Fondots @ Fondots @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Well at the end of it, you can see he actually starts leaning pretty far to the left

Not a Doctor, take this for what it's worth

But my understanding is that, depending on the type of seizure disorder and a whole host of other factors, there's a lot of things that can potentially trigger seizures

Flashing lights are a classic example, but also smells, temperature, stress, diet, hormones, drug/alcohol use or withdrawal, fever, lack of sleep, etc.

Also you said that you gradually halved your dose since then, that might also be a factor. Lets say you were on 100mg before and 50 now. When your body was acclimated to 100mg, it was probably a bigger shock to your system to go without than it is now that your body is only used to 50, obviously 0 to 100 is a bigger difference than 0 to 50.

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.

1. Ethnic
2. Fusion

Figure that pretty much covers all of my bases.

Even if we ignore the doodle

And that given all we know about about trump and Epstein, we know that the inside joke between them here is about pedophila, or at the very least about them being creepy misogynistic sex pests.

And let's assume that despite everything we know about them that somehow this is about something inane, like a shared love of football, or model railroading, or going to McDonald's for hamberders or something.

Can we agree that this is just a really fucking weird and creepy way to write a birthday letter? Someone tells you they're going to put together a book of letters from friends for someone's birthday and this is what you spit out? The script of some weird scenario you imagined where the two of you are responding to a voiceover and jerking each other off about your shared hobby?

If I got a letter, card, Facebook post, message, etc. like this from someone I know, I'd ask them if they're alright because that's a fucking weird way to send a birthday message.

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.

The in-universe science behind Cyclops' optic blasts have been very inconsistent over the years.

The explanation that I'm personally familiar with is that his eyes themselves are portals to a dimension of pure concussive energy that doesn't produce heat, and that energy is also conveniently blocked by ruby lenses in his glasses and visor, and also his own body is immune to it.

Which doesn't really make any sense from a real world physics perspective, but that's comic books for you.

And of course depending on what timeline/reboot/alternate universe you're dealing with, who's writing it, and what's convenient for the plot, any of that can go right out the window, I've definitely seen him melt things and start fires with his blasts in some versions.

I think another explanation that gets used sometimes is that his body absorbs sunlight to power them.

I really hate the term gun show loophole

Maybe the situation and laws are different in other parts of the country, but at every gun show I've ever been to all of those people with stands set up selling guns are dealers, so to buy a gun through them you have to go through all the legal hoops as if you were buying from a regular gun store.

I suppose there's a lot of randos wandering around there who own guns who might be convinced to do a private sale, but that doesn't really have anything to do with them being at a gun show except it's a convenient networking opportunity. You could just as easily hang around outside of a shooting range trying to find a private seller.

Although if we want a more pessimistic view

If we assume that "eligible voters" is a roughly representative sample of the country in general, well over 51 percent of the country either voted for this (directly by voting for trump, or indirectly by voting 3rd party) or didn't care enough to even show up and vote.

Because that's what happened. Something like 3/4 of eligible voters decided that this was an acceptable outcome.

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.