I’m not disabled, at least not visibly, there might be a bit of neurospiciness going on in the background, but I do have kind of a unique look- shaved head, big beard, curly moustache, and kind of an interesting sense of style, so I get a lot of looks (and, not for nothing, compliments.)

The other day I was dressed up a bit and on my way to meet up with my wife to have a nice dinner. I was wearing a linen suit and panama hat, so definitely dressed a good bit spiffier than most people on the street.

As I was walking down the sidewalk on my way to this restaurant, this little girls’ eyes just kind of lock onto me like I was the most interesting thing she’d ever seen, and she just kind of starts wandering towards me, and walks directly into my path. If I’d been distracted on my phone or something I might have tripped over her.

She wasn’t quite a toddler, but not much older.

I didn’t mind it at all, I don’t really like kids, it was kind of funny, maybe even a bit flattering, but i could definitely see it getting old for people getting that kind of attention for things they’re not in control or proud of.

You and I make s’mores very differently.

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.

I luckily haven’t been on-scene with a lot of EMS calls, I work from a bunker that’s usually miles away from where the action is taking place, so take thoughts on this for what they’re worth, I’m a bit outside of my area of expertise, and I don’t have a lot of details to go on so I don’t really want to speculate here, but I’ll leave some thoughts.

Also, just to reiterate, the class 1,2,3,4,5 terminology is what my agency uses, things can vary a lot from one place to another, and I certainly can’t speak for the policies and training and such that are in place anywhere else.

But an unconscious person is basically always going class 1 or 2 unless they were already a vegetable and it’s normal for them to be unconscious, but honestly even then it would probably be class 2 unless they really just need an ambulance to move them from point a to b and there’s not actually any other medical issues going on. They’re going to be going with some sense of urgency and leaving with lights and sirens.

If he was, in fact in cardiac arrest that is absolutely class 1 material. They’d be doing CPR on him or shocking him with a defibrillator as they’re going, he’d probably be intubated and they’d be ventilating him with a bag, I assume EMS in whatever town he lives in probably have some pretty good equipment so they’d probably have a LUCAS device to do chest compressions for them, etc.

I was actually on-scene with a cardiac arrest after a motorcycle accident once, helped perform CPR on someone until the ambulance arrived. I don’t think EMS was on-scene for 5 minutes before they were speeding off with the guy with lights and sirens going and a LUCAS strapped to his chest. I never looked up the call, but I would bet good money that that guy didn’t make it, but it was still fresh enough that there was a tiny chance and so he went class 1.

Hypothetically if they were able to restore a normal pulse with a defibrillator or whatever else they might have in their bag of tricks these days, it might go class 2, but that would still be high priority.

I can’t imagine any situation where they’re taking a patient who is unconscious and normally isn’t any less than a class 2 unless they’re dead.

From the short clip, and based off of the descriptions, it’s hard for me to say much. They’re certainly not running with the stretcher, but that could just be them being calm and professional, you don’t really want to be jolting the patient around after all, and they’re not exactly pussy-footing around, but still I don’t know if I’m seeing the kind of urgency I’d expect. If they did in fact leave without sirens, that’s really not jiving with the class 1 or 2 I’d expect for an unconscious patient, that sounds like 3, 4, or 5. It could be that they turned them on once they left the neighborhood, that’s not unheard of to avoid disturbing neighbors and causing a scene if there’s no traffic in the neighborhood for them to have to get through.

As far as VIPs getting priority, the only thing that comes to my mind that I’ve come across is one old rich guy with a note attached to his address with instructions that for basically any medical calls there can be directly airlifted to one of the big hospitals downtown

He’s loaded, lives almost right across from a small airport that one of our medevac helicopters fly out of, and made his fortune in some sort of healthcare/health insurance something-or-other (I’m fuzzy on the details of, but he was one of the big players in that field probably 30-40 years ago)

We have a handful of other pretty rich and influential people in my area, and I’ve gotten calls from and regarding a couple of them (nothing too crazy) but at least from my end of things there’s not a whole lot of special treatment going on. What special instructions the cops and other field units have isnt something I’m privy to.

I work in 911 dispatch, different areas and agencies may handle things a little differently but where I work we give our incidents a priority from 1-5, with 1 being the highest

For EMS, priority 1 is things like cardiac arrests, shootings, stuff where the person has a very real chance of dying any second.

2 is most of the things you’d expect people to call an ambulance for, they do need to be seen in a hospital for and relatively quickly, but you’re not immediately in danger of expiring.

3 is the stuff that you probably could have called around to a couple friends for a ride or called an Uber or something for or maybe driven yourself to urgent care. Like sure, you probably want to see a doctor about that, but it’s not really that urgent, if you waited until tomorrow you’d probably be no worse off than you are today and in some cases you probably could have slept it off.

4 is basically for psych issues. You’re basically completely physically healthy and stable, you’re just cuckoo for coco puffs. The only way you’re going to die on the ambulance ride over is if it gets T-boned by a semi truck, or you annoy the crew so much that they throw you out the back of the ambulance while doing 70mph down the highway.

Which brings us to class 5. You’re dead. You’re obviously dead and no amount of life-saving measures are going to bring you back. Usually they’re not even going to actually take you away in an ambulance, they’re just going to say someone with medical training can go “yep, that’s a corpse” in case the cops on-scene are even dumber than usual and didn’t see you breathing, they’re going to throw a white sheet over you and let the coroner come around later to scrape you up. Unless you’re Mitch McConnell apparently.

Kind of similarly, my wife tends to come home from work and get changed right into her pajamas, and I think that kind of flips a mental switch for her saying that she’s done doing stuff for the day, and so she kind of struggles to get any chores done after work or on her days off. She also kind of has trouble sleeping sometimes.

I tend to get dressed and stay that way until it’s time for bed, and I feel that I tend to be a bit more productive at home than her.

And I feel like that kind of helps create more of a mental divide. If I’m up and wearing clothes it’s time to get stuff done, if I’m wearing pajamas it’s time to relax and get ready for bed.

My old dog was a puppy when the local baseball team won the world series. We took him outside after the game, and our neighbor behind us started lighting off some pretty big fireworks.

The first one or two startled him a little, but he saw that we weren’t reacting and quick settled down. Then he started to enjoy them. He’d watch the neighbors light one up, watch it shoot into the sky and explode, and then back to the neighbor, tail wagging waiting for another one.

After that, any time he heard them going off somewhere he’d run around to the windows trying to get a better look. If he could find a good angle he’d happily stand there and watch the entire show.

My current dog just doesn’t react to them at all. We got her at about a year old, so I don’t know what, if anything, her previous humans did to desensitize her, but at most she just kind of groans and rolls over if they’re close enough to disturb her nap. I actually use them as a good excuse to take her for a walk because she is kind of dog-reactive and I know no one else is going to be out walking their dogs during the fireworks.

I don’t think it needs to be an actual AI to cause a “Chernobyl Moment” maybe almost literally.

We have tech bros and random clueless idiots trying to shoehorn these glorified chat bots into basically everything, and an administration that doesn’t seem interested in putting meaningful guardrails on the technology. What happens when it gets put in charge of something it really shouldn’t and starts to hallucinate?

If it somehow ends up in charge of critical safety systems in a nuclear plant? (Remember that some of these tech bros want to have their own plants to power their data centers)

Or air traffic control and causes multiple crashes? (Pretty sure I’ve already seen that idea being floated)

Maybe every cybertruck goes haywire stuck on self-driving mode and they cause tons of damages and deaths for a few hours until their batteries run out.

Maybe it gets used to route navigation in Google maps and it ends up causing massive gridlock in every major city around the world for a day or two

Perhaps it gets used for identifying vehicles on traffic cameras and automatically issuing citations, but ends up citing everyone on the highway for a week whether or not they actually did anything plus a bunch of cars that it hallucinated before someone catches on. Millions of tickets are issued and need to be sorted out, if anyone actually pays the fines refunds need to be issued, some people maybe get their license revoked and maybe even get arrested because of it and all of that needs to be set straight

If any of these kinds of things happen on a big enough scale, I think that could be a Chernobyl Moment for AI

In PA, where this bill is from, the state police already give out free gun locks, many other local police departments and community organizations do the same

A simple cable lock can be had for about $5 from Walmart and fills the requirement, and you can find them for even less if you hunt around a little, and this bill is also making gun locks and safes exempt from sales tax.

There’s also at least a handful of gun brands that include a lock as part of the standard equipment their guns come with, and at least a few gun stores that will happily give you a free lock with your purchase.

And while you may not have children, can you truly say that there will never be a child in your home? Do you have friends or relatives with kids or who may have them someday? Is it possible that they may stop by someday and your attention may be distracted from the kid for 5 minutes while they wander off and find your unsecured gun? Do you maybe have a neighbor with a special needs child that might wander into your house when you left the back door open to air out the kitchen after burning your dinner? If you don’t, can you say that will always be the case?

Could you live with yourself if that happens and the kid kills himself knowing that you could have prevented it with a $5 (or free) lock?

At least as far as ice harvesting goes, that’s a pretty well-documented historical fact that can be verified.

As far as my friends dad being able to ice skate on the creek, it’s a bit harder to verify what he was doing 60 or so years ago, especially since he’s dead, but he was also the kind of guy who did plenty of crazy things in his day, and that story would be downright tame compared to just about every other story involving him so it’s kind of hard to imagine that that was the one he misremembered or embellished, but I suppose it was possible.

And there are plenty of other little leftovers, like several parks and such in the area where the ice thickness is monitored by the park staff because once upon a time you used to be able to reliably skate and fish on the ice.

I live in an area where ice used to be an industry. Not even a minute drive from my house is a lake where they’d cut big blocks of ice and ship them downstream to stack and pack in sawdust and such to last the rest of the year. This area supplied a lot of the ice for the city of Philadelphia because closer to the city the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers were too dirty and no one wanted ice from them.

This went on until around 100 years ago, maybe even a bit longer, my dad in his 70s remembers his grandmother still getting ice delivered for her icebox for part of his childhood until she finally got a refrigerator.

My friends dad, who was a bit younger than my dad, used to tell stories about how the local creek would freeze over in the winter and he and his friends would ice skate down the frozen creek to get to another town about 5 miles away.

I actively keep an eye on ice conditions around me because I would like to try ice fishing some day. It’s only been a handful of times over the last decade or so where any body of water around here has frozen over enough for it to be possible, and even then it’s only been just the absolute bare minimum 4 inches and I’d ideally want another inch or two before I felt comfortable enough to actually try it.

I’ve never even seen that creek freeze over enough that even some foolhardy kids would be able to try skating on it, I’ve seen it get maybe 1 inch of ice, and even that was a rare occurrence, they’d break right through if they tried.

These are things that people around me should remember or at least should remember their parents and grandparents talking about, not something that’s totally out of living memory, and yet they still refuse to see it.