For the US, I’d say a pretty strong contender is Woodstock, NY, with a population of around 6,000, and of course famous for the music festival of the same name (even though the actual festival was something like 60 miles away in Bethel)

My friend forgot their umbrella at the office.

They nervously answered the phone.

They’re a lazy motherfucker.

I gave my friend a hug and wished them a speedy recovery.

Any of those sound unusual, or like they’re referring to more than one person?

It’s been a long time and I’m not sure of it’s current state, but some friends and I used to have a blast play Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator (I think there’s a couple other games out there now that are similar)

You kind of need the right setup for it to work well, a big TV or projector you can hook up to a computer and everyone needs their own laptop, etc.

The basic idea is- picture the bridge of the enterprise (or your starship of choice) you’ve got a bunch of people with their own consoles responsible for different aspects of the ships operation, the helm, engineering, weapons, etc. That’s what you’re doing.

I think at some point they added support for support fighters and such to accompany the main starship so if you have more people they have something to do.

We also made up a couple extra positions, like a captain who didn’t really have his own console, he just got his own chair front and center and a fancy hat and gave out orders.

My dog likes to steal things when we’re out of the house and leave them on the stairs or on our bed.

She’s not a breed that’s known for having a particularly soft mouth, their claim to fame is probably the opposite if anything (malinois) so it’s kind of impressive when I find an avocado or a martini glass somewhere unexpected without even the slightest bruise.

We joke that they’re her “emotional support objects.”

You need to do yourself a favor and go get yourself a proper frying pan/skillet. It doesn’t need to be an expensive or nice one, but if you don’t have one that can fit a few hot dogs, your kitchen is way under equipped.

What you’re most likely looking for is amateur (ham) radio. The exactly regulations will vary by country, usually there’s some sort of testing/licensing required (at least if you want to transmit, you can listen without a license)

I didn’t look too far into it but it looks like the app you linked is basically a tool to let you use your phone as a controller for other radio equipment. You’d probably need to be licensed to actually use it, and there’s a good chance the equipment needed is pretty pricey. Ham equipment can kind of run the gambit from handhelds that run from about $20 up to thousands of dollars depending on what you want to do with it. You’re probably better off starting with some more standard equipment before you start trying to rig together other stuff controlled by an app.

There’s a lot of info out there for free on the internet and plenty of books have been written about how radio, so there’s a lot of resources out there to learn from, or if there’s a radio club in your area (there usually is) you can show up to a meeting and ask some questions.

Assuming you’re in the US (different countries again have different laws) there’s a few other radio options if all you want is to talk to people who are local to you. You can get a CB radio (think Smokey & the Bandit or truckers talking to each other) some places have more or less people actually using CB radio. The range and capabilities are more limited than a lot of ham options, but you can usually count on a few miles of range, and sometimes it’s nice to get a heads up from truckers about traffic issues and speed traps and such. I personally like to use them with friends in different cars when we’re on a road trip.

There’s also FRS radios, you can pick them up pretty cheap at Wal Mart, pretty basic walkie talkies.

Many of those FRS radios are also GMRS radios, there’s a GMRS license needed to use the GMRS capabilities, not test, just a licensing fee, so that’s something to be aware of.

MURS radios also exist, I honestly don’t know too much about it, but it’s another free, no-license radio service you can use.

Each of those have their own limitations and restrictions on what you can do with them, but in probably 99% of cases you’re probably not gonna run afoul of the law if you don’t try to modify the radio or do something obviously stupid and use it in a way that’s not interfering with other people’s uses.

If you have enough people, bulldozers, and money to throw at the problem, sure.

Does Israel have that available? I can’t really say.

Some of the things that would factor into how many people, bulldozers, and money you’d need to do so

How big of a city?

What kind of construction are we dealing with?

How much are we willing to ignore worker safety and such?

How much of that city has already been partially demolished by other means the time the bulldozers get there?

How bulldozed does it need to be? There’s a spectrum here that goes from something “crashing a bulldozer into every building enough times to make it unlivable” to “everything completely leveled, and all the debris cleaned up, neatly pushed into piles, loaded into trucks, buried, etc.” Do we need to bulldoze the entire city? Or just most of it? Or maybe just enough that pretty much every block is looking pretty wrecked? Or maybe just all of the structures and we can leave parks, parking lots, streets, and other open spaces intact?

Do we have to be picky about using specifically bulldozers? If the end result is essentially the same, you could also use excavators, guys with sledgehammers, cranes, wrecking balls, explosives, airstrikes, artillery fire, etc. there’s plenty of other options to work into the mix if we don’t limit ourselves to just bulldozers.

I’m a 911 dispatcher

Was once at a party where a motorcycle crashed right outside.

By the time I got outside, 911 had already been called, my friend was already performing CPR. I know he’s been trained, so I let him keep at it, made sure he was doing it right, counted with him to keep time, and basically repeated the same CPR script I’ve given over the phone countless times and stood by in case he got tired and needed me to take over.

EMS shows up, as they’re running over with their equipment they tell my friend to get the guys shirt open, he starts undoing buttons, I tell him to just pop them, a couple lost buttons are the least of this guys problems, and every second counts.

I’m 99% certain this guy was dead the moment he hit the ground, but regardless of what the outcome was (I’ll probably never know and am OK with that, I’m used to that from my job, after I hang up with my caller I often don’t get much if any follow-up on how a call turns out,) if you’re going to crash a motorcycle and go into cardiac arrest, short of doing it outside an ER, you can’t do much better than the house with a 911 dispatcher and counting myself and my friend who was doing CPR, no fewer than 4 eagle scouts.

There were a handful of bystanders pulled over not doing much of anything but standing around. I got the impression that they were already there not being particularly helpful when my friend started doing CPR. Looked like the kinds of guys who fancy themselves to be real rugged tough guys, driving big trucks and whatnot. The bystander effect was on display there. I’m pretty sure one of them was the person who called 911, which means they didn’t really check on the guy, because if they had they would have been on the phone with one of my coworkers getting CPR instructions and doing it themselves. Remember that people don’t usually rise to the occasion, they fall to their level of training.

It seems like OP is probably pushing a bit of an agenda here (maybe a good one, maybe a bad one depending on where you land on the whole Israel situation, I’m not gonna go into that right now) but in case you’re just out of the loop

There’s recently been some incidents in Lebanon where pagers and radios have been exploding. Not just defective Samsung Note battery bursting-into-flames exploding, but packed full of actual explosives, detonating, and killing people exploding

Long story short, Israel intercepted a shipment of these devices going to Hezbollah, and planted remote triggered bombs in them.

And some people are concerned about this, and probably rightly so, first of all these pagers have caused some collateral damages, killing and hurting bystanders. Secondly, we don’t exactly know how widespread this has been- are there other people out in Lebanon or other parts of the world walking around with literal bombs in their pocket? What if those devices get lost, stolen, sold/traded in? What if the target had been onboard a plane or something when the pager detonated? What if the bomb doesn’t go off as intended- is it gonna go off in a trash truck, recycling facility, or incinerator when they decide to get rid of it?

I consider myself to be a fairly tech literate person. Not a professional, but better than average. The guy my family comes to to troubleshoot computer problems, basic working understanding of programming and networking but not nearly enough to do it professionally.

I think you’re shooting too high on some of these.

Basic hardware is good, but don’t spend too much time on it or go into too much detail, just kind of basic overviews. Boot chain is probably pushing it, but basic overview of operating systems is good.

I probably wouldn’t go so far as having them install their own Linux distro, that feels like you want to take a week of your class time to troubleshoot all the potential issues that come up, if you do it on school computers you’re probably looking at a nightmare getting that cleared by your IT department, and if it’s their personal devices you’re probably going to catch an earful from some parents for messing up their/their kids computer.

I do think it’s a good idea to have some computers running Linux for them to use so they can see what it’s like, and probably some macs too, I’m not an apple guy but there’s a lot of them out there and people should be at least a little familiar with both.

I don’t know what the current state of things in schools is, but you can certainly hand out some flash drives, but there’s a decent chance they already have some. I know over a decade ago when I was in high school pretty much all of us were already carrying around flash drives.

Programming is good to introduce them to, python is a solid choice, but unless these are kids who are pretty sure they want to go into computer science I wouldn’t go too deep. It’s not a particularly useful language for actual usage but I think that BASIC still has a useful role as a way to teach the fundamentals of programming to people in an accessible way to see if they may want to pursue it further. I know programmers hate it, but visual basic is also kind of satisfying because it makes it pretty easy to crank out something that looks like an actual finished product.

I’d keep networking pretty straightforward. Network stack and OSI are probably a little too high level to go into, but basics about WiFi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, routers, switches, firewalls, etc. are good to know.

Basic typing and general computer use are probably something a lot of kids could use some work on. A lot of kids these days have a lot less experience with keyboard and mouse computer use thanks to smartphones and tablets. Don’t shun the touchscreen devices though, they’re more powerful than a lot of people give them credit for, and since that’s the way technology is trending figure out how to push the borders on what you can do with them.

I haven’t, but I live in PA, so we have scrapple which sounds pretty similar.

I once drove through Ohio, don’t remember my exact route, but came up north from Kentucky to Cincinnati, then east into Pennsylvania

There may be more boring drives out there, but I haven’t made them.

Cincinnati seemed like a nice enough city though. Can’t think of any particular reason I’d ever want to go back, but I didn’t hate it, so that was pretty much the high point of my time in Ohio

My mental health is pretty solid, but it’s in spite of capitalism. I do pretty well at managing stress, I don’t have any real mental health concerns or other issues. I’m physically pretty healthy, have a decent head on my shoulders, and am lucky enough to work a job thats very secure and for me is pretty enjoyable and pays well enough that I’m not struggling in any significant way.

But damn-near every ounce of stress or anxiety I ever experience has to do with money. What if I lose my job, what if I have a health problem, what if I need a new car, what if my house burns down, etc.

Big one-time infusion of cash or a decent enough raise would eliminate just about every source of stress I have.

Poland and Hungary have historically been very close allies since the middle ages, lots of shared culture, history, they’ve faced similar struggles over the years, and generally they’ve always held each other in pretty high regard. They each even have a little poem about how much they like each other

Them polish version translates to something like

Pole and Hungarian brothers be,
good for fight and good for party.
Both are valiant, both are lively,
Upon them may God’s blessings be.

The Hungarian Version

Pole and Hungarian — two good friends,
fighting, and drinking at the end.

Unfortunately there’s been a lot of tension between them in recent years over the war in Ukraine, and their relationship has been deteriorating.

I don’t know, I’ve met a decent amount of Canadians over the years, never got any bad vibes from us. I think the problem is America has more than our fair share of assholes, so they approach us a little skeptically, but if you show you’re not an asshole, I think they like us just fine.

Of course, my biases should be disclosed. Most of the Canadians I’ve met have been from roughly the Toronto area, plus a good handful of French Canadians.

Couple of the officers at the border when I went to Montreal were kind of dicks, but I think that’s more of a universal feature of border crossing and customs officials around the world. Once I was there though no one gave me any shit.

An independent artist probably isn’t going to have an employer-sponsored retirement account like a 401k or a pension, etc. like many of us with “normal” jobs have, and are counting on to help our spouses, children, or other dependants should we die before them. Allowing them to retain the rights to an artists work for after death seems to me like it would help fill that same kind of role and also provides them a little protection, since not all artists are wildly successful and may not have been able to save much or anything for retirement/funeral expenses, etc. on their own. I don’t think it needs to last their whole life, their kid could potentially live 100 years which seems excessive and against the spirit of allowing things to go into the public domain, but I think seeing them into adulthood is fair.

Edit: I’m personally contributing to a pension at my job, my wife has never worked there but she still gets to collect that pension after I die, that’s a big part of our collective retirement plans. If we had kids, I’d want to make sure those kids are being provided for out of that pension at least until they’re old enough to live on their own. I think artists would also like to have that kind of safety net for their loved ones after they die.

I feel like there needs to be at least 2 separate sets of rules for copyright.

For independent artists, I think it’s pretty reasonable that copyright should last for their lifetime and maybe a little longer to make sure that their spouse, children, or other dependants can be cared for before the work goes public domain. We can quibble over exactly how long after death that should be, but that seems pretty fair to me (personally I’m tempted to say 18 years+9 months, so if hypothetically a male artist knocked up his wife immediately before kicking the bucket, that kid would still be able to receive something from their father’s works until they reached adulthood.) And if they don’t have any apparent next of kin, it just expires at death.

But when it’s not an independent artist, and it’s something like Disney, where that legal entity that owns the property could very well be around forever, I think it’s more appropriate to put a hard limit on it, maybe 50 years as long as they’re actively using the property- marketing it, selling merchandise, licensing it out, making it available on streaming, etc. and maybe 15 years if they aren’t doing anything with it (Again, we can quibble over the exact length of time, I picked 50 it’s a nice round number, and 15 because that’s how long a design patent lasts and it felt appropriate)

There’s of course going to be some interplay between those two categories, an independent artist who’s contracted to make something for Disney may retain some rights to that work, so what happens after 15 years? What if that artist is contracted to make something using IP that’s about to expire even sooner? What if an independent artist creates something insanely popular and builds a disney-like megacorporation around it with hundreds of other people all creating derivative works from that original thing, does the copyright stay with that original artist to expire when they die or does it become one of those corporate copyrights that expires in 50 years? And if the latter, does that happen automatically when the company hinsts a certain size or how would that happen?

I definitely don’t have all the answers to all those questions, but as a general framework that feels fair to me.

Another thing that just occurred to me, is that if we harp on people too hard about only calling 911 when it’s a “real” emergency, they start getting paranoid and are reluctant to call sometimes when they really should call

I’ve seen it happen in person, one time I was over my friend’s house and we had a short but really intense storm roll through. We look outside and a big tree on his property is leaning and very obviously about to fall over the road and probably take down some wires.

He starts talking about calling the township and the electric company and like 3 other agencies to get it taken care of and starts looking up phone numbers.

And I’m there telling him to just call 911. I get about 50 calls just like that every time there’s a storm, it’s not a big deal- you know your address, your cross streets, what town you live in, you’re not a moron and not freaking out and can explain the issue intelligibly and succinctly, so you’re better than like 70% of the calls I get on any given day, the entire call will last you like 30 seconds. We have all the contact info to get anything we need out there to deal with it and can do it blindfolded because we do it every time there’s a storm.

And even with a 911 dispatcher, standing there telling him to just call 911, he was really reluctant to do it because to him it wasn’t a “real emergency”

And of course everyone has a different threshold for what a “real” emergency is. I’ll get people calling in cool as a cucumber to calmly report that their daughter just got stabbed like it’s something that just happens to them every other Tuesday, and I’ll get people losing their minds like it’s the end of the world as we know it because some road construction is too loud (and of course that same person would probably call in just as angry that there’s a pothole in the road and they’re angry it hasn’t been fixed yet)

I have a thousand other stupid reasons people called, some came in on non emergency lines, some on 911, and just as many stories of people who called in actual emergencies on a non emergency line for one reason or another.

I think the worst case scenario is us getting hit by a hurricane at the same time our local nuclear plant has a major meltdown, there’s widespread cellular network outages, our dispatch center catches fire and we have to evacuate to our backup center, and there’s also a mass shooting incident going on while someone’s trying to deliver a baby over the phone with someone in a moving car speeding down the highway refusing to pull over and also fighting with their husband and causing multiple accidents.

Serious answer- my agency is lucky, even with handling basically every emergency and non emergency call in our county, our staffing and call volume are good enough that even a long wait for us to answer the phone is usually only like 2 or 3 rings. My coworkers are good at what we do, our training is better than what some other centers get, we can keep the calls moving, there’s about 20-30 of us on at any given time depending on the shift and staffing and such, and there have been major incidents where we’ve handled something like 1000 calls in the space of an hour or two and no one had any significant delay in getting their call answered. As a general rule, we don’t even put callers on hold regardless of how minor the incident is, or if they called 911 or 10-digit, we just handle the call and move on.

Non emergency calls, and honestly even a lot of actual emergency calls are a lot more simple than you might think. The majority of my calls have maybe a dozen or so words in the notes, many are just one or two words. I’m not taking a full report, I’m getting a location, a brief description of what’s happening, and some general safety information, giving them some brief instructions if necessary, then the callers name (if they’ll give it to me) and phone number and I’m off to answer the next call. I’m not taking a full report, I’m not an officer I’m not taking a full report that’s the cops’ job, I’m sending responders to go handle the emergency.

Every situation is different, sometimes I’ve had to stay on longer, I’ve had a couple calls I’ve been on for over an hour because the situation kept evolving and we needed constant updates from the caller, but that’s an extreme outlier. Most of the time my calls are well less than 5 minutes, often less than 2 or even less than 1 minute and between all of us we move through the queue quickly.

If we’re not busy, I can take my time, go full customer service, and help people with all of their stupid problems that are in no way a police issue. If we get busy, I can cut right to the chase, get what I need, and hang up.

Some agencies have higher call volumes, major staffing issues, and frankly are sometimes just bad at what they do, and that can cause delays. Some places it is a real issue, but I’ve had to transfer calls all over the country and most of the time it’s a non-issue. Overall, dispatchers know how to keep the queue moving, when they can slow down and take their time, and when they need to power through.

Also it’s a somewhat self-correcting problem. If there’s a long non-emergency queue, there’s probably a long 911 queue as well, and someone who doesn’t really have an emergency is probably going to hang up pretty quickly instead of waiting 2, 3, 5, 10, 20+ minutes for an answer for someone to answer. They’ll hang up and try the non emergency line, or try back later, or drive themselves to the station or hospital, or maybe just decide it’s not a big enough deal to worry about.

There are always weird exceptions and edge cases in our job, there’s very little we can say that will apply to all situations in all dispatch centers across the country. To some extent, you just kind of have to try being aware of what things are like where you are. If you’re not sure what to do, that’s what’s 911 is for, just try to keep things to-the-point, and listen to what we’re asking/telling you.

So there’s 2 aspects to this

What cops theoretically could do if they’re properly trained and motivated and working on the crime of the century with the media and mayor’s office breathing down their neck

And there’s what they’re actually going to do for anything else.

Theoretically it’s almost impossible to be truly anonymous in the world we live in today. If you make a phone call, there’s phone records the cops can get access to, security cameras everywhere, if you call from a deactivated cell phone or take out your SIM card they can try to get the the IMEI number and see who that phone was last registered to, if you submit something online they can try to trace your IP address, etc. they can try to track down witnesses who may be able to ID you, etc.

Basically none of that is ever going to happen just to trace down a witness that called 911 who’s probably not going to be cooperative anyway. People watch too many CSI TV shows.

And good luck trying to get cops to try getting fingerprints for anything short of murder, and even then they’re going to be looking for the suspect, not a random passerby who called it in. They’re also probably not going to get useful prints off a payphone because 10,000 people have probably had their fingers all over that phone since the last time someone bothered to wipe it down. And if your prints aren’t already in the system, they’re not going to be able to tie them to you anyway (although from the way you’re talking about it I suspect a lot of people probably have previous records and been fingerprinted)

The practical answer is call from the payphone, call from a deactivated phone without a sim card, call from a borrowed phone, call from a TextNow or similar service number. That is more than enough anonymity that in all but the most extreme serious crimes the cops aren’t going to put in any real effort to try to track you down as a witness. They may put in a little more effort if they think you’re a suspect, but it’s usually pretty clear if that’s the case. Most of the time, they’re probably not even going to bother looking up the phone records even if you call into the station from your own number.

If the department has it, you can also try an anonymous tip line or submit the tip online. Those may not be checked very often, so I wouldn’t necessarily count on that if you have an emergency you want to be addressed quickly.

Really, just call, they’re not trying to bust people for other stuff for calling in an emergency, they’re not ratting people out as the one who called, that’s all counter productive and just makes more work for themselves in the long run. Make the call and leave the area if you want, we can’t make you stay there and you should have at least a few minutes to skedaddle before the cops show.

Edit: call from a nearby business’ phone or a borrowed cell phone, and just don’t leave your name and try to stay off a security camera while you’re doing it. Unless you’re really distinctive looking, odds are the person who let you use the phone is probably not going be able to give much of a description of you if cops ask for some reason