Don't diss it, you might be the only one of us employed in fifteen years. It's easier to replace white collar suites and low level physicians with computers than it is to replace a nurse with the same. Nobody wants Mr. Handy caring for their needs.
Name: Corporal Keller "Bits" Vannin Species: Human Age: 25 Planet of Origin/Birth: Uslam Force Sensitive Y/N: No
Appearance: Vannin is a powerful man. A little on the short side, at 5'8", but his muscular 205-lb build is intimidating at any height. Dark high-and-tight haircut, and hazel eyes that seem a little distant until the blasters start firing. His features are very animated whenever he talks -- which is always. At any given moment, odds are pretty good that Vannin is muttering to himself, or shouting insults at the enemy, or, in some very rare and special circumstances, having a normal conversation with an actual person.
Tom Sizemore in Blackhawk Down is, like, close I guess. minus the whole 'shot in the face' part.
Skills:
Pointman -- Vannin is a little bit crazy, which is good, because you need to be. A pointman is the first one through the door, when you've got no idea how many guns are on the other side. Whether you're clearing urban streets or breaching a Carrack-class light frigate, someone has to go in first. Vannin thinks fast and moves faster, a shock trooper and a force of nature. When the point man hits you, you stay hit.
Scary -- Morale is a lot simpler than they make it sound. What it boils down to is, in infantry work anyway, "Shoot at the guy you're most afraid of." Sometimes that's the enemy and sometimes that's your boss. If Keller Vannin is in play, though, it's him. He's loud, mean, and effective, and typically, that means he's drawing fire for the rest of the team. He seems to enjoy that.
Clobber -- On page V-92BB of the Imperial stormtrooper regulations, it notes that the plastoid armor plating of the Mark-II standard suit does not protect against being lifted in the air and hurled through a bulkhead. Vannin likes to take credit for that one, but it was probably the wookies..... probably.
Door Guy -- it's not his area of expertise, because usually, it's faster for someone else to blow the door while the pointman runs through. But sometimes people get shot, so everyone needs to know the important stuff. Vannin knows doors -- how to plant charges effectively, how to overload the chips, and failing everything else, how to pry them open with a blaster stock and elbow grease.
Tactics -- Vannin's not a crack shot, but he's experienced enough to know that at the end of the day, you don't have to be. He is completely at home in the infantry. Sometimes you have to know what you're doing to know how to follow orders -- Vannin gets the job done.
Shifty -- Vannin has an uncanny resistance to being shot full of holes. Some of that is gear, some of that is getting in the enemy's head, and some of that, in his own words, is that "The safest place to be in a battle is wherever the Imps are trying to shoot." But the truth is some people just move better -- tuck tighter, cover harder, roll faster. Vannin is a difficult target to hit.
Equipment:
- Blastech A280 Blaster Rifle - PPE -- personal protective equipment. Vannin works with some of the other regulars to keep his gear as light as possible, and still cover the important parts. In an ideal scenario, he wears pirated plastoid sleeves (repainted, of course, not white), and chest protection, but the rest is fairly minimal. Of course, when the situation calls for something else, he's happy to adapt. - off-duty: jumpsuit and flight boots, usually worn with the zipper down. - flash-bang grenades - Any other standard-issue and/or 'privately requisitioned' gear, as the mission parameters dictate
Psych Profile:
Keller Vannin has seen some shit. And on the surface at least, it seems like he kinda enjoyed it, and wants to get back to it ASAFP. You could almost believe that he's addicted to the rush, but if you pay attention to the slanderous curses that serve as his war cry, you start to figure out that it's not the battle he loves -- it's killing Imps. Vannin doesn't give a womprat's third nipple about the Rebellion, or the politics, or the hoo-voo magic monk swordfighting BS. "There's people out there need a good killing, and most of 'em are wearing white." He's not suited for peacetime, and he'll probably give his shrink nightmares someday. He might even be haunted by nightmares now, for all anyone knows, but that seems like the sort of thing he'd enjoy. On the surface at least. In war, anyway, he's a mind at ease. He easily transitions from grim reaper to class clown, almost like there's no difference between leaving rotten eggs in the women's locker and planting a few rounds in a surrendering foe. But he's working on that -- rotten eggs are taboo, he gets it.
Some friends call him 'Bits' from time to time, because he's not all there, probably -- the animated conversations with nobody sorta give that much away. Most people call him Keller, or Corporal Vannin if they come from off-world. His morbid, deadpan sarcasm takes some getting used to, but it's clever in its own way.
History:
Unremarkable, all things considered. Like everyone else from the original unit, he's a guerrilla who survived the crackdown. He tells a story about breaching an AT-AT walker and killing his way to the bridge, but that's a lie -- he was moving civilians when the fist came down, and he was one of the first fighters to make it off-world. What came before that doesn't matter anymore -- his family life started in the room where the Liberators first regrouped, and it ends when an imp finally gets lucky and they jettison his body from an airlock. In the meantime, he's built a healthy reputation as the unit's native sociopath. A few people remember him before the attack -- he was much the same, but a little bit less 'touched.' There were two other soldiers with him during the evacuation, but they both left the service immediately after, citing abstract horrors of war and personal problems. He doesn't talk about them, and he doesn't talk about what they saw, and the records are understandably sparse, but there were no children on his transport.
Yes, and:
Corporal Beskad, another Uslam native, is a trusted friend and frequent pranking target. Beskad knows his way around gear, and has "The right attitude" about the war. Toland Vas, on the other hand, is an off-world political nut. But, he hates the right people, and he's got the right skills. They're starting to warm up to one another -- though, Vas might not know that Vannin is the one who's been loosening bolts on a few of the choice droids while they're powered down. They share some practical working knowledge about breaching tactics, and work well together in combat -- usually if Vannin goes right, Vas goes left, and they're able to lay down a wide base of fire for the rest of the squad to work with. Their final tallies are usually pretty close -- not the highest of the squad, on a normal day, but there's a running tradition between the two that the loser buys drinks.
The sad truth is that the process of passing new medicine is really just needlessly complicated, on purpose. See, businesses like stability, and introducing new, potentially revolutionary drugs into the market disrupts that stability. By making the process needlessly long, they can anticipate the effects a drug can have on the market, minimizing the potential disruption. Pharmaceutical companies are always on the watch for new drugs. Not to mention cheap, accessible and effective drugs means less profit margin. Imposing excessive bureaucracy on human experimentation is just a byproduct of that profit-centric mindset. In a similar way, petroleum companies are trying their darnest to halt the development of alternative energy. The status quo is profitable, why change it? That's how the big heads think, unfortunately.
Is it? Them evil drug corps are pushing vaccines out like candy to keep people from getting sick in the first place -- seems like a bad investment. And since pharmaceutical companies pay for their own research, you'd think they'd want more than 8% of their research to hit the markets. Here's how the process actually goes, with some numbers.
End of May 17th before you go to bed. There's a slim margin of error built in between the deadline and the posting of threads to account for anybody on any time zone anywhere -- but if it's past midnight wherever you live, you're risking DISASTER! So don't cut it too close.
Also, when will the results be revealed?
We're thinking May 31 (or possibly a similar end-of-may-31 voting deadline, and winners posted on June 1st). It's a slightly tighter window than we used in RPGC #1, but we didn't really use all that time effectively so it seems like a smart step.
Unfortunately it's been graduation week for me and there's no way I'm getting up a story of the quality I'd like. SO, I will be battling that deadline and hopefully shall entertain you all with some poetry.
Poetry's great! Everybody who writes fiction should write poetry too.
You're all making it sound much more horrible that it really is. For example, Hitler or Hitler-like experiments are repeatedly brought up.
Only once, actually, and only to point out how irrelevant it is to the conversation. I'm specifically not calling you Hitler. Just wanted to reiterate that. Because what you're in fact talking about is just what you said next:
I'm suggesting the testing of experimental drugs/techniques that theoretically have a positive effect on the human body but we have no idea if there are potentially unknown side effects. Such drugs take incredibly long times to be approved because they have to give many theoretical reasonings behind why they believe the drug is completely safe for human use.
This is what I'm disagreeing with. Or rather, the insinuation that this is an injustice. "First, do no harm." That is the bedrock of medical ethics and it should be. If you want to harm yourself to save others, that's your prerogative -- but medical institutions can't make that call. It's hairy enough with organ donors coming into an ER. Open those doors and things get miserable really darn quickly.
*snip Iron Lung response*
What you're advocating is skipping the part where the life-saving machine was tested and proven effective on animals first. What you're advocating is Joe Scientist coming into the patent office and saying "Hey, I bet if I chop open a sick guy's chest I can hook up a motor and probably keep him alive. Send me a hundred brown people and I'll prove it." What I'm advocating is exactly what happened -- the life-saving device was tested, proven effective, and successfully implemented with no human suffering, and the safe practice was refined over time as our understanding improved. It didn't save everybody, but it didn't kill anybody. That is a night-and-day distinction.
why not keep a grizzly bear?
That is a horrible example and somewhat irrelevant?
Exactly. I'm demonstrating the reason why false equivalency is bad thinking. That was the point of that illustration.
I haven't eaten for 3 days. I'm on the brink of death and someone tells me they'll give me a meal except I have to pay them $10,000 dollars for it. In your perspective, thats a despicable thing to do. They're taking advantage of my situation. So you step im and prevent them from doing it. In reality you just stole my meal away when I would have accepted that $10,000 offer.
The only moral thing to do in that situation is to give you a meal for a fair price (I know, I know, you hippies reading this are saying FREE MEAL! bite me). The person taking $10k for a cheeseburger is stealing from you. That person is objectively terrible. What I've been arguing all along is that we continue to practice humane research to help people safely. And I've already linked like a handful of new treatments (just from the last couple of years) to demonstrate what should be readily apparent just from the state of the world you keep moaning about -- western medicine works. Ebola broke out in Africa, not here, and we still cured it in weeks. We're doing everything right, far as research is concerned, and the crazy part is you already implicitly recognize this by comparing the US-Africa health situations.
Third, if 'that's how crappy their lives are,' and you care, then make their lives less crappy without murdering them. Everybody wins.
Unfortunately, thats not how it works.
Bullshit. That's exactly how it works, and if you're not already doing it, you don't actually care.
How would you improve their lives? Amass millions of dollars and invest into upgrading their entire country one tier? Where would that money come from?
You can't solve everything =/= you can't do anything. =/= you should just use them as lab rats instead.
Lastly, the primary issue that I see @mdk and @Vilageidiotx having is that you're worried about such things being exploited. Fortunately, other similar exploitable systems already exist in the world yet they work with proper regulations. By the logic from both of you, wouldn't life insurance be a ridiculous thing? A poor family tries to get their grand parents killed so they can get the lump some of money. "Life insurance should not exist otherwise!" is what you're otherwise saying.
"That's a monstrous crime" is what I'm saying. "You shouldn't murder people to get an advantage" is what I'm saying. One of us is arguing against that.
Human experimentation can definitely be regulated to prevent exploits as well as being relatively safe to the individuals it is performed on. At least to the extent, that the benefits to them outweigh the risks for those being experimented on. However, this is not done nor implemented because the populace is concerned about ethics.
What? Exactly that is 'done and implemented,' and it's because the populace is concerned about ethics. Rightly so. You have an unreasonable definition of what's 'relatively safe to the individuals,' and that's where your frustration is coming from. If you get rid of that, you'll see that the system already actually does what you want it to do, better than how you want to do it, without killing people. Stop trying to fix it with murder.
Foreign area studies (combination of history, economics, and poli sci) with a minor in Japanese and four semesters of Chinese on the back as well, and an engineering core, with follow-on pilot school. Service academies are fun.
Interestingly I'm probably headed back to school soon. I get to choose between more engineering for dollars, more politics for impact, or writing for passion. This is what being retired at 28 looks like.
Incentivizes convictions. In other words, anybody with a sick relative sitting on a jury has all the more reason to send someone to prison, so that their meat can serve to further the cure effort. Considering we already convict in odd patterns, and overturn a significant number of guilty verdicts, that seems like something the justice system isn't prepared to handle.
England is not the 51st state. England can be the 245th state, right after every other country on earth. The capital will not be London -- the capital will be DALLAS. Tony Romo will be the new queen.
Half Pint,
Ohm,
TokyoPewPew,
Maksart
