I work in 911 dispatch

The location we get from your phone isn’t exactly a magic “here’s exactly where this person is” button.

For the most part, we rely on triangulation from the cell towers, which means the quality of that location is highly dependent on how many towers are around, how close you are to them, signal strength, the surrounding geography, whether you’re inside a building, in a basement, outside, etc. and the location isn’t constantly updating.

I work in an area with pretty solid service, and at my cunter our policy is that if our ping is accurate to within about 300 meters we can use that if we can’t get any other location information from the caller, and most of the time we’re well within that, but not always. And a 300 meter radius is still a pretty big area, if that drops within a crowded downtown area, or if they’re in a high rise apartment or office building, that could be pretty much useless. And it takes us about 20 seconds to refresh the location and the new location may not be accurate when it does come in, so they’re in a moving vehicle they might well be a half mile away from where they were by the time the next ping comes in. And once you hang up we stop getting that location info and if we want to ping your phone again it’s a bit of a process that requires our officers or our dispatch supervisor calling the phone company, faxing or emailing them paperwork, etc. so not something we can just do totally on the fly, and for whatever reason the pings we get when we do that never seem to be very accurate, and it takes some time and we only get one ping at a time, and if we’re lucky we get one maybe every 10 minutes. We can also only request those pings when we have reason to believe that someone is in danger.

I suspect that there’s a whole mess of local/state/federal laws and regulations, and department/agency/corporate policies that come into play with all of this with a million different exceptions, but overall that’s going to be broadly true in most places around the IS at least.

We are starting to get more gps-based cellular location, this kind of depends on your phone’s capabilities and settings, what network you’re on, and your local 911 center’s capabilities. We’re generally a bit ahead of the curve on our technology and capabilities, so that’s not something everywhere can do yet. We’ve actually had it for a while but the implementation was pretty janky and not very useful, but we got some upgrades within the last year or so. It’s usually, but not always, more accurate than triangulation, the location updates faster, and we do continue to get location updates after you hang up but only for about a minute or so.

Generally speaking, we also have no quick way of knowing who’s calling from a cell phone. Your name won’t usually come up on our caller ID, just your carrier. If you have your emergency info filled out on your smartphone and made it available we can access that, but frankly most people haven’t. If you’ve called before and given your name, we can search for prior calls (in our jurisdiction) from your phone number. Otherwise we can try our luck with some free phone number lookup websites, or try to get the subscriber information from your provider, and if you’re on some kind of a family plan that may mean we’d get maybe your parents information from the phone company not yours, and some prepaid plans don’t really seem to have much if any information on their subscribers on file so it ends up being a dead end.

And that’s pretty much the extent of what we can do from 911. There may be other resources cops can use or other options for exceptional circumstances, but that’s outside the scope of 911 tracking your phone.

Also if you call a non-emergency line, even if it’s one that redirects into a 911 center (we answer a lot of the departments when they’re out of the office, some of them just always come into us, and even if you reach someone at the station there’s a good chance they’ll transfer you to our central dispatch) we won’t get any location info and we need to go through the phone company to get a ping.

And calls from TextNow numbers and other similar apps can be really hard to track down.

On further research, you are correct. I’ve heard the thing about it being deductible for the business repeated enough that I thought it was true. Guess that’s just a reminder to always be fact-checking. I will be editing my comment accordingly. I do feel like the rest of my comment still has some value on how to determine whether it’s worth it or not.

Thank you for pointing out my wrongness.

How are we defining “worth it?”

EDIT: THIS IS INCORRECT, the business cannot deduct your donations.Yes, the business can claim it as a deduction on their taxes. If it’s a business you like, maybe that’s a good thing, if it’s not then that may be a bad thing. Does the money that goes to charity outweigh whatever harm may come from that company paying less in taxes? I don’t know if there’s any good way to objectively say that.

You don’t really get much say in which charity that money goes to, it’s just going to whatever charity that company has chosen to partner with. Some charities can be kind of sketchy, not all of them are on the up-and-up. If it’s a cause you care about, you may be better off just donating directly yourself to a charity you trust.

Now your individual contributions doing this are really a drop in the bucket, let’s say you go to a store and donate at checkout 3 times a week, and since you’re rounding up to the nearest dollar, you’re donating a max of $1 × 3x a week × 52 weeks a year = a maximum donation of $156 dollars a year donated by rounding, probably going to several different charities, and realistically you’re probably donating about half of that unless you have some real OCD about your purchases being even dollar amounts, so probably about $78/year divided up among however many different charities the various places you shop at are involved with.

Now of course you’re not the only person making those donations at any given store, each store is probably making hundreds or thousands of dollars in donations between all of their customers rounding up their checks.

Unless you’re really struggling, you’re probably not going to miss the maybe $100 or so that get siphoned off from you making these donations spread out over a whole year.

Can you Deduct those donations from your own taxes? I’m genuinely not sure, my gut says no (EDIT: you can), but let’s say you can. Do you think that $100 or so + whatever other deductable expenses you have in a year are going to beat the standard deduction? If it does, then sure, feel free to save those receipts and try to add it all up, that sounds like more trouble than it’s worth to me, but maybe it’s worth it for your purposes, there’s a lot of different tax situations I won’t pretend to know for certain.

Are those charitable donations going to improve your life? That’s hard to say, I don’t know your life. EDIT to expand on this a bit Are you in a position where you’re going to benefit directly from a charity? If you are you may need to reconsider making a donation because you may need that money yourself. Although there are cases where a charity may be able to make better use of money than an individual, for example being able to pool money from donations to buy things in bulk at a better price, but you’d have to know how that organization is ran and how the money is going to get used to determine whether you’ll be able to benefit from that directly. Indirectly maybe you’ll see some benefits but probably not immediately and it probably won’t be immediately obvious. Maybe donating money now to a charity that supports youth sports leads to some kid taking up baseball who wouldn’t have been able to afford to otherwise which in turn keeps him off the streets, gets him scholarships, etc. when otherwise he might have ended up in a gang or hooked on drugs or something and broken into your neighbors car 10 years down the line to steal some change which resulted in your insurance rates going up because your in a “high crime area” or something. Or maybe it will just give you a warm fuzzy feeling inside.

A lot of Latinos are fairly conservative people, a lot of them are strongly Catholic with all of the baggage that comes with it, etc.

Basically the only major policy reason they ever leaned towards the democrats is immigration, so with the Dems going further right on immigration it makes a lot of sense for some of them to be jumping ship

I think in many cases a bigger issue is going to be how the game is designed, whether open or closed source.

If your open source game is a mess of poorly-documented, barely-decipherable spaghetti code, held together by a bunch of tacky bullshit, that’s going to be a nightmare to mod.

On the other-hand, a closed source game may have absolutely phenomenal documentation and tools available specifically to enable the modding community.

Similarly, you can have well-written, open-sourced code with built-in mod support with proper documentation, and you can have ridiculous bullshit closed-source code that no one is quite sure how or why it even works.

My family had an interesting experience with this

My mom’s cousin was a wonderful woman, I don’t think there is anyone who would have anything bad to say about her.

Her husband was a piece of shit. I’m not going to go into all of the ways he was a shitty person, I’ll just leave it at he was an illiterate moron who wasted all of their money, never held down a job for long, weighed probably well in excess of 300lbs (my mom, who is not petite by any definition, could fit in one of his pant legs) bought stupid cars and all kinds of shit for himself, and his wife had very little despite usually being the sole breadwinner of their household.

She got sick, my mom helped make arrangements for what would happen with their dogs when she passed because fat ass definitely wasn’t going to take care of them.

The day she died my mom was over helping take care of her, I was on my way over to pick up the dogs, I’m a couple blocks away and get a frantic call from my mom telling me not to come over, because he came downstairs with a shotgun and was talking about ending it.

I pulled up outside, my mom met me at the porch. He’d calmed down a little, I made sure cops had been called.

I go inside, there’s her cousin gasping for air beating down deaths door on the couch. He’s sitting in the kitchen, fucking around on his computer, distraught but not even giving a moment’s thought to his wife dying in the other room. He’s clearly more upset that no one’s going to take care of him than anything else. The shotgun is leaning in the corner of the kitchen.

We decide it’s best if I don’t stay long and I don’t pick up the dogs at that time.

I get on my way, cops come soon after, confiscate all of his guns. She passes, my mom gets the dogs and gets them to their new homes.

Fat ass never has a funeral for her, and definitely never tried to reach out to any of us.

Some months later my mom and grandmother are going to check out a new store that recently opened. They were driving near that house, and fat ass, being who he was, had recently purchased a ridiculous new Camaro, probably with life insurance money that most people would have used for a funeral.

My mom makes a small detour to drive by and show my grandmother that car, when they see several police cars and an ambulance turn down the same road, and sure enough they stop right in front of the house.

My mom pulls up and asks what’s going on, afraid that maybe he had done something to the neighbors, they’ve had issues before.

Turns out that they’d gotten a 911 call from the house, from a woman, who I don’t believe was never identified, we suspect probably a prostitute.

Fatass had a heart attack and keeled over dead.

She called 911, grabbed his computer and maybe a few other small valuables, nothing in particular that we noticed missing, and ran off never to be heard from again.

Good for her.

My mom was still listed as the executrix of their wills, so it fell on her to untangle their debts, see what could be salvaged, etc. it wasn’t much.

I’m especially salty about the whole situation because the house originally belonged to my mom’s aunt/he cousins mother. It had been paid off years ago, and at one point the plan had been for the house to be left to me, since her daughter didn’t have any kids, and most other branches of that side of the family were also dead-ends, I sort of represented the future of the family.

But when her daughter married fatass, since he kept wasting all of their money she let them move in because they would have probably been homeless otherwise, and they got the house when she died. They took out loans against the house, he didn’t really keep up with any sort of maintenance, etc. to call it a fixer-upper would have been an understatement.

My mom’s main priority was to have a proper funeral for her cousin, and had her ashes buried.

She never bothered to claim his remains from the coroner’s office. They tried to reach out to his kids from other relationships, other relatives, etc. and none of them wanted anything to do with him either.

After a certain amount of time, the coroner’s office here cremates the remains, and if they’re still not claimed I believe they eventually have them scattered or buried somewhere.

I’m not someone who cares much about what happens with my, or anyone else’s body, once they die. Once you’re dead you’re dead, and your corpse deserves no more respect than any other slab of expiring meat. I’d just as soon throw bodies unceremoniously into an industrial composter.

Many people of course have a different idea of that, and I’m willing to respect their beliefs.

But I think fatass should be more-or-less the model we should follow for bad people. Everything is carried out respectfully, but without ceremony, no fancy headstones, no elaborate funeral ceremony, and no easy way for mourners and kooks to make a pilgrimage site from it.

In some cases where religion and culture and such dictate that a body shouldn’t be cremated, I would support burial at sea, unmarked graves, or plain graves in in an area where they can be visited by family but not the general public.

For the US, I’d say a pretty strong contender is Woodstock, NY, with a population of around 6,000, and of course famous for the music festival of the same name (even though the actual festival was something like 60 miles away in Bethel)

Pretty much exactly what you probably think they are, I think they’re mostly a thing for people living off grid and maybe some RVs

Sort of

For most toilets there’s universal fittings that will work just fine, you may need to adjust them a little bit, but they’re made to be adjusted, and they’ll work just fine with most toilets.

If you have the original factory parts in your toilet, they may not be adjustable, and if you tried to swap them into another toilet they may not fit/work in other brands/models, or they may kind of work, but maybe not quite right.

There are a handful of brands that don’t tend to play well with the universal fit parts, I want to say Kohler is one, and if you go to a hardware store, most likely they’re going to stock the universal parts, then a couple of the most common oddball brands.

There’s also of course some weird toilets that are just totally different- pressure assisted flush, composting or incinerator toilets, etc. that aren’t even working on the same principle as most toilets, but I think the odds are that if you have one of those, you know that already.

Also I haven’t played with any toilets that were manufactured that way, but I did retrofit one of my toilets to be a dual-flush. Those kits seem pretty universal, but probably double-check before trying to put them in an oddball toilet.

One time I was working my way down the bread/dairy aisle at a grocery store. It’s one of the wider aisles there, if 2 people pulled their carts off to the side, a third person could squeeze down the middle as long as those first two took a little care to not stick out into the aisle too much

Of course they never do

So there I am coming down the middle of the aisle, trying to squeeze between some idiot agonizing over which container of sour cream they should buy, and some moron who can’t decide on a loaf of bread who are stopped directly across from each other, uttering plenty of “'scuze me/pardon me/lemme just squeeze through heres” and of course neither of them move an inch

I nearly make it, but do tap one of their carts a bit in the process

I give her a quick “sorry” and continue on my way.

Then she yells down after me with a very indignant “excuse you”

Lady, you were the one blocking the aisle without any situational awareness, and I already apologized, fucking die mad about it.

Centrifugal governors are possibly one of the origins of the phrase “balls out” or “balls to the wall” (although many say “balls to the wall” has to do with the ball-shaped handles on old aircraft throttle levers)

Also somewhat similar to governors are centrifugal switches, which are used in just about anything with an electric motor to disconnect the motor from a capacitor which gives the motor a little extra juice to get it going (I like this video for an explanation of how they work)

Purely annecdotally, picaridin has worked as well or better than DEET for me. I barely get bitten when I use it, and I usually get bitten up pretty badly when I use DEET (though less than when I don’t use it)

I also find picaridin bug spray to not feel greasy and has less odor than deet, which is nice.

DEET is also fairly toxic to dogs (and cats, but I don’t have one of those) and while it’s not licensed for use on dogs, it doesn’t appear to be toxic to them, which I appreciate as a dog owner (I’m unsure about cats, that info seemed less readily available but I also didn’t put much effort into finding it)

Yeah, I’m commenting mainly on quality, not value, they’re probably about the worst bang for your buck in a burger

US (as I think most answers in this thread are, people should really specify) I’m just gonna try to list every fast food burger joint I’ve been to into general categories

Top tier (in order)- shake shack, smashburger, five guys

Mid tier- checkers, cookout, Sonic, A&W, Freddy’s, Hardee’s/Carl Jr, White Castle (that ones gonna be contentious, I really like white Castle, but others intensely dislike them, so I’m hedging my bets putting them in the mid tier)

Bottom tier- Wendy’s, Burger king, dairy queen

McDonald’s is absolute bottom of the barrel, that said, they’re probably the most consistent, and they check off pretty much all of the things your body craves-salt, sugar, fat, protein, etc. so I’m not at all above grabbing a McDonald’s burger when it’s convenient and I’m hungry.

Not rated because I haven’t been to them: In-N-Out, Whataburger, Fuddruckers, Jack in the Box, and probably a few others

And of course pretty much any hole-in-the-wall burger joint or sit-down restaurant will make a better burger, but that’s outside the scope of this.

as you feel your body just stop doing things that keep you alive (like breathing)…

As I understand it (and to be fair, I’m no octopus scientist or human medical doctor) it’s pretty much just breathing that’s the issue. It doesn’t really directly cause any damage on its own (though the consequences of not breathing can and will of course cause quite a lot of damage in pretty short order)

The venom causes paralysis, basically by (someone correct me if I’m wrong) clogging up the receptors your body uses to send signals to your muscles. It will all get cleared up in about 24 hours or so though.

Problem is that you use some of those muscles to breathe. But if you make it to shore (you also need some of those muscles to swim) and if you get put on a ventilator right away (to do the breathing for you,) your prognosis is actually pretty good and there’s a nearly 100% survival rate (although that has to be two of the biggest “ifs” in all of medicine)

Another thing that comes to mind is your heart also uses muscles to do its thing, and I’m not totally clear on why that doesn’t seem to be a factor here, since paralyzing those muscles is basically just instant cardiac arrest. I did a bit of googling, but I’ll be honest I was in deep over my head in medical jargon and couldn’t make heads nor tails of it. I think my takeaway is that tetrodotoxincan affect the heart muscles, but I guess for whatever reason (dosage? Different kinds of muscles? The way your body processes the venom and moves it around your body? I really don’t know) it just kind of doesn’t, which I guess is lucky for us. I’m kind of hoping someone who speak doctor will maybe see this and give an ELI5 answer to that.

I suspect there’s probably a lot of minor consequences, like I bet your next trip to the bathroom once you recover in going to be some sort of event after your bowels stopped moving for 24 hours, but otherwise it seems like if you hang out on a ventilator for a day unable to move (which, to be fair, is probably one of the last ways I’d want to spend a day, but I guess it narrowly beats out a refrigerated cubby in the morgue) you’re pretty much in the clear to get on with your life.

The CB radio thing is going to be very location specific, I work in 911 dispatch, I think the state police around me theoretically monitor channel 9 on the highways, but in practice I wouldn’t have a lot of confidence in that, they barely look at info we send them over the computer, CB also has a somewhat limited range, so you’re counting on them having an officer somewhat nearby or you being close to their station.

As for local police, around me I suspect a few of them probably still have a CB antenna on the roof of their station and maybe even an old radio stashed somewhere in a closet but not hooked up and not being monitored, and the officers definitely don’t have them in their vehicles.

I’m in a pretty dense suburban area outside of a major city, they might still get some use in more rural areas where cell signals aren’t as reliable, though you’re probably going to run into the same issues with range limitations, in normal ideal conditions, you might get a range of about 20 miles or so, depending on atmospheric conditions, geography, etc. you might get only a fraction of that.

EDIT: FWIW, I keep a CB in my car, decent amount of chatter still happens on 19 around me, and a few other channels, and somehow channel 9 seems to have become essentially the Spanish language channel.

I believe when talking about naval ships, commissioning is when they enter active service, so construction probably began early 90s, maybe even late 80s, and probably a few years of designing, bidding, etc before that. And of course there were probably all of the usual idiot politicians, bean counters, stubborn assholes, sales people, etc. involved who pushed for older tech. Maybe because everything else they had worked on the old disks, maybe they were skeptical of the new tech not being robust or tested enough or wouldn’t catch on, maybe it was just cheaper, etc.

I’m willing to bet that they somehow locked themselves into using 8 inch disks in the early to mid 80s if not earlier, when the 5¼ discs were still new-ish and the 3½ were brand-new or not even available yet.

In general, that’s probably a pretty OK income, not amazing, but probably a bit better than average depending on where you are in the country, but far from being wealthy, you’re probably not struggling, but you’re not above needing to worry about money sometimes either.

And since public defenders are lawyers, that’s kind of a shitty income given that they had to go through law school and such.

To build on/give some example about what you said with the comments and function names (programmers, excuse the sloppy pseudocode that’s about to follow, it’s been a long time since high school intro to computer science)

Let’s say in a video game, you run around collecting coins, and if you get 100 coins you earn an extra life

One small part of that code may look something like:

IF
newGame = TRUE
THEN
coinCount = 0
lifeCount = 3
coinModel.all.visibility = TRUE
//Players start a new game with 3 lives and 0 coins, and all coins are visible in the level

IF
playerModel.isTouching.coinModel.x = TRUE
THEN
coinModel.x.visibility = FALSE
coinCount++
//If the player character model touches one of the coin models, that coin model disappears, and the players coin count is increased by 1
IF
coinCount % 100 = 0
THEN
lifeCount++
//if that coin count is divisible evenly by 100, then the players life count is also increased by 1

Quick notes for people who have even less programming background than me

++ Is used by a lot of programming languages to increase a value by 1

% is often used as the “modulo” operator, which basically returns the remainder from division. So 10 % 2 = 0, because 10 is evenly divisible by 2, 10 % 3 = 1, because 10 is divisible by 3 but not evenly and leaves a remainder of 1

// Are comments, they don’t affect the code, they’re just there for human readability to make it more understandable, so you can explain why you did what you did for anyone who has to maintain the code after you, etc.

Hopefully, between the simple variable names and comments, those pseudocode blocks all pretty readable for laypeople, but if not

The first block basically detects if you’re starting a new game (IF newGame = TRUE)
If it is, then it resets your life counter to a default 3, and you start with 0 coins and sets all of the coins in the level to be visible so you can collect them
Otherwise it would carry over the values from your previous level, or save game, or whatever

The second block detects if you touch a coin (playerModel.isTouching.coinModel.x = TRUE) If you do, that coin vanishes (coin.x.visibility = FALSE)
It also increases your coin count (coinCount++)
Then if your coin count is divisible evenly by 100 (coinCount % 100 = 0) it increases your life total (lifeCount++)

When the code gets compiled, that gets turned into machine code, basically all 1s and 0s that the computer can understand. The computer doesn’t care if you call a coin a coin or if you call it object1, it’s going to strip all of those human-readable elements out because it would just be a waste of storage and processing power to keep it in.

So when you recompile that, you don’t get any of the explanatory comments or the easy to read variable names, so you might end up with something looking kind of like this

IF
Variable1 = TRUE
THEN
Variable2 = 0
Variable3 = 3
object1.all.condition1 = TRUE

IF
object2.condition2.object1.x = TRUE
THEN
object1.x.condition1 = FALSE
variable2++
IF
variable2 % 100 = 0
THEN
variable3++

Which is a lot harder to understand. The code will still work, you could recompile it and run it, but if you want to make any changes, you’d basically need to comb through it, figure out what all the variables, objects, conditions, etc. are, and try to piece together why the programmers who originally wrote the code did it the way they did

And that’s of course a bit of an oversimplification, for various reasons it may not decompile and recompile exactly 1:1 with the original code, it’s almost like translating the same sentence back and forth between 2 languages with Google translate.

And even this little snippet of fairly simple and straightforward code would probably going to be backed up by dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of other lines of code just to make this bit work, defining what a coin is, the hit boxes, animations, how it determines if it’s a new game or or continuing a previous game, etc.