I'm 41. My youngest brother blew his brains out in July. My other brother has cut himself twice. I quit my job as an EMT because I'm in no mood to transport SI patients. I needed a job on short notice to keep making my mortgage payments, so now I'm breaking my body 50-60 hrs/wk pouring concrete with the Amish. And it doesn't even cover the bills.
I can't afford health insurance, let alone health care. 0 sick days, 0 vacation time, $0 leisure spending. Credit card debt ticks up each month. Retirement savings is a pipe dream. How could I conscionably attempt a family under these conditions? I'd never have time to be a part of it and would be plagued by the guilt of not being able to provide.
But hey, I'm told to feel lucky I managed to lock in a 30-year mortgage at 5.99%: If I'm diligent paying on it until I've got a foot in the grave, selling the house might pay for end-of-life care!
> If you’re not on an ambulance, it’s very hard to fulfill the NREMT’s continuing education requirements, so your certificate will quickly expire.
I think in the past, CEs had to be done in person, but after COVID they started allowing 100% online CEs. IIRC, certification is good for 2 years, so if you renew at the end of your cert period, you can immediately knock out your CEs for the next renewal period, you'll be set for a whole 4 years, and you only have to pay for a month subscription to one of the CE providers.
Oftentimes you can reach out to a fire department and ask if you can sit in. Or instructors like me can freelance do them for you. Further back in the day, a couple of instructors and I would have rodeos near the end of the year to get people caught up - the formula was generally one bottle of alcohol of choice per student per required CE block.
> Placing any degree of trust in a system known to hallucinate seems inherently reckless. I'm alarmed that this is even up for debate.
The longer this all goes on, and the deeper the vast majority of folks keep choosing to entrench themselves at one extreme or the other (while being completely unwilling to even consider that there might just be a middle-ground closer to actual reality), the more alarmed I become.
The levels of literal insanity surrounding this technology are how you end up with a real-life "Terminator" scenario, except you're gonna get autonomous killing machines without the time-travel nor any actually intelligent machines. They'll just do their job (killing humans) until we end them, or they end us.
Thankfully, we're not there yet but we do have the exact sorta utterly dangerous completely clueless clowns running around in "the Halls of Power" making the sorts of decisions which bring that reality closer with each passing day. We're really truly screwed if we don't start putting these people under serious scrutiny.
How do you think it's solved? The number of things that folks on both sides (and it really does seem to be a two-sided debate, at least in America) are "alarmed...is even up for debate" that are so obviously worthy of reasoned investigation and potentially experiments is annoying and seems to be calcifying onto ersatz partisan stances versus resolving anything usefully.
I wish I had the slightest clue how to dial down the insanity and approach this whole situation with reason and logic, but the people in charge aren't up for any of that foolishness, and far too high a percentage of everyone else chooses to either 100% believe every word of the crazies in charge as Gospel Truth, or at the other end of the extreme, wanting to outright shut down the technology entirely due to "doomer" fears, and none of them want to listen to a single word from anyone who actually understands how this stuff really even works. It's not freakin' magic FFS! It's math and software. Some of us do know how it works and try desperately to help others understand, but nobody wants to understand. They just want to believe the "machine god" is gonna save them (or kill them). It's just a tool. Whether it does good or bad depends entirely on what we humans choose to do with it and how well we use it (just like any tool).
I can't afford health insurance, let alone health care. 0 sick days, 0 vacation time, $0 leisure spending. Credit card debt ticks up each month. Retirement savings is a pipe dream. How could I conscionably attempt a family under these conditions? I'd never have time to be a part of it and would be plagued by the guilt of not being able to provide.
But hey, I'm told to feel lucky I managed to lock in a 30-year mortgage at 5.99%: If I'm diligent paying on it until I've got a foot in the grave, selling the house might pay for end-of-life care!