2022: HOLD MY TEA! đŸ”

Did you actually say an oath in yours?
I think we did, but it’s been too many years to remember clearly.

1 Like

Yes, I think there are a couple of standards ones for the occassion. Not really the kind of formal Hippocratic oath for doctors, but a generally scientific one about truth, integrity and stuff, if I remember correctly.

2 Likes

Older people seem to enjoy it because they are proud for the “younger generation” or because they didn’t make it to high school.
Younger people seem to avoid ceremonies, unless there is a party afterwards and they can dress accordingly.
Family is different, we are there for the popcorn :wink:

I think there is always an oath, but in some cases (my Uni) it’s read aloud with great fanfare by the top graduate and everybody else is thinking about what to order for food, if they switched off the water heater and if they can rearrange their toes in their shoes without all the photographers immortalizing the moment.

2 Likes

The first one I missed due to travel, so I picked up the hardcopy on a random Tuesday. The second one was cancelled due to Corona, and I had to do an extraordinary amount of work to receive my diploma (as I have documented somewhere on the forum before, I think) so I could apply for my PhD
 :roll_eyes:

I suppose my PhD may or may not have a ceremony attached, although it might happen digitally, with people not wanting to travel anymore.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/06/27/mystery-rocket-crashes-moon-leaves-large-double-crater/

Amateur astronomers first pointed the finger at SpaceX, but then recalculated that it was likely to be from a 2014 Chinese lunar mission (Chang’e 5-T1). China has contested this, saying that the booster in question had “safely entered the Earth’s atmosphere and was completely incinerated”.

A mystery rocket has crashed into the Moon, creating a large double crater

At least 47 Nasa rocket bodies have created “spacecraft impacts” on the Moon, according to 2016 data from Arizona State University.

However, “no other rocket body impacts on the Moon created double craters,” said Nasa.

2 Likes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Hunga_Tonga%E2%80%93Hunga_Ha%27apai_eruption_and_tsunami

In the Volcanic Explosivity Index scale, the eruption was rated at least a VEI-5.[1]

It was the largest volcanic eruption since the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo


https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-61567521
image

Researchers have just finished mapping the mouth of the underwater Tongan volcano that, on 15 January, produced Earth’s biggest atmospheric explosion in over a century.

The caldera of Hunga-Tonga Hunga-Ha’apai is now 4km (2.5 miles) wide and drops to a base 850m below sea level.

4 Likes

Could be true there, but there sure are no “gender reveals, post-wedding, divorce parties or promposals” here :stuck_out_tongue:

Remember, all that is good business and cost A LOT of money, so it makes sense of marketing to push for all those new “celebrations” 
 I mean you cannot sustain a whole industry just with marriages, especially now that they are on the decline.

2 Likes

Yeah, if I understand correctly that’s military departments in universities. You don’t have to serve after that you go into reserve right after. It was a legitimate way to dodge the conscription. You waste time out of army to not waste time in the army. I considered it and even did something for it but then like nah, maybe because I don’t like physical exercise. They were required to pass some time in the fields so while everyone was preparing their final university works they lied in a ditch somewhere. Probably right call not to go, honestly, with all the instability in the world, you don’t wanna look like a trained soldier ready to be sent somewhere.

This way to dodge was changed recently though. I’m not entirely sure how it’s all in practice but on the internet they write that you have to sign contract with the military after officer training for 3 or 5 years. Which means shooting people in some foreign countries. It seems you can refuse but you need to pay back money spent on you or something, and you can be unfit for military after all, and I heard that there’re programs where you don’t need to sign contract too
 Lots of annoying details.

But even if you dodge that, country doesn’t train you for fun. And we’re warring nation, motherland might need our skills at some point. Screw that. Better play dumb.

3 Likes

It is a very nice idea, but as you said it seems to be a bit complex in its implementation. At the end of the day if you cannot really avoid getting drafted (via some loophole or legitimate reason) and you have to spend some mandatory time of your life in the army, I’d say that picking whichever officer program each country might have is always something worth considering for four reasons that are valid in any such system:

a) If you are going to spend time there anyway, why not learn and experience the most they can teach and offer, instead of wasting time just guarding empty fields and buildings? Any path that offers up “more knowledge” is worth at least considering.
b) You will come out of whatever training program they have with a rank that is higher than the “sergeant type” 
 outranking those people is a huge and underrated plus.
c) Unlike soldiers who are usually lumped into the “infantry” category en masse, reserve officers usually get a much higher chance to be assigned in various support corps.
d) If, at any point, the worst comes to pass and the country does need to re-draft the reserves, the re-draft has two rules/ideas 
 “younger and more recently trained first” and “soldiers and low ranks first” 
 just by entering the reserves as an officer does not only put you in a better position on how dangerous any sort of deployment might be, but it also puts you in a better position in the fact that they might not call you to serve at all., if your type of corps/training is not deemed to be needing re-inforcements (if you get re-drafted as an officer, you get paid as one :innocent: 
 noone wants that 
 soldiers are much cheaper).

Well, here in the Balkans there are similar 
 historical tendencies.
As far as I am concerned, just being able to listen to the yearly dance of news about “imminent war” and all those scare tactics and actually knowing what on earth is really going on, was worth it all the trouble I went through.

Also, having three stars and the rank of Captain in a support corps, instead of being just “another infantry soldier”, ain’t nothing to sneeze at either :wink:

You can be dumb and an officer 
 in some posts it is actually required ahahah

On 2022 news for those interested in legal explanations and intricacies and rummifications:

There’s a saying, not entirely sure how do you say it though. The law is like a horse. It goes wherever you turn it.

To be fair, if only 55% are pro-choice maybe this shouldn’t be a right then. What kind of right is that if half the country is against it. And that’s record high since 1995? It’s somehow good result then? I wonder what happened in 1995.

2 Likes

A more precise poll by gallup:

I guess they are stuck with it now, but who designs a poll like this and thinks it would be a good idea to use “under any” for one side and “in all” for the other?

6 Likes

Do I understand correctly that

  • pro-life activists generally think that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances
  • pro-choice activists generally think that abortion should be legal under any circumstances
  • those who think that abortion should be legal only under certain circumstances are classified as “pro-life”?

I can just shake my head about ‘certain circumstances’. People choosing that option might think that abortion should only be allowed if there are life-threatening circumstances for the mother after incestual rape within the first 4 weeks of pregnancy. Or they might think that it should be allowed in the first 8 months only, no other questions asked. These two people are registered as having basically the same opinion!

5 Likes

Also, I know we disagree about this a lot, but not all opinions are created equal.

Also also, men who disagree should get vasectomies pronto and then we’ll talk.

I guess it was funny back then before DNA tests when lords could claim their underage servants were just promiscuous and deny fathering children here and there without consent.

3 Likes

I don’t really understand the logic in those two sentences. Could you explain? If 45% of the population states that they don’t want anyone to have a choice, then you think no one should have a choice?

What does “what kind of right is that” mean? A right is a right. It means a woman can freely walk into an aborting clinic and have an abortion, regardless of whether 45% of the population think she shouldn’t have that choice.

1 Like

Note that only 39% of the US population is “pro-life”. I guess 6% of the population doesn’t have an opinion.

1 Like

The terms “pro-choice” and “pro-life” say more than the polls themselves.

2 Likes

I think the comparison that should be made in order to understand the issue, is that the pro-choice group finds it more important to allow women the choice to abort a pregnancy and decide their own life, than to continue the (potential) life of the unborn fetus. On the other hand, the pro-life group finds the perceived ending of the life of the unborn fetus to be so amoral that abortion should be prohibited, even though it means many women have to suffer through an unwanted pregnancy and most likely the raising of a new child.

These are essentially incomparable viewpoints, since one is about the right to control your own life while the other is about preventing murder. However, the first group doesn’t see it as murder, and the second group can’t see how body-autonomy can be important enough to condone murder.


What I find strange, is that many of the same people who tend to be against abortion, have little issue with the gigantic loss of life due to gun violence, or climate change, and even condone death penalties, which is quite clearly just a form of murder.

7 Likes