81–90 of 191 posts
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Wow, that's crazy. Terrifying stuff.
and then there's FOOF https://web.archive.org/web/20150825171826/http://pipeline.c... (Webarchive since original seems down)
I've seen this article before, but I will never get tired of reading it again.
Planet Money had a recent podcast titled "The Onion King", where someone took physical control of onion futures, and why that is the one type of future outlawed by congress. http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/10/14/448718171/episo...
"and why that is the one type of future outlawed by congress" I was intrigued enough to follow this up, although I didn't listen to the podcast. From wikipedia: During the hearings, the Commodity Exchange Authority stated that it was the perishable nature of onion which made them vulnerable to price swings. Then-congressman Gerald Ford of Michigan sponsored a bill, known as the Onion Futures Act, which banned futures…
such an unstaple food that The Times of India has a page dedicated to track the price of onions
Another notable excerpt from the linked state safety agency document ( http://www.michigan.gov/documents/cis_wsh_cet5041_90142_7.do... ): -- Two employees of a fertilizer company in Riga, Michigan, were assigned to install a new float valve in an old 35-foot deep cistern for a new 300-foot well. This cistern was covered with a concrete slab with entry through a covered manhole. The first worker entered the cistern an…
I remember trying to smell the substance by wafting[0] (as previous teachers had instructed us) and thinking 'hm, I thought I smelled that a second ago, but now I can't'. My teacher's response was 'oh, you're just not smelling it hard enough. You really need to take a big sniff' and stuck his nose over the petri dish to demonstrate.
Fortunately I was skeptical enough of him by this point in the semester that I ignored him. Only later did I look it up and discover that H2S is not actually odorless - it smell like rotten eggs. But it also dulls your sense of smell at the same time[1].
This is only one of several times when he almost killed us with labs in that class (my favorite was when he came just a second away from lighting a classmate on fire with Thermite[2]).
I'm really glad I'm not in high school anymore.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQis0nnap74
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You receive samples first and check them. Another option is having an agent in find on your behalf perform QC before you pay the balance on your initial deposit. That's what I do..
How do you find an agent to perform QC?
On a related note, the (slightly stylized) retelling of a time a commodities trader accidentally bought actual coal: http://thedailywtf.com/articles/Special-Delivery
Hilarious story :) I worked for someone who was a variation on the 'Brad' theme for a while, absolutely infallible. One day I walked through the workshop where he was making a positive from which a mold would be made for a piece of machinery. There was an obvious error in it (it really isn't all that hard to make a mistake, moldmaking is intricate) and I tried to interrupt him to ask how he planned to solve this and…
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> slightly stylized Or "completely made up"
The giveaway would be the WTFSE, only that actually seems to be a real exchange.
Relatedly(?) When I had a diesel car, I bought and stored a small barrel of biodiesel in the basement of our apartment (saving like $0.05 a gallon!). I was told that diesel doesn't burn except under extreme pressure, and that you could throw a match into an open cup of diesel and it would just go out. Never actually tested that out.
You can throw a match into an open cup of gasoline and it will go out (yes, I've tried it). That doesn't mean I don't treat it as the highly flammable fluid that it is. That includes not storing it in the basement where the gas furnace and it's pilot light live.
Please, no one try this at home...
Planet Money had a recent podcast titled "The Onion King", where someone took physical control of onion futures, and why that is the one type of future outlawed by congress. http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/10/14/448718171/episo...
The book is a mixture of fiction and real life and it's just great! One of my favorites