Trump could barely get any laws passed.

Something can be both ironic and tragic at the same time.

I feel triggered.

It depends on how much you care about your knife. If its a cheapish german knife with soft steel and you dont care about grinding off a lot of steel, electric sharpeners are fine. When you get into super hard and thin japanese steels in the 61-65HRC range, they tend to chip the blade just due to the edge geometry, and you have no control over your knife edge angle.

That NYT article fully misunderstands knife sharpening and its there to sell a product. A few passes on a single diamond stone ($50 bucks) followed by a leather strop ($15) to remove the burr will bring any knife, any steel to a razor edge without needing water or any other complex setups.

I fully get that most people don't want to spending the time to learn to sharpen a knife (probably takes 4 or 5 hours of practice to get good on a shit knife) and dont want to invest in a set of stones they'll use once a year at most. But if you have 1 good stone and just use it on your knife for 2 minutes every month you'll never have a dull edge. Hell if you replaced a hone with a strop with diamond compound sprayed onto it and stropped it for 60 seconds every week it will never go dull.

Rant aside - I highly recommend the spyderco sharpmaker for anybody want to sharpen knifes without learning to use a stone. Nearly impossible to mess up and it doesnt destroy your edges.

Electric sharpeners are great for knives that cost less than $20. If you have a good knife with good steel those types of sharpeners are just going to mess up your edge over time.

If I had to make one recommendation, its to buy a knife that has equal edge angles on both sides. Specialty Japanese knives can often have different angles on both sides and those knives are both difficult to use and difficult to sharpen. A single bevel or 30/70 knives are extremely niche and cannot serve the same multi purpose role of a good chef's knife.

Go on youtube (outdoors55 has some good videos) and just watch a bunch of videos and how different people do it. You can get excellent results with 1 stone and a strop, although 2 stones + strop is probably ideal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJT5BVt7c5c is an excellent video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFhMGJYhYpU The famous Bob Kramer video (hes a bladesmith but started his career as a knife sharpener).

Kyle Noseworthy is good.

Burrfection is a good channel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yk3IcKUtp8U&t=4265s - the king of knife sharpening videos. 3 hours in depth tutorial. The guy makes his own knives and stones so ignore the marketing of his products, his technique is excellent and the videos are good. Im not a big "thin behind the edge of every knife" kind of guy but to each his own.

Personally I use a spyderco ceramic stones because they dont need to be lubricated, although they can be. Most japanese stones need to be soaked in water before they sharpen, and you need to learn to use the slurry they create so its a little bit of a mess. I use a DMT extra rough for regrinding edges, but any DMT diamond stone is a pretty good value since they dont need to be flattened and they will cut through any steel.

One thing you'll find about the way that "sharpening services" work is they use a high speed belt to sharpen the knives to save the time it takes on a stone. The issue with belts is they quickly heat up the steel and ruin the temper if you aren't careful, permanently destroying the knife. (Short of reheating it, quenching it, tempering it again). If you notice the blade is a slightly different color than the rest of the knife, it means the temper has been ruined and the knife will no longer hold an edge very well since the steel is now significantly softer.

Learning to sharpen knives isnt about videos, its about spending a few hours on a stone. Buy a shitty knife, find a rock, get your sharpening stone and sharpen to a razor, dull it on the rock, sharpen to a razor over and over and over until you are confident enough to do it on your good knives. Sharpening really can be boiled down to grind the blade until you form a burr, flip and grind for roughly the same amount of time until the burr flips, then either use a finer stone or a strop to remove the burr and the knife will be razor sharp.

PM me if you have any questions on knife sharpening, stone advice etc. There's a wealth of knowledge out there but it can be hard to determine what is useful or where to start.

Final edit - don't fall into the trap of thinking that being a "master" sharpener is all that impressive. Anybody with a few hours on a whetstone can learn to sharpen anything to a razor's edge once you understand the general principles. Somebody with more practice will do it faster and more consistently, but its a relatively low skill ceiling to sharpen a knife.

With the number of people dying from opiods, we will never decriminalize them.

Right. As opposed to the patient care they get bleeding out on the sidewalk while the cops wait for the ambulance, unsure when it will get there. Nobody is saying that a cop is a better transport than an ambulance. The choice is do nothing and wait, or take action and get to them to the hospital yourself.

Your cynicism is pretty messed up. Philly Police are generally dogshit but them diverting resources to get people to the hospital ASAP is probably the best thing they do. The fact that you are shitting all over it because you don't get to play medic first is really sad.

I know many ER doctors that think the police program saves lives, so I guess that's your grain of salt. There is no one size fits all. Getting people to medical treatment ASAP is the goal.

This entire article is about alternate pathways for students to earn diplomas, its not like the state is making it hard, they are giving students more options.

It feels pretty shitty to book a table a nice restaurant and they want to put you outside in a wooden shack inhaling car fumes.

The only time they dont let u on the street is during active shooting. Between takes they dont care.

Gran Caffe L'Aquila also a big soccer/football place. Most of the staff speak italian so sometimes the broadcasts are in Italian

This isn't news to anybody. Legacy admissions are a way to secure easy funding.

Go to a gun store. Most of them carry high quality high lumen stuff meant to be mounted on rifle, meaning the electronics are strong enough to handle recoil and not fall apart.

USPS did the same thing to me. "Attempted" my ass. I was home all day and nobody attempted shit. I had to ask them to hold it at the post office and I went to pick it up .

Outlaw reports directly to kenney.

Outlaw is that you?

If you read the report you would see she's been working on this since 2020. She didn't want to put out some half ass statement like the rest of our city politicians do.

I still disagree with your overall statement though. Her Jan 2021 report was extremely critical of the police and their failings. The fact that you would even consider somebody criticizing Krasner to be a "trope" shows how biased you are. Being critical of the DAO is not mutually exclusive to being critical of the PPD. Krasner and his office are incompetent. Outlaw and McNesby are equally incompetent.

I think most sane people realize that both the PPD and the DAO are completely incompetent. They are the two halves of our criminal justice system and the fact that they don't even try to work together shoes how much they actually care about the people of Philadelphia.

She firmly blamed Outlaw and Kenney for the dysfunction during the protests turned riots, so its not like she's on one side or the other. She's calling out all the bullshit.

Theres an entire curb your enthusiasm based on this. Larry pretends to be super racist to get off a jury.

Thats not Florida thats the entire country. Marijuana is federally illegal.