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

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.

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.

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.

I don’t know the specifics of this project, but not all Amtrak trains are electric, they also run diesel and dual mode (diesel/electric) trains (I’m pretty sure, but not certain that the northeast corridor is all electric)

There’s also other things worth considering like emissions from construction or maintenance vehicles, some lines are used for freight and passenger rail, construction might stir up any crap that might be in the soil, I suspect there’s some amount of metal dust created by the constant grinding of wheels on rails, plastics from brakes and such, leaks from any hydraulics onboard the train, refrigerant leaking from the air conditioning, etc.

In the grand scheme, even if they’re running straight diesel trains, leaking fluids, asbestos brake pads, etc. it’s probably all negligible in emissions compared to just living in Baltimore, maybe even offset if it leads to more people using Amtrak instead of driving but all of it is still worth considering.

Looking further into it, your numbers do seem to be more accurate and I’m going to edit my above comment to reflect that.

Serves to illustrate my point about fucky numbers though, there’s lots of bad sources out there that are cherry picking different stats and statistics that sound like but aren’t quite what you’re looking for, doing some questionable math, bullshit written for SEO algorithm purposes and AI generated content making up numbers, etc, and I’m not immune to falling for that. Whatever the hell I was googling earlier (unfortunately I keep my browser and search history wiped pretty clean and I’m having a hell of a time trying to retrace my digital steps, otherwise I’d share where I got those numbers and where I went wrong) was giving me the very distinct impression that the 75th percentile was roughly in the ballpark of 100K individual

These numbers are always a little fucky unless you really want to go combing through some incredibly dull spreadsheets, reports, statistics, etc. to find exactly what you’re looking for

EDIT #2: I’m an idiot who doesnt heed my own warnings about fucky numbers. Disregard the rest of this comment unless you want to see me being wrong, leaving it up because I own up to my mistakes. See the following comments for details

But from a couple minutes of googling, it looks to me like the top 25% of income in the US puts you at around $100k/person, give or take maybe about 10K or so depending on where exactly you’re sourcing those numbers.

That’s of course only part of the picture, net worth, investments, all kinds of creative accounting, etc. also play into that, but I only have so much patience to comb through all of it.

That’s not what I’d consider wealthy, but I’d probably consider that to be a pretty comfortable income for a lot of people. Again, a lot of variables there, but in general that would probably be enough to make sure your basic needs are all covered, and probably to save a decent bit on top of that, be able to send your kids to a decent college and pay for at least part of it out of pocket, and at least generally enough to give you a leg-up over a family making the median income at about half of that.

EDIT: My wife and I fall a bit short of that by probably about 30K each, we’re doing OK, not struggling but not making a whole lot of forward progress either. That kind of money would be almost like having a whole 3rd income for us

I’m an eagle scout from the days before they started accepting girls, I remember always hearing about how much cooler the BSA program was than girl scouts

Part of the problem is with how things are structured. BSA troops tend to stick around for a a while (the troop I was part of well over a decade ago is still going strong and just a couple years off from its 100 year anniversary,) so you end up with a lot of accumulated knowledge and resources over the years, people stick around after they age out of the program to stay on as leaders, they bring their own kids into the program years later, we had some 2nd or 3rd generation eagle scouts who had all earned it from the same troop their fathers and grandfathers did, we had a garage full of troop gear, a pretty decent troop library fell of merit badge books, old handbooks, various first aid and camping manuals, etc. some troops have their own cabins or campsites or other such properties, and the organization makes it very easy for new scouts to find an existing troop, pack, crew, ship, etc. to join.

Girl scouts often don’t have that. Sometimes they do, and when they do they can actually do a pretty amazing program, I’ve heard of some girl scout troops who’ve done some pretty cool stuff that honestly puts my own troop to shame, but more often they kind of tend to get formed with a group of girls around the same age and their mothers, never really do much recruitment, and when the girls either age out or lose interest and drop out the troop just kind of folds. They have to put a lot into the cookie sales and fundraising because they’re usually starting with no troop gear or other resources, there’s not much generational knowledge about how to run a scouting program, so they tend to just kind of have to figure things out on the fly. And a key part of the boy scout program was “boys teaching boys” the older kids in the troop take on leadership roles and help run the program teaching the younger kids, if you’re starting with a group all about the same age, you lose out on a lot of that dynamic.

Also as far as recruitment goes, at least back when I was in scouts, even if you waned to join an existing girl scout troop, it could actually be pretty hard to find them. BSA had their BeAScout website, you could find all the local groups, meeting schedules, and contact info pretty easily, girl scouts, at least at the time, didn’t have anything like that. I remember there was one time my troop wanted to reach out to some of the local girl scout troops to see if they wanted to participate in some kind of event we were having, and they had a hell of a time finding any contact info for them.

Also, some of the girl scout leader training requirements seemed a little excessive, maybe the situation has changed, but I remember hearing that they had to have leaders with specific training for pretty much any little part of their planned activity, like there was a specific training to go on camping trips, a separate training if you wanted to have a campfire on the camping trip, etc. and a lot of them were paid courses and I don’t think they were cheap. I don’t have anything against training in general, I had to do a few when I was a boy scout leader, but some of what I heard from the girl scout side of things sounded pretty excessive to me.

Going back maybe a decade or so I remember most anti-vaxers I encountered being real crunchy-granola, hippie liberal types, often the types who would go on about natural remedies, crystals, etc. There was the odd conservative looney in the bunch, but they were more of a fringe minority.

I haven’t personally encountered many of them liberal types lately, it definitely seems like there’s been a pretty significant shift. I’m absolutely certain they’re still out there, but at least in my area in the sorts of groups I’m tuned into, they’ve become a minority.

Annecdotally, I used to have a pretty good track record for being able to sway people’s opinions on vaccines. I have a enough things going for me on both sides of the aisle that liberals and conservatives will both usually give me the benefit of the doubt and a bit of a reputation among people who know me for being fairly knowledgeable about a lot of things. Since the pandemic, that’s not really the case, everyone’s opinion is pretty much set in stone at this point. I have had a couple people I know thank me for straightening them out before COVID hit though so it’s nice to know my lessons stuck and who knows, maybe even saved a life or two.