Depends on what you’re doing, and how often you’re going to be doing it.

For mechanical tools, I like both Harbor Freight and Gearwrench. I like Gearwrench a lot more, but I haven’t managed to break any Harbor Freight tools yet that weren’t air or electric. For basic sockets, etc., it will be fine for almost everyone. (Spend more for torque wrenches though; don’t cheap out on those.) HF tools have pretty limited sizes though; they don’t have anything really large, like about around 25mm. Unless you are a professional mechanic, you probably shouldn’t waste your money on Matco or Snap-On.

For most cordless general and woodworking tools I like Makita. For more specialized powered hand tools I love Festool, but do not try to fill a shop with them. Just get the ones that no one else makes an equivalent of, like their Rotex sanders, or the domino joiner.

For woodworking shop tools–things that aren’t portable–buy old Delta or Powermatic, particularly stuff that is in no way shape or form portable. Trying to do any serious cabinetry on a job-site table saw is an exercise in frustration and wasted material. A tabletop jointer won’t give you good results.

And for hand-powered cutting tool, like chisels, pull-saws, planes, etc… Be prepared to start spending a lot of money. Hand planes alone can set you back a few hundred each, like for Lee Valley ‘Veritas’ planes. And that’s not even getting into the water stones that you’re going to need to keep them working in perfect condition.

This is my body, this is my blood. Happy are they who come to my supper.

That’s not why Costco is doing it though. The crowd they’re catering to buys things in advance of when they need it, rather than just-in-time, and usually well before the actual seasons for thing.

Eh. It’s Costco. They’re going to have shorts and swimsuits in store by the start of January.

Why not use a fiber that’s not not stretchy, and also not smooth? How would using a synthetic fiber affect the sound?

That is… Likely not correct. Finland came very, very close to losing the Winter War; Russia pulled back because they didn’t realize that the Finns were on their last legs. Yes, Russia right now couldn’t walk through Finland, but at the strength they had prior to invading Ukraine? It’s much, much more probable. The military of Finland is tiny compared to Russia; 292,000 (about 25k active, the rest reserve) compared to 3,159,000 (1.1M active); looking solely at active military, that’s 44:1, Russian advantage.

The big thing that would stop Russia now is NATO, since all countries are pledged to help any other member country if (when) Russia invade. The US is a significant part of NATO, both in terms of raw manpower, and in terms of money spent on the military. Without NATO, Finland probably loses, as long as Russia presses their attack. With NATO, but a NATO without the US, Finland wins, but it takes years. With both NATO and the US, Finland takes Moscow in 2 months.

What’s fucking delusional is thinking that a bunch of civilians armed with handguns and rifles could ever match a modern military should it come to violent revolution

You just have to make it expensive enough that the military doesn’t want to fight, and you need to have enough of the civilian population on your side that the gov’t can’t control them, too. As the gov’t commits atrocities against its’ own people in an attempt to crush a rebellion, it ends up creating more ideological rebels.

And anyways, you’ll note that the US has tended to get pretty fucked up when dealing with insurgencies and guerilla warfare where it can’t leverage air superiority. How many, say, Air Force pilots do you think will start refusing orders when they find out that their last ‘precision bombing’ run killed 150 children in a hospital?

The cost of entering the market is so high that it’s functionally impossible for any new carriers to enter the market without having major investor backing. The only way to make the cost reasonable for most people is to have a very large risk pool; you can’t get a large risk pool without having a lot of people signing up, which means already having the infrastructure in place to handle that kind of numbers.

If you insure, say, 1000 people, and 999 of them are incredibly safe drives, and one of them drives drunk and kills a busload of school children–costing the insurer a “mere” $1,000,000 because that was the limit of their liability–that means that every person in that risk pool needs to pay $1000 annually for that single accident, and that’s just to break completely even, without accounting for any of the overhead involved in running an insurance company.

Can’t really expect anything else from a person that’s on a pro-tankie instance. Almost every time someone starts this both sides nonsense, it’s lemygrad, lemmy.ml, or hexbear.

Where are you from, exactly?

There’s no classes of licenses like that in the US. If you are 18 and meet the minimal legal requirements, you can buy a long gun of any type in most states. (Some states are trying to move that age to 21.) That means a single shot, break action, lever action, bolt action, pump, or yes, semi-automatic. Once you hit 21, you can buy handguns. Again: that includes break action, revolvers, and normal semi-automatics.

The only real restriction in all of this is machine guns; to get those, you need to come up with the $20,000+ that a legal one will cost, and file a transfer application with the BATF, pay a $250 fee, and wait to see if your application is approved or denied. There are some states that prevent individual ownership of machine guns entirely.

tbh my take is alot of people would like an option between paying $2 for a garment they know involved exploitation/slavery vs an accessible1 independent option that doesn’t cost $500/garment.

I would have wanted to believe that too, but then you see things like Temu that promise clothing and consumer goods at impossibly low prices, prices that simply aren’t possibly without forced labor somewhere, and people eat that shit up. I think that most people have an out of sight, out of mind approach to it, and as long as they can’t directly see the exploitation, they’ll accept it.

1 Quick note on accessibility, there are ofc some scant options between $2-500, but what isn’t clear (ie. readily accessible) to the consumer is which of those options isn’t just some greedy bastard buying a $2 option and selling it on for $15.

I strongly suspect that this obscurity is by intent.

And, taking this whole thing a bit farther, as a designer that was paying myself $20/hr, I still can’t guarantee anything about being free of forced labor, because I have no way of realistically tracking everything in my supply chain. This is why there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, so the best you can do is pick your battles.

You need to be 21 to purchase a handgun from a dealer.

This was not a handgun.

Look, no one decides that they want to work in the mines because it’s good for society as a whole to have consumer goods made from what they mine. Everyone expects to be paid in some way.

If I’m making jeans as an independent designer–which I tried doing, briefly–and I decide that my time is worth $20/hr, then I’m going to have to charge around $500 for a single pair of jeans after you figure in all the time needed to make a single pair that’s been customized to fit a single, specific person. (Maybe more; I haven’t done the math in a decade or so.) Almost no one is going to want to, or be able to afford to pay that. Am I skimming off the top? No, I’m charging a fair–and actually very low–rate for custom work. But just like when I tried to do that a decade ago, no one can or will pay for that.

Even if we capped profits of investors, and capped salaries of executives, and had most of the profits going to the workers, people would tend to prefer less expensive goods over more expensive goods. That’s how competition in the market works. In a sufficiently competitive environment, without legal constraints, prices have to drop. (Monopolies raise prices by reducing competition; a sufficiently competitive environment assumes that there is no single company dominating the market.)

Just because something is expensive doesn’t always mean that the standard of living of those making the product is any better.

Oh, absolutely. But when mills, etc. are in the US, there’s more direct control over the living conditions of the workers.

make everyone feel guilty all the time,

Then people just tune it all out, and learn to accept the inherent violence of the system. Sadly.

It is in part a consumer issue. Consumers want things as cheaply as possible, and companies that produce as cheaply as possible sell more product. We’ve seen the same issue with apparel; America wants cheap clothing, and so the mills in the US have largely closed, and most production has been moved overseas in order to make the final products cheap enough.

And while it’s partly a consumer issue, the fact that wages haven’t kept up with productivity–that is, more and more money is being skimmed out of the system by investors and executives rather than going to the workers–has been the driver towards making consumer goods more and more cheaply, simply because people have less purchasing power.

<serious> Frozen blueberries are about $15/4#, and don’t go bad unless you forget them for several years and they get hideously freezer burned. Yeah, they’re as good as fresh if you’re just eating plain blueberries, but if you’re making something that uses blueberries as an ingredient, they work wonderfully.

It also seems like you don’t understand that it being banned 50 years ago is not the same as it being banned for 50 years.

Dude, it is literally illegal at the federal level at this very moment. If you use marijuana, and you buy a firearm, you are a felon. The ban may not be fully enforced in some states right now, but the feds can, at any moment, and on a whim, go into California and Colorado and arrest every single person working at a dispensary and charge them under federal drug trafficking laws, and send every single one of them to prison for life.

I would ask what you’re on, but I’m pretty sure I can guess.

So, alcohol was banned far longer than marijuana.

…What? The 1970s were 50 years ago. And marijuana was illegal long before it was classified as a schedule 1 drug under the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970.

…No?

You aren’t paying for the merit badge per se, you’re paying for the physical manifestation of it. You have to do the work and meet the goals in order to get the merit badge. Once you’ve earned the merit badge, there’s no need to pay for the embroidered patch if you don’t want to. It’s not going to affect whether or not you are able to get your Eagle.