Luckily I don’t have it quite that bad I am just very uncomfortable with it.
Sprained my knee really badly once and the doctor used a giant syringe to drain some fluid after the swelling hadn’t gone down much after a couple weeks. Really didn’t like that, wasn’t even close to passing out, but can’t think I’ve ever been more uncomfortable.
Similarly I’ve also been on-scene with some pretty nasty injuries, and I work in 911 dispatch, I’m generally not bothered by too much.
I have 3
I cannot juggle. I don’t generally lack in hand-eye coordination (not that I’m overly-gifted with it either, but I’d generally say that I’m at least average,) and I understand the theory of it well enough, I’ve even been able to teach people to juggle successfully, it’s just that I, myself, cannot juggle.
I’m also a reasonably handy, technically-minded person, again not an absolute wizard, but if I crack a gadget open, with a couple Google searches and how-to guides, I can usually understand more or less how things work and how to fix them if they’re broken.
But something about sewing machines breaks my mind. There’s something going on right around the bobbin that just doesn’t make sense to my brain and doesn’t seem like it should work, but it apparently does, because I’ve successfully used a sewing machine and can confirm first-hand that they work.
Lastly, I don’t like needles. It’s not a horrible phobia that sends me running for the hills, but something about needles sleeves me out like nothing else. I can suck it up and get my necessary vaccines and such, but I do kind of have to give myself a little internal pep-talk first. It’s not a fear of pain, I have pretty solid pain tolerance and needles really don’t hurt that much at all, it’s specifically needles that weird me out. If there was an option to get my vaccines where a doctor would shank me with a scalpel and rub the vaccine into the wound, I’d absolutely go for it.
I kind of feel like this is kind of one of those rare cases where we should ideally be letting the free market do its thing.
If a print shop, bakery, etc. wants to refuse your business on ideological grounds like this, you take your business elsewhere and tell everyone else to do the same.
It of course kind of falls apart with big companies like office Depot, where they’ve often driven all of the local competition out of business and someone can just keep running their complaint up the corporate chain of command until they reach a soulless bean-counter who only sees dollar signs.
In no particular order, and not an exhaustive list
Except for a few obvious spam posts, I’m pretty hard-pressed to think of any specific posts or comments I’ve seen that struck me as bots (although to be fair, I’m there may be some bias due to which communities I choose to follow)
There are, however, plenty of idiots, people who don’t speak fluent English, trolls and other people whose motivations may not be purely good-faith discussion, people who probably have various types of neurodivergence and/or mental health issues
And I could see some of those categories being very easily mistaken as a bot under a lot of circumstances.
I’ve seen a couple reports that the ammo they found had anti-fascist and transgender inscribed on them.
If it’s true, that’s not definitive evidence of course, but it wouldn’t be zero evidence either.
It also feels a little too convenient to me after the Luigi thing. It could just be sort of a copycat, or it could be a right wing accelerationist trying to paint that picture.
And I fucking hate that at this point I don’t know which of those two options is more likely.
When I first joined Reddit, maybe around 2009-ish, give or take a couple years, I remember there being a pretty sizeable libertarian/Ron Paul crowd there.
That’s not to say they were like the modern maga/alt-right lunatics,I think the reddit-libertarians of that era probably would have hated maga bullshit
But there’s a definite path from that to the crazy shit we have now.
And there was always some crazy people there, one of the first subreddits I remember checking out was /r/conspiracy, I’m an enjoyer of a good conspiracy theory, I don’t believe them except for a few relatively mainstream ones, after all, who doesn’t have a favorite theory about the Kennedy assassination? But I noped out of there really quickly because holy shit those people actually believed the shit they were talking about.
And with all of the corporate bullshit they’ve had over the last few years driving away people who haven’t been brainwashed, I’m not surprised that the users who are left are completely insane.
Figure that pretty much covers all of my bases.
I feel like 3d printing would probably be slower than just cutting them out by hand with an xacto knife, you can get a pretty good rhythm going and depending on what material you make it out of you can probably cut a few of them out at a time.
Also feels like a bit of a waste to make them out of plastic since it’s something most people would probably only use a couple of times then throw away, and even if you make it out of a recyclable plastic they probably couldn’t be recycled with paint residue (not even gonna touch on the plastic recycling debate right now)
I’d probably try calling around to a couple more print shops and such, maybe some art studios and maker spaces. May also be worth thinking outside the box, the maintenance department of some businesses might have a stencil cutter to stencil things onto their equipment, schools might have them (my mom worked in an elementary school, it wasn’t exactly a stencil maker, but they had a tool for cutting letters out of paper for art projects and such that might work for your purposes)
Short of a dedicated stencil maker (which is pretty pricey) a cricut or similar machine is probably your best bet. They’re not too pricey if you wanted to get one yourself, and don’t know what the arts and crafts scene is like in the EU but I feel like every artsy person in the US went nuts for them a couple years ago and most of the bigger arts and crafts stores around here have a whole aisle dedicated to them (much to my chagrin because they got rid of some other stuff I occasionally need to make room for them) so if you ask around you might be able to find someone who will let you use theirs.
It may also help to rephrase what you’re looking for, especially if you’ve been asking for die-cut templates. You might have better luck asking for stencils, or maybe asking if they have a cricut or vinyl cutter, or maybe even a laser cutter and just providing the file for them to cut out. There’s a chance the employees just aren’t really thinking about what their equipment can do and just know that they don’t have a specific stencil making machine.
Coming up on 7 years married, probably about another 2 maybe 3 years together (she seems to think we were dating for a while before I realized it, I’m kind of dense)
We were friends for probably about another 2 or 3 years before that, and for probably about that long again before that we kind of recognized each other as friends-of-friends but only ever bumped into each other in-passing and didn’t hang out.
A better term for what you’re looking for might be “stencil”
I don’t have any specific recommendations for companies, especially in the EU, I feel like a lot of print shops and sign companies could probably do it for you. If you want to DIY it, you could probably pick up some generic letter stencils from almost any hardware store to trace onto something and cut out yourself. Depending on what material you want it made out of you could probably get anyone with a cricut or similar machine to make one for you if your ok with something like paper or vinyl, or if you for some reason wanted it made out of metal or something else sturdier that a cricut could manage you could try asking around to local machine shops.
You know, I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of that same rule of thumb, and it hasn’t steered me wrong yet. It feels like it shouldn’t work, when it comes up people are always skeptical of it, but the results are hard to argue with.
See, that’s why I post my math so someone can double check me, I’m just some assholes one the internet doing math while I’m standing around staring at my washer waiting for it to finish
EDIT: I mathed wrong, see comments below.
I also saw that comment, all they cited was “napkin math” for that number, which is really all I’ve done here, so both of our answers should be taken with a big grain of salt.
They might know a lot more than I do and started with better numbers and used a better methodology, or they might be talking totally out of their ass and just picked a number that sounded about right to them, I can’t say. If they want to look over my math, they’re more than welcome to, that’s why I wrote it out, so that people can fact-check me, I very well might be wrong. And if they they explain their napkin math, I’ll look that over as well.
And to just do my math another way to back up the idea of it being more than a half ounce, let’s go by weight. A gallon weighs about 8lbs, x 55 × 8 = 3520lbs of water, or 1596.645kg. 1596.645 × .001 = 1.596645kg of heroin by weight. And let’s go ahead and assume I’m being overly optimistic about those weights, the purity of heroin, and all of the other science involved, and go ahead and use that cut that by 75% again like I did the first time, which gets us to about .4kg of heroin, not too far off from the .5kg I estimated the first time, and in either case significantly more than a half ounce.
EDIT: also, I just watched the video included in the article. A lot of the screenshots and such there seem to be talking about fentanyl while the article says heroin, so there seems to be some crossed wires here. Fentanyl is of course much more potent, so if the substance in the barrels was in fact fentanyl that would also be worth considering, ½oz of fentanyl would still plenty for a few dozen lethal doses, still a far cry from “millions” but it’s something else that may be worth taking into consideration.
EDIT: I mathed wrong, see comments below.
Just my 2¢ as a complete nobody who likes to think about stuff and Google some numbers, take it for what it’s worth.
Of course the numbers here are all very fuzzy, but if we take the inaccurate initial estimate of “millions” of lethal doses at face value (which you probably shouldn’t, these estimates always seem to be massively inflated,) .001% of 2 million (the smallest number you can really call “millions”) is still 2000 lethal doses. Probably several times that in actual doses since most addicts aren’t looking to outright kill themselves.
I don’t know the physics/chemistry of how heroin dissolves into water, let alone how pure the heroin involved was or any of the other factors that would play into this, so these numbers are probably gonna be way off, but 8 55gal drums of water is 440 gallons. .001% of that is .44 gallons of heroin. And I believe that would theoretically be a solid block of heroin with that volume, not a loose power where some of that volume is air.
That’s an upper bound, because that’s not how volume works when you dissolve stuff, s let’s go ahead and assume the actual amount of heroin is ¼ of that (based on nothing but a wild guess, easy math and an assumption that I’m wildly overestimating) so .11 gallons, (1.76 cups, a 2.94 inch cube, 416.395 ml)
With the amount of googling I was willing to do, I couldn’t find the density of heroin, but anhydrous morphine is apparently 1.32 g/cm³, so let’s roll with that. 1.32×416.395 = 549.6414g (a little over a pound for my fellow Americans)
Let’s go ahead and call that 500g or ½kg to make math easy and further account for me probably overestimating things earlier.
A little googling tells me the value of heroin is between $10,000-$100,000/kg, so for half of that we’re looking at $5,000-$50,000 of heroin in those drums (assuming that all of my many assumptions weren’t too far off-base)
So for that kind of money, assuming they have the means to recover the heroin at the other end (industrial freeze dryer maybe? Not sure what the best method would be,) I could definitely see it being worthwhile to have a couple mooks rent a u haul to smuggle heroin from point a to point b this way.
Also gives you a little insurance against the driver stealing any of it en route. It’s not easy to just walk off with a full barrel, and if they siphoned some off, they probably wouldn’t have the means to recover it, and even if they did it wouldn’t be much.
One of the barrels tested negative, and I kind of suspect they didn’t just put in a barrel of plain water for shits and giggles, so I have a hunch that the plan was to dilute the heroin down to below the detection threshold for whatever field test kit cops usually have, so if they got stopped they’d just say they have barrels of water, which would be weird but probably not illegal, but either they just had bad luck and the cops had a better batch of test strips than usual, or someone fucked up dividing the heroin between the barrels.
Again, take that all for what it’s worth.
All of those other letters around “phosphine” in “Trimethylbenzoyl Diphenylphosphine Oxide” are important too. You can’t really just pull out one part of a chemical name like that and pretend like that tells you much about the properties of that substance.
Like how “sodium chloride” is neither a poisonous gas like chlorine, nor a highly reactive metal like sodium, but is in fact ordinary table salt.
Or methane, methamphetamine, methadone, methanol, methyl anthranilate, etc… all very different chemicals that happen to have a methyl group as part of their structure (3 hydrogen atoms bonded to one carbon atom)
I’m not saying that TPO is safe, it’s just that the fact that “phosphine” appears in the chemical name doesn’t mean all that much in the way that you’re trying to imply.
For anyone who’s into this sort of thing, NileRed on YouTube does a lot of stuff where he’ll, for example, show how part of the structure of a chemical found in, for example, rubber gloves, is also found in a totally different chemical, like the one that makes chili peppers spicy, then takes a bunch of rubber gloves, extracts that chemical from them, does some chemistry stuff to turn it into the spicy chemical and makes hot sauce with it.
In my opinion, the lyrics tell a pretty straightforward story, no real need for metaphor
Someone releases a bunch of balloons into the sky, they get mistaken for enemy aircraft/missiles, and set off a war.
If you get more out of it with your interpretation, more power to you, but it feels like a bit of an unnecessary stretch though.
It sounds like you’re actually conflating The Iranian Hostage Crisis and The Iran Contra Affair
Which is a very common mistake, you’re not the only one, both involve hostages and Iran, and they’re not totally unrelated.
This is all greatly simplified of course.
The Hostage Crisis was was basically part of the Iranian Revolution when Ayatollah Khomeini seized power, where a bunch of supporters of the revolution took hostages at the US embassy. This happened under Carter. Carter placed an arms embargo against Iran in response. And like you said they held off on releasing the hostages until Reagan was elected. The Algiers Accord that formally ended the crisis did not involve any arms sales.
Iran Contra happened under Reagan. Reagan wanted to fund anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua (the Contras) but was blocked from doing so by Congress.
Meanwhile, the Iran-Iraq war is going on, Iran is still under that arms embargo, and really needs some weapons for that war.
At the same time, over in Lebanon, Hezbollah (who Iran has some influence over) takes some US hostages.
So Reagan and his cronies, like Ollie North, come up with an idea.
To raise money off-the-books to send to the Contras, they secretly sell weapons to Iran, and in exchange Iran will use its connections to Hezbollah to get those hostages released (and the hostages were in fact released, but Hezbollah pretty much immediately took more hostages, this was in the middle of a whole decade-long hostage Crisis in Lebanon with hostages from several countries taken, this was really just a small part of that)
US
It varies from district to district of course
My school offered Spanish, French, and Latin
They used to offer German, but ended that a few years before I got there.
In 7th grade, unless you’re in remedial English, they have you do ¼ of the year taking each as an “exploratory” language (the last quarter they had something else, I want to say they called it “study skills” or something, just a very general class on how to do school stuff)
Then in 8th grade you took that class, it’s been a long time but I think you had it for half the year, but it possibly might have been for just a quarter or maybe for the whole year.
Then in 9th-12th grade you had each class for half the year. If you really wanted to you might have been able to arrange your schedule to have, for example, French 2 1st semester and 3 2nd, but again, it’s been a while, I don’t remember exactly how the scheduling worked.
Little tangential story about my own language learning
I went with French
Initially I kind of wanted to do Latin, but the Latin teacher was a little bit insane. Not actually a bad teacher, but I just didn’t jive with her energy, she was a former gymnast from Russia, and also kind of a germophobe, and just really intense and hyper, one of those rare human beings that if you saw a character like her in a work of fiction it might break your immersion for being unrealistic, but there she was, in the flesh.
There were two Spanish teachers, one was fine, the other was arrested a few years later for being a child molester (I heard somewhere that it eventually turned out that the kids who accused him made it up, but I really can’t find anything from after his arrest to confirm that one way or another) and I didn’t get particularly good vibes from him regardless.
So I went with French. The French teacher was actually pretty great. Also, I decided that I’d rather go to France for a school trip if I stick with it over Spain or Italy (for Latin class)
Unfortunately, she also had a baby that year and was out for most of the year.
We had a long term substitute who was also pretty great, and a pretty competent French teacher.
However, that substitute had some kind of health thing come up and was also out most of the time.
So we had a string of short-term substitutes who mostly didn’t speak a word of French.
And so we all pretty much just got passed along to French 2 knowing barely any more French than we did after our one quarter of exploratory French the year before.
That year, the high school got a new French teacher. He wasn’t so much a French teacher as much as he was a teacher who happened to be from France. He didn’t seem to me to be particularly good at teaching a language. He was also kind of a sad, lonely man who was too soft to deal with American teenagers, and some of the most unruly and problematic our school had to offer were in his first semester class, and they absolutely broke this poor man’s soul, he was an empty husk of a man by the time we got him 2nd semester, and although my class was decent in comparison, teenagers can smell weakness in a teacher and he was totally unable to control the class, he ended up having to take a lot of time off, I’m pretty sure because of depression, and actually got canned a couple weeks before the end of the school year.
So again, we all kind of get shuffled along to French 3 despite having only the most basic understanding of French possible.
The higher-level French teacher had been there for a long time. She is good at her job. She’s intense, but not unlikeable. Unfortunately from French 3 onwards, the class is supposed to be mostly taught in French and most of us could barely manage to ask to go to the bathroom. So she was frustrated with us, we were confused by her, it wasn’t a great experience.
So after barely scraping by in that class I decided no more French class for me.
Which was kind of a bummer, because I was kind of looking forward to going on the class trip to France in French 4 or 5 (they did the trip every other year) but I was way out of my depth and didn’t want to put in the effort to catch up on my own.
I think I see a bit of steam escaping from the pan, so I think they tried to weigh it after cooking
Which makes sense, there’s going to be some weight change after you cook it because of evaporation and such… hence the steam
Before cooking you couldn’t really call it Jollof Rice, it would just be a big pot of the raw ingredients for Jollof Rice
And they know the weight of the ingredients going in already, they’re quoted in the article, so that’s just simple addition to figure out.