I did something similar. Didn’t get me banned but got me inducted into the student sysadmin group instead. My highschool generally had one kid a year who did something notable enough to become an apprentice to the IT closet wizard. The hazing ritual was to deal with the fallout: respond to all the helpdesk tickets for ‘weird message on screen’ or ‘I can’t print’, etc, and then listen to the older apprentices tell their tale.

I guess I wasn’t as clear as I could be. I was not implying all gamers had good reaction times, pattern recognition and such. What I meant was that people who play games and consider themselves gamers are generally speaking striving to play those games better, and will often build some skills to pretty significant levels. Some of those skills will be relevant to ATC work.

To your point, this is true of many hobbies or professions and any hysteria against “gamers” being targeted with an ATC ad campaign is dumb.

And… also… Have you seen gamers?

The comments here seem somewhat strange to me for what is likely to be a “gamer” heavy demographic. There’s a lot of ‘I should stop flying’ or otherwise implying that people who, having games as their preferred hobby, will be bad at this. Instead, gamers tend to get really good at a few specific skills such as reaction times, pattern recognition, strategy and min/maxing, etc.

About the only thing I could think making this better would be to select for speedrunners.

That way we get livestreams for APLS - Awesome Planes Landed Safely - and also raise some money for a charity or two.

The catalyst there is businesses (and to a degree governments).

I used to pay attention to my physical mail. Then it was all “junk mail” and the signal-to-noise ratio got hard to manage.

I migrated the important stuff to “electronic mail”, where I had a curated list of people and entities that sent me items, so I could focus on things that were important. Then my address/mailbox became common knowledge and that filled with “spam”.

I started using SMS/text for the important stuff. But that also became a common place to send me stuff I didn’t care about, so I used specific apps on my phone that had permission to notify me when something needed attention, and now my phone gives me so many notifications I just ignore them all.

Our attention is the prize, and it won’t matter where our attention goes: The businesses will follow.

The same will hold true for connectivity. If the current internet becomes a wasteland and we migrate to Mesh, then it’s only a matter of time before corporate interests take that over too; then knitted, or fabric, or the glob.

The solution will be protections for personal identity and privacy, which have been and will be fought tooth-and-nail by the companies because they want that info so they can be where our attention is so they can make profit. I think we can also fight the profit motive, but that’ll be harder than getting protections in law… so small steps.

Honestly curious: I’m not a battery or even energy person, but this is interesting.

The charge/discharge efficiencies and rates could just mean we build networks of mixed types? “Trickle” charge/discharge via a slower battery that handles more cycles and is probably way cheaper to build (that’s the premise of Na+, right?), but have those batteries back up a more expensive high-rate bank for when power is needed in a burst? Probably a switching problem at that point, which I imagine we already deal with having solar/hydro/fossil/etc.

A Na+ bank sized to handle regular use and charge a Lithium bank when underused so that one is ready for spikes seems like a way to go.