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Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide

nytimes.com

571–580 of 599 posts

Re: Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide

#571
post #427

Qualifier: Former US special operations operator that served in multiple wars. My anecdotal take is there are many ways that shock and trauma can accumulate through training and war that are far beyond the minimal effects of an M4. Firearms: While the primary weapons systems are the M4 and side arm (pistol), there are many weapons systems utilized by special operations such as sniper rifles, crew serve weapons, and n…

Side question: Why are round chutes so much worse than rectangular ones?

Round parachutes are typically deployed with a static line and open very quickly, resulting in significantly higher acceleration.

Ram air parachutes can effectively open in a more gradual manner due to the cellular design.

Re: Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide

#572
post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Side question: Why are round chutes so much worse than rectangular ones?

Round parachutes are typically deployed with a static line and open very quickly, resulting in significantly higher acceleration. Ram air parachutes can effectively open in a more gradual manner due to the cellular design.

Really cool! Falls squarely in the realm of "stuff I didn't even know I didn't know". Thank you.

Re: Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide

#573
post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh. It's almost like these bigotries are structural, embedded throughout the system and making it much harder for anyone subject to them to get into the "owner class"...

it implies an unlikely homogeneity of thought process. it only takes one person to think different and they would end up making bank.

....That's what "systemic" means.

It doesn't "only take one person" to try something like that. It takes one person who is already part of the capital class—ie, someone who is already wealthy, a category correlated, if somewhat loosely, with the exact bigotries listed here. It takes someone who has, statistically speaking, made their money by being ruthless about it deciding they want to take a huge risk with it rather than do the sure thing (hire from the privileged classes). It also takes them having an idea for an actual business that's not merely viable, but highly lucrative. It also takes enough people in the marginalized classes who are within the target industry, who actually hear about the business, who are looking for a job, who are qualified, who can prove to the hirers' satisfaction that they are qualified.

This is not an exhaustive list.

You are oversimplifying in service of justifying an irrational ideology.

Re: Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide

#574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet another reason to not join the military. You’re just fuel for the machine. https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/06/14/armys-recruit...

Thats a nice sentiment you got there. Mind if i take it: Every dictator everywhere everytime. And it turns out the international order cant survive defectors.one large party going imperial or isolatinist and its bsck to olden times.

No boots on the ground. Deliver freedom and justice from afar on the business end of a fast moving vehicle, whether that is subsonic, supersonic, hypersonic, or ballistic.

Re: Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide

#575
post #452
post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article links to a USSOCOM-funded study. In your opinion, are they (as a whole) seriously concerned with mitigating this issue or is it just checking the box? The worry is this can be similar to the buried diesel tank issue contaminating water, which was known for decades but seemed to be ignored (possibly out of liability concerns).

I'm not sure how much of it you can minimize. You can only control what you can control...and war/combat is chaos. Honestly it seems most things in relation to this over the years has been on treatment, not so much prevention.

Wouldn't using silencers reduce the pressure peak? The new standard assault rifle has one integrated IIRC.

Re: Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide

#576
post #568
post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You spelled "occupation" and "resistance to occupation" in ways that make them hard to recognise. Might want to not do that next time you bring up the subject.

I'm not sure what you're talking about. If you're talking about Palestine, you should try to judge an argument by its content rather than by whether it uses words that offend you. Your time is better spent addressing other people than me, trust me.

Did I come across as offended?

You were using the wrong words, that's it. I think it would be good for you to use the right ones instead, for several reasons, one being that you might not get mistaken for a Ruggiu kind of person.

Re: Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide

#577
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best part of turning over waging war to machines is that they will fight 'adversaries' just as well as they'll fight your own subjects.

Soldiers can do that perfectly well too.

Only if they have faith in you and your legitimacy.

Re: Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide

#578
post #459
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then it didn't have 80% responsibility and you failed to identify the bottleneck, it just means you identified a local optimisation, which is again "every little bit helps" thinking - what you should do when thinking about queueing systems (or multi-stage) like you describe is to identify the bottleneck. An improvement on the bottleneck should directly translate to an improvement to the end result.

The issue is when there is overdetermination - fixing a single cause resolves 80% of the current cause of failures, but the process fails at another point which becomes the new bottleneck. Say, most people are failing at a task due to stress(A). But even if you solve that, then most people can start failing due to another cause, B, say laziness. Fixing A is not "a little bit" and any solution will have to face A(in o…

All I said is you identify the major factor first and fix it, and keep doing that. What you're saying now is basically what I started with, except applying a recursive step of "keep identifying new bottlenecks". But the algorithm should always be "Look at the biggest factor and nothing else", of course you should check if the biggest factor stays the same over time

Re: Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide

#579
post #427

Qualifier: Former US special operations operator that served in multiple wars. My anecdotal take is there are many ways that shock and trauma can accumulate through training and war that are far beyond the minimal effects of an M4. Firearms: While the primary weapons systems are the M4 and side arm (pistol), there are many weapons systems utilized by special operations such as sniper rifles, crew serve weapons, and n…

Side question: Why are round chutes so much worse than rectangular ones?

(former - non-US - army airborne captain)

Round chutes (cupolas) are designed to get soldiers from the plane to the ground quickly.

Quickly enough to remain the least possible amount of time in the air where they are an easy target for any ground troop. (This is why soldiers are dropped from very low altitudes; 400m is usual, but some combat drops occurred at even lower altitudes) But not too quickly that too many of the dropped soldiers end up unable to fight from the hardness of the landing. Please note that it is assumed that some will get hurt on the landing, and the calculus is designed to balance the risk in the air with the risk of the landing.

In contrast, rectangular chutes (wings) are designed to be dropped from higher than 900m, steered in the air, and to provide a very comfortable landing (as long as the surface of the wing is adequate for the suspended weight). They were also introduced for skydiving as a sport, and only later found some military use.

Re: Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide

#580
post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if the Havanna syndrome is somehow correlated with this as well

There was a rather scathing study on it here. [1] In short the government's own internal investigations realized the obvious answer, a mass hysteria event, was the most likely culprit. But politics got involved and so then they classified reports mentioning this, and released reports suggestive of foreign adversaries attacking people with some mystery weapon, even though their own internal reports put the chances of…

Any thoughts on this 60 minutes piece with circumstantial evidence that this is a GRU driven program using an ultrasonic system of some kind: https://youtu.be/JdPSD1SUYCY?si=DQNJ6EwFbwbPiDS1
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