> short out your own electrical outlets so that nobody else in the apartment building can listen to the radio

Keep in mind the vintage of the document. At the time, it's likely that fused electrical circuits would be shared between multiple apartments. At least in North America, it's very very likely that each apartment would have its own panel.

We could adjust that suggestion to modern times and give a guide to create an electric arc that stays just under your fuse's break point - the goal being to create enough broad-spectrum RF interference to jam radio electronics for everyone else in the building.

(IANAEE, but a hardware hacker colleague of old told me a story years ago, about a DIY device you could plug into mains which (AFAIR) dumped high frequencies into the wire, and this would screw with television sets and lots of other sensitive electronics, everywhere in the circuit up to the next large transformer. He also told me the best place to plug it in would be a street light; it could kill all the TVs in a group of apartment buildings.)

> We could adjust that suggestion to modern times and give a guide to create an electric arc that stays just under your fuse's break point

That is delightfully disgusting :). There might be some heat problems, but in the Canadian Winter, having an extra 1750W of electric arc heating wouldn't be too bad!

My great aunt married a Norwegian who was a teenager in WWII... he told us a story once that he and some other kids wanted to know what they could do and they were told to carry laxatives with them and drop them into any open container they saw.

"bag full of moths"

That sounds good, but... how to catch and transport more than a couple and keep them viable? they're really delicate critters.

Shorting your outlets (i assume) to take out the building? What? Breakers and fuses exist to prevent that.

Bed bugs. The modern equivalent would be bedbugs. Breeding them would be comically easy, and distributing them in public places would be extremely hard to detect.

Buses, doctors offices, libraries, offices, You could cause a lot of damage with this.

Ok, but why??

https://www.complex.com/life/2020/01/police-investigating-so...

Sabotage, obviously. Sounds like a cheap way to really screw with morale in an industrial town that's building the parts for the bombs intended to be dropped on your homeland.

You don't have a moth guy?

But in all seriousness, I'm not sure how long it would take, but a quick amazon search showed you could get moth larva as bait.

Yeah, and our modern day pervasive surveillance would quickly reveal who is buying moths like crazy.

Go into a fishing store, pay cash.

People sell weird stuff. I remember a co-worker coming to the office the other day with two bags that... moved. One contained live grasshoppers, the other locusts. Turns out he has a pet spider, and bought food for it on his way to work.

Moths are outside you don't need to buy them. Crikey not everything needs to be bought via Amazon.

Have you no imagination?

Radio broadcast: "And up next,we have a word from our party leaders."

/* Shorts oulet, trips breaker.

/* Management / Maintenance takes 10 minutes to sort through confusion and diagnose and figure out the problem is a tripped breaker.

/* Flip breaker, Radios back on

"...and that's the word from our Glorious leader. Next up, the Beatles"

If only the propaganda broadcasts had been more often followed by Beatles music, maybe we wouldn’t have had to wage the Cold War.

Here's the kicker: we didn't have to have the cold war.

I'll bite - why wasn't the cold war a necessary result of the geopolitical tensions at the time?

Here’s one possibility:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/jun/17/russia.iantray...

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/molotovs-proposal-t...

You know, internally I said to myself "I'll bet this involves bending over backwards to authoritarian Communists like that was a viable idea."

Yup.

"In May 1954 the Western powers rejected the Soviet proposal to join NATO on grounds that the USSR's membership of the organization would be incompatible with its democratic and defensive aims."

It's 2020, and I still think they made the right call.

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Perhaps by allowing the Soviets into the Western sphere, the U.S. would have influenced them and nudged them towards democracy. Though perhaps it would have been as much of a disastrous failure as opening markets to China has been, in that respect.

Yeah, and maybe if Britain had played nice and just let Hitler have the Czech border areas, just the one time, and allowed Germany's rearmament, it would have eased political tensions and averted WWII. Errr... Wait.

Actually, the reason for why Chamberlain unfairly gets a bad rap is because Britain needed the time to rearm in response to the growing German threat. Going to war over Sudetenland would not have been the right time. Appeasement was always meant to be a short-term solution, not a permanent plan.

Because Molotov's last big idea for an alliance worked out so well...

The document is from 1944. I believe that breakers were only an innovation in the last 30-40 years. Fuses would have been used instead.

modern breakers are from the 20s, the originals are from the 1879.

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

I tried searching, but couldn’t find details when they became an National Electrical Code requirement. I’ve lived in a 1980s construction building where there was still a fuse box.

(Most of the results I came across were around the recent AFCI requirement for breakers in residential construction.)

Interesting. Living in Poland, I only remember seeing fuses in apartment buildings; circuit breakers started to show up everywhere only around the early 2000s.