Yeah I did get that from the article, I was more building on the comment I replied to.

But I do appreciate it, those little dialect differences can trip people up, like I’ve talked to a surprising amount of British/Australian/etc. people seem to think that when Americans talk about peanut butter and jelly, that we’re talking about putting a gelatine dessert (like Jell-O) on our sandwiches, because that’s what they call “jelly” (for anyone just now learning that’s not what we mean, what we call “jelly” is sort of like a pulp-less jam)

I work in 911 dispatch, I’m always a little amazed at how many calls I get for lift assists. Not for a patient that fell and hurt themselves, not for someone who weighs 300+lbs, it’s just that no one there can apparently help an uninjured, 100lb old lady up off the floor or to stand up from the chair she’s sitting in.

Now granted, sometimes it’s another 100lb old lady calling, or someone with other disabilities, and they genuinely can’t do it. But just as often it’s a reasonably young and apparently healthy, able-bodied person, and most shocking to me it’s sometimes a nursing home or other facility like that where you’d really think they’d be prepared to handle something like that in-house.

I know there’s proper technique and equipment involved, and in some cases theres a lot of liability issues at play, but man It’s pretty wild to me that so many people and facilities are either unable or unwilling to just pick someone up.

Also, from all of the calls for falls and lift assists I’ve taken, I’ve started telling my wife that if I ever fall and can’t get up to just leave me on the floor. Gravity has spoken, I’m to be a floor-person from then on. Just slide a skateboard under me and let me scoot around on it. I have some people who call almost every day, and sometimes multiple times a day because they’ve fallen and can’t get up, and I really don’t want that for myself.

You can’t really do it to yourself, but I’ve had really good luck ending other people’s hiccups by offering them $5 if they hiccup again

I’ve read what you’ve linked and plenty of other info about NG911, and like I’ve said multiple times I’m looking forward to the new capabilities it’s going to give us.

I still don’t see how any of it helps with the sorts of things I end up needing to look around on Google maps for.

I am very willing to be proven wrong about that. All you need to do is point out what specific parts of NG911 you think will help, and this conversation will end and I’ll admit I was wrong and you were right and you’re not doing that. Instead you’re just being a miserable asshole while I’m trying to have a conversation with you and understand what you’re trying to say.

So excuse me for matching your energy. I kind of relish the opportunity to be honest, I spend 12 hours a day at work talking to assholes like you who won’t listen to me when I’m trying to tell them how to not fucking die, and needing to be polite and professional to them. It’s pretty damn cathartic to call you out for being a dickhead and I’m not going to apologize for that.

I like my job, I like talking about it so that people understand how it works and how to access the help they need. I can only assume that you hate what you do and that’s why you’re acting this way. Sure, you make more money than me. I don’t give a fuck, my needs are met, I’m happy, and you clearly aren’t. Find a job you want to tell people about and help them understand what it is you do.

So much for

we know what we’re doing because we fucking read.

Guess you don’t actually know what the fuck you’re doing.

And not a damn part of that has anything that would keep me from having to look around on Google maps or something similar trying to match up a vague description of a location that my caller may not even be at to something that I can enter into our system.

For someone so hung up on reading, you’re really fucking bad at comprehend what the issue is that I’m describing.

Sure, I may getter more accurate location info, maybe even good enough to tell what side of the street my caller is on now, but I’m still going to need to figure out what side of the road they were on when an incident actually happened to figure out jurisdiction, because they may have turned around, pulled over 2 blocks away, turned I to a parking lot across the street, or waited 6 hours and went home before calling.

So one way or another I’m going to need to look for landmarks on a map or something like Google street view that my caller will recognize and get them to describe where they were in relation to those landmarks.

And sure they’ll be able send me pictures or video call me to show me where they’re talking about. If it’s live video that combined with location data while they’re still on-scene that would certainly be great, but otherwise I’m still gonna have to be hunting around on a map trying to figure out which of the 6 Sunoco gas stations in town they sent me a picture of.

And they can text me, which is something we’ve had in my county for a while. Great for people who aren’t able to talk for one reason or another, but not exactly a dramatic upgrade over asking the same questions and getting the same answers verbally

PSAP registries, better interoperability with other PSAPs, etc. is nice, but totally besides the issue here. Both sides of the border could be departments we dispatch for and I just need to know which one to send

And better address lists, ALI info, phone records and such are nice, but if they’re not at their home address, they don’t know the name of the business they’re calling about, and all they can give me is that it happened “in the park with a statue that looks like a dick” or “that vacant lot where Bob’s Deli used to be” (Bob’s Deli, as it turns out, burned down in 1983) none of that is particularly helpful.

Again, there are really good use cases for NG911, and I’M not denying that. Every day I find some circumstance where I’d love to have those promised capabilities that are allegedly just around the corner for us.

But none of them solve this problem.

And you’ve been sold on the idea that ng911 is some sort of magical pill that’s going to give every dispatcher $10,000, a pony, and a blowjob while the calls practically handle themselves, and that’s just not the case.

So get your head out of your fucking ass.

You’re a fucking corporation stooge who’s huffing your own farts.

There’s a lot of places where ng911 is going to be very helpful, this isn’t one of them and if you had any actual confidence that it would be helpful I this situation you’d be singing it’s fucking praises explaining how.

Those are the vibes you’re giving now. How about you actually try to explain how NG911 is gonna help with those scenarios I gave, because I don’t see any way the technologies involved that I’ve been told about are going to save me from having to manually look around on Google maps (or similar kind of service) to figure out where I need to enter a call.

Sure, I suppose they’ll be able to send me a picture or a video, instead of trying to describe it to me, but I’m still going to need to match that up to the real world somehow.

And sure, maybe our location data will be a bit better, but if they’re driving 5 minutes before pulling over to call, that location data won’t tell me what side of the road they were on when the accident actually happened.

My boot brand recommendation in general is Danner, they can get pricey but they’re worth it, and many of them can be recrafted with new soles, liners, etc.

But brands recommendations are very individual, some people swear by one brand or another while someone else may think that those brands are the most uncomfortable shoes in the world.

And really it also all depends on what you want to do with your boots. If you just need something to get from the front door to the car and then into the office, probably you don’t really need much. Any decent waterproof hiking or work boot is probably more than sufficient. Rubber rain/muck boots could work well with some heavy socks, you can even find some designed to fit over regular shoes if you want to take them off when you get to work and not have to wear boots all day. You also may want to go a half size or so large depending on how thick your winter socks are, so make sure you’re wearing whatever socks you intend to wear with your boots when you go to try them on.

I tend to like taller boots that I can tuck my pants into so they don’t get wet if I’m trudging through snow and slush, or you can also get gaiters to cover the bottom of your pants.

Traction on snow isn’t usually a huge problem, but if things get icy or slushy I’ve never really found any pair of regular rubber soled boots that inspired a lot of confidence. I usually use some sort of slip-on ice cleats if I’m going to be dealing with that, personally I’ve had the best luck with kahtoola microspikes, I tried a couple yaktrax models and they always seemed to break on me partway through the winter, but I’m sure some people have had the opposite experience or have other brands they like. I also had a pair of cheap logger boots for a while with a thick sole that I screwed some fishing wader studs into, and that worked pretty well but probably only worth it if you’re going to be outside for a long time and don’t mind having to change your shoes when you come in.

If you’re expecting to be outside for an extended period of time, avoid steel toes unless you really need them, that toe cap can get cold.

Pac boots are sort of the gold standard for insulated boots if you do decide you want that. They have a removable inner bootie that you can take out to dry faster between uses if they get wet

Insulated hunting boots are a pretty good bet, again I like Danner, but there’s certainly other good brands out there. I also know a lot of people who really like LL Bean style duck boots.

Also as far as cold weather boots go, I think the military style “Mickey Mouse” or “Bunny” Boot is always worth mentioning. They are almost certainly overkill for anything you’re likely to get up to, and you certainly won’t win any best-dressed awards in them, but if you find a pair in a military surplus store or something, I’m pretty confident that you will never find a warmer, more waterproof boot in your life, arguably they’re probably even too warm and waterproof unless you happen to live in the Arctic circle

Most importantly get some good wool or synthetic socks, cotton looses basically all insulation value if it gets wet, and even if your boots are 100% waterproof, even just sweating in your socks will make your feet cold eventually, so be prepared to change your socks if you need to. You can also get thin sock liners for extra insulation/moisture wicking, and can also help prevent blisters (instead of your sock rubbing against your foot causing friction and eventually blisters, you have one layer of sock sliding against another. I wear synthetic sock liners with my heavier cushioned hiking socks even in the middle of summer.) I’m a fan of darn tough socks personally.

I really don’t see how NG911 is going to help when all my callers can tell me sometimes is something like that they’re near some trees, a big rock, and a brick wall. That’s not exactly something I can punch into my CAD. Or when it’s a 3rd party caller for their grandmother in a different town who needs help, but all they can give me is that it’s a big yellow house about 2 blocks from the elementary school with a statue of a cow on the front lawn.

There’s a lot of cool things that NG911 can help with, some of it is already implemented in my county, but they’re largely not the things I use Google maps for.

I work in 911 dispatch, we’re not really supposed to log into our personal accounts on the work computers, there have been a couple incidents (not specifically in the 911 center but other parts of our county government) where people have gotten viruses and such from opening links in their personal emails on county computers.

A lot of us in dispatch make pretty heavy use of Google maps. When a caller doesn’t know where they are and we’re not getting a good location from their cellphone, we can sometimes see a lot of details on Google maps that we can’t see on the maps on our dispatch software.

There have been a couple times a caller has described a house to me and a general area that it was in but not the exact address, but I was able to get that address from looking around on satellite view and street view.

Sometimes we can see businesses and other places on it that aren’t in our system or come up as something slightly different, like maybe everyone calls a school “the Smith School,” but the actual name of it, and how it’s listed in our system is the “John Q Smith Preparatory Academy” so if I search in our system for “Smith School” I won’t find it, but if I look on Google maps I might see that pop up.

There’s cases where like if the call is on the border between 2 towns and I need know which department to dispatch, I can look on maps for little landmarks that probably wouldn’t be listed in any map software so that I can ask something like “are you on the same side of the road as the house with a big statue on the front lawn, or are you across the street from that house?”

Point is, it’s a very valuable tool for my job in situations that can actually be life-and-death sometimes, and since I can’t log in to it at work, I worry about getting shut out from features I use or even out of the service entirely.

There are 3 naturally occuring types of carbon, called isotopes, ¹²C, ¹³C, and ¹⁴C. These are all basically the same except for the number of neutrons in the nucleus of the atom. Living things can use all 3 types to build sugars and proteins and all those other organic molecules needed for life. Animals get it from the food they eat, plants get it from the air. These 3 isotopes all exist in nature in a pretty consistent ratio

¹⁴C, however, is unstable (radioactive) and over time decays into more stable elements.

But it also is constantly getting replenished from cosmic rays interacting with other gases in the atmosphere to in the atmosphere, so as long as something is alive the ratio of carbon 14 in that plant or animal to the other types of carbon stays pretty consistent.

But once it dies, it’s not taking any new carbon in, so what was there when it died is all it’s ever going to have until it decomposes away entirely or gets eaten by scavengers or whatever. The ¹²C and ¹³C are basically going to stay put, while the ¹⁴C slowly decays.

So to date something you just need to look at the ratio of the different types of carbon and you can figure out how old it is.

Let’s say ¹⁴C has a half life (the time it takes for half of it to decay) of 1 year (its actually something like 5 or 6 thousand years but this makes the math easy with smaller, easier to digest numbers)

And let’s say the ratio is 1:1, ¹²C+¹³C to ¹⁴C (again, it’s more like 1% carbon 14 IRL)

So after a year, half of the ¹⁴C will be gone, and the ratio will be 2:1

After another year half of that remaining ¹⁴C will be gone and it’ll be a 4:1 ratio, another year and it’s 8:1, etc.

This of course has limitations. After a long enough time basically all of the carbon 14 will be gone and you can’t really date things that way anymore. I think the limit is something like 50,000 years.

It’s also only really useful for plants, animals, and stuff made from them (leather, textiles, the straw in mud brick buildings, food, etc.)

So not really useful for dating rocks from a few billion years ago like we would need to date remnants of Theia.

There’s also a few things that can cause more ¹⁴C to form than normal, humans caused one with our nuclear testing, there was another event around the 8th century that we’ve discovered from measuring the carbon 14 in tree rings from that time that we think may have been caused by a supernova sending more cosmic rays our way than usual. So those events also need to be accounted for.

But there’s other similar techniques using elements with longer half lives that we can use to date older or inorganic materials.

For example uranium-lead dating. When the mineral Zircon forms, it tends to include uranium but exclude lead. But over time uranium decays into lead, so if you have a sample of zircon, you can measure how much lead is in it and figure out how long ago it must have formed because that lead must have once been uranium that has decayed at a steady pace over the centuries.

So we can use methods like that to determine when certain rocks formed.

We know pretty well what the earth and moon are made of (X% silica, Y% Iron, Z% aluminum, etc. with certain amounts of different isotopes) so if we were to find some deposit of minerals that deviates a lot from what you’d find elsewhere on earth or the moon, it’s pretty safe to say that that material might have originated elsewhere, like on theia.

I think you seriously underestimate the value of a propane grill

No. There’s not much that you can do on one that you can’t theoretically do on your stove or in your oven

But if you’re doing something that’s likely to smoke up, you can do that without filling your house with smoke, and sometimes a grill is exactly what’s needed for ripping hot direct heat, not everyones stove or oven can replicate those conditions well.

There’s less cleanup, usually you’re cooking things right on the grill, no pots and pans to deal with later, just utensils, plates, and the grill itself which often doesn’t need much more than a quick scrub or sometimes you can even get away with just burning it off.

Using your stove or oven can sometimes noticeably heat up your house, and in the summer that’s something most people are trying to avoid.

If you’re having an outdoor event, you can stay outside where the party is instead of hanging around away from everyone in the kitchen. You’re opening the door less to bring out food as it’s ready so you’re keeping the cool air inside and the bugs outside.

And frankly, not everything really benefits much from charcoal. If you just want to grill up some hot dogs you’re not gonna notice a ton of difference between charcoal and propane.

And all of that does of course apply to charcoal as well, but what gas brings to the table is convenience. Turn a couple knobs, press a button, and your grill is ready to go in a couple minutes. No waiting for the charcoal to get going, no needing to add more later on if you’re doing a long cook (and if you do manage to kill your propane tank, if you’ve got a spare, it takes all of 30 seconds to swap it out for a fresh one) and once you’re done cooking, just turn the knobs the other way and the fire is out and the grill will cool off pretty quickly. No need to worry about your still burning coals that might keep going for another couple hours because you misjudged how much you needed. And it’s less fiddly, want it hotter? Just turn up the gas. Cooler? Turn it down. You get basically instant feedback about how hot your grill is, unlike with charcoal where you may need to spend some time fucking around with the vents to get the right airflow.

If I can, and I have time, I prefer charcoal, but I will always have at least a small propane grill around as well, because it’s pretty hard to beat that convenience when you just want to quickly grill up a couple things for a weeknight dinner and be done with it.

Yeah, autocorrect was doing me dirty there

I don’t know how available they are in the UK, but I’m a big fan of Danner boots. Most, if not all of their styles are available in wide, a lot of them are recraftable so the sole, shank, heel counter, and liner can be replaced either by sending them back to Danner or by a competent local cobbler. They have a lot of options and I’m pretty sure at least one of them is somewhat similar to a classic timberland.

I have a pair of Danner lights with some hard miles on them hiking and close to daily wear. I got about 4 years out of them before it was time for a resole and the uppers are still in pretty good shape, and I expect to get at least another 4 years out of them.

IMO, no shoe is truly BIFL if you wear them regularly, especially anything that’s going to get put to serious use and abuse. Keeping them clean, the leather conditioned, letting them dry and rotating your footwear will go a long way towards extending their usable lifespan, and getting quality recraftable boots, while a bigger upfront cost, will save you money in the long run.

I’m not really a jewelry-wearer, and certainly not an expensive jewelry wearer

That said, I think it’s kind of fun. If I were the kind of person to wear jewelry, I might consider this. I’m a pretty hands-on, DIYer type of guy, I find myself fucking around with hose clamps pretty often, and hell, I might even say I have a bit of affection for them, I’ve solved a lot of problems with them.

That price seems steep to me, but I feel that way about most jewelry. I don’t know what material it’s made out of or how big it is, maybe that’s a fair price for how much silver or whatever is in it, maybe it’s horribly inflated.

I guess I like the plaid tops more than the hooters tank tops, but otherwise it’s just standard chain restaurant food. Nothing too special.

For me, most importantly I lay in bed with my eyes closed those are the two big prerequisites to sleep. If you’re getting out of bed or keeping your eyes open to use your phone or whatever, of course you’re not gonna get to sleep.

From there, what I do doesn’t matter much. I think about stuff, make up a story, just imagine a bunch of swirly lights and patterns, doesn’t much matter. Keep your eyes closed and eventually sleep happens.

Ever if “The Beast” itself isn’t used, I’m pretty sure a lot ,f the rest of the motorcade vehicles are all armored with various additional bells and whistles so they probably outweigh standard SUVs by a good bit. I’m pretty sure one of the motorcade vehicles usually has a mini gun turret that pops out of the roof.

Also, I haven’t seen anything specific about it, but I do believe the beast is at or near the end of its intended service life and i saw a few months back some article that pointed out that he was seen in an Escalade-looking vehicle instead of the beast at some event, so there might possibly be a new beast making it’s way into service, but they weirdly haven’t made any major announcements about it yet (I wouldn’t be too surprised by any other president being a bit tight-lipped about it, but trump absolutely would not be the type to shut up about “his” new custom Cadillac.)

I work in 911 dispatch, I like to think I have my head on more or less straight, but a lot of my coworkers are bootlickers

A few years ago when the BLM protests were in full swing and there was a lot of “defund the police” talk going around. I remember one of my coworkers was complaining about that

I pointed out how many fucking calls we get for things that aren’t police issues that we end up having to send cops out to because that’s basically the only tool in our box, and how if we funded some of those instead of the police it would free them (and us) up to handle actual emergencies

Of course basically none of them wanted to hear that.

And it’s not just mental health issues, it’s animal control, road and utilities maintenance, legal advice, code enforcement, homeless outreach, non-emergency healthcare, etc.

Hell, half of the “disturbances” (fights) I get are just verbal arguments between two emotionally-stunted adults who really need a middle school guidance counselor to go out and tell them to take a couple deep breaths and use their fucking inside voices.

And I would love to be able to hook people up with some of those services instead of sending a couple armed cops out to not really do anything useful about the problem.

And instead it seems like half the departments in my county have built a new police station since then.