As I said

pay is livable but not amazing

I personally came up just a hair short of 69k last year, I’m paying my bills, treating myself to some luxuries, and usually manage to save a bit, but I’m not rolling in it by a longshot.

But like I said that varies a lot around the country, I believe that’s a decent bit above the national average, but not a ridiculous outlier either, it’s fairly average for my area.

For context, I’ve been there about 6 years, so I have some seniority, but I’ve also elected not to pursue some training and certifications and such that could have given me a bit of a pay bump. I rarely come in for overtime, but that’s always available if you want it (there have been a couple years where one of our supervisors ended up being one of if not the highest paid county employee here because the man is an overtime machine, he’s a supervisor so he of course makes more than me to begin with but not so much more that you’d expect him to be in the running for that without the insane amount of overtime he does)

On average the county I work for is fairly wealthy and we’re not hurting for funding. We’re not union (although every few years someone starts talking about it, hasn’t gotten off the ground yet but we’ve gotten close a few times) but most of our surrounding counties are so that helps keep our pay competitive.

It’s absolutely not a job for everyone, but assuming you’re in the US, damn-near every 911 dispatch center in the country is always short-staffed and hiring, and usually only require a high school diploma or GED.

Since you have a computer background, I think it’s safe to assume that you can type at a halfway decent WPM, that’s a pretty big chunk of our aptitude test that a lot of people fail on.

A lot about this job varies from one jurisdiction to another, but in general pay is livable but not amazing and the hours are usually weird, but the benefits and job security are pretty solid.

Background checks, drug testing, etc. are of course usually part of the hiring process, and again it’s just not a job everyone is cut out for.

I remember coming across the thing you’re describing years ago while digging through my dad’s collection of miscellaneous cables, adapters, etc. back in the 90s or early 2000s. It wasn’t quite so low-profile, it definitely stuck out from whatever you plugged it into maybe about a quarter to half inch or so, but otherwise it was a 3.5mm jack with a plastic cap on the other with no wires or holes or anything that muted whatever you plugged it into.

The shade of beige the plastic was on that particular example makes me suspect it was a relic of the 80s. I do feel like I remember seeing them for sale somewhere at a later time, but I couldn’t begin to tell you where.

A little googling turned up this eBay listing

Based off of that and a little more googling I think the term you’re looking for might be a shorting and/or blanking plug or or cap or dummy/dummy plug

Without too much effort I was able to find “shorting caps” for RCA jacks, various coaxial connectors, and banana plugs, but had no luck finding any more for 3.5mm

There’s a few other weird situations that can come into play too, like mailing addresses, census designated places, neighborhoods, etc.

My town doesn’t have its own post office, so my mail gets handled by the post office in a neighboring town, so my mailing address says that town instead of the municipality I actually live in, so more often than not if I have to give out my address that’s what I’m saying.

I also live in a 'census designated place" basically an area that’s officially recognized as having its own identity. It’s basically just a fancy nickname for my neighborhood, so some people in this area will say that instead of the name of the municipality or the mailing address.

It’s actually pretty rare for anyone to give the name of my municipality when asked for what town they live in unless we’re talking about local politics.

A lot of this is going to be subjective and depend on your personal frame of reference, as well as local laws and customs that can vary a lot around the country

In general, in normal casual conversation, most Americans are going to refer to a municipality as a “town” unless they’re in a big city. Legally, that municipality might be considered a city, town, township, borough, home rule municipality, village, etc. but unless it’s a big city we’re probably going to refer to it as a town most of the time

There’s also, in some areas, unincorporated communities that don’t have an actual municipal government, but if there’s a relatively dense area, we might go ahead and refer to that area as a town.

Some parts of the US do have some sort of legal definition for “village,” in others it might be used informally to refer to a small “quaint” town, or part of the town.

There’s also the distinction of, for example, being “in a town” vs “in town” or “downtown”

Most of us who don’t live in a big city would say that we live in a town, meaning the municipality we live in. Somewhat less of us live “in town” meaning something more like the denser, more “urban” parts of town, probably resembling what you think of as a village, and “downtown” would refer to something like the area around the main street or main commercial area where you might find stores, restaurants, bars, etc.

So a “rural town” is basically any sort of town in a rural area. I’m not sure if there’s any sort of a legal definition for a rural town, but in general I’d say that if a town is surrounded by woods and/or farmland and you can’t trace an unbroken path of suburban sprawl from it back to a major city it’s rural.

Some of those rural towns can actually be fairly big and urbanized, but they’re otherwise in a rural area in their own little bubble so we’d still consider it to be a rural town.

As far as town vs “small town” that’s kind of subjective.

The town I grew up in is often referred to as a small town, largely because it’s physically pretty small, almost exactly 1 square mile, but that 1 mile is pretty densely populated, I think the population is around 9-10k people currently, it’s just a couple miles outside of the nearest major city, and pretty well-urbanized itself, connected to several major highways, was once a big manufacturing town but is now pretty gentrified, with a solid handful of 10+ floor office buildings. People from more rural areas probably wouldn’t agree that it’s a “small town” but people from a bit city probably would think so, and for those of us “townies” whose families have lived here for a few generations still feel like it has a small town feel, even if the newer transplants don’t all share that feeling.

The town I currently live in isn’t quite rural, but it’s getting there. I’m towards the edge of the suburbs now, maybe even into the exurbs. The town is physically much larger, but only has about half the population. That small, less dense population makes it still feel kind of small-towny.

Also worth noting, my town doesn’t really have any sort of a “downtown” area, no real main street to go walking around or anything. We have a few businesses and stores and such roughly clustered in the same area, but it’s not a cohesive thing that feels like a “town” or what you might recognize as a “village.” I would normally may this, but if I said I was going “into town” for something, most people around me would probably understand that I’m going to one of our neighboring towns that are a bit more built-up

So some combination of physical size, population, population density, and a curtain je ne sais quoi are what makes a town a small town.

Yeah, it is probably largely dependent on the parts of the internet you inhabit, I can’t see it coming up in gamer forums outside of maybe in-depth discussion of piracy laws, but it’s definitely something I’ve seen around the internet as long as I can remember (my family got online in the mid-lato 90s, I feel like I first encountered it in middle school or early high school so early 2000s-ish.

But by that point it was pretty well-established, it wasn’t hard to google what it meant at that time.

People have been throwing that kind of disclaimer on online comments so long that they came up with the abbreviation “IANAL” back in the 80s or 90s, back when the World Wide Web was either not even a thing yet or brand-spanking-new and Usenet was king.

There are, frankly, a whole lot of absolute morons out in the world.

Sometimes those people are the ones asking for advice, sometimes they’re the ones trying to give it.

Some people who will take anything you say at face value, won’t verify any information for themselves, won’t do any research, etc. and if they follow your advice and screw up they sometimes like to lug litigious about it.

And when they’re the ones giving advice, they’ll confidently state stuff that is just flat out not true and sometimes dangerous.

Hopefully you can see at least some of the ways those could be a bad combination.

Personally when I make those kinds of disclaimers, it’s because I’m

1. Looking out for myself, I don’t want to get sued, I dont want some asshole to harass me or dox me or ruin my reputation or anything because they followed advice I gave because they thought I “sounded like I knew what I was talking about”

2. I’m looking out for the other person. I’m not a professional and I know it, I’m warning them that they should only take my thoughts or advice for what they’re worth which may not be much, and there’s a real chance the person I’m talking to is an idiot.

I also feel like it kind of invites someone who does actually know better to come in and correct or add on to what I’ve said, and I always welcome that sort of learning opportunity.

And it can sometimes be a way to slip in a little humor if you slip in something like “I’m no octopus psychologist” or something when you’re discussing the behavior of an octopus. (To the best of my knowledge, "octopus psychologist is not a real job, and that’s why it’s humorous, at least to someone with the same kind of dry humor as me)

In the Lord of the Rings, what is the explanation for swords and other metal goods?

At some point in the past, the arts of smelting, smithing, casting were discovered, refined over the centuries, different races and cultures advanced them in different ways, and eventually led to swords, mithril shirts, magic rings, etc.

Same thing with star wars, in-universe they have tens of thousands of years of history, I think canonically the old Republic was founded 25-or-so thousand years ago, if you go back that far in real earth human history and you’re pretty much at the point where a handful of weird wolves are starting to get comfortable enough with humans to let us start domesticating them.

And at that point in the star wars timeline, space travel and other advanced technology is already pretty well-established, so there’s probably at least that long again of incremental technological advancements leading up to that point.

Basically they just got a massive head-start on us

As far as how and where the technology is made, we get little glimpses of it here and there, droid factories on Geonosis, corelian shipyards, various mechanics, scrapyards, tinkerers, etc.

But that’s all just kind of backdrop. Star wars is a space opera adventure thing, not a mockumentary about the history of lightsabers and hyperspace drives, or a how-its-made for blaster pistols and gonk droids. It wouldn’t make sense for most star wars media to really go into depth about that kind of stuff and probably would piss people off if they did (not that most star wars fans don’t exist in a perpetual state of being angry at star wars about something anyway)

You wouldn’t go into a Fast and Furious movie expecting a whole history and mechanics lesson on automobiles, the movies are focusing on a handful of people who (race cars? Fight terrorists with cars? I really don’t know I’ve actually never seen any of them) there’s a whole in-universe world around them where all of those things happened/are happening out of sight and out of mind but it’s not directly relevant to the plot so it gets kind of glossed over, you can just assume most of the history and engineering stuff has been handled by people somewhere off-screen at some point in time.

Same with star wars, there’s untold trillions or more people scattered across millions of inhabited planets working dead-end jobs making widgets that have built on millennia of science and technology, but the stories focus on a handful of freedom fighters, smugglers, soldiers, warrior monks, etc. who mostly just use those things and probably don’t have much more idea how their hyperdrive works than you do about the alternator in your car.

“Trillions” is probably a major lowball, coruscant alone officially a population in the trillions, and when you actually do the math making some estimates based on densely-populated cities on earth it’s more likely in the quadrillions.

And there’s million of inhabited planets, most not even close to as densely populated as coruscant of course, but there are a good handful of other ecumenopolises (ecumenopoli?) around the galaxy

Personally I’ve gone in on Hawaiian shirts, bit less good for a laugh, but still attention grabbing and easier to show off in public. No one wants to see my fat hairy ass sporting a whale tail.

Small typo in my comment, was supposed to say get a laugh out of my wife

It served its intended purpose. It was for Valentines or our anniversary or something, so I was waiting in the bed for her to come home in my leopard thong, rose petals scattered around, and some funky 70s porno music playing, and she cracked the fuck up.

I’m a fat, unsexy dude, I bought a goofy leopard-print thong to get a laugh out of my life wife once

It’s not my favorite pair of undies by a longshot, I still prefer my usual boxer-briefs, but it’s certainly not uncomfortable. Even wore it to my city’s naked bike ride to bike around in.

My dog is very aggressive/reactive to other dogs.

We got her when she was just a few weeks shy of a year old, from a family friend who rescued her from some random guy on Facebook who basically said “someone come take this dog or I’m gonna put her down”

I don’t know much about that first guy except that he was obviously a piece of shit. He was also at least pretty neglectful, she has a pretty low maintenance coat, occasional brushing is about all she needs, but apparently she was filthy and her fur was even a little matted when they rescued her. I also suspect he was kind of abusive, because for a while she was kind of afraid of people holding broomsticks, fishing rods, etc. and I can’t think of any good reason for that except that he hit her with something.

Again, she was still a puppy, less than a year old.

So needless to say she probably didn’t get any kind of socialization with him.

The people we got her from kind of suspect that he got her as payment for a drug deal or something along those lines.

She’s a very high-energy and intelligent breed (a malinois, she’s actually pretty lazy for her breed, but that still makes her more energetic than just about any other dog I’ve ever met) very driven, incredibly mouthy (we’ve long since trained it out of her, but I can tell that she still sometimes wants to bite me in a playful way)

The people we got her from are very nice, but already had 2 kids, 2 dogs, and a couple cats, not a very big house, and no experience with this sort of high-energy breed, and I am certain that she was an absolute terror.

But things went pretty much fine for a while, she got along with their dogs and even their cats, they thought about keeping her for themselves

But then she started getting into fights with their one other dog. She was getting into sort of her adolescent phase, pushing boundaries, trying to assert dominance, and probably just being a crazy little crackhead.

So she ended up getting bitten pretty badly by their other dog (and maybe kind of deserved it)

And since then she just hasn’t been good with other dogs. We’ve gotten her to a point where she can more-or-less ignore a couple familiar dogs around the neighborhood, but I doubt she’ll ever be at a point where she’ll ever be friendly with other dogs.

She’s been bitten, she doesn’t want to get bitten again, and her breed is pretty much all-fight no-flight (as in fleeing, watch a couple videos of military/police malinois jumping out of helicopters and shit and you’ll see they clearly don’t have a problem with flying, and their jumping game is probably about as close to flight as any dog can manage on their own,) so in her mind the way to stay safe is basically to go on the offensive and get the other dogs before they can get her.

Better early socialization and more experienced owners who knew how to manage her energy and instincts better in that first year or so of her life probably would have made a huge difference for her.

It also doesn’t help that she was a covid puppy, not easy to get proper socialization when your humans are stuck quarantining at home.

She loves people though, she rolls over for belly rubs from just about anyone, cuddles right up next to me in bed, and while she does get a bit uncomfortable in bigger crowds, she always wants to at least be near where the people are. I remember taking her on a camping trip with a few friends, some she knew, others she didn’t, and she wasn’t sure what to make of all of these people hanging out in the same place, so she didn’t really insert herself into the group, but she definitely sat nearby watching us, and anytime someone broke off to go to the bathroom, get something from their tent, grab a drink, etc. she was right there with them

I have one idiot coworker who supported Trump (I’m unclear if she actually voted for him, in the past she’s been proud that she’s never voted, like I said, idiot) largely because of something he said during the campaign about lowering costs for IVF

She doesn’t have kids, as far as I know doesn’t want them.

She was in some kind of poly relationship, is going through a divorce, is wiccan, we work in the public sector (county level so kind of insulated from DOGE type bullshit, but not that insulated because of course we get a butt load of federal funds) and has a few health issues.

It’s like she’s aiming to be the poster girl for getting her face eaten by leopards.

It looks pretty damn good to me, but I have a small rant about tomahawk steaks in general.

I get that they’re a premium cut of meat, they’re a big fat slap of ribeye, but they’re also a novelty cut, the big ol’ handle of bone hanging off of it doesn’t really serve any purpose except being big and showy. The tomahawk steak is kind of all about ridiculous excess.

And I’m not knocking that, I love goofy, showy, ostentatious, kitschy shit. I’d even say that it’s kind of my thing.

And I think when you serve one like this, take it off the bone, slice it up, and serve it on a plate, that kind of removes some of the fun factor.

I have a friend of a friend who is kind of ridiculously wealthy and likes to throw very elaborate parties. One such occasion was a “viking feast” (the historical accuracy of this is dubious at best) where the only foods served are meats and bread, no plates, the only utensils allowed are knives and your hands.

There was a lot of meat. A whole lamb roasted over the fire, a whole massive salmon, many chickens, probably more than I’m forgetting, but most relevant to this, enough tomahawk steaks for everyone who wanted one to have their own.

And that I think is the environment where the tomahawk steak really shines. It’s the perfect “walking around” steak, it’s got a big fucking handle of bone built into it. It’s like the turkey leg you’re almost required to get at the Renaissance faire on steroids.

It’s staying true to it being a high-end steak, this was a special event, not something that happens every year and we’re celebrating, but it’s also leaning into the sheer novelty of the steak. It’s goofy and it’s supposed to be, and it’s not trying to pretend otherwise.

As an aside, another friend and I managed to wrangle a standing invitation to return to this when he throws one (it occurs when the local team plays the Vikings in the playoffs) because we’re both burly bearded dudes with no interest in football, so we pretty much stood outside by the fire all night drinking from horns we brought ourselves, and host was stoked to have “actual vikings” there.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

I kind of think of myself as “prepper light” I keep a small stockpile of food and supplies around, have at least general plans for most emergencies that might arise, like I live close to a nuclear plant so I know the evacuation route I’m supposed to take from my home if something ever happens there, what radio station is going to have information, etc. I know what I’m doing if we lose power for an extended period of time, etc.

But I’m not devoting a significant amount of my time to it. A few minutes or hours here or there, a little casual research, the occasional “roughing it” camping trip for fun and practice

But most importantly, I have friends. I’m a pretty all-around capable guy, but there’s a lot of gaps in my knowledge. When it comes to fixing cars, spinning yarn and weaving cloth, more advanced construction, plumbing, gardening, etc. I’m kind of clueless. But I have friends who are really good at those things. If shit ever really hits the fan in whatever sort of “end of the world as we know it” sort of scenario you might be imagining, none of us are going to cut it long-term by ourselves, but with all of our various skills put together we might just stand a chance.

And also I like those people, I want to make sure they make it through it with me.

US

My situation is a little fucked up because I work 12 hour shifts, but PTO is based around 8 hour days because that’s what most employees here work and they haven’t made any special exemptions for us. These numbers are going to be based around 8 hour days because I don’t feel like doing the math

Vacation time- 10 days for new hires, and you get 5 additional days at 5, 13, and 19 years, so assuming I stick around for 19+ years I’ll have 25 days. You can carry over up to 15 unused days to the next year

5 personal days, no carryover

Sick days accrue at 1 day per month, so essentially 12, with unlimited carryover,

1 personal holiday

Certain things like perfect attendance, coming in for overtime, etc. can earn you “flex time” which actually is usually awarded in 12 hour increments.

I’m kind of bad at using my PTO. My schedule is kind of wonky and I work less days overall than most people and tend to just slot most of my vacation plans into that. If I plan things right I also only need to take 2 days off to get a whole week, and every other weekend I have a 3 day weekend. I don’t tend to take a lot of elaborate vacations, 3 day or less trips are kind of my norm. Every couple years I’ll do something a bit more elaborate and take a week or more, but more often my PTO tends to get used for other things besides going on vacation. I have a week coming up that I took off to paint some rooms in my house for example.

I mean, welcome to the world. Sometimes concepts are complicated and require more than a simple dictionary-style definition to fully understand. Otherwise there’d be no use for classes and textbooks and you could learn everything you need to know from a dictionary.

And I did provide some pretty short definitions right at the beginning, the rest is examples and me sort of musing on the terms for further clarification for those who need/want it.

Elsewhere in the comments I think you used the term “misogynist homicide.” If for some reason that term sits better with you, by all means use it, I’d say they’re synonymous, and all of my explanation applies just as much to that term. Language evolves and new words are coined every day, if we can come up with a neat one-word name for something as opposed to clunky 2+ word phrases I’m generally a fan of that.

Also, I think a critical reading of my comment might show you that I also have some misgivings about how we use the term, because like I repeatedly said, it can be damn hard to properly sort out the killers motivations. I think some people are too fast to slap the label on any instance where a woman is killed, especially by a man, and while it’s probably likely that the label is appropriate in the majority of those cases, I don’t think it’s necessarily a useful term to use unless you can clearly explain the misogynistic motivations behind it.

Domestic violence is violence that occurs between people who have a domestic relationship- family members, roommates, romantic/sexual partners, etc. It may or may not rise to the level of murder.

Femicide is killing a woman due to her gender, and there may or may not be a domestic relationship between the killer and the victim.

There’s going to be a lot of overlap and grey areas between the two. Many femicides are domestics, but not all, and not all domestics result in femicide

To provide some examples

1. Sort of your “classic” domestic abuse situation- man beats his wife. Domestic abuse, not a femicide because he’s not killing her.

1.5 He beats her to death. Domestic, and this may ruffle some feathers, but I’m going to say only probably a femicide. I’m sure I’m going to end up saying something like this a lot in this comment and expand on it as I go, but you kind of have to examine the killers thoughts and motivations, and they may not always be totally clear. In probably the vast majority of these kinds of situations you’d probably find there’s sort of an underlying attitude of “I’m the man, she’s the woman, so I can do whatever I want to her” to one degree or another which would make it a pretty cut-and-dry femicide, but I think there’s also cases where he might be just as violent and abusive to other people regardless of gender given the opportunity, which muddies the waters and makes it a little harder to call a femicide, if he was just as likely to kill a man under similar circumstances I don’t know if it necessarily warrants slapping the “femicide” label on it, but it sure as hell looks like one on the surface. I suspect that most places collecting and studying data on this kind of thing would just go ahead and call it a femicide and I’m not going to blame them for that, I don’t think there’s any feasible way to really examine each individual incident with the kind of attention you’d need to properly sort it out, and even if you could, in the end given the sorts of cultural imbalances between men and women that exist, you’d probably end up with the conclusion that the basically all of them do in fact qualify as femicide to some degree and the rest are just kind of a rounding error.

2. Religious extremists kill a woman they see out on the street because (take your pick, she wasn’t dressed “appropriately,” didn’t have a male guardian with her, she dared to have a job or education, etc.) That’s a femicide, but not a domestic because there was no relationship between them.

As an aside, there was a conscious decision on my part in that example to use the gender-neutral “they” in that example. You probably pictured male murderers, I did as well, but on further reflection I think it would be perfectly fair to still call it a femicide even if the perpetrators were women. The victim is still being targeted because she’s a woman who’s not behaving the way they think a woman should.

3. Woman kills her husband. Domestic, murder, not a femicide because the victim was a man.

4. (Here’s where shit really starts getting murky.) Man kills his wife because she was having an affair with another man. Again it’s a domestic, it’s a murder, and its maybe/probably a femicide. It’s a bit harder to nail down the motivation here. There could be a lot of underlying psychological, cultural, interpersonal, etc. baggage here. Did the man kill her just because she was cheating, or does he have, for example, some sort of underlying expectations that because she’s the female partner she’s supposed to be loyal and subservient to him. I don’t know that there’s an easy way to untangle that, and many men may not even really be consciously aware of those sorts of biases they have in the back of their minds. If hypothetically the man way gay/bit/pan/etc. would he have murdered a male partner in the same sort of situation?

5. Wife kills her husband’s mistress. Murder. Kind of a domestic, maybe stretching it a bit because unless he was cheating on her with her sister or something there’s not really a direct domestic relationship between the two women, but there is still an indirect link between them through the husband. Femicide? Again, maybe, for pretty much the same reasons as #4, lots of potential baggage there that would need to be unpacked.

5½. Man kills his cheating wife AND/OR wife’s mistress ~(wife was cheating on him with another woman.)~ Murder✓ Domestic? See above. Femicide? Maybe, again see above, but there’s also potentially an added aspect of “she cheated on me with another woman?” That, in his mind, adds extra insult to just the fact that she was cheating on him, would he have been so quick to jump to Murder if she had cheated on him with a man?

5¾? Woman kills her wife AND/OR her wife’s mistress. Murder- yes. Domestic - see above. Femicide - again see above, probably not a femicide, I think in this one since we’re dealing with a lesbian relationship we’ve kind of reached a point where we’d kind of expect a lot of “traditional” ideas about gender roles and such to be thrown out the window which would sort of take the concept of femicide off the table, but in practice that shit is really deeply ingrained in a lot of people and hard for them to shake entirely. There can still be some lingering notions that “a woman should be faithful to their partner” that they wouldn’t apply equally to men, and so you could make a solid argument for it qualifying as femicide.

6. Man rapes and kills woman jogging alone in the park. Murder? Yes. Domestic? No, no relationship between them. Femicide? Almost certainly yes. I’m sure there could be some edge cases of a rapist lurking in the bushes who would be happy to target the next person who came jogging down the trail regardless of their gender, but far more often they probably specifically were preying on women.

7. Man kills woman in a carjacking. Murder? Yes. Domestic? No. Femicide? Maybe. This could be a situation where they literally just carjacked the first person in a vehicle they come across, so not a femicide, it could have just as easily been a man. Or it could be a case where they specifically targeted a woman because they perceived her as being weaker, easier to victimize, less able to defend herself, etc. which I think would make a compelling argument to call it a femicide.

That’s not meant to be an all-inclusive list by any means of course.

And there’s a lot of complicating factors we could go into that I’ll be honest, I don’t feel like digging into too deep right now and I may hit the character limit if I tried to. Like how trans and nonbinary people fit into the equation, to give a short example a transphobic person kills a trans man who they “see” as a woman, you might say that they had “femicidal intent” or something to that effect, even though the victim was a man, and if they killed a trans woman, their motivations might not have been femicidal, and in their own minds they wouldn’t think they committed femicide, but to the rest of us they committed femicide anyway.

FWIW, if you haven’t already, it may be worth giving the packaging of your “regular” bacon and such a good looking-over

I haven’t done an exhaustive survey, it’s just something I tend to notice because like I said, I dabble in cured meats as a hobby, but at least around me a lot of bacon, hot dogs, etc. across the whole spectrum from bottom of the barrel store brands up to the fancy high-end name brands are touting that they’re “uncured,” and even if they don’t outright say that as a selling point they’re only listing celery powder and natural flavors in the ingredients and no sodium nitrite/nitrate

It’s not all brands by a longshot, but it’s a lot of them.

Not trying to push any kind of cured meat agenda, just kind of giving you something else to look out for, maybe it will give you a few more options or help you discover some other things you should avoid.