Post: #26

Quote:
"Passenger safety is our priority!"

Dick is their priority. Which is fine, that's how it should be.

Post: #27

(10-17-2017 10:23 AM)C-Note Wrote:  Have you noticed a decline in the general attractiveness of JAL and ANA flight attendants over the last six years or so? I asked one of them about it on an ANA flight one time (I didn't phrase it exactly like that, of course) and she said it was because JAL and ANA had drastically reduced its flight crew salaries and benefits and increased the intensity of the flight schedules, so the occupation wasn't seen as glamorous anymore by young women.

I haven't been in the game for six years, and really haven't noticed any decline. Maybe it is due to my location, which is mostly leisure travel as opposed to business, both airlines stewardesses are rookies. What I can tell you, is that there is a serious gap in quality between ANA and JAL. JAL is far superior. ANA seems to hire more provincial types.

JAL girls have professionally manicured nails and waxed vaginas. ANA does their own nails, and got a bic job if they are shaved at all. ANA doesn't appear to provide dental coverage, bit JAL girls all have straight white teeth.

The fishy part is the items that they carry. My googling says these girls make about twelve dollars an hour. They all have rimowa suitcases, a Louis Vuitton bag and wallet, designer sunglasses, and I phones and laptops. The scarves they wear are designer and so are the shoes, and they have several sets. This means that they are travelling with a years salary worth of crap everywhere they go. Who's paying for this stuff?

I tried to figure it out, but I grew weary of dealing with them. Frankly, I'm just too old to put up with the little baby act Japanese women come with.

And I don't have some type of stewardess fetish, I was just in the right place at the right time and capitalized.

Aloha!

Post: #28

(10-18-2017 01:48 AM)Kona Wrote:  JAL girls have professionally manicured nails and waxed vaginas.

Man, that's one strict uniform policy. Still, I can appreciate the need for a well-trimmed snatch in the event of an emergency; that extra 0.05 metres per second down the rubber* could be the difference between life and death.





* ramps

God save us from people who mean well. -storm

Post: #29

A few days ago I crossed the Andes mountains aboard a plane (used to be a very dangerous plane route, long ago, still is I guess), and well, the plane got in very rough winds or whatever, and seemingly lost altitude fast, on top of being plummeted for a few minutes.

Stewards and stewardesses were nowhere to be seen (having just warned us). But people did shout and cry aloud, with even a kid shouting "mommy I don't want to die", and people were grabbing the seats in front of them with obvious terror... Except for a few kids and idiots who actually thought it was a joke or funny ride (at the beginning, cause after one minute nobody was into bravado anymore)...

So anyway, I'm telling you, even grown men were seriously scared. Not to the point of shouting like the kids or women did, but... myself, I was not bragging or enjoying the moment, I can tell you. I was just praying and hoping I wouldn't end up like some Uruguayan rugby player, dead on impact or cannibalizing my friends...

Post: #30

(11-08-2017 10:34 PM)Going strong Wrote:  A few days ago I crossed the Andes mountains aboard a plane (used to be a very dangerous plane route, long ago, still is I guess), and well, the plane got in very rough winds or whatever, and seemingly lost altitude fast, on top of being plummeted for a few minutes.

Stewards and stewardesses were nowhere to be seen (having just warned us). But people did shout and cry aloud, with even a kid shouting "mommy I don't want to die", and people were grabbing the seats in front of them with obvious terror... Except for a few kids and idiots who actually thought it was a joke or funny ride (at the beginning, cause after one minute nobody was into bravado anymore)...

So anyway, I'm telling you, even grown men were seriously scared. Not to the point of shouting like the kids or women did, but... myself, I was not bragging or enjoying the moment, I can tell you. I was just praying and hoping I wouldn't end up like some Uruguayan rugby player, dead on impact or cannibalizing my friends...

Seeing as I can't find any sexy South American stewardess photos to spam the thread with, this seems a germane moment to point something out, albeit it's something the Last Psychiatrist said:



Granted that everyone in this shot is an actor and Carrie Fisher was likely high on coke anyway, notice the difference in attitudes: Han's not terrified out of his mind even though the former Imperial slave (Chewbacca) and the torture victim (Leia) presumably have seen the same sort of horrible shit he has. What's the essential difference, and why is Han Solo (on real life analogues) less likely to get PTSD than Chewie or Leia?

This: Han Solo believes he has some control over his destiny and is acting on it. He's flying the ship; he can choose the route, even if the odds are very high -- 3,720 to 1 against -- that all his skill and action are going to be irrelevant, that a random rock he can't see will bust the Falcon's shields and pulverise them all.

TLP quotes Sebastian Junger's book War:

Quote:One of the most puzzling things about fear is that it is only loosely related to the level of danger. During World War II, several airborne units that experienced some of the fiercest fighting of the war also reported some of the lowest psychiatric casualty rates in the U.S. military. Combat units typically suffer one psychiatric casualty for every physical one, and during Israel's Yom Kippur War of 1973, frontline casualty rates were roughly consistent with that ratio. But Israeli logistics units, which were subject to far less danger, suffered three psychiatric cases for every physical one. And even frontline troops showed enormous variation in their rate of psychological breakdown. Because many Israeli officers literally led from the front, they were four times more likely to be killed or wounded than their men were -- and yet they suffered one-​fifth the rate of psychological collapse. The primary factor determining breakdown in combat does not appear to be the objective level of danger so much as the feeling -- even the illusion -- of control. Highly trained men in extraordinarily dangerous circumstances are less likely to break down than untrained men in little danger.

The division between those who feel in control of their fate and those who don't can occur even within the same close-​knit group. During World War II, British and American bomber crews experienced casualty rates as high as 70 percent over the course of their tour; they effectively flew missions until they were killed. On those planes, pilots reported experiencing less fear than their turret gunners, who were crucial to operations but had no direct control over the aircraft. Fighter pilots, who suffered casualty rates almost as high as bomber crews, nevertheless reported extremely low levels of fear. They were both highly trained and entirely in control of their own fate, and that allowed them to ignore the statistical reality that they had only a fifty-​fifty chance of surviving their tour.

My guess would be that if you did a study of PTSD likelihood as between passengers and pilots in near-death airborne incidents, the results would be the same: passengers far more likely to develop PTSD than the pilot not because the pilot has seen the situation before or because he knows how tough the plane is, but because of everyone on board, only the pilot is afforded the illusion of control, the illusion that he can choose whether to live or die by pressing buttons.

TLP, of course, extends this suggestion out more generally, given we are living in a narcissistic era and one of the most powerful blows to a narcissist's psyche is the discovery of his own limitations:

Quote:Marshall McLuhan once said, "if everything around you is a nail, then get a really strong hammer." So the psychodynamic hammer: if narcissism is the exertion of will towards the maintenance of ego-- trying to get everyone to see you the way you want to be seen, and to get them to act the way you need them to act-- then a narcissistic injury would be the discovery of the limitations of your own power.

If the Americanized culture of the past two generations has deliberately encouraged narcissism as a positive personality structure, then we can expect higher rates of PTSD than in WWII not because the physical stresses are more severe-- in fact, they are most often less severe-- but because the discovery of the limitations of our own power shock us more deeply than it shocked them.

Typically, avoidance and flashbacks are the proxies for the diagnosis of PTSD, but these are drawn from experience with soldiers from a different time and a different culture. Today, the primary symptom of a traumatic reaction to the discovery of powerlessness wouldn't be fear but rage. Hence, new onset domestic violence is more sensitive than nightmares. "Being there" (suddenly staring off into the distance) more specific than reliving the traumatic event.

It follows that a PTSD soldier at home would be much less traumatized by a terrible car accident than by the suspicion that his wife is cheating.

IVb.

I'm not saying soldiers are narcissists; but that's the culture we were taught from the day of our birth. The military should have made an effort to understand the psychic vulnerabilities of the culture it was recruiting from, and adjusted its training to anticipate those vulnerabilities.

More broadly, a nation that chooses to go to war-- for good reasons or bad-- should train its population to be more selfless, to establish as obvious that each person is merely part of a far more important whole, and to incentivize displays of that thinking with explicit rewards.

If it cannot do this, if it can't institutionalize this, it shouldn't go to war, most practically because it will not win. ... The military's immediate problem is that this advice must now be learned in adulthood; there hasn't been 20 years of practice. It is not reflexive; narcissism is. I hope it requires no elaboration that the people we are currently fighting have exactly the opposite circumstance.

God save us from people who mean well. -storm

Post: #31

(10-18-2017 01:48 AM)Kona Wrote:  The fishy part is the items that they carry. My googling says these girls make about twelve dollars an hour. They all have rimowa suitcases, a Louis Vuitton bag and wallet, designer sunglasses, and I phones and laptops. The scarves they wear are designer and so are the shoes, and they have several sets. This means that they are travelling with a years salary worth of crap everywhere they go. Who's paying for this stuff?

Beyond All Seas

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe.
To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it, you'll be lonely often, and sometimes
frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself." - Kipling