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.

The type of ice cream definitely makes a difference, more premium brands tend to be a lot stiffer than cheaper brands. And I admittedly tend to buy just some basic vanilla ice cream because I like to go crazy with toppings.

My brain defaults to fahrenheit, and that probably shapes how I look at temperatures a bit, but those temperature differences between our different freezers feels pretty significant to me. In warmer temperatures, for example, that amount of temperature difference could be the difference between shorts & t shirt weather and needing a jacket.

Also, for what it’s worth, my family once acquired a full container of Ben & Jerry’s that would have been served at one of their stores. The instructions on the box were to store it at or below -20f/-29c, and bring it up to 10f/-12c in the serving cabinet.

My fridge freezer is currently set to -2f (about -19c)

My basement freezer doesn’t have a convenient temperature display, and I don’t have a thermometer in it, I’d guess I’m probably at around -10 to -20f (about -23 to -29c) some people go as low as -40f (which is also -40c)

It of course varies a lot depending on where you are but I live in the suburbs, and they’re pretty common around me. Not necessarily an “everyone has one” kind of thing, but definitely something that you know a good handful of people who have them.

https://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/data/2020/state/pdf/State Appliances.pdf

According to the EIA, about 33% of households overall, state by state it’s as low as 19% in California, and as high as 65% in south dakota. So even in states like California, Nevada, or New Jersey where 94+% of people live in an area that’s considered urban, if you assume 100% of the rural residents have freezers, that’s still about 13% of those city dwellers with a dedicated freezer.

I feel like the biggest deciding factor is probably whether or not you own a house, which is going to have a lot of correlation to being urban/rural. They take up space, so not conducive to apartment living, and they’re kind of a bitch to move so you probably want to make sure you’re going to be able to stay in a house for a while before buying a freezer so that you don’t have to deal with moving it every few years if your landlord jacks up the rent and forces you out.

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

Do most refrigerators in the world not have a freezer?

Because I’m pretty sure that’s what they mean by “fridge freezer” as opposed to a separate “deep freezer” like a chest or an upright freezer with no refrigerator.

Not sure how common having a separate freezer is in other parts of the world, but it’s fairly common in the US.

I know my basement freezer is really fucking cold, it’s actually kind of painful to handle things I pull out of it sometimes because they’re so cold. The freezer on my fridge upstairs is a bit warmer (still well below freezing of course) I can usually manage to scoop ice cream out of my upstairs freezer without too much trouble, but out of my downstairs freezer it would be kind of like chiseling at a rock with a spoon.

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.

The us has always been anti illegal immigration

The US actually made it almost the first hundred years of its history without many meaningful immigration laws

I’m sure someone will argue otherwise, but one thing commonly cited as the first US immigration law was the steerage act of 1819, which was pretty much just “you can’t overcrowd your ships, you have to have enough food and water for everyone, you have to have a list of your passengers and account for anyone who died on the way”

So not really limiting immigration, more making sure that the ships bringing immigrants here were providing at least basic livable conditions for the trip.

Immigration overland was totally unregulated.

And with some minor alterations here and there, that was pretty much the state of things until the 1870s and 80s with the Page Act and Chinese Exclusion Act. Until then there really wasn’t such a thing as “illegal immigration” and borders were pretty much wide-open.

To be thorough, between 1776 and the Page Act, we did have the Alien Friends and Alien Enemies acts to allow the US to deport non-citizen immigrants under certain circumstances, and we took a few steps forwards and backwards at times regarding the naturalization process, but we also had the 14th amendment and “An Act to Encourage Immigration” in there as well.

And of course after that, shit went downhill pretty damn quickly.

So it’s a bit of a mixed bag, but again for almost half of US history there really wasn’t any such thing as “illegal” immigration for anyone to be against (general anti-immigrant sentiments are another story)

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.

A sound question.

Ok, where do you get those 50 people?

Do you have 50 people sitting around on-call 24/7/365 just in case they need to go knock on everyone’s door?

Are you taking them off of other jobs to go do this? If this happens at 3AM on a holiday weekend, there’s probably a pretty good reason those other people are already on the clock, like maybe fixing whatever issue is causing the advisory.

Are we relying on volunteers? How are we going to get ahold of them to let them know, let alone guarantee that they’re actually going to show up.

We gonna mobilize the national guard to do it? How long is that gonna take to get going?

Maybe we’ll just press-gang the first 50 people we can get our hands on to do it. What could possibly go wrong?

But let’s say getting the people is a solved problem. How are they getting around? Not every area is easily walkable. Do we have 50 municipal cars on standby for them to use? Are we going to have additional people driving them around to the needed areas in vans? Are they using their personal vehicles and will need to be compensated for gas and mileage (not to mention probably an insurance nightmare for those people using personal vehicles for non-personal use)

3d printing is not the default fabrication method now that we’re getting good at it. It just shines in certain applications.

Getting a little theoretical here

With the current state of the technology, 3d printing lags behind some traditional manufacturing techniques like machining and in terms of speed, cost, quality, available materials, etc. except for some relatively niche cases.

However, that gap is closing a bit every day, it may or may not ever catch up completely or surpass the old technique in those aspects

But if it does ever get close, I could very much see 3d printing being a preferred method

Subtractive manufacturing like machining, by design, creates a lot of waste, all of the chips and off cuts that are removed from the stock are either discarded or require additional energy and/or materials to recycle.

And things like injection molding require custom molds that wear out over time, and can be expensive to design and manufacture

And in either case, you’re largely locked into making one thing on an assembly line at a time, and to switch over to a different product you’re probably going to need to switch out a lot of the molds and tooling, recalibrate everything, etc. which can be time consuming.

With 3d printing, you could theoretically use only the amount of material that’s actually in the finished product (if you design it that it doesn’t require any external supports ) you don’t need any custom tooling or mold, just generic, interchangeable nozzles (for FDM, LCD screens or lasers or whatever the equivalent is for other printing technologies) and you could switch production from one item to another by just hitting print on a different file.

Again, we’re not there, may never be there, but it’s a cool thing to think about

It kind of sounds like that article is about the “hey Siri” feature getting activated accidentally, like if it picks up something that sounds similar to the trigger phrase and starts recording

Which is still a big security/privacy issue, but not exactly the same as if they’re just turning the microphone on whenever they want to listen to you and serve you ads

Overall, I tend to just be happy to be watching anything star wars. None of the movies are that deep, I’m just in it to watch space wizards with laser swords flying around in space ships with robot sidekicks battling evil. As long as most of those boxes get checked, I’m pretty happy with any star wars media, and in my mind I’m right back to being a little kid watching Star wars for the first time. Anything more is just icing on the cake.

Now I can absolutely rank them and admit that some of them are better movies than others, and the sequels and prequels definitely drop the ball on that in a lot of ways

And while on the whole, the sequels and prequels aren’t great movies (arguably the OT aren’t even great movies if we’re being totally objective) I think that in a lot of ways they do a better job at universe building by dropping hints at other parts of the galaxy that we don’t get to explore right then and there, they just do a shitty job of following through on them and tying them together into a coherent narrative.

I think that just about any part of episode 8 for example could have been expanded out into a pretty cool movie or show, there was a lot to work with there, they just didn’t work together as the same movie

The force dyad thing between Rey and Kylo is pretty fucking cool

Casino heist or spycraft movies are a pretty tried and true movie formula, I probably would have saved it for something like a Solo movie, or maybe Andor. The stuff about the military industrial complex profiting off of selling weapons to both sides could work for either of them. Han is from Cornelia, where the arms dealers are building a lot of these battleships and such, and it’s also established that he’s a gambler so a casino makes sense for him, or Andor could work well with the gritty political side of things.

Fucking broom kid! Let’s get more non-jedi non-sith force sensitives

Finn was just criminally underutilized all-around

The Holdo maneuver was pretty fucking badass

You can argue about how the bombing run doesn’t make sense from a physics perspective, or was tactically stupid, but it was a cool scene nonetheless

I could go on, I think you could build out a pretty decent movie, show, or at least an episode or two of a show from any of those ideas if they just committed to the idea

I don’t think that most of the big tech companies are listening to your microphone (I’m not ruling it out entirely, and I’m certainly there are some smaller sketchier companies that are doing it)

But I think most of the time most of the time they don’t need to

They know what ads you’ve seen on your phone/computer, what you’ve been googling, the websites you’ve visited, where you’ve used your credit card, what shows and movies you watch, and where you’ve been (from gps locations, or from what wifi networks and Bluetooth devices you’ve been near or connected to) and what ads, playlists, stores, products, etc. you were exposed to while you were there, and of course who you talk to and all of that same information about those people.

That’s all going to influence the things you think and talk about, they probably have a pretty good idea what kind of conversations you’re going to have well before you do.

And don’t get me wrong, that’s creepy as fuck.

I think most of it comes down to people not even realizing how much data about ourselves we put out there and all of the ways it can be collected and used to build a profile about you.

And honestly I think they can probably get better data from that most of the time than from trying to filter out background noise and make sense of what you’re talking about through your microphone.

Couple different kinds of notes, but I think this covers most of my use cases

I use google keep for small reminders, things I want to look up later, grocery lists to share with my wife, etc.

I keep a couple field notes notebooks around in my car and bag for things I want to make a physical note of, especially things I need to sketch out (I am no artist by any stretch of the imagination but I’m a capable DIYer and I sometimes need to sketch out the thing I’m building/fixing) while I’m out and about before I forget about them. I like the size of them, and the dot grid lends itself well to the kind of notes and sketches I use them for.

I also have some sketches of the rooms in my house in those books, list of some furniture dimensions, so when I’m out shopping with my wife and she asks “do you think this will fit in our dining room?” I can tell her definitively yes or no.

It also has a list of the bulbs, tires, wiper blades, air filters, etc. that our cars use, so I can reference them quickly while out shopping, it’s quicker to just flip to the back page of my little notebook than to try to look it up on my phone from the aisle at AutoZone or Walmart.

I also have a rite in the rain notebook I keep with my tools, it’s fairly rugged and waterproof, mostly ends up getting used for scribbling down a list of stuff I need to get from the hardware store in the middle of a project. Went with that one because I’m pretty likely to be using it when I’m wet or dirty, outside in the mud, under a leaking sink, etc. while I’m halfway through a project.

I keep another one of those with my camping supplies.

I have a pad of graph paper at my workbench, I like it for sketching things out, same as I like the dot grid in the field notes books, but this one doesn’t have to travel around with me or pull double duty for written notes, so I could go bigger and cheaper

We also did our kitchen cabinets in blackboard paint, so my wife and I can leave notes to each other on there, mostly reminders to empty the dishwasher and such.

Also worth noting another key issue with car exhaust in a confined space is carbon monoxide, you’ll feel the CO2 build up and make it difficult to breath in your environment before it does any damage, the CO on the other hand will kill you quietly. CO breaks down relatively quickly in the environment by reacting with other substances in the air, so it’s not really a long term pollutant concern.

There’s also other chemicals and particulates, but they’re mostly going to be at lower concentrations that aren’t going to kill you in a hurry, but may contribute to longer term cancer risks and such, but that’s a little harder for people to wrap their heads around. You won’t immediately die of cancer in your garage from breathing exhaust but it might give you cancer years or decades down the line.