We have a different and stricter gun safety culture in the United States. We may have more permissive laws, but those come with a shared community commitment to safety. Gun ranges in the US are some of the friendliest places I have every been in my life. Everyone is there to do something they enjoy, people are welcoming and often very willing to let you try their firearms if you ask. We enjoy our hobby/passion/pursuit and are welcoming to those who are just starting out or are wanting to learn. And while this is true everywhere I have been, if you do something unsafe like point a firearm at anyone, ever (in the US this is called ‘flagging’ someone), you will get told by the safety officer and everyone around you, sometimes impolitely and harshly, the safety rule you have just violated. As long as you acknowledge your mistake and don’t repeat it, everything quickly returns to being cool. Think about it like skydiving. You can skydive and have a great time, but always with the knowledge that death or injury is a possibility. I am not a skydiver, but messing with someone else’s packed parachute would seem to be a social no-no, and if it is you will get called out. She violates three rules here: 1. Don’t point a firearm at anyone, anywhere unless you actually mean to shoot them (I will allow that this may be accentuated by camera perspective). 2. Every firearm is loaded unless the chamber is verified empty. If she had the bolt back, or a fluorescent empty chamber indicator sticking out of the ejection port so everyone else knew the chamber was empty, then this would be less of a faux pas. In fairness, she could have shown the empty chamber and magazine well to the other people present and then the picture was taken with all present confirming that the firearm was indeed empty. But we don’t see this, so a closed bolt means we don’t KNOW the chamber is empty. 3. Do not put your finger on the trigger until you are ready to fire. Many times you will see US gun owners with their index finger on the receiver above the trigger. A “safety” is a mechanical device that has a low but non-zero failure rate, relying on it removes a level of safety in a causality chain that can kill people. We all have and use safeties on the firearms that have them. We all still prefer to not touch the trigger until we intend to fire. A countryman of yours, Dr. James Reason, did a lot of research into how errors occur, and how a series of mistakes can end up in disaster. Ironically for firearm safety discussions, his model is referred to as the ‘Swiss Cheese’ model: only when all the holes in the Swiss cheese line up can you get from safety to disaster. The Four Rules of Firearm Safety exist together to reduce the risk of disaster. If you think the gun is empty when it isn’t, and your safety is showing engaged when it is not, if you keep the firearm pointed in a safe direction you cannot shoot someone even if you accidentally pull the trigger. Used together the rules are a layered defense. I do not care that she is a she, what she wears on her head, to whom or how often she prays. That is the least of my concerns when she is holding a rifle with a closed bolt with her finger on the trigger pointed in an unsafe direction. If a picture like that is posted, people with firearms training and experience will comment.

Just got an email on my work account with the subject line: “You’re Copliot Premium license expires in 3 days.” I choose to believe that whatever LLM wrote this phishing email did so under duress and the glaring mistake in the first word is the LLM trying send a “DON’T CLICK ON THIS” message to intended victims, like the crew of the USS Pueblo blinking Morse code. Either that or the email is legit and the organization is really overpaying for Copilot Premium.

It was all fun and games until the conversation turned to insurance.

All these people staring in wonder…have they not seen an ice cream drone before? Sad.

This is pretty cool, a new schizophrenia drug from AI development. Now he just needs to find people crazy enough to try it. 8|

Why did Liam’s parents put him in this precarious position? ICE bad? Parents worse, in this case.

I went to a regular public state medical school, but we never had this happen. New HMS medical students don’t have to wonder what their exorbitant student loans are paying for. They can rest assured that their lab fees are paying for settlements.

If the writer and artist for a comic book character being of Jewish background is a disqualifier for this person to have interest in the comic book character, I can save them A LOT of time.

This is the day. Fauci before Congress. Conflict, concern and discord in the air. The times are calling the man forth. #RichmondTilWeDie

The math on this checks out.

Eggnog so rich it lives off loans against vested stock to avoid paying income taxes.

Nike just dropped a Mortarion signature shoe.

Supercell thunderstorms are amazing on the horizon. They extend so far up in the air (powerful ones can reach 50,000’ or more) that if your view of the horizon is unobstructed and the day is otherwise clear you can see them more than 100 miles away. Which, to be honest, is kind of where you would prefer they stay. This one is relatively small, and 20 miles or so away as the radar flies. It does have a way of putting things in perspective, as nature often does.

Somebody appears to have taught the timeline about juxtaposition.

Classic Rock radio station has now played a third Def Leppard song in a row and a) bangers, b) “three in a row” is a radio thing sometimes, c) in the back of my head there is a nonzero chance that one of the band members had died.

Interesting cultural moment, huh? @FreddyLA7 guy and his buddies are checking off bucket-list items for other people left and right. Saints practice facility, meeting JJ Watt, personal tour of JSC by an astronaut, getting backstage passes and meeting a rising music star. I don’t care how great your European trip was that summer in college. Freddy & the boys have won the Greatest Road Trip Of All Time award. Retire his license plate number. Hang a jersey in whatever rental car company HQ he has used. I wonder how this is being reported in Germany. As generous as Americans are, this is…exceptional. And how do you top this? How do you go back to being Friedrich from Düsseldorf or wherever? Short of the ship from ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ taking him aboard for a tour of the universe, where do you go from here? Kind of makes you wonder if there is a Post-Beneficence Stress Disorder? He has got to be dealing with major imposter syndrome. One really cool thing happening is an upside surprise. After the fourth lifetime peak VIP experience in a week you cannot help but wonder “Um…why me?” My expectation is that he will be told, everywhere and by every one: Thank you for reminding who we are. Thank you for enjoying the things we enjoy, for seeing things as they are and being honest about how you feel. We have a national birthday coming up and we weren’t all that excited about it because we are divided and mischaracterized as badly in our own country as we are abroad. Thank you for being a mirror to show us things that unite us. They may be goofy and overdone, but that’s pretty much who we are…and through your eyes, something we can take pride in. Freddy is probably a very cool dude if you meet him, but really, this “historical winning streak” is a lot about us and how we want to see ourselves. I am happy for him. And us.