22,721 karma · joined June 24, 2011
And they'll get even further down the line of "red states scream bloody murder about socialism while being supported by the socialism of blue states".
I always thought it odd that people asked what the worst calls I've been on were - like "tell me about an unpleasant experience". But the thing that most people don't consider is that they assume it will be a gnarly trauma call. TBH, for me anyway, when it comes down to it, we're just blood and tissue, and in some ways you can, and have to, just 'disconnect' from that.
The worst calls are the emotionally damaging ones: SA/CSA, elder abuse, domestic violence, tragic accidents, the like. Those add up.
A department in my County has two fulltime therapists on staff.
As you slice and dice, the problems become simpler, the answers easier, and the insurmountable chaos you showed up to becomes progressively more manageable.
Compassion fatigue, depending on where you work or volunteer, is a real thing, and is ultimately the reason I retired after 14 years as a volunteer and part time EMT, paramedic, firefighter, instructor, state evaluator for new certification and continuing ed, and SEI (senior EMS instructor) accreditation, which is a state requirement to be able to oversee and sign off on the accreditation of new EMTs to the Department of Health (in my state your program needs to be certified by the DOH, and one of those requirements is oversight by an SEI who ultimately accepts responsibility for delivery of the curriculum and attestation of test documentation and results.
Culture can be a challenge, depending on where you are, yet around here there are regularly engine companies staffed by all women (who, sadly, regularly have to answer the question of whether their CPAT - candidate physical agility test - is the same as the men's. It is).
Private ambulance and in particular IFT (interfacility) can be a drain. And most companies in private EMS nickel and dime the shit out of everything, rigs that are 300,000 miles in, held together by hopes and dreams, high call volumes - the right partner on those shifts makes it a fist bumping "we're in this together", the wrong partner makes it a miserable "FML".
There is an aspect of EMT training that is "how not to kill your patient who is critically sick or injured before they get to definitive care", and there is a lot that is 2am "I fell going to the bathroom".
It is hell on your body. You are picking people up off the floor, working around them in cramped conditions that say "fuck ergonomics and lifting mechanics". My students stand around on a big concrete pad in the apparatus bay of a fire station well lit on a Saturday afternoon. "This is the most perfect scene you will ever show up on". In reality it's 3am, the patient is morbidly obese, wedged between the toilet and bath in their double wide (none of this is judgmental, it's just the scenarios you have to work on).
And you're going to get paid utter shit.
Realize that most of the EMT salary reporting you might see online is a weird hybrid of paramedic and EFT pay reporting. The PNW is progressive and you'll be lucky to break $20/hour. Want to do it in the SE and it's very likely you'll be at half that, with companies promising that "you'll make more than you think because you can get as much OT as you like!" which is ... not the promise it's cracked up to be.
I loved it, relished it, it was my life. I missed it but now, mostly, I just look back on it and think of the few patients I genuinely made a difference to, above and beyond immediate outcomes.
I was a paramedic for 14 years, and saw more than anyone should see with people having to use the emergency system for issues that could and would have been taken care of far easier, with far less discomfort, risk, and cost, if they had access to some manner of healthcare safety net.
I had a kidney stone several years ago. I suspected, but didn't know, and the pain was crippling (vomiting, crying in the fetal position).
I went to the ER. CT. They loaded me up with pain killers and moved me by ambulance to another hospital 15 minutes away because they had no urologist available. They took me to theater, found some infection, abandoned plans, IV antibiotics, discharged me the next morning, to return 2 weeks later for lithotripsy or otherwise.
So I came in with a kidney stone, left with a kidney stone (and stent, and pain management).
My bill for this 12 hour process was between $60-70K.
"They're poor" doesn't cut it.
This is a very common thing. And while my presentation was less common, it's still not unusual.
You're not poor if you can't afford a $70,000 unexpected bill for an ER admission, a CT, an abandoned surgical procedure and a stent and an overnight bed on a ward.
> 2) medical debts are easier to ignore than other debts that these people also have (because they're poor)
"ignore" is doing some heavy lifting. There's an element of that, sure, but remember: these had to be legislated to not affect your credit score because they're almost always events that were not poor judgment on your part, but unplanned (they're not being generated from elective or cosmetic events). And people were being penalized for having the unmitigated gall of not having, to use my example, $70K laying around, "just in case" they got sick. And those penalties have real impacts. You still need a roof over your head if you're sick, but good luck finding a rental, let alone a mortgage, with that on your credit report.
TM3 is basically "if this is your approach to shipping sooner / more quickly, then you're going to have a bad time." It's not a solution for a delayed project. It's not "you shouldn't invest more in the infrastructure of a large project" (or at least not blindly).
Something about "this technology is invasive and violates the right to privacy of our members"...
And he has said “I am WP.org, it has nothing to do with the Foundation” which is weird because the Foundation hosts it.
All of these entities have been very … fluid … when it comes to how Matt chooses to utilize them.
Guess who owns an irrevocable, free, exclusive and universal commercial license for WP? Automattic. They got it the same day the project was gifted to the Foundation. Matt’s claims pushed for WPE to give damages to Automattic, not the community or foundation.
WP is OSS because it is as built on other projects and had to be.
Matt is not the victim here.
And that WPE didn’t owe the Foundation anything for their alleged issues, but their for profit competitor, his private company.
Matt has used “foundation”, wp.org, wp.com and Automattic interchangeably for years based on whichever definition was most convenient to him that day, so I don’t really see “it’s clear exactly what people were getting into”.
On the spam topic though, it is, or was, a common tactic for some spammers to do just enough on the call initialization front to generate a missed call or similar without actually ringing a device, leave no VM, the goal being to prompt you to return the call. Though this doesn't fit with the time delay aspect.
Not a single mention of Pepsi, or UPS who largely canceled their orders after waiting in Pepsi's case seven years to get 36 trucks.
But wait, it was parts and battery shortage! Except Tesla, you already said it wasn't batteries back in 2024.
Well, parts, battery shortages, the pandemic, semiconductors... and poor design on windows... completely changing axle lubrication...
But finally! You can order as many trucks as you'd like! Wait, that's what they told Pepsi and UPS, who ordered about 1,000 each. See what happened the last time they promised that!
> though charging infrastructure remains a hurdle, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch on the condition of anonymity
You will have a hard time charging them, when you get them, but you can order them and give Tesla your money now, and isn't that what really matters?
> “We fully admit we were wrong about the windows,” he said. “Turns out there’s a lot of infrastructure in the world, whether it’s a badge reader, or your toll booth, or you’re talking to somebody on a call box. There’s all kinds of stuff right at that height, and it became evident that we needed a roll-down window in order to make that infrastructure easier to interface with.”
If there's ever a tale of "Life at Tesla" beyond dealing with Musk... it's "Tech bros think they know better than domain experts".
> While Musk was missing, he did pre-tape a segment that ran before the event started. In the video, he said the Semi will be the “funnest truck to drive.”
Oh, well, that's a commercial driving priority, let's be clear.
> He also promised Tesla’s partial automation features (curiously missing from the Semi despite the years of delays) will be added in the “near future.”
No way. FSD for trucks is "Coming soon. Near future." We'll be able to set our clocks by it! This year. For sure. Or next. But real soon now.
What an utterly uncredulous article.
https://www.bmj.com/content/394/bmj-2026-100867
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/uk-lawyers-israel-calls-b...
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/9/17/uk-charities-protes...
... and they're variably being compared to physicians, specialists, "median healthcare professionals" (whatever that means).
I'm more breaking up that these comparisons... don't really make a lot of sense, the way many of the arguments here are going.
I live in a capital city of 60,000. Unemployment 4.5%, median household $79,000. Here, you're not seeing >$150K in IT unless you're a Director, or more likely a VP level employee.
Conversely, I drive by multiple homes that are being built or were recently built by physicians living in the area that are in the $2M range (our median home price in the area is just under $530K.
You can't say "the subset of one thing compared to the spectrum of another", because testers, tech writers (the "median IT professional") are not generally clearing high six digits even at FAANG (well, Netflix maybe, which is an outlier of an outlier).
> MSF had no indication that Fadi Al Wadiya might have been involved in military activity of any kind prior to his killing by the Israeli Forces. If the Israeli authorities had any reliable information about Fadi’s involvement in military activity, they never shared it with MSF either prior to his killing or when we reached out immediately after he was killed to ask for clarifications around the circumstances of his death.
> We would never knowingly employ people engaging in military activity. Any employee who engages in military activity would pose a danger to our staff and patients.
So let me ask you, is MSF a terrorist or terrorist supporting organization. If so, why?
Like my County's Sheriff, up for re-election, as an Independent, "I voted for Trump three times". Or the County Auditor, also Independent, "I voted multiple times for Trump and for Bush."
It was sadly too trivial using various Discord search engines to find things like BDSM servers advertising to "14-28 year olds", or ones where minors openly sell NSFW content.
Discord as a whole is oftentimes enabling the communities to prey on those users, not just making the users more identifiable.