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Comment by Donzo | Hacker News Reader

I must admit I only read the headline, but I'm sure the organizations are making due with the thin, tight-margins off black market cocaine, heroine, and methamphetamine sales.

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I'm really sorry for being pedantic, I'm uusally not like this, but I have seen this frequently on HN. It's making do, not making due.

In all seriousness, I greatly appreciate corrections like this in a way that so few people do.

Technically your "that" is superfluous. ;)

> In all seriousness, I greatly appreciate corrections like this in a way so few people do.

I upvoted you.

I wouldn't be so sure. "To make due" seems correct to me, as a foreign speaker, because the grammar suggests a noun phrase as object, because it works en lieu "to settle debt". It's easy to see how french-illiterate anglophones would mishear due as do. So I guess you make do now. And I have to ask how are you making do today?

As a speaker of English where "do" and "due" are not pronounced the same I assure you it's "do".

Stress being on where - and not only but also on when. Due is from times when French was hip and foxy at the court royal. I'm sure you can tell many first hand tales about that. Wherever in the many different English speaking parts of the world you are.

edit: more to the point, "dues" is pronounced "doos" in one dialect or another, I assure you. This is because it has nothing to do with "mountain dew".

Don't mind me but... I double checked :D and you're right !! :)

- https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/make_do

- http://grammarist.com/usage/make-do-make-due/

According to the second link, here's where it comes from:

'Make do is short for make [something] do well enough, where do carries the rare sense to serve a specified purpose. So this do is similar to the one used in sentences such as, “I could use a cup of coffee, but tea will do.”'

interesting !

edit: formatting

You double checked second hand sources which don't link to primary sources, so at best you are speculating (that) I were wrong, thank you very much.

Edit: And either way, I didn't contest make do as it is used now, I merely hinted at a different origin. So, by that line of reasoning, if make due is in use, it is correct simply by merit of custom, as well.

PS: And this is why these comments are frowned upon, they invariably lead to discussion without a slight chance of consensus.

PPS: But since I tried it already, googles index of old books shows a CLEAR preference for make due. In my opinion though, I'd settle on neither is correct, just like shortenings like "I'd" aren't correct to use in writing.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=make+do%2C+mak...

You're right you're right. My sources weren't primary. I liked grammatist because they had some sort of ethimological insight as to why it's do rather than due. Anyway, here's a primary source:

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/make_do

Happy ? :)

P.S. use 'make due' if you want. Parent was just trying to be nice.

P.S.S Sourcing grammatist again (soooorrryy):

'While it’s tempting to call make due a misspelling and leave it at that, make due appears often enough (about once for every ten instances of make do in a current Google News search) to have gained some acceptance, and some people (including commenters on this post) find it at least as logical as make do. Perhaps due, which is mainly an adjective, could here bear the sense appropriate (as in, we have done due diligence), or perhaps it could mean sufficient (as in, we have due cause to be thankful). And because the phrase is an idiom, its logic can be loose.'

Oxford dictionary is not a primary source, and if I'm not mistaken, they subscribe to the descriptive persuasion, i.e. collecting lexemes as they are in use, especially the online version, and others use it as prescriptive source.

All I see is "I always thought it was make do, because that fits better into my primary vocabulary and I don't speak French so I don't know how to pronounce dew, I mean do, err I mean ... that's just like your opinion, man".

I liked the comment noting the uptick (up take?) of make-do after WW2 much better -- which coincided with the invasion of often underedumacated Americans into Europe.

Here's a nice quote

> ... which shows how careful the Poet was to make due provision for his amendment.

If you had met due dilligence and followed through from the ngram search I linked before, you'd find plenty more sources from before 1660 like that, one with make do from 1660, and plenty american usage after 1945.

Well, the article is barely more than a headline and a bunch of mediocre comments itself, although it links to a paper behind a paywall. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ecoj.12521/full

I would guess though that meth (a la Breaking Bad) is too easy to make inside the US for import competition, while heroin has been hit by the dual availability of Pharma delivered Oxy and China delivered Fentanyl/Carfentanil... the combination makes for a bad time in the cartel industry. Of course that makes them more desperate to import other things for pay.

Meth is actually really interesting. It's a very democratic drug in that it's really easy for the user to make it themselves. Pot is another one that theoretically lets you grow it yourself, but it's significantly harder and requires a larger investment. From what I gather, as long as you manage to not blow yourself up, the shake and bake method requires very little supplies and tools to make meth.

Edit: to be clear, I am not advocating that anyone use meth. It's a horrible drug that will fuck your life. I do however find its particular properties interesting in the abstract.

> Pot is another one that theoretically lets you grow it yourself, but it's significantly harder and requires a larger investment.

A bunch of seeds and a pot of compost?

Speaking from experience, fwiw.

> A bunch of seeds and a pot of compost?

...and a location with proper sun. Outdoor-sun-grown weed... that brings back memories.

Not speaking from experience but I thought it requires heating lamps, knowledge of make vs female plants, different types, etc.

I suppose in the states where it’s been decriminalized, you can grow it outdoors and not worry about some of that stuff, but that certainly seems like more work than tossing some Sudafed and whatever else in an empty can and shaking it a bunch.

Again, not advocating anyone try meth. Do not try meth.

I'm not sure what would be more fitting, but "democratic" seems like thewrong word here. I understand what you mean, though. The easiest drug to make yourself is probably alcohol e.g. people making their own in prison.

Alcohol actually seems kind of hard to make. I did some beer brewing and it’s a process. Fermentation takes a long time, contamination could make it super foul, etc.

As far as the word choice, you are probably right. It’s probsbly better to say “most easily accessible to the DIY community” :)

I think it takes practice for sure, but in terms of necessary equipment and ingredients, it's the simplest. Any sugary water (fruit juice) is enough. And can be done in very small spaces, like in prison like I'd mentioned

Welch's juice (any kind) and baker's yeast in room temperature storage will yield 7-8% alcohol wine in a couple of days. Doesn't taste particularly good but it is very easy.

Could be "accessible" or "egalitarian".

It's relatively easy to make from ephedrine or pseudoephedrine, but the over-the-counter decongestant pills containing those precursors have had their availability drastically curtailed in the US over the past 20 years. I think that Breaking Bad showed how much hard work it was to have a bunch of straw-purchasers buy pills up to each person's legal limit, so you could gather enough of them to make wholesale quantities of the drug.

Cartels can run large labs supplied with drums of industrial chemicals instead of taking the "easy" but difficult-to-scale route that starts with OTC pills. And if they used to be able to turn a profit on smuggling product with a mass-to-value ratio as low as cannabis, they should surely be able to manage the same with methamphetamine.

But again that presumes the markets are substitutatable at the same sort of scale and they're just not.

This line of thinking feels like a hold over from the 80s and the notion of drug pushers.

High school kids aren't going to just start doing meth.

I agree that cartels can't just "pivot to meth" and make the same total profits. There's not enough American demand for meth. I was trying to explain why, for supplying the demand that does exist, meth smuggling is profitable despite the relatively low barriers to entry for small-scale production of meth inside America.

There's a Wiley paywall past the abstract.

Would be curious how they separate out the impact on Mexican cartels from cheap fentanyl from Asia.

US opiate overdoses were already high, and they went up 21% last year, largely driven by synthetics. They're not joking about it being an epidemic.

More on the economics of fentanyl vs heroin: https://news.vice.com/article/americas-new-deadliest-drug-fe...

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