conditional_soup

Not smugposting. Shit sucks. :(

I'm just wrapping up my last shift in fifteen years on the job. What I'm about to say is coming from the perspective of someone who operated almost entirely within private ems. I've moved on outside the healthcare sector completely because:

• Medics in decades two and three of experience get their asses kicked just as hard as medics in decade zero of experience. I've seen too many medics that were in their fifties and just miserable because the job never really gets any easier. If you get injured such that the doctor tells you you can't do the work anymore, there's precious little else you can pivot to; seems like you usually either get a TYFYS on the way out the door or everyone collectively turns a blind eye to the fact that you really shouldn't still be on the ambulance.

• It feels like there are few options for naturally growing your career in EMS with your experience. In law enforcement, fire, and healthcare, there are more opportunities to naturally pivot out of the front lines and into roles that both make use of your experience and offer more rewarding pay and challenging or interesting work. For example, moving from a firefighter to inspector or investigator, moving from being a patrol officer to a detective, or moving from a nurse to charge nurse. With EMS, your options are basically flight medic or supervisor, and there's really not that many positions available for either. Kinda related, but going lateral into other roles like RN didn't always exactly feel natural. I tried to go to nursing school three or four times, and each time I did, my schedule got jerked around and I had to drop the classes; every paramedic to RN bridge program I heard about had just finished getting shut down (likely because it limited the college's ability to milk the students by playing RN program fuck fuck games, and that made the admins sad).

• Seems like EMS as a whole still has the mindset of a job, and not a career. You can stay and flip burgers for as long as you like, basically. There's little institutional support within agencies to help people advance within either healthcare or emergency services. There's also not much support to help people be the best they can be at their job, you've really got to self motivate and care about being as good as you can. Agencies themselves often feel uninterested and disengaged in trying to make even incremental improvements to the way things are done, and seem to insist on only changing when acted on by outside forces.

Anyway, it's a well known fact that EMS struggles with long term worker retention, and we're all worse off for a lack of institutional knowledge and experience. What can be done to change it, though? As far as things go on the private side, I have no idea; the money has to be there, and the only thing that makes money is running calls. I've become increasingly convinced that the private model has largely reached the end of its life and needs to be replaced wholesale by fire and third service providers that don't depend on a private healthcare style pay-for-service model.

Urge: Dark

Adjusted to: Light

Messier 79 isn't real. I've checked. It just isn't there. It's a lie told by big astronomy to keep us buying guide books and telescopes, eternally looking for made up Messier objects that just don't exist.

Everyone always says that they can't see a dog, but you've got to be pretty stupid not to see it. There's so many other constellations that look nothing like what they represent, I mean, the Big Dipper looks nothing like a bear wtf; Orion just doesn't look like anything, like ???? It's just nice when you can look at a constellation and tell right away what it is.

https://apnews.com/article/trump-musk-gsa-terminate-office-leases-f8faac5e2038722f705587c8dd21ab26

Last week, regional managers for the General Services Administration, or GSA, received a message from the agency’s Washington headquarters to begin terminating leases on all of the roughly 7,500 federal offices nationwide, according to an email shared with The Associated Press by a GSA employee.

The order seems to contradict Trump’s own return-to-office mandate for federal employees, adding confusion to what was already a scramble by the GSA to find workspace, internet connections and office building security credentials for employees who had been working remotely for years.

But it may reflect the Trump administration’s belief that it won’t need as many offices due to its efforts to fire employees or encourage them to resign.

More than a dozen protesters, some affiliated with the Sunrise Movement, repeatedly stopped the DNC forum proceedings throughout the first 30 minutes. After five individual interruptions, six more protesters surged toward the stage, attempting to unfurl a banner, before they were forcibly removed.

The moderators — MSNBC hosts Jen Psaki, Jonathan Capehart and Symone Sanders-Townsend — grew visibly frustrated by the frequent outbursts, even as they readjusted questions to address climate change.

“If anyone else feels the need to disrupt, please stand up and do it right now,” Sanders-Townsend said.

But the protests continued — becoming so distracting that some of the DNC chair candidates vented their annoyance. Jason Paul, a longshot among the eight contenders, accused the protesters of “hijack[ing] the whole evening” and turning “this into scream night at the DNC.”

The city of Merced is having a series of town halls over these next two weeks. The first of which was last night, 1/28, at the Civic center. There's another planned for 1/30 at Merced High cafeteria, and a last one on 2/6 at Stowell Elementary. These town halls are an opportunity for you to tell the city what you think their priorities for the next year should be. If you're in the area, please go! It's a wonderful chance to meet up with other activist groups in the area and grow your network.

Does anyone have any experience home brewing a radio telescope? I'd really like to make one myself, both because it seems fun and challenging, and because it would probably be cheaper than buying one of there are any consumer grade radio scopes. I'm aware of some tutorials online, and one concern that I have is that many of them are intended to output data to software. I'd like to convert the signal into something audible, so that people can actually hear the emissions. The three targets I have in mind are: the sun, Jupiter (like the JOVE project), and hydrogen emission frequencies from nebulae. Ultimately, my goal is public outreach and education rather than amateur research.

I have next to no experience working with radio anything except old AM/FM receivers and walkies. I also know next to nothing about how radio telescopes work, so if you have a particularly good resource besides googling it, I'd be greatly obliged. My questions are: did you find building/using the telescope difficult or expensive? Did you find that it was worthwhile / would you do it again? And what advice do you have for someone looking at it for public outreach?

Hey everyone! I'm putting on stargazing classes in my city with the help of the city parks dept. It involves lugging out 12" dob (we mostly hang out ~120x mag, but I have plans to really juice the magnification if we get small classes and good seeing), some binoculars, and a green laser pointer. I just did the first one last night, and I found it to be a hugely rewarding experience. Unfortunately, the class was a bit on the smaller side and not asking too many questions (I think because it was cold AF for California), and I found the energy kind of flagging halfway through. My plan has been to teach the basics of star finding, telescope use, etc. and follow the Astronomical League's Urban Stargazing program (I want to help folks get certified if they're interested). I was wondering if anyone else has done any kind of astronomy public outreach and if they had any advice to help keep the engagement up when folks are taking turns peeking through the scope. In case you might be wondering, it's not a GOTO or PUSH TO scope, I personally find that there's a bit of magic in manually slewing the scope, but it does unfortunately mean that I spend extra time bringing the scope back on target between students using it.

We ended up with probably a dozen participants, with most coming and going within about 20 mins out of the hour. Again, I think the weather was a big part of it, but I was really hoping they would find it worth it to stay. We started the night off viewing Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and Venus, (not part of the urban stargazing program, but I wanted to include them), and moved on to showing the Pleiades and Hyades through low mag binoculars, and then on to the Orion Nebula and Theta Orionis, and finally Gamma Andromedae. Then, most people started to dip and we just kind of did requests until the end of class. Maybe I'm just enough of a dork that it would have kept me around in spite of the weather, but I worry that it wasn't interesting enough. Any advice would be appreciated.

Hello, fellow dogs. I need some advice. Every time I play fetch with my human, they keep trying to take the b*ll from me. This is causing me a lot of stress, because I want them to throw the ball for me, not take it away. Sometimes, I'll run away with the b*ll to keep them from taking it, but then they won't throw it. I mean, what's with that behavior? It's so frustrating, and it happens every time we play. I didn't ask, but the c*t said I'm in the wrong here. What do you guys think?