I’ve worked in sewn products for >15 years now. I’ve never heard them called that, by anyone.

Yes, my recommendation for a home defense shotgun is DON’T.

Shotguns have very limited capacity (unless you have a 3-gun shotgun with an extended magazine, but then you have a problem moving it around indoors), and loading them efficiently takes a lot of practice. Also, at home defense ranges–under 10y–spread on 00 buckshot is going to be pretty minimal. And you shouldn’t be using bird shot at all.

I would suggest instead getting a PCC as an SBR. That gives you capacity, the ability to easily mount a light, and far more controllable than a pistol

How many of the women you knew while working were also working as escorts?

I’ve known four women that worked as escorts; there seems to be a lot of crossover, like, once you can be comfortable taking your clothes off and doing a lap dance for a stranger, it’s not a very big stretch to go to escorting.

That’s an easy thing to say, but not really accurate. Even without capitalism, we’ve wiped out entire animal populations. We’re just doing it a lot faster now. Even if we were fully socialist, and there was no profit being made for anyone, our own humanity would be destroying the ecosystem; strip mining would still happen under perfect communism (e.g., not authoritarian states).

Capitalism and communism both need to same resources, they’re just distributed different.

I’m just curious -

Starting with the clear and obvious provision that Israel has stolen Palestinian land, and has been killing Palestinians for over half a century -

What is the “right” way for Palestinians to resist Israel? How should they fight back? Please, paint a picture for me in a way that shows how they can effectively stop Israel from killing more people, and stealing ever more land, until the Palestinians have been completely wiped out.

Consider, while you’re at it, that the US has been arming Israel for decades, and has been using it’s own military force to prevent other countries in the region from holding Israel to account. Sure, Iran could do something, except that the US has sold Israel the arms and technology to stop Iranian retaliation, and has also had Iran under embargo for so long that Iran is a disaster. (Not saying that the ayatollah is good, but maybe if the US hadn’t been propping up the shah, we wouldn’t have a religious nutter in charge.)

In addition, check out ShivWorks Instagram page. They use videos of real fights to show just how fast shit starts, ends, and how badly things go. Fights and assaults usually start with someone sucker-punching someone, not with people squaring up.

Well, you’ll get arrested for carrying one in most places, since they’re not exactly concealable, and getting the sheath off of one takes far more time than pulling a gun from concealment and doing a ‘failure to stop’, AKA Mozambique drill. Also, you have a limited effective range; if someone is inside about 3’, you can’t use the sword effectively, and would need to drop your sword and switch to your rondel.

They’re really only effective if your opponent is riding a horse, or is a pike phalanx.

I have. I’ve been in places and situations where being able to get someone to back down and slow their roll would have been a better outcome than what I was able to get without being armed. Shit just happened around me, and I couldn’t exit the situation in good conscience. It’s terrifying to try to stand up to stop shit from going really sideways knowing that if it does, there’s not a lot you can do except be a meat shield for someone else. Almost all defensive gun use doesn’t involve shooting; it involves having a gun, knowing how to use it, and using the threat of force to stop someone else from escalating a situation.

People say that when seconds count, the police are only minutes away, and fuck me, that is extremely optimistic. I’ve never had the cops show up in under five minutes; the closest was about ten minutes, and that was after a shooting in my 'hood in Chicago. CPD showed up after the ambulance.

Interestingly, a lot of gun violence in the US comes down to neglected spaces. Without changing anything else, cleaning up vacant lots, demolishing abandoned buildings, adding street lights, and general neighborhood beautification cuts down on a LOT of gun violence. Violence intervention programs–teaching kids restraint, essentially–does a lot too.

Oh. Uh. Hanzo the Razor: Sword of Justice (1972) Hanzo the Razor: The Snare (1973) Hanzo the Razor: Who’s Got the Gold? (1974)

They’re, uh, something. I think that they’re probably part of the reason that I really got into shibari. The films are graphically, cartoonishly violent, misogynistic, as close to pornographic as you can get in ‘mainstream’ Japanese cinema, and there’s just something about them. My partner HATES them, so use your best judgement before attempting to watch them.

I’m an outsider to this instance, so my vote doesn’t count.

I’m fine with banning Zionist content and users. I’m starting to see them regularly on Bluesky; they make inflammatory claims, but don’t back anything up, and immediately resort to ad hominem when challenged. Even if you thought that some of the claims they made might have a degree of validity, they’re still disruptive assholes. So far I haven’t run across any that are acting in good faith; the accounts I’ve encountered sound like Israeli psy-ops.

I live in a very, very rural part of the country. Land is CHEAP; you can buy 100+ acres of forest for under $2000/acre. There are a lot of vacant houses. Why? Because no one wants to live here. (Obviously not no one, since I chose to move here, but still.) There aren’t jobs locally; part of the price I pay for living where I want to live is spending 3+ hours in a car commuting each day. The vacant houses are vacant because the people that lived there either died, or moved because they couldn’t get work. They’re not vacant because some venture capital real estate company is buying up rural homes just to hold on to them as they rot away.

The issue isn’t vacant housing; the issue is where the housing is, and whether it’s actually habitable or not.

You may not pay a lot of attention to how much water you use if you have a well, yes.

On the other hand, if you live in northern Arizona, and you have to pay to have water trucked in, you pay REALLY close attention to how much water you use. I may not waste water by average standards, but by the standards of a person that lives in a desert, I waste enormous amounts of water.

People tend to be less zealous stewards of resources when their lives aren’t directly impacted when they personally waste those resources. When resources are managed in some way, people tend to exploit them until they’re gone or destroyed. A very real example is the deer population in Georgia; prior to the institution of game control, white-tail deer were hunted into extinction in the state. It took >40 years, and the unwavering efforts of a single DNR employee, to reintroduce white-tail deer back into Georgia.

This isn’t me saying that capitalism makes the most efficient use of resources, because it obviously doesn’t. But resources that belong to all–like clean air and water–need to be managed in some way so that they continue to be available to all.

Generally speaking, precious metal commodities are a hedge investment; they aren’t a primary investment themselves, but they’re a hedge against a loss in value of other investments, like stocks or bonds. If you are investing in gold as a hedge against inflation wiping out stock market gains, then yeah, it’s pretty solid. You probably don’t want to hold on to it forever though; if you’d bought gold just prior to Carter taking office and the stagflation of the late 70s, you be pretty much break-even with things like index funds.

As far as total societal collapse, you would need to have the physical bullion, not just have precious metals in your investment portfolio. And even then, gold might not have a ton of value in a subsistence society. People might trade for it, but if I had food to trade, I don’t think I’d be trading for gold, since I can’t eat gold. The people that will clean up in a subsistence environment? The Amish.

Huh. I wonder how effective it is at catching the heat from light? If you, for instance, wore a parka made from this material, would it be absorbing heat, and thus warmer than an equivalent parka made with a different material?

But if a cop says you’re doing a sobriety test, you don’t have a choice.

Not correct. Field sobriety tests are ‘voluntary’ in all states in the US, although refusing to take one may be used as evidence against you in a trial, depending on the state. Likewise, you can refuse breathalyzer tests, although that may carry significant civil penalties.

It depends on the state; you aren’t required to take a breathalyzer in all states, nor are your required to submit to field sobriety tests in all states, although refusal can have different results depending on the state. It would be best to check the laws in your state. source

Actually, no, there aren’t. As of this moment, there’s no way to know if you’re intoxicated by marijuana, and, since that’s legal in a number of US states, that’s a ‘problem’. (Although, let’s be real, stoned people tend to drive reeeeeeaaaaaalllllllllly slowly, not exactly hugely dangerous.) You can detect the metabolites with a urine or blood test, but that doesn’t tell you how long ago you used it, or if you’re still under the influence.

Unfortunately for me, Starlink is the only option available that’s faster than about 2Mbps.

:(

Maduro is a monstrous dictator. He’s just not the kind of monstrous dictator that Trump likes. Like, y’know, Putin.

The person that won the Nobel Prize recently–Machado–ain’t exactly a great person to be leading Venezuela either, but the odds appear to be pretty damn high that she would have won the 2024 election in a blowout landslide, had she not been barred from running, and the vote count being entirely fraudulent by Maduro.