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Joined 15 days ago
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Cake day: April 4th, 2025

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  • I had never watched the movies or read the books as a kid because my parents thought they would make me turn to satanism and so I was horrified watching a friend play lego harry Potter and I see this anti semitic stereotype hoarding gold so I was like “bro what is that” and he was like “oh yeah that’s a goblin they run the wizard banks” and I was like “so wait a race of evil creatures with giant hook noses run all the banks in Harry Potter? That’s sketchy as fuck” and he was like “Huh… Never noticed it before but yeah that’s messed up”


  • This is a braindead take. The word “empire” has a lot of cultural baggage with Russian nationalism and it is totally different than say “the Spanish Empire” or “The British Empire” because when Russians say “The Russian Empire” it is specifically referring to an idea within Russian nationalism that Russia is the successor state to Rome and all of the cultural and religious ideas that come with that. The idea is that Moscow is the “Third Rome” with the first being, well, Rome, the second being Constantinople, and after the fall of Constantinople, it went to Moscow because of the unique connection of the Rus’ with the Byzantine empire and Eastern Christianity. To use the term “Russian Empire” would be a huge boost to Russian nationalists and accomplish nothing substantial for anyone else.


  • Ngl I totally understand this one. When you’re Russia it’s not like you have a lot of options for international partners and the Taliban are straight up the government of Afghanistan. It’s kind of awkward to try to make trade deals with one of the only countries still willing to trade with you when all of its leaders and officials are considered members of a banned terrorist organization. I suppose this is an issue any time there is a revolution, once the radicals are the actual government everyone has to re-evaluate how to deal with them.


  • I think some mods are overly jumpy with chemistry type questions because uninformed morons will confidently answer the wrong thing and the mods are afraid it will get someone hurt. That or the subs in question just aren’t geared for this kind of Q&A. You’d probably get better responses from a chemistry subreddit.

    Scent compounds being potentially hazardous to some minor degree in their super concentrated form isn’t a huge issue, because that’s not how they’re going to be experienced and it’s hard to find anything that isn’t harmful in some quantity. The alchemist Paracelsus, who pioneered evidence backed approaches to pharmaceutical medicine wrote the old adage “The dose makes the poison.” Even water can kill you if you drink too much of it all at once, and pure oxygen is an extremely dangerous substance even though we need it to breathe.

    That said, I happen to know a bit about chemistry and just did a bit of reading. It looks like rose oil comes in two forms - one produced by steam distillation, and one produced by solvent extraction. The one produced via solvent extraction is more common, more concentrated, and according to Safety Data Sheets (SDS) I was able to find, has more potential health hazards associated with it. The other form, known as Rose Otto, is produced via steam distillation and is less concentrated. This means you will need more and will need to adjust your formulation, but according to the SDS this is a pretty safe substance. If your concern is potential hazards of making your soap during manufacturing, then that may be a better option I guess. I still think that it’s fine to use substances that are toxic in quantities that will never make it into the final product.



  • I hope so. Textual analysis suggests a “2 Q” theory where the earliest posts were mostly one author on 4chan (interestingly not all, several early drops are believed to be from different users) and then another person (who I believe wholeheartedly is 8chan administration Ron Watkins) started posting as Q and moved to 8chan. I’m interested in knowing who the earliest Q was and what the content of the very first Q drops was, given that there are believed to be several that didn’t get archived. Several people have claimed to be 4chan Q but none of their stories are particularly convincing. My guess is that it was a bunch of random trolls at first and then one of them just went with it when they started getting a following.



  • Okay so at what point does it get handed off to private industry unless the government is just in business with manufacturers in a much more direct way than it is now? We’d need a completely different economic system for all research to be publicly funded. Consider this- often the way it works now is that a government funded researcher discovers a new molecule that could be useful. Then, private companies figure out how to make it industrially and run trials in pilot plants and design the plant to make it at scale. Should the government be doing all of that? This is extremely expensive, and I don’t know how you’d try to prioritize resources in the current economic system.


  • This would be disastrous for actual manufacturing because a patent is the only thing that makes it worthwhile to spend a bunch of money upfront to develop a new technology. Unlike with software where you don’t have nearly as much up front capital investment to develop something, it costs millions of dollars to get a manufacturing process up and running and in a good enough state to where it can actually work out financially. Without patents, your competitor can just take all of that work and investment and just copy it with the benefit of doing it right the first time, so they’re able to undercut you on cost. The alternative is that everyone is super secretive about what they’re doing and no knowledge is shared, which is even worse. Patents are an awesome solution to this problem because they are public documents that explain how technologies work, but the law allows a monopoly on that technology for a limited amount of time. I also feel that in the current landscape, copyright is probably also good (although I would prefer it to be more limited) because I don’t want people who are actually coming up with new ideas having to compete with thousands of AI slop copycats ruining the market.

    TL;DR- patents are good if you’re actually building things, tech bros are morons who think everything is software.



  • I may legitimately lose my supposedly magical and highly important American manufacturing job because of this shit and these dumbasses think that this is all a genius move that will finally Make America Great Again. Everyone else I know who works in manufacturing is feeling the same way. One of my coworkers is mildly Trumpy and was talking about how he thinks it’s a negotiation tactic and was shocked when I said I think the people in charge are just legit stupid and think tariffs will magically make things better in their own right. He didn’t have anything to offer as a rebuttal he just seemed surprised that anyone would think Trump isn’t a turbo genius who is secretly making 5000 IQ negotiation moves.







  • Here’s the thing -they always were. For any free service, the users are the product and the customers are the advertisers. It’s just that for most of the lives of these companies, interest rates were at historic lows and their profit requirements weren’t as high as a result. Businesses are constantly borrowing money and spending it to expand, and interest rates determine how much money they need to make to make those investments worthwhile. If you get a loan to start a business at 3% interest, you can afford to make less money on that business than if your loan was at 7%. As interest rates have gone up, so have the pressures for making more money on investments.