I think that you vastly overestimate that. When you look at states like Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, etc., they're almost overwhelmingly Republican. If elected officials aren't Republican, they're often still deeply conservative on social and fiscal issues.

I see that they have Lone Wolf and Cub, Hanzo the Razor (and if you haven't seen the Hanzo the Razor series, I highly recommend it!), and Zatoichi, but I don't see Sleepy Eyes of Death.

I would be that pretty much all of the chanbara films are probably on there. Chanbara is roughly the Japanese equivalent of spaghetti westerns.

I'm the exact opposite; I thought that Planet Terror was far more fun than Death Proof. Death Proof just felt like a long, mean-spirited chase scene. It's one of only two Quentin Tarantino films I didn't like, the other being Reservoir Dogs.

Sheehy accidentally shot himself in 2015, when he was travelling with his family and his gun fell out of a vehicle and fired when it hit the ground in a parking lot on Logan Pass. The ranger who was quoted in the story was Peach.

This is... Unlikely. Not impossible, but very unlikely overall. In almost all cases, handguns are drop safe; they won't go off unintentionally when you drop them. What will make one go off is trying to grab it while it's falling, and accidentally pulling the trigger in the process of fumbling with it.

The exception to this are certain Sig Sauer guns that have recently been the subject of a lawsuit; they've been found to go off unintentionally when dropped, or when the trigger wasn't being pulled.

Regardless - lying about how you go shot is still a big problem. I wouldn't want a senator that lies to protect his buddies; if his Navy SEAL buddies negligently shot him while they were conducting an operation, he needs to report that shit, and they need to be given additional training.

As a counterexample, look at the Marina City towers in Chicago (aka the corncobs); all of the units have balconies, and the balconies are definitely a selling point. They're quite large; in the case of the studios, the balcony can be nearly as large as the living space. (I think that I recently saw a nearly all original condo in Marina City go up for sale in the mid $400s? It was an interesting time capsule.)

My house is in an HOA. I'm not allowed to have a clothesline.

I do anyway. It's on my screened in porch, and not visible unless you're climbing trees in my backyard. And if you are, fuck you, I'll walk around naked all day if I goddamn well please.

First: you don't iron fabrics when you wax them. You use a heat gun. If you're thinking about doing that, you will need to use a cellulose fiber (cotton, jute, hemp, rayon, etc.), because oilcloth doesn't work well with protein fibers (wool, silk), or synthetics. The traditional basic recipe, IIRC, is beeswax, an oil like walnut or linseed (a drying oil, I think? you want something that's pure, not a mixture), and turpentine, heated enough to melt the wax and dissolve everything together. The cooled mixture should be a soft paste, and will obviously have a strong smell of turpentine. You rub it on, and then use the heat gun to melt it, and wick it into the fibers of the fabric. Best fabrics for that are going to be tightly woven, heavy cotton canvases.

Second: I'd recommend Dyneema, if you can find it. It's a fabric made from ultra high molecular weight polyethylene (UHMWPE). It's hydrophobic and extremely strong. It's commonly used for ultra-lightweight backpacking tents, motorcycle protective apparel, and UHMWPE is used for lightweight bullet-resistant rifle plates in body armor. If you can't find that, the next choice would be a lightweight, treated Invista Cordura, probably something in the 50D range. You'll need to tape the seams if you want it to be waterproof.

If you want to stick to natural materials, then the obvious choice would be going with leather and/or fur. Leather that's treated with mink oil or neatsfoot oil should be pretty water resistant, and will very effectively cut all wind. Sheepskin that still has the wool on can do double-duty, as wool is naturally hydrophobic, although it will felt on you eventually. Oilskins were the traditional foul weather apparel--with wool underneath, as wool keeps you warm even when it's soaked--for sailors before the advent of synthetic materials.

The real thing--as opposed to satire--is alarming enough. The essential problem is that you simply can't maintain a constant level of vigilance.

Accelerometers don't work that great with motorcycles; when you go into a hard turn, the accelerometer still thinks that you're straight up, due to centripedal force. You'd actually need gyroscopes. (...Which is why adaptive headlights for motorcycles end up being so expensive, and why only BMW specs them, and only on one or two touring models.)

This idea that everything has to be a video essay-response from some no-name YouTuber has got to fuckin' die. Just write a quick blog post, link to your sources, and be done with it.

Okay, and if we're going to say that, then Russia, SK, and China are all capitalist then, and there is no socialism/communism. Then we're right back into 'no true communist' territory.

Russia started the war in Ukraine, and China and North Korea have been actively helping Russia's war effort. That's not capitalism, that's imperialism.

I knew someone that unintentionally carried a switchblade in their carry-on bag to NYC, discovered that it was in their bag when they were unpacking at the hotel, and then intentionally carried it back home to Chicago in their same carry-on. Both times it passed through an x-ray machine without comment.

This shit is all security theater. Look up how often Red Teams get guns, ammunition, and simulated explosive devices past TSA; you'll be unpleasantly surprised.

I'm in the middle of trying to get a fairly expensive surgery.

If I had insurance, I would need to pay about $15,000 (between premiums, copays, annual deductible, coinsurance, and out of pocket maximums) with the only insurance available to me through my workplace before anything would be covered. So it's not really worthwhile, right? Well, the surgery I need--around here--gets quotes of as much as $89,000. The most recent quote that I have is around $18,000. Keep in mind that the surgery takes about an hour, is a surgeon, one OR nurse assisting, and an anesthesiologist. The fee for the surgeon and nurse is about $5000, and the facility takes about $10,000. In the case of surgery in a hospital--rather than an ambulatory surgical center (ACS0---it's even worse. With the same surgeon and OR nurse at an ACS, I had a quote of $16,300; at a hospital the quote was $49,000. The surgeon and nurse get the same fee regardless, which means that the hospital charged >$30,000.

...And good fucking luck getting a lot of places to give you prices at all, even though DHHS has mandated pricing transparency. Even if you know exactly what CPT billing codes are going to be used, it can be days of back and forth before you can get a price. If you need shit fixed NOW, you're just going to be stuck with whatever they charge.

I mean, it kind of makes some sense. Part of what they're doing is checking your location, speed, bearing, etc., and--IIRC--using cell signals for some of that. That's bandwidth, and someone has to pay for it, even if it's not very much. OTOH, Helite makes a vest that uses a tether, and that's going to work well enough in most cases.

I think that there might be some that have options to pay for it all up-front instead of having a subscription, but I'm not positive; I just rely on leather and Knox inserts.

unexpected engine malfunctions

On the other side of that is the known problems that lead causes. Seems to me that the best solution is to give everyone a cut off point, and say, hey, when we hit this point, you're going to have to retire that engine, and get one that's known to be good with lead-free avgas. Sure, it's a cost, but that's why you give people time to prepare.

It's pretty bad. IIRC Australia has banned/is banning stone composite countertops because of how many workers were getting silicosis from breathing the dust, and they were getting silicosis at really young ages. Like, mid-20s. Silicosis isn't bad in the same way as mesothelioma, but it's its own kind of hell.

You can absolutely get high octane ethanol-free gas; there's a place near me that sells it. I know that a lot of people with motorcycles use it, because inline four cylinder motorcycle engines tend to be high compression, and motorcycle people tend to be almost religious about not using ethanol. (Which is unnecessary; assuming your motorcycle is fuel injected, the only risk with ethanol is storage for several months at a time with a full tank of gas. If you do that, then you're going to end up with water in your gas, because ethanol is hygroscopic. As long as you keep riding regularly, or empty your tank and run the motor dry before storing it for more than a month, you'll be fine with ethanol in your gas.) I know of at least once place near-ish to me that sells 110 octane ethanol- and lead-free racing gas. Ethanol-free high octane fuels tend to be about 25-50% more expensive than fuels with ethanol.

Avgas is another story. The odds are pretty good from what I can tell that any prop airplane is going to need gas with tetraethyl lead. To me, that sounds like a good reason to remove them all from service in favor of jets, but I think that jets have a higher stall speed, which can be a problem, esp. in backwoods areas.

(Jet-a and jet-a1 are kerosene derivatives, and don't have lead.)

(otherwise known widely as trailers or mobile homes, but trailer parks already get a bad rap despite largely being the last few examples of affordable housing in the U.S.).

Trailer parks get a bad rap in part because they're usually incredibly abusive. You own the mobile home, but you don't own the land it sits on. You pay rent for the right to have your home there, and that means that you can get stuck with enormous rent increases. Even though mobile homes are technically mobile, moving one is expensive enough that people have a very hard time doing so once it's installed somewhere. That means that if the owner of the trailer park raises rent past what you can pay, you can end up losing the house that you own, because you can't afford to move it.

Also, if this is the kind of thing you want, look into shipping container conversions. Yeah, they're still very small, but they're a lot more durable overall than these are likely to be.

Text my spouse to see where they went, and why they're up before me.

I live in a cabin already.