In general, I’d like to see secret service protection for ex presidents limited to only to basic everyday security. Their homes, offices, daily commuting, errands, family events, etc. the kind of stuff that any regular private citizen has to do.

Anything above and beyond that they should have to arrange their own security services. No one is making private citizen trump hold rallies and invite throngs of people to gather around him while he stands up on a stage, most of us don’t do that, and if we do we’re certainly on the hook for security if we need it.

Now being a presidential candidate, he’s also entitled to usss protection within 120 days of the general election, which I suppose I can agree with, and that would have kicked in for him on 7/8, so a few days before the assassination attempt, so I guess this might still be their mess to deal with if we think they should have to provide security for campaign events.

An EDC should take into consideration what your average day consists of, and I’m getting some conflicting messages about that from what you’re carrying.

The tinder fire starter and emergency blanket kind of suggest a lot of time spent outdoors to me. Sensible enough things to carry if you’re out in the woods or whatever. But one thing I don’t find a lot of in the woods is locks, so one or the other is probably unnecessary, especially with 2 sets of lockpicks.

Also always be careful if you carry lockpicks, know your local laws, especially if you’re carrying anything else that may paint a funny picture to the police like a knife. Just having lockpicks on you for any reason may not be legal, cops may be able to assume that you have intent to use them in a crime, etc.

Realistically, what kind of situation are you going to use an emergency blanket in around town that you couldn’t just as easily duck into an open convenience store to get out of the weather?

Similarly, when around town are you going to need to start a fire? Sure, if you’re going hiking, 2 or 3 ways is probably a good idea in case you get stuck in the woods, but beyond lighting cigarettes and such and maybe fusing the frayed ends of some synthetic rope/string, I’m pretty hard pressed to think of reasons to carry more than a lighter around town, you probably don’t need the tinder, leave that in your hiking pack.

2 lighters can be fine though, I tend to have one in my pocket and one in my bag, but I’m a smoker.

Depending on what you mean by a multi tool, if it’s something like a Leatherman, I don’t think there’s really a reason to carry one and a knife, but if it’s some other keychains gadget type thing I think that’s a fine way to carry things, though I’d probably lean more towards a Swiss army knife personally.

“Old people can’t be ageist against young people”.

Is basically what you are saying.

I’d very much like to hear you explain how that is your takeaway from what I said.

Older people have more cardiac-related problems because they’re old, and things just wear out.

Which would fall under the category of age-related health issues I mentioned that is one of the special considerations their specific demographic needs special attention paid to. People of any age can keel over of a genetic defect, and addressing those kinds of issues helps everyone, but it doesn’t address the specific issue of a 70 year old with a worn-out ticker with no genetic issues, and so there also needs to be attention paid to those specific issues that don’t affect young people. Just as addressing mental health issues helps everyone not get shot by cops but doesn’t address systemic racism, and how improving voter turnout overall is good but may not be enough to specifically get younger voters to turn out in similar numbers to older ones.

the problem here, is that this rhetoric is a prelude to “those damn kids didn’t vote and that’s why we lost”.

And how wild would it be if those damn kids actually turned up and voted in unprecedented numbers, took this election by storm, and kept doing so for the rest of their lives turning politics on its fucking head, making politicians have to cater to them and subsequent young generations? It’s only a prelude to that if 1. The younger people in fact don’t vote and 2. The election is lost by a margin that could have been made up by those youth voters, and if both of those things happen, it would in fact be true that it’s one of the reasons the election was lost from a numbers perspective, millennials and Gen z could be one of the biggest voting blocks, we have the numbers to call the shots if we just turn out and vote, but we don’t.

You want to make sure young people’s voices are heard? Then listen to them.

I’m listening, hell, I’m looking forward to hearing your rebuttal to this, the problem is that what matters isn’t getting some rando on the internet to listen to you, you need to get politicians to listen to you, and unless you have the money to throw around and buy them like big companies, lobbyists, and billionaires can do, the only way to get them to listen is by using your vote.

Pointing fingers rarely is persuasive or motivational

And sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling when someone says something you don’t like doesn’t exactly leave you very open to being motivated or persuaded, and yet here we both are doing weird things with our fingers.

I’m only expressing my thoughts on what conservatism means to me and what I think it should be. I’m not making any claims that it is what conservatism actually is in this country or any other, or about what it has been at any point in time (even if they sometimes like to pretend that it’s what they’re about.) like I said, I don’t align myself with any of the so-called conservative movements that are out there.

Heart disease is one of the biggest causes of death in all age brackets.

For people 65 and older it is the leading cause of death.

Is it ageist to point out that statistic? Is it ageist to recommend that older people should see their doctor regularly, pay special attention to their cardiac health, eat right, get exercise, etc?

Of course all people should do those things, but since those older people are the ones who are most at risk of those issues, I think it’s pretty reasonable to specifically target them with those messages.

Ageism would be if you refuse to hire someone who’s over 65, or insure them, or allow them to do other things just because statistically people in their age bracket are more likely to randomly keel over dead of a heart attack, whether or not they themselves actually have any cardiac issues.

Same goes for voting. Americans in general vote in pretty sad numbers, but the numbers for young people are especially bad, even if our current young people are better at it than young people of previous generations, the numbers for them still are pretty bad.

Pointing that out, encouraging them to vote, talking about why that’s the way it is, what it means for them and for the rest of us, etc. isn’t ageist.

What could be considered a form of ageism, however, is that because they don’t vote in as great of numbers, politicians don’t pay attention to the needs and wants of younger people.

And unfortunately since we can’t just flip a switch and make politicians and other voters grow a conscience and take those younger people into consideration when they’re making decisions, the only way to address it is to actually get those younger people to vote and make their voices heard.

There’s other issues at play, the way people talk about young people not voting and such can certainly contain some ageist language, not all of the takes on the issue are good ones, and the way people try to target their messaging to those younger people to encourage them to vote is often seriously lacking, tone deaf, and even offensive.

There’s also the issue that the way voting and politics are handled in this country can often make it difficult for young people to get to the poles, be engaged in the process, etc, and there’s certainly an argument to me made for that being an ageism issue.

But just making the core statement that young people don’t vote in high enough numbers is not in and of itself against.

Circling around to the all lives matter comparison

Just as people of any age can die of heart disease, people of any race can be needlessly killed by police. However, in both examples, people of certain demographics are at significantly higher risk of those things occurring. Yes there’s a lot of overlap between things that may get both a black guy and a white guy shot by cops, or that may lead to both a 20 year old and an 80 year old having a heart attack, and tackling those common issues is important, but there’s also risk factors that significantly impact one demographic or the other and they need special attention. Black people have to deal with poor police training, mental illness, drug use, etc. same as white people, but they also have to deal with systemic racism on top of that and white people don’t generally have to deal with that, and old people have congenital heart issues, environmental exposures, poor diet and exercise habits same as young people, but have additional health concerns due to their age on top of that which don’t tend to affect young people. As they say a rising tide raises all ships, but some of those ships have issues besides just being stuck at low tide, and the rising tide isn’t going to do anything to fix their leaky hull.

Which is why “all lives matter” is such a stupid statement, because if they truly think that all lives matter, they’d be happy to see those leaky ships getting patched up so they can take advantage of the tide rising for everyone.

So yes, it’s an issue that Americans in general don’t vote enough, but younger people especially don’t vote enough, and so we need to be paying special attention to that issue to try to solve that and make sure their voices are heard. And saying that calling attention to that issue is ageist because other demographics also don’t vote enough absolutely has the same kind of energy as pulling the “all lives matter” bullshit when people talk about black people being killed by police because “white people can get shot too.” Both can be true, and we need to address both parts of those issues, but one demographic needs a little extra or at least a different kind of attention. We can’t ignore the age-related health complications, the systemic racism, and the factors that lead to poor voter turnout amongst younger people just because those issues don’t affect everyone, we have to address them alongside those other issues.

In a saner world, I’d probably consider myself a conservative, in the world we actually live in though, I’m not touching anything the conservative parties have anything to do with.

I generally think that things should overall trend towards being more liberal, and conservatism should just kind of be a moderating factor, not really working against a liberal agenda, just kind of slowing it down, making sure everything is fully thought through before we jump into anything, that the plans and funding and contingencies and such are in place, and in some cases just slowing things down because some stubborn assholes (mostly the current “conservatives”) need to be eased into certain changes because their tiny minds will explode if you go to fast

The CB radio thing is going to be very location specific, I work in 911 dispatch, I think the state police around me theoretically monitor channel 9 on the highways, but in practice I wouldn’t have a lot of confidence in that, they barely look at info we send them over the computer, CB also has a somewhat limited range, so you’re counting on them having an officer somewhat nearby or you being close to their station.

As for local police, around me I suspect a few of them probably still have a CB antenna on the roof of their station and maybe even an old radio stashed somewhere in a closet but not hooked up and not being monitored, and the officers definitely don’t have them in their vehicles.

I’m in a pretty dense suburban area outside of a major city, they might still get some use in more rural areas where cell signals aren’t as reliable, though you’re probably going to run into the same issues with range limitations, in normal ideal conditions, you might get a range of about 20 miles or so, depending on atmospheric conditions, geography, etc. you might get only a fraction of that.

EDIT: FWIW, I keep a CB in my car, decent amount of chatter still happens on 19 around me, and a few other channels, and somehow channel 9 seems to have become essentially the Spanish language channel.

I have a few ideas about that ranging from the boring to insane conspiracy bullshit.

1. A decent amount of people, myself included, have chosen to register as republican despite not really aligning themselves with the party. PA is a closed primary state so if you want a vote in the primaries you basically have to choose R or D, I personally went Republican on my registration because in general I can live with whoever the Democrats put up, they may not be my first, third, or 20th choice of candidate, but on the Republican side there are mostly only bad choices, and I’d rather try to head off the worst of them before they make it to the general election. In other cases it might just be down to a coin flip.

2. A lot of PA is pretty damn red, in some cases you may not have many or even any Democrat candidates in your local elections, and the ones you do have don’t really have a snowballs chance in hell, so you might as well try to work with what you got on the Republican side.

3. Or maybe even you just registered as a Republican because that’s what your parents told you to do when you got your driver’s license and never bothered to change it. Maybe you just kind of figured that’s what everyone did, or maybe you’ve had a change of heart since registering.

4. There are still some never-trump type Republicans out there, some of them even have their heads screwed on mostly correctly. Someone who sees trump as damaging to their party, or maybe even democracy while holding other Republican values may want him and his ilk taken out.

5. Again, some Republicans do have their heads screwed on mostly right, and maybe they feel very strongly about one of the many things Trump will obviously make worse.

6. Starting with the conspiracy bullshit - someone wanted to make trump a martyr to galvanize the Republican base. Maybe they only intended to wound him, maybe they did want to kill him. Maybe it’s a publicity stunt orchestrated by Trump himself or other high ranking Republicans, maybe it’s a lone actor who decided that it would really get Republicans motivated.

7. They know Trump is overall pretty incompetent, and felt he has already served the role he was needed for and wanted him out of the picture so that someone just as evil but actually good at his job could step into his shoes.

8. Even more radical Republicans who think that trump doesn’t go far enough in advancing their race war, or christofascist, or whatever insane bullshit they want to bring about.

9. Putin is sick of his shit, or some other foreign actor helped bring this about.

10. Just plain ol’ mental illness and trying to understand the motivation here isn’t going to get you very far because it’s not based on anything approaching logic.

I believe when talking about naval ships, commissioning is when they enter active service, so construction probably began early 90s, maybe even late 80s, and probably a few years of designing, bidding, etc before that. And of course there were probably all of the usual idiot politicians, bean counters, stubborn assholes, sales people, etc. involved who pushed for older tech. Maybe because everything else they had worked on the old disks, maybe they were skeptical of the new tech not being robust or tested enough or wouldn’t catch on, maybe it was just cheaper, etc.

I’m willing to bet that they somehow locked themselves into using 8 inch disks in the early to mid 80s if not earlier, when the 5¼ discs were still new-ish and the 3½ were brand-new or not even available yet.