you know what's cool? Poison Control Centers. there's a zillion different poisons that all do different things under different circumstances, and a regular ER doctor is not going to have it all memorized. so if someone comes in with a toddler that drank some obscure chemical only used in the alpaca breeding industry, the ER doctor calls the nearest Poison Control Center, and any time of day or night, free of charge, they will get a live toxicology expert on the line that can talk through this specific case with them. and they will escalate the weird calls as high as they need to. Poison Control knows the one guy on Earth who has dedicated his life to treating pediatric alpacin toxicity, and by God they will put him directly on the phone with you.

they also offer a poisoning advice and triage service to the public: in the US, you can call 800-222-1222 or go to poison.org and they don't just call an ambulance, they are able to resolve 70% of their calls with home treatment

(which is probably mostly a euphemism for "caller reassured that the substance wasn't actually poisonous or they weren't actually exposed," but still, saves an ER visit)

this feels like exactly the sort of thing that would get replaced with a self-help database to save a few bucks so I just think it's incredibly cool that this service still exists to provide direct connections to human experts.

do... do people have these

Archiving my favorite tweet from TheYearIs20BC about this on cohost because Twitter might die any day now

Reasoning:

• Rock comes out frame 1 and is impossible to react to
• Paper has the slowest startup but is the best counter to rock, which is the most common in this meta
• Scissors loses heavily to rock and only beats paper, which is less common than rock

I blacked out for 4 hours and when i woke up this existed

If we ever meet intelligent alien life how are we gonna explain that large swathes of the planet refer to the galaxy using a word that originally meant “milk”