1. Ethnic
2. Fusion

Figure that pretty much covers all of my bases.

I feel like 3d printing would probably be slower than just cutting them out by hand with an xacto knife, you can get a pretty good rhythm going and depending on what material you make it out of you can probably cut a few of them out at a time.

Also feels like a bit of a waste to make them out of plastic since it’s something most people would probably only use a couple of times then throw away, and even if you make it out of a recyclable plastic they probably couldn’t be recycled with paint residue (not even gonna touch on the plastic recycling debate right now)

I’d probably try calling around to a couple more print shops and such, maybe some art studios and maker spaces. May also be worth thinking outside the box, the maintenance department of some businesses might have a stencil cutter to stencil things onto their equipment, schools might have them (my mom worked in an elementary school, it wasn’t exactly a stencil maker, but they had a tool for cutting letters out of paper for art projects and such that might work for your purposes)

Short of a dedicated stencil maker (which is pretty pricey) a cricut or similar machine is probably your best bet. They’re not too pricey if you wanted to get one yourself, and don’t know what the arts and crafts scene is like in the EU but I feel like every artsy person in the US went nuts for them a couple years ago and most of the bigger arts and crafts stores around here have a whole aisle dedicated to them (much to my chagrin because they got rid of some other stuff I occasionally need to make room for them) so if you ask around you might be able to find someone who will let you use theirs.

It may also help to rephrase what you’re looking for, especially if you’ve been asking for die-cut templates. You might have better luck asking for stencils, or maybe asking if they have a cricut or vinyl cutter, or maybe even a laser cutter and just providing the file for them to cut out. There’s a chance the employees just aren’t really thinking about what their equipment can do and just know that they don’t have a specific stencil making machine.

A better term for what you’re looking for might be “stencil”

I don’t have any specific recommendations for companies, especially in the EU, I feel like a lot of print shops and sign companies could probably do it for you. If you want to DIY it, you could probably pick up some generic letter stencils from almost any hardware store to trace onto something and cut out yourself. Depending on what material you want it made out of you could probably get anyone with a cricut or similar machine to make one for you if your ok with something like paper or vinyl, or if you for some reason wanted it made out of metal or something else sturdier that a cricut could manage you could try asking around to local machine shops.

The us has always been anti illegal immigration

The US actually made it almost the first hundred years of its history without many meaningful immigration laws

I’m sure someone will argue otherwise, but one thing commonly cited as the first US immigration law was the steerage act of 1819, which was pretty much just “you can’t overcrowd your ships, you have to have enough food and water for everyone, you have to have a list of your passengers and account for anyone who died on the way”

So not really limiting immigration, more making sure that the ships bringing immigrants here were providing at least basic livable conditions for the trip.

Immigration overland was totally unregulated.

And with some minor alterations here and there, that was pretty much the state of things until the 1870s and 80s with the Page Act and Chinese Exclusion Act. Until then there really wasn’t such a thing as “illegal immigration” and borders were pretty much wide-open.

To be thorough, between 1776 and the Page Act, we did have the Alien Friends and Alien Enemies acts to allow the US to deport non-citizen immigrants under certain circumstances, and we took a few steps forwards and backwards at times regarding the naturalization process, but we also had the 14th amendment and “An Act to Encourage Immigration” in there as well.

And of course after that, shit went downhill pretty damn quickly.

So it’s a bit of a mixed bag, but again for almost half of US history there really wasn’t any such thing as “illegal” immigration for anyone to be against (general anti-immigrant sentiments are another story)

I really hate the term gun show loophole

Maybe the situation and laws are different in other parts of the country, but at every gun show I’ve ever been to all of those people with stands set up selling guns are dealers, so to buy a gun through them you have to go through all the legal hoops as if you were buying from a regular gun store.

I suppose there’s a lot of randos wandering around there who own guns who might be convinced to do a private sale, but that doesn’t really have anything to do with them being at a gun show except it’s a convenient networking opportunity. You could just as easily hang around outside of a shooting range trying to find a private seller.

In my opinion, the lyrics tell a pretty straightforward story, no real need for metaphor

Someone releases a bunch of balloons into the sky, they get mistaken for enemy aircraft/missiles, and set off a war.

If you get more out of it with your interpretation, more power to you, but it feels like a bit of an unnecessary stretch though.

Ok, where do you get those 50 people?

Do you have 50 people sitting around on-call 24/7/365 just in case they need to go knock on everyone’s door?

Are you taking them off of other jobs to go do this? If this happens at 3AM on a holiday weekend, there’s probably a pretty good reason those other people are already on the clock, like maybe fixing whatever issue is causing the advisory.

Are we relying on volunteers? How are we going to get ahold of them to let them know, let alone guarantee that they’re actually going to show up.

We gonna mobilize the national guard to do it? How long is that gonna take to get going?

Maybe we’ll just press-gang the first 50 people we can get our hands on to do it. What could possibly go wrong?

But let’s say getting the people is a solved problem. How are they getting around? Not every area is easily walkable. Do we have 50 municipal cars on standby for them to use? Are we going to have additional people driving them around to the needed areas in vans? Are they using their personal vehicles and will need to be compensated for gas and mileage (not to mention probably an insurance nightmare for those people using personal vehicles for non-personal use)

I am very bad at remembering to clean my water bottles regularly, I have about 4 nalgene bottles and a CamelBak in fairly regular rotation, they get left in the car, sometimes with water in them, sometimes empty but rarely totally dry, often for days, weeks, or even moths at a time. I don’t drink water that’s been sitting in my bottles for that long, but I’ve never noticed any weird smells, scum, cloudiness, mold, etc when I go to empty them.

And I can’t say I’ve ever had an issue with mold or any other funkiness in any of my bottles.

And I think a lot of it is that I only put water in my bottles, no flavorings or anything else (except maybe occasionally iodine or other water purification products when I’m camping, which of course is just going to kill anything that would start growing in there otherwise)

I also usually (but not always) fill them with purified water to begin with.

The roads get better, the drivers get worse, there’s jughandles everywhere, they won’t let me pump my own gas, and there’s liquor stores that aren’t owned by the state.

Also I have to cross a river, and pretty much everything gets flatter.

For the other borders, mostly the same. One direction you start seeing more places serving crab, another has no sales tax, one is just boring and depressing, and the other unless you cross at some very specific places is mostly just woods and farms and shit that kind of blend into our own but with better roads.

Only half-jokingly, my suggestion te my wife is to have me cremated, then mix my ashes in with some concrete to make a life-sized statue of me.

Stick me on the front lawn and dress me up for holidays, put a pointy hat on me and make a giant lawn gnome, stick a bowl on my head to use as a bird bath, or dump me at a cemetery and let me be my own headstone, doesn’t really matter to me, I’ll be dead, I won’t care, but I figure she might as well be able to get a chuckle out of it, and maybe ruffle the feathers of some HOA Karen while she’s at it.

She actually really likes the idea. She wants to have my statue posed like Buddy Christ from Dogma.

And maybe go ahead and do the same with the ashes of any dogs I’ve had and stick them right next to me. Better than having them take up space on the mantle forever, and they’re more deserving of a monument than I’ll ever be.

My family has some experience with this

My mom’s cousin was a wonderful person, her husband, however, was an enormous piece of shit in just about every way you could imagine.

She got sick and died, he never had a funeral for her.

Then he up and died maybe a year or so later.

My mom was still listed as the executrix of their wills, so it fell on her to decide what to do with him.

And she decided on nothing. Let the coroner haul his body away and never claimed it.

After a while they cremate the remains, they hold onto them for a while to see if any other next of kin wants to claim them, then after a while they bury or scatter them somewhere if no one does.

I’m sure the exact specifics of how that all works varies a bit from place to place, but in general that’s gonna be an option. They can’t exactly force you to pay for a funeral you don’t want, and the local government has some plan on dealing with bodies no one wants to pony up for a funeral for (otherwise there’d be a lot of corpses of homeless people and such piling up in a freezer somewhere)

Yeah, but if, like OP, the intent of donating your body is to ensure that one exploitative industry (the funeral industry) doesn’t profit from your death, you probably also want to make sure that other industries (like the military industrial complex) that you also don’t like aren’t going to be able to benefit either.

*role model

My wife watches some cooking YouTube channel where they have some normal people competing with or against some professional chefs

The normals have picked up the habit of chopping up a “thinking onion” while they’re trying to figure out what to do for a challenge, because almost every meal can use an onion somewhere, and it gives them something productive to do instead of standing there freaking out

Sip of beer, mostly foam, almost certainly a yuengling or Budweiser.

Also would occasionally have a small glass of wine or champagne for holiday dinners and such.

Liquor was a shot of some kind of fruity vodka, chased with some Gatorade. I was about 18 or 19, didn’t really drink but my girlfriend did, and she wanted to have a drink with me so I obliged. Only time I drank with her.

Couple years later I was still living at home, I was about 19 or 20, parents were out of town and I was looking to make dinner. Found a recipe that sounded good that called for some beer, texted my parents I was gonna use a beer for cooking and got the ok. Used about half the beer, drank the other half. I believe it was a yuengling Oktoberfest.

First proper time drinking was about 2 weeks before I turned 21. I stayed on with my old scout troop as a leader, and we were going to be away on a week long canoe trip over my birthday. I was at a friend’s shore house hanging out for a few days, and since a couple of us were 21, we grabbed a case of beer, I believe corona and a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black. We didn’t go hard, we sat on the deck, smoked some cigars, had some scotch and a couple beers, but mostly we just hung out, went to the beach, and played D&D.

After I got back from my trip, for my first legal drink I went out with some coworkers after work. Had a few Yuenglings and a shot of Jack. Had a nice buzz going so I walked home. Had the hiccups most of the way.

If they’re not part of the US, who are they part of? Because they’re not considered a sovereign nation on their own, and they’re not part of any other sovereign nation.

The US president is their head of state, they have a resident commissioner who is a member of the US house of representatives and although they can’t vote on legislation they can introduce it.

And as far as incorporation goes, although officially PR is considered to be unincorporated, there’s an argument to be made that various acts of congress over the years have effectively incorporated Puerto Rico, for example, Gustavo Gelpí argued just that in his opinion in CONSEJO DE SALUD PLAYA DE PONCE, et.al. Plaintiffs v. JOHNNY RULLAN, SECRETARY OF HEALTH OF THE COMMONWEALTH OF PUERTO RICO

it’s not technically part of the United States,

I feel like this is a really bad way to think of Puerto Rico

There’s a lot of legal weirdness about their status, I get why people think of it that way, and I’m pretty sure that’s how it was explained to me almost verbatim back in like 4th grade.

But I think it’s better to think of Puerto Rico as “part of The United States, but not one of the united states”

That is, it’s part of the country known as the USA

But it is not one of the states that are united that the country is named after.

They’re US citizens, if they wanted to, a Puerto Rican could run for president and do anything that any other natural born US citizen could do, just the same as if they’d been born in Texas.

Well your guts and skin and other tissues do have some elasticity, I suppose it is possible that a large gas bubble might be able to expand your abdomen slightly.

We’re very much into spherical cows in a vacuum territory here. I don’t think there’s any way this would be realistically measurable,just fun to think about.

I think that, theoretically, if someone’s flatus contained an abnormally high amount of lighter-than-air gases, like hydrogen and methane, they might get very slightly heavier. Having a gas like that inside of you would, I think, provide a bit of a buoyant force lifting you away from the scale that would make your weight read lower, and releasing that gas would sort of drop your full weight onto the scale.

In practice, methane and hydrogen are only part of a fart, and other gases and such in the mix are heavier than air, so at best you might break even.

Probably a few caveats to that about temperature and pressure and such, and it’s doubtful that anyone’s gut produces enough of the right kinds of gas for that to happen.

Personally, I’d prefer if games and such would use universal face button glyphs on-screen.

I’ve switched back and forth between Xbox, Nintendo, and PlayStation controllers so much that I really don’t have a mental map of which button is which, and in game I’m usually not looking at my controller to be able to tell.