Hey what happened to this we used to have one? Maybe it was merged with the whats on your mind topic? Well we don't talk about international news enough maybe if we have another thread it'll influence more people to talk about the news?
 
Heres one I heard about today, I don't really watch the news so I just get what I can from here and facebook.
 
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/01/17/145328987/hopes-are-fading-for-missing-in-italian-cruise-ship-disaster
 
An italian cruise ship captain ran his ship aground passing a 500km line that is a no shipping area trying to show off to folks on the beach (something about a horn salute). Dude ran it on a large coral reef that you could visibly see above water but expands below kind of like an iceberg. Guy is a captain he should have definitely known better. They also didn't practice their fire and emergency drills so none of the people onboard knew what the hell to do incase of such an emergency. When he ran the ship on the reef he punctured what I'm guessing is the bottom hull of the ship (aka the ship's keel) which caused it to take on alot of water losing balance and flipping over on its starboard (right) side. I heard that about six people are dead so far, they're worried about fuel spilling out into the waters which are nature reserve, and they have about two dozen people still unaccounted for.
 
What made it even worse was the captain took a lifeboat and left leaving his crew and passangers to fend for themselves, after putting them all in that position. That is like the biggest no no ever. And when confronted by the coastguard and told to return to the ship dude started bawling like a baby and making excuses and shit not to go back.
 
That is like, worst case scenario for what we'd call a damage control situation or "running aground". The only thing that could have made it worse is a fire/explosion from fuel leakage or the ship falling off the reef and sinking. So its prolly like, 7/10 bad.

I got a friend with kind of the same viewpoints as us that links to the "huffington post" alot and they don't seem too biased. I like democracy now but they don't really report on technical innovations or anything other than international politics and injustice. Which is cool but I like to read about a little more than humanitarian efforts.

I think I'm gonna start reading discovery and pbs though because they're more scientific and neutral minded and you don't really have to worry about mis-information.

Also, Quasicrystals: http://news.discovery.com/space/russian-quasicrystals-might-come-from-space-120112.html

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2011/10/quasicrystals-win-chemistry-nobel.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasicrystal

They're these, formerly thought to be synthetic crystals made in a lab by scientists. But have recently been found on earth in russia millions of years old. Its theorized that they had somehow developed in space and fell to the earth but they're trying to figure out where they came from.

So from what I understand, scientists independently created these things in laboratories experimenting with crystals and thought the quasi-crystal was a man-made development but then found out that nature also forms the same kind of phenomenon all on its own. Which is fucking awesome.
 
well now I'm reading about mathmatical projections and the theorizing of what a quasi-crystal was years and years before actually having a substantial one. So I'm not 100% sure if they actually made them in a lab first or if they just theorized and realized they could in fact exist. The first article I read was from yahoo or something and it said they were synthetically created before the one in russia was actually archeologically found so I'm guessing what I said still holds.

I work? there, this is the high pressure line of the #2 pump being drained right after our shutdown..... it happens all the time, tbh I can't believe this video has gone this far. Don't be so stupid people, the world is not going to end!!!!! oh the 3 guy's standing there are Greenhorns clearing brush so we can lay pipe Jimmy (camera guy) Ed(Edwardo) and Brian are the guys I know them they are shit heads and they have you guys all freaked out over nothing.

.........................

It reminds me of the trumpets of revelation from redstate though. Man the end of that movie was so awesome.

Braking the rules are for cool people, the captain knew what was best and he said fuck this, this captain is not going down with the ship. don't you see guys this captain is the smartest captain  because he ignored everything he was told in training. He knew all the answers by supplementing it with his own. THIS MAN IS A GOD DAM GENIUS.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-11997571
show this to the next person who starts ranting about a TED talk they saw about how micro-finance will lift the third world out of poverty

I don't have anything to contribute atm but I thought I'd take this opportunity to ask you guys what you think are good/trusted news sites. The only ones I bother reading semi-regularly are Al Jazeera English and Democracy Now. Are there any better alternatives or good ones I should know about? Dietcoke I'm looking at you pal.

i don't really care what news sites i read tbqh, i'm not one of those people who is all into like alt-media. someone important/prominent/smart, prob. chomsky or something, once said that you could just read like the NYT WSJ and FT and have a pretty good idea about what's going on in the world. I subscribe to the nyt and steal the economist from the various cafes/newsstands at school, and everything else i just get from google news which has everything(BBC NPR DN etc etc etc)

INFOWARS.COM

i mean you really can't go wrong with NYT, BBC, and the FT, they tend to have pretty good coverage of what's going on and are pretty well written with minimal fluff. al-jeezy is pretty solid too.
i have a love-hate relationship with DN because i want it to be much more radical than it is but they're all a bunch of fuckin' liberals who'll have ralph nader come on and talk about corporations or whatever and spend the rest of the year talking about israel/palestine.

it's pretty incredible to imagine how you'd view the world if infowars.com was your only available source of news, you'd be completely crazy

someone usually has nbc news with brian williams on around me thanks to successful youth branding and 30 rock ads. seems to be not as bad as the other news programs and is a pretty accurate representation of what people are/will be talking about

osama bin laden is dead

so does aljazeera cover world news totally or just alot of stuff on the western side of asia/parts of europe/middle east? I never really got into them but hear em named dropped here every once in awhile.

I'm kind of confused on what micro-loans are. Are they just low-credit loans from independant companies and not banks or other financial institutions? Like the ones you see on commercials in the states where you don't have a credit check and can get a 3000-5000$ loan? I can see how an appealing idea like that could draw alot of poorer 3rd world folks in. But how do they get to the point of killing themselves over it? What happens if they don't pay, wages are garnished? Or is their credit ruined? I guess the problem I'm having is understanding why a poorer person like that would kill themselves over having their credit shit on when they don't have enough money for it to matter in the first place?

I fucking hate loans. I got one on my car and some furniture I got but I hate having them hang over my head. I try to pay them all off before I go buy anything else because that shit can fuck you pretty hard. My credits really really good though because I'm so paranoid about credit cards and loans.
 
 
 
Edit: we should start an economics thread too. Like about CD accounts, Bonds, stock markets, buying precious metals, good investors and stuff like that. It would be pretty cool to learn/talk about that sort of shit. I'm gonna start investing my money when I pay my loans off and some advice would be cool.

I think a micro-loan is A high interest short term loan for example to cover the 4 days till payday. At least that's what I think since we have that here in britain.

Braking the rules are for cool people, the captain knew what was best and he said fuck this, this captain is not going down with the ship. don't you see guys this captain is the smartest captain  because he ignored everything he was told in training. He knew all the answers by supplementing it with his own. THIS MAN IS A GOD DAM GENIUS.

I know this is a joke but captains aren't supposed to "go down with the ship". That is an old world concept and kind of a misnomer. A captains job description is to ensure the safety of the vessel and everyone aboard it to the best of his capability. Dude just had to make sure that A) his crew and the passengers knew what to do in case of an emergency and B) safety equipment IE: lifeboats and liferafts were dislodged and ready for boarding.

It takes about two to three people to (easily) tie a liferaft to a handrail and push it overboard or just roll the damn thing over the side. And two people to quickly lower a lifeboat but both can be done with a single person. I have lowered a lifeboat with just me and my boss and we're both under 160lbs each. Shit all he could have really been responsible for was finding a secure location and either gathering some officers/crewmen to call people to muster at that location or call it over the PA system if it was still functional.

Chances are that dude was never a real captain but an idiot with the position. You get alot of people that want the money and the power but not the responsibility when it comes time to act on it. We've got one of those on now though I think he's getting better about it (he's pretty young). We actually had something like that happen on my ship about five years before I got there. It hit an oil platform and took off half the helideck and a good chunk of the ship's housing structure. Even then experienced and trained men were running around in circles and freaking out.

My boss told me that they were in mexico then too, they were scared they hit an underwater pipeline (they did but it wasn't active) and released this gas I mentoned earlier: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_sulfide


Its just a matter of keeping calm, remembering your training, and knowing that if you freak out or don't do what you know you're supposed to you will only die quicker or do something to make the situation so much worse.

Thats why if that shit happens when I'm here I'm probably not going to listen to anyone unless I feel that person is capable. If there is a fire I'm going to put it out. If theres gas I'm getting my mask and going up high. If we're sinking I'm throwing all those floaty things over the side until I can't no more. Not only for myself but for the dumbasses freaking out too.