SwingingTheLamp

joined 1 year ago

Watch the Not Just Bikes video, if you have the time and interest. The short answer is: yes. The trucks are enormous because they carry all the equipment for any sort of emergency, so they send the big trucks to every call. Not every fire station has an ambulance unit, so the trucks can get to many locations more quickly.

It's ridiculous.

[–] SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social 5 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Here in 'Murrica, they send something like in the second photo when grandma falls in the bathroom.

Yes, I'm exaggerating, but not by much. The truck in the first photo is smaller than the trucks my city fire department has. There's a retirement community not far from where I live, and they send a ladder truck for medical emergencies there several times a week. I'm not really sure what use 4,000 liters of water would be when somebody is having a stroke.

It's wise not to share the details, but the broad strokes are important: Information is the game. Getting it, distributing it, analyzing it. Successful authoritarian regimes always strive to keep people uninformed, terrified and unable to act.

Defend the information networks at all costs. Only with good information can we effectively do those things that it's not wise to detail in public.

That is exactly what they were hoping for, actually.

See, that's the thing: It's the passing lane, not the fast lane. A lot of semis are speed governed to 65MPH, so if I'm doing the 70MPH speed limit, I need to use it to pass them.

[–] SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social 16 points 1 week ago (12 children)

The left lane, and how no, it's not for going as fast as you want to drive.

[–] SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

That last but is almost NMEA 2000, which standardizes exactly that kind of information, but in boats. It's old enough that they based it on CANbus, but there are many repeater products to add IP devices (Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth) to the network.

ETA: By which I mean to say, plenty of designs already exist in the marine market which could be used to bridge a car's CANbus to consumer devices, if they wanted to.

There's still an important distinction: JMS likened Babylon 5 to a novel for television. It had a defined beginning, a middle, and an end, conceptualized that way from the start of development.

Yes, soap operas are serialized television, but totally open-ended. The producers of Dallas didn't plan for J.R. Ewing to get shot as part of the series arc; they didn't even plan him as a main character. A lot of soap operas have a very throw-it-against-the-wall feel. My grandmother was a Days of Our Lives watcher, and stuck it out even through the alien abduction storyline. Other people I know would stop watching for even years at a time, then come back and pick up whatever new storylines were then current.

I mean no disrespect to soap operas, as they give lots of people years of enjoyment. TNG itself was largely episodic, but had some soap opera elements, following evolving relationships among the crew which were carried through. But that's still not the novel-for-television concept.

I used to know a woman named April, and her two daughters are May and June. (Both still under age 12.)

True story. I remember back in the bad old days when Firefox had notorious memory leaks, so when building my latest PC, I put in 32GB. The monitor app on my desktop has only ever topped out at showing 30% of memory allocated.

[–] SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social 8 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Back in 2020, I read op-eds from several pundits who worried that choosing Biden was a mistake, as he ran on a platform essentially of returning politics to "normal." They worried that once he won, people would settle back into the old routines, and forget about the simmering fascist threat and do diddly about it. I remember this well, because I feared the same.

That's pretty much what happened. Credit to the House January 6th special committee for finally forcing Merrick Garland to get off his ass and do a something about the insurrection... 2 years later. (Which made it easy to delay the trial until after the next election.) That's about it, though. Hell, this wasn't difficult to predict, given the way that Obama decided to "look forward" and not hold Bush administration officials accountable for their crimes.

That is to say, if Harris wins, I predict more of the same. Folks on the blue side will breathe a sigh of relief, make excuses for why they can't act, and do their best to forget about it until the next most-important-election-in-history. We (Americans) don't have a plan to deal with it, and they'll instead just get angry and call you and me disingenuous, or Russian bots, for pointing it out.

That really hurt the elephant's feelings to be always singled out, so no wonder.

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