You can see a pretty clear difference looking at fertility rates between red states and blue states. So there is definitely something to the idea.

What’s a bit harder to sort out is whether it’s because more conservatives are choosing to have kids in general, or if those who do are just more likely to have multiple kids.

I don’t think the argument is really that becoming a parent makes you more conservative, it’s more the other way around- conservatives are more likely to become parents

On paper it makes some amount of sense, with the lack of belief in abortion and contraception, emphasis on “traditional family values” and such.

In actuality, I don’t know if it holds water. I’ve seen a couple studies done on that idea, and the results have kind of been a bit of a mixed bag, I think my takeaway was more that conservatives who have kids tend to have more of them than liberals who have kids, but overall rates of liberals and conservatives who have kids in general were pretty damn close.

Yes, but his heightened senses borderline on superpowers

He’s also usually considered to be a street-level hero, he’s mopping up the gangster and ordinary (by comics standards anyway, around hells kitchen, but usually doesn’t go too far beyond that (varying by writer, storyline, etc. of course, nothing is absolutely so in comics)

His villains, overall, tend to be relatively run of the mill gangsters, assassins, etc. just dialed up to 11 because that’s what sells comics. Kingpin isn’t really out to take over the world, he’s just out to run a criminal empire. The hand is mostly similar with some magic thrown in. They’re not the biggest existential threats to earth or the marvel universe as a whole, daredevil is mostly just dealing with whatever crimes are threatening his part of New York.

Arguably, he does just as much good with a wider impact as a lawyer given the types of clients and cases he takes on.

Yeah, I’m holding onto hope for the electric VW bus when that comes out. Fingers crossed it kicks off a wave of electric vans

The flex was a cool car, never had one but I remember trying to convince my parents to get one when they traded in the family minivan during Cash for Clunkers (also I love minivans in general, there’s a good chance I’ll be a minivan guy someday )

That also touches on something that drives me nuts about a lot of pickup trucks- the short beds that so many of them have these days. It feels like it misses the point of a truck- being able to haul big shit around. If I can’t fit a mattress, couch, or refrigerator comfortably in the bed, what’s the point? My dad’s truck is a single cab with a 7ft bed and I can’t imagine having a smaller bed, it’s going to be a sad day when that truck finally dies (although it’s a '93 with less than 100k miles on it, so at this rate it may well outlive me)

Even though we had the truck, we got just as much use out of the van hauling mattresses and such for exactly the reason you gave- it was covered. My wife and I actually borrowed their van once for a road trip (different van, after they traded it in my parents realized they missed having a van and got another) because we could fit a full sized air mattress in the back and camp out in the car with some room to spare for a cooler and our bags.

Yeah, I kind of ended up here accidentally while scrolling through someone else’s comment history. Thought about not commenting since this thread is a few weeks old, but I figured I have some thoughts and Lemmy can always use more activity in general.

Also I do want to say that while there are some different concerns with driving a pickup truck vs other types of vehicles, 99% of the time it’s not all that different than driving any other car, it’s just that for that 1% of the time it really pays to know what you’re doing and take a little extra care.

And for all my words, my personal biggest concern with people driving trucks (rented or otherwise) is people not securing their loads properly, which is totally independent of weather. If I could add one thing to school curriculums it would be how to use a ratchet strap.

Think of a pickup truck, you have a big engine and a cab up front, and then not much in the back except a big empty bed.

Most pickup trucks are rear wheel drive, so there’s not much weight over those drive wheels. That can create some traction issues in rain, snow, loose sand, mud, etc. if you’re not careful, it’s not hard to spin your tires when starting from a stop, or oversteer hydroplane. Having some weight in the bed-cargo, sandbags, etc. can help a lot with that. They also have a higher center of gravity than most smaller vehicles so they’re a higher rollover risk when that kind of thing happens.

Most people who drive trucks regularly are used to this in their vehicles and know how to compensate for it. It also helps to have some weight in the bed over those rear wheels- cargo, sandbags, etc. Or depending on what sort of 4wd system it has (if equipped, I’m not sure if home Depot rentals are 4wd or not) you may also be able to put it in 4wd to help, some are able to be driven on dry pavement in 4wd provided you stay under a certain speed, others should really only be put into 4wd if you’re driving through significant mud or snow or similar conditions or you risk significant wear and damage to various vehicle component, or at least compromising some of the handling characteristics or increased fuel usage.

It’s something most people should be able to learn and adapt to pretty quickly, but frankly I’ve seen how people drive, and I don’t exactly blame the lawyers and bean counters for hedging their bets there. You can’t know for certain what that person’s driving experience is like, but since they need to rent a truck, it’s probably a pretty safe bet that they don’t regularly drive one, and may not know how to drive one safely in inclement weather.

One of the cars I learned how to drive in was my dad’s rwd ranger. It’s kind of shitty in any kind of weather, and it has occasionally struggled to get up some sheepish gravel driveways without some weight in the bed, even though other cars had absolutely no issues making it.

Small addendum, there’s 94 commercial reactors that are generating power for the grid

But there’s a few dozen more active nuclear reactors that exist for things like training and research.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_research_reactors#United_States

Not sure what’s with the situation at your CVS, or when you tried to get it (there have been some big changes to the regulations and policies around narcan over the last year or two that might have made a big difference if you tried to get it before then) but FYI, you can get a 2 pack of name-brand narcan on Amazon for like $45, no prescription, prime eligible, shipped to your door or an Amazon locker. Looks like they also have generic for slightly cheaper, and through Amazon pharmacy with a prescription you can allegedly get it down to $11 with insurance.

Not that I particularly want to support Amazon, but it’s pretty hard to beat that convenience, especially if other ways of getting your hands on it are proving difficult.

You probably don’t need to hear this, but for anyone else reading it, a little PSA: I’m a 911 dispatcher, narcan/naloxone is a wonder drug. It has no significant side effects worth mentioning, so in the event you come across someone you think there’s even a snowballs chance in hell might be overdosing, go ahead and squirt some narcan up their nose. You’re not going to hurt them, barring some really rare allergic reactions and medication interactions, it’s not going to have any meaningful effects on someone who’s not on opioids, maybe their nose gets irritated and they have some nausea and dizziness, and if they are in fact overdosing you might just save their life. I get a lot of callers who are nervous to use narcan when they have it available, but it really is that safe and easy to use (there’s some generics out there that have kind of a fiddly syringe-looking device that you have to put together, they’re becoming pretty rare I think most have switched over to the narcan-style pre-assembled spray)

And the effect is pretty dramatic. In the space of just a couple minutes someone can go from being, for all practical purposes, dead- unconscious, not breathing/agonal breathing, CPR being performed, etc. to up and talking (but feeling like grim death since they’re often going to go into full-blown withdrawal immediately.)

There’s stories of patients getting up being really agitated and aggressive. I’ve been on the phone with a lot of narcan cases, but I can’t say I’ve heard that exactly, usually they’re just very angry but not aggressive, more often they just try to leave before the cops or ambulance get there (which is a bad idea, because depending on how much they used, the narcan might clear their system before the drugs do, and when that happens they could fall right back into an overdose, and then there’s no one around with narcan to bring them back again) still, you probably don’t necessarily want to be crowding around someone you just narcan’d if you can avoid it.

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.

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.

I think the scam calls are annoying, but it takes basically no effort to ignore them when I’m not in the mood to mess with them, so I don’t mind them so much.

I figure though if I can keep one tied up talking to me for a few minutes that’s one less chance for them to be scamming someone’s grandmother. It’s a tiny drop in the ocean, but it’s still potentially one less person getting scammed that day, and that’s worth something.

There’s a large park in my area that has a lot of deer. There used to be no hunting of any kind allowed in the park. You pretty much can’t drive through any area of the park without seeing a few dozen deer.

The result was, predictably, since we have no real predators left in this area, that the deer population exploded. The deer ate a lot of vegetation, there were a lot of car accidents involving deer, and it even got to the point that a lot of the deer just were not even very healthy because there was too much competition for food and numbers of other animals also took a dive.

Maybe 10 or 20 years ago they implemented some deer culling programs to thin the deer population, and so within my lifetime I’ve seen biodiversity explode in the park, I’m seeing lots of different plants and animals that I don’t remember seeing as a kid, the deer are healthier, car accidents are down, basically all of the issues have improved dramatically.

And probably the craziest thing to me is that around 100 years ago or so, give or take a couple decades, deer in my state were in really sad shape from overhunting and deforestation. There was even one hunter who believed that he may have shot the last deer in the state (he probably didn’t, but the fact that he believed that was the case speaks volumes about how few deer were left)

The state of course put a lot of programs into place to rebuild the deer population, hunting licenses, tags, seasons, limits, and other restrictions and various other conservation programs, and the deer pretty quickly rebounded, so well in fact that the pendulum has arguably swung too far in the other direction and we now have too many deer in parts of the state (personally I think it’s a bit odd if I see less than about 6 deer on any given day, and mostly all I do is drive 20 minutes to and from work, and walk around my neighborhood)

And circling back to dogs, until very recently because of those restrictions put into place, you could not use dogs in any capacity to hunt deer in this state. A lot of the damage done to the deer population a century ago was by commercial hunters who would often use dogs to help drive large numbers of deer. A couple years ago they did finally change the law to allow dogs to assist in tracking wounded deer.

I also strongly support reintroducing predators, however in my area, it probably won’t be feasible without some major un-development, deer may only need a home range of about a mile or so, so they can carve out a decent life in isolated pockets of woods and fields scattered around suburbia, many larger predators like wolves, bears, mountain lions, etc. on the other hand may need a range of tens or sometimes even hundreds of miles, so it would be hard to get them established here (although our coyote population has been growing and adapting well, so they may be able to start filling some of that role)

I feel like there’s some room for nuance here. I don’t like using dogs to hunt down live uninjured game in general, flushing, chasing, treeing, etc. that just seems like unnecessary stress for the animals which should be avoided.

But I have no issue using tracking dogs to follow a blood trail and find a wounded animal after it has been shot, which could mean the animal can be humanely dispatched more quickly, or to retrieve dead game, like with waterfowl hunting since ducks and such are often shot over the water making them difficult to retrieve.

There can be some narrow exceptions for people who are actually subsistence hunters and rely on hunting for a significant amount of their food needs

There’s also cases like feral swine that are often hunted with dogs, they’re invasive and can be very damaging to the environment, can be aggressive towards humans and can present a health hazard for domestic pigs in nearby farms, so it’s often important to keep their numbers in check, so it might sense to allow dogs for that purpose if it makes the hunters more effective.

I am so ready to hop on the PHEV or even full electric bandwagon.

I do have 2 major hurdles though.

First is there aren’t a lot of vehicles out there, at an affordable price point for me that quite fit my needs. I’ve pretty much dialed in that a midsized SUV or small pickup truck is just right for me. There’s some exciting options coming down the pipeline, but none that are out there have quite hit the sweet spot for me yet. (I am champing at the bit for Ford to release a PHEV AWD maverick with a midgate to make up for that short bed. That’s basically my ideal vehicle, I’d also be stoked for Toyota to do a plug in 4runner, my current car is a 4runner and I like it a lot, if either of those happen before I’m ready for my next car theres a good chance that’s what I’m getting)

Second is charging, I live in a townhome with no garage or driveway, so if I want to charge at home I’m pretty much stuck running about a 30ft extension cord across my front lawn and sidewalk. That’s less than ideal, and my HOA hasn’t exactly been friendly to others in my neighborhood who have gone electric who have done that. I can probably work around that though, the way my schedule works, unless I go in for overtime I usually don’t work more than 3 days in a row, so if battery-only range gets a little better for PHEVs (which hopefully they will by the time I’m able to budget for a new car in a few years) I can probably do most of my commuting on one charge and find an hour or two on my days off to go somewhere with a fast charger.

In the meantime, I just try to get my wife to do as much of the driving as possible when we’re both off since she has a prius, our schedules don’t always align, but when they do I only drive if we need my bigger car for something.

It’s a long way off, but we also fantasize about the possibilities of self-driving cars someday when all of the problems are worked out. Since we have different schedules (she works a regular 9-5, I work 3pm-3am on a 2-2-3 schedule,) we could have one self driving car for most of our commuting and errands, it could take her to work, come home and take me to work, pick her up and take her home, and pick me up at the end of my shift, and go charge itself in-between.

Part of the problem is not having the money or space for an extra vehicle.

I drive an SUV, I don’t particularly like driving an SUV, I get a lot of use out of having a larger vehicle, I’m an avid DIYer who makes frequent trips to the hardware store to pick up lumber and such, I have a lot of outdoor hobbies and usually end up being the one who drives so I’m carrying gear for several people, I don’t exactly go off roading, but those hobbies sometimes take me on some poorly maintained, deeply rutted, muddy roads and 4wd has gotten me out of some jams, I occasionally drive onto the beach to go fishing, usually find myself towing a small trailer a couple times a year, and I’m an essential employee that lives in an area that gets snow with a weird schedule that usually has me commuting before the snow plows have gotten through everywhere.

But even though I probably get more actual use out of an SUV than most people, most often I’m still only driving about 20 miles or less a day, on paved roads, in weather that doesn’t require anything more than working headlights, wipers, and tires that aren’t totally bald.

If I had the budget and parking space I’d probably have the cheapest base model EV I could find for most of my commuting and small errands and save the SUV for my days off and when it snows. That’s not the case though.