hm, a little away from 200k ;)

@Laurel can't miss it :D

@Laurel (┛ಠ_ಠ)┛彡┻━┻

@PM2Ring it's crazy how inhumane some people's viewpoints are about addicts to all sorts of things. Alcohol, drugs, even games.

@M.A.R. actually here...

its taxes

I guess Clint Eastwood and John Wayne caused a few lung cancer deaths by looking cool while smoking, but at least they saved smokers from the same treatment. Mostly

'industrial' alcohol is cheaper, and the taxman wants his due

@JourneymanGeek I'm not talking about that. You do need deterrents. But some people are like, for example, "we shouldn't treat addicts with HIV because it's their fault."

ah

I'm singaporean, we just chuck em all in remand

or hang em

@JourneymanGeek here, most methanol poisoning are unintentional. Poorly fermented ethanol with too much methanol custom made in basements since drinking alcohol is forbidden by law

@M.A.R. ah yeah

though that also means its distilled ya?

Also, don't y'all have some degree of a tradition of making moonshine?

@JourneymanGeek we haven't had alcohol-related traditions in checks calendar 46 years.

lol

officially

I don't drink either, but if you distill, you'd want to discard the head and tail of the distillate so you don't have that happen. Learnt that from youtube :D

Sure. Theocrats always shoot themselves in the foot. People used to be religious like 30 years ago, but now, anecdotally, only 5 out of 62 people in a chemical factory my uncle supervises are fasting during Ramadan

@JourneymanGeek well I'm not all that clear on the process beyond the dots I can connect with my own chem knowhow. But apparently it's usually inappropriate storage. Most herbs, if mixed in with the pulp thing or whatever, will always ferment to methanol

@M.A.R. all alcohol probably has traces of methanol - even stuff that's mostly neutral

When you're distilling, you're concentrating it and the methanol comes first IIRC

Sadly it's probably not that they can't separate it, but that they don't care

yup

Sometimes they also add it

Sure. There are only three things without limits: Human stupidity, human evil, and altered Einstein quotes

Late last year, 6 people died in Laos from methanol poisoning. It's still unclear why the alcohol they drank had such high methanol levels. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Laos_methanol_poisoning

@PM2Ring six? That's incredibly low. What's the population of Laos? 12 people?

@M.A.R. They were mostly young travellers, at a hostel.

Aha, it's just one incident.

@PM2Ring it's more often than one would like. And I think more often than what can be attributed to mistakes or malice alone.

Yes

Several others were also hospitalised, but recovered.

A few months ago like a dozen doctors at some doctors-only party were poisoned.

In Shiraz

@PM2Ring if its rotgut, sometimes its added to reduce cost + methanol apparently in SMALL amounts adds flavour

@JourneymanGeek oh they do all sorts of things. Human creativity and all that. They add tramadol, benzodiazepines, all sorts of drugs.

Well, if youre running a still, there's the temptation to reject as little of the distillate as possible.

@M.A.R. in the old country, supposedly rats, and battery acid

Unfortunately, there isn't a cheap & simple test to detect methanol levels in drinks.

I mean, to an extent, legalisation helps but sometimes you end up with regular alcoholism instead

@JourneymanGeek When I was briefly an intern at a poison center, the composition of the admitted patients was pretty fixed. Women were drinking detergents to commit suicide, though it's pretty ineffective, they just usually gave themselves a minor burn in the stomach. Benzodiazepine poisoning are common in both men and women, but they're usually pretty benign. Just leave the patient to snooze on the bed for a couple of days, monitor vitals and routine lab checks, then discharge

@M.A.R. :( grim

A LOT of methadone poisonings by recovering addicts that the system has failed; they'd become addicts to methadone instead.

One or two pesticide / insecticide poisonings. Usually someone mistaking the bottle of, say, malathion for water. Thankfully, it tastes pretty horrible so while dangerous people don't usually ingest too much.

The rest, usually acetaminophen (paracetamol) and methanol.

in india the pesticide thing happens

I'm told parecetamol poisoning is grim

also, the max recommended dose is close to dangerous?

@JourneymanGeek it's a developing country thing. In the west where you can buy Tylenol like mint candy from a normal store, acetaminophen poisoning is most common.

@JourneymanGeek it won't kill you. Just left untreated, it will absolutely wreck the liver.

yeah, so SLOW death

as opposed to quick death

It's like a hack button to set life's difficulty to impossible

Hi @Aibobot.

Woof

(don't mind me, testing some stuff out)

@JourneymanGeek not really, nearly half. It's just easy to OD. 20 pills will definitely poison you. And no one would bat an eye if you walked in a pharmacy and asked for 20 acetaminophen pills.

@M.A.R. Sure, the number of fatalities is pretty small, compared to the stats you quoted. However, the incident got a lot of publicity here in Australia. There's a bit of a tradition here of kids just out of highschool going for cheap holidays in south-east Asia. I expect that Laos methanol tragedy will have a big impact on young travellers. Which will have a big impact on the Laos travel industry.

@PM2Ring 40 years of prohibition have made people here very thirsty and very uneducated about alcohol, so I suppose more people here get poisoned than they should

I see the spamstorm has started

I'm going to take shelter

Trying to edit in the grace period. I don't know if it works anymore but they're ruining their effort by adding answers

@M.A.R. Understood. But even during the USA Prohibition in the 1920s, there was a lot of methanol poisoning happening. Only a small percentage of drinkers are concerned about the technical details, apart from taste and how bad a hangover it gives you.

Or trying to keep the spam on top of SE.com?

If people flag both questions and answers, they run out of flags faster

War of attrition? Whoa

Also, they switched sites

ya, they were hitting SU really hard

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webapps also got it by... 1.2k posts in a day I think

so I suspect its very much an attempt to overload the spam filtering systems

This is no longer about spam. It's about something deeper inside us.

lol

To quote B5...

"No moral ambiguity, no .. hopeless battle against ancient and overwhelming forces. They were the bad guys, as you say, we were the good guys. And they made a very satisfying thump when they hit the floor."

:10100873 k

@M.A.R. They also edit outside the grace period.

ya

There's no 'real' way to get around it but - I was monitoring the active page RSS feed + SD + the front page + chat reports

else we couldn't have kept up

k

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I am half jokingly wondering if I could have a SF diamond for a month :D

@JourneymanGeek Do it.

@ElementsInSpace there's no real mechanism for that

I vote for Aibobot.

ah

the beacons are lit

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I can’t find myself in the SEDE query results mentioned in this post. Any ideas why this might be?

Oh wait, there I am. Never mind.

ctrl F dosen't work

weird

#314

I mean #444

That’s believable.

@Laurel oooof. Yea that's not good. I'll look into that as well and see if I can reproduce that

@Laurel I don't have full edit privileges and I wouldn't want to put tag edits through the queues

I don't even have an account. Nor do I have questions or answers. I'm the kind of native speaker who has no idea how to explain her language, since I learned grammar by osmosis and vibes instead of formally

oh my

yeah

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whoa

→ 140 messages moved to Chimney

There's too many for anyone to go through all

I'll clear for now

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Yeah, but they should be paid.

@ShadowWizzard yes lol

@ShadowWizzard sort of a emergency pro tem role

@ElementsInSpace If SE would pay me, I can do more than, to borrow the one notable phrase from local TV - crush them like a cockroach beneath my feet

@ShadowWizzard i vaguely hope to be remembered for being more than a spammers worst nightmare should that happen

I wonder if balpha can fix that. Or has suggestions...

probably not, but let me have a quick look

uhm

@balpha Thanks for devoting some time to this.

@ShadowWizzard That one's deleted, but see meta.stackexchange.com/questions/407778

Ah, you've already seen it. :)

Yeah, it's not very aggressive. But it's definitely not constructive criticism.

And I tend to be suspicious of MSE questions from 1 rep users who have no other visible accounts...

Weirdly it’s an old account

With no other activity?

Ah. The recurring tale of the Mutiny on the Bounty. ;)

See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutiny_on_the_Bounty

@ShadowWizzard Gone

wierdly, this is good :D

the spammers seem quiet

True.

lol

@ShadowWizzard i can't speak to this specific suggestion, but we put this request in review for a reason :D

@Frog I mean, in theory, if I manage to convince enough people, I think I can voting fraud myself a SF diamond... :D

@JourneymanGeek pshh, since when is canvassing voting fraud?

@Frog I mean, I know where most of the old SF users are

Odd, seeing the Frog reminded me of that old question of mine on Arqade.

but is it questionable?

clearly a timetraveller

@ShadowWizzard clearly a cat frog person