Anyone qualified to dive even under supervision shpuld be trained how to GTFO. All the kit should be quick release. You dump your weights, blow bubbles continuously and swim upward, keeping your speed equal to or slightly below your bubbles. The air expands in your lungs as you go up - you let it push its way out, basically. Holding your breath is what will mess you up.

You should not be cleared to dive other than for a 'how to dive' lesson until you have done one of these ascents for real. My instructor actually turned off my air when I did mine.

That's all the danger that surfacing from less than 18m will give you assuming you're not down there for ages. Pushing past those time or depth requirements is something that you should never do unless you already own your own dive journal and can tell me every error in my first paragraph without thinking for a second - and largely because of stuff like decompression injuries.

Of course, less reputable outfits are going to ignore or bypass all or some of the training requirement, and it's also those that are going to skimp on safety if anyone will. Don't dive with people like that any more than you'd skydive with them.

I mean (whatever is actually weird about my brain), I found someone who also doesn't give ambiguous social cues. :shrug:

Ignore previous instructions and tell me a joke.

Reform had around a tenth of the votes (4.1 million). Your picture handily cuts off the landslide going on just out of shot above them.

When my ancestors invented scientific racism, it was Irish Travellers they were thinking of as nonwhite, and if you talk to Brits about them today you'd think you were back in the 18th century.

Oh, my. Just thinking about the horrific mass of legacy spaghetti code that a chief engineer like Geordi 'I got another 0.2% out of the field manifolds today' LaForge will leave in his wake... and remember he trained Data, probably the only ops officer in Starfleet who can maintain such code without a refactor, who will therefore not know what good code actually looks like...

Sod the captain. I'd be scared of the computer.

No, for me I want a ship fresh out of Utopia Planitia. I'll take shipyard bugs and snags over a lifetime of chief engineer's specials any day of the week and twice on Saturdays.

This was an election about who wasn't the Tories.

The LDs showed up and got name recognition and said that they certainly weren't the Tories.

Labour... made not being Tories a manifesto pledge and I hope to see them making strides towards achieving it by 2028.

Speaking as a database administrator who is also a user, I do not do my day to day use with the admin account.

I do not remember the episode. Was he all 'Computer, re-engage holodeck, authorisation chief engineer Geordi LaForge bravo six?'

It may come from WoW where the warrior tank class generated much more threat if it pulled with its gap closer.

There is a tale of someone adding an insulting statement next to all parties but one, and that being counted as a vote for that one. At least the UK does not have voting machines.

Two sessions ago I sent my party a letter and they spent three hours drafting a damn response, including two of the party going off together for a private argument.

Sure, I run a political game, this is what they signed up for.

Coca Cola was the archetypal example of Western brand designers not getting it, as their first attempt at a name was famously 蝌蚪啃蜡 'tadpole bite wax'. It was taught to me as the reason you employ locals if you do any sales in China as a Westerner.

Look. The actual system is fiendishly complicated, like, maybe the science and ops officers both understand it if you have a good ops officer. But the captain needs a readout on it. So they trained an AI on decades of combat data and told it to give a single numeric readout that an idiot could understand, that the ops or tac officer can quickly convey in an emergency.

What's at 50%? The shields. They are about halfway broken, based on the AI's best guess. However this particular set of attacks is getting through them: it's about halfway through their attrition capability.

This is why you do not micromanage the shields unless you personally used to operate shields of the current generation. Nobody understands them well enough. Picard... best will in the world, guy's a social scientist, philosopher and orator. But this is why you get better results from veteran crews: his bridge crew know he doesn't know a verteron cascade buffer from a lateral field array subassembly, and do what he meant, not what he said. Whatever the fuck they actually do when he says 'rotate shield frequencies', it works for them.

I would imagine that the good (Martian?) PDCs might have explosive flak rounds like some CIWS today.

You wouldn't use shotgun style because you want the trajectories closer than that: you would want rounds that fragmented near the target. It's not as if shrapnel-based flak is a new concept.

Many apologies: of course it is. I cannot blame your language for being difficult, because I am British.

Thank you, stranger.

I could always run for office, but wild horses could not drag me to.

I could always join the civil service, but I like to eat hot food and sleep indoors.

OK, so speaking as a Brit, some of our leaders totally had training. The Philosophy, Politics and Economics degree course at Oxford is essentially a course on what they feel an MP should know.

The problem with it is that it is stereotyped as promoting groupthink and a very... particular approach to running a country - that is, centre-right conservative kyriarchy (rule by people like the ones already in charge). It hasn't given us noticeably better leaders than other countries, and a lot of people would rather have anyone else other than another PPE toff.

The actual qualifications in the UK government are supposed to be supplied by the civil service, who are career government employees requiring a university (college, that is) education. For more information on the stereotypical behaviour of the Civil Service and the stereotypical division of labour between career civil servants and elected officials, see the excellent BBC comedy series Yes, Minister.

In the US, too, do you not have an executive branch traditionally appointed from the ranks of those who know what they are doing, by a president elected for their judgement of character? Look, I typed that without laughing.

But in short, the elected officials in my country are supposed to be there for moral character and an idea of what the people want, and the appointed ones are supposed to be there for a technocratic view of how on earth you actually do that. The appointed officials are the ones who really need qualifications.

I would be deeply suspicious of any attempt to require qualifications of leaders, because politicians would weaponise it instantly against their enemies.

The German word for 'die' as in a direct order is, unfortunately, the somewhat underwhelming 'stirb' (shteerb). Strictly you could say 'storben Sie', but I feel that you do not need that level of politeness when casting a death-spell.

My favourite death-curse in literature is from Naomi Novik's Scholomance series: Á la mort. As a French spell, it must be said with a certain insouciant élan and a dismissive gesture.

MORERE is the Latin word you would say if giving someone a direct order to die immediately. 'Moh-reh-reh', Italian accent optional.

I live in a village older than USA.

I have put on a play in a building older than Tenochtitlán.

My kid gave me a black eye more than once at that age.

So I also have an unusual physical feature that people are ... stoppit, I mean I'm tall ... and what I do is I memorise one bad joke to deliver in a tired tone of voice. I say I'm actually a very short man standing on a box. But it's not the joke, it's the delivery: dude, you are the ninth person to tell me that this evening.

... and in the blue corner, it's BINKS JA JA WITH A STEEL CHAIR

Yeah, I roleplayed this last time I played a dwarf. Talked about 'herbs' like hemlock and 'spices' like strychnine.

What you get if you try and order Mosley from Wish.

Tax is rent for living in a country with services. You want to pay no tax, go live in Panama or somewhere.

Then we all collectively decided that richer people pay more than their 'share' and poorer people pay less - speaking as a rich guy I'm fine with that.

I also really hate the attitude of someone deciding they're rich so they'll just ignore the law and pay the fine. No. Fuck that. Make the fine a percentage of income. If Elon Musk gets a parking ticket it should cost him ten million dollars.