I’ve dabbled in ham radio a bit, comms is something that at least some of the right are thinking about with these kinds of things, there’s more than a handful of right wing doomsday pepper lunatics in the ham radio circle, if you ever decide to listen in on CB radio chatter, there’s a good chance you’re gonna hear some lunatic ranting about conspiracy bullshit, I’m pretty sure I saw some pictures of guys at 1/6 with some baofengs (cheap Chinese ham radios, pretty much every ham has one or two kicking around)

I remember when I first started looking into ham radio, I was googling some stuff, clicking into a whole bunch of different results not paying too much attention to where I was, and I found one forum thread that was actually pretty informative until halfway down the thread someone said something really unhinged about race wars or something, and no one called him out about it and some even agreed with him, so I took a look at what site I was on and it was the stormfront forums. Nope I out of there really quick.

Also not the only experience I had like that, few of my hobbies and interests have significant overlap with the right wing lunatics fringe since I’m into some outdoors camping and survivalist type stuff, the algorithms try really hard to suck me into crazytown sometimes.

Pockets-

Front right:
keys if they’re not clipped to a belt loop
Lighter
Cigarettes if I don’t have a shirt pocket or cargo pockets Phone - pixel 7 pro, otterbox case

Keys: Carabiner
NiteIze DoohickKey FishKey
Small comb
House and car keys
A couple frequently used store membership cards
Mostly held together with s-biners, or niteize g series biners

Front left:
Mustache wax
Pixel buds
Knife- depends what I’m doing, most commonly an opinel, but

Back right:
Bandanna

Back left:
Chums Zipper Wallet, with key to my bike lock attached
A couple bandaids and safety pins in the wallet

Cheap sunglasses, no real brand or style preference, but I like metal frames, usually hanging from my shirt collar when not in use

Left wrist- Casio Protrek prg-550 with a cheap nato strap

Work bag:
Maxpedition Kodiak gear slinger (I like this bag’s functionality but I’ve fallen out of love with the military styling, and it’s probably bigger than I need these days, but it takes a beating and hasn’t fallen apart in over a decade of regular use so I can’t bring myself to replace it)
My work headset
Phone charger
Cheap Lenovo tablet for reading (M8 I think?)
Sometimes my switch
I normally keep a small first aid kit in my bag but I took it out for something a little while ago and keep forgetting to put it back, I believe it’s whatever the smallest ultralight/watertight kit that adventure medical sells
1l narrow mouth nalgene bottle ’ Maxpedition pocket organizer

In that organizer:
Zebra f-701 pen
Pentel graphgear 1000 pencil in .9 lead
Spare lead
Zebra pm-701 permanent marker
Yellow sharpie highlighter (if anyone knows of a highlighter thats less cheap looking, preferably metal with replaceable ink, I’m interested)
Thrunite ti4 NW flashlight
Pocket screwdriver, little plastic pen shaped thing, double ended with 2 double ended bits at either end, I think mine is Stanley branded but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen other brands selling the exact same thing with different logos
Small crescent wrench (I think channel lock brand)
County comm widgy pry bar
CRKT CEO flipper
Tide pen
Lighter
Eraser
Field notes pitch black notebook
County comm titanium ruler
Samsung bar flash drive
Eraser
Spare AAA batteries
Small sewing kit
Small spool of some very strong thread (I think dyneema, not sure, pretty sure I picked that up from county comm as well) Wrapped the handle in some Paracord
USB A to C adapter (my wife borrowed it a while ago and I haven’t gotten it back yet)

Metal Stanley lunchbox
20oz Stanley thermos/travel mug thing (I don’t think they make my exact model anymore but the “trigger action” one is pretty close

His formatting leaves a bit to be desired, but that basically boils down to

1. Knives with certain features like a double edge, a handguard, butterfly knives and certain other one-handed opening mechanisms (I assume switchblades, maybe assisted openers, possibly gravity and flick knives) are weapons and can be owned but generally not carried

Otherwise…

2. Knives (and I assume this applies to other bladed tools as well since he mentioned an axe)with a blade length of less than about 5.5 inches are ok to carry for no particular reason, as long as either the blade doesn’t lock or it needs two hands to open it (from how he wrote it sounds to me like one or the other of those features is ok, but not both)

3. You can carry a bigger knife if you have a good reason that you need one, like if you’re going campings/hunting, or clearing brush with a machete (and from how he phrased it sounds like you could also carry a one-handed locking knife with a good reason)

4. You get carded to prove you’re an adult if you want to buy a sword (I assume knives as well)

Which is pretty straightforward, and actually similar to a lot of laws in the states (looser than some states I believe, and stricter than others)

Not really relevant to the comment you replied to and only tangentially related to some other comments in this thread. We’re talking about knives and soda caps here.

A lot of us don’t think of our knives as weapons, they’re tools.

It’s rare that I don’t carry a knife, and using it in self defense is the furthest thing from my mind every day when I put it in my pocket. I use it for things like opening packages, cutting string, sharpening pencils, use various other tools on the knife like screwdrivers, pliers, awls, I have a lot of outdoor hobbies like camping, hiking, fishing, and knives are kind of indispensable for those pursuits.

If I’m ever in a situation where I absolutely need to defend myself, and I don’t really foresee that ever being necessary, I’m probably not even going to think of using my knife in self defense, I don’t think of it as a weapon anymore than I think of my wallet being a weapon, it’s just something that lives in my pocket that I frequently need to use.

And knives make a shitty weapon, if you’re close enough to stab someone, you’re close enough to get punched in the face, or for your assailant to wrestle it out of your hands and stab you with it. You’d be better swinging around pretty much any larger object within arms reach to create some space. They say about knife fights that the loser dies in the street, the winner dies in the ambulance.

The knives I tend to carry especially aren’t good weapons, most need 2 hands to open, aren’t really designed ergonomically as fighting knives, most are fairly small so I’d have to get really lucky to hit anything vital and would probably just piss them off more and not stop the attack quickly, some of them don’t even have a pointy blade so not good for stabbing (I actually make it a point to choose less threatening looking knives for my EDC needs) some of them don’t lock open so they’d just as like close on my fingers as cause any harm to my assailant, and some of them actually lock in the closed position so definitely not good for a weapon.

I’m not saying that everyone who carries a knife has the same mindset. Lots of people do carry them as weapons, those people are idiots. And not everyone puts the same thought into the knives they carry and just get something that looks cool whether or not it’s functional for their needs.

I also don’t carry anything for self defense regularly and don’t own a gun (not opposed to gun ownership in general, but my thoughts on that are part whole 'nother debate,) in general if I feel like I need to be prepared to defend myself if I go somewhere, I just don’t go there. There’s a bit of privilege to that, since I live in a safe area and can make that call, not everyone is lucky enough to live somewhere they can feel safe. The only exception is the pepper spray I keep with my dogs leash, since my wife or I often end up walking her alone at night, and that’s more of a precaution against loose dogs, coyotes, etc. than against people.

There’s a lot to say about Americans’ love of violence and weapons and the sort of mindset we have about self defense, and overall I tend to think that a lot of my country is absolutely insane when it comes to those matters. That said, I also think people who look at the little swiss army type knives, or Leatherman multitools I tend to carry and see a terrifying deadly weapon have their own issues to work out too.

As far as straws go, I agree that for most people in most situations they’re unnecessary for most soft drinks. I do, however, think they’re a pretty important part of the experience with some cocktails though, it has some effect on how fast you drink it, how it hits your tongue and you experience the flavors, if the drink is layered it effects how those different layers mix, what order you get them in and how the drink evolves as you drink it.

That said, I think most reusable straws make for a bad substitute in a lot of cases because they’re too thick compared to the coffee stirrer type straws I usually tend to get in bars when I order a cocktail that calls for a straw. Thinner straws would probably be kind of a pain to clean though.

I’m not a huge fan of metal straws, they’re just too hard and kind of unnerving if they crack against your teeth.

I have some bamboo straws I like, and they fit my vibe since I make a lot of tiki drinks at home.

AFAIK, these tethered caps are mostly an EU thing (and at the very least are not widely used in my area of the US) and a lot of European countries are less knife-friendly than the US.

A lot of them absolutely do learn those skills the same way I did

But for a lot of parent/child relationships, being gay can still be a pretty big stumbling block. If your dad is rejecting you, doesn’t want anything to do with you, maybe even kicking you out of his house, you’re not going to be able to learn anything from him. If he’s overall supportive but worried about not wanting to push you into traditional gender roles and ideas of masculinity and such that you may not identify with, he may not try hard enough to pass those skills on. If a kid coming to terms with his sexual orientation feels pressured to act a certain way because of pressure from his peers or society, he may push back against his parents trying to teach him those skills, etc.

It’s not unique to being the father of a gay son, lots of parents struggle to find ways to bond with their kids who have different personalities, interests, opinions, etc. than they do, but being gay can throw an extra level of complications into the mix and so I suspect you’d see it at least somewhat more among gay guys than otherwise comparable straight guys.

I feel like a big part of how districts are drawn should involve asking the people which areas are important to them.

It would definitely have to involve some algorithms to sort out and keep the populations roughly equal.

But in general, I kind of envision a system where maybe every 5 or 10 years or so you’d sit down in front of a computer, maybe on election day, or when you renew your driver’s license, or something like that, and you’re presented with a map of your county and the ones that surround it. You select all of the places you live, work, shop, drive through regularly, or otherwise spend most of your time or have particular interests in or concerns about

The computer then draws a district around as many of those points as possible, keeping the population fas even as possible even, and snapping the borders to obvious places- city and county borders, rivers, school districts, major roads, etc.

Then it averages them together into maps that more accurately reflect where the people in those districts actually spend their time.

Pretty big undertaking on the software side, we’d run into the same kinds of issues we do with voting of how to get people to actually show up and fill in their maps, but if we could implement it, to me that seems like the best way to actually draw districts that make sense.

Because I know when I look at the district map where I live, I see a lot of areas included that I have absolutely no connection with, I don’t live there, work there, drive through there, go shopping there, know anyone who lives there, and in general if they burned to the ground today I probably wouldn’t notice for a year or longer, and then there’s other areas where I do spend a lot of time and have other connections to that are not part of my district.

In addition to being disinherited, discrimination, moving to more expensive bluer areas that are more tolerant, and such that people have already touched on, and I’m sure are significant factors at play, I just kind of want to spitball a couple thoughts. I’m no sociologist or economist or anything of the sort so I don’t know how much these thoughts hold water

The sort of stereotypical American dream- husband & wife, 2.5 kids, 2 cars, house in the suburbs, etc. probably looks at least a little different for many LGBTQ people. In many cases, the kids are kind of a non-starter- adoption, IVF, surrogacy, etc. are out of reach for a lot of people for a few different reasons, and if you’re not planning around having kids, you may not need that house in the suburbs with a good school district and a yard for them to play in. And if you’re not spending money on kids, you may want to spend that money elsewhere, it may be more important to you to be close to other things, or to not have a mortgage hanging over you’re head and want to be able to move to a different neighborhood, city, state, or maybe even country every few years when your lease is up.

I’m a fairly stereotypical straight dude, I grew up holding the flashlight for my dad and getting yelled at while he fixed pretty much everything around the house himself, and it gave me a pretty solid foundation as a handyman. There’s not much around a house that I’m not confident I could fix myself or with a couple buddies if I needed to, and I suspect that a lot of girls and probably many gay guys have a different experience with that kind of thing in their childhoods. Not that they can’t learn those skills on their own later on in life if they want/need to, but it can be a pretty daunting prospect, and I could see a lot of people who didn’t grow up learning those skills choosing to live in an apartment or rental house where they can just call maintenance or their landlord when something breaks instead of needing to learn a bunch of plumbing, electrical, carpentry, drywall, etc on the fly as your house is falling apart around you. I’m not sure I’d want to take on home ownership if I had to start from square one and relearn everything I picked up from my dad on my own.