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.

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.

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.

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.

You don’t need an FFL, it’s a 200 dollar tax stamp, some lengthy background checks, and you have to find one made before 1986 owned by someone who’s willing to sell it to you.

You can kind of get around that by getting an FFL to acquire post-1986 machine guns, but that comes with its own red tape, and you can basically only get them for your business as a gun shop. If you close up shop, you gotta get rid of the new machine guns.

It has been a pretty common thing for the national guard to be deployed domestically with weapons but no ammo, or with ammo on their person but not loaded into their weapons, so it’s a valid question.

nonessential items such as clothing, appliances and furniture

There might be some weird wording in the law or how the article is reporting on it, but those things feel pretty damn essential to me.

Good thing it’s legal to walk around naked since clothing isn’t essential.

Oh, you need a new fridge so that you can store food or medication? Sorry, appliances are nonessential.

Beds, chairs, tables, etc, who needs those?

Some people out there are really reluctant to branch out and try anything different. There’s a million places around me selling the same food but better, but some people just want to go to cracker barrel.

Old people especially, but also some people with, for example, autism, ARFID, etc. can be really picky about where they’ll eat, and sometimes it’s just not worth the aggravation of trying to get them to try something new.

Hell, I have some friends who aren’t even particularly picky who can be reluctant to try out new places. Restaurants aren’t cheap, I can understand being reluctant to spend money on food you’re not sure you’re going to like.

You can go way down the rabbit hole here, you can blame Christian European colonial powers, but you can blame the pre-christian Roman empire for opening that door for Christianity to spread into Europe in the first place, you can blame Jews for being the religion that Christianity spun off of, you can blame various other religions and cultures that eventually morphed into Judaism

You can do that all the way back to the first organism that evolved that had a hint of sapience if you really want to

But that would be ridiculous.

That’s all in the past, and while it’s important to understand how we ended up here, we can’t do a damn thing to change any of that.

However here and now, we have groups like family watch international actively fanning the flames and funding this crap.

They’re not the only ones, they’re not all American, but you have your head in the fucking sand if you think America isn’t the biggest piece of this puzzle.

I used to work at a pizza place around the time that gluten free stuff was starting to get big. We added a gluten free pizza to our menu. The crusts came pre made, frozen, wrapped in plastic, with their own disposable aluminum tray.

However, we were a pizza place. The whole pizza station constantly has a light dusting of high-gluten flour on every surface, because that’s what happens when you’re tossing pizza dough around. We used the same cheese, sauce, and other toppings for them as the regular pizzas and I’m certain those had at least traces of that high gluten pizza flour in them because, again, flour was everywhere.

Honestly, no one with celiac or any other form of gluten sensitivity should probably ever step foot in a pizzeria, I’m sure the very air in that place probably had detectable levels of gluten.

School also really killed my love of reading

I always had a book, sometimes several books, that I was reading on my own, and I read well above my grade level. But my high school went on a really big reading kick while I was there. Basically every class had books assigned to read at one point or another, I think even some of the math classes did. One homeroom period a week was dedicated to SSR (sustained silent reading) where you had to be reading something, you weren’t allowed to do homework, be on the computer, etc.

So they did a really great job of turning reading from something I genuinely really enjoyed to something that was a dreaded chore.

I still read occasionally, but nothing like I used to. Some of that’s being an adult with a busy schedule

But I definitely see plenty of space in my schedule where I could read and just don’t. It’s harder to get myself into the headspace where I want to read anymore.

I almost got myself back on track a few years ago, unfortunately it was just as COVID hit and I had just started reading The Road, which I was really enjoying, but with all of the shortages from supply lines being disrupted it was hitting a little too close to home.

I’m almost back on track now, but I doubt I’ll ever get back to where I was before high school murdered my love of reading.

Gideons actually encourages people to take those bibles, giving away Bibles is kind of their whole schtick.

Sure, if enough people do it, maybe eventually the idiots donating to it will run out of money, but more likely they’d just think that what they’re doing is working really well and use brag about it to get even more people to donate to them.

It will of course depend on which place you go to.

I’ve only noticed 2 at this place (but it’s pretty wild how quickly you stop noticing peoples bodies when everyone is naked, so there may have been more,), but one of them is an employee, and another was a performer they had for an event.

The clientele is mostly (but not entirely) middle aged white people, and I’ve seen more than a few trump stickers on peoples vehicles there, but they do have rules about not discussing politics and religion and aren’t afraid to kick people out if they make an ass of themselves, so I haven’t witnessed anyone saying or doing anything transphobic. This place is also fairly popular with swingers and such (behind closed doors, nothing sexual allowed in public) and we’re all a little weird since we like going to nudist resorts, so I think everyone has adopted a pretty “live and let live” attitude towards people with lifestyles that are different than their own.

No shortage of gay, lesbian, bi, pan, etc people though, and there are usually more than a few rainbow flags flying around the campground.

So I can’t really imagine anyone making an issue of it at the place I’ve been going.

There’s also a few nude/clothing-optional resorts out there that cater more specifically to LGBTQ people, so that’s potentially also an option.

Also, weirdly, I feel like in a lot of cases, depending on the state of their transition, it may be harder than you think to tell someone is trans/gender non-conforming there. Can’t exactly base your assumptions about someone’s gender by the clothes they’re wearing after all. Not that people would necessarily assume the right gender, mind you.

It’s not everyone’s thing to be sure, but I started going to a nudist resort largely because of this. I really just wanted a place to go hang out that has a pool that’s not overrun with kids.

It is technically a family resort, not too many people actually show up with kids, but there’s occasionally a few, and while I don’t particularly want to see naked kids (or honestly most of the adults either, nudists are rarely the kinds of people you’d want to see naked,) the parents are obviously keeping an eye on their kids there and keep them under control.

National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism defines binge drinking as a pattern of drinking that brings a person’s blood alcohol concentration (BAC) to 0.08 grams percent or above. This typically happens when men consume 5 or more drinks, and when women consume 4 or more drinks, in about 2 hours.

By that definition, most of my drinking probably wouldn’t count as a binge. I might, over the course of a day hanging around camp or whatever, have a dozen or so drinks, but that’s spread out over almost as many hours.

I have seen other definitions that call any day you have more than 2 a binge, and by that definition, sure, I have an occasional binge, but I don’t know if I’m a fan of that definition, it feels like there’s too many variables with body weight and metabolism and such, and of course how quickly you’re drinking, there’s a big difference between a 300lb man killing a 6 pack over the course of a day and a 100lb woman pounding them one after another, so I like how the NIAAA definition ties it to BAC.