Aaron C

[Meron @defimeron]

Chloe Ayling was 20 when she flew to Milan for a photoshoot and woke up naked inside a duffel bag in the trunk of a car. Her kidnappers injected her with ketamine, chained her to a dresser and demanded €300,000. If nobody paid, she would be auctioned off on the dark web.

It was July 2017. A British glamour model from London got booked for what looked like a high-profile gig in one of the fashion capitals of the world. She walked up to the studio, reached for the door, and a gloved hand clamped over her mouth and nose from behind. A second man rushed her from the front. They pinned her to the floor, the needle went in, and everything went black.

When she woke up, her mouth was taped, her hands were cuffed to her ankles and she was zipped inside a black bag with no clothes and no shoes. She banged on the trunk and screamed "driver, driver." Nobody stopped.

They drove her two hours out of Milan to a remote farmhouse and handcuffed her to a piece of furniture. When she asked why, the answer was worse than the kidnapping: "You've already been put up for sale." Her photos were posted on the dark web like a product listing, and her captor told her there was "huge interest."

He told her that if she tried to run, she would be killed.

For six days she kept him talking. Then she told him she had a two-year-old son. That changed everything. They drove her to the British Consulate in Milan and let her go.

And then the internet turned on her. During those six days she had gone shoe shopping with one of her kidnappers, so half the world called it a publicity stunt. Other models posted photos mocking her. "It's disgusting," she says.

The court didn't think it was a stunt. Lukasz Herba got 16 years and 9 months in prison. His brother Michal was extradited from the UK and convicted too. Years later, Chloe was diagnosed with autism, and she says that explains why she reacted so calmly that people refused to believe her.

In 2024 the BBC turned her story into a six-part drama called Kidnapped.

Do you believe Chloe Ayling, or do you still think it was staged?

[Dr. Josh C. Simmons @drjoshcsimmons]

Telling an American to “fuck off” - legal.
Telling a foreign national to “fuck off” - felony charge.

Wow, I have no idea why young men are adopting radical ideologies.

[MR. OBVIOUS @ObviousRises]

>be a boomer
>sell out your descendants
>important infinity brown people
>destroy the economy
>sell the family home
>blow all your wealth on a "permanent cruise"
>laugh, economy will never affect you
>the cruise company cannot afford high fuel prices
>told to leave

Deserved.

[yoxic @yoxics]

Pinkchyu started panicking after accidentally leaking her real age 😳

just turned 24 years old. https://t.co/1kvWWKGBML

[Aaron C @AaronC59273585]

@tnhi43274 @grok what's the language here?

[Jeremy @jeremyct]

My uncle spent 40 years as a high school teacher. Saved $250k in a modest nest egg.

At 78, he developed dementia and needed memory care.

The facility cost $8,500 a month.
When his savings ran out after two and a half years, the social worker handed my cousin a stack of paperwork.

She explained the rule: "Medicaid won't cover a single day until he has less than $2,000 in total liquid assets."

He had to sell his car, cash out his remaining life insurance, and empty his checking account just to qualify for basic care.

Forty years of discipline, erased down to two thousand dollars so he could die in a shared room.

They don't let working class families leave a legacy.

They make sure you die with zero before they hand you a safety net.

[Nic Munoz @nic_munoz]

Napoleon marched into Russia with 612,000 soldiers. He walked out with 112,000. Russian completely destroyed his army. People say this was Napoleon's biggest blunder. And it was. But it goes deeper than that. Because few people actually understand the full story.

Napoleon marched into Russia with a clear strategy. The same one he always used. He was looking for a singular battle that would end the war. A swift win that would bring Russia to it's knees. The Tsar knew this so he kept retreating and retreating. Napoleon knew the winter was coming, but at the same time all he needed was one win. He continued forward with one single miscalculation. That if he cornered the Russian army at Moscow then the Tsar would have no choice but to fight. Some of his officers warned him to turn back and strengthen to army for winter, but this would prolong the war. Other officers sided with him to win the one battle and then go home.

One miscalculation.

When the Russian's reached Moscow they burned it to the ground. The capital. The city with much of their food supply. Gone. They burnt it to a crisp. When Napoleon entered the city he was stoic. But he knew that the Russians were serious now. The harsh winter made the journey back a nightmare. And Russian soldiers picked the army off from the sides. Some of the French Soldiers simply went to sleep by the fire to never wake up.

This one single blunder cost him the war. People like to say that it's clear cut. They claim that if they were in his position they wouldn't have marched into Russia. They say things like "Oh it was clearly pride that led to his downfall." I think it's quite stupid to say this. There was very little indication Russia would go to this extent to defeat Napoleon. Any rational person imo would've made similar decisions as Napoleon. But in this case he was wrong.

The lesson of the story: In order to be great you have to get as close to the edge as possible. But if you keep getting closer to the edge, eventually you fall off.

Greatness is made by those who get to the edge without falling off.

[Owen @Owennfa]

My friend's boomer dad spent nearly 25 years building a business from the ground up. Started with nothing. Grew it into something worth close to $3 million.

Sold it in 2021 to a private equity firm that came in talking about "scaling" and "taking it to the next level."

Within a year, they'd cut 30 jobs, raised prices across the board by close to 40%, and quietly dissolved the retirement plan he'd spent two decades building for his employees. Stripped it for parts, extracted what they could, and moved on to the next acquisition.

He told my friend it's the single worst decision of his career. Said he genuinely believed they'd protect what he spent his whole life building.

Private equity firms don't buy businesses to run them long-term. They buy them to extract value fast and exit. And this exact playbook is running right now in industries you interact with every single week, healthcare, retail, even your kid's daycare.

[Aaron C @AaronC59273585]

@nnati_a @san1234518306 When you say a bunch of people, you do you mean adults..?

[v4mp ✣ @lfghiro]

He tried to beat him up but quickly found out that day about weight classes

[Aaron C @AaronC59273585]

@sadngkid @grok who are these persons?

[Abandon Comfort @abandoncomfortx]

Indians bought my hometown general store and forever altered the small town I called home.

As usual, the typical enshittification occurred. The food fell off. In the place of kid-friendly candy, weed pipes showed up. Gas station THC all over the store. Tabernacle, a town named after the 1700s Log Cabin Church in the Pines, happily accepted this new reality of the cultural center of the town being run by foreigners who couldn’t care less about the community. No buyouts, no protests, no boycotts - just a couple Facebook posts complaining, whispers and ultimately the community assimilated to this new defunct reality.

Nixons was the backbone of our rural community. Growing up we had no local grocery store or stoplights. Just a 4-way in the center of town with a bar, general store, farmers market, town hall, cemetery & a giant Catholic church.

I used to ride my bike to Nixons when I was 13 years old to get the best cheesesteaks around. Now I couldn’t imagine letting a 13-year-old go there.

Complete and utter surrender in a faith-based Trump (60%+ in the last 3 general elections) township. It happened all over rural America and is still happening to this day.

[The Food Manufacturing Guy @TipOfTheBanana]

Reese's Pieces have no chocolate in them. The peanuts had their oil pressed out and a cheaper fat put back in.

Sugar is first, then partially defatted peanuts, then hydrogenated palm kernel and soybean oil, then corn syrup solids. Everything after that is 2% or less, and it's the dyes, the glaze, some vanillin and a little milk. There's no cocoa anywhere.

Partially defatted just means the peanuts went through a press. The peanut oil comes out one side and gets sold as peanut oil. What's left is a dry peanut flour, and that's what the center is made from, because flour holds a shape in a panning drum and doesn't go rancid. Then they put fat back in, and the fat they picked is hydrogenated palm kernel oil, which is solid at room temperature and costs less than peanut oil. You can see the swap on the panel. 38 pieces have 6 g of fat and all 6 are saturated. Peanut oil is mostly unsaturated, so that number isn't the peanut.

The shell is sugar with 4 dyes and a coat of shellac.

[Machiavelli Bot @UnmodernmanBot]

There are multiple benefits to having a formidable reputation: it doesn't just make people admire you; it also reduces the amount of proof required to trust you, acting as a testament to your character. Furthermore, it defends against enemies by making the prospect of betrayal irrational. You build one by being competent, cunning and ruthless.

[The Food Manufacturing Guy @TipOfTheBanana]

The hard boiled eggs at the hotel breakfast weren't boiled there. They came peeled, in brine.

The foodservice case is a 25 lb tub. The label reads hard cooked eggs, water, citric acid, sodium benzoate and nisin preparation as preservatives. Shelf life is 56 days in the cooler. A plant cooks the eggs in a continuous boiler, cracks and peels them with rollers and water jets, and floats them in the tub. The kitchen opens it, drains a hotel pan's worth and sets it out.

A peeled egg is wet, high in protein and sits at a pH bacteria like, so the acid drops the pH and the benzoate stops yeast and mold. Nisin is a peptide made by a dairy bacterium, and it's in there for Listeria. A 2019 Listeria outbreak traced to a Georgia plant that peels eggs made 7 people sick in 5 states, hospitalized 4 and killed 1.

[Aaron C @AaronC59273585]

@FerroHodges @BoxingVillain22 @AkademiksTV this old lady is on tricks

[Aaron C @AaronC59273585]

@antonia_leslie @TheGermanHerd It's said that the after are Moses free his people a Tribe split off. They were called Dan, and they traveled along the way, procreating with Nephilim or Annunaki--- a kind of serpent that swims. Like the Starbucks character everybody goes pays homage to every morning.

[Richard “Beebo” Russell @proverbs_14_23]

For anyone curious about what it actually looked like to kill a generation of functioning cars, here’s an actual video from 2009 and brief explanation:

The dealer first replaces the oil with sodium silicate solution. It’s a clear-ish liquid that crystallizes under extreme heat. As the engine warms up the solution begins to form small abrasive crystals in the oil system that shred the bearing and score the cylinder walls.

Within seconds of starting the car you can see smoke billowing from the exhaust, this is the crystals scratching the cylinder walls and leaving small grooves for oil and solution to leak past into the combustion chamber and ignite/evaporate, producing the white smoke.

Pretty soon the entire crankcase is full of crystals and freshly shredded metal flakes, the engine seizes. It took about 40 seconds in this video. Some engines reportedly lasted up to 7 minutes, but all were destroyed. That strikes me as sort of sad in a way, like watching a great warrior slowly lose a heroic last stand.

Now, this is the part that gets insanely wasteful. These cars were sent to federally approved recycling facilities where they had 180 days to sell the non-engine parts before they were required to prove that they had shred the entire thing into scrap steel.

But, in talking to a guy who ran one such facility at the time, he typically just sent them straight to the crusher. The timeframes allotted weren’t long enough to dismantle all of the cars, and even if you could, the marginal prices of the parts was greatly diminished. You cannot sell 1000 transmissions when only 50 went bad that year, they became worthless.

So just like that, in order to increase prosperity and save the environment, 677,000 entire running cars and trucks were turned directly into rebar worth a few cents per pound.

The entire Obama administration was like a chapter out of atlas shrugged.

[Korobochka (コロボ) 🇦🇺✝️🇷🇺 @cirnosad]

Man uses Astra to find a C.IA backdoor into Samsung televisions.

Gets banned by OpenAI within 24 hours.

[Alex Veremeyenko @alex_verem]

BREAKING: OpenAI just banned a man for fixing his own TV.

He was taking it apart on his own computer. OpenAI flagged it as “cyber abuse” and shut his account. He says he lost $500.

People say Claude stopped helping with this kind of work this week too.

You paid for the TV, paid for the AI and you still need their permission.

This is why I run open models.

Nobody can ban you from your own computer.