A Fool and Their Money - Partisan Edition

[James Brown]

I don't think Tigers is questioning how the individuals in the OP or in this thread obtained their money.

I believe Tigers is repeating a joke attributed to George Burns.

 

[Ford]

Gold, prepper, anything pro-gun -- always right wing.

Maybe we were an exception. EMS and Tactical Medicine have a lot of matériel needs overlapping with preppers. All of our principals and board were leftish - vehemently anti Trump from day one.
Our site didn’t include ads on the top levels; if included at all they’d be buried in product descriptions and the like.
Preppers went nuts for our stuff.

Maybe because of the word "tactical." I swear, sometimes all you gotta do is add that word and the wingers will buy it. I even saw an ad for a company that sold "tactical" diaper bags. Because you just never know when you might have to change a baby diaper in the middle of a firefight!

 

[hurtinbuckaroo]

Gold, prepper, anything pro-gun -- always right wing.

Maybe we were an exception. EMS and Tactical Medicine have a lot of matériel needs overlapping with preppers. All of our principals and board were leftish - vehemently anti Trump from day one.
Our site didn’t include ads on the top levels; if included at all they’d be buried in product descriptions and the like.
Preppers went nuts for our stuff.

Maybe because of the word "tactical." I swear, sometimes all you gotta do is add that word and the wingers will buy it. I even saw an ad for a company that sold "tactical" diaper bags. Because you just never know when you might have to change a baby diaper in the middle of a firefight!

Were they adult size?

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Preppers used to be fringe. Now days, thanks to Trump's existence and run in the GOP, prepperism expanded from doomsday to a war is brewing... ie... they plan to start one.

The odd thing, and typical for short-sighted people, is that the ads for preppers are always the intake stuff. Not stuff to deal with the outtake. I suppose it sounds less alt-right sexy when you are talking about waste removal products, women's health products, or managing waste in general. Women think it is bad now... just imagine being in a bunker with a bunch of women and a lot of guys and the first woman asks about the period products, and the guys look at each other with dumb expressions on their faces. And it starts to dawn on the women that maybe... just maybe... they should have involved themselves in the pre-insurgence planning a bit more.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Gold, prepper, anything pro-gun -- always right wing.

Maybe we were an exception. EMS and Tactical Medicine have a lot of matériel needs overlapping with preppers. All of our principals and board were leftish - vehemently anti Trump from day one.
Our site didn’t include ads on the top levels; if included at all they’d be buried in product descriptions and the like.
Preppers went nuts for our stuff.

Yeah, there probably are a few other businesses that sell to preppers without catering to them. I don't know what they would do with most of it, though--what you need to get the patient to the ER is very different than what you need if there's no ER to get them to.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Gold, prepper, anything pro-gun -- always right wing.

Maybe we were an exception. EMS and Tactical Medicine have a lot of matériel needs overlapping with preppers. All of our principals and board were leftish - vehemently anti Trump from day one.
Our site didn’t include ads on the top levels; if included at all they’d be buried in product descriptions and the like.
Preppers went nuts for our stuff.

Maybe because of the word "tactical." I swear, sometimes all you gotta do is add that word and the wingers will buy it. I even saw an ad for a company that sold "tactical" diaper bags. Because you just never know when you might have to change a baby diaper in the middle of a firefight!

Most anything "tactical" is going to be right wing.

It's not totally nuts, though--an awful lot of portable things come in a range from as light as can effectively do the job up through the proverbial brick outhouse. What little I have seen of "tactical" things is they're far towards the heavy duty end of the range. That tactical flashlight is going to stand up a lot better to being dropped and banged than the headlamp in my pack--but it's going to be a lot heavier, also. (Not necessarily more expensive--you pay extra for light weight, also.)

 

[Tigers!]

I don't think Tigers is questioning how the individuals in the OP or in this thread obtained their money.

I believe Tigers is repeating a joke attributed to George Burns.

Yes indeed.

 

[Elixir]

Most anything "tactical" is going to be right wing

You might be surprised. Our origins in the Outdoor Industry centered on mountaineering and orienteering, and the spearhead peeps were uniformly libs.
We took items designed for military use and redesigned and improved them for the recreational market, making them stronger, lighter, smaller … whereupon the military (spec ops) would demand their own versions of the improved civilian product. The main difference is often just the colors (black, camo).

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Most anything "tactical" is going to be right wing

You might be surprised. Our origins in the Outdoor Industry centered on mountaineering and orienteering, and the spearhead peeps were uniformly libs.
We took items designed for military use and redesigned and improved them for the recreational market, making them stronger, lighter, smaller … whereupon the military (spec ops) would demand their own versions of the improved civilian product. The main difference is often just the colors (black, camo).

But that doesn't make the civilian products tactical. Not everything the spec ops community uses is labeled "tactical".

 

[Alcoholic Actuary]

Gold, prepper, anything pro-gun -- always right wing.

Maybe we were an exception. EMS and Tactical Medicine have a lot of matériel needs overlapping with preppers. All of our principals and board were leftish - vehemently anti Trump from day one.
Our site didn’t include ads on the top levels; if included at all they’d be buried in product descriptions and the like.
Preppers went nuts for our stuff.

Maybe because of the word "tactical." I swear, sometimes all you gotta do is add that word and the wingers will buy it. I even saw an ad for a company that sold "tactical" diaper bags. Because you just never know when you might have to change a baby diaper in the middle of a firefight!

Exactly! If one was actually in the military, they would know immediately that 'military grade' means overpriced cheap shit that will break any time after the fourth use.

aa

 

[Elixir]

Gold, prepper, anything pro-gun -- always right wing.

Maybe we were an exception. EMS and Tactical Medicine have a lot of matériel needs overlapping with preppers. All of our principals and board were leftish - vehemently anti Trump from day one.
Our site didn’t include ads on the top levels; if included at all they’d be buried in product descriptions and the like.
Preppers went nuts for our stuff.

Maybe because of the word "tactical." I swear, sometimes all you gotta do is add that word and the wingers will buy it. I even saw an ad for a company that sold "tactical" diaper bags. Because you just never know when you might have to change a baby diaper in the middle of a firefight!

Exactly! If one was actually in the military, they would know immediately that 'military grade' means overpriced cheap shit that will break any time after the fourth use.

aa

Ah yes. That’s what we called “tacticool”.
Believe me, the spec ops folk brook no shit.
We inherited their accounts along with USSS, Air Marshalls and others due to suppliers trying to sell them the same crap they sold to the Army.

 

[Jarhyn]

Gold, prepper, anything pro-gun -- always right wing.

Maybe we were an exception. EMS and Tactical Medicine have a lot of matériel needs overlapping with preppers. All of our principals and board were leftish - vehemently anti Trump from day one.
Our site didn’t include ads on the top levels; if included at all they’d be buried in product descriptions and the like.
Preppers went nuts for our stuff.

Maybe because of the word "tactical." I swear, sometimes all you gotta do is add that word and the wingers will buy it. I even saw an ad for a company that sold "tactical" diaper bags. Because you just never know when you might have to change a baby diaper in the middle of a firefight!

Exactly! If one was actually in the military, they would know immediately that 'military grade' means overpriced cheap shit that will break any time after the fourth use.

aa

To be fair, there are some military grade things unlike what you described.

If it's something that a soldier is issued without expectation of re-issuance? Yeah, cheap POS. If it is a piece of hardware that won't be replaced any time soon and is used by numerous soldiers you can bet your ass that thing is going to be fucking indestructible.

I would be hard pressed to break one of those radios... in fact I almost got broken by one of them.

But you can be damn sure that the uniforms would be damn near falling apart after just a year of being worn, despite having 5 other uniforms you also wear.

 

[Elixir]

Yeah, cheap POS. If it is a piece of hardware that won't be replaced any time soon and is used by numerous soldiers you can bet your ass that thing is going to be fucking indestructible.

There was a medical kit component that cost about the same as the 10 or so other components plus assembly, packaging’s blah blah. DOS Opmed didn’t want to pay for it, but I felt that it was basically worth the price for its capability. I had a decent rapport with the trainer who wanted these kits, and I got talking with him about who was constraining the budget. Pretty cold shit there. I got him to figure out what it cost to deploy one operator for the kinds of missions for which this kit was designed and it turned out to be over a million bucks in 2011. He took the figure back to the bean counters (and probably slightly misrepresented the chances that they’d lose a given operator to the type of injury for which the costly item was intended on a given mission) and they sprang for the extra. When we first got the contract, it was awarded based on the “Parking Lot Test”.
WTF?
“Yeah, the parking lot test is, we go out in the (blazing hot asphalt) parking lot, stand about 75 feet apart and slid it back and forth to each other until it fails”
(Ours was last to fail.)

DOS (State Dept) Operators don’t get the crappy wound treatment stuff issued to everyone who passes a Combat Life Saver course. But even that stuff is night and day vs what was going on in WWII.

 

[Jarhyn]

Yeah, cheap POS. If it is a piece of hardware that won't be replaced any time soon and is used by numerous soldiers you can bet your ass that thing is going to be fucking indestructible.

There was a medical kit component that cost about the same as the 10 or so other components plus assembly, packaging’s blah blah. DOS Opmed didn’t want to pay for it, but I felt that it was basically worth the price for its capability. I had a decent rapport with the trainer who wanted these kits, and I got talking with him about who was constraining the budget. Pretty cold shit there. I got him to figure out what it cost to deploy one operator for the kinds of missions for which this kit was designed and it turned out to be over a million bucks in 2011. He took the figure back to the bean counters (and probably slightly misrepresented the chances that they’d lose a given operator to the type of injury for which the costly item was intended on a given mission) and they sprang for the extra. When we first got the contract, it was awarded based on the “Parking Lot Test”.
WTF?
“Yeah, the parking lot test is, we go out in the (blazing hot asphalt) parking lot, stand about 75 feet apart and slid it back and forth to each other until it fails”
(Ours was last to fail.)

DOS (State Dept) Operators don’t get the crappy wound treatment stuff issued to everyone who passes a Combat Life Saver course. But even that stuff is night and day vs what was going on in WWII.

That's actually a pretty good test, TBH.

 

[Alcoholic Actuary]

Actually can get behind the specialty equipment argument. Those radios had to be able to hop frequencies like 100 times per second. But my last job in the 3ACR was regimental comptroller. We were deploying to Egypt for a training exercise and had to contract for 300+ 'ocean going' shipping containers. The shipping company provided rusted out containers with holes in them that could not possibly cross the atlantic. We filed a lawsuit that took about 3 years and we paid almost $60k per day for those things until the lawsuit settled.

I honestly think that while there are some military-specific equipment that can be high quality, most of the contracted junk we get has a civilian counterpart with higher quality and similar pricing - but somehow the manufacturer forgot or didn't contribute as much to their congressfolk.

aa

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

When the GOP slashes Social Security, Medicare, Medicade and 101 more saftey net programs, those preppers will need their vast stores of inedible emergency foods, heirloom garden seeds, and off the grid farming tools and equipment. Eat more possum.