Posts by fadedgardener15

Alex Patel96 said:I honestly feel like society is constantly trying to strip away our right to be selfish.🙂

Look, being selfish isn't against the law in America. So, society isn't actually denying anyone the "right" to be self-centered. It’s more about accountability. From a moral standpoint, if you’re out here preaching selfishness, you’ve gotta own up to it. You have to admit you're a selfish person. It’s just like how an alcoholic needs to step up and admit they have a problem. Real simple.

restlessfox5 said:Man, when I was a kid, I remember hearing nonstop about how Japan was this unstoppable economic powerhouse. I clearly recall watching all those 80s and early 90s American movies and shows where everyone seemed terrified that Japan was gonna totally outpace the US economy. Then, just like that—poof—that whole vibe basically evaporated.
Plus, I've come across that "lost decade" thing mentioned a few times regarding Japan's economy.
Nowadays, when people talk about massive economic surges, it’s always about China or India, but nobody really mentions Japan anymore. So, if anyone actually knows what went down there, fill me in.

Capitalism isn't built for the long haul. It basically just burns through human resources until it either finds a new way to grow or hits a wall. If it can't find fresh resources, it just stalls out, and that's usually when civil liberties start taking a hit.

Alexander Lewis said:He was crushed between the relentless grind of unchecked communism and the unstoppable momentum of runaway capitalism.
The social etiquette we once valued has become a joke. Nowadays, self-control and decency aren't worth much. Instead, the biggest tough guy in the room is always the one who steals, fights, and breaks things just to prove he can—basically signaling that if you even look at him the wrong way, you’re next. 😢

And honestly? That’s what some women go for. They want that raw, unrefined energy—someone they can basically pay off with sex to act as their physical bodyguard. It lets them play the part of being rude or arrogant in public, knowing they have that muscle behind them. At least, that's the deal, right up until the guy decides to turn that aggression on her instead.

Zachary Hall7 said:Are you thinking I should use rhodamine and auramine instead of dye, or should I stick to your formula? I actually want this stuff to burn with an open flame because I need it for a specific purpose, not just as some little experiment. And it really shouldn't be toxic. If you think I should go with your recipe, could you tell me where I can pick up some potassium chlorate, auramine, and rhodamine?

I used to have some of those old military-grade mixes lying around, and they weren't meant to just burst into flames. You had to heat them up just to get them smoking. Usually, there’s a starter mix inside a smoke bomb that does that heavy lifting. If I remember correctly, in my own recipes, using bentonite as a calming agent along with potassium chlorate as the oxidizer and some tar resin creates exactly that effect. The color and the lactose are what actually make the mixture work, because I know for a fact that the smoke itself takes on whatever color the mix is—so, red, yellow, or white. Tar is black, and you'll find it right near the cap of the smoke bomb.
You might be able to find potassium chlorate at Hospitality under certain conditions. Honestly, though, they probably won't sell it to you since it's treated like an explosive. But hey, it's used to make matchsticks, so there's your hint. You could also try using perchlorate, which is what they use in kids' toy caps, but watch yourself with that stuff—it's pretty touchy.
Rhodamine and auramine aren't all that toxic; if they were, they wouldn't be used in military drills. I've inhaled plenty of that smoke myself and I turned out just fine.
As far as the auramine and rhodamine reds go, once you know the actual chemical names, it should be way easier to track down. Besides, rhodamine dyes are used in laser tech, so I doubt it's hard to find.

Otherwise, if you don't want to deal with the headache of heavy chemistry, you can get smoke the same way they do in tanks: just mix ammonia and hydrochloric acid. Just those two together. Hydrochloric acid is easy enough to grab, and if I'm not mistaken, you can find ammonia at any local pharmacy.

Zachary Hall7 said:POTASSIUM CHLORATE, BREWERS LACTOSE, BLACKROCK SMOKE DYE - A 30 - 40 - 30 MIX... I just don't have a clue where to track down these ingredients anymore.

Well, why don't you go hunt down some rhodamine and auramine? I used to keep a decent stash of them back in the day. Such a bummer I don't have any left, otherwise I'd hook you up with a little bit.

Zachary Hall7 said:I’m looking for some info if anyone knows where I can pick up dyes that actually color smoke. Organic dyes won't burn, obviously. You can't find much of that stuff at the local chemical supply shops anymore. I checked online (BlackRock) but they aren't interested in selling to me.

Colored smoke isn't even really a combustion product. It’s more about evaporation and sublimation. Like, back in the day, people used glycerol for smoking, now everyone uses ethylene glycol. With smoke cartridges, you usually use lactose and then toss in the coloring agents.
I actually dug through my old notebook—I used to jot down all this useful stuff...

Training mines and smoke canisters for military use (old US Army recipes):

red:
potassium chlorate 23%
rhodamine red 23 %
lactose 23%
inert filler 23%
coal tar 8%

yellow:
potassium chlorate 29%
auramine 21%
lactose 23%
inert filler 18%
coal tar 9%

grey:
hexachloroethane 44%
zinc oxide 32%
calcium silicide 17%
rivil (for mixing) 7%

Note: do NOT light this mixture. You have to heat it until it starts smoking on its own. Don't just hit it with an open flame; you need to heat it, maybe in a test tube or something.

Also: instead of using inert filler as a phlegmatizer, you could try something else like sawdust, but you'll have to play around with the ratios to get it right.

One last thing: watch out for that yellow mix. It dissolves in water, and once that yellow stain hits something, it’s there for good. The smoke is the same way. One time in my neighborhood, the smoke turned the neighbors' laundry bright yellow while it was drying on their balcony. Aside from the smoke rising up like some weird cloud, those sheets stayed yellow forever. Not even Taylor Swift could fix them.

Appendix:
Auramine (yellow dye): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auramine_O
Rhodamine (red dye): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Red

Look, honestly? Nobody actually knows what friendship even means anymore. And I’m not even surprised. In this day and age, people act more like wolves than friends. We're all just getting chewed up by globalization, the endless rat race for cash, selfish interests, and this weird trend where absolutely nothing is considered certain anymore—except for relativity, I guess. When everything is that hollowed out, there’s just no room left for actual values, let alone real friendship.
If you want a perfect example of the total opposite of friendship, just look at this contest and the people entering it. Especially those big-name influencers who are all over it.

P.S. Please, just leave me off the list.

hollowtinker18 said:If you want to lose a so-called "friend," just lend them some cash.😂
That’s basically your situation—sticking by someone through thick and thin without expecting a dime in return.
...Or maybe it's just when shared interests are the only thing holding people together?
Bottom line: one loyal friend beats a hundred fake ones any day of the week.
Cheers.

Personally, I don't care about winning; sometimes I just want a clean, simple game. Not that I could ever beat our unbeatable Batić🤣 anyway. Send him my best.👍

Any particular Song would be welcome on this thread?

I tried that once. Seriously. It works every single time.

Well, since I can't exactly beat the legendary, unstoppable Batić anyway, I might as well send him my best.🤣 Cheers to him!👍

Is it okay if I drop some poems in this thread?

It’s nice to remember the greats. But honestly? It's even better to figure out why they had to leave us in the first place.

Hannah Moore8 said:I’ve been chewing on this idea for a while now, but it finally crossed my mind again today and I just felt compelled to get it down on paper. It might seem like nothing to most people, but I find it absolutely fascinating...
Of course, I realize the human brain is an incredibly passionate and still largely enigmatic organ, but purely
from a philosophical standpoint, I wanted to pose this question. We are all more or less familiar with the widely accepted theory regarding the brain as a complex web of interconnected information where impulses travel through pathways, and forgetting occurs when those connections weaken... and so on.
Now, consider when someone asks us a direct question—for instance, what is the capital of the United States (Washington, D.C.)? That falls under declarative memory; we either possess that fact or we don't. In this specific case, we would all answer "Washington, D.C." (bravo!), assuming we aren't simply experiencing a momentary lapse in retrieval. The cognitive process involved would essentially be a search through our neural architecture to locate that data point and pull it into working memory to provide the answer. In this scenario, the brain's job is made significantly easier because the data exists and can easily find its way to the surface. So far, there's no ambiguity there. However, if the question were, say, "What is the capital of the White Coast?" (and let's assume I have no idea what that is), what exactly does the brain have to do to arrive at the response "I don't know"? How does one search for something that simply isn't there??? We wouldn't be able to categorically state "I don't know" until the brain has scanned the entire memory bank—which some studies suggest is virtually limitless—unless the brain actually knows exactly where that non-existent data *should* be located, realizes it's missing, and then stops. Just try to visualize that: we are searching through an infinite memory, and if we don't find it, we conclude that we don't know. Furthermore, why does searching through this perceived infinity take roughly the same amount of time as searching for something finite that we know how to find? To clarify, it takes us about the same amount of time to answer "Washington, D.C." as it does to answer "I don't know." To me, that fact serves as further evidence for the theory that the brain knows precisely where the information ought to be, even if it isn't there, thereby reducing the search to a finite task.
Call me crazy if you want, but I truly don't care.

Look, neither a computer nor the human brain works by just stuffing info into a sack. Information is structured; it’s all about hierarchical and associative connections. Any programmer worth their salt knows about tree structures—binary, symmetric, asymmetric, you name it.
To keep it simple, think of it like a folder system on your laptop. You find what you need (or don't) pretty fast because of that organization.
If everything was just tossed into a pile without any order, searching would be a total nightmare. Impossible, really.

That structure where information settles is what actually creates KNOWLEDGE! It’s dynamic, always making new links and associations.

For example, if you're looking for cities, you aren't out there searching through elephants or scales. You go under the "cities" category. The White Coast is in Africa. So you narrow it down to African cities. How many African cities do you actually know? See? It's not infinite.

cosmicpuma15 said:A few months back—I can’t remember the exact date—I was watching German TV when they mentioned how a prominent Austrian politician, Joerg Heider, was planning to call for a referendum on Austria leaving the European Union, fueled by the public's growing frustration with Brussels. Then, just a week later, Heider died in a car crash, allegedly while driving drunk. But everyone who actually knew him? They insisted Heider never touched a drop.
My immediate thought was that Heider was taken out. Why? Because if Austria pulls the plug on the European Union, it sets a precedent that would almost certainly trigger a rapid collapse of that already shaky, centralized dictatorship.
The more I dig into the true nature of the European Union, the more these patterns start making sense. Look at the facts: On November 28, voters in Ireland rejected the Lisbon Treaty in a referendum. Then, on December 6, dioxin was suddenly "discovered" in Irish pork exports. Immediately after? All exports from Ireland were shut down.

And today, I stumbled upon this article:

What’s your take on this?

Look, I’m not exactly a fan of right-wing politics or Heider himself, but even I think this smells fishy. I don't buy for a second that he just drifted off a curve because he had too much to drink.
In my book, it looks like someone tampered with the car's safety tech—you know, the ESP or the brake assist. As for the alcohol tests, there are so many ways to rig that. One possibility is straight-up falsifying the autopsy. Another is that maybe he *was* a little tipsy, but totally capable of driving, yet he couldn't handle the fact that his stability control system had been sabotaged. All they had to do was wait for him to have a drink—or nudge him toward one—and then mess with the electronics. Once the system fails during a turn, it's game over.
I wouldn't jump to blaming Mossad. Honestly? It feels more like something orchestrated by the European Union. If a member state like Austria leaves—especially if Italy follows suit—the whole thing collapses.

crimsonranger38 said:That’s just incorrect, because there aren't actually any elements of socialism at play here. Are you trying to suggest that Japan was a socialist state fifteen years ago? That’s precisely why capitalism survives while socialism fails—it adapts to new realities. The government hasn't gone out and nationalized the banks; they’ve simply taken an equity stake, and once the crisis blows over, they’ll sell those shares right back. In actual socialism, all primary means of production belong to the collective. Any surplus generated by those collective resources is also owned by the collective. People really shouldn't get carried away with these labels unless they want to end up disappointed.

The only real letdown we’re looking at is if we end up feeling the impact of an American collapse ourselves.
Honestly, it's their own fault, but the rest of the world is going to end up footing the bill. I don't care what label people slap on how things are run here—America basically stays afloat by picking everyone else's pockets. Call it capitalism or call it socialism, it doesn't matter. It's all just one big shake-down.

Donna Wood52 said:Have you ever actually crossed paths with someone like this? What’s your take on people who operate this way—I mean, what do you think drives someone to be completely antisocial and just... totally detached from everyone else?

I'm a big fan of 21st Century Schizoid Man (King Crimson).
Most people just label them as antisocial or distant. Usually, those folks don't really "get" them, so they reject them. But honestly? The person isn't trying to be difficult—they're just being themselves, whether that fits in with the crowd or not.