The need for citizen militias was specifically to support regular forces but also oppose them if necessary. The idea was that citizens should always be more powerful than the government. Some people think that modern weaponry means that people could never overpower the military, but we see it all the time.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_No._46

Pretty much every time there have been head to head competitions between birds and wires, the birds have won.

That sounds similar to lupin beans.

In America, we have pokeweed, which everyone knows is toxic, but people eat it after boiling 3 times (I don’t think we have another word for that).

A lot of foraging books talk about boiling and/or soaking to make things edible, but usually it’s to remove bitterness/astringency like with acorns. For something neurotoxic, I don’t think I’d trust it, though.

Looking at the wiki page for gyromitra, it looks like it’s sold for consumption in Finland. Were you taught it was safe to eat?

False morel, despite the name, is not really something you’d confuse for a morel. If the only description I gave you of a morel was 1 sentence long, maybe you’d grab a false morel by accident, but if you’ve ever seen a picture, or any longer description than that, you wouldn’t confuse them.

These people know which mushroom they are foraging.

It beats vacuum sealing cause you can put like 20 servings of food in one big bag, but they remain separate servings that you can thaw one at a time. I often just use a zip lock, but I just reuse the same one over and over again.

I use them for freezing stock, and it’s nice to know that each cube is 125 ml.

If you had a territory where you could sort mostly the wealthy people into one “country” and mostly the poor people into another “country”, you could make one really happy and one really sad country.

Putting up shelves, you have to decide if you want them to be level, parallel to the floor, or parallel to the ceiling, and those are all different.

If you are a business generating rubbish, it is your moral responsibility to account for that rubbish. The business selling stuff doesn’t have their employees filling their pockets with the bulk food packaging rubbish at the end of the day to dispose of at home; they have their own bins. They just don’t want to be responsible for all the rubbish they generate cause it costs them more money than trying to put that responsibility on someone else.

Food that comes on reused plates and/or drinks in reused cups. Much of the advertising around littering prevention was developed by industries who saw profits in creating a lot of single use items that wanted to shift the blame for any litter to individuals instead of them. When you see an empty bottle of Pepsi floating in a pond, Pepsi deserves more criticism than whoever dropped that specific bottle since they are the ones who brought it into the world, and they do it on a much larger scale than any 1 person could ever manage.

On 11, I’d say you also need to decide if the type of terrain you are going on really even calls for boots. Plenty of people do long trips in trail running shoes, which is usually my preference on decent trails, but on really rugged backcountry (or snowy/mountaineering) conditions, you need boots.

Also, to an extent, you don’t really break boots in as much as you break your feet into the boots, so a pair you wore all summer last year and set down for 8 months could probably still use a little ramp up to a long trip.

On 12, I’d say gaiters are really nice even if you aren’t in snowy or wet conditions. I wear them even when it’s nice so I can keep rocks, dust, etc out of my shoes.

There’s also the somewhat counterintuitive idea of “be bold; start cold”. Basically, once you get hiking, you’ll get a lot warmer, so you might as well start a little chilly and save yourself getting sweaty 20 minutes in and having to take off a layer.

A huge percentage of trout fishing is essentially farming with extra steps. Especially in the US, there are a lot of rivers and streams that get too warm for trout in the summer, so the government puts a bunch of trout in each fall and winter, and they all get either caught, or die in summer.

Lots of these rivers would have previously had native fish populations that were severely reduced by damming or whatever other ecological disaster we imposed on them.

There are a few levels of accuracy. Simplest is just using your max heart rate according to the equation (or trying to actually see how high you can get your heart rate), and basing percentages off of that.

Slightly better than that, most heart rate monitors/apps have some analytics built in that can factor in stuff like speed to approximate metabolic cost, and predict your lactate threshold. That’s the heart rate that corresponds to the workload at which your body can’t keep up with processing lactic acid (a byproduct of anaerobic metabolism). It’s an important threshold cause you want some of your workouts to be definitely below that limit, and some to be definitely above.

There are ways to actually test that limit, often involving finger pricks to get blood samples while running on a treadmill.

The most accurate way (and what elite athletes will do), is a full metabolic test involving running on a treadmill with a heart rate monitor and a mask to measure oxygen consumption/co2 expiration.

For most people who just want to be healthy, and maybe get a little faster, it’s not that important to be super accurate. The main thing is that in order to improve cardiovascularly, you basically need to activate the signaling pathways in your body that signify that you can’t take in and process as much oxygen as you’d like to be able to. That involves high intensity work that is really hard on your body (muscles, joints, cardiovascular system) and it can take a few days to recover.

If you do most of your work in that low intensity zone, you give your body time to recover from high intensity while keeping overall volume up.

If you try to go too hard every time, you never recover, and never adapt.

The worst is building something perfectly square, and then realizing the space you need to put it into is very not square.

I’d say consider where things are growing, too. If you are foraging near roadsides, pipelines, powerlines, houses, or old dump sites, there are things to consider. If you are in somewhere like Appalachia, it’s shocking how common "artisanal " mining sites are when you can recognize them.

Herbicides are often used to keep growth down in those places.

Old houses often have lead paint falling into soil, and leaded gas polluted a lot of roadsides. You don’t want to eat roots/tubers or low growing leafy veggies in those places. Luckily, plants apparently don’t accumulate lead.

There’s been a lot of back and forth on that. At this point, it’s probably not possible to prove, but it seems like he was eating something that wouldn’t be harmful as part of a normal diet, but was harmful to him as a large part of his diet while he was already malnourished.

Lots are LED since it’s way more energy efficient.

It’s not like they are unskippable ads, so i don’t think it’s as bad as YouTube or Hulu or whatever.

It’s an engineering disaster podcast with slides, so it’s on YouTube. It’s a good one to listen to while doing chores where you can occasionally glance at your screen to see what they are talking about.