Cracked is pretty much always lying, for clicks...
The editorial they cite says studies in Ireland show the strategy made NO difference. In the UK it's not the packaging but the quota... Instead of buying a bottle with 200 pills, you can only buy packs of 16 in most stores that sell them, at 10X the price. Meanwhile, two decades later, the UK still has an insanely high rate of Tylenol poisoning: "Paracetamol-linked liver failure, so severe a patient needs a transplant, happens in UK 8 times more than Holland, and twice as often as in France. Rates are 66 times higher in Britain than in Italy, new figures reveal."
If caught in a rip current, DON'T try to fight it. Instead swim left or right (parallel to the beach/shore), until you get out of the current. Then you can easily swim back to shore. If exhausted, just lay back and float. The human body is lighter than water, you just need to stay calm and time your breaths in-between waves.
This may be the dumbest story I've ever heard. Anybody with the most summary business sense knows that a deposit has to be more than the replacement cost of the product, with only a few exceptions to that, for items which are easier to recover if not returned. Either this is a fake story to drum up free PR, out else some sham to fleece dumb Chinese investors.
I don't understand the obsession with hard tac. You can go buy a box of crackers at a store for under $1, which will similarly have a long shelf life, actually taste decent, and will get household use so can be rotated out of storage before they expire and replaced basically for free (no additional cost over your normal monthly cracker budget, just a one time larger investment up front).
I'll take a sealed plastic bag of rice for survival food any day. Dirt cheap, lasts forever, has all the vitamins/minerals needed, requires no pre emergency prep, tastes a lot like bread, very calorie dense and relatively lightweight. You can easily figure one lb of rice will minimally feed one adult for one day, which means one of those $8 25lbs bags will get your through nearly a month.
Water is the real limitation, you need one gallon of water per person, per day. That's about 8.5lbs for every pound of rice. Fortunately you may need considerably less water in cooler weather and with reduced physical activity, but you're still dependant on those immovable 30gal trash cans/bathtubs/water heaters filled with water. That is unless you're sure water will be available, then you can take just a filter or purification tablets and just a few gallons with you.
Of course in a lesser emergency you'll want some more variety from your food, so you can throw in some cheap generic boxes of mac & cheese, maybe a couple cans of stew/chili/meat, ramen, a bit of candy, etc.
There were several digital cameras with cellular phone transmission capability shown by companies such as Kodak, Olympus in the early 1990s. There was also a digital camera with cellular phone designed by Shosaku Kawashima of Canon in Japan in May 1997. In Japan, two competing projects were run by Sharp and Kyocera in 1997. Both had cell phones with integrated cameras.
While professionally made, urine diverting, composting toilets are expensive, you need little more than a bucket, funnel, liquid and vent pipes, and a lid to make your own. The cost of microbes to jump start the composing process is trivial as well.
Personally, I'm convinced modern plumbing is still the way to go. Toilets using just 0.8 gallons per flush are available and not much more expensive than an entry level unit. Even if you think that's too much, or that they won't combine to improve, there's no reason that toilet can't use grey water, taken from your sink or shower drain.
As someone who lives in the desert, I can assure you all that plastics don't melt at 120F (49C), not even close. The only way those pictures MIGHT be remotely real is if the plastic objects were having sunlight reflected off of something like a window, and focused on the plastics, in addition to direct sunlight, getting the temperature up over 400F. Of course this is the internet, and it's just as possible the photos have nothing to do with the current summer heat.
I've thought of starting up a building maintenance/handyman service, and calling it "Ghost Busters". Fix all the squeaky door hinges, screw down the floor boards to stop the creaking, strap the water pipes better, seal up the air leaks around the windows, check out the electrical and HVAC system, and more. The vast majority of hauntings are really trivially explained (and fixable) by anyone with a strong building maintenance background. You'd think somebody would have thought to specialize in this type of work by now...
Dozens of ways to get it out easily and quickly. A strong magnet on a string lowered into the same cavity would attach and lift it out. A small hole cut out of the wall would allow removing it, and if you're not in the mood for patching, a blank electrical plate would cover it for the time being. Heck, you know where it is, start drilling holes until you skewer and disable it! Pretty absurd that somebody would decide to put up with it for years, rather than a trivial effort.
It's not all that complicated. One flat-prong NEMA plug for North America, Japan, big chunks of South America, etc. And one round-prong Europlug for Europe, Australia, big chunks of Asia, etc. Between those two you can power up across the vast majority of the planet.
"vacation travel trailers can be bigger than many site-built homes."
Wait... What? The biggest travel trailers are only as large as small as studio apartments. Even depression-era homes were considerably larger. Where are these site-built houses of less than 400sq.ft.? Smaller than a 1-car garage. Is that even allowed by modern building codes? The CW article talks about mobile homes being larger than some houses, but certainly not travel trailers.
WiFi Prioritizer (free) in the Android store actually works quite well, though it's complicated and painfully non-obvious how you should adjust all the thresholds. It's a huge shame mobile devices don't have such functionality built-in...
The editorial they cite says studies in Ireland show the strategy made NO difference. In the UK it's not the packaging but the quota... Instead of buying a bottle with 200 pills, you can only buy packs of 16 in most stores that sell them, at 10X the price. Meanwhile, two decades later, the UK still has an insanely high rate of Tylenol poisoning:
"Paracetamol-linked liver failure, so severe a patient needs a transplant, happens in UK 8 times more than Holland, and twice as often as in France. Rates are 66 times higher in Britain than in Italy, new figures reveal."
I'll take a sealed plastic bag of rice for survival food any day. Dirt cheap, lasts forever, has all the vitamins/minerals needed, requires no pre emergency prep, tastes a lot like bread, very calorie dense and relatively lightweight. You can easily figure one lb of rice will minimally feed one adult for one day, which means one of those $8 25lbs bags will get your through nearly a month.
Water is the real limitation, you need one gallon of water per person, per day. That's about 8.5lbs for every pound of rice. Fortunately you may need considerably less water in cooler weather and with reduced physical activity, but you're still dependant on those immovable 30gal trash cans/bathtubs/water heaters filled with water. That is unless you're sure water will be available, then you can take just a filter or purification tablets and just a few gallons with you.
Of course in a lesser emergency you'll want some more variety from your food, so you can throw in some cheap generic boxes of mac & cheese, maybe a couple cans of stew/chili/meat, ramen, a bit of candy, etc.
There were several digital cameras with cellular phone transmission capability shown by companies such as Kodak, Olympus in the early 1990s. There was also a digital camera with cellular phone designed by Shosaku Kawashima of Canon in Japan in May 1997. In Japan, two competing projects were run by Sharp and Kyocera in 1997. Both had cell phones with integrated cameras.
Personally, I'm convinced modern plumbing is still the way to go. Toilets using just 0.8 gallons per flush are available and not much more expensive than an entry level unit. Even if you think that's too much, or that they won't combine to improve, there's no reason that toilet can't use grey water, taken from your sink or shower drain.
http://pipedot.org/story/2015-10-20/hunter-gatherers-with-no-access-to-technology-still-only-sleep-65-hours-a-night
Wait... What? The biggest travel trailers are only as large as small as studio apartments. Even depression-era homes were considerably larger. Where are these site-built houses of less than 400sq.ft.? Smaller than a 1-car garage. Is that even allowed by modern building codes? The CW article talks about mobile homes being larger than some houses, but certainly not travel trailers.