MacGyver

I'll admit that I've kind of enjoyed looking at 'unread content' and seeing a gun board today.

I was in Canada last week and everyone wanted to talk about the Preds. Everyone was impressed with how Nashville fills an arena. Last night at the buzzer, you could hear the celebrations downtown from my backyard in Brentwood.

David moved it this morning. It sounds like we've still got some work to do.

College is kind of a time to learn how to operate as a grown up - hopefully with some boundaries - and hopefully without permanent consequences. I think you've kind of answered your question. She's around people her age - and some of them are going to do stupid stuff. Your responsibility as a parent is to help the consequences of that matter less. You've clearly done a great job so far. I wonder if a conversation about defense for a college aged girl coupled with some pepper spray and a good knife wouldn't be a better option? On the firearm front I like a handgun with a lockable safe that can be bolted down. College apartments aren't the most secure places. I don't like the shotgun just because it's harder to secure.

Man, almost 10 years later and it still catches me sometimes when I see this thread come up. I get my hopes up for just a fraction of a second...

The Russians are getting too much attention. Gotta go big.

Awesome! Some of the best engineers I know came out of TTU and UT Martin.

I wonder if Eddie Vedder is calling up Willie Nelson and asking for advice?

That's awesome, Greg! Congrats to you all. Does he know what he wants to study at Tennessee Tech?

I love the G-10 scales on the civilian - but the FRN on the Matriarch cuts a lot of weight and is plenty robust in its own right. I love love love the Emerson Wave feature on the Matriarch 2. If you've never used a knife with that feature - it gets the blade into action faster than just about anything out there.

I was in graduate school in Seattle in the mid-90's. It was a year or two after peak-grunge, but it was a great place musically (I still mourn KMTT The Mountain.) I needed a few more hours one semester and actually ended up in a class with Chris Cornell's mom. Two things struck me, even then. One, it was cool of him to pay for his mom to go to school. Second, she was so proud of him. Depression is a disease and it can affect anyone. Man, if you need help - talk to someone. There are a bunch of us here who would drop what were doing to climb down in that hole with you. He'll be sorely missed.

No, it's the classic spyderco big thumbhole. Maybe it because I've been using a Spyderco in some form or fashion since my first Rescue in the early 90's, but I prefer them to assisted opening or auto alike.

I was kind of hoping that the snake would win. Probably only a matter of time, I guess.

Of course it would be someone like US Optics. It's totally a niche product - but there is great business to be had in finding a few people who really live you and working to make them really happy.

That's a problem no equipment will fix I'm kind of surprised that no one has made a high end scope with a level inside the tube. It seems like you could even make it so that it was at the top of the field of view or someplace unobtrusive. I expect you could even do it with a mirror and red dot in a way that if you can see the dot you're level - if not you need to adjust.

I like that. That's a nifty placement of the level.

Yep. The Civilian has a good record of getting the pointy end engaged just about any way you choose to run it. It's single ground, too - so once it hooks up it's going to slice. Then, the blade shape is designed to cut deeper as it continues It's arc - even if the person deploying it instinctively or defensively pulls away. It really has a very limited use case - but it's really good in that lane.

I'll be in.

That looks great.

Funny, if they had been more present to help earlier on, they might not have found themselves in this current predicament. I don't know how many Gander Mountains I've walked into over the years with money to spend only to walk out with nothing. I remember a case in that very store in Bowling Green where I was ready to buy 3 Stradic CI4 reels and left in frustration because they couldn't figure out who had the key last. The manager's comment was probably telling when he said, "you can probably tell that we don't sell too many nice reels."

Your AK's are going to mutiny if you're not careful.

Yeah, I don't think it lets them cut in line come judgement day - either grace is sufficient or it's not. The above was just my personal admiration of two people who have given away their earnings. Warren Buffett is weird - I don't necessarily agree with much that comes out of his mouth when it comes to politics. But, I find it interesting that unlike say the Ford Foundation which has outlived the vision of its founder by 70 years, or other "foundations" that are really about passing down wealth, the intent of this foundation is to spend itself out of existence.

It's entirely possible at this point that Bill Gates will be remembered for his charity more than his role at Microsoft. His obituary will at the very least have two distinctive parts. I've worked for Microsoft, and one thing you will not hear from their employees is that their management team has gotten rich by stepping on their employees' backs. Microsoft has made a few billionaires and thousands of millionaires. Warren Buffett is probably a bit of an anomaly. At the very least he's a mathematical savant was also in the right place at the right time. Fun fact about Buffett, though. He basically gave his entire fortune to Bill and Melinda Gates a few years ago on one condition - that the entire fortune be spent on charitable work in their lifetimes.

It's interesting, and maybe it's a direction we can go in this thread, but if you're in you're early forties like me, you and I inhabit a different world and economy than our parents and grandparents did. There's a bootstrapped version of my story that I could tell. It's relevant, but it's definitely not the whole story. There are a couple of points in there where if I'm being intellectually honest, it comes into focus, though. My mom went back to work when I graduated from elementary school. Her dream was to send my sister and I to a private high school, and she did. She took a job as a teaching assistant in a special education classroom. She had good benefits, but her salary was never that high. She was able to send both my sister and I to high school on that salary though. That wouldn't happen today - at least not in Nashville or Atlanta where I grew up. My parents wanted and were able to cover the difference between what scholarships covered and what the tuition actually was for both my sister and I to go to college. Looking back now, I see how much they did without to make that happen. Graduating without debt put me in a position to have a lot more flexibility early in my career. That's a lot more difficult today, too. For my middle-middle class family growing up, I see what a stretch that was, and my tuition then was literally 25% of what it would be today. They would not have been able to provide me with the same opportunity in 2017. There are things that definitely work to our favor in 2017. Memory, processing power and storage have all basically become commoditized. An Amazon Web Services account coupled with a Pluralsight account and a year's worth of nights and weekends can have just about anyone with an idea in a position to start a side business. This is the small business owner in me talking, but there are some inconsistencies in a market that's dominated by giant corporations. Figure it like this - anywhere there's an 800-pound gorilla, there are necessarily some really unhappy customers. Figure out how to serve that small segment better and you can feed yourself.

The data is pretty clear on this stuff. There are two consistent factors that are most present in cases where a family achieves financial stability in America today. They are: Someone in the family unit has gotten as much education as they could They've waited until they're married to have kids If you want a surefire formula - the data shows that these two metrics are about as close as you can get in America today. Even then, you're still playing some odds. The risks of health calamity are always present. Health problems can bankrupt a family. As to risk taking, you're still in a pretty decent position. You're young (still under 30?), no kids(I think), and you're married so you have two incomes and as a family unit you get 336 hours in a week instead of just 168. You're in a position where you can tolerate some risk and the consequences of missing some of those assumptions simply aren't as dire. I just got accepted to one of the major startup accelerators with my new company. I didn't think they'd accept a 42 year old single founder when my competition is a bunch of 22 year old Stanford graduates. I have a lot more experience than they do, but they're in a position to tolerate a lot more risk. The data shows that the odds are in their favor. Most startups will fail. That's a known fact, and it's accounted for in the market right now. Why do people keep investing - because the consequences of being wrong are simply lower when you're in your 20's, and some of those folks are likely to take that experience and turn it around into a new venture that succeeds. Happy to talk about it sometime if you like.