Yep. The mistake was putting family above the group. Now Lydia will be treated as just another enemy combatant. Thus her comments to Daryl. I don’t think you can keep her safe.....unspoken implication is because when I attack she’ll die with the rest of you fools.

 

I agree about the knives. I remember reading in college that anthropologists found that in cultures where children had unsupervised access to knives, they learned how to handle them safely just as you did. No big deal. Makes sense to me. We had idiotic blunt scissors at school in early grades. I hated them. I used the sharp scissors at home without anyone giving it a thought. Some things kids want some coddling over--other things they just have to bite their tongues about and think daggers at the grownups.

I love that you made flint knives--imagine how quickly you would have picked it up if you had had adults to watch. That is just so cool. As a kid, I lived up north in the area where Ishi, the last native Indian living off of the land, finally came in to the white community. My group of kids was still able to find an occasional arrowhead, and we longed to have living-off-the-land skills, but all we could do was founder around with our imaginations.

The butter knives keep me laughing, every time I think about it. But you have alarmed me about the credit cards. I have one that I can just tap on a register and it pays--that's the kind you are talking about? I really have to upgrade to one of those protected wallets.

 

@Lindigo
I would have loved to be taught knap flint into arrowheads and knives; some YouTubers (Shawn woods comes to mind though he usually does mousetrap videos now as apparently flintknapping gets demonitzed due to "making weapons" or some BS like that) do videos showing how to do it and making complex stuff like arrowheads is really involved and difficult when you finish them. Interestingly enough some surgeons have started using obsidian scalpel as they are sharp right down to the molecular level, whereas steel is really rough under an electron microscope. Wounds seem to scar less when an obsidian scalpel is used as the flesh is cleanly cut rather than very finely torn.

Our schools had plastic scissors in the earlier years. They didn't cut paper so much as bend sheets of paper.

That's so cool living near where Ishi lived must have been fun finding all the Stone arrowheads as a kid; native Americans made some really brutal barbed arrowheads too and a complex arrowheads which fitted (snugly but not too tightly) into an arrow shaft, so only the shaft would come out if you tried to pull the arrow out. I found some old metal standard when I was a kid around in a castles and (although they were heavily rusted) they looked really brutal too. I know the English had a habit of only attaching arrowheads as they fired them, or just before a battle, usually with wax; it's why some old medical treatises suggest that for arrows lodged in the flesh of a leg or arm be pushed all the way through, broken then pulled out old arrowheads could potentially be left inside a person however whereas a musket ball always had to be a extracted as they would push a circular piece of clothing into the wound (which was a bigger risk than the musket ball; provided the wound wasn't lethal) and would usually cause sepsis and death if the cloth wasn't removed due to the poor hygiene of the era.

I would definitely recommend getting a card which isn't contactless or an RF protected wallet. I heard that you can even get details from people in places like airports. I remember reading an article of someone trying a card grabber app on their NFC equipped phone on an escalator when they saw a wallet in somebody's back pocket, they only had to pretend to be texting and managed to get the card details.
It is unlikely that it'll happen to you but always something to consider. I know my bank lets me choose which countries I can use my card in at will via my ebanking app so I have everywhere but here locked out and I can lock/unlock my card via the app; which is useful in case I think I've lost my wallet, previously I had to phone up and ask for a new card; which took time and was a pain if a card had simply been misplaced as they couldn't unlock it.

Anyway, on topic I honestly think the survivors should have a proper military system set up. With things like mandatory training (they could use toothless walkers for this) rather than just throwing people into the fight like meat into a grinder.
Everybody should have a certain number of hours a week set aside for things like practicing fighting walkers and people.
We have great fighters like Michonne, yet she never bothers to train people in swordsmanship (swordswomanship in her case I guess) and Carol has already tried to teach kids simple things, like how to use a knife in self defence. Sparring and military drills and hikes holes definitely get everyone into fighting form, it's bad to just have a few good fighters when everyone is capable of being a good fighter. They're trying to rebuild but are completely unprepared when it comes to threats, apart from a select few who could be training everyone else. Compulsory military service should exist for everyone in the four communities, even if someone isn't able bodied they can be taught to make arrows, spearsspears, swords, etc. Or they could be taught to farm. Classes for children and adults in (real) self defence, military tactics and military form should be taught every week alongside classes in medicine as well as the sciences (biology and chemistry mainly), mechanics, farming/fishing, survival and construction.
Minor surgeries should definitely be taught to everyone, an amateur can stitch skin (I learned to do so myself by getting cheap suture online and pork trotters from a butcher) and that paid off when a piece of sheet steel came down on the back of my left arm. I couldn't be assed waiting so I got some sterile suture (swaged to a suture needle) sterilized my needle driver in a pressure cooker along with adison forceps and a few other medical tools and closed the (too deep to superglue) cut up. A doctor could have done a much better job but I would have to have waited hours in a hospital with people in severe pain and people with (loud) mental illness. Besides I prefer to be as self reliant as possible.
The same goes for doing stuff at home, even though the house is rented, I would rather work on things myself. That way I learn and improve in certain areas.
[Tangent warning]
Self reliance is something we've lost over the last 50-100 years; we've handed some jobs that should be done by friends and family; such as digging a grave, even though I've only dug graves for pets, there's something in the digging that allows the enormity of the situation to sink in, now even this is clinical, the body is placed in an (expensive as all hell) casket and gracefully lowered into the ground. Having lost my father at a young age I would have much preferred to have helped bury him personally, rather than the over-professional ceremony that makes death look happy and graceful.
The same goes for counselling; unless the job cannot be handled by a friend or family member it shouldn't be "outsourced", having someone who barely knows you agree with how you think or feel helps in the short term, but those memories aren't retained. The same goes for having a shrink telling you that what you are doing is wrong and you need to change your ways. It simply won't sink in, though have a friend, parent, brother, sister, cousin, etc say it and you'll listen and consider their words more. Recently we've been taught to be all too dependent on others and to avoid depending on eachother.
[/tangent]
Everyone should specialize in something but have at least basic training in everything else. It would be good for plot expansion, I remember Falling Skies did this quite well.
Compulsory service would also build loyalty and camaraderie in each community.
They have a charter but they haven't made themselves a flag. A good flag would be a flag split into four with a symbol designed to represent each community, e.g. A a crown for The Kingdom, a hill fort & archer for Hillttop, a trident spear for Oceanside, and a (I have no clue, someone help me out here) for Alexandria. Anyone doing recon on each community would see the same flag at each one, showing that each community is allied; or possibly part of an even larger community they've not found yet, a good deterrent.

One thing I've noticed is a lack of a dentist. A bit of an oversight considering an infected tooth can kill you. IIRC dental drills are pneumatic, so all you would need is a compressor and to raid a nearby dental surgery for dental tools. Mercury amalgam tooth filling material is easy to make (and most dentists have lots of elemental mercury in stock) the silver for the amalgam could be obtained through salvaging jewellery. Even if you didn't have mercury the old method if hammering tin (not aluminium, it isn't malleable enough) foil into a drilled tooth would still work. A lack of local anaesthetic would be a problem though the survivors could either grow coca and make cocaine (which was the first ever local anaesthetic and is still used (extremely rarely) today) or grow opium poppies and harvest the opium (which would be easier), plenty of houses grow poppies not knowing the poppy latex (sap) is opium and contains about 10% morphine by weight. A small poppy plantation would yield a fair amount of opium which could be harvested and turned into laudanum (a strong tincture of opium containing about 10mg morphine per millilitre) or have the morphine extracted from the opium (which is more complex, though Afghan farmers do it all the time), or just keep the opium whole and have someone undergoing surgery eat a piece of it. They've lived in settlements for years now and must be running very low on pharmaceutical pain meds.
Laudanum was a wonder drug back in the 19th century. It slowed the gut, helping people to not die when they had cholera or similar sickness, it also suppresses the cough reflex, meaning influenza spreads less rapidly and easily, it dulls pain greatly and helps people sleep. Laudanum and then morphine were also seen as a "soldiers drug" as it seemed to help with shell shock (PTSD). Naturally it has a high dependence liability though it's medical use would make it a commodity easily worth more than food and salt, opium would probably be about as weight valuable as 3-5 bullets; maybe more. Obviously each community would need to draft their own laws when it comes to narcotics, though if a community has soil in which plants grow, poppies would take up a significant share of land. After all Oceanside would be able to provide fish and salt (the salt would be good for preserving meat and seasoning food) though they would likely be limited in what they could grow, therefore trading fish, salt, or preserved (smoked or salted) fish would be an excellent way to get fresh food as well as grown pharmaceuticals.


PS Thank the forum gods that posts get saved, I accidentally closed this page and thought I had lost my post.

 

That would have been an epic waste of time. LMAO