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PaperclipPerfector  29d ago (text post)   3700 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 19, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Reddit finally banned me for running afoul of their permanent Anti-Rightist campaign, so I bit the bullet and registered on KiwiFarms. But whenever I try to post, the captcha tells me I have a "residential VPN" on my phone. AFAIK I have no such thing; I always connect on T-Mobile 5G (Android.) Is it just not possible to post there from a phone? Is there something I'm missing? Thanks.

I think I read somewhere that "residential VPNs" get phone IP addresses by tricking people into installing on their phones apps that relay VPN traffic. Maybe the administrator has decided to just block all IP addresses from the mobile network that you use because residential VPNs like to use that particular network (akin to rangebans on 4chan).

Huh - just tried it at home and I posted just fine, didn't even show the captcha. Guess I passed their spambot test!

I think this particular restriction came about because of one bad actor known as UnrealSkybox who spams websites with CSAM and has a seemingly endless network of residential proxies to burn through to do it. The farms is pro-privacy and allows and encourages registration with regular VPNs.

My daughter (7) wants to do chores for money. I have been putting it off, because I don't want to commit myself to something that I will later regret. Has anyone else offered paid chores? Any suggestions about it? For reference, I am an extremely bad housekeeper with a toddler at home, so everything just keeps getting messy again immediately, and I have turned down her suggestion that she could clean up a space whenever it seems messy, since that's basicially immediately after tidying.

I would almost rather pay her to do slow concentration tasks, like crafts and reading, since that is what I actually want her to start doing more of. An artist I talked to, for instance, said she paid her daughter to read books like Harry Potter aloud while she painted.

This is pocket money and how you earn it, unless things have drastically changed since I was young. Do you pay her an allowance otherwise? I started asking to be paid pocket money when I was seven, because I was already doing small chores around the house and I had no money of my own to buy things like comics (my parents did not pay allowances etc. because this was not a thing).

If your daughter wants to help around the house, and she's capable of doing simple tasks like "put the toys away", "pick up the clothes", and even "sweep the kitchen floor" then let her. Agree an amount of pocket money you will pay her weekly and then she can do a list of simple tasks and/or things you ask her to do (e.g. "play with your little sibling and keep an eye on them while Mommy washes her hair").

I'd be careful about that "for" in "do chores for money".

She should do chores because it's part of maintaining a household. She should have money because it teaches planning and responsibility (including responsibility for creating her own fun). I don't think you could create something employment-like enough to give those benefits, which is why I'm opposed to linking them together.

I have no answers for you

It's a tricky thing paying people to do stuff. I remember reading studies decades ago about how it lowered motivation for many tasks to add a paid component.

You could give a fixed allowance predicated on some amount of chore completion so she acquires money but it isn't 1:1 related to the task

My concern is less chores, and more of any unintended blowback by accidentally making her dislike crafts because her parents monetized it and it killed the vibe (I can't remember the mechanism of action in the studies lol)

It's called overjustification.

The British paying for dead Pythons conundrum at the individual household scale

Do you think that the 3d place match should be abolished? We got a farce this year and it is additional humiliation ritual for teams that are already pissed off at the universe.

No, I found it oddly satisfying that England won third place in a goal bonanza match where Mbappé was the eventual Golden Boot winner and still that didn't mean France won the World Cup.

I don't want football (soccer) to end up like some boring American sport where points are artificially inflated and the entertainment consists of getting out your slide rule for esoteric calculations on who has the best average whatever scoring ratio to three decimal points, not from the "take a break every ten minutes so we can sell TV ads and you need fifteen specialised positions where someone might only play five minutes in a game because they're the designated 'kick the ball from this particular spot on the field, now go back to the bench' player" type of play that I've seen in American football (football) matches.

No. I think we should do everything we can to preserve rituals in sport that honor all competition and fighting for every single spot, rather than the "Championship or Bust" mentality that has destroyed the NBA and is eating away at the NFL and MLB.

Oh man, I laughed so hard at the "this is why black people were cheering against the Argentinians" article I read online, because it was by some "who the heck are you?" writer whose entire expertise seemed to be that once upon a time he played in basketball. Tell me you've all heard of Etan (no "h", sic) Thomas, the famous ex-basketball player? 😁

My admittedly unkind reaction was "you're just salty that globally even a yak herder up a Mongolian mountain knows who Messi is, while in the USA itself does anyone outside your own family know you used to play professional sports?"

That's one thing I really hate about what the playoff is doing to college football. As bad as the BCS system was, it meant that an awful lot of teams who weren’t the best could end a season on a massive high note.

This year's was wonderful, and not just because England won. We got a great, flowing game without the pressure, we got to see some beautiful goals, the story of the match (4 down, recovered, ended 6-4). Way better than England vs. Argentina or Spain vs. Argentina.

(Although I also think Argentina just play in a way that doesn't fit the spirit of the game.)

It got Mbappe the golden boot and it’s consistently one of the better games of the tournament. This year was a really good game for watching.

More importantly it deprived Messi of the golden boot, which in turn muted all the pundits who had been falling over themselves in their race to beatify him.

Is this not the primary reason to get rid of it? Those awards should go to the person who earned it NOT the person running up stats in an exhibition game.

To be fair to Messi, he had an amazing cross in the final, nearly scoring from the corner of the pitch. I'd never actually seen a football turn a right-angle in midair before.

A soccer thought. I think it’s fair to say soccer is an inferior sport and us Americans are correct to not play it. However since it’s an inferior sports that’s also why you can have a World Cup.

Tiny nations could not put up a fight in America’s sports even if they played them at the same rate. You need to be a rich country to compete in American sports. For American football it’s probably only America that is richest enough to play it. It requires a huge amount of resources and technology to play at the highest levels. Even if the European powers played American football at the same rates I have my doubts they could create a team that’s competitive with a NFL team and we have 30 of them.

Baseball is showing some ability to create a few competitive national teams but baseball can’t be played internationally because of how much we’ve perfected pitching to the point that a human arm has limits on how many pitches it can throw a year. Elite arms can handle about 150 innings per year so there is basically no ability to use them for an offseason tournament.

And since Soccer is a low event sports it means that inferior teams can actually pull out ties or wins against power house teams with the right luck.

I think it's nice that the USA has its own little sports leagues where they can play with themselves and proudly announce they are World Champions in horseshoe pitching.

Everyone should have a hobby!

This is just cope. Polo is a more expensive sport to play by any standard and is also more involved and I'd wager, a superior gentleman's sport compared to the hooligan sport that gridiron football is. And yet the US is nowhere to be seen in the polo rankings and would get bodied by multiple developing countries were a match between national teams to be held.

Baseball is showing some ability to create a few competitive national teams but baseball can’t be played internationally because of how much we’ve perfected pitching to the point that a human arm has limits on how many pitches it can throw a year. Elite arms can handle about 150 innings per year so there is basically no ability to use them for an offseason tournament.

Baseball is undoubtedly an inferior sport to cricket, and the US national cricket team I guess would likely lose to Zimbabwe. Perhaps even Hong Kong.

I thought baseball was just rounders (a girls' school sport where I come from) with some frills?

Polo is a fantastic sport that should get more press and coverage. It's incredibly entertaining, more effectively co-ed than any more legitimate sporting event, it has the crash-danger of NASCAR and the player-hotness of Italian soccer.

The patron (team owner) often plays on the team itself, which is achieved by the polo equivalent of a salary cap: the handicap system, by which players are rated in goal-value from -1 to 10, and then the team has a budget of handicaps it can spend. As a result, if a team has one of the Argentine star 10 handicaps on the team, you need to balance it by grabbing somebody who sucks with a 1 handicap. So you get a 55 year old investment banker trying to play a real professional sport on a team with real professionals.

Plus, in America at least, the tickets cost almost nothing and they encourage you to tailgate right on the side of the field! In Newport, $150 gets you 20 people, a tent set up for you, and a place to park your truck. Bring your own food, and the drinks there are strong and delicious and reasonably priced.

the US national cricket team I guess would likely lose to Zimbabwe. Perhaps even Hong Kong.

It made minor news a couple years ago (2024) when the US team beat Pakistan (generally one of the top teams). Of course, the usual suspects noted that most of the team was first or second generation South Asian immigrants.

So last year I was at a town meeting for my little burgh. And the audience is full of Indians, like twenty or thirty Indian guys of all ages, when the typical public audience of people not involved is like me and two boomers. And I'm thinking, oh, there must be a motel or a gas station up for a zoning exception and his friends came in to support him. But they work through the agenda and the Indians don't stand up for anything. And I start thinking, oh no, they're all here together for the courtesy of the floor at the end, something bad must have happened, I bet something racist must have occurred and they're here to complain about it.

And the end of the meeting comes and the public comment, and sure enough their spokesman gets up and walks to the podium, and says: "We are all here as part of the [Region of PA] Cricket Club, and we are here to ask for a cricket field to be built in one of [municipality's] parks for the use of all the cricket players in [Region] who currently have to travel to New Jersey to play on a proper cricket field."

Ah, that was an extremely embarassing thing and a one off black mark to be forgotten. Pakistan are known for being mercurial, one day they make easy pickings of the world champions and then a week later look like they're all on some drug and lose to a much worse team.

So why does nobody else care for American Football? Are the other nations so inferior that they don't even see its greatness?

(Is American exceptionalism going the way of Japan now, from "we are so great everyone wants to be us" to "we are so great nobody gets us"?)

It's not really American football vs soccer. The reality is that, if you haven't grown up watching either rugby or American football, and then you were exposed to both, you'd never choose the latter as a viewing experience. The rest of the world has their own version of American football, but more free-flowing, more naturally physical, and less advertisercucked. Even the Japanese play rugby.

Even the Japanese play rugby.

When I last visited Japan I took some pictures out of a Shinkansen of kids playing in a field, and only later realized they were playing American Football from the ball and formations (the train was moving too fast to tell at the time). The Internet tells me it is played there at least a bit, and there is even a professional league. I was surprised, but it's also possible I found the local American expat school.

American Football is a very different sport. This is important to the appeal! In my mind Rugby is just a shittier version of soccer, that's reductive but it is true that sports like Hockey, Rugby and Soccer scratch similar itches with free flowing gameplay as an example feature. Tennis, Golf, American Football - these are all very different experiences.

An example of what this means practically - Football is chess, in the sense that the pieces have abilities but really it's all about the person moving the pieces (the coach) making choices. Football is a coaching battle and a roster construction battle. Yes your coach and roster matters in the other team sports but football is a bunch of different players basically playing an entirely different game (on the level of the difference between a goalkeeper and everyone else) but for every different position on the field.

It's crazy intricate and complicated.

As much as I want to call soccer an inferior sport which I believe is true; I also like that it exists. And that it slot in somewhere around Sport 4 or 5 in America.

It has two greats features. The endurance test of soccer and players actually becoming tired is kind of cool. And while I think being a feet only sport is inferior since the upper body is a significant component of fitness that also allows it to select for athletes without the same emphasis on pure physical size.

The two are related. Almost every Big Guy soccer player is perennially injured - the torque that big muscles or even a big frame puts on your joints really adds up over the levels of sustained work that a soccer player's body is expected to put in just to be competitive. The only exception is the old-fashioned big striker who hangs out up front and doesn't run all that much except to try and score a goal, and those are only fielded by low-ranked teams.

I find them both beautiful, but for different ways!

I suppose so. Though there's a lot of coaching and player specialization involved in other sports, it's just the most extreme in American football because there isn't the need for players to fill other roles (even in cricket, you occasionally get the equivalent of your big guy needing to kick a field goal). Do you feel that the emphasis in ultra-specializing players physically is good or bad for that chess-style of watching?

Personally, I simply cannot understand the appeal of a sport where you sit around watching largely unimportant nonsense for almost all the time in the hope of catching 30 seconds of action - I already have my girlfriend for that.

Football is the most war simulator sport or in modern terms - Football is like Fire Emblem.

It's turn based. You go and then they go. Your units perform an action their units defend against that action. Your units have stamina, you rotate them throughout the game, some hero units need to be in for the whole game.

Understanding your units and the strategies that work well for them (and how they relate to the enemy units and their strategies) is critical.

Football more than most sports (with perhaps the exception of pitching in baseball) requires strategy, tactics, and "logistics" - roster building is fair and open (because of the salary cap) and unit selection and resource management is critical because even a dozen games at the tempo of one per week is too much for most human bodies. Basketball load management is trivial in comparison.

This complexity really rewards high level fan engagement, I know a guy who got a summer job out of emailing an essay on a bad game plan to one of the major NFL teams.

On the other hand without the higher level of knowledge it's pretty enjoyable, most partners I've had in my lifetime who are sports avoidant have gotten more into American Football - the attack and then defend structure makes it more understandable than a lot of Soccer for instance. I love watching the gradual grinding down of a defense or Spain midfield control but it isn't as enjoyable to casuals.

As you note the action is limited to a short span, but you know exactly when that span is, leaving the rest of the time for celebration, drinking, and chitchat. It's a much better on the background at a party sport, you can easily miss the only true action of a soccer game if you piss for thirty seconds.

Interesting, in my experience watching American football I'm basically unable to tell when the action will resume in a given space of milling around. I assume you pick that up fairly quickly.

In my experience, women go for soccer very quickly, but they only remember the good-looking players (I have an American friend who still occasionally asks about Olivier Giroud) or the villains of a given team. It's easier for sports-agnostic women to experience sports as personal drama between men - see also the explosion of F1 interest.

I think the connection to baseball is a meaningful one, even if cricket is probably closer than baseball to the abstract idea of American football you're portraying. American sports are, generally, optimized for ultra-intense fan engagement with lots of statistics, whereas old-world sports tend more towards "may the best man win, old chap" with relatively less structure around that. Personally, I sort of appreciate that the stats wonks in soccer aren't really that useful, but it also means that there's very little to actually think about beyond watching the games and scouting transfers. Tactics are incredibly important to a team, but you've discussed them to death by Monday.

I can see the Fire Emblem metaphor, though I think the "war simulator" thing has been tortured to death (I could also give a spiel on how soccer and rugby are closer to small-unit infantry tactics - let alone that soccer fans engage in much closer activities to war than any professional athlete...) and we should accept that the war-related psychological inheritances that sport activates in us have almost nothing to do with what happens on the pitch.

Yeah you get the tempo pretty quickly (and you have an actual play clock that tells you when you have to go by).

You'd think so but the major lesson from the World Cup was that bitches over here love Haaland (because he's goofy). America football players offer more of a variety of good looking men (because each position requires a different body type) and the outfits show off the gents butts more. Both have sex appeal lol.

I love Soccer's evasion of stats and rules loose nature. I also love American sports nitty gritty and optimizable nature. Just as I suggest to Americans to enjoy the looseness of Soccer I think Football also has some value for things in the other direction.

So it's interesting, I think American Football most resembles a war simulator, European Football most resembles an actual fight. The simulator makes some things clear and explicit. Things have to happen, ambiguity is artificially reduced. People take turns slugging each other in the face. In contrast you have a free flowing game where nobody wants to get punched in the face, you push and pull, ebb and flow until you can safely strike without cost - or something slips up and things happen quickly. Things are rarely clear. Sometimes it just ends when it ends vs. goes on forever etc etc.

I bring this up not to explain which most resembles the territory, but point to which map is on display. You can enjoy both stylized maps without ever having seen the territory.

Even Rugby Union is the superior sport to gridiron football (all variants).

What do you mean by "even"? Rugby Union is a fantastic sport.

The Count hails from one of the few British colonies where rugby never took off. (Canadian rugby evolved into a game which is more like American football). So I expect he is comparing it unfavourably to cricket and (field) hockey.

If he is advocating Rugby League as the superior game, I will be surprised as he appears to be neither a chippy northerner nor an antipodean. I do think League would be a better gateway drug for converting gridiron fans to following a real sport.

Interestingly, a lot of the spread of Rugby Union beyond the Commonwealth is driven by a great many cultures having a traditional sport involving trying to advance a held "ball" over the try line while the opposition try to physically take it from you, and World Rugby is good at finding them and saying "this is the international version of the sport you are already playing - why don't you adjust your tactics to our rules so you can compete internationally".

League is the better sport to watch, as in union so much of the action happens underfoot.

Uh, isn’t non-commonwealth rugby Union mostly in countries with very heavy British influence to begin with?

Personally I prefer League (to watch, wouldn't want to personally play either) but yes I'd agree Rugby Union is still a very good sport to watch.

I think it would fair to say that other countries don’t play American Football because they can’t afford to so I guess that could be considered as them being inferior.

Soccer is a solid middle income country game. It’s why Argentina can be very good. France had the most players in the World Cup and it’s largely because Africa appears to be too poor to train their players domestically.

What nationalities are the coaches? It could also be a coaching issue.

I think it would fair to say that other countries don’t play American Football because they can’t afford to so I guess that could be considered as them being inferior.

I am at least curious to see what happens with the inclusion of Olympic (flag) football for 2028. One of the benefits of being host country is influence over choosing demonstration sports -- baseball/softball is also coming back like it did in Tokyo. It looks like the NFL (and CFL) will allow their athletes to play in the games, but of course flag is a very different game: unclear if NFL players would dominate like the NBA Dream Team. IMO it is a variant more likely to sell as a viable sport internationally. It looks like cricket, squash, and lacrosse will also make an appearance, but breakdancing isn't coming back.

There are lots of countries that are wealthy enough to play American Football- but soccer got to Africa from France, not the other way around.

I think arguably Europe is too poor to compete in football. And it’s not just a pure GDP. You probably do need an entire region dominated by the sport let’s call it 50 million people minimally to start to have filters big enough to have professional leagues (college football is probably fair to call professional). To play top level football you may need to have integrated black populations for for wide receiver, cb, and rb positions. It’s the one area where diversity is our strength makes some sense.

And then you need the more direct wealth of being able to pay for 20 coaches per side since you need a lot of coaches because there are 4 types of players (throwers, fast guys, big guys, kickers) plus guys who are mixtures. Sporting equipment is expensive for the game. You likely need emergency medicine to a greater extent.

The counter on why some countries play certain sports is basically a network effect argument. It’s more fun to play games that a lot of other people play so nations tend to keep playing the same games even if its sub-optimal.

The American mind wants to think that it’s our black athletes that would take over soccer because of superior fast twitch muscles, but Kickers and punters are like 98% white and Internationally soccers best players are at a minimum half white.

There are more than a few European nations where rugby is reasonably popular, no? Why would American football be that different? And it already fills the "big guys colliding into each other" niche of team sports for a lot of folks, lessening the chances of American football being adopted in a major way.

American football is ludicrously more expensive and has more specialized players. But typically rugby(and Canadian football) players find more success slotting into American football teams than the reverse, and I struggle to believe that high income countries can’t afford to build NFL teams.

But the other thing to point out is that the NFL is not, primarily, a sporting organization, it’s an entertainment platform. A limited number of teams isn’t going to expand, because the NFL’s success formula is celebrities+tabloid fodder+a big show that’s easy to televise- and thats a lot harder to replicate. Hardcore sports fans in the US are pivoting away from the NFL and towards things like hockey and soccer(college football is also huge, but it’s a class/cultural phenomenon).

Tua, for all his flaws and failures on the biggest stage, is pretty much a disproof that Samoans can't produce a QB. He might not have been able to stick around as a top-10 QB, but he played at the highest levels and lead the league in yards one season.

Ditto your theory that HBD dictates black players are necessary for RB/WR/CB, where some of the best players of the past decade are McCaffrey, Kupp, and Dejean.

I think what really makes American Football expensive is a need to have multiple development platforms for training specialized position groups. You need to be rich, big population, and potentially even diverse. American Samoa and Hawaii can produce some interesting players likely due to some genetics that are good for American football but could they produce a full team. I’m not sure they could produce a higher end QB or kicker which would leave flaws on their roster.

American football is expensive but it’s within the realm of what Western Europe could afford- after all it took off in America when we were a lot poorer than they are now. Could Europeans fill out a full team? Probably, a number of those countries are very competitive across a range of different sports.

More comments

Soccer is an awesome sport. It has rules that are simple enough that everyone can understand them- but at the same time, they don't let everyone get away with murder. It's not highly scripted. It isn't a sport that rewards sheer mass over athleticism. Anyone except the wheelchair bound can play, anywhere, anytime. It's the world's sport for a reason, it beat out rugby and cricket for a reason.

Tiny nations could not put up a fight in America’s sports even if they played them at the same rate.

Tiny nations do, however, do this. The rugby powers could field good American Football teams if they wanted to, probably quite quickly. Plenty of small european countries already field good basketball teams- Serbia actually pushed the US to the brink for olympic gold. And Latin American baseball players are extremely common.

Soccer is an awesome sport. It has rules that are simple enough that everyone can understand them- but at the same time, they don't let everyone get away with murder.

Except offsides, which will never be understood or make sense.

Inferior to what? Team sports do not excite me usually, especially very long team sports (I barely have patience for basketball, anything longer is a nope, maybe highlights only). But I assume by "American sports" you mean egghand, which Americans insist to calling "football" to piss off Europeans (a noble goal, but doesn't make it make sense) and baseball? The latter is so boring that it should come with a warning label "may cause prolonged coma, do not attempt without medical supervision", while the former is more exciting, to the point it looks like a bar brawl but without the fun parts like alcohol and singing. Of these three, football (which Americans in line with the Good Ole England tradition long abandoned by the English call "soccer") is the most entertaining, and this is very well confirmed by the experience. Games like baseball or rugby exist everywhere, and they have some popularity, but you would find orders of magnitude more kids (or amateur adults) playing football than any of them. The market has passed its verdict.

I don’t believe the market has passed its verdict. There is a first mover advantage in sports and soccer spread first so a lot of its popularity is because people grew up with soccer.

But part of my argument for soccer being inferior would still fit in under your market test. Other countries are in fact poorer than America and soccer is cheaper to play and be internationally competitive than Americas leading sports. You can reasonably say soccer is more popular elsewhere because they are poorer.

There is a first mover advantage in sports and soccer spread first

Modern football rules were finalized in mid-19th century. Rugby rules were finalized at the same time. Baseball became popular in US at the same time. There was no "first". Of course, all of those games had historical precursors reaching into the ancient times, but whatever criteria do you use, it is not possible to establish one was "first".

Other countries are in fact poorer than America

Assuming they are (though that would be highly dependent on definition of "poorer" - by GDP per capita both Norway and Switzerland beat the US) I am not sure what this has to do with anything. Rugby is not much cheaper to play than football (if you don't count medical bills of course).

You can reasonably say soccer is more popular elsewhere because they are poorer.

No, not reasonably, Vast majority of players do not play it as high-stakes competition, any they very well can afford the basic equipment and training, They just don't seem to want to. Netherlands may be slightly below US by the GDP per capita, but it doesn't mean they can't afford a baseball bat or an egg-shaped ball. So no, it's not popular because they don't want to play it, not because they can't afford to.

Modern football rules were finalized in mid-19th century. Rugby rules were finalized at the same time. Baseball became popular in US at the same time. There was no "first". Of course, all of those games had historical precursors reaching into the ancient times, but whatever criteria do you use, it is not possible to establish one was "first".

Cricket was formalised almost a century before any of the foot ball or base ball games, with the first printed law book appearing in 1755 and the MCC being founded in 1787. So it is clear which one was first, and it hasn't exactly won.

Actually soccer, rugby, and cricket spread out from England at about the same time, but soccer got the widest adoption and displaced the others, in both rich and poor countries alike. Rugby and its descendants(like American and Canadian football, or Australian rules football) are dominant in most anglosphere colonies, but not in Britain itself.

I think it’s fair to say soccer is an inferior sport

I'll bite: how're you defining "inferior"?

There is a critical flaw that competitive games need to avoid: a competitor or team purposefully running out the clock rather than trying to play. Such as passing the ball back and forth with no serious attempt to advance or a combat sport in which one person constantly disengages and retreats. Most sports have rules contrived to prevent this boring lack of play. Combat sports have scoring penalizing "timidity" and allowing referees to stop the fight and forfeit someone who consistently refuses to engage. But the refs don't have to since no one would do that knowing the consequences.

Soccer lacks such wise game rules and reaps the expected outcome. It is a poorly designed game that allows and enables this sort of bad gameplay. You are ahead or tied and can't accept risking a loss due to how the tournament is structured? Then burn time passing the ball back and forth. Spend half an hour doing effectively nothing. Fans and interesting gameplay be damned.

Playing that way is a gamble though because you're surrendering the initiative to the other team. If you're unwilling to press your advantage they can bring their defenders forward to increase the pressure with little risk of an effective counterattack, use the extra men to more easily dispossess you and then take their time probing for an opening because you're too afraid to proactively tackle them, and any clearances immediately fall back into their possession to repeat the process. That leads to a barrage of goal attempts, and the longer that continues the likelier it is that one succeeds. It's frustrating for supporters of the defending team, but it's not boring or uneventful.

What makes matches boring is when both teams play conservative, possession focussed tactics where they retreat deep into their own half the moment they encounter any resistance to their advance, instead relying on a series of mistakes from the opponent to grant them an easy opportunity. That's what leads to a dearth of attempts and corresponding lack of intensity.

Soccer is inferior because 98% of possessions do not advance the game state.

In American football, every play advances the game state. Even if nothing happens, 2nd and 10 is meaningfully different from 1st and 10. 3rd and 10 from the 20 is a very different game state from 1st and 10 from the 20.

In basketball, about half of all plays end in a score (arguably this is too much).

Let me bend your ear briefly on why modern basketball is the worst of all sports.

First, it is the only major sport with a freakish morphology requirement. The best predictor of success in basketball is your height - the average for pro players is the 99th percentile. The only other team sport where you see this is volleyball, which nobody cares about, so it's fine if it caters to a small group. But basketball is the sport for many demographics, and yet 98-99% of people can never go pro no matter how hard they work or how skilled they become.

Second, the rules are stupid. Running with the ball in your hands is not allowed, except you can take a few steps I guess? Especially if it leads to a cool dunk! (Pretty sure that's the actual reason, people like dunks so they bend the rules to allow them). On a more serious note, the modern style of play has devolved to take advantage of these silly rules. Many plays I see in modern games are just a big player bull rushing with the ball in their hands for three steps, then leaping through the air and tipping the ball up while in midair. There's no teamwork beyond setting picks, no finesse, just a big flying body that the defender is not allowed to do anything about. If the ball goes in great, but if the defender gets in the way it's usually a foul and free throw so just as good.

Third, shooting baskets is stupid. It requires kids to spend thousands of hours on a movement skill that has no application to anything else whatsoever. Seriously, can someone come up with any other action in life that is remotely like shooting baskets? How much of our kids' time is wasted on this junk?Also, there's relatively little interaction involved in shooting baskets. I should say, there is interaction if the defender is taller and can put their hands over you, in which case you simply can't succeed no matter how good you are (see point one), but most of the time it's just a skill check roll to see if you get the points or not. What, in every similar sport, is a battle of wits between offense and defense, in basketball is often just a roll of the dice. Player XY hits 3 pointers from this distance at 38% chance. What fun! (BTW, how are there professional players who can't hit free throws? What an embarrassing sport!) The result of this is that basketball is a highly statistical game - the opposite of soccer, upsets and comebacks in basketball rarely happen, because there are so many scoring plays, and scoring is so easy. By minute 5, you can already see which team is better, and the same ratio of points will likely continue for the rest of the game. Everything about basketball is boring.

All basketball arenas should be renovated into indoor soccer arenas.

I strongly dislike basketball and, especially, the NBA.

And - you are wrong on almost all of your points and have betrayed the fact that you don't watch much basketball.

Let's start with the whopper:

he result of this is that basketball is a highly statistical game - the opposite of soccer, upsets and comebacks in basketball rarely happen, because there are so many scoring plays, and scoring is so easy. By minute 5, you can already see which team is better, and the same ratio of points will likely continue for the rest of the game.

(Link) Literally the most recent NBA championship included the largest comeback in finals' history.

This is an embarrassingly cliche level of "truth nuke" as the kids say. Basketball is not "highlight statistical" (what does that mean?) and there's a ton of randomness. You can tell because of the length of the season. They need 80+ games to feel confident that one or more teams didn't just hit a statistical (there's that word again) improbability for a 10 game stretch.

the average for pro players is the 99th percentile.

(Link) And the Finals MVP, from this years' championship team, is 6'2"

Again. Big yikes. Sure, 6'2" isn't manlet territory, but, in relative sense in the NBA, in actually is! Brunson's whole "vibe" is that he is undersized and also not a giga-autist shooting specialist. He works his ass off and mostly focuses on ball movement and causing defense schemes to falter and break so he can exploit it. It's actually quite cerebral.

and yet 98-99% of people can never go pro no matter how hard they work or how skilled they become.

How is this not literally exactly true for MLB, NHL, NFL, UFC, Pro Soccer, Olympic Wrestling, Professional Musician, Professional Actor etc. etc. etc.

On a more serious note, the modern style of play has devolved to take advantage of these silly rules. Many plays I see in modern games are just a big player bull rushing with the ball in their hands for three steps, then leaping through the air and tipping the ball up while in midair.

(Link) Again, literally the opposite of what is happening

Mid 2000s NBA? Maybe. That's back when the typical (white) boomer Dad joke was "NBA, more like WWF!" But Steph Curry et al changed the game on such a fundamental level that a Shaq-like player wouldn't make it out of the D League today. You might be pointing to Lebron as this "bull in the China shop" And it's also true that LeBron has always received favorable foul treatment. He's also a 5x 1st-Team Defensive player and noted for his assists. Much like Brunson, interestingly enough, LeBron is so good because he makes other players on his team so good that the opposing team has to make a lose-lose choice to double up on LeBron and leave someone else open, or single cover LeBron and open themselves up to his penetration game (...hehe).

There's no teamwork beyond setting picks, no finesse, just a big flying body that the defender is not allowed to do anything about.

See above. Teamwork has never been more important. The pace at which defense (and offenses, frankly) adapt in game is so fast that incomplete team play is how you get blowouts.

it's usually a foul and free throw so just as good.

Okay, but later on you say:

(BTW, how are there professional players who can't hit free throws? What an embarrassing sport!)

So, free throws aren't "just" as good as making the basket. Hmm.

Third, shooting baskets is stupid.

There it is.

Seriously, can someone come up with any other action in life that is remotely like shooting baskets? How much of our kids' time is wasted on this junk?Also, there's relatively little interaction involved in shooting baskets.

This is perhaps the strangest argument. Practice one's shot is absolutely a necessary part of training, but it's not the only thing you do. And eventually, you know, you're playing or practicing with other people. Specifically, you are coordinating in real time with a group of peers to accomplish a competitive goal against a common opponent. This is what makes all "sports dumb lol" arguments so tedious. Sports are one of the most effective ways to build real pro-social capability. There's a reason why college athletes have such better life outcomes (in general, across the distribution) than college non-athletes. This "shooting baskets is stupid" (literally what you said) is taking a very specific item and stripping away all of the context around it as a means to paint the entire enterprise of Basketball as vapid. It's almost a .... Motte and Bailey.

All basketball arenas should be renovated into indoor soccer arenas.

Even if I shared your potentially homoerotic inclinations for indoor soccer, I couldn't get past the fact that this is an insane de-growth position. The 30 NBA teams are worth, on average, $5.4bn each. That's About $150bn in just team value right off the top. Add in the various marketing, promotions, adverts etc. and The NBA (like the other Big 4 sports) is probably close to a half-a-trillion-dollar-per-year economic impact across the US.

Indoor soccer is not. It's not a tenth of that value. It may be a hundredth, but I don't know (nor do I care). But your position seems to be that we should turn a half-a-trillion-dollars into far, far less because you don't particularly like Basketball. But literally millions and millions of other people do and are willing to pay for it. You must make a stronger case.

Here's The Stronger Case for Why Basketball - Specifically, the NBA - Sucks

All of these are common knowledge problems. I've done enough citations above for the day. If you want to look these up on your own, you can. They are all valid.

  1. Tanking. Because of how the NBA draft works, teams towards the bottom of the league, at the end of the season, will lose on purpose to secure a higher draft pick for the next season. One player can really be that important (LeBron in Cleveland being the canonical example). This means that the end of the regular season is a fucking travesty.

  2. Sports Betting. In the past few years, several players (including major names and, oddly, retired superstars) have been indicted for fixing games, point shaving etc. This corrupts the game, of course, and creates is own gravity because it helps the mobile sports books make money and set better lines. It's become so ubiquitous that, IIRC, the NBA league office is hiring Cybersecurity teams to monitor and secure player devices around game times. There's probably a lawsuit in there somewhere. But the larger point is that guys making seven figures a year still think it's a smart move to get paid $50k to shave points. Which leads to point number 3....

  3. Culture War (Hey, we made it!). The NBA is the most "culturally" aware of the Big 4. Baseball, Football, and Hockey dudes tend just to want to score points, win, and go home (and / or party). The Colin Kapernick saga in the NFL showed that if you really want to get hyperpolitical, you can Resist (TM) your way out of a contract (Also, side note, Kapernick really did suck as a QB, but that's a different thread). In the NBA, being "cultural" seems to be par for the course. It starts at draft night where guys are wearing the most retarded suits in the world. It extends to post game interviews where they discuss, with the media, the scientific merits of flat earth theory (look it up, seriously). And eventually you get the fuckery that is smile posing with Jay-Z while wearing comic sans "I can't breathe" t-shirts.

The issue isn't that the NBA has gone too woke (ask them how they feel about gay players!), it's that the league has become a hyperslop live action TikTok. This is the league of "dabbing each other up" before games (look it up). If Gen-Z wanted to ironically-vibe-code a sports league, it wouldn't be surprising if the "app" turned out to be today's NBA.

I appreciate your thoughts! I intended my original post as somewhat hyperbolic, I thought the last line made that pretty clear - that said, I do think the criticisms I leveled are valid reasons why basketball is comparatively worse than other sports in its fundamental design.

And the Finals MVP, from this years' championship team, is 6'2"

Fair enough, I didn't distinguish roles in my first post. Point guard is the one position where shorter guys can be successful (mostly because it's the position that doesn't take shots). Although apparently the average height of point guards has been increasing in the last few decades - they used to be able to be much shorter!

This "shooting baskets is stupid" (literally what you said) is taking a very specific item and stripping away all of the context around it as a means to paint the entire enterprise of Basketball as vapid.

I'm saying that shooting baskets is a far worse activity than shooting goals in other sports. It's interesting that you highlight "coordinating in real time with a group of peers" when practicing shooting baskets is largely a solo activity - again, in comparison with shooting goals in soccer (which you do against a goalie) or throwing a baseball around. In fact, have you ever seen basketball players get together and have fun practicing passing the ball? Of course not, instead they take turns shooting baskets, because that's the activity that requires the most practice. It's fundamentally less pro-social compared with other team sports.

But your position seems to be that we should turn a half-a-trillion-dollars into far, far less because you don't particularly like Basketball.

What are you even saying here? If basketball were replaced by indoor soccer then obviously soccer would make more money...

spend thousands of hours on a movement skill that has no application to anything else whatsoever.

Unlike hockey, where the skill of using a shaped stick to throw things will pay dividends over their lifetime lol

I used to play soccer as a kid, and I now kick stuff around my apartment with precision to clean up, so that was good.

An amusing framing, no doubt! But the fundamental skill in kicking a soccer ball is not the propulsion of the ball, it's balance. Specifically, bilateral balance on a single leg under differing conditions and while under stress and perturbation. Ask a PT or OT and they'll likely confirm that this is one of, if not the most important physical skills to learn for lifelong health and injury prevention. It's what we train the elderly on to prevent falls.

Can't speak to hockey as much as I never played, but shooting a puck seems to involve whole body coordination in a similar way, and manipulating a stick with two hands is endlessly generalizable.

I agree with you on all of this. I just think it applies to basketball too via similar mechanisms of action.

I broadly agree that elite level basketball is boring to watch and stupid because solving for the game at that level is too heavily controlled by height.

I would have to disagree that shooting basketballs lacks usefulness outside of basketball. It’s hand-eye coordination which seems important for a lot of things in life. Perhaps it’s over optimized in some ways for shooting but in general sports that promote hand eye coordination seem to be good.

I will admit it's not a particularly useful skill, but I use a basketball throw to toss things in the trash/some other receptacle while yelling "Kobe!" significantly more often then I do anything resembling a football pass, swinging a baseball bat, or kicking a soccer ball.

Tossing a thing into another thing is 100% a widely applicable skill. (Ignoring, for the moment, that basketball players knowingly use biomechanically inferior technique for free throws for aesthetic reasons, and that playing basketball isn't actually teaching you the best and easiest way to do it's central skill)

Learning to shoot a basketball has some utility, in the same way learning any skill has utility. But throwing a baseball or football is a much more translatable skill, and biomechanically what our shoulders are designed to do. The proper movement for shooting a basketball is almost unnatural in comparison, which is why most kids do it wrong until they're corrected and properly trained.

Would turning the hoop sideways fix the sport?

All basketball arenas should be renovated into indoor-soccer arenas.

Don't forget that indoor American football also exists.

The only other team sport where you see this is volleyball, which nobody cares about, so it's fine if it caters to a small group.

Volleyball even innovated the Libero to provide a jobs program for shorter players.

I think I’ve seen three argument for why it’s inferior.

  1. The better team should win the game more consistently. I saw some data today that soccer has the lowest % chance of favored team winning the game. Upsets do make sports more enjoyable but in soccer the outcome is too heavily on random luck versus ability. You also see this with like Cape Verde being able to draw powerhouse teams which shouldn’t happen in a better game.

  2. The game doesn’t utilize the human upper body. A good game some how incorporates an athletes upper body. It’s literally half the human body.

  3. All sports some how mimic war. Soccer has the least application to war of any sport. We don’t have any weapons that involve kicking stuff. This is sort of similar to not using the upper body. But in war we throw stones, spears, arrows, etc which most other sports mimic in some way. War had a lot of hand to hand combat.

Come to think of it, there's something somewhat anti-humanist about soccer's no hands rule. Being able to accurately throw things is kind of humanity's whole thing (beyond language/complex social structure). If we were a video game class, it would be our special racial skill. Kicking is beta prey animal shit.

(Soccer fans, please note this is tongue-in-cheek. I've enjoyed watching the world cup. I like your game)

If we were a video game class, it would be our special racial skill.

Not IQ?!!?!? What?!?!?? Or communication?!?!?!? Throwing things? Really?

I don't want to downplay how OP we are at throwing things but I'm not typing this comment on a thrown projectile lol

Imagine a video game where there are multiple sentient species, like a space opera.

In a space opera I'm really hoping we're leveraging our IQ and coordination abilities, not rock throwing at their laseguns

In a space opera everyone is presumably smart enough to have achieved interstellar spaceflight. And coordination? Humanity has famously never been united under a single government. If all other aliens come from "planets of hats", as is tradition, it will be hard to explain how humans are better at coordination than them.

You also see this with like Cape Verde being able to draw powerhouse teams which shouldn’t happen in a better game.

If it were "too much luck in football compared to other sports" then they wouldn't be able to do it every damn game. Cape Verde fielded a good team, and their results reflect that.

Also, there just aren't sports where a single match selects the best team from two world-class teams with a reasonable degree of reliability. Pro baseball and basketball both use multi-game series in their playoffs, and the best-of-1 single-elimination format of the NCAA basketball playoffs produces so many upsets that you call it "March Madness".

All sports some how mimic war. Soccer has the least application to war of any sport.

You clearly haven't met European football fans.

I agree. The perfect sport is one where both teams show up to the pitch, the computer decides who is better, and the victory is awarded to the superior team. You don't even need to get your cleats dirty.

I get your sarcasm but in sports there is a line between matchup decided between “random number generator” and “better team wins”. The ideal game has a balance between the two. Soccer I think is probably a little closer to “random number generator” chooses winner. I feel like Spain absolutely dominated that game and it was almost a tie. That’s not a good outcome.

And yet, after drawing with Cape Verde, Spain won the tournament, holding the world champions to a single shot. The nature of football is that it evens out over the course of a campaign, without being boringly predictable. (Also, with regard to your second point, football players use their upper bodies a ton when competing for the ball - to keep balance, hold space, know where the other player is, control their movements, etc. You don't notice it, because it only becomes really obvious to a new viewer when it turns into a foul. There's a reason the players don't look like cyclists).

In fairness, Spain had 12 goals blocked, which only happened because Argentina has the best keeper in the world.

In fairness too Spain did not shoot well. They had a lot of shots but I didn’t record Martinez making a great save. It felt like all the shots were right at him. But in general what’s the conversion rate from shot to goal - 15%? Which is an 11% chance the game draws. Maybe that’s too high?

Hockey and baseball have a similar issue and they deal with it by playing 7 game series.

There's other ways in which sports can suck though.

  1. Players do things that barely relate to one another. This is the reason Quiddich in Harry Potter is a stupid idea from someone who probably doesn't understand sports as a concept. But baseball also does it; the pitcher, the batter, the basemen, the fielders do things that outside of the direct level of ball itself, barely have anything to do with one another. Sure, the pitcher is is in direct opposition to the batter, but how does the pitcher affect the fielders?

  2. The sport is so optimized that large parts of the intended spectacle have become irrelevant. I don't know much about basketball but from what I hear people saying, that's its state now.

  3. Having so many players that are focussed on only one physical aspect because that's the only thing that's asked of them. Baseball and american football do that. In american football, you got your QB that's usually fairly well rounded, then you get a mix of big mofos and sprightly gazelles. In baseball it seems at this point all that people care about is pitchers (and star batters; I know, they play a position on defense, but that's just to keep them busy).

Sure, the pitcher is is in direct opposition to the batter, but how does the pitcher affect the fielders?

By choosing his pitches to the batter in an attempt to get the batter to hit in such a way that it's easier to field or will lead to a double play.

This is the reason Quiddich in Harry Potter is a stupid idea from someone who probably doesn't understand sports as a concept.

I recall that JKR intended the snitch as a satire of this exact problem with penalties in Soccer, which have such outsize impacts on the game that you can play the entire game and have it all be irrelevant because of a single play.

And then people unfamiliar with sports tried to make quidditch real, giving ammunition to ‘JKR made a fictional sport, not a real one’.

College Quidditch teams are just the latest in a long line of "upper class white kids invent a new sport because they like playing sports but aren't very good at the existing ones." This is essentially the entire history of most modern organized sport, actually. Soccer, college football, marquess of quensbury boxing rules, BJJ, Rugby, marathon running. All originate in their modern form in the search by upper class white kids for an athletic outlet that isn't already dominated by the lower classes.

This seems off. Both association football and rugby come from an attempt to write down the rules of the folk "football" games, which were played by boys and young men of all classes, to support organised inter-school play, and the The Marquess of Queensbury is obviously trying to do the same thing for a different pre-existing sport.

Marathon running was invented by a French academic in order to provide an on-theme marquee event for the first modern Olympics.

Both association football and rugby come from an attempt to write down the rules of the folk "football" games, which were played by boys and young men of all classes,

All the forms of football (Association, Rugby, Gridiron) were originally called "football" because they were played on foot rather than because you kick the ball. ((Hence the stupidity of the "handegg" sneer))

Prior to the emergence and dominance of the various Footballs, when we talked about sport and sportsmanship, we were largely talking about aristocratic pastimes: horses, hunting, hunting on horses. Football was played on foot, as opposed to the Sport of Kings, Polo. Horse sports require both a lot of money, for the horses, and access to a lot of land. They're unavailable to the urban professional class.

The urban professional classes had a rising sense of their own importance and wanted to demonstrate their athleticism, but they didn't have horse-and-land money, they needed something accessible. This shows us the contrast that they were part of building: the upper class students at British boarding schools or American colleges were upper class, but not Aristocrats, they weren't as capable of participating in the existing cultures of sportsmanship at the time, which were oriented around horsemanship and hunting. So they elevated these townsfolk games, codified them, and made them into something socially valuable in which they could participate.

For Soccer in America, the same dynamic actually recurs in the 90s, when Soccer emerges in America as an athletic alternative to the dominance of football and basketball. The "Soccer-mom" term of the 90s didn't just refer to a mom, it referred to a suburban upper-middle class white mom. Why did her kid play soccer and not football or basketball? Football was too violent, basketball too "urban," (I mean everyone knows white men can't jump). Soccer emerged as a youth sports alternative that was less violent, classier, more European, but most importantly it was just a sport that poor kids and black kids didn't play. This is reflected in the fan dynamic, being a fan of European soccer leagues has long been a blue-tribe coded kind of sports fandom, a sports hipsterdom that allowed not just the players but the fans could sneer at American sports. This dynamic is how we wound up with the "pay-to-play" model that everyone involved with American Soccer has been kvetching about since the World Cup, but people don't understand how it came to be.

Marathon running, long distance running, jogging, are all popular in America primarily as and because they are upper-middle class pastimes. It's got huge advantages as a status-class marker: no contact, solo, primarily about discipline and determination rather than talent, historically finishing is the primary status symbol rather than winning. No large law firm or investment bank lacks a Marathon-Guy since the jogging craze of the 80s; while historically few law firms have a powerlifter or a wrestler (though Crossfit and BJJ might have changed this by now). You can't walk through an office in Boston leading up to April and not hear about someone training for the Marathon, I've never walked through a law firm in Boston and heard about partners training for the Mass state USAPL. You can see this dynamic in long distance running continue as the popular distances have extended, ultramarathons are the new marathons, because the ultras are still competitive for upper-class white boys with discipline and character, rather than the province of professional Kenyans. Finishing an ultra is still worth more than comparing times because so few people run them at all. Sport exists, is popularized by upper-middle class whites, comes to be dominated by other groups as the prestige of the event grows, upper-middle class whites move on to a new sport to enjoy as a pastime.

Jogging craze among yuppies => NYC and Boston Marathons become prestige events => Kenyans come to dominate the major marathons because prestige means monetary reward => yuppies start talking about ultramarathons.

White kids at old Ivy League schools invent modern football(s) as an interscholastic pastime => football becomes a national professional sport with teams at every high school and a path to riches => poor kids dominate the sport because they see it as a path to scholarships and money => white kids at old ivy league schools discover Soccer, Lacrosse, etc and develop those into interscholastic pastimes

This is too long already, so I'll just cede that the Marquess of Queensbury was a slightly different dynamic and I'm a little wrong on that one.

If they aren’t good at playing sports I don’t believe it’s because upper class kids are worse at playing sports than lower class kids. But you have a lot more lower class kids so even if the lower class on average produces half as many great athletes per capita their share numbers mean they will dominate.

I think it’s likely true that on average upper class kids are taller than lower class kids and intellect does matter more than people like to admit in sports so upper class kids should be producing at a higher % athletes.

But true elite athletes are still a small % of elites that you would still want to create new games you can be the best at.

It's not that upper class kids are, on an individual basis, bad at sports, that's neither necessary nor sufficient for the argument.

It's that people recognize, implicitly, the various advantages from playing sports, but individual kids aren't all good enough to play at a high level. Playing sports in an academic setting is good, has numerous social and physical and credentialist benefits. It's good for your body, your mind, your ego, your social life. But if you can't make the team in high school or college, you often don't even get to play, and even if you do play casually you're strictly inferior to the players on the varsity squad.

College quidditch (and rock climbing and historically lacrosse and ultimate frisbee etc...) is the lindy form of college athletics: a bunch of students forming a club and creating rules to hang out and play sports, and eventually organizing games against other schools until it builds enough to be a real tournament sport.

It's finding an outlet to express your athleticism when the ordinary forms of athletics that already exist are closed to you.

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College quidditch is also notable for being ridiculous and inane as a sport. They run around with brooms held between their legs, even.

Like ultimate frisbee is not that.

Yes but the inanity is what keeps athletic kids who can play a different sport out of it. It's similar to the comment I've seen that Juggalo culture is one of the last real subcultures remaining because it is so off-putting that it is difficult for the Sociopaths to push out the Geeks and the MOPs aren't interested.

Unfortunately the readers seemed not to notice, tried to implement it as literally as possible, and the grouching comes from HPMOR!Harry and his big flashing BUY A CLOCK sign.

(3) is why I think NFL is the game of games. Sports are basically practicing war. Football is most like modern combined warfare where completely different weapons and systems need to work together to accomplish a goal and no one system can be as powerful as combining different systems working together.

Football has a lot of specialization that can fit the elites of different body types.

A country in war would not be good at war if they were really good at making tanks but didn’t know how to make a plane. Similar a country really good at producing fast gazelle running people but bad at producing big strong guys would lose to a country that can produce gazelles and strong guys.

In American football, you've got your quarterback that's usually fairly well rounded, then you get a mix of big mofos and sprightly gazelles.

Compare the old system of one-platoon/ironman football, under which substitutions were strictly limited and therefore all players had to be competent both on offense and on defense. Presumably, the replacement of this system with unlimited substitution and two or three totally separate platoons of players has contributed to the specialization of players in the modern day.

It's quite unclear how bat and racket sports mimic war, or why we should care either way.

Range weapons. The ability to control a projectile and maximize its speed to kill your enemy.

The purpose of sports is to practice war.

The fact that the team with the best stats can easily lose in soccer makes it more similar to war.

That's actually not true- the handful of sports whose ancestors were clearly documented functioned as a substitution for war. A lacrosse match substituted for a battle.

I'm not aware of any range weapons which work on projectiles thrown at you by the enemy. In fact, I'm not aware of any range weapons that are used with bat or racket like implements at all. Perhaps you can enlighten me.

The purpose of sports is to practice war.

Citation, uh, needed.

What's your question? Other than 'who will chomp down on my terrible bait'?

You may have noticed we had a soccer tournament that ended yesterday. So a lot of people on the internet - myself included - have been thinking about soccer versus American Sports.

So it’s not bait. It’s just me thinking on the subject. And it’s basically that soccer is in fact an inferior sport but it’s weaknesses are also why you can have an international tournament.

I mean, he's not wrong on soccer's inferiority...

But the real best sport that cannot become a real world cup sports because it's too advanced is hockey, and even then, there's 3 countries that can field an all-star team, and a few more that can field at least an NHL-level team, if not an all-star one.

What do you carry in your pockets every day?

For me, it used to just be my keys, wallet, and phone. When I started to consider concealed carry, I realized that I had a pocket knife and pepper spray that I never carried around even though it's really not much more cargo than what I already had, and I just need to build the habit. I don't have the pepper spray oriented in a way that makes it very easy to get out and use, but the pocket knife has already been quite useful; at work, cutting off zip ties or opening packages is useful. At July 4th, other people handling the fireworks were asking to borrow my knife quite a lot. The knife you bring with you is a lot handier than the knife you leave at home! Even a dull one.

I also bought an OLight Mini 2 for my keychain. Pretty nice, though I think it's only really come in handy once or twice so far. It seems to be marginally brighter than my phone light, and a lot quicker to bring to bear. It was cheap.

Things I have considered:

  • A telescoping baton. Like the pepper spray, I was considering it for dog defense, mostly, but apparently it's legally questionable to carry one and actually ever use it in a self-defense scenario. I wonder if one would be useful for anything else.
  • A lighter. I don't smoke. When lighting off fireworks for the 4th, I was using someone else's long lighter for lighting grills, and it was very unreliable, bad for what we were trying to do which was synchronize 4 different mortar tubes of fireworks at once. I thought that if I had my own lighter, I could have just used my own and not been as frustrated.
  • A multitool. These are commonly carried, but I don't know if I would use most of the functions or not. Many people swear by them, though.

Does anyone carry a fixed-blade knife instead of a folding one as an EDC?

It might make sense if the plot of land you live on is measured in acres. I don't see how an EDC fixed blade would be useful in a usual urban or suburban environment.

I imagine a fixed-blade knife for rural communities would be something like a Bowie. For urban or suburban, something smaller.

I live on a farm and carry a fixed blade when I'm around the property but it goes back in a tool box when I'm done. Most of my fixed blade knives are marketed as utility or work knives and have plastic somewhat ergomic grips and often chissel ends instead of points though lately I've been using one of the Japanese Hori form knives that double as a passable trowel and have other useful geometries on them. Most of the time its one of these:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B092MX1M91

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DN11ZTT3 <- more this one lately

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B6WJJWMB - this general price point, about $15, is the sweet spot for a work/utility knife imo. Something you don't intend to be harder on than needed, but thats just the life this knife is going to lead. Walmart occasionally gets decent low end ones in stock too.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N44CY0L - I got introduced to these knives through the scuba knife line. Scuba/diver knives are generally batter value for money. Than a lot of the tool-knives in the same range. This company has a decent system of interchangable blades. Once I had the diving knife with the handle geometry I like then you can get new blades for about 65% the cost of an entire knife.)

My everyday carry off the farm is the same keys, wallet, phone with a tiny multitool keychain that seems popular. My only unusual addition is a 4" brass pocket slide ruler for quick dimensional measurements of items in standard sized, like bolt heads and tube ODs etc.

You can often get higher quality carbon steel knives, that you have to maintain yourself to prevent rust, at lower prices than the various stainless variety. Knowing how to sharpen them correctly is also needed to really get value from carbon steel.

I think I've seen some people online (not on this site, pocket knives don't come up much) say that fixed blades are better. It kind of reminds me of the old 2DS vs 3DS arguments I've seen. With the old 2DS, you eliminate one of the major structural weaknesses, the hinge. On the other hand, the display itself is exposed, so it could wear out more easily over time. I imagine the same could be said of pocket knives. But to me, it seems a bit impractical; you'd almost certainly need a holster/pouch on your belt for a fixed blade knife, right? Otherwise, you could put your hand in your pocket and cut yourself, or the blade could be dulled by just cutting your pocket up every day. I think the argument for fixed blade knives is best in the case of outdoor, camping, wilderness survival contexts. At least, I think that's the context in which I saw people advocate for them.

you'd almost certainly need a holster/pouch on your belt for a fixed blade knife, right?

Yes. No use, as you said, putting an exposed blade in your pocket day after day.

I hate feeling weighed down or like my pockets are bulging, so usually just phone/wallet/keys. A revelation for me was a credit card shaped multitool I can slide into my wallet. It's got a bottle opener, flathead screwdriver, holes to fit various sizes of hex bolts, and functions as a short ruler/straight edge and phone stand. It's not great at any of these things, and doesn't have a cutting edge, but it's nice to always have a bottle opener and little screwdriver on me. And it doesn't take up any extra room in my pockets or have to be removed to fly.

A phone. Earphones in their case. A vape. Liquid for the vape. My hopes and dreams in the rear pocket, so I can sit on them.

Depends on where I'm going and if I'm taking my messenger bag with me. At most I carry:

  • left pocket:
    • travel card
    • debit card
    • earpods case
    • keys
  • right pocket:
    • phone
    • pocket knife
    • work ID

Car key, a separate bundle of keys for everything else, wallet, phone. It all fits well enough into cargo pants pockets. When I wear other kinds of legwear, I usually take only what I intend to actually use.

But then again, I carry a backpack to work and to hikes. I drive a car pretty much everywhere. And the backpack and car contain a host of other items. Which of those containers it is depends on plans, but the following items are usually within reach:

  • Swiss pocket knife, beverage opener edition.
  • Leatherman multitool.
  • Hunting knife (no I don't hunt, hunting licenses are too expensive, the knife is a heirloom).
  • Hat.
  • Mud pants.
  • Hygiene kit, including toilet paper, trash bags, a few diapers and toothbrush and toothpaste.
  • A book. Regularly switch that one out.
  • Backup shoes.
  • A hoodie in summer, a thick jacket or blanket in winter.
  • Binoculars.

Of course, this being Germany, I go unarmed. The big knife is buried deep in the glovebox, where nobody grabs it by accident and no policeman sees it when I reach for the car's papers, and is practically inaccessible without a flashlight and the grim determination to go spelunking so deep one might as well start in the engine block. But grandpa used to have it in the car, and I'll be doing the same.

I just don't go anywhere where I would think myself well-advised to be armed. Just about the best I can do in this country, and thankfully still somewhat easy to do here in the countryside. Otherwise I might need to step up my martial arts game.

The items you listed sound sort of close to what you'd call a "bug-out bag" a.k.a. a "three day survival kit" if you stocked just a few other items. Nice.

True, but I doubt I'll be bugging out anytime soon. Hell, around here, I wouldn't even know where to bug out to. You can't just go innawoods; the entire region is covered with a dense network of towns, villages and hamlets, and any woods here aren't wilderness either, and are highly frequented by hikers, bikers, dogwalkers and whatnot.

Those items are really just my "Car breaks down in the middle of the night and the phone battery is empty" kit.

When I have pockets: cell phone in wallet case with ID and credit cards, small toys my children have left behind, wrapper, receipt. When I don't have pockets, I haven't been carrying a purse lately, so everything except the phone, which is in my hand, stays in the car.

My car has many and varied wonders within it, including a knife, I believe.

  • Right pocket: Wallet; keychain with house key and bedroom key; keyfob for my car

  • Left pocket: Phone; keyfob for my mother's car

bedroom key

Why does your custom home have a bedroom lock?

Keyfob for my mother's car

Does she not need it? Why carry it?

Why does your custom home have a bedroom lock?

(1) The new custom house is (still) not yet complete. This key is for my bedroom in my (mother's) current house. My mother directed me to add locks to that house's bedroom doors several years ago, in preparation for a several-weeks-long visit by her annoying mother.

(2) The new custom house's bedrooms have locks (and solid doors) for privacy.

Does she not need it? Why carry it?

Her car has two keyfobs—one for her and one for me. I actually don't remember why I decided to carry the spare keyfob around all the time, but I can think of two justifications: (1) If both of us are away from home, and the house is burglarized, then the keyfob will not be stolen. (2) If both of us are away from home, and she locks herself out of her car and calls me to come and unlock it, then I can drive directly to her rather than needing to stop at the house and pick up the keyfob.

In pockets: Knife (Leek), wallet, phone, keys.

On belt: G19

I don't bother with much else, unless it's specifically a political protest.

A Glock guy, huh? The concealed carry guys I know either carry a Sig or an M&P (and you can probably guess the specific model of those guns). When I start concealed carrying, it'll be the CZ P10-C. Despite its cheapness, it seems to be one of the more reliable guns I have, and I can shoot it decently.

I tried the S&W M&P Shield 9mm at first, but I hated it. Racking the slide and loading the magazines was so hard, and there were too many buttons I didn't know how to use.

So I got a hammerless S&W Bodyguard 38 Special next. Much better! It's so simple; there isn't even a safety! The single button is for unlocking the cylinder, and then you just push a rod to remove the rounds.

Most people look at me weird for carrying a revolver in the age of semi-autos, but it's just right for me. Besides, revolvers have a noble history; American police officers were using them well into the 80s (as seen in Lethal Weapon) and Korean cops still use them (as seen in Squid Game).

Another of my acquaintances carries a double-action only revolver. His arguments for them make sense to me. It's pretty fun too shoot, too. I prefer autoloaders, of course. They're cheaper and hold more shots and the manual of arms are pretty familiar to me by now, and I wouldn't be surprised if certain autoloaders were actually more reliable than most revolvers. But if I carried a revolver, I think I'd want something with a little better accuracy than the snub-nose he's got. It kind of goes all over the paper, no matter who's shooting it.

I carried a Smith Airweight for a decade, so I know why you're carrying a revolver. Does it have to be the Bodyguard?

Out of curiosity, exactly how many rounds have you fired in that gun?

Two boxes of 25. I don't go shooting very often.

Well, hopefully you never need it.

There's guns I like a lot better than Glocks, subjectively. But in terms of the whole package, aftermarket, reliability etc. the glocks are just too ubiquitous. It's cheaper and easier to run multiple guns in multiple holsters with various magazines etc. Plus they're dead simple to work on, and I shoot them as well as anything on the duty market. Do like Walthers and Caniks, even M&Ps aren't that bad.

I shoot my Frankenglock (Grit Grips frame with OEM internals, Brownells Complete G19 slide) pretty well, even though it had quite a few problems at first. Maybe it just had to be broken in, maybe it needs some more oil, maybe it didn't like Winchester white box. I think I need to put a lot more rounds into it to be comfortable with it. I don't really like the trigger, but everything else about it is nice, I seem to shoot it better than most other guns somehow.

I'm probably going to make another gun-related thread in the Wellness Wednesday thread. I had a power outage last night and it made me contemplate my power outage readiness, or lack thereof.

Glock triggers are among the worst factory pulls in that class, and the stock shoe is pretty bad. But they do smooth out well at high round counts and the shoe is easily replaced. Learning the Glock trigger was much easier than full double-action-only snubby triggers. When people shoot my battered old carry gun, they think the trigger is great for a Glock, but it's just a shoe and fifty-two thousand rounds. Most expensive trigger job in history.

A multitool. These are commonly carried, but I don't know if I would use most of the functions or not. Many people swear by them, though.

The funny thing is, you have to start carrying it to find uses for all the tools. Lots of things you used to do the hard way, or not do at all, are suddenly easy, you find reasons to use it. Tightening a screw that you saw was loose might ordinarily be a task of running and getting a screwdriver, and you might just figure it'll be fine, now you just do it. Pliers make all kinds of things easier. You become Leatherman Guy by carrying the Leatherman.

But then, when it comes to EDC I'm also a fanny pack guy, so maybe take me with a grain of salt.

Okay, I might have to get one now. I can already think of several times I could have used a small screwdriver in quick access...

Wallet, phone, keys.

The latter used to have a small folding leatherman but I always forget to put it back on after flying. There’s enough stuff on there as it is. The tiny scissors saw much more use than the blade. The tiny screwdriver probably saw less, but was indispensable when it did come up. One time I actually needed the file to take a plastic nub off of something.

If I’m going somewhere remotely outdoors, I will usually bring a 2.5” folding knife.

Bottle opener. I do live in Wisconsin though.

My sister gave me a bottle opener that I carry on my keychain. I've gotten more use out of it than every other gift she's ever given me combined.

I was considering it for dog defense, mostly, but apparently it's legally questionable to carry one and actually ever use it in a self-defense scenario.

I've pondered getting one of those novelty 12" baseball bats to carry when I'm running as a dog deterrent. So far, the aggressive dogs who have come after me have been deterred by the rocks I've picked up (amazing how even obnoxious dogs recognize what it means when a human bends down to grab a rock), but there is bound to be one eventually that isn't deterred by that.

amazing how even obnoxious dogs recognize what it means when a human bends down to grab a rock

Love this

I'm confused, are there not leash laws where you are? Are dogs running around free the way they did in the 70s?

It's a rural area. Loose dogs with bad attitudes running around the countryside are a Thing.

If the baton would be taken as evidence of ill intent, maybe the bat would signal that you’re planning a comedy sketch?

Proof I'm on the way to the littlest league.

I came across a "Keyport" at DEFCON a few years ago and have been fully converted.

It's a customizable Swiss army knife.

The way I use it is to turn my handful of house keys, a Yubikey, and a Moca tool (all purpose low profile bottle/box opener/measure that gets through airport security) into a compact carry. I've also added a slim USB thumb drive that I can use to boot a Linux live image or show anyone a DVD rip of Hackers in a clutch situation.

They have a wide variety of fun attachments.

I just think of mine as a kind of universal access device.

+1 for the Linux thumb drive. I think I'd go with "Johnny Mnemonic" for the movie file alongside it, though. Cool product!

I recently reported on a series of stabbings that took place in Dublin at hip hop concerts, and a recurrent sentiment I've seen expressed by multiple people independently is that a person who brings a knife with them to a gig probably fully intends to stab someone at said gig, and the fact that they were carrying a knife on their person should be judged evidence for premeditation.

I cannot fathom why anyone would carry a knife with them to a social occasion. If I was hosting a party or barbecue and someone brought a knife with them (without a good reason, like they were coming straight from work), I would mentally strike them off all future guest lists.

EDIT: I got a lot more pushback on this than I expected. Give me credit lads, at least I can laugh at myself.

I cannot fathom why anyone would carry a knife with them to a social occasion.

My good man, all I can say to that is don't set foot in the United States. I can't remember the last time I attended a social occasion where somebody didn't have a blade on them. That's not even getting into guns.

I live in the US, and there's only been one time I can think of when someone had a knife at a social event. I can't say it's common in my experience. Bringing guns is completely unheard of.

I imagine it can be uncommon in some areas in the same way that some people might not know anyone who owns a truck. As for the guns, though... the point of concealed carry is that it's concealed. You almost certainly have been around random civilians with guns and you just didn't know it. Unless you're in some hell state like New York or New Jersey or something.

In Texas concealed carry is often enough not concealed very well.

The majority of states allow permit less open carry

Well yeah, of course you won't know if someone has something but conceals it. I think it's fair to count that as evidence in my favor though, because there's no way to distinguish "someone has X hidden" from "someone doesn't have X" when comparing casual experiences.

That's wild. I work at a few venues where weapons are banned for basic common sense reasons (trip hazards, flammable gas, etc), and even there I clock at least a dozen people with poorly concealed pistols each night. Knives are so common we literally have the equivalent of a coat check at one place.

I'd give someone carrying a knife a questioning look, but wouldn't worry past that. As you can see from this thread, some men have strange hobbies. I'll live in peace, as long as it's not a machete or a Bowie knife.

As a knifemaker who finds them incredibly handy to have, I think you're painting with far too broad a brush.

I can understand being disinvited for that.

At last, someone who understands where I'm coming from.

Harmonica
Music

A likely story.

I once attended a pre-wedding party carrying a knife/multitool.

The company managing it was so bad that I was the only one with a bottle opener on said multi-tool.

I got alot of good attention because of it.

Then you'd wrongly judge me and most other adult men my age. Yes, I have a knife clipped to my pants. No, I've never stabbed anyone or planned to do so.

This premeditation mind reading is certainly something.

I lost my (full-sized) Swiss Army Knife, a gift from my uncle, to a TSA bin shortly after 9/11. Intellectually I know it was foolish of me not to adjust more quickly from "knives are useful and a bit nerdy" culture to "nobody would need to carry a blade unless they're premeditating an attack" culture, but if I'd realized the former culture would eventually become unfathomable I think I would have resisted adjusting even longer.

I recall some of my elders' generation reporting similar feelings, after the statement "my classmate brought a gun to school" no longer primarily implied "I want to go hunting after class too!" Like, even if this is a change that needs to be made for safety's sake, there's definitely something being lost along the way.

I recall some of my elders' generation reporting similar feelings, after the statement "my classmate brought a gun to school" no longer primarily implied "I want to go hunting after class too!" Like, even if this is a change that needs to be made for safety's sake, there's definitely something being lost along the way.

There was absolutely something lost along the way. Imagine* living in a place where one could have a gun rack in a pickup's back window with a rifle in it parked at the high school. Not only was no one concerned about violence at the school, it was so safe that no one would break into the truck to steal the rifle.

*I don't have to imagine it, I did live in and attend HS in such a place. Only the 90s, and yet a totally foreign country now.

At home it would be very surprising if any of the men in my family were at a BBQ and did not have a pocket knife to be honest. I have one in my cargo shorts almost all the time.

I have a lovely walnut handled folding knife in my pocket right now in fact. Unless I know I am going somewhere they are likely to screen for blades/weapons, it will be with me everywhere I go.

I did grow up culchie to be fair so maybe there is an urban/rural divide here.

I had something to open or cut at work a few years back, so in front of the owner, I asked my manager if I could borrow his knife. Keep in mind I didn’t know if he had one on him, but he has a Texan accent.

The CEO looked at me with an expression of incredulity, as if I’d grown a third ear and she just noticed it.

Well, without a word, my manager grabbed a Swiss Army knife from his pocket and handed it to me. She looked at him with an even more incredulous look.

It was the single most sitcom moment ever. I could practically hear the laugh track.

You'd be put off by someone carrying an Opinel or Buck folding picket knife?

I guess a man can't even give a little boy a useful knife any more.

Opinel

I assume you mean a No.07 or No.08, which are the most popular EDC sizes. The former of which is right around the 3 inch limit for locking folding knives in more restrictive US states.

But, I like to imagine you are referring the No.12 which has a 5 inch blade and 11 inch reach. Might count as a dirk in some states. I'm sure it would still be horrible to deploy, since it has the same mechanism as the smaller ones. I suppose with something that large you could use it as a club if you don't have a free hand to work the mechanism.

Yes, absolutely, I would.

If I was hosting a party or barbecue and someone brought a knife with them

How big of a knife are you envisioning here? This is my daily carry and no one I know would blink at me taking it out during a bbq to cut open a stubborn package (although I do live in a small town in a rural area of a red state). It's not as if I'm hauling around my grandfather's WW2 Kbar knife (if only I were that based).

I guess I'm experiencing culture shock. In Ireland, the only people I can imagine carrying around a knife like that would be drug dealers or aspiring drill musicians (but I repeat myself).

Folding knives are extremely normal for Americans to have in their pockets for opening boxes and the like; even if it's technically illegal nobody cares outside of the sorts of places that already have metal detectors.

Then again, this is the country where a day long class and a background check entitles people in most states to carry a firearm anywhere they go.

Then again, this is the country where a day long class and a background check entitles people in most states to carry a firearm anywhere they go.

And some states don't even require that. Up to 29 states now that allow concealed carry with no permit.

Every single man in the world carries a knife.

Maybe in the South but in rural Northern Ireland most of my family would be carrying a folding pocket knife at pretty much all times. There's always a good use for a knife (folding, blade under 3 inches generally) in the countryside. Maybe with a few other attachments but often just the knife itself is useful enough. They'd also have larger ones for specific purposes, but those wouldn't be usually carried.

I suppose I should have said "in urban Dublin" rather than "Ireland". I can imagine lots of entirely legitimate reasons someone living in the countryside might have to carry a knife around with them.

Pocket knives/pen knives are useful, you never realise it until you need to cut something and realise you are not in reach of anything like scissors etc.

People used to routinely carry knives because they'd be cutting up their plug tobacco to put in their pipes. Those days are long, long gone though!

I see people smoking pipes quite often, but it's been a long time since I saw someone (other than my grandfather) using one to smoke tobacco.

Aye, it's fair to say it would be a bit more unusual in Belfast, unless you are a tradesman of some sort. Or just handy.

Right. The one person in my immediate social circle I can imagine showing up to a party with a blade would be my cousin who does landscaping work. But even if he did, I'd much rather he leave it in the van, especially if he's going to have drink or drugs taken (which he almost always will).

What if they keep a swiss army knife in the car or in their backpack?

In the car, fair enough. And even a Swiss Army knife would be far less objectionable to me than some of the specimens people are sharing here. But I can't imagine a Swiss Army knife would be a whole lot of use in a self-defense situation, and OP explicitly claimed that was his reason for carrying one. I misinterpreted, apologies.

Wrong, I never said that. I said the pepper spray was for self-defense, and the telescopic baton was a contemplation along those lines as well. The pocket knife is, as I said, useful for opening stuff or cutting zip ties off or cutting cheese or whatever. Knives are not good for self-defense. I guess in an emergency, you could use it on an attacking dog if the pepper spray didn't work, but you're already bitten by then.

I guess I must have misinterpreted you. From this:

When I started to consider concealed carry, I realized that I had a pocket knife and pepper spray that I never carried around even though it's really not much more cargo than what I already had, and I just need to build the habit.

it sounded very much like you started carrying around the pocketknife as an alternative to carrying a gun. My apologies if I got that wrong.

I guess I worded it poorly. From the concealed carry classes I took and the videos I watched, they emphasized getting into the habit of putting it on every time you left the house, because the gun you leave at home is of no use to you. The more I thought about it, I realized I had a couple things that I also had wanted to carry with me for ease-of-access but never got into the habit of doing so, even though they were easy enough to take along, certainly less burdensome than a compact pistol.

That makes more sense, thanks for clarifying.

I cannot fathom why anyone would carry a knife with them to a social occasion.

...Like, a pocket knife, not a fixed blade?

Maybe you can provide an example of what you're referring to by a pocketknife.

a 3-to-4-inch blade with some form of locking mechanism.

I actually don't routinely carry a knife any more, mostly because I work from home and am not usually anywhere but at my home, which has knives like these scattered across most interior surfaces. But anywhere I go, my prior would be that 50%+ of the men I see, and no few of the women, are carrying one of these.

The women too? I live in a rural area, and I think I might know one woman who regularly carries a pocketknife. Of course, like you say, the majority of the men do. I’ve been both gently chided and ruthlessly mocked for not always carrying one.

Well, gosh, I really am experiencing culture shock now.

This thread really could use a link to the "that's not a knife" scene from Crocodile Dundee.

Also this seems like a good question to add to the next user survey.

Or better yet.

I cannot fathom why anyone would carry a knife with them to a social occasion.

I carry a small multi-tool on my keychain, and other than having to remember to remove it before air travel or large venue events with metal detectors, I've never stabbed someone with it in the almost two decades I've carried it. The closest I've gotten there has been on myself. Also useful as a screwdriver and small pliers. The knife on it is maybe two inches long and would be a very ineffective weapon. I know folks that carry a full-size multi-tool around, too.

Hopefully you wouldn't kick me out of your social occasions, but I suppose standards for edged "weapons" vary a lot by country: it'd be legal here for me to concealed carry a firearm many places I go, but I don't.

A multi tool or Swiss Army knife that's small enough to fit on your keychain, fair enough. I'm talking about a knife that's long enough to be used as a weapon, which the OP explicitly stated his is. I misinterpreted, apologies.

...What? I didn't say how long my pocket knife is. I have a "Magnum" Boker knife that says "440A" on it. It's a cheap shit knife.

I know you didn't say how long it was. As I said I was under the impression that you started carrying your knife as an alternative to carrying a gun, and therefore assumed it could be used as a weapon.

But looking at photos of that model, it certainly looks like the kind of thing I'd look askance at someone for if they brought it with them to a party.

I will keep this in mind if I ever have to account to foreigners for my knife. Nobody at the party cared, the house I was a guest in didn't care, my uncle found it useful enough to ask me to borrow it a few times because he left his at home, and a ~13 year old boy bragged to me that he had like 20 different pocket knives at home, which his father attested to as true. I think it's generally a good thing to have. If you wanted to murder someone here, you'd really want to use a gun anyway.

Yeah, I guess this is just a major cultural difference between urban Ireland and the US.

While not exactly a bayonet, a typical multitool could easily be used to stab someone to death. And to me and most people I know the blade on a multitool is easily the most useful tool on it, by a lot. So your being ok with someone having a knife is dependant on them also having less useful tools stuck on it?

I'm specifically picturing a multitool small enough to fit on a keychain, and I have a hard time imagining how something that small could be used to kill someone. How long would the blade on something like that be, two inches?

Most "US" multitools are based around the gerber style, which usually ends up around a 2.5" 'primary' blade. You'll see Swiss Army keychain knives that closer to what you're thinking and are someone common (if considered very much a 'for kids' product, especially Scouting), but the last time I've seen one of the multi-tool-but-tiny versions was well before COVID.

They may be more common on the coasts; New Jersey and Massachusetts have much closer norms around >3 inch knives than the midwest or southwest does.

So no Leatherman? The "standard" one has a blade a bit under 3 inches.

I guess it comes down to expectations. While a Leatherman could in theory be used to kill someone, it's hardly optimised for that purpose, and my default assumption if I saw someone carrying one would be that he uses the various tools on it (including the blade) for his job. I would certainly find it surprising if I invited someone to a party and they showed up with a multitool, but that might just be a reflection of the circles in which I move (there are no electricians, plumbers or other tradies in my immediate social circle). I would probably ask him why he carried it with him, if only to satisfy my curiosity. It wouldn't be an automatic "you are no longer welcome in my home" thing.

But if someone showed up to a party I was hosting carrying a knife (just a fixed blade, rather than a multitool), my immediate assumption would be that they were a drug dealer. I think this assumption is an entirely reasonable one in Dublin.

I think "social occasion" is doing more definitional work than "knife" here. "Concert" is very different from "barbecue." If a bunch of my buddies came to my house to grab a beer I wouldn't be surprised or shocked if one had a knife, if we went to a concert and one of them had a knife I might find it odd.

@FtttG was saying he wouldn't accept a knife at a house party or barbecue. I think that's pretty extreme and I hope if he ever visits the US, he keeps in mind a culture difference here. Folding pocket knives are just generally useful for opening stuff. I used mine to cut some cheese for a lunch we were having, too.

I agree that taking a knife to a concert or something like that is a bad idea, but in defense of knive-havers everywhere, stuff you get in the habit of carrying every day is very easy to forget that you have with you. I went to a baseball game on the 3rd and had to think to myself "okay, baseball game, no knife". If I already was in the habit of carrying it every day for multiple years, it probably would have been easy to forget.

Seconded. When it's part of your daily carry, it doesn't always register that it won't be allowed quite everywhere you go.

I did manage to convince an NHL stadium to let me coat check my knife at the customer service desk, once I gave them my business card and explained that I made these for a living.

I lost my best knife when I accidentally took it into a federal building in D.C. a few years ago. To their credit, the security officers offered to let me turn around and leave with it, but I was miles from the hotel by then. I’d even reminded the rest of my group to leave their knives at home or in the hotel, but my mind was overcome by force of habit. I’m still annoyed by it to this day.

You should've just quickly buried it in their lawn.

I think it's important to teach the youth that knives are tools more than they're weapons, and alcohol is a social lubricant more than something to binge in private. I have a bunch of little (but very sharp!) knives in my elementary classroom I inherited from a previous teacher, and I don't let the kids use them very often, but I do want them to see adults using tools that require care to be safe. That's actually one of the art standards, learning how to use tools safely. I think it's a Scouting requirement as well.

You're right, I misread OP. I'm downvoting myself.

Mrs. FiveHour was once deeply embarrassed when the courthouse security took my leatherman off me at the metal detector when she asked me to come in and hang a picture for her.

Mrs. FiveHour was once deeply embarrassed when the courthouse security took my leatherman off me at the metal detector when she asked me to come in and hang a picture for her.

In urban courthouses in my state, trying to bring a gun into a courthouse will get it confiscated and the bearer will likely be charged criminally. In my rural area, they tell the person to take it back to their car. It's no exaggeration to say everyone here carries, and they carry so often they forget they're carrying.

Yeah I had the same happen although it was at City Hall. They said they were supposed to dispose of it, but luckily the security guard was a nice guy and held on to it for me unofficially until I came out.

What day to day tasks does this help with? I have a swiss army knife somewhere but there never seemed to be anything to do with it, so I'm curious about what I could use it for.

I realize this is a common cultural difference even within the United States, but there's a lot of relevance, anywhere from opening packages to cutting zip ties to prying out heat-set inserts to breaking open containers to stripping cable to trimming plastic nubs.

My uses are a little more common than most people -- I carry the cheapest tantoized blade possible because I've had to derivit aluminum plate in the field enough that it's a parlor trick -- but still, I work in a field with soft hands.

I try not to carry to public events like a concert, but I'll admit I've had to throw mine away a couple times because I just forgot I had it on me and went to a venue that banned them.

What is "deriviting"?

I assume "de[-]riv[e]ting".

Sorry, typo. Removing rivets, generally from joined plates. If you ask a mechanic, the 'right' way to do it involves a properly matched good quality drill bit, but if you have a good knife or even a wood chisel (and don't mind permanently damaging the knife/chisel!) you can get almost all aluminum rivets out with just the heel of your palm, and some steel rivets out with a good hammer.

Is the tanto shape more conducive to this?

Yeah. You need a flat or mostly-flat edge a little wider than the rivet head; anything too curved will slip over the rivet, and anything sharp will dig into the surface of the plate instead. And they are much stronger, which matters more with decent quality knives than walmart-grade ones (440j isn't brittle, I'll give it that), but since you're using a knife like a chisel on metal, you want every bit of redundancy you can get.

While there's a few other cases the tantoized shapes make sense (uh, mostly leather or upholstery work?), for most cases I wouldn't recommend it.

tanto points are significantly stronger than a lot of other point styles. In addition, tanto-style blades are frequently chisel-ground, which is worse for cutting but better for this sort of thing.

I read it as removing rivets.

It probably gets most of its use cutting boxes, zip ties, those infuriating plastic clamshell packages, and once or twice has cut and stripped copper wire. Often enough that it's worth carrying around, but not used daily, and not always at home where I know where the scissors are. I can't undo zip ties by hand.

Yes, I see. Thank you for explaining.

opening packages, breaking down cardboard?

I see. I'm used to using kitchen scissors for that.

In my experience, a lot of people who carry knives are used to spending time outdoors. When you're out in the woods, in a field, etc etc, then having a tool on hand (even if it isn't the best form of said tool) is super valuable.

Are you my wife? She'd rather spend five minutes futzing with scissors to open a package rather than five seconds with a knife.

A pair of sharp scissors held open is a knife. In any case, I'm not criticising, it had just never occured to me before.

Yes, a knife with a blade for a handle. I severely chastise people I see using an open scissors as a knife.

More comments

If I was hosting a [...] barbecue

Don't all men eat using only their personal dagger? The fork was invented by Italians.

You use cutlery at a barbecue? La-di-da Mr. Frenchman.

LMAO. Real men pluck meat from the fire with their teeth.

fire

Does your widdle tummy goes ouchy and achy from eating a bit of raw meat?

Actually, no. Chicken sashimi is surprisingly good, and I could eat thin steak tartare for days.

Funnily enough I was at a country house party once. The hosts were very grand but not always very aware of prosaic detail, and they'd cooked a delicious pheasant. Now, I'd had a few glasses of wine and it took me quite a while to actually look properly at my plate and realise that the inside meat was dark purple: they had put it in the oven without defrosting it properly, and the inside was entirely raw.

I remember thinking, If I make a fuss about this, I will humiliate myself and my poor hosts who have been very nice; on the other hand I've already eaten half of this and I've either got food poisoning already or I'm not going to. So I ate the rest of it. Not one of us said a word.

No food poisoning, either :P


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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

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