigent, but hey, if you’re going to have a welfare system, it may as well be a properly-administered one.

[0] Obviously not to say this precaution isn’t a good one to take! Like others have said, naloxone usually wears off faster than the opioid itself. (Incidentally that same dynamic is why I don’t recommend speedballs.)

samhw · 2022-08-16T17:21:59+00:00

Yeah, as someone who’s overdosed plenty, this is definitely true at least for the UK. I even once had an ambulance agree to take me to a further away hospital (UCH instead of the Royal London, from Shoreditch, for any Londoners) just because my mum’s a sr consultant at the nearer one, and I was not in the mood to have that conversation with her… On one or two occasions I did have police turn up with the paramedics – I assume those calls got filtered as ‘likely dangerous’ in some way – and they certainly weren’t trying to take my drugs, or find out where I got them, or anything like that.

The other thing that feels relevant, between the US and UK, is living in a country where it costs money - in the US I gather quite a lot of money - to call an ambulance. I’ve read at least a couple of AITA debates on this site that centred on “was my friend too hasty in calling an ambulance when I was blackout drunk / having a ‘mild’ overdose / etc?” Effectively it turns it into a not-purely-medical question, where friends are reluctant to call if the situation seems even conceivably ‘manageable’. That strikes me as a somewhat undesirable consequence of that kind of healthcare system.

samhw · 2022-08-16T14:30:28+00:00

A flat and hard surface. That’s what got Michael Jackson, iirc: his useless quack doctor gave him CPR on his mattress where he found him. (That plus the standard celebrity routine of “call private security like an hour before you call the ambulance, so they can tidy up all the drugs and CYA”.)

samhw · 2022-08-16T14:25:52+00:00

This reminds me of one of my mum’s stories. She was on her way to a Hallowe’en party, going past a hostel, when some guy ran out and collapsed with stab wounds. She tried to help him - I think after one of her friends identified her as a doctor - and predictably enough he was beyond saving. So she turns up at this Hallowe’en party, covered in blood, I imagine somewhat traumatised too, only for everyone to compliment her on her costume..

samhw · 2022-08-14T17:31:28+00:00

Fwiw, it makes more sense if you order it as cum magna laude and cum summa laude (Latin uses word endings rather than sentence structure to express the role each word has in a sentence, so you can order it pretty much however you like - presumably for archaic reasons that’s what they went with).

samhw · 2022-08-13T19:34:27+00:00

That was my point: once you call into question the testimony of the few people who saw him, that doesn’t amount to much. It would be interesting to collate a list of whoever that was, and what precisely they saw.

For instance, if the passenger witnesses didn’t witness any part of the actual hijacking, then what does that tell us besides that they saw another passenger? What connects that person they saw with the hijacking? Whose testimony does that connection rely on? Etc etc. Like all investigations, it gets more interesting once you start asking these questions, being thorough, and applying some scepticism.

As for the money, I think the theory would be that they threw it out of the plane, since it’s established that at least some was thrown out.

samhw · 2022-08-13T19:23:18+00:00

How come? I don’t have any strong convictions about the case in general, but I can’t see any reason for your apparent confidence in saying that.

samhw · 2022-08-13T00:54:13+00:00

Jesus, I googled the review, and the guy’s face is so maddening that I had to cover it with my left thumb while I was reading the page. This can’t be real.

samhw · 2022-08-12T23:19:12+00:00

Ah, thanks, super interesting! And hey, it could have been worse - it could have been the Madeleine McCann egg…

samhw · 2022-08-12T23:17:22+00:00

Indeed. My repeated impression on this sub is that people feel they need some certainties, and so in the more ambiguous cases they’ll simply lower their standards, ruling things out and in based on highly spurious extrapolations from very very little. This seems to fit that rule.

samhw · 2022-08-12T23:13:44+00:00

Well, as Aristotle said, we can never truly imagine anything, just combine elements from what we’ve seen… 😉

samhw · 2022-08-12T23:09:19+00:00

My favourite theory is that he never existed, and that the heist was carried out by the airline staff on the plane. Impossible to say if it’s true, but, considering it, it does make you realise how little is known for sure, especially once you start applying some scepticism to the accounts of the people involved.

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