Same goes for a lot of generic-sounding "A" business names- Acme, Apex, Ajax, A+, American-whatever, etc.

I work in 911 dispatch, it drives me nuts how many people lose consciousness for various reasons, and then when they come to they say they're fine and don't need to be checked out.

There's maybe some very narrow exceptions for people with known conditions that they're already managing with the help of a doctor and they know exactly what's causing it.

But in general, if you're losing consciousness that's a bad sign and you need to see a doctor about that ASAP

I flip flop back and forth, I'm not totally sure if there's a specific rhyme or reason to my choices, it may just come down to a subjective feeling about which I think sounds better in the sentence.

My wife is a dayta analyst, and she analyzes dahta.

Definitely, normally my skin is pretty resilient, never really been someone who needs to spend money on moisturizers and such, I could probably just about wash my hands with acetone and steel wool and be none the worse for it.

But there were a few times when I worked there that my hands were getting noticeably dryer than usual, pretty sure if my skin were any more delicate I would have been in pretty rough shape.

We definitely called them cardboard cuts, can't say how universal it is but every job I've where I've handled a lot of boxes it seems to be in pretty common use

Salem witch trials were almost a century before the revolution, feels like a little bit of a stretch to lump them into other events that have posed a threat to american democracy since it didn't even exist yet.

It certainly makes a good point about how certain parts of America have always been primed to go off the deep end since the very beginning, but I think that's part of a separate but closely related discussion

Cardboard cuts are absolutely a thing, like a paper cut on steroids.

I used to work in a warehouse and spent most of my day opening, resealing, making, and breaking down boxes. Spend enough time around them and the boxes will get you.

What you're most likely looking for is amateur (ham) radio. The exactly regulations will vary by country, usually there's some sort of testing/licensing required (at least if you want to transmit, you can listen without a license)

I didn't look too far into it but it looks like the app you linked is basically a tool to let you use your phone as a controller for other radio equipment. You'd probably need to be licensed to actually use it, and there's a good chance the equipment needed is pretty pricey. Ham equipment can kind of run the gambit from handhelds that run from about $20 up to thousands of dollars depending on what you want to do with it. You're probably better off starting with some more standard equipment before you start trying to rig together other stuff controlled by an app.

There's a lot of info out there for free on the internet and plenty of books have been written about how radio, so there's a lot of resources out there to learn from, or if there's a radio club in your area (there usually is) you can show up to a meeting and ask some questions.

Assuming you're in the US (different countries again have different laws) there's a few other radio options if all you want is to talk to people who are local to you. You can get a CB radio (think Smokey & the Bandit or truckers talking to each other) some places have more or less people actually using CB radio. The range and capabilities are more limited than a lot of ham options, but you can usually count on a few miles of range, and sometimes it's nice to get a heads up from truckers about traffic issues and speed traps and such. I personally like to use them with friends in different cars when we're on a road trip.

There's also FRS radios, you can pick them up pretty cheap at Wal Mart, pretty basic walkie talkies.

Many of those FRS radios are also GMRS radios, there's a GMRS license needed to use the GMRS capabilities, not test, just a licensing fee, so that's something to be aware of.

MURS radios also exist, I honestly don't know too much about it, but it's another free, no-license radio service you can use.

Each of those have their own limitations and restrictions on what you can do with them, but in probably 99% of cases you're probably not gonna run afoul of the law if you don't try to modify the radio or do something obviously stupid and use it in a way that's not interfering with other people's uses.

If you have enough people, bulldozers, and money to throw at the problem, sure.

Does Israel have that available? I can't really say.

Some of the things that would factor into how many people, bulldozers, and money you'd need to do so

How big of a city?

What kind of construction are we dealing with?

How much are we willing to ignore worker safety and such?

How much of that city has already been partially demolished by other means the time the bulldozers get there?

How bulldozed does it need to be? There's a spectrum here that goes from something "crashing a bulldozer into every building enough times to make it unlivable" to "everything completely leveled, and all the debris cleaned up, neatly pushed into piles, loaded into trucks, buried, etc." Do we need to bulldoze the entire city? Or just most of it? Or maybe just enough that pretty much every block is looking pretty wrecked? Or maybe just all of the structures and we can leave parks, parking lots, streets, and other open spaces intact?

Do we have to be picky about using specifically bulldozers? If the end result is essentially the same, you could also use excavators, guys with sledgehammers, cranes, wrecking balls, explosives, airstrikes, artillery fire, etc. there's plenty of other options to work into the mix if we don't limit ourselves to just bulldozers.

I understand your meaning but saying that those east coast cities were built to European standards is maybe not the best way to phrase it.

Philly in particular, is a standout for being one of the first planned cities. Not that there weren't attempts at city planning before then, but they tended to be more of an attempt to straighten out the wacky stuff that had grown organically. With Philly most of the city was pretty much laid out from the beginning, which was fairly unique at the time. You'd be pretty hard-pressed to find something totally comparable to that in Europe at the time.

What they do share with European cities though, is that they (relatively) old, and from the era before cars were a thing, so the city planning happened with the assumption that people would be walking pretty much everywhere.

Side note- I remember reading an article about one of the older assassins creed games set in the American revolution, and one of the reasons they decided to not set it in philly was because Philly, even back then, was too orderly of a grid with lots of long straight streets that you can look a long way down and the graphics engine had a hard time rendering that far.

So first of all, the US is big and diverse, if you hop in a car and drive from New York to LA without stopping, taking the fastest route, mostly on major highways, averaging out to something like 60+mph (about 100 km/h) you're still going to be spending just about 2 days in the car.

And in between, you're going to see a little bit of everything, mountain, plains, forest, farms, huge dense urban cities, towns small enough you can barely even call them a town, suburban sprawl, massive industrial facilities, you name it you're going to see it.

Overall, if you live in an urban area, the situation may not be too bad, cities are somewhat walkable, there's public transportation that will usually get you fairly close to where you need to go, there may even be protected bike lanes, etc. although the situation will vary wildly from one city to another.

It will even vary from one part of the city to another. You can have large sections of the city where there's no real grocery stores or other places to get your basic necessities, and you're pretty much limited to whatever you can get from corner stores, bodegas, convenience stores, etc. (mostly pre-packaged and processed foods, and if you're lucky maybe a couple pieces of fresh fruit) and if you want anything more than that you're probably looking at taking a few hours out of your day to walk a significant distance to a store or take public transit that may not go exactly where you need it, may be slow, expensive, or just a pain in the ass to deal with, etc.

Getting out into the suburbs, it's again kind of a crapshoot. There are some walkable suburbs, with wonderful shopping options, there's some that are a maze of residential developments and gated communities that come off of major roads with no sidewalks or even shoulders worth speaking of and you're taking a significant gamble trying to walk anywhere from there. There may be little or no public transportation and if there is it may not be going anywhere you need to go, or be convenient to get onto

Personally, I live towards the rural end of the suburbs, about an hour or less from a major city depending on traffic.

Damn near everything I could ever want or need is within about a half hour drive, and most of I commonly need is covered within about 15 minutes.

If I don't have a car though, my options drop off significantly. I'm looking at an hour walk one way to get to a grocery store, mostly along a long winding road with little or no shoulder and few streetlights. The only things I would really feel safe to walk to are 2 pizza shops, a small hardware store, a bar, a CVS, and gas station/convenience store, those last 2 are going to be about a half hour or longer walk, and along that winding road, but it's a stretch that at least has a half decent shoulder and some lawns to walk on for most of the way.

If you have a bike, there's a decent bike trail that will get you to some more shopping options, but it's about an hour's ride one way.

If you need to catch public transit, you'd have to walk about 2 hours to catch a bus, that line basically runs straight up and down a main road between the city and a larger, urban-ish town further out in the suburbs. There's not many options to transfer to anywhere else along the way but there's a lot along that route so if you can get to that bus most of your needs will be covered, but it doesn't run super frequently and it's not going to get you anywhere in a hurry.

Getting out into rural America, you have some small towns that are functionally self-contained, with their own grocery stores and other shopping options in-town within walking distance. Your options are limited but for the most part everything you really need is right there in town.

If you don't work in town though, and often people in these areas don't, they may be involved in farming, logging, oil/natural gas, construction, etc. and may work many miles from town, you're pretty much screwed if you don't have a car, or at least can count on carpooling with a coworker.

There's other small towns where there just isn't much of anything at all, maybe they have a gas station and a liquor store, and if you need anything else you're SOL, in some cases you may be looking at an hour or more drive to get to anything else so you can forget about walking.

Regardless of where/what kind of area you find yourself in, transportation between cities is often going to be an issue. You can probably catch a Greyhound bus or maybe Amtrak or similar between most major cities, though you may have to get a little creative with figuring out your route, but if you're trying to get to the smaller towns in between you may not have much luck.

There are, of course, nearly as many exceptions and special cases to everything I said as there are individual towns and cities.

I don't care about the death penalty as a deterrent. I care about it as a way to deal with certain people who will continue to pose a threat to others and for whom there are no other viable or humane options to rehabilitate them or otherwise render them safe to be around other people.

You can deal with a greedy pharma exec by seizing assets, injunctions against them participating in the pharmaceutical industry or serving in particular roles, stricter laws, regulations, and oversight on the pharma industry as a whole, etc.

You can't just regulate someone out of being dangerously emotionally disturbed, and if they can't be rehabilitated, what other viable options do you have left to keep them from harming others? You can lock them up in solitary, or perhaps take some drastic medical interventions like sedating them, lobotomizing them, or I guess chopping off their arms and legs, and at the point you're considering those sorts of options, the ethics of just killing them start to sound much more attractive.

I'm not altogether opposed to the death penalty for certain crimes, but I think the evidence, chain of custody, record keeping, etc. needs to be absolutely immaculate to an almost cartoonishly paranoid extent before the death penalty can be on the table.

Like if the suspect was off camera for even a moment between the moment the crime was committed, that's enough to make it intelligible for the death penalty because you can't be absolutely certain they weren't swapped for a body double when they stepped out of frame.

And that's before you even get into the absolute insane security and storage requirements needed for that footage to ensure it couldn't have been tampered with.

If there is any theoretically possible scenario, no matter how absurdly unlikely it may be, where the person in custody isn't the same person who committed the crime, then you can't seek the death penalty.

Small addendum, there's 94 commercial reactors that are generating power for the grid

But there's a few dozen more active nuclear reactors that exist for things like training and research.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_research_reactors#United_States

I understand that I come from a place of pretty significant privilege, but it is wild to me that when faced with these kinds of situations anyone is gambling on the kinds of medical care they might/might not be able to receive in these red states with restrictive abortion laws.

I know that if any of my friends, even if we're not particularly close, came to me and said they needed me to drive them halfway across the country for an abortion because they may not be able to get life-saving medical care in our state if something goes wrong, we're going, right then and there, no questions asked, I'm calling out sick from work, running up my credit cards on gas and hotel rooms and whatever else we may need and we're hitting the road, and if needed I won't ever breathe a word of it to anyone.

The fact that people are in a position where they feel like they can't do that or don't have people they think they can trust to do that for them is maddening.

Yeah, astonishingly if you don't wander into the crowded center city areas that are packed with people and bars, things are a lot more subdued.

There's something 1½ million people in the city, a lot of whom are watching the game, either at home, in a friends house, or at one of the 1300 or so bars in the city, all spread out over about 140 square miles. If you don't go seeking out the craziness, it's easy to not see it in person.

Not to mention all of the eagles fans in the surrounding suburbs.

And take a good look at your video, how much actual violence or destructiveness are you seeing there? I'm seeing mostly a big crowd of people milling around outside chanting and yelling at no one in particular. Creating a nuisance or impeding traffic? Sure, hardly a riot or anything of the sort though.

You have, being generous, maybe a couple thousand people (I'm pretty sure I've seen more people turn out to ride in the Philly naked bike ride) gathering around city hall, a major landmark located in the very heart of the city, and doing what? yelling? Maybe 2% of a city where "go birds" passes as a greeting, wandering around outside being a bit rowdy.

I'm a 911 dispatcher

Was once at a party where a motorcycle crashed right outside.

By the time I got outside, 911 had already been called, my friend was already performing CPR. I know he's been trained, so I let him keep at it, made sure he was doing it right, counted with him to keep time, and basically repeated the same CPR script I've given over the phone countless times and stood by in case he got tired and needed me to take over.

EMS shows up, as they're running over with their equipment they tell my friend to get the guys shirt open, he starts undoing buttons, I tell him to just pop them, a couple lost buttons are the least of this guys problems, and every second counts.

I'm 99% certain this guy was dead the moment he hit the ground, but regardless of what the outcome was (I'll probably never know and am OK with that, I'm used to that from my job, after I hang up with my caller I often don't get much if any follow-up on how a call turns out,) if you're going to crash a motorcycle and go into cardiac arrest, short of doing it outside an ER, you can't do much better than the house with a 911 dispatcher and counting myself and my friend who was doing CPR, no fewer than 4 eagle scouts.

There were a handful of bystanders pulled over not doing much of anything but standing around. I got the impression that they were already there not being particularly helpful when my friend started doing CPR. Looked like the kinds of guys who fancy themselves to be real rugged tough guys, driving big trucks and whatnot. The bystander effect was on display there. I'm pretty sure one of them was the person who called 911, which means they didn't really check on the guy, because if they had they would have been on the phone with one of my coworkers getting CPR instructions and doing it themselves. Remember that people don't usually rise to the occasion, they fall to their level of training.

As a philly native, I will say that the vast majority of philly fans are more reasonable levels of passionate, I've never personally been around anyone getting violent over a game, at worst just a lot of yelling and cursing directed at no one in particular.

But yeah, our worst fans definitely have a way of going the extra mile into the heart of crazytown.

Philly has a tough image and we're proud of it and embrace it, but a lot of assholes don't understand that being tough doesn't mean being needlessly violent, offensive, and destructive.

Personally, I like the lunatics here that climb light poles and think of the city greasing them up as a challenge, that's the kind of crazy fan I want to represent my city.

I sometimes like to entertain sort of a radically modified 2 state solution.

Both sides get their own state, the catch is neither state is in Israel/Palestine.

We carve out 2 Israel-sized chunks of land that are nowhere near each other from the emptiest space we can find in large developed nations, maybe the American southwest, siberia, australian outback, Canadian wilderness, etc. The world throws money at the problem for them to set up any schools, government , infrastructure, etc. they need to run a country in that space, then we draw straws or flip a coin to determine which gets to be the Israeli state and which gets to be the Palestinian state.

Then all of the residents get 2 options. They can go set up shop in their new country, or they get a one-time free pass to pick any other country in the world and be granted instant citizenship.

No one gets to stay in Palestine/Israel. It gets overseen directly by the UN or something as a giant world heritage site, people are free to visit, play tourist, make pilgrimages, etc. but no one gets to live there full-time, anyone who works there to facilitate tourism, conduct research, maintain facilities and infrastructure, etc. must be kept on a strict schedule where they're cycling in and out of the area so that they don't spend more than half the year there without special permission. Anyone caught attempting to live there gets departed to their home country immediately.

The new countries' borders are strictly enforced, no trying to expand the borders, settlements, etc. and it's up to them to negotiate what the border situation with their surrounding country.

If they can't play nice, we're taking their toys away from them and sending them to stand in opposite corners of the room to think about what they did.

If any verifiable God/Messiah/prophet, etc. should happen to show up, we'll defer to their judgement on the matter.

There are, of course, a million different reasons why this can't/won't happen, and hopefully they're obvious enough that I won't have to explain why it's a crazy fantasy.

Little context on that, we obviously camp and hike and such a lot, so trees are pretty much what we have available in the woods. And one of my friends has a pretty messed up septic system at his house that he's reluctant to put too much money into servicing because he's allegedly on the list to be hooked up to the city sewer at some point, so we go outside when we can to avoid stressing the septic system too hard.

We don't normally expect women to use the trees at his house (they of course don't have many other options when we're in the woods) but a couple have risen to the challenge over the years and more power to them. I don't think anyone has come prepared with a go girl, sheewee or other such device, they just pull down their pants and pop a squat behind a tree, but we're a bunch of old boy scouts so we'd certainly applaud anyone who did for being prepared.