shobble

• Which are (in general) harder to clear, UXO or mines?

• Do any of the things you work with include anti-handling measures or other nasties (magnetic triggers, minimal metal content, etc)?

• Do you do primarily controlled detonation, or manual suits&screwdrivers clearance? Pigsticks?

• Any interesting up & coming tech that could be usefully applied to historic area remediation? (Bio/biomimetic sensing, ground-penetrating radar, better metals sensing, UAV/robotic platforms, etc)

• Any dangerous or particularly persistent rumours/legends about UXO/mines that you've come across?

• Do you think modern military capabilities to deploy auto-disarming mines, and to accurately map their deployment is sufficient safeguard, or should they be banned in their entirety, Ottowa-treaty style?

How confident were you with the purity of the finished product? Clearly enough that you had no problems consuming it, which is riskier on a personal level than producing it to sell. Especially considering trace levels of impurities/side products that might have long-term health implications way beyond what anyone purchasing it could reasonably expect to detect.

I would assume you go for a few extra wash steps and damn the yield, since there's no benefit in ripping off yourself, but how do you actually tell when what you have left is truly pure?

I guess purely visual exam of crystal structure, maybe MP/BP tests would give you some confidence, but at what point are you really ever sure? It's not like you can just nip down the lab for an NMR or GC/MS workup.

In fact, i think quite a lot of the anonymous pill-testing lab services available have regulations on reporting actual quantitative data due to worries that they'll become 'QA labs for drug dealers'

Something I've idly wondered about is how the purity indices for a given drug vary depending on source/routing. Source being who actually creates it, and routing being the method in which it's (maybe smuggled internationally) and finally sold to the end user.

I'd expect large-scale production facilities (eg: "Mexican superlabs") to have relatively sophisticated techniques with good yield + purity, since they can arrange to divert the preferred precursors and benefit from economies of scale in terms of reagent distillation/solvent recycling.

They might even have sophisticated stuff for actually measuring purities and impurities, but there's a conflict of interest in removing anything since it lowers their 'saleable weight'.

On the other end of the scale, I'd imagine shake&bake/motel-bathroom methods in which you're lucky if you're starting with the right chemicals, let alone approaching 50% purity. Ditto, no easy way to tell if what you've got is any good short of ramming it into one of your (or perhaps someone elses) holes.

Somewhere in the middle I suspect people like you, maybe small scale operations carried out in the back of university/industrial chem labs who have both good access and good technique, maybe good equipment as well.

In terms of routing, it's pretty much a given that a) the further it goes, the more it gets stepped on, and b) when smuggling internationally, purity is probably close to maximum (beyond camouflaging methods). Where you are in the chain and what sort of weight you handle probably determines your incoming purity, as well as perhaps your capacity to pay and/or employ violence.

Have you ever read the DEA Microgram journal? I'm often surprised it's public access, but I dunno how they'd feel about a convicted felon criticising their lab technique :-)

How do you handle foreign languages, especially ones you don't speak? (My personal favourite was an interview with a north korean defector, which helpfully brought up a [speaks foreign language] sub every time he spoke, usually in an awkward spot)

What sort of control do you have over placement, and do you have to consider how it'll work on different size/aspect screens?

What's the hardest thing to get right, or that takes the most creativity/judgement? Watching comedies, especially stand-up demonstrates a huge range in subtitler effort and ability, especially in choosing exactly when to show a punchline.

Any idea how multi-language subbing is produced? Does it get a native subtitle and have that textually translated, or is each produced from the audio by a speaker of the source and target?

What does '888' mean? :-)

That it's only £2.4k should be a bit of a hint. Total GDPs are in the hundreds of billions range.

Still, a mistake on his part, but unlikely to be intentional.