https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

If I had spent as much time chasing ass when I was 15 as I spent chasing Russian Sub Pens at 200' AGL.....

...and because I hit the submit button too fast:

The tax money is going to the school, yes. Generally, to the teachers salaries, not to the facilities. Problem is with such an expensive place to live, if you want any sort of teacher retention, you're going to pay. Dearly.

There's the administrative costs, too. 5 Principals with full staff for each school. Very well paid superintendent looking over a school population of just over 1400 kids. There are regional schools in Southern New Jersey that are 6000+ kids for one superintendent. But, by law, we have to pay for the schumck.

Hi. New Jersey Homeowner here.

Yup, highest average property taxes in the nation. In real numbers: I live in Passaic County. 2nd highest tax rate next to Bergen (the next door County). In real terms: I have a small home on a 50x125 foot lot. My property taxes, per year, are 9k. Yes, you read that right. It's expensive living here.

Why? Here's a large reason - New Jersey has 21 Counties and 565 Municipalities, with a land area of 8,700 square miles. Texas, by comparison, has 254 Counties and 1,214 Municipalities in 268,597 square miles. So Texas, being 30 times larger, only has double the amount of Municipalities. This has painful concequence. Back 130 years ago, NJ was big on breaking up these big districts into these tiny municipalities.
  My town is the typical New Jersey Story: The town I live in has a land area of only 4 square miles. It has 13,000 residents. We have our own, non-shared (other than in an emergency) Police Department, DPW, Pre-Kindergartern program, 2 grammar schools, a Middle school (grades 6-8), and our own high school. Our own Superientandant, Mayor, etc... etc.... The town next to us has a population of 7,000....and their own grammar school and middle schools, own Police Department, own DPW, etc....

Lots of very small towns with low populations, and no regionalization of cost. Regional schools are common in Southern New Jersey, but in North Jersey, are rare. Rather than merge districts with the one next to us, saving 3/4 of a million dollars a year, we stay separate. So, yes, the property tax is staggering to support all oft these services on a town-by-town basis. The amount of money the state gets from us is reasonable, but it's nothing compared to what we pay the towns to keep things running.

Long story, short: yes, the taxes are high and we don't really get shit from the state for it and get utterly screwed by the federal government every year.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned this little car yet.

Mazda got it right with this car. It's a very good blend of screen and knob. They clearly took the time to think though what functions the driver needed while driving, and what functions they needed at rest, and separated them. I haven't had a car since the 80's and early 90's cars that got it right. I (almost) never need the screen while driving. The stuff I need: A/C, heat, mirrors....all big knobs or buttons.

They did one last brilliant thing: you can turn the screen completely off in two button presses. Not screen presses, button presses. Driving at night, on familiar road where I don't need the screen, it's darkens out the car like it should be. I don't think we all appreciate how much light the LCD panel on low emits at night. Turning it completely off and my night vision comes back like I remember the roads should be.

Then I get blinded by some asshole with aftermarket HID's that are improperly leveled. :)

....because Ethylene Oxide has a problem with something like a facemask:

https://www.cdc.gov/infectionc...

TL;DR: "ETO is absorbed by many materials. For this reason, following sterilization the item must undergo aeration to remove residual ETO.". There's a large part of the problem with ETO sterilization: you have to let it offgas for X period of time depending on the material sterilized. In the case of N95's, being that you have a wide, wide variety of manufacturers, and therefore different materials with different offgassing rates, to figure out X mask must be offgassed for Y time....forget it. And screwing it up has consequence, because it's a guaranteed exposure to the wearer. They will inhale the unreacted/unaerated ETO. Not good. It has an exposure limit of 1PPM.

Now, VHP is nasty in its own right, but it's whole, whole lot safer if you don't get all of the unreacted peroxide back out of the mask. Yes, it could still cause respiratory tract problems if inhaled. In this case, though, it's the safer bet.

" few patients know that drug companies often conduct research through universities at a steep cost savings."

Citation, please?

Yes, you are correct: some of the very early/mid phase research is conducted though and in partnership with the Universities. It's not a steep cost savings; it sometimes costs just about as much as doing it in-house. The partnership is formed because the university has a patent and/or a researcher that has an interesting/potentially new compound/idea/whatever. The university wants the grant money and the bragging rights, the pharma wants access to the new shiny thing....and there you go. It's not cheap compared to doing it in-house, but thanks to patents (the university system is just as guilty here), it's sometimes the only way to get it done.
/
That's not the whole case. What's ignored in that is that's just the first step: the research. The Development is where there's money spent by the truckload, and there is no cheap way of doing that. A large enough set of preclinical safety studies to satisfy the FDA for a first-in-man? 20 million? 30 million? Wildy depends on the program. The rules for those studies ares strict; there's no cheap way out of them. Then we get to the early clinical trials themselves; my fingers will get tired of pressing the 0 key before we pay that bill off. Yup, the same university that did the research up front might be involved with the clinical trials later on, especially if it's a teaching hospital system, but that work is either done internally or (more typically) though partnerships with other companies.

You can site 100 exceptions to this pattern; this is a pretty general way of looking at it. The orphan drug status changes things a lot, the orphan disease / rare disease treatments change this pattern, too. My entire point is that the system is as complicated as the heath care system as whole, about as transparent to the outside world as mud, and has a brutal number of moving parts. Yes, there are better ways of doing this. Yes, there are worse ways.

Full disclosure/bias: bench scientist at one of the major pharma companies.

This is why I come here.

Sure, we come for the "News for Nerds; Stuff That Matters".

We stay for a quasi-intellectual discussion about the use case/implications of Eating a Bag of Dicks.

This.

Dumb-as a brick Fireman here, friend of many dispatchers. Any given dispatcher may or may know appreciate the differences between alpha, beta, and gamma. They might even have enjoyed the Chernobyl series and can argue the finer points of RBMK reactors. But, as someone stated earlier, there are procedures and run cards. If the procedure card for "Potential Radiological Incident" says to call everyone including the Pope, then I hope he has his hat on while he's in bed, 'cause it's wakeup time. It doesn't really matter if the dispatcher is 98% sure the person on the other end of the line is full of shit, and they knew a particle accelerator wasn't going to cause a problem if it was turned off. A particle accelerator would fall into the "potential radiological" category, and we go from there. Whomever was initial incident command isn't going to fuck around with something that might be radioactive; they're going to go right by the book and start moving people away from the incident.

Most fire companies/cops don't carry Geiger counters on their first-due apparatus, and hazmat might be a few 10's of minutes behind, depending on how they're dispatched. Ensuring the safety of the public is Job #1, so if it means we wake up a bunch of folks and have then annoyed at us for a half-hour until we're sure it's safe for them to go back to bed, so be it.

"Consequently I don't think it will be long before we see a second hand market emerge for these blades whilst they come up with a solution."

I'd love to make a cantilevered deck from the side of my house with a few 20' sections of these blades. Even if you used them as joists, how much stronger would they be than 2x6'?

As pointed out earlier, HT does indeed start for "Handi-Talkie" , and was the prefix for a past generation of radios: HT750, HT1200, HT1250, etc....

From TFA, Motorola wouldn't talk about pricing. I'll give a little insight as to why, this coming from a municipal volunteer firefighter who just went though this. We were using the HT series of radios for almost 2 decades now and just started getting the grants needed to replace them, as they've been out of production for almost 10 years. The HT's are of legend, sort of: you can hammer a nail in with it and it doesn't really care. FDNY used them for years. Tough little things. We were looking at the Motorola APX4000's, as they are largely in the same lineage as the old HT family.

That 4000 might as well have been the advertised price. They were somewhere around 3k for each radio. EACH! That was before the remote hand-mike, the extra batteries, etc. We lose or destroy 3 or 4 radios a year, on average, which comes out of operating budget. So now, rather than spending 1500 bucks a year on replacement parts and radios, we were looking at spending over 10k out of our budget. No can do. Motorola was zero help with the pricing, too, as "Well, this is our top-shelf radio, so if you don't like the price, sorry". They know full well that most of these are purchased from grants, so they charge an arm and a leg. Yes, it's a relatively low volume item with a lot of engineering behind it, so I don't expect it to cost like an iPhone. It was more Moto's attitude that sucked. They know who they are.

We ended up going with the XPR series of radios from Motorola. Are they as "good" as the APX family? No. You can't hammer nails in with them and expect them to survive. Are they good enough? Yes. Are the 700 bucks a radio? Yes, yes, they are. Motorola has a lock on a lot of municipal departments, including mine (It's the "No one was ever fired buying IBM" mentality), but Harris, Icom, and Kenwood are slowly chipping away at that dominance. Good, too. Moto needs the competition. We're not getting into radio programming, either. That chaps everyone's asses with what Moto pulls compared to the competition

So, my point: I'd hazard a guess that this little wunderkind radio is going to be North of 5k each, and another $$$ for the backend you'll need to support it. Will it save your dispatcher's time? Maybe. Their supposition of "Let the dispatcher answer 911 calls rather than looking up licence plates" is negligent. I don't know a single dispatcher that won't tell an officer "Wait 1 - on 911" if they're busy. They get what ranks as more important.
Yeah, TLDR.

>>"If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so,"
>Quoting this shows that you do not understand what it means.

Ok, please explain to us all what else this could possibly mean? It's pretty damn clear English.

No, it was a brilliant design....
For what it was designed for

Continuous operation while refueling. Easy access to irridate materials for medical and military use. Cheap(er) to build and run. Used lower-enriched uranium. Makes plutonium.

They didn't build it to be the safest design known to man. They built to do the job it was tasked to do.

Interestingly, New Jersey (USA) just banned almost exactly what you're describing, literally 3 days ago:
https://www.nj.com/politics/20...

"Five other states have outlawed pet leasing: California, Indiana, Nevada, New York, and Washington. Connecticut lawmakers are considering a ban."


Soapbox: Growing old with your dogs is a privilege. /Soapbox

Because I haven't seen a complete explanation yet.....

The vast, vast majority of the public alert systems in the USA were installed in the 1950's/60's. It's a dumb-simple system that has been hackable since then, too, using the same tools that are available now. The vast majority of the systems are RF based: It's simple carrier frequency that carries a particular pair or frequencies or a particular DTMF pattern that triggers the siren system. For my town, for instance, it's a carrier on 48.90mhz, and a 4-digit DTMF on the carrier, each one about 0.25 second long that tells the siren box what pattern to signal and how long signal it for. There's also a two-tone pair (about 1.4khz and 1.9khz) that signals the siren to stay on until it's signaled to turn off again.

The beauty of the system is its simplicity: it just works. No IoT bullshit, no computers being cranky, no downed wires matter. So long as the police station can broadcast the signal and the sirens have power, the system works. We've even tested it using a hand-held radio and two tuning forks, so in the unlikely event the police station was out of power or otherwise unuseable, we can still set the whole system off. Having a IoT, 256-bit AES 2xROT system would be useless if we're standing in the middle of a shitstorm and need to get the public's attention.

Disclaimer: am a volunteer firefighter and help keep this system running in our town

To add to that, a little WHOIS:

Domain Name: theohiostar.com
Registry Domain ID: 2090314152_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
Registrar WHOIS Server: WHOIS.ENOM.COM
Registrar URL: WWW.ENOM.COM
Updated Date: 2019-01-01T04:37:07.00Z
Creation Date: 2017-01-15T20:10:00.00Z
Registrar Registration Expiration Date: 2020-01-15T20:10:53.00Z
Registrar: ENOM, INC.
Registrar IANA ID: 48 Domain Status: clienttransferprohibited https://www.icann.org/epp#clie...
Registrant Name: REDACTED FOR PRIVACY
Registrant Organization: REDACTED FOR PRIVACY
Registrant Street: REDACTED FOR PRIVACY

It's the same story for the other two websites. All three are registered though the same registrant.

I realize that's not completely odd, but what news organization has all of their registration information redacted?