Con Flambers

Small EMS departments in particular need to nickle and dime; it's well and good to say "you should carry EpiPens" in the service - and I agree in theory - but in practice you have to ask, "where does the money come from?" We need to address the underlying problem of corporate greed.

One fact that will make you angry at big drug companies: a seasoned paramedic who serves as a TA for my class was talking about EpiPens a few weeks ago and said in oh so many words, "Yeah we used to carry these all the time, but then they got too expensive so we had to stop."

It feels vaguely naughty for me, a lowly EMT student, to get to use a $20,000 piece of equipment in class. But I ain't complaining

POV: you're in cardiac arrest and this boy is about to smash your chest so you still get that blood perfusing to your brain, heart, and lungs

Automated CPR devices are so cool (but also ungodly expensive)

Trumpist health care policy turns out to work like Trumpist trade policy: You navigate a bureaucratic tangle by requesting the personal intercession of the executive.

Christopher Lee as Sarumann from Lord of the Rings. Could honestly do this with a lot of LOTR actors

I see that CBS chose not to air this part. It probably explains much of what they did decide to air.

I'm scared all the time and it's exhausting. The cruelty in my country toward the poverty class and the disabled still takes my breath away. So many people truly think I have SNAP because I'm too lazy to provide for myself. I'm a quadriplegic. I truly need help.

The idea that the powerful never get held accountable is such an American idea tbh. You see other powerful democracies toss their former leaders' asses into jail all the time. Our elites just decided that in America, Donald Trump is a Very Special Boy who should never face accountability.

Reminder that Trump had dinner with this Nazi like 3 years ago

Would put money on TikTok consumption having an even bigger effect, esp since the data I've seen on TikTok's impact on politics has been Alarming to say the least.

TBH I long ago stopped feeling despair for the most part and instead replaced it with good old-fashioned rage as my "bad feeling of choice" about all this.

Among the many amazing things about Adams pleading his case here is that he openly supports and now is asking for help from… people who cancelled funding for cancer research.

I recently complained about the sparsity of data/map-making people on BlueSky, but we do have some here - here's a list of them. Will be useful for election night on Tuesday!

bsky.app/profile/did:...

Always odd to me that even people who earnestly profess that politics is a bottom-up affair seem to think that "tens of millions of Americans vote for the party that constantly promises to make everything worse for everybody but the ultra rich" is an incidental detail of our current crisis.

Oh, you have an emails job that pays you 80 grand a year? That's sick. That's so cool, dude. Yeah, but do you get to drive the weewoo machine? I thought not.

Yeah EMS professionals are criminally underpaid, but have you considered that we get to drive the weewoo weewoo weewoo vehicle?

Seems like people had fun with the baseball stuff, idk I was watching a movie

I would describe being in school for EMS as the knowledge equivalent of drinking water from a fire hose. I love it, but also: the work basically never stops

This might be the one that breaks me. Every federal agency reduced to banana-republic personal fiefdoms where criminal Trump allies loot the public and fire vastly more qualified people for daring to do their jobs. It’s unthinkable. It’s obscene.

In any previous era, INCLUDING TRUMP’S FIRST TERM, this kind of overt corruption would have likely led to Patel being shown the door. But in Trump 2.0, the media and our institutions have decided none of this matters, so Trump and his friends have formed a pact for mutual plunder.

One reason I think Winston Churchill enjoys a fairly sterling historical reputation still despite having a lot of awful views is he got a pretty important question right, that being "should you trust the imperialistic fascist ethnostate led by a fanatical Nazi to keep its word?" (no)

It’s okay to be glad that restaurants are doing stuff like this AND absolutely furious about the utter failure of the United States government.

Fun politics facts: in 2020, asking white voters without a college degree if they had read a single book in the past year was VERY predictive of it they voted for Biden or Trump. Trump won non-readers among this group, Biden won readers. I'm not saying... but I'm just saying.

Extremely confident that everyone at Trump's gaudy Gatsby party has never read the book and I can prove it mathematically

genuinely crazy-making how much the national press is indifferent to the verifiable fact that jd vance is buddy buddy with internet nazis, and the degree to which this is almost certainly a form of solidarity among people with a similar institution pedigree

Met up with a friend who's doing some organizing at his workplace and they wanted to consult with me about how to go about it... felt good to be useful!

You would be kicked out of any writer’s room in existence if you had the villains celebrating a Great Gatsby-themed party while taking away food benefits from millions of poor people.