Fondots

I think you're misreading the comment of the person you're replying to here, it's worded a little wonky and I don't know if you picked up on a bit of a sarcastic tone there, I think you also may not be reading far enough into the history to really have a handle on the situation but frankly neither of you are doing a great job of explaining your positions so it's a little hard to say what point either of you are trying to make

Tl;dr of modern Afghan history:

Around the 80s, Russia invaded Afghanistan and installed a socialist government

The US backs Islamic militants, essentially the Taliban or the groups that eventually morph into them, to oust the Russian backed government,

The Taliban also likes to style themselves as the Islamic emirate of Afghanistan

Some power struggles ensue, by the 90s sometime the Taliban is in charge of the country

9/11 happens, US invades, tries to set up their own government, pulls out, Taliban quickly takes back over

The impression I've always gotten (and I'm sure no political guru or social scientist or anything of the sort) isn't so much that the country overall prefers the Taliban as much as most of them just don't really give a rat's ass about the country as a whole or who's claiming to be in charge of it at any given time, they don't have a strong sense of national identity, they care for more about their tribe or village than anything going on outside of it. American, Russian, Taliban, doesn't really matter too much to them, when the guys with better guns roll into town, you pay them lip service until they go away then continue right on doing things more or less the same way you have for the last 2000 years.

It does happen that the Taliban probably aligns with their traditional values more closely than the other people who have tried ruling it as a unified country over the years, but day-to-day, they're still probably mostly only going to the Taliban when they need something from them and deferring to village elders or local warlords or whoever for everything else.

There's variation I'm sure, those in cities probably have a stronger sense of what a country is and what it has to offer in the modern world than those in rural areas, but it's a largely rural country, almost 75% of them are living in rural areas and some of them are super rural where some of them have probably never even seen a city.

Same goes for a lot of generic-sounding "A" business names- Acme, Apex, Ajax, A+, American-whatever, etc.

I work in 911 dispatch, it drives me nuts how many people lose consciousness for various reasons, and then when they come to they say they're fine and don't need to be checked out.

There's maybe some very narrow exceptions for people with known conditions that they're already managing with the help of a doctor and they know exactly what's causing it.

But in general, if you're losing consciousness that's a bad sign and you need to see a doctor about that ASAP

I flip flop back and forth, I'm not totally sure if there's a specific rhyme or reason to my choices, it may just come down to a subjective feeling about which I think sounds better in the sentence.

My wife is a dayta analyst, and she analyzes dahta.

Definitely, normally my skin is pretty resilient, never really been someone who needs to spend money on moisturizers and such, I could probably just about wash my hands with acetone and steel wool and be none the worse for it.

But there were a few times when I worked there that my hands were getting noticeably dryer than usual, pretty sure if my skin were any more delicate I would have been in pretty rough shape.

We definitely called them cardboard cuts, can't say how universal it is but every job I've where I've handled a lot of boxes it seems to be in pretty common use

Salem witch trials were almost a century before the revolution, feels like a little bit of a stretch to lump them into other events that have posed a threat to american democracy since it didn't even exist yet.

It certainly makes a good point about how certain parts of America have always been primed to go off the deep end since the very beginning, but I think that's part of a separate but closely related discussion

Cardboard cuts are absolutely a thing, like a paper cut on steroids.

I used to work in a warehouse and spent most of my day opening, resealing, making, and breaking down boxes. Spend enough time around them and the boxes will get you.

What you're most likely looking for is amateur (ham) radio. The exactly regulations will vary by country, usually there's some sort of testing/licensing required (at least if you want to transmit, you can listen without a license)

I didn't look too far into it but it looks like the app you linked is basically a tool to let you use your phone as a controller for other radio equipment. You'd probably need to be licensed to actually use it, and there's a good chance the equipment needed is pretty pricey. Ham equipment can kind of run the gambit from handhelds that run from about $20 up to thousands of dollars depending on what you want to do with it. You're probably better off starting with some more standard equipment before you start trying to rig together other stuff controlled by an app.

There's a lot of info out there for free on the internet and plenty of books have been written about how radio, so there's a lot of resources out there to learn from, or if there's a radio club in your area (there usually is) you can show up to a meeting and ask some questions.

Assuming you're in the US (different countries again have different laws) there's a few other radio options if all you want is to talk to people who are local to you. You can get a CB radio (think Smokey & the Bandit or truckers talking to each other) some places have more or less people actually using CB radio. The range and capabilities are more limited than a lot of ham options, but you can usually count on a few miles of range, and sometimes it's nice to get a heads up from truckers about traffic issues and speed traps and such. I personally like to use them with friends in different cars when we're on a road trip.

There's also FRS radios, you can pick them up pretty cheap at Wal Mart, pretty basic walkie talkies.

Many of those FRS radios are also GMRS radios, there's a GMRS license needed to use the GMRS capabilities, not test, just a licensing fee, so that's something to be aware of.

MURS radios also exist, I honestly don't know too much about it, but it's another free, no-license radio service you can use.

Each of those have their own limitations and restrictions on what you can do with them, but in probably 99% of cases you're probably not gonna run afoul of the law if you don't try to modify the radio or do something obviously stupid and use it in a way that's not interfering with other people's uses.

If you have enough people, bulldozers, and money to throw at the problem, sure.

Does Israel have that available? I can't really say.

Some of the things that would factor into how many people, bulldozers, and money you'd need to do so

How big of a city?

What kind of construction are we dealing with?

How much are we willing to ignore worker safety and such?

How much of that city has already been partially demolished by other means the time the bulldozers get there?

How bulldozed does it need to be? There's a spectrum here that goes from something "crashing a bulldozer into every building enough times to make it unlivable" to "everything completely leveled, and all the debris cleaned up, neatly pushed into piles, loaded into trucks, buried, etc." Do we need to bulldoze the entire city? Or just most of it? Or maybe just enough that pretty much every block is looking pretty wrecked? Or maybe just all of the structures and we can leave parks, parking lots, streets, and other open spaces intact?

Do we have to be picky about using specifically bulldozers? If the end result is essentially the same, you could also use excavators, guys with sledgehammers, cranes, wrecking balls, explosives, airstrikes, artillery fire, etc. there's plenty of other options to work into the mix if we don't limit ourselves to just bulldozers.

I understand your meaning but saying that those east coast cities were built to European standards is maybe not the best way to phrase it.

Philly in particular, is a standout for being one of the first planned cities. Not that there weren't attempts at city planning before then, but they tended to be more of an attempt to straighten out the wacky stuff that had grown organically. With Philly most of the city was pretty much laid out from the beginning, which was fairly unique at the time. You'd be pretty hard-pressed to find something totally comparable to that in Europe at the time.

What they do share with European cities though, is that they (relatively) old, and from the era before cars were a thing, so the city planning happened with the assumption that people would be walking pretty much everywhere.

Side note- I remember reading an article about one of the older assassins creed games set in the American revolution, and one of the reasons they decided to not set it in philly was because Philly, even back then, was too orderly of a grid with lots of long straight streets that you can look a long way down and the graphics engine had a hard time rendering that far.