"Manly" website starter pack

I knew someone who would replace their knives every year or two after they were dangerously dull. He called me a sucker for buying a nicer set, and it never occurred to him that they could be sharpened and reused.

It's getting bad out here.

Every year or two??? That's just when a new knife is finally getting broken in lol I've got knives my parents bought before I was born that I still use!
- We're talking real low grade, picked up at walmart knives. Unlikely they would last like that anyway, but absolutely refused to spend more than like $10 on a chef knife because they were treated as disposable.
  
  If they won't even pay more than $10 then whatever they bought probably already needed sharpening straight out of the box lol
  
  Even the cheapest knife is still going to last many, many years of normal use. Most of my knifes are super cheap actually. But they are super sharp, so who cares? Just sharpened then a few days ago (has been a few months). Only takes like a minute per knife with my "work sharp" to get them just about razor sharp.
  
  Aren't those still made from steel? There should be nothing preventing you(r friend) from sharpening them.
It's getting bad out here.
You haven't seen anything yet. If you have teacher friends, ask them how the new generation is doing 💀 they haven't learned almost anything since COVID started and have virtually no social skills on top of it... I'm legit scared for the future.
- The whole COVID made the kids dumb is just the newest excuse in a long line. Before that it were phones, computers, calculators and probably a lot more. My kids are from the new generation, and they're doing just fine.
- So just like every generation before us then...? Socrates 400 BC:
  The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
  
  CHILDREN CROSSED THEIR LEGS!!!!!!!!1!!!!!11!!!!!!!! what an abomination!
  ?
  
  can u seriously believe those shits?!
As the older "uncle" of the family, I get called to handle a lot of things, like unjamming a garbage disposal (you stick a broom handle in and push until it moves again) to changing a car tire (the instructions are LITERALLY printed on the body of the car) to very basic things like removing insects and spiders from the houses of adult families, to fixing electrical problems (breakers tripping.) And of course, fixing computers... miles and miles of fixing computers. Usually just installed programs that need to be removed or setup that needs to be completed, the age of viruses seem to be slowing but they still call at odd hours asking for help to remove a "virus" when it's just an app on borderless window mode.
I never thought of any of this as "man skills" I always thought this was just shit you had to do as an adult. I was prepared for helping kids just getting started, not grown-ass men and women with arms and legs and presumably careers with responsibilities.
I would say I'm surprised people can even wipe their own ass anymore but I have read some posts about people having to deal with boyfriends who think touching their own butt is "gay" so really I am not surprised by anything anymore. Is it any wonder why politics is so incredibly stupid? It's a reflection of larger society.
For me, if it doesn't come with a sharpener build into the sheath, it's not good enough quality anyway (I do not generally buy expensive knives). I've moved a dozen times over a decade and lost pieces of so many silverware sets they're disposable to me. Never had a knife long enough to NEED to resharpen it. Got a few nicer ones now though so maybe that will change.

I know people who just throw them out and buy new knives when they dull, so there's also that 😔

Seriously? Just throwing out practically brand new knives is a thing now? Decent knives will last for decades if you sharpen them a few times a year lol
- Oh no, they'll use crappy blunt knives for a few years.
  
  And they'll keep them in a drawer and cut on plates and glass "cutting boards."
  
  I just realized why my pizza cutters never last long...
  
  Ugh. I went through that for years with my sister. I finally got together with my brother in law and we surreptitiously threw away all the glass cutting boards after I was getting really tired of hearing her constantly bitching about all her knives being "crap." This was such a tooth pulling exercise because she absolutely would not allow anyone to put two and two together for her. In her mind, all the knives constantly being dull was everyone else's fault.
  Somehow I simultaneously "don't know what I'm talking about," but I'm also specifically asked to bring my entire kit every time I visit so I can sharpen every piece of cutlery in the house. Since apparently I'm the only one who can do it properly. Hmm.
  
  I had a roommate like that once! She insisted on using a glass cutting board and would never get rid of the damned thing... Apparently she couldn't chop onions without having a copy of a Van Gogh painting underneath them lol
  
  we have one that is clear, it only gets used for raw chicken basically. it's much easier to sanitize after. i wonder if theres a good alternative for that use case?
- Apparently. I complemented them on their knives and they said they just got them cause their old ones were getting dull.
  Told them to let me know next time, and I'd take them. I may be a bad friend as I did not disclose that knives could be sharpened lol.
  
  Offer to take them, and then go pick them up with your sharpener. Sharpen them there. Test their sharpness. Then take the knives. Obviously don't be smarmy about it, but friends don't let friends throw money down the garbage disposal. I bet a lot of people would genuinely appreciate learning how to save some cash on knives. Even shitty Walmart kitchen knives are expensive enough to make a $50 work sharp bench stone worthwhile
  
  Doesn't even need to be that nice. A $10 knife sharpener that you can buy at Walmart ten steps from the knives is more than enough for anyone who doesn't particularly care.
  It's not gonna do a great job, but it'll keep the knife sharp enough until it's dinged, chipped or worn away.
  
  For sure. I'm just speaking from my experience that 1 good knife sharpener is the very best dollar to performance ratio purchase you will ever make and the work sharp bench stone is priced low enough to be, potentially, both the first and last knife sharpener someone ever buys. And man... some shitty walmart knives are just the things to learn how to use it with. They're made of enough real steel that they won't flex like the crap you get at the grocery store, but they're also crappy enough that they won't retain an edge for very long and you'll get some practice in with them. And a set of walmart knives is about $30 meaning if someone is rebuying walmart kitchen knives once a year, after 3 years they will have saved money (and material waste), not to mention some sickos out there are going to enjoy it. I don't enjoy sharpening knives, but I know of people who do actually get satisfaction from it.
  But yes. If it's between buying bad knives every year, or buying bad knives and a bad sharpener and getting by for 2 years, the bad knives and the bad sharpener WILL save you money.
  
  I would absolutely take their old knives lol next time they come to your house make sure to use them to prepare a meal
- Not everyone knows about Vimes' Boots Theory:
  The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
  
  Vimes was always my favorite Discworld character lol
- Good knives will last multiple generations.

...maybe..

Well, if you don't have time or don't want to learn about knife sharpening my advice is to get a cheap pull through sharpener for your kitchen knives. They're super easy to use and will add years to the usefulness of your knives. It doesn't work as well as doing a full sharpening, but it will get them cutting well again at least!
- Are these the ones with the angled V shaped thingy? I have one where you put the knife through three different coarseness levels and it works good enough for me. I'm sure I'd fuck the blade up with real ones.
  
  Yes that is it! They work great for any standard kitchen knife, but you wouldn't want to use them on any kind of fancy blades with a special grind angle or anything
  They usually look something like this:
  
  Yes! It's almost exactly like that. I only use it to sharpen a couple of "nicer" kitchen knives I use for cooking, we don't even bother with butter knives or other ones, and the cooking ones are decent (German) but nothing crazy either.
  
  Those sharpeners fuck your knives up after a while. https://youtu.be/0uy5NrLEZ4g so don’t use them on expensive knives.

I know, right? Sharpening things like knives and scissors is what I consider to be a basic maintenance skill. You don’t even need to go all out on it. Just owning a basic Spyderco Sharpmaker or WorkSharp Precision Adjust will let you sharpen a lot of things.

It’s also a given that many knives that you buy simply aren’t as sharp from the factory as they can and SHOULD be. A little effort can get you a lot better cutting performance.

I suppose the reason behind it is also that your average person thinks that ‘sharp knives are dangerous’ when in reality it’s dull knives that cause the most issues. When a supermarket chain here sold knives, people complained that the knives were too sharp! Can you imagine?

I would just use dull knives if not for the people in my life who sharpen them. The sound of knife-sharpening burrows into my brain and shuts off all rational thought. It’s like tinfoil on teeth for me and I cannot deal with it.

Luckily, my husband enjoys it, so he just does it when I’m not home.