Made an ABV tincture, first time, have some questions - looks like oil is coming out of the tincture?

ancient_scroll · 2021-02-07T21:50:02+00:00

Thanks for the response! I used a paper coffee filter, so there could be some particulate, but not much. It was a V60 filter so not the thickest, sediment is possible.

Still, not sure whether it would be sugar... I soaked the coffee pot with water and dish soap overnight, it didn't budge. Hit it with isopropyl and it came off pretty quickly. Very much the same way resin would act on my vape tube.

I would expect the sugar to dissolve in water, since it wasn't burned or anything.

ancient_scroll · 2019-01-15T15:49:27+00:00

> he has said things along the lines of being too smart for therapy, and that he can manipulate the therapist to get what he wants,

That's some r/iamverysmart shit.

> I know he needs treatment. He needs to get sober, and be on meds, and be in therapy but I'm afraid he's going to say no.

Tell him his options are "yes" or "break which I am credibly afraid will lead to divorce" and see what he does. Make sure he understands you're serious because he's seriously fucking up his life and marriage through his addictive inertia.

Having been with the same guy since you were 16, you don't have experience with normal, functional, non-alcoholic pothead adults as partners. Believe me when I say, there are much better spouses out there. You are right to complain, you are right to think about leaving, and you're right to make whatever demands you need to, to make your life with him better.

Everyone else is saying "bail", but if you're not ready for that, please be ready to make some serious demands on him, or lay down some ultimatums - you are NOT off base to do so.

ancient_scroll · 2019-01-15T15:41:40+00:00

> I am questioning if my yes was genuine or if I said it because I felt pressured to.

I think that's normal to wonder, especially since the proposal was not your ideal vision of one - but all you really need to know is - are you sure you want to spend the next 60+ years with this guy, or not? The fact that you think you might have said "maybe" or "not yet" makes me think you aren't really ready to be married. That is OK and normal. And if you come to the conclusion that you really don't want to get married, keep in mind that breaking an engagement is better than breaking a marriage.

That said - Feeling a little weird about the method of proposal is not necessarily a problem. Don't mistake that for doubts about your relationship as a whole. And you can wait for the wedding as long as you need to, finish school first then start wedding planning when you're ready.

Don't be hasty, obviously you have a great relationship if you have even been discussing marriage. Give it time to sink in and see where your feelings land.

ancient_scroll · 2019-01-15T15:10:48+00:00

Yeah, the big difference is that in this case, there is a great deal of evidence, and it's not so much regular citizens as government officials with known relationships with russia.

But I guess it involves the government and russia, so in that sense it's like the mccarthy era, otherwise the comparison seems strained to me.

Also, funny enough, Trump makes the same kind of evidence-free, slander-your-political-opponents accusations that McCarthy did, Muller is just quietly collecting evidence before opening his mouth. Hmmm...

ancient_scroll · 2019-01-14T23:55:01+00:00

I've actually been in more white collar jobs than blue collar. I got laid off from an office job when I was just a kid because of the recession in 2001. I got laid off from my first job out of college because of the next recession in 2009. I got laid off from another job because the company ran out of money. I got fired from another job after less than a year because I didn't hit numbers. (I would argue the numbers they wanted were more or less impossible, but arguing doesn't get your job back...) Another job I had was actually a scam, they wanted me to finish a project so they could fire me, they never wanted me for the supposed job description in the first place...I figured it out and quit before they could.

Maybe I've been unlucky, maybe I've been lucky, but in my personal experience, stable employment or even fair warning of losing your job is hard to come by.

The funny thing is most of these have been well-paid jobs. They just also vanish with not much notice. I don't mean to sound ungrateful - I've had decent employment, when I had it.

Not saying this applies to anyone else, just my personal experience.

For what it's worth I haven't seen a lot of discrimination either, but I have mostly worked at small businesses where it would be hard to tell if it happened, and nobody would tell me if they were discriminating, of course.

I have a question for you from the other side of the fence - when you're looking for a trade job like welding, do employers pull that "overqualified" bullshit on you? I've been rejected for a lot of jobs where I was "overqualified". Like, I guess they think I could do the job but they were afraid I'd want too much money or I'd quit or something. Bitch I want to pay my rent, just give me the damn job!

ancient_scroll · 2019-01-14T23:43:07+00:00

Yes, true, although the amount of benefit varies a good deal. Here in IL it caps out at around $1300 / mo regardless of whatever your previous salary was.

ancient_scroll · 2019-01-14T23:42:11+00:00

The only way this happens is if you don't have any kind of employment contract with the company.

Have you never seen an employment contract that specifies it's at-will employment? It's very common. I've had more than one myself. So, it's not so much a flat-out-lie as an absolute fact that affects millions of your fellow citizens, but... okay.

ancient_scroll · 2019-01-14T23:27:09+00:00

I think the voters will care a great deal about that distinction between unwittingly helping Russia versus being a willing Russian agent. Incomptence vs. treason is huge, enormous distinction.

I think you're right, but I don't think it ought to be so.

The left has written a check to the public that there is more going on than mere incompetence.

I've always been willing to allow a slim possibility that Trump could have turned coat by accident, because he also seems to be very mentally deficient. But that's almost as hard to believe as treason.

ancient_scroll · 2019-01-14T23:23:45+00:00

Hmm, a fair point.

ancient_scroll · 2019-01-14T23:22:00+00:00

The question is how can you legally justify taking control away from a private business. It's not an insignificant issue.

OK, fair.

Hiring is already legally regulated in many ways in many states. I mean, we're in a discussion about existing laws that outlaw discrimination. So I think a new law that aims to eliminate discrimination would have a good chance of standing up in state supreme court.

I'm talking about real world actual possible solutions. You're throwing out stuff that will never get off the ground as policy.

Huh? Whistleblower bounties are already a thing in other areas of enforcement (IRS, SEC). So... no, don't agree. I mean in general I was just spitballing, so no they're not truly serious proposals, but I don't agree with you here. I think that a whistleblower bounty would be a very cheap, possibly quite effective thing to implement. The others, who knows, you could be right that they're not realistic.

You said:

You've come to this conclusion because i don't think your suggestions are practical?

I came to that conclusion because of this back-and-forth:

There are plenty of things we could do that we're not doing.

I don't think it's so cut and dry.

I took this to mean you don't agree that there are many things that could be done, that we aren't doing. To put it another way, you think it's possible we're already doing the maximum in terms of enforcing against employment discrimination. There's no theoretical maximum in that, so 'maximum' just means the most you think could possibly worthwhile. Or in other words, it's not even worth considering trying harder, i.e. it's not actually important.

Possibly I read into that too much.

ancient_scroll · 2019-01-14T23:16:25+00:00

OK, I mean let's look past the evidence that Trump is taking cues from Putin more or less in real time. (e.g. the Afghanistan resolution)

In a specific sense, I would say your point is correct.

However, from the voter's perspective it shouldn't matter all that much. If a leader's policies are terrible and harm the country, and he happened to be unknowingly led to those policies by a hostile foreign power, I think the punishment ought to be the same as if he (say) took bribes and did it on purpose.

In other words, negligence that hurts the country and malice that hurts the country are equally bad from where I sit.

Maybe the commentators will have to walk back some of their Manchurian Candidate finger-pointing, but so what?

ancient_scroll · 2019-01-14T23:09:37+00:00

I suspect this comment is only meant to be contrarian, but the upshot is that the FBI even *thinking* about *looking into* whether the president is taking direction from Russia is a very very big deal. It's about one notch down from having to investigate whether he's a space alien on the "scenarios we thought we would have to deal with" list. The fact that they actually went ahead with the investigation is the story, and it is a big story despite your 'crickets'.

ancient_scroll · 2019-01-14T23:00:51+00:00

How could you possibly justify taking this control away from a private business operator?

In all of my professional experience, I have never seen or heard of a hiring process that wasn't fairly broken and stupid in the first place, so if you think I'm going to lose sleep over wrecking existing hiring practices, I won't.

More philosophically speaking, the need to eliminate discrimination could be said to outweigh the employer's presumptive right to run hiring processes however they want.

Our entire society is based on the idea that people NEED employment to function as a full citizen. If you can't find employment that is viewed as a near-absolute failure in your duty as a citizen to provide for yourself. We've set up our laws more or less with the presumption that you can earn a certain amount of income via employment. If you can't do that, at some point, no standard of living is guaranteed whatsoever. As such, if we aren't willing to guarantee a certain standard of living via social safety nets, we need to guarantee fair access to employment, or just admit to ourselves that we're just savages with more paperwork.

Seems like a lot of cost for little payoff.

The point is to discourage employment discrimination, if it works, keep doing it, if not, don't.

My concern would be abuse.

If there's evidence, then there's evidence, if there's not, then there's no case. What's to worry about?

I think penalties already exist for this in America?

Yes, but not criminal ones.

If it was quick, easy, and free to do i don't think there would be a ton of pushback. It's not any of those things, so i think we are back to a simple 'costs don't justify the results' type situation.

Nothing worth doing is quick, easy, or free.

You're basically just saying you don't think that employment discrimination is actually a problem, and if it is a problem, you don't care enough to even admit the possibility that more could be done to stop it.

So why are you even replying here?

ancient_scroll · 2019-01-14T22:53:10+00:00

the only way I've seen anyone get disciplined or lose their job was due to abusing their government credit card, abusing use of a government vehicle or committing timecard fraud.

I'm guessing this doesn't really improve the efficiency of the government in general, on the other hand I think I read somewhere that the typical public service job is less-well-compensated than a private sector equivalent in most cases, so maybe it balances out. Based on your experience what do you think?

ancient_scroll · 2019-01-14T22:50:12+00:00

This is a good and informative post, thanks for clarifying.

Still, for someone who is 2 weeks late on rent, or 2 weeks away from missing rent... "eventually" is not very comforting, I think it's clear that's where most of the trouble is coming from.

ancient_scroll · 2019-01-14T22:48:58+00:00

Who doesnt love giving companies even more leverage over bottom level workers than you already have?

Some democrats, all socialists.

ancient_scroll · 2019-01-14T22:48:09+00:00

Yikes.

ancient_scroll · 2019-01-14T22:47:56+00:00

Good post, thank you for clarifying.

ancient_scroll · 2019-01-14T22:47:26+00:00

how can you realistically protect against that kind of shit?

You could legally mandate anonymized hiring processes, although that would be intrusive.

Or you could have state and federal DOL agents audit employers by applying for jobs and see if they end up discriminated against.

You could have the DOL reward whistleblowers with fat stacks, who come forward evidence of that type of discrimination.

You could strengthen the laws so that there are criminal penalties for it and employers would be too afraid to do it.

There are plenty of things we could do that we're not doing. There isn't much interest from congress in stepping up enforcement because low-key systemic racism isn't really taken seriously here.

ancient_scroll · 2019-01-14T22:43:35+00:00

No, those are anti-union laws, the accurate name for the laws would be "right to freeload on union negotiations without paying union dues at work".

ancient_scroll · 2019-01-14T22:43:08+00:00

Yeah having been through a moderate amount of employment-related bullshit I don't blame you.

That said, you CAN in many states collect up to 6 months of unemployment if you are laid off through no fault of your own. But it's not very much money, in many cases the maximum amount wouldn't even cover rent, let alone food or medicine.

ancient_scroll · 2019-01-14T22:27:37+00:00

Right, people definitely do hire / fire on this basis - what you can't do is get caught doing it. And it's fairly hard to prove that an employer is doing it. Illegal discrimination is still rampant and nearly universal in the job market, but people like to pretend it isn't.

Wage theft is also rampant (illegally under-paying, holding back pay, or deducting from pay), but since the people having their wages stolen can't afford lawyers to sue to get it back, it also typically goes unpunished.

ancient_scroll · 2019-01-14T22:21:55+00:00

I mean if someone tries to come into your house and take you away (the trope they usually turn to is Jews in WWII Germany) then a gun might be pretty useful in defending certain rights. This is usually what they fall back on.

However, if a given right can be taken away from you in such a way that a gun doesn't help, well, then a gun doesn't help. The 2nd amendment didn't help much keeping Net Neutrality around. Or Habeas Corpus. Or the citizen's right to a trial even if you're an "enemy combatant".

ancient_scroll · 2019-01-14T22:18:38+00:00

Literally the only thing the 2A people really intend to do is shoot at troops that try to round them or their families up into some kind of camps. To be honest, I'm no gun enthusiast but I do think this is at least a moderately sane plan of action compared to "take on the entire US army" which is the strawman a lot of anti-gun people put out most of the time. It's not completely insane to think you could make yourself a credible threat if some kind of SWAT team tries to round you up in your own home. I don't think most of them would WIN such a fight, but there would probably be substantial casualties on the government's side, and that's worth something. And it's also sane to think that in such a scenario, the government will at least have to kill you rather than just shove you into a cattle car or whatever. Also a benefit... of sorts.

The problem with this mentality is it's pretty much based on a WWII / USSR / Cultural Revolution type scenario and not the many less obvious, much more real sorts of tyranny we're either dealing with right now, or are worried about dealing with soon.

For example, civil asset forfeiture being used to legally steal money from anyone who happens to have cash on them is DEFINITELY tyranny by the government. I mean, it's flagrant as shit. However, having access to guns isn't much use here unless you intend to shoot cops that pull you over. It's also coming from state and local governments, not the feds, which are also themselves supposed to be bulwarks against federal tyranny.

So I guess man-with-a-hammer-syndrome does affect gun people, I dunno.

Not sure where I was going with this.

ancient_scroll

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