Why are you citing a Saudi finance account as a source?
Also what the crap is going on today with Twitter and misinformation about this event, because for some reason it's trending again as of this writing and most of what is being posted now is unsourced and/or false.
There's a massive thread on the Reddit front page about this incident. In a video, a man films the dark ominous sky while ranting about the toxic fumes. Hundreds of comments express rage and alarm.
Check the local weather and it turns out the video was filmed on a cloudy day. The man is literally yelling at clouds, but it's enough to drive a tidal wave of panic.
I'm not sure when it happened, but the internet has blurred reality and fiction beyond recognition. The truly disturbing part is that people seem to organically stir up confusion, for no reason other than to engage with other humans.
I used to run a manufacturing plant that made millions of pounds of the precursor to vinyl chloride every day (EDC, ethylene di-chloride). The EDC was sent in a 3 mile long pipe to another unit which was run by my very best friends that I drank with/barbecued/watched game of thrones/went fishing on the coast with every weekend, and their unit produced the vinyl chloride (VCM, Vinyl Chloride Monomer). I was often inside that unit's control room diagnosing a variety of manufacturing problems.
This is a very, very serious disaster and the panic is well-warranted. These chemicals are awful and can produce even worse chemicals after combusting -- much less of those worse chemicals, but some of them, like small quantities of PCB's, will stick around in the soil forever and potentially make this whole place un-inhabitable. I say "small" quantities of PCB's but if you're combusting a million pounds of Vinyl Chloride Monomer, you will generate a very significant and scary amount of PCB's that don't really ever degrade.
I can't imagine how much PCB might be generated by burning as much VCM as they burned in Ohio. I also can't figure out a better way to clean it up. The rail company should absolutely pay for all the effects of this.
When like a process pump caught on fire (from friction, etc) it would spew PCB's around the concrete pad. Our only viable solution to clean up the PCB's was to spray it with EDC to dissolve it -- PCB's are too sticky and inert to clean up manually. EDC is also a toxic chemical but nothing else worked well to clean up the PCB's. It's illegal to spill too much EDC but we kept it under the "reportable quantity" by only spraying less than a gallon per incident so we didn't have to file an EPA or OSHA report about EDC pollution.
My very last day of work I watched a vinyl chloride railcar explode as I was carrying out my last box of stuff at 8PM. From 2 miles away the explosion hit me in the chest like I was 20 feet from a naval gun. I never wanted to work in a chemical plant again after that.
Pretty much all of the guys that were in the plants for more than 5-10 years have endocrine/HPTA issues.
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I also used to work at an acrylates manufacturing unit in a different state. Personally as a nearby resident I'd be more immediately worried about the combustion of all the leaked Butyl Acrylate producing Acrolein than I would be about the potential PCB's.
Acrylates are by far my least favorite bulk chemical. I fucking hate acrylates. Trace amounts of them in the air have a massively terrible affect on my respirator health.
I have no reason to doubt that harmful chemicals were released. I can understand that the risks haven't been communicated to the satisfaction of the public. And I can see how that would trigger a panic.
My issue is that a random person filmed the sky on a cloudy day, confidently claimed the clouds are fumes, and so injected falsehood into a serious event. Lots of people are doing the same right now, guided only by panic and distrust of the authorities.
Be concrete and point to specific unreliable information in the thread or to conflicting information elsewhere. Until then I'll put my money on falcon-backed securities.
I did a similar thing with my server, akkoma.sandhill.social.
It's going to cost me about $5 per month (I am using a different cloud server to host it) but together with the $100 credit I got through a promotion I won't have to pay that for some time.
> In more recent decades, being a session musician for regional or mid-tier bands has stopped providing a living, following the huge consolidation in radio and music publishing in the 90s and 00s.
How is this a problem of recorded music being a thing rather than of mindless consolidation that has affected many, many industries since that time? This is like blaming recent consolidation among publishers on the invention of the printing press.
I honestly don't know how well (or not well) this article has aged. My impression is that 2022 might have brought some new developments (specifically the tech downturn and Musk's Twitter debacle) but I would like to hear what other people here think.
One issue with this article is that there is nothing preventing a person from having multiple accounts on different servers. I have three I still use because I was uncertain which community to join in 2019. There are many apps for Fediverse that allow one to use multiple accounts on different instances and flip between them as easily as flipping between Discord servers or alt accounts is in the Discord app.
I also agree with madrox's comment that having specific instances with peculiar rules according to taste is a feature, not a bug.
Heck, I agree with everyone calling out this article here, because it's just a bad take.
Yep.
Twitter and Musk are screwed. The question now is how fast Musk will bring about Twitter's demise, how painful it will be, and where that pain will fall.
This aged like milk before it was even published...
Like seriously, between the legal and financial issues Twitter is facing from fleeing advertisers and stiffed vendors and renters preparing to sue over unpaid bills and the recent disasters Twitter has had with Elon's approach to running the site, one has to wonder if this was written by an AI.
Have you considered that many people here actually work in companies and know how they work, meaning they don't need a media source to know that the Twitter files are bogus? In fact, most people here have brains and can think for themselves, and we actually don't rely on a media outlet for all our takes.
Have you also considered that there is a huge difference between Khamenei and PMs saber rattling online against other countries (which was actually consistent with Twitter's then current policy of treating world leaders, Trump included, with a lenient hand) vs. a president not condemning and (very likely encouraging) an attempt by his own supporters seeking to overturn an election as said attempt was going on?
> a president not condemning and (very likely encouraging)
So not condemning something (that is to say, choosing not to speak) and "very likely encouraging" (as opposed to actually encouraging) is somehow worse than calling for outright genocide?
Your comment isn't really clear here. Are denying that the two comments I posted aren't contributing to violence that was actively going on at the time of their posting?
And with regard to this:
> Have you considered that many people here actually work in companies and know how they work, meaning they don't need a media source to know that the Twitter files are bogus? In fact, most people here have brains and can think for themselves, and we actually don't rely on a media outlet for all our takes.
Also what the crap is going on today with Twitter and misinformation about this event, because for some reason it's trending again as of this writing and most of what is being posted now is unsourced and/or false.