Also not a biologist and I’m similarly out of my depth, but I’m pretty sure this part of the quoted text is kind of explaining that, but from the perspective of laypeople like us, is kind of glossing over it.

Based on the body surface area of humans and animals, and considering the metabolism and absorption of fluoride in rats

Surface area and mass/volume don’t scale the same way (for example the square-cube law- a 1inch cube has a volume of 1 cubic inch, and a surface area of 6 square inches, so a 1:1 ratio of volume to surface area,a 10inch cube has a volume of 1000 cubic inches, and a surface area of only 600 square inches, so a 5:3 ratio of volume to surface area )

I don’t know where/how in the body fluoride gets absorbed, but for the sake of argument, let’s say it gets absorbed through your stomach lining, so a big limiting factor in how much and how fast you absorb it is how much surface area the inside of your stomach has. More surface area means absorb fluoride more quickly.

So if rats were just scaled-down humans, you’d expect them to need a lower concentration to absorb the same kind of dose as a human.

But rats aren’t just scaled down humans. They’re rats.

And again, not a biologist, I have basically no idea what the inside of a rat looks like. Maybe their stomachs are roughly the same size proportionally to us, or maybe they’re significantly bigger or smaller, which would throw off how much stomach surface area they have available to they absorb fluoride.

And of course their metabolism and body chemistry is going to be different than a human. I’m pretty sure their metabolic rate is way higher than ours so basically everything inside the rat is happening faster, stuff is getting absorbed faster, but also excreted faster, and food/water is spending less time in the stomach leaving less time for that fluoride to get absorbed.

And maybe rats are just fundamentally better or worse at absorbing and metabolizing fluoride than we are, maybe their stomach lining is just more or less capable of absorbing fluoride, maybe they have more or less of some protein or enzyme or something that does something with that fluoride so it gets used more or less efficiently by their body, etc.

So all of that would need to be taken into account. Whole lot of math involved figuring that out that I don’t even want to think about.

And, of course, experimentally, we want to be able to see and measure the effects. The study is looking for its effects on the brain, not, for example, liver and kidney function (or whatever organs would be damaged by too much fluoride.) Trying to measure the IQ of a rat I’m sure is already hard enough in general, let alone trying to measure potentially very minute changes in it. It may be they’re trying to push the dose as high as they can to try to create any measurable cognitive symptoms, if we’re giving the rats 6x the normal dose, maybe to a level where it might damage their kidneys or something, and still not seeing any cognitive issues, it’s probably pretty safe to say that a normal, safe, dose isn’t going to cause issues either.

Policies and what resources are available are going to vary a bit from one agency to another, but assuming it came in to us on a 911 line

From landlines, we get an address for the phone number. There’s a couple exceptions to that with certain kinds of business and VoIP lines where the address we get may not actually be the actual address where the person is, or there’s always the chance that the phone company has wrong info, but generally speaking if you call from a landline we know where you are.

From cell phones, things get a bit fuzzier. For the most part we’re relying on triangulation from cell towers to locate you (we call it “Phase II”) which means the quality of that location can vary from pretty good to basically useless based on how many towers your phone can reach, signal strength, geography, etc.

What that location looks like is we get a set of coordinates

An “uncertainty radius” or “confidence factor” which is a distance in meters from that point that the caller is probably within

A “confidence percentage” which is how confident the system is in that location (I’ve literally never seen this be anything other than 90%)

So what it ends up looking like is something like “90% confident that the caller is with 200m of 40.12345°N,-90.12345°W” (random-ish coordinates, not sure where that location actually is, but it’s definitely not where I work)

I’ve seen the confidence factor be in the single digits, and I’ve seen it in the thousands. Sometimes it takes a minute before we get a good fix, sometimes it comes in right away, sometimes we never get a good location from it.

My agency’s policy is that if we have a confidence factor of 300 or less, we can enter the call as normal with just that phase II if we’re unable to verify that location any further

And if they’re in somewhere like a wide open field or parking lot or something, 300m is pretty good, they’ll probably see you when they get out there. If you’re in a denser neighborhood with apartment complexes and a bunch of houses, wooded areas, etc. that’s really not much to go on. Usually we can get at least that 300m, but again not always.

That phase II location also takes a while to update, if we’re lucky we can only get an updated location every 20 seconds or so, so if, hypothetically, you’re in a car flying along the highway at 70mph, you could be about a half mile away from where you were by the time we got a new ping.

So we always try to verify the location, and we can’t, as my callers like to put it “just GPS your phone”

New technology is rolling out, we can sometimes get actual GPS locations from your phone which is usually more accurate and updates faster, but it depends on what settings you have enabled, what your carrier supports, etc. I think my center currently can only get it from iPhones. Same for your emergency information like contacts, medical info, etc if you’ve filled that out.

Once you hang up with us, that’s usually pretty much it, we’re not getting any further updates on your location even if we call you back and you answer.

We also don’t get any of that if you call on a 10-digit non-emergency line, usually we get your phone number and maybe a name on the caller ID, but depending on how the call got routed to us, like if you were forwarded from a station, we may not even get that much.

If we get a call with no other usable location info, if it came from a landline we can look up the phone number to get the address.

We can also look up the phone number to see if we had any prior calls from that number that we might be able to get an address from. We only store those records for about a year, sometimes our police departments have records that go further back they can look up, but we need something to go on to pass it along to the correct department that would have those records.

Pretty much anything beyond that is usually something that needs to be initiated from the police. There are only very narrow circumstances where we’re able to request for a phone company to try to ping your phone, and even if we can do it, the location may not be any better. They can also try to get subscriber info from the company to get your home address (although that’s not always super useful, people move and don’t update their address, are on someone else’s plan, etc) if they get a name and date of birth they can try to look up your info from your drivers license info (again assuming it’s up to date) property records, etc.

So if we get a call that’s just an open line with heavy breathing or something else suspicious, we’re using those tools to try to get someone out to at least the general area to try to locate the, and police are hopefully using whatever other resources they have on top of what we do to try to narrow it down if needed.

We’re probably going to enter it as a hang-up call or a suspicious activity which just gets a police response unless we heard something that makes us specifically think fire or EMS are needed.

If we heard yelling, gunshots, alarms going off, etc. then we might enter it as something else as appropriate to make sure we’re sending the right resources.

If they stop talking to us while we’re on the call, hopefully the first thing we got from them was a location, it’s the first thing we ask, otherwise all the same thing applies.

If it’s just an open line, we’ll stay on for about 30 seconds or so to see if we hear anything. If we don’t we enter it as a hang up, try to call it back, and if they don’t pick up we just kind of move on and it’s in the hands of the police to do something about it.

Once in a while I get a notification that, for one reason or another, doesn’t actually bring me to the content it was supposed to link to and instead brings me to the main page of an app, and sometimes it’s difficult or impossible to find where the link was supposed to go

But going in through the notification history, the second try usually takes me where it was supposed to go

I remember shortly after the switch launched, my friends had gotten one, and when I was over their house one day I asked if they had licked one of the cartridges yet.

One of them said no, of course not. It didn’t seem like he was going to grant a request to taste one, so I didn’t press the issue.

A few minutes later he walked out of the room for something, and his wife, who is definitely much more of my partner-in-crime when it comes to dumb ideas, got a little bit of a mischievous look in her eye and asked if I wanted to lick one.

I of course said yes, and tasted their Breath of the Wild cartridge.

I asked if she had tried it when her husband wasn’t looking, and of course she had.

I’m pretty sure there are two kinds of people in this world, those who, on being told about the bitter coating on the cartridges have to test it out themselves to satisfy their curiosity.

And those who think the whole idea is gross and it never crosses their mind to test it for themselves.

And I think the two types tend to end up marrying each other, those two did, and my own wife has not yet licked any of our switch cartridges despite having ample opportunity to do so.

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As much as I’m happy to blame boomers

The youngest boomers are in their 60s now, not too many of them are out working as any kind of field agent. Most of those assholes out there now are Gen X, Millennials, or even Gen Z.

There have been some changes under this administration, and I don’t know what the current “rules” are (as if they care about following rules anyway) but I know at one point there was actually a mandatory retirement age for federal LEOs, and I’m pretty sure it was at about 55 or 60, so under those old rules you couldn’t be an ice agent as a boomer. Some probably hung around in admin positions and such, and since the rule changes I’m sure a couple have come out of retirement, but I’m pretty confident that that’s a vast minority.

The issues with not questioning authority, gullibility, tech-illiteracy, etc. remain though.

It hasn’t become a pattern yet, at least not in my area, but I’m sure it’s not gonna be the last call I handle where bad AI info is gonna be a problem somehow

I did mention it to my supervisor, and did my best to politely and professionally chew the cop out for blindly trusting the AI search results.

We’ve already had plenty of experience sorting out issues where addresses and such that people got from Google maps or whatever don’t match up with reality, but we’re pretty good at catching that kind of stuff and figuring it out.

As far as getting calls passed along to us in weird ways, unfortunately I think the only solution for that is for people to just suck it up and call 911 on their own instead of calling their mom. With a few exceptions for VoIP phones and such, if you call 911, it’s going to your local dispatch center wherever you’re located, and we hopefully have some kind of approximate location for you. The amount of times I’ve had to play 20 questions with a 3rd party caller who has no clue about what’s going on for something I could have cleared up in about 30 seconds if someone had just called themselves is pretty insane.

And even if you do have to be that 3rd party making a call for someone somewhere else, calling 911 is probably going to be your fastest way to get there. It can be weirdly hard to find a good number for local police sometimes, but most 911 centers have access to some database or service to find the right contact info faster than you probably would googling it (I’ve gotten calls come into me for towns in other states or even other countries, because they had the same or similar names to ones in our area, and the caller didn’t double check that they were calling for the right Townsville)

Although, I will say, some 911 centers are pretty terrible. One that borders my county has a bad habit of transferring any calls for something that isn’t in their area to us, either because they didn’t bother to verify the location, or because they just can’t be bothered to look up the information themselves and they know we’ll do it for them. Occasionally they even transfer us calls that they should have kept themselves and I have to transfer a really frustrated caller back to them.

That’s another thing my higher-ups are aware of and working on.

I work in a 911 dispatch center, one time I had someone from the police in one town, let’s call it Townsville, trying to get ahold of an officer from another town in our county, Citysburg.

I go to put a phone call request in for them, and ask what it’s regarding, and they say it’s about an incident that happened at the Mega Lo Mart in Citysburg.

There is no Mega Lo Mart in Citysburg, but there are a couple in nearby towns, some of them have Citysburg mailing addresses, or people might casually say that they’re in Citysburg because they don’t really know where the borders are, this is pretty common and we deal with it a lot, so I ask if they have the address to make sure that I’m getting them in contact with the police department that actually covers that store.

They spit out an address like 123 Main St in East Jabip

East Jabip isn’t in our county, I’d never even heard of that town before. I punch it into Google maps, it’s like 2 or 3 hours away from us and sure enough there is a Walmart at that address there.

So to make sure I wasn’t missing something, I asked why they wanted to speak with Citysburg police if the incident happened in East Jabip.

And they reply “yeah, I’d never heard of east Jabip either, so I punched the address into Google and the AI told me that it was in Citysburg”

Just blatantly false, AI-hallucinated bullshit.

And our cops (or their office staff, can’t remember who exactly it came from) just blindly believed it and didn’t bother to verify it at all.

And Citysburg isn’t some nowhere town, we’re a fairly dense suburban county, these two towns are maybe about a 20 minute drive from each other if traffic cooperates, and Citysburg is our county seat, cops from all over the county are there all the time for court and such and the surrounding areas, they should know that area at least well enough to know that East Jabip isn’t there

And they even admitted that it didn’t sound right to them, but they still went ahead with it and didn’t question the AI.

And luckily this wasn’t for anything too urgent, it was for credit card fraud or something along those lines. But actual emergencies get called into us all kinds of bass-ackwards ways like someone in another state calls their mom who lives here who calls her local police who transfer her to us so that we can transfer her to the police where the person who’s actually having an emergency is.

That kind of stuff happens pretty frequently by the way, that’s not some bullshit scenario I’m making up, I get that probably on a weekly basis.

And so it burns me up thinking that if there had been an actual emergency, having to sort out this bullshit could have caused delays in getting help to someone who needed it because someone outsourced their thinking to a shitty AI

Nah, even the bushes were better at this than him

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I had a math professor from Nigeria

The dude spoke like 6 different languages, but when he first came to America, he barely spoke a word of English (which is how he ended up in math, numbers work the same in any language, and probably why he was really good at teaching math)

But the dude had seen some shit in his day, and we’d occasionally get some absolutely insane lore drops about armed militias and such rolling through his village, I’m pretty sure he spent some time as a child soldier, he’d occasionally get a little nervous if he heard a helicopter fly overhead, etc.

I’m glad he taught math, because like I said, he was really good at it, but man, I would have just signed up for a class to hear him talk about his life.

I’m an essential employee who will probably always have to work in-person

I remember during COVID lockdowns with less traffic on the road my car was getting noticeably better mileage.

And I already commute at weird times when there really isn’t much traffic anyway.

Nothing much else really changed about my habits, a lot of my hobbies are solo outdoors activities that are pretty social-distancing-friendly, so pretty much everything else was business as usual for me, just with less traffic.

It feels like such a no-brainer to be that any job that can be done remotely should be

The goods you buy are transported to the stores you buy them from with fossil fuels

The public transit is, in all likelihood, powered by fossil fuels, which may make prices go up

Even if it’s an electric train, or your goods are being delivered by electric trucks, etc. there’s a good chance that the electricity is being generated by fossil fuels

But even if it’s not and it’s coming from solar, hydro, nuclear, etc. those are still likely reliant in some way on fossil fuels some extent for vehicles used to provide maintenance, deliver new/replacement parts, etc. and probably for backup generators to make sure critical systems stay powered in the event of an emergency shutdown, so the price of the electricity is going to go up.

You’re really not as insulated from this as you seem to think, basically our whole economy is based around fossil fuels, when the price of them goes up, the price of literally everything else does as well. Sure, you’re not outright paying directly for fuel, but everything else you are paying for is going to go up before too long.

Edit: also a lot of plastics and countless other materials you almost certainly use daily are made from petroleum.

For the record, I don’t think the government is in contact or aware of alien life, at least not any technologically advanced civilization (I’m open to the possibility of maybe them being aware of microbial life on Mars or Europa or something and keeping it under wraps)

But, if they were, and assuming we’re talking about a civilization based in another star system (as opposed to somewhere in our solar system or maybe in interstellar space somewhere) I think it’s a pretty safe bet that that’s being handled by people in the military and the president, etc. are all kept out of the loop.

Because it would take too damn long to get a message back and forth to them assuming they don’t immediately give us the key to FTL travel or communications.

Let’s assume that first contact was made in January 1993, and one of Clinton’s first acts as president is to acknowledge that we received their message, introduce himself, and signals that he’s willing to open a dialogue with them.

He fires off that message, let’s say it’s to proxima Centauri, the closest star to us, it takes a little over 4 years to get there, arriving around early to mid 1997.

They reply and we get their next message probably mid to late 2001 (I really don’t feel like crunching the exact numbers of how long these messages are taking to travel or speculating how long it’s taking to draft our messages.)

Bubba is out of office, and Dubya needs to be brought up to speed on the alien situation right around the same time 9/11 is going down. He fires off a reply, and gets back to starting a war in the middle east.

Aliens get that reply around late 2005, and send another reply. We get that around early 2010. Obama’s been in office for about a year, things have kind of settled down a bit. He fires on another reply, it arrives around 2014, aliens are starting to get the picture that they’re probably not going to have a real back and forth conversation with the same president. They send a reply.

Their reply reaches Trump in 2018 sometime. He rambles at them a bit, they get it in about 2022, the aliens aren’t at all sure what to make of that, they think maybe the transmission got corrupted somehow. What they do make out sounds like insane raving bullshit, but at least this guy will be gone soon and they can get back to talking to a real grown up with the next message.

They don’t learn about COVID, or Jan 6, or any of the other stuff going on. Biden get skipped over, Donny is about to receive that reply in a few months, he’s gonna be the first president to have an actual back and forth with the aliens, and he’s probably gonna be pissed that they’re asking if we can put Obama back on the phone.

So yeah, not a great way to be having a conversation. It probably makes a lot more sense to give that responsibility to maybe some career military types, or maybe some unelected pencil-pushers whose government careers can last decades and have more of an opportunity to select and train their successors to ensure smoother communications, and to keep the president and politicians as far out of the loop as possible, because there’s a good chance they could be out of office before they can actually get anything done.

The dynamic changes a bit if we’re talking to someone closer, if maybe we’re dealing with a fleet that’s parked somewhere in or near our solar system that’s authorized to act autonomously from their home planet. Maybe then we could loop the president in a little more, but if they do ever need to phone home for something we’d still have the same problem.

Or if they’re further away than the closest star to us, the problem gets even worse. Let’s say instead of proxima Centauri at about 4¼ light-years away, they’re instead based around Altair at about 16.7 light-years away. They would have gotten Clinton’s message in around late 2009 or 2010, and we’re probably just about due to finally hear back from them in the next couple of months.

How much do you think the average American flies?

Less than half of us get on a plane in any given year, so most of us aren’t impacted one bit by long lines at airports because we just weren’t going to go to the airport anyway.

And if we do, most of us are only flying a couple of times a year. A couple extra hours at the airport a couple times a year isn’t that big of a deal.

Especially since odds are that you already planned to arrive early because there’s always the potential for all kinds of hold-ups and delays at the airport anyway.

It’s something like 10-15% of the population who account for something like 2/3 of all airline passengers. They’re the only ones this is really “hurting” (and even then I’d still say it’s more of an inconvenience than causing any actual hurt)

And conveniently, it’s also about 15% of the population who are immigrants, and every last one of them should consider themselves to be in real danger of having their lives uprooted or even ended by ice. They are actually being hurt.

So no, fuck that.

I really only need 1 HDMI port on my TV- to connect my AV receiver to, everything else gets plugged into that receiver, it’s got about 8 HDMI ports.

Right now there’s 3 consoles, a pc, and a Chromecast hooked up to it, so I have ports to spare, and I haven’t had to use anything on my tv since I initially set it up and set the input to HDMI 1

It’s not necessarily feasible for everyone, it does take up a little more space in your entertainment center that not everyone has, but I also think it’s 100% worth it to at least have a decent set of speakers hooked up to your TV if you can find the space and budget to do so.

My wife likes to listen to podcasts.

And often I find that the podcasts she listens to are about things that I’d followed closely in the news weeks, months, sometimes years before (we just have some different interests, she’s actually probably the bigger news junkie than I am)

But so I’ve taken to calling her podcasts “late news” because she’s getting that news later than I did.

I think it’s coming sooner than a lot of people think.

We may even hit it within a year or so if we count the Steam machine and how that launch goes

Less and less people even have a home desktop these days. It’s basically gamers, programmers/IT/etc. types, and old people who refuse to learn how to use a smartphone.

A decent amount of those techy types are either already using Linux, or at least have some familiarity with it from working on servers and such, and it’s only a matter of time before a lot of them switch out of frustration with Microsoft’s enshitification

Gamers are already moving in pretty great numbers, valve has made it so that most games can now run fine on Linux which kept a lot of people from switching previously, and the steam deck has made a lot of people curious about it. And there’s a lot of people who have perfectly serviceable rigs that they can’t “upgrade” to windows 11 now that they won’t be getting regular security updates for 10, and with the price of RAM now, they may not want to invest in hardware upgrades and may turn to Linux to at least squeeze a couple more years out of their system.

And as far as the old luddites go, most of them could probably use Linux just fine. They’re not doing anything besides browsing the web checking their email, and using basic office programs anyway.

I recently switched my parents over to Linux Mint because their computer was just too bogged down with windows 11 bullshit and everything was going at a crawl. They’ve been on it for about a month now and it’s been smooth-sailing.

And I think as more of us gamers and tech nerds get more familiar and comfortable with Linux, more people are going to do the same thing. For those of us who have made the switch ourselves and play tech support for our parents and grandparents, the next time they call you up to come take a look at their computer, bring a Linux flash drive and boot that up for them. Tell them to play around with it a bit to see if they can live with it (I left my flash drive plugged into their computer for about a week for them to play around with it before I installed it for them) show them that libre office is basically the same as Microsoft office, install whatever web browser they’re used to, make sure their printer is working, etc.

And eventually, maybe they’ll even tell their old people friends about it. I can definitely see one of my mom’s friends complaining about how slow their computer is, and my mom saying “well my son put this Linux stuff on our computer, and it sped everything right up” and then boom you got old people getting curious about it too.

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I don’t know if this particular iteration of this is good, but I can see at least the start of a good idea here

I don’t know exactly what’s in their wing rub, but I’ll bet it’s probably along the lines of salt, pepper, chili powder of some kind (probably cayenne,) garlic & onion powder

Coffee has a fairly similar flavor profile to dark chocolate

Chocolate and chili peppers is a pretty classic combination, think along the lines of a Mexican hot chocolate

And salt also goes well with chocolate, and a tiny pinch of salt is a common hack to cut the bitterness of coffee.

The garlic/onion powder and any other herbs/spices in there are kind of the oddballs, they’re definitely going to pull things more towards the savory end of the spectrum, but things like coffee-rubbed steaks are a thing, and sweet & savory combinations are a thing, so I’m not immediately horrified by that concept.

Again, don’t know if this particular version is good, but I think someone somewhere out there could probably make a good version of this idea.