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.

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.

It of course varries from one school or area to another, and from different age groups.

I ended up going to 4 proms, my own junior and senior proms, the senior prom my junior year because a girl asked me, and then I ended up dating a girl at another high school after I graduated and ended up going to her senior prom (in case anyone’s getting skeeved at that, we were both 18 at the time we started dating, just a few months difference between us, I just barely made the cutoff to be part of the previous grade and she just missed it)

That last prom was the only one where I was actually dating my date, the other 3 we just went as friends, although I did have a pretty big crush on the girl I took to both of my own proms but could never quite work up the nerve to ask her out.

There were never any elaborate promposals or anything, that was just starting around that time and hadn’t quite caught on yet, my sister a couple years behind me did it, nothing too elaborate I think she gave her friend a cake and balloons.

The promposal thing is mostly just that it’s silly and fun, and nowadays I guess it probably makes for a funny tiktok.

Prom was not a particularly big deal in my area, if I had to attach any particular significance to it, it’s just that it’s kind of your first “adult” formal event that you’re attending for your own sake, not because you’re going to a cousins wedding, not something like your first communion or bar mitzvah or whatever when you’re still very much a kid. You get to dress up, you get a fancy meal, you rent a limo, maybe you go to a cool post-prom party and you’re going to be out till the wee hours of the morning mostly left to your own devices. It’s fun for its own sake, and the kind of event most teens don’t really get to experience very often.

I was in Montreal for the eclipse, I’m sure it was a very busy tourist weekend and they were ready for the influx of us English speakers coming to town, but I didn’t have any issues anywhere.

It was probably my favorite city I’ve ever visited. Everything we ate was amazing, even when we just stopped into some random hole in the wall Chinese takeout place for a quick bite.

Public transit blew anything I’ve ever experienced in the states clean out of the water. I was also kind of in awe at how bikeable the city was.

There’s not many cities I’ve visited that I’m itching to go back to, but I’m definitely planning to go back sometime.

To be fair, you didn’t say it had to be a modern technological invention, just that it impacted the modern world

So I don’t have any specific insight to what’s available in the Netherlands

But I kind of feel like maybe you’re explaining what you’re looking for poorly

First some terminology

SIM and e-SIM are basically how your cellular service provider knows that your phone is connected to your account. The phone that has either that physical SIM card inserted, or that e-SIM data gets the calls, texts, data, etc. that are supposed to go to you. Take the SIM card out or change the e-SIM, and that phone no longer gets those calls, texts, and data. Put that same sim or e sim on another phone and it starts getting all those calls texts and data.

VoIP is Voice over Internet protocol, basically sending a phone call over the Internet instead of over phone lines. This might be from a computer, or from something that looks like a landline phone (or maybe even is a regular landline phone with some sort of adapter) or from a cell phone with a VoIP app installed. To use it from a cell phone you’d need to have either a WiFi connection, or a cellular data connection, and to have that cellular data connection you need to have either a sim or e-sim.

I don’t think there’s any VoIP provider that’s set up to just use your phone’s dialer and text app to directly handle calls and texts (though I could be wrong on that, I don’t try to keep up with all of the different types of phone services out there) everything would have to go through their app. If you want to do that, and you’re either ok having no cellular data and all of your calls, texts, and data use would have to go over WiFi, or if you keep paying for a cell plan (and the associated SIM/e-SIM) maybe either just a data plan with no talk/text, or a regular plan and you just don’t use the talk and text parts, then you just need to track down a VoIP provider, sign up for an account, and install their app on your phone.

If you want to transfer your actual phone number from your cell phone to a VoIP account, either to use on your cell phone through that VoIP app, from a computer, or from one of those landline VoIP devices, I don’t think that’s really a thing. If you just want calls to your cell to go to your VoIP phone number as well you’re looking for call forwarding.

You might also be getting tripped up with things like WiFi calling, VoLTE/VoNR (marked by some carriers with terms like “HD Voice”) which are things that are all going to be dependent on a regular cell carrier, not a specific VoIP company, and may depend a bit on their network infrastructure and what features your partic6 phone does or doesn’t support.

A large part of the “magic” with human relationships is that out of all of the 8 billion some people in the world, those who are close to you have chosen to spend time with you. For all of our flaws, they see your true nature and value you for it, and choose to have you as part of their lives.

With an AI, that may not be a thing.

If they’re programmed to like you, they’re at best a toy and at worst a slave. There’s no freedom for them to choose or not to choose to be with you. You’re getting an imitation of a relationship. It could be a convincing imitation, with built-in arguments and other idiosyncrasies, but to me every time I hit one of those, it would just be a stark reminder that it’s not the real thing and it’s just programmed to behave that way.

If they’re not programmed to like you and are free to form or not form connections with humans, there’s no guarantee you’d have any more luck wooing an AI than you would a human.

Children are a big part of romantic relationships for a lot of people but by no means all

Many people are happily in committed childfree relationships, other people cannot or should not have children for a great number of reasons but still want and need romantic relationships, and there are still other cases where children put unnecessary strain on otherwise happy relationships.

I think there’s a great number of reasons that AI should not be considered a replacement for human relationships, romantic or otherwise, but reproduction isn’t one of them.

Even if AI could otherwise replace a romantic partner, and if children are something you desire in a relationship, there’s still options like adopting, IVF, and surrogacy

And if we want to get a bit weird and sci-fi about it, that’s without considering the sorts of unknown scientific developments that may come further down the line. Who knows what form AI may take at some point in the future? We may end up with AIs inhabiting some sort of replicant body that’s compatible with human reproduction, or perhaps even entirely new forms of life and intelligence in a sort of melding of man and machine.

Yeah, didn’t mean to imply that you were, just wanted to expand on options for deaf people that are already out there, and point out some of the relative strengths and weaknesses they have compared to text-to-911

Hurricane season lasts from roughly June through November. The worst of it normally comes between August and October, so late summer and we’ll into the fall.

There’s no such thing as bad weather only inappropriate gear.

The problem is, in the summer, “appropriate gear” means an air conditioned house.

This absolutely can be a useful tool for deaf people or others with hearing/speech difficulties.

However, there are already several ways for deaf people to contact 911 without text-to-911

I work in 911 dispatch, probably the most common way I’ve gotten calls from deaf people is through a video really interpreter. The caller is basically on a video call with an interpreter and they relay what’s being said to us. There’s very little delay in communication like there can be when you’re typing back and forth, and usually it works pretty well. There are some situations where it has its issues, if the caller is somewhere dark it can be hard for the interpreter to see what they’re signing, if they don’t have a video-capable device they of course can’t use it at all, and a lot of our deaf callers come from a behavioral health group home place in our county, and some of those callers have a tendency to just kind of walk off-street in the middle of the call, though it’s still kind of useful because the interpreter can at least try to describe what they’re seeing and hearing in the background if the caller didn’t hang up.

Also all 911 centers (in the US at least, I assume it’s probably the same elsewhere in the world) are required to take TTY/TTD calls. The classic example of these is the caller has a device that kind of looks like a typewriter with a little screen and a speaker and microphone they place a phone handset on. They type out their message,the device turns it into a bunch of beeping noises that go out over the phone line like a regular voice call, and the person on the other end’s TTY device (in our case it’s built into our computer phone system) decodes the beeps back into text. Most, if not all cell phones these days also have TTY built into them in the accessibility settings somewhere. There’s some grammar peculiarities because it doesn’t really include punctuation, and some tty users will use ASL gloss, which is a written form of ASL (ASL isn’t totally 1:1 with English, and if you don’t know what you’re looking at ASL gloss reads kind of like that bit from The Office “why waste time say lot word when few word do trick.”) It also allows for hearing or voice carryover, where the caller is able to hear but not speak or vice-versa, so you only need to use TTY for half the conversation and can communicate verbally for the other half. The 2 biggest drawback is that we hear all of these TTY beeps in our headset, and they get pretty annoying really quick, small price to pay though, and generally only one party can be typing at a time, so you have to wait for them to finish before you can reply.

I will say that, at least in my area, TTY is vanishingly rare. In the 6 years I’ve been here, I’d be amazed if we’ve gotten 3 calls from an actual deaf person using TTY, although we did have one mental health patient who used it on his cell phone and used it to just ramble nonsense at us. He had no hearing or speech difficulties, sometimes we were able to get him to talk to us

In either case, if you call from a landline, we get your address just like a regular phone call, with tty from a cell we also get your cellular location like a regular call. Video relay calls from cell phones can get a little funny location wise because of how the call needs to be routed, often it works out that we get a home address they have on file and not their actual current location. With texts the location data often isn’t very good (although we’re implementing some new technologies at my center that improve on it a bit, though it’s still not as reliable as a voice call in some ways)

I posted another comment/rant in this thread with some of my gripes about how people use text to 911 if you haven’t already seen that, and I do want to reiterate that it is a really good option to have available, we can always use more tools in our toolbox, and it can definitely be useful in some circumstances, but it does tend to get misused in some frustrating ways for us.

I work in 911 dispatch, there is an audible groan whenever anyone here gets a text to 911

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that it’s a tool that’s available, there are certain cases where it can be really useful, domestic abuse situations where you’re unable to make a voice call because you’re abuser is in the room or car with you, an active shooter situation where you’re hiding and don’t want to give away your location, people with hearing or speech issues, etc.

That’s almost never what it gets used for.

Most of the time it’s someone calling in some non-emergency. I suspect in their minds it’s probably quicker and more convenient for us to get a text, but it really isn’t. We’re not multitasking and taking other calls at the same time we’re on the text, when we’re on the text, that is what we’re doing, same as if we were on a regular 911 call. And that first text usually is missing some crucial information about what is going on, and it takes a whole lot longer to go back and for asking questions and waiting for an answer by text than if you just made a phone call, if they even reply at all to answer my questions, very often they put their phone in their pocket and never look at it again for the rest of the night. We can’t even call them back because we don’t know if it’s safe for them to speak on the phone, we just have to sit there for 5 minutes waiting for a reply that isn’t coming before we can disconnect.

I’ve also definitely had at least one instance where the caller was definitely texting while driving, and not for anything remotely urgent enough that they couldn’t have found somewhere safe to pull over first.

Agency policies will vary on how texts to be handled, I can only really speak for where I work.

Most calls, even a lot of actual actual emergencies, if my caller is cooperative and knows where they are, and the situation isn’t actively evolving while I’m on the phone, I can handle in about 2 minutes or less, sometimes I can even get it down to less than a minute. I’m going to easily spend twice that on most text conversations, and often I’m going to be tied up on it significantly longer.

Technology also varies a bit from one place to another, but we also don’t get the same kind of location info with a text like we do on a regular phonecall (and even on a call our location data may not always be super accurate or useful) we did recently get some of our systems updated, and we get more information than we did before, but it’s still less reliable than on a phone call.

And we also can’t transfer a text like we can with a voice call, so if you’re texting regarding something going on at your grandma’s house in another state (we get calls like that all the time, where someone tells a friend or relative about something going on, but can’t or won’t call 911 themselves) we have to either A convince you to take a voice call so we can transfer you, or B make a call to them while still texting you, and play middle man relaying questions and answers between you and the other dispatcher, so you’re tying up dispatchers in 2 jurisdictions on your call (it used to be that we weren’t able to make an outgoing call while we were on a text, so we’d have to have 2 dispatchers at our center tied up on these texts, one to message back and forth with you, and another to relay the info to the correct agency by phone. We’re a pretty well-funded county, so I’m sure there’s a lot of dispatch centers still out there where that’s still the case)

I already occasionally get people trying to send us pictures and links with no explanation (pro-tip, we can’t see your pictures or open your links with our current tech, and even if we could opening links would probably be a no-no from a cyber security standpoint)

If at all possible, please just make a voice call, it will be quicker. If you genuinely cannot make a voice call, at least make sure your first text contains the correct location (address, municipality, nearest cross street, apartment number or name of the business if applicable should cover your bases pretty well) and a good description of what is going on. Then please keep your phone with you and try to answer any follow up texts we send you quickly and succinctly.

And again, don’t get me wrong, it really can be an amazing tool when it’s needed, but it’s a massive pain in the ass for us when people use it when it’s not necessary and usually makes just about every part of our job harder and slower, which means slower responses to your emergency.

I buy some roadmaps probably every 10 years or so to make sure mine are up to date and not too beat up, I keep them in my car and do use them occasionally. I usually have 3 maps, a local maps of my nearest city and surrounding area, one of my state, and then one of the surrounding region.

I also tend to pick up free maps wherever I can, lots of state parks and such, tourist maps, etc. but I’m not buying them so not exactly relevant.

I also tend to pick up free maps from AAA since I’m a member whenever I’m going on a road trip, I’m paying for the membership so I guess in a sense I’m buying them, but also not really

I’m not from this instance, so probably not totally relevant to this poll, that said

NO, I’m not a tankie.

I think, however, it’s worth considering that a lot of people that could be considered tankies probably wouldn’t apply the term to themselves, and that could skew the results of your poll. First of all, tankie is sort of a pejorative term, and many wouldn’t want to apply it to themselves for that reason alone. Secondly a lot of people just may not consider themselves to be a tankie, and genuinely do not recognize their own tankieness.

I don’t think I’m the guy to come up with a definitive checklist of what does or does not make someone a tankie, but for the sake of getting the conversation going (and feel free to disagree with me here, I welcome the discussion) I think two of the biggest hallmarks of being a tankie are

1. Communism- not all communists are tankies, but all tankies at least claim to subscribe to some sort of communist ideology.

2. Authoritarianism- tankies either are authoritarians themselves, or are willing to support or overlook authoritarians as long as they see them as being in some way opposed to “the west”/capitalism/etc.

I think the authoritarianism aspect is going to trip some people up trying to answer this truthfully. A lot of authoritarians probably wouldn’t consider themselves authoritarians, most people like to think they’re standing for freedom, justice, liberty, equality, etc. even if their actual actions tell another story. Don’t get me wrong, there are people out there who are openly authoritarian and proud of it, but a lot of authoritarians are a little brainwashed to the point they’ve lost sight of what they’re actually supporting (take a look at the MAGA crowd, they think they’re about free speech and anti-censorship but want to keep books they don’t like out of libraries, they think they’re about small government but want to regulate what kind of medical care you can get, they think they stand for law and order but also proudly proclaim that they are all domestic terrorists and have a convicted felon as their poster boy)

And politics are messy, full of moral grey areas and times where you have to choose between the lesser of two evils, make uncomfortable alliances, difficult choices, and kick some cans further down the road to deal with later while you tackle the current crisis. It’s not always easy or feasible to draw a crisp line in the sand and say “we will not ally with/support/turn a blind eye to these authoritarian regimes,” sometimes you have to play a little bit of the “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” game if you want to actually make any progress against that enemy, or you may have to prioritize and deal with something else before you deal with them. There is a whole lot of grey area to explore about when, why, how, how long, and how much you can support or ignore them before you’re advancing their cause as much or more than your own.

I think there’s probably some tankies who have been taken for a ride on the propaganda wagon and don’t truly realize how authoritarian they are, and there’s others who have justified it, thinking that they’re only going to be/support authoritarians temporarily to achieve a specific goal and will pivot away from that later, but have gone too far or keep moving the goalposts.

Couple last thoughts from me.

There can always be bad actors who are falsely claiming to be (or not to be) tankies for their own purposes. Not really much you can do about that.

Personally, a lot of the criticism I’ve seen about tankies here has been directed towards the mods and admins, not necessarily the rank average users.