Points of fact

[FirebirdNC]

That is freaking sweet! I wish I lived closer I could have a lot of fun with that. Your stove/griddle set up is almost exactly what I have at the deli. Good Luck with that you can charge people to process their animals and also sell your own product it could be a very good business with the non-gmo/free range crowd. I look forward to a cured meat sample down the road.

[raptor9k]

If you enjoy that kind of work, processing for hire can be good money. Our local guy makes something like 70-75%of his annual income during deer season. I gladly pay $90 ish for a fully processed deer including skin and gut. He gets another $12 a stick for smoked summer sausage.

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[Deacon]

Yeah, I'm not sure if I enjoy it enough to want to do it for a living or a business. I bring my deer in from the field whole, hang them up on the t-hangers attached to overhead electric hoists, under cover and light on a very slightly sloped concrete pad, and I gut, skin, and quarter them out right there. Unless I have time and feel like proceeding further, I usually go ahead and lay the hams, shoulders, backstrap, and tenderloins in a bus tray, load it all down with ice, and slide it in the fridge to cool so I can come back to debone and whatever else later.

PS That griddle is so awesome. It's amazing how much food you can cook at once. We did a kind of secondary Christmas dinner with another mutual family of friends, making naan bread wrapped venison cheese steak sandwiches, all (except for the cheese) from scratch. After doing all the naans, we cleared the griddle and did the entire batch of cheese steaks at once for 8 people.

PPS You see that cutting board table in there? It's about 8.5 feet by 3 feet, made out of 4 2x10's planed, glued, and sanded all together, mounted on a frame we welded together from square tubing, and then treated with lots and lots of mineral oil before a final treatment of a mineral oil and beeswax/carnuba product for butcher blocks. We built a removable piece in the middle that can be used as a cutting board separately but mainly so that we can have lots of room to debone and prep (even have 4+ people doing so at once) and set a large, lined trash can under the hole and push all the bones and undesirable bits into it. Works really well.

PPPS That 4x16 two-door cinderblock smokehouse with external castiron woodburning stove and 4 full-height rolling aluminum bun racks for sliding bun pans or hanging sausages works SUPER WELL. I'm so happy with how that turned out.

[Mav]

Holy shit, I finally get my Deacon Goes Crazy thread and I can't even enjoy it.

I'll also admit I'm not able to read everything in this giant piece of tl;dr because I have to get back to Xcom 2, but suffice to say, I'm there with you, man. The seeming general stupidity of the world, and my experiences through it, has driven me to enough drinking, smoking, and cynicism that I fear I might have even accidentally turned into an adult at some point.

The world is a quandary. Despite your perfect examples of how utterly fucking retarded the general masses can be, we have cement, steel, electronics, and one day we might even escape this gravity well (God help the universe at that point.) Attempting to hold it all in proper balance (in the mystical buhddist sense of the word) often seems to be like trying to hit a moving bulls eye where the rest of the dartboard is labeled with varying degrees of insanity. Especially when you've got some chick fucking with your heart (not that I would ever admit you had one.)

Tl;dr: "You may say to yourself, 'My god, what have I done?'. Water flowing underground. Same as it ever was."

[Deacon]

Maturity makes fools of us all.

[The Cid]

This thread is an amazing read. Some of you are just awesome.

Now since I personally don't have any words of encouragement, I'm just going to be silly because this is how I operate.

People who choose a career in law enforcement aren't inherently heroes nor are they necessarily authority hogs looking to feel big. They're just people. Some have good intentions, some like the idea of it. Yes, it can be a very demanding job, and while some are good at it, some aren't. They're not any better or worse than anyone else who picks any other job.

And some of them are loose cannons who play hard and fast with the rules, no matter how many times they're told. But dammit, they get results, so you can't just ask them to hand in their badge and gun. Plus they usually have an angry ex-wife and some kind of payments due, so you just can't stick the poor unstable guy out on the street.

Okay, that's all I got. Oh, okay, one point of fact of my own too, because election years are really frustrating.

Most people out there are not experts in every major issue. In fact, pretty much all of us have our personal background, and if we're lucky some kind of "expertise" in something, but for the vast majority of the things we read about in the news, we're 100% in the dark. So most of our political beliefs are built off of very little background, none of which is our own because it's simply not our field, and yet we're all so convinced that the side we've chosen is the pure and right one. Well let me start: I am almost definitely wrong about a lot of my political opinions, because of course I am, how would I know. Might be right about some others. Feel right about some specific ones. But let's face it, even if I am right on things that aren't in a field I'm familiar with, it's complete blind luck. Be confident in yourself, but never be certain your opinion on this thing you know little about in the grand scheme of things is going to hold true. So if you're watching the news, and someone comes on it from a different side, try to avoid hating the person because you disagree on something about which you could both be very wrong. Just think for yourself--or try--and express your opinions with the humility that you are probably wrong more often than you're right. I know I am.

[Deacon]

Unfortunately the admonition to think for yourself fails in the first part too often, as no real thought goes into it--nor does it ever appear to have been the intention.

[NorthernComfort]

I agree with The Cid. That's why I don't really talk about politics or really much of anything much anymore. I like my own ideas, and I like them in my own head. Talking about them with other people would be the next logical step, but people are unpredictable and it just creates conflict and then I doubt myself and well fuck it. Should have left those ideas in my head. It's not like I walk around with truly retarded thoughts in my head all day long, afraid of saying them because people will call me out and laugh at me and pull my trunks down after I get out of the pool.... it's just really not worth the hassle.

I'm 28 so I'm still a young guy and already I can look back at the last maybe 15 years of my thinking in a somewhat rational fashion, at least so rational that I can look back at the memories and remember my thought process.... anyways... I was a huge dumbass. Trump would say I was a UUUUGE dumbass. Hell even I would say that.

So if I'm 28 and less than halfway through my statistically probable existence, why would I not assume I'm a dumbass?

See ya when I'm 50 because then I will consider it the perfect time to start becoming an outspoken asshole again.