Related fun fact - On many industrial robots that I've worked with, the teach pendant (the handheld controller you drive it around with), requires you to hold a 3 position spring-loaded switch in a middle position for the robot to operate, which requires you to hold with a rather precise amount of force. Squeeze it either too loosely or too tightly and the robot disables.
The idea being that not only will you dropping the pendant disable the robot, but it will also disable if you accidentally touch energized equipment and your hand clenches, or (more likely) you panic and squeeze the controller too tightly.
One probably has to be perfect - not just good with opsec - to maintain anonymity from the government. The FBI has multiple side-channels, such as agents physically tracking if you're home at your "super-secure" 7-VPN computer when your Internet persona is active online
You can be good and yet the heavy hand of the law still gets you. They got Escobar and "El Chapo" Guzmán too. And his operation was smaller than either of those fine gentlemen's.
I think they are stating the odds of the federal government actually allowing secession to go through would be...minimal at best, given these assets in the state.
Bingo. 100-200 physics packages go through the facility annually, and if you think Uncle Sam got mad when someone touched his boats, try touching his nukes.
Brought back memories of taking french in middle school for me! I remember very little of that class, save the last few letters of the alphabet "w,x,y,z" as something like "double-vay, eex, igrek, zed" burned into my brain.
(Edit: I'm also learning quite a bit from the comments! "igrek" seems more common than I realized, and the american / english "why" pronunciation I grew up with may be the outlier!)
This thread has been a personal goldmine for me, as this just unlocked another memory lol.
When our elementary school started english classes, and we got an assignment to memorize the alphabet, I was getting help with that from my dad.
The twist was that he didn’t learn english in school, because during his time in school (less than a decade before USSR fell apart), kids were taught either french or german. He took both french and german at different points in time. And due to no internet and my less-than-perfect notes in class, pronunciation of some letters had to be “reverse-engineered”[0].
We didn’t make the mistake with W, because of that whole “double-u double-u double-u, tochka [aka dot], <the rest of the URL>” thing you hear on TV and elsewhere all the time when a website link is mentioned. But for V, I indeed got a bit embarrassed by learning it wrong and pronouncing it as “veh/vay” when reciting it in front of the class.
0. No internet access at the time, and english literacy among the population in our small city (that even most russian people have never even heard of, and if they did, still having zero knowledge about it) was pretty much non-existent at the time. Our republic (kind of an equivalent of a US state or an autonomous territory like Puerto Rico) had more than enough language-related problems to worry about already at the time to even bother with english at all, like the eternal fight over the importance/dominance of russian vs. tatar language. Which spilled into a lot of aspects of life, including politicians, parents, and schools having shitfights over legally mandated number of hours schools should dedicate to russian vs. tatar language classes.
