Our neighborhood has the Magical Chicken Wing bush. The dog thoroughly inspected it for months afterwards, and still checks on it now and then just in case.

I think it’s from the boot camp scenes in the movie Full Metal Jacket.

Looks like NOAA has historical data here: https://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/historical_data.shtml. The buoy from the screenshot in the article only has a few years worth, here’s 2019: https://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/download_data.php?filename=jkyf1h2019.txt.gz&dir=data/historical/stdmet/

Like many services in the US, it is highly dependent on the region. In the places I’ve lived (in California and Washington state), each county generally contracted with a private ambulance company (or sometimes several, just to be confusing) to provide transport services. Even if an individual city’s fire department staffs their own ambulances, they may still attempt to bill insurance (since they’d be leaving money on the table at the expense of their taxpayers otherwise). Some of them may cover city residents free of charge but bill people from out of town. It just all really depends.

I would definitely dispute your last sentence — in many places, ambulances are absolutely part of the predatory American healthcare industry. Plenty of people will try to avoid calling an ambulance or try to find an alternate ride to the hospital, since they know an ambulance ride may end up costing them thousands of dollars.

The article already has one example: “Juneau, Alaska, voted to remove fluoride from its drinking water in 2007. A study published in the journal BMC Oral Health in 2018 compared the dental records of children and adolescents who received dental care for decaying teeth four years before and five years after the city stopped adding fluoride to the water. Cavity-related procedures and treatment costs were significantly higher in the latter group, the study found.”

A nurse at work had “CA$H MONEY” tattooed inside her lip. Sounded like the result of a drunken dare/bet.

Fun fact - we will intentionally inject (small) bubbles of air into your veins to look for connections between chambers of your heart that shouldn’t be there. It’s called a Bubble Study. https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/what-is-a-bubble-study

Hospitals will hire some staff on a temporary basis (e.g. 3-6 month contracts) to fill gaps in their staffing during times of high demand. The idea is that experienced and flexible healthcare workers (whose living situations allow it) can “travel” by working 3-6 month contracts around the country. These contracts will often pay quite a bit more than permanent staff, and it’s especially desirable for staff from states who don’t pay as well (e.g. Florida) to work someplace that pays much better (e.g. California).

You will often hear of it in the context of nurses, but I’ve run into radiology techs, social workers, and all sorts of other staff who were traveling on contracts.

In contrast to your image, I find that travelers tend to skew younger (since they generally have fewer commitments keeping them in one place). However, I’ve also seen couples who travel together (both in healthcare), and facilities will often accommodate this by hiring both and scheduling them to work same shifts so they can carpool. I’ve also seen empty-nester couples travel with an RV.

Anyway, these travel nurses would need places to stay for 3-6 months at a time, hence renting a room to them.

My link issues seem to be fixed, I haven’t gotten any more crashes or white screens so far. Thank you!

I often leave Steam running in the background. Indeed, KDE seems to be suspending more reliably after I exit Steam. Thanks for the suggestion!

I just finished “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien. It’s a series of haunting (and sometimes poetic) stories from the author’s experiences as an American soldier during the Vietnam War.

I just started “Because Our Fathers Lied” by Craig McNamara. It’s about his growing up in the shadow of his father, Robert MacNamara, a Secretary of Defense and one of the architects of the Vietnam War (which the son and his friends were opposed to).

My backlog is digital, since the only way I’ll end up actually getting reading done these days is if it’s on my phone. If I hear about something interesting (usually either an NPR interview or mentioned online), I’ll either buy ebooks for Kindle (if they’re on sale) or obtain epub/mobi’s from other sources. I try not to do this too often, since it takes me a while to get through things. I think I have a dozen or so items in the backlog at the moment.

Added "mdns" service to allowed list for public zone, still get the SANE error. (Previously added 5353 UDP per another suggestion -- sounds like this is the port for mDNS)

“Die With Your Boots On” and “The Trooper” for me.

https://youtu.be/eeJu_eQPKKI

https://youtu.be/X4bgXH3sJ2Q

My city has a tool library program that sounds exactly like this (I haven’t tried it yet, not sure how well it works in practice). Would be especially nice for one-off sorts of tools you don’t expect to use often.

The downside is you’d need to line up your project with their hours, and hope no one else is using it when you need it. But if you have the flexibility to plan ahead, could be a nifty resource.

Across all provider and payer types, the mean reimbursement per ambulance transport is $1,147.

From: https://www.ems1.com/ems-trend-report/quantifying-the-gap-between-expenses-and-revenue-for-ems-services

So $1500 doesn't seem unusal.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services report they reference has a lot of information about how much ambulance service in the US costs to provide and how much they end up getting reimbursed: https://www.cms.gov/files/document/medicare-ground-ambulance-data-collection-system-gadcs-report-year-1-and-year-2-cohort-analysis.pdf

Personally, I can’t write and listen at the same time. The few times I tried to take notes in class, I ended up missing everything the teacher said while I was writing. I did best if I focused as intently as I could on what the instructor said and asked clarifying questions. (Fortunately, slideshows were usually available on the class website, so I didn’t have to worry about not having the information later.)

I do keep a notebook in my desk at home, and will sometimes jot down ideas related to personal projects in there. I feel that hand writing in this case helps cement the idea better than typing it. It’s also nice to be able to write down a quick idea without waking up the computer, logging in, loading up a program/website, whatever.

I always read “f/u w/PCP” as “fucked up on PCP” instead of “follow up with primary care provider”.

No change with allowing 5353 UDP through the firewall, unfortunately. But thank you for the suggestion!

Yes, "sane" service is already in the "Allowed" list.

Added some info to the post. Firewall is blocking 3289 UDP from my printer, so I added 3289 UDP to open ports for "home", "public", and "internal" zones. However, I'm still seeing filter_IN_public_REJECT entries in dmesg, so it seems the firewall is still blocking these. Is there a different way I should be telling it to allow requests on this port?

Firewall also allows mdns service (again, in "home", "public", and "internal" zones), but I also see entries like this:

[41951.119486] filter_IN_public_REJECT: IN=wlp0s20f0u3 OUT= MAC= SRC=192.168.1.1 DST=224.0.0.1 LEN=36 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=1 ID=10725 DF PROTO=2 MARK=0x3214

It sounds like 224.0.0.1 is related to mdns broadcasts, so it seems firewall is also still blocking these (despite mdns being allowed service).

Am I specifying these in the wrong place? (Per Connections - System Settings, my wifi is in Firewall zone "home").