I’m the same way when I’m down. Nothing anyone could say seems to apply to me and I’ve always got a logical, (mostly) rational reason why. Depression is weird like that. I’m bipolar so I’ve done a lot of therapy and tried a lot of medications but none of it really sticks when I’m at the bottom of the cycle. The advice I offered was stuff I had to figure out on my own the hard way, but it was not something I invented. It was little bits and pieces of things therapists and confidants had shared with me over the years that eventually clicked.

But the only truth that matters is that the only way out of it is through it. You’ve got to find the things that work for you because we’re all different. It’s about taking care of yourself first and foremost. I rationalize and use research about neurochemicals and mindfulness to stay afloat, you might find something else that works better to help you cope. All you have to do is keep trying and eventually you’ll find it.

Move your body if you can, light to moderate exercise, even just going for a long walk is the absolute best non-medical treatment for depression. Your body makes a bunch of the feel good chemicals when you move that depression deprives you of. Also a change of scenery can help a lot. If there is a place you’ve wanted to go nearby like a museum or a park or something that can help you start to process and move on from a bad relationship end.

I live somewhere very hot so when I get like that, every other month or so, I go to a shopping mall and walk a few laps in the air conditioning and watch all the people. Your mileage may vary but walking around in places with a lot of people helps me.

It also might not hurt to talk to your provider about adjusting your medication if you feel like you are for more than a couple weeks. The most important thing to remember is that states like these are temporary, you have felt better before and you will again on the other side, you just have to get through it.

Cops don’t even have the ability to enforce laws of the United States outside their jurisdiction. That New York cop you mentioned couldn’t arrest/detain/engage a criminal if they were on vacation in LA. Depending on the place some departments might allow it, but just as often they get annoyed.

There used to be a retired sheriff in my neighborhood growing up who maintained his peace officer license. He had lights and a siren on his personal vehicle and would pull people over and ticket them. The local court though would just dismiss everything he issued.

Abroad it would depend heavily on the location, but it seems unlikely many countries would tolerate a foreign law enforcement officer doing anything related to police work. There are all sorts of treaties and agreements about that sort of thing so likely a vacationing cop would create an international incident if they tried anything. I’m sure in some situations like murder or sexual assault they might get a pass, but it seems unlikely.

The heart of a young boy when I had to tell him that aunt bel was out of spicy water (what he calls flavored, carbonated water).

I had a friend in highschool who claimed to sleep better listening to metal like Cradle of Filth and Powerman 5000. I crashed at his place a few times and he would put the music on loud, like had to yell to be heard over it loud. Not a chance I could fall asleep like that but he was snoring by the time I decided seeming cool and going along wasn’t as valuable as good sleep. He lived in a detached guest house in the backyard, so I guess his parents never noticed.

I’d actually say bus fatalities probably isn’t a good data set to use if you wanted to do like actual research about it. There are too many variables that easily accessed public data doesn’t cover. Like you’d want to filter accidents caused by the driver or another vehicle, the number of buses in circulation over time, demographics of the victims, among others.

Someone has that data, but it’s probably specific to a city. Additionally there are entire classes of people with near zero chance of being hit by a bus, such as people living in rural areas and people who mostly travel during hours buses aren’t running, like 3rd shifters in cities with a limited bus program.

Out of curiosity I searched around for the amount of people killed by buses over time, the classic not-paying-attention death, and it seems like the number has been fairly stable since 2000.

My hypothesis was that if people were getting less good at paying attention that number should rise. One factor I couldn’t control for is people becoming more aware of being hit by a bus and being more alert in that specific situation. That would also explain the stability of the number as the population has risen quite a bit since 2000 but the bus fatality rate has remained the same, which might imply the bus death per 100,000 would actually be going down. I also didn’t look at the rate of injury, so safety technology could be shifting more fatalities to non-fatal injuries.

Either way the bus data does not suggest that people are paying more or less attention than they always have. Further research is required as the results were inconclusive.

I’m kind of over all these articles saying the world is soaked in gasoline and someone is about to strike a match. I feel like every day for the past 10 years at least we have been on the verge of some societal collapse-level catastrophe and it never fucking happens. Quit edging the apocalypse and just get it over with. Let it burn so we can get to rebuilding better.

They do, but the alliances are unstable. The problem is in determining what you mean by compete. Militarily that’s next to impossible. The advanced weaponry the US, Russia, and China can wield requires an advanced technological society to produce. Many smaller countries just don’t have the infrastructure, and worse would be hard pressed to access the materials to make them. Even fpv drones, like the Ukrainians are using against Russia, require advanced computing technologies that take decades to develop internally. But unless the countries have all of the materials within their borders they’d have to trade for it and be at the whim of the superpowers who control most of the world’s supply. The science is available for much of the tech with maybe a 20 year lag time, with more current science being highly controlled and classified.

Economically there is more leeway. If the allied countries had natural resources or cheap labor they could trade that with other nations, but some resources such as oil, lithium, and rare earth metals pose an serious and deadly risk for any government looking to leverage them on a global market. Dozens of countries across the world have been destabilized and overthrown by the CIA alone, nevermind the 20 or so countries the US has directly invaded and dismantled for favorable oil trading.

Realistically a small group of countries allied together is the same as the individual countries going it alone. You’d need a larger alliance that is continent scale to have any real power when dealing with the superpowers. But even that is no guarantee as the US/EU relationship demonstrates. Without military strength the alliance would have no hard power to wield on the world’s stage. Any nascent alliance would have to overcome meddling from the CIA/FSB/MSS if they started to become successful and threaten superpower interests.

Realistically the only countries on Earth that are sovereign are the superpowers, the rest are subject to their demands.

A bear walks into a bar and the bartender asks what the bear wants. The bear replies, “I’ll have a gin and…tonic.” The bartender looks confused and asks, “what’s with the big pause.” The bear looks at the bartender and says, “well I’m a bear.”

I used to work for a software consulting firm and one of our clients was NASA. Nothing exciting, just replacing an expensive proprietary system written in a commercial language with an open source one used for analyzing data from the Parker Solar Probe (PSP) and the then to be launched Interstellar Boundary Explorer (I BEX).

The maths were so far beyond my two time community college drop out, barely graduated high school, self taught background I couldn’t even explain them. Fortunately we used paired programming and had enough mathemagitians on staff I never had to deal with the maths alone. My contribution was mostly UI and data visualization.