happybadger [he/him]

Working class employee of the Sashatown Central News Agency, the official news service of the DPRS Ministry of State Security. Your #1 trusted source for patriotic facts.

  • 0 Posts
  • 50 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
Cake day: October 7th, 2020
  • happybadger [he/him]@hexbear.nettoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What's the most alarming experience you've had with a stranger?English
    12·
    1 month ago

    Pretty much. What got me is that he was an aviation officer with a pretty high rank. They have extremely strict entry requirements, regular psychological screenings, constant checks by flight surgeons. He was around 20 years beyond when a lot of psychiatric illnesses start presenting and as far as I know we never established an etiology for it. The only trigger I could ever think of was the needle piercing him but until that moment he showed absolutely no anxiety about the blood draw and I thoroughly explained why we were drawing two separate chest panels over the next few hours. One moment he fully understood what was happening and was discussing it, the next it was chaos. After really fine-tuning my sense of shit about to kick off from that line of work, I had zero indication anything was off about the situation.

  • happybadger [he/him]@hexbear.nettoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What's the most alarming experience you've had with a stranger?English
    24·
    1 month ago

    A patient came into the ER for chest pain. He was uncomfortable and a bit anxious but otherwise normal. The guy was a military officer and very athletic. I go in to draw his blood and get some background information, we’re chatting as I get my supplies ready, and as I’m putting the needle in his arm he says “you’re from the government.” in a very cold voice. I look up and his face has completely changed. He’s furious and looks like a cornered animal. Before I can ask “what?”, he screams it again and rips the needle out of his arm. He kicked me backward and then stood up while screaming “you’re from the government” repeatedly. I get to my feet and he charges, easily twice my size and probably trained to kill. I run to the far end of the ward, he keeps running after me, and the only thing that saved me was having my paramedic boots on. I managed to get one good kick with the steel toe into his shin and brought him down after which I got him into a restraint position and the doc sedated him. I had never seen psychosis suddenly come on like that from a completely neurotypical presentation. A switch flipped mid-conversation and he was determined to kill me without any ability to perceive pain or limit the strength of his muscles. I broke his leg and he was unaffected, still trying to get up and attack me again.

  • happybadger [he/him]@hexbear.nettoAsk UK@feddit.uk•What's the worst job you've ever had?English
    3·
    3 months ago

    Tech support. I was with a broadband company that beams microwave internet to rural customers. Their only other options were dial-up (in 2019~) or much more expensive satellite. The company was inflating its network stats by buying up small regional ISPs and claiming their users/infrastructure as its own. This resulted in patchwork hardware across the entire country. Some towers I could access with our normal software. Some required downloading proprietary software, others were from the 1990s and could only take command line interactions. With any hardware that wasn’t ours, it was usually cheaper to disconnect the area than to service it.

    So meemaw calls in because she hasn’t been able to read her far-right facebook conspiracies for the day. She hasn’t spoken to her children in decades so I’m the first human contact she’s had in a while. I pull up her system and it’s from 2001. Nothing works with my interface and I can’t tell if the tower is malfunctioning or if its radio transmitter or her radio receiver is or if there’s a tree somewhere in the 15km~ distance between the two. The last maintenance entry was five years ago and there are under a dozen people connected to it so the company won’t invest further. My call centre’s QA team is listening in on the conversation for up to ten minutes. I’d have to string the boomer along for those ten minutes, listening to all the insane shit they have to say about minorities, while pretending there is any hope of their service returning. Then after I knew QA wasn’t listening I’d quickly explain the situation, urge them to go with any other option, and end the call before my time metrics were fucked up by trying to help them.

    All the while I’d be looking at their internet speeds and fixating on the broadband gap. It took them days to download what I can in ten minutes. Our service was the best they could get and the company existed to deprive them of access to data.

  • happybadger [he/him]@hexbear.nettoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•Where do you get your news?English
    5·
    4 months ago

    I try to cross-reference things and then look at the critical angles. Public media generally has higher editorial standards for me. I don’t trust right-wing sources or the New York Times because they lack editorial standards. State media I don’t trust for domestic issues, but while I don’t go to Al Jazeera for news about Qatar I trust their coverage of Palestine and France. I try to avoid sources that have an involved stake in the conflict, so something like Ukraine means no RT/Pravda but I’ll watch the primary footage coming off Telegram and then compare it to multiple countries’ coverage of it. I try to stay dialectical with all of it, so I’m cognizant of the history and material/social angles which create the issue and the biases of those covering it. I’ll read a socialist article but I don’t want to uncritically agree with news so that’s more supplemental unless the media hasn’t yet/won’t cover it.

    Otherwise I listen to a lot of podcasts that are leftist or left-liberal, keep a critical eye on social media coverage, and follow scientific journals/niche science websites that summarise those journal articles without editorialising.

  • happybadger [he/him]@hexbear.nettoWorld News@lemmy.ml•A suspected attack by Yemen's Houthi rebels damages a ship in the Gulf of AdenEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    The attack Wednesday in the Gulf of Aden targeted a Barbados-flagged bulk carrier called True Confidence,

    It was unclear why the Houthis targeted the True Confidence. However, it had been listed as being owned by Oaktree Capital Management, a Los Angeles-based fund purchases vessels and sells them back to firms on installments. Oaktree did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    […]

    Meanwhile, a separate Houthi assault Tuesday apparently targeted the USS Carney, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer that has been involved in the American campaign against the rebels

    The Houthi attack on the Carney on Tuesday involved bomb-carrying drones and one anti-ship ballistic missile, the U.S. military’s Central Command said.

    The U.S. later launched an airstrike destroying three anti-ship missiles and three bomb-carrying drone boats, the Central Command said.

    Highlighting that because the autogenerated subtext makes it seem like they got the destroyer instead of the American-owned but Barbados-flagged bulk carrier. At least the destroyer attack shows that they are fielding more sea drones so that will be coming at some point.