Please share the specific jurisdiction where it is illegal to hire a moving company to relocate an AirTag.

So your "proof" consists of a personal injury law firm suggesting that they'll be happy to represent you if you were injured by a Good Samaritan?

The burden of proof is, actually, on you. You're alleging that you're opening yourself up to risk here. I'm simply asking for even a single example where this has happened.

My 911 dispatch center's medical director would beg to differ. She (usually) does not answer individual 911 calls, but is absolutely involved in establishing policy, procedure and protocols for the 911 call takers and dispatchers.

Yes, absolutely!

Do some research on what has gone into protocols for 911 Dispatcher Directed CPR (sometimes called 'DLS' or "Dispatch Life Support"). This isn't just a random person answering a phone and winging it. There are very specific protocols - questions asked of the caller, instructions given to the caller to assess the patient, the same question sometimes asked in multiple ways to ensure a consistent answer. CPR instructions are also given with a very specific formula. Dispatchers undergo specific training to perform this task. There's been quite a bit of research on this system. It might not be perfect, but it absolutely associated with an increase in cardiac arrest survival.

Paramedic here.

You are incorrect - or, at least, incorrect based on our current understanding of cardiac arrest treatment.

CPR instructions provided by 911 dispatchers are associated with lives being saved.

Current AHA guidelines for Pediatric Basic and Advanced Life Support specifically call for chest compressions to be performed even if the infant has a pulse at a rate too low to sustain life. Chest compressions are unlikely to damage an infant's body, since much of their rib cage is still cartilage and thus not likely to fracture as a result of chest compressions.

Adult guidelines for laypersons specify that chest compressions be performed for a patient who is unconscious and not breathing - even if they do/might have a pulse. While there is a risk of fractured ribs/sternum, that risk is considerably less than certain death due to ineffective breathing or circulation.

Your legal concerns are baseless. Point me to any judgement made against a Good Samaritan acting in good faith, following reasonable procedures or acting on the instruction of a 911 dispatcher. I'll wait.

Please go take an actual CPR class before you spout off outdated and harmful advice. We (the medical community) have been working very hard to promote CPR education among the general public, bystander CPR and 911 Dispatch Directed CPR. There's ample evidence showing substantial increases in survivability from cardiac arrest when dispatch provides CPR instructions, and bystanders and trained and comfortable providing CPR prior to the arrival of professional rescuers. Do yourself and everyone else a favor and take some time to learn something that could save a life, and quit spreading false information.

You're not wrong, but you're overlooking some practical matters.

My 86 year old grandmother could benefit from this device (and, in fact, uses a competing product purpose-built for fall detection that automatically places a 911 call when triggered.) My grandmother is statistically pretty likely to have need of this device at some point during the remaining years of her life. She's statistically pretty unlikely to be arrested, charged or convicted of a crime that police happened to notice/fabricate when they respond to her call for help. Its extremely unlikely that the police have any reason to look for an excuse to arrest my grandma. For her, the cost/benefit clearly supports having this kind of device.

I'm a young, healthy, mobile person who usually has my cell phone in my pocket. Statistically, I'm not likely to have any use for a fall detection device, hopefully for at least the next 30 years or so. I'd like to imagine the police wouldn't have any particular reason to want to find an excuse to arrest me, but I won't be giving them the opportunity. The cost/benefit doesn't support me using one of these devices.

That's life. I don't know if you've ever have had to respond to an elderly person who's fallen on the floor and remained there for several days before being found. I have, several times (I work as a paramedic.) Its gruesome. Beyond the medical consequences (broken bones, pressure sores, malnourishment), its degrading - likely lying in your own piss and shit, and then having your house fill with cops, firemen and paramedics to help you. And elderly people are rightly terrified of this scenario. I can't in good conscience recommend that they forego this kind of device because of the hypothetical conspiracy theory that the cops might dig up some arcane law just to throw them in jail.

Not everything that is illegal is punishable by prison time. And I would not expect scalping concert tickets to carry a penalty of prison time, nor would I want the tax payers to bear the costs associated with imprisoning someone convicted of scalping.

Ideally, this crime would be punished by levying a hefty fine against Ticketmaster, and investing that money into something which benefits society as a whole.

A lot of cynical responses here, and glib references to assumptions that the hospital chose to treat the guy so they could bill his insurance. As a paramedic, let me assure you that 1) cases of ambiguous DNR orders are among the most difficult decisions we have to make in our career, 2) no health care provider involved at the point of delivering emergency care has any idea how or if the patient can pay for treatment 3) most health care providers, especially emergency health care providers, are in fact huge advocates for DNR, hospice, and patient's right to determine the extent of health care they receive at the end of their lives. We don't get a kick out of resuscitating people for fun. A resuscitation is ugly, painful, and fails far more often than it succeeds. We know, as well as anyone, that resuscitation is so often futile, and that even a successful resuscitation rarely results in a return to a real quality of life.

Here's a few examples of real situations I've personally been in, to give you an idea of just how much of a gray area this can be, and how challenging it can be to do the moral and ethical thing.

A 40 year old man is diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. While currently in good health, he is expected to have less than 4 months of good health left, and 6 months at most to live. He gets stung by a bee, to which he is severely allergic, and develops an anaphylactic reaction. His airway is swelling shut, his blood pressure is dropping, he is losing consciousness and can't talk nor follow directions. He needs an administration of Epinephrine, along with multiple other drugs and interventions, to reverse the allergic reaction. He has a valid DNR bracelet on his wrist, which he has not removed. What's his intent? Did he intend for the DNR to prevent you from treating a life threatening allergic reaction?

You are called for an 80 year old woman who is unconscious on the floor of her kitchen. She has a valid DNR order. Her husband tells you she choked on her soup, and needs the Heimlich. You don't see any food in her mouth or upper airway. Performing the Heimlich, chest compressions, or inserting an advanced airway would violate the DNR. What do you do?

An elderly man arrives in the ER with fresh bruises. He is unconscious with critically unstable vital signs and inability to maintain an airway. A woman identifying herself as his daughter says that she can't find a DNR, but she is certain he had said that the doesn't want anything heroic measures done at the end of his life. You suspect foul play given his apparent injuries, but then again, old people bruise easily. You have no ID on the man, and haven't yet been able to ID the alleged daughter. Do you begin resuscitation, at least long enough to verify the pretense or absence of a DNR?

You get called to do a welfare check on someone who hasn't been seen in several days. You force entry into his house, and find him unconscious on the floor, surrounded by blood. There's a scrap of paper next to him that says "Don't bring me back" with a signature. You can't tell whether this is the natural progression of some terminal illness, an accident, an attempted suicide, or an attempted murder. You also can't tell the extent of the patient's injuries and whether they're obviously incompatible with life. Do you begin resuscitating the patient?

The case of my own grandfather, who had terminal lung cancer and a valid DNR. His dying words were "Please save me." He specifically asked to be saved. Do we start performing resuscitation?

In each of these cases, you need to make an initial decision within seconds. You don't have time to do a lot of research, interview witnesses, search for evidence. And, if you guess wrong, the patient could die - which is kind of a lot for us to live with.

I'm not trying to defend or blame any particular party here. I'm just asking for a little sensitivity to the fact that, most of us in emergency health care are decent people doing the best we can to serve our patients the best way we can. I, personally, find a kind of beauty in being able to help a patient live out his or her final moments with dignity and comfort, and I'm certainly not advocating that we always err on the side of resuscitating. I will, however, point out that there's a large number of cases where the patient's intent, and the right thing to do, are far from black and white.

Its possible that you might change your mind at a time and place inconvenient to a tattoo parlor. 99% of DNRs are in the form of paper, or bracelets. Which can be easily destroyed to signify your intent.

Paramedic here. This is technically not true (at least in any state I've ever worked in). Though, perhaps it should be. Of the four states I've worked in, each one has required that a DNR order appear on a particular form, with particular legal-ese. Each state has required that the form be witnessed by at least one additional competent party, and three of the four have required that it be signed by the patient's primary care physician. Some states allow medic alert bracelets to signify a DNR order. The paperwork typically allows the patient to opt in or out of specific interventions (for instance, you can have a DNR, that would allow your ventilations to be assisted via rescue breathing, but would not allow a breathing tube to be inserted.) A tatoo would not be considered a legal DNR in any state I've ever worked in. Now, this has actually caused real problems in the past, that I've personally been involved with on several occasions. Some hospice services weren't great about getting the proper paperwork in place, or educating the patient's family on the necessity of having the paperwork present and producible. So when a terminally ill hospice patient dies, some family member panics and calls 911, we show up and find an obviously terminally ill hospice patient either in cardiac arrest or damn close to it, but no technically legal DNR present. Technically, we'd have to begin full resuscitation efforts. In practice, a quick call to our supervising physician is usually enough to get permission to withhold resuscitation efforts. One state required a DNR bracelet be physically on the patient's wrist for the DNR to be valid. Thought being that the patient could remove the bracelet from their wrist, if they wished to signify their intent to rescind the DNR. Turns out, people sometimes fall or thrash around as they die, and these bracelets were coming off in what I'd presume to be an accident. Again, puts us as paramedics in a tough spot. Long story short - I personally believe it should be easier for people to indicate their end of life preferences. Though, the current situation would render things like this tatoo to not be a valid DNR, in many states.

One of the more significant events in recent Slashdot history was the bungling (and ultimate dismissal) of the failed Beta redesign project. A topic which, understandably, gets little further mention from the /. staff - but I'd love to see something of a postmortem of that project. Seems like it could be a useful parable for our audience.

The fact that the operation is irreversible is clear enough. That fact that "all changes" is actually synonymous with "every file, regardless of whether or not you think you've actually CHANGED it" is not.

> Go to less developed countries and you don't see plastic bottles and plastic bags and food being thrown away like it worthless. You don't see 50 gallon garbage cans being emptied every week.

Have you actually ever traveled anywhere near a "less-developed" country?

Consider Rwanda, for example, which has such a problem with discarded plastic bags that they actually prohibit you from bringing them into the country. As in, the customs officials search your luggage and confiscate any that you might try to sneak in.

Paramedic here.

The specific drugs you're referring to here (Epi, Atropine, D50, etc) are known as "code drugs" or "ACLS drugs." The majority of these drugs are actually quite cheap, as far as pharmaceuticals go. In all honesty, it ends up being cheaper just to discard these drugs when they expire, rather than investing the effort in tracking expiration and rotating drugs across multiple sites and potentially across multiple organizations (like between unaffiliated doctor offices and ambulance services.) It doesn't have anything to do with "unlicensed re-sale" or whatever imaginary regulations you've come up with - its actually just less cost effective than budgeting to replace them every ~2 years or so.

That said, we have identified cost savings by coordinating purchasing across multiple EMS services, clinics, etc, just to be able to leverage volume discounts. But that requires far less manpower to manage than it would to coordinate a large scale drug rotation project in hopes of saving, maybe, a couple hundred dollars every few years.

A more interesting problem concerns the small number of expensive drugs, which treat rare conditions, but are carried by many ambulances and stocked by many hospitals. A few examples that come to mind off the top of my head - Dantrolene is a drug which is occasionally used in small quantities to treat muscle spasms. It's also the only treatment for an incredibly rare but quite deadly condition called malignant hyperthermia, where it needed in huge quantities. So you have hospitals which stock enormous quantities of this drug, knowing full well that it will almost certainly expire prior to being used. There's similar stories for drugs to reverse poisonings that are damn near statistically never going to occur - but, we have to have them, and have to have them readily available.

So you allude to a somewhat interesting problem... But the problem really isn't sugar water (D50) and cheap Epinephrine. Its these other, far more expensive and very rarely used drugs. I'm not sure there's a clear solution to the problem, though.

That's the problem - In your analogy, you've hired "production workers" when you actually need engineers.
If you're hiring people dumb enough to copy and paste code into production, without understanding the ramifications, you deserve what you get.