I’ve got absolutely no complaints about any of the Ridgid tools I have. They’re still right up there in the A tier for performance, and usually at a much better price than like, DeWalt. Perfect for the handyman or DIYer that isn’t using them 12 hours a day, every day.

Milwaukee is definitely geared towards those making money from them though. If it’s your actual job, Milwaukee or Makita are the way to go. They’re expensive, but they are absolute workhorses.

Oh yeah I’m aware they’re owned by the same company, and they use the tiered model where Milwaukee is their top end. I wouldn’t say it’s done so that people “have” to buy Milwaukee. Just that it gives different options for different customers.

Ridgid is perfect for me. I don’t use them for my day job, just for projects around the house, remodeling, and hobby work. Milwaukee is better, because they’re built to last longer and stand up to the abuse of someone using them 12 hours a day every day for work. That would be a waste of money for me because I simply don’t use them that much. For someone that makes money with them, or is doing a lot more heavy lifting with them, that’s more critical and worth the extra money.

For my use, I don’t need to spend the extra money. Ridgid more than gets the job done, and if it doesn’t last as long as Milwaukee it doesn’t really matter because they have the lifetime warranty. I can just go to HD and grab a brand new one off the shelf for free if it dies on me. Same with batteries.

Ryobi are geared toward the homeowner that only needs occasional use. I’ve got a Ryobi table saw and miter saw from 15 or so years ago, and they’re… fine. But they’re more of a pain to get set up accurately, and you have to repeatedly make adjustments to keep them accurate. They’re good for a project, but are not great for making repeatable consistent cuts. I’m doing more projects since we bought our current house, so those two are starting to become the pain factor for me, and will be upgraded soon.

My grandpa used to only use Ridgid hand tools for plumbing. That’s about all I know about them lol.

But yeah, Ridgid is great for a homeowner or hobbyist, but doesn’t quite stand up to something like Milwaukee for a pro.

I would not put it in the avoid list. Ridgid is perfectly fine, they have a huge selection, they’re powerful enough, and they warranty is killer. They’re about all I buy for cordless tools, but I’m also just a DIY homeowner and not a contractor. But I’ve also not tried their new Nuke like which is supposed to be “pro grade”.

I just wish they’d put a rack and pinion fence on their table saw before I buy one. When I upgrade from my 15 year old ryobi, it’ll probably be dewalt unless Ridgid upgrades that fence.

That’s not what it says about Ridgid.

The Ridgid brand is owned by Emerson Electric, which licenses it to Techtronic Industries (TTI, parent of Milwaukee and Ryobi) for power tools. Emerson retains the plumbing tools (pipe wrenches, etc.) as its own line. Power tool Ridgid is effectively a licensing arrangement where the branding and the manufacturing are separated.

Why Avoid

Licensing arrangement, Home Depot exclusive, built to a price point. The Ridgid name carries plumbing heritage that the power tool products don’t inherit.

They don’t say the power tools got worse. They say that the power tools don’t have the quality that the hand tools were known for, because they’re just a licensing agreement to slap the name on price point built stuff rather than actually built by the same company.

They don’t ever say that Ridgid made power tools before TTI. They say the exact opposite.

I disagree with them about the quality of Ridgid power tools, because they’re great for the price and have a lifetime warranty.

I’m not sure where this idea that Biden “promised” not to run again came from.

He never once said that. The only thing that comes from is his staffers had a private understanding that he wouldn’t run. He never once promised the public that he wouldn’t.

That’s not a strawman. Marx himself has stated this in his writings. The existence of a State is to oppress the proletariat. That’s direct from his own mouth.

You cannot talk about Marx without talking about the dictatorship of the proletariat. That is FUNDAMENTAL to Marxism.

My point is that once you get there, that is the final stage. Transcending beyond that is impossible with humanity. You can disagree with that all you want. I don’t care.

Yeah that’s a big failing on the teachers, not explaining why you can’t cite Wikipedia. It’s not hard to explain “you can’t cite wikipedia directly because it isn’t a source. It’s just a collection of references, and you need to go cite the primary source, and here is where wikipedia lists their sources for each claim and how you can cite them”.

My point is that that is physically impossible in the real world. Engels is fundamentally wrong when he says " The first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a State."

That first act of the State is just that, the first act of the State. Once the State seizes power, it will NEVER naturally lose it.

You cannot have people without governing the people. People aren’t robots. They are diverse individuals with wildly differing moral compasses and ideas, and you absolutely need some sort of governance to resolve disagreements among the people, and a system of authority that enforces those agreements. You cannot have a society without laws, because there will always be people that don’t want to cooperate in society. And you cannot have laws without a State enforcing those laws, through the threat of violence.

I mean, hell, we live in a society right now where there are PLENTY of people that commit violent crimes, pedophilia, thefts, sexual assault, murder, etc. That isn’t going to somehow disappear. There will always be people like that. And that requires a State with a monopoly on violence to keep under control. And as long as you have a State, you will never have a truly classless society, because by virtue of having an authoritative body that governs the people, those in power are in a separate class than the rest of the people.

No encyclopedia is citable. They’re not primary or secondary sources.

You can’t use tertiary sources in academic research because they’re just aggregation of references. You need primary sources whenever possible, and secondary sources when primary sources are unavailable.

Which is where going down to the references and grabbing the primary sources there comes in handy, because you can cite those.

Again, I am not the one that drew the line… The now removed comment did.

And no, you are the one now trying to blur the line. There is a hard line between socialism and communism, and that line is the existence of a State. Communism is by definition stateless. Marx was pretty explicit about that part.

Up until that, it requires a dictatorship of the proletariat. Which is de facto an authoritarian state to enforce the transition from capitalism to socialism, with the end goal of the state naturally withering away and losing all of its power.

That last bit is the impossible part in the real world. Give humans power and they will never naturally give it up. Power always corrupts. You will always get someone in there believing that they are truly chasing the common good, and they will use any means necessary to get there.

Absolutely it is. We desperately need a return to the small local processor model that we used to have. As well as a pretty drastic cut in meat in general back to mid century levels.

In 1950, meat consumption was around 138lbs per person per year (with a population of 151 Million). In 2025 it was 226lbs per person per year with a population of 342 million. Going back to 1950s level of meat consumption would eliminate over 30 Billion pounds of meat per year, be WAY better for the environment, and drastically cut prices because demand would match actual supply.

Well, the removed comment was about how people bastardize communism with a form of socialism and that “real communism” isn’t authoritarian.

“Real communism” is a classless, stateless, moneyless society where the means of production are communally owned, and people self-govern. Everything up until that point is some form of socialism where the means of production are owned by the people, through the control of the state. That is not possible in the real world, just like the idealistic capitalism on paper is not possible in the real world. Humans are too flawed to have perfect systems.

The absolute best you could ever hope for is some form of Democratic Socialism, where the means of production are owned by the people, through the means of the state, where the state is controlled directly by the people through democratic means. There is still going to be a state involved though, and all governments are authoritarian by nature. That’s the entire point of a state, to be the authority.

So, I was arguing against the comment that I directly replied to, thank you very much.

No, almost a third of the hay grown in the western US is exported to dairy farms in China, Saudi Arabia, Japan, and a couple other countries. 31% of all hay in the western US is exported, amounting to over 2.1 million metric tonnes per year.

The most water starved areas in the US are growing some of the most water intensive hay crops like alfalfa, for Chinese and Saudi dairy cattle an ocean away.

The worst part is that a LOT of that feed doesn’t even go to animals in the US. A ton of the alfalfa gets exported for dairy cattle in places like China. 2.13 million metric tonnes a year recently, slightly down from the peak of 2.88 million metric tonnes in 2022.

31% of hay in the western US is exported, while only 3% of the total national hay production is.

They’re not completely wrong. It’s just not Flock.

Police have had Stingrays for well over a decade now, which are basically man-in-the-middle attacks. They mimic a real cell tower, so your phone connects to it like a normal cell tower. Then the police have full access to all transmissions your phone makes to that tower. That doesn’t give them access to things like your contacts that are stored encrypted locally, but it does give them access to your text messages in transit (if not E2EE encrypted), your voice data during transmission (so any phone calls you make they can listen in and record), and any other metadata in transmission.

There’s plenty of competition at the rancher level. That’s not the issue. The bottleneck is the meat processors. That’s where the oligopoly is. All the beef at the grocery store goes through a couple of major processors.

You can get beef for cheaper wholesale or buying beef shares. Even with processing from a smaller place, you’re looking at $8-10/lb for buying a whole beef, which is way cheaper than the grocery store. You just still need a place to keep 400+lbs of beef frozen.

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50 years is a really good timeline for a time capsule. Close enough that parents or grandparents were there and lived it, far enough out that it’s decades before you existed.

Time capsules are never meant for the people who were there when they were sealed. That would defeat the purpose of a time capsule…

No shit you remember it. You were there. That’s the whole damn point. That there will be people around that lived it and can actually explain it all firsthand. That’s why they’re not super long-timeline things. It’s not for you. It’s nostalgia for the people that buried it, and a good passing down of information from generation to generation. But the primary point of time capsules are showing new generations history.

It’s like how the 90s are an exhibit at museums now. I took my kids to one. It was fun explaining all the shit they saw and thought was wild, because I lived it firsthand and it was just life.

It’ll be fun when it’s my grandkids too.

Have you ever met humans? That would be a recipe for “no I’m not calling about that, I want a human” just to get to a human and say you’re calling about exactly that.