Oh lol, no this was in Maryland and I've seen the dude there years later so I'm pretty sure he's a local.

Does not shock me at all that bikers selling leather goods would be a common farmer's market staple haha

Yes but if the best thing you can say about your product is it meets the legal criteria for being called leather, it brings to question why that would be your selling point.

There are grades of leather, and yes you could call them all genuine, in practice anything advertised as "genuine leather" instead of "top grain leather" or "full grain leather" is just meeting the minimum legal standard for calling itself leather.

You can definitely make a product that is 99% cardboard and plastic and 1% animal hide and call it genuine leather. Pretty much every cheap fast-fashion belt I've ever seen was built this way.

I'm honestly not familiar with that.

I imagine belts are not their bread and butter revenue stream, belts seem like the sort of thing you'd manufacture if you're already manufacturing lots of other leather products and have materials that would go to waste otherwise.

Honestly the thing is you can't go to a typical retail store and buy a leather belt. They sell "genuine leather" belts, but "genuine leather" can literally be cardboard wrapped in vinyl (so it looks like leather but that's it). Despite its name, "genuine leather" is actually the lowest quality material that can be legally advertised as leather.

I bought my belt from a biker looking dude at the farmers market like eight years ago, it's warped a little from the way pants pull on it but it's still going strong, and I honestly can't imagine it will break in my lifetime. I'm sure there are online specialty shops that sell real leather belts.

Leather is a very strong material, your body weight really isn't enough to break it, so if your belts aren't holding up then it's most likely because they're not actually leather. A good leather belt is a buy it for multiple lifetimes product.

The main thing is that instead of it being two blades with straight edges that "cut" something, it has two thicker blades with at least one of them being serrated. This in effect means the scissors "chew" through material instead of cutting it.

This means they're much better for cutting heavier things, like copper wire or sheet metal.

That being said, if you don't need to cut strands of copper wire on a regular basis, I might actually recommend gardening shears for most people's uses. They "cut" like traditional scissors, but have one flat and dull blade, and the handles are designed to give you mechanical advantage so you can cut fairly thick things like small tree branches. You can use them to cut anything you'd use electrician's scissors for, they just might not give you the clean edge on the copper wires for a very long time like you'd expect if you were an electrician doing that a lot with electrician's scissors. They're also just about as good as cutting sheet metal as tin snips are, while being much more versatile. Again, if you're not cutting sheet metal on a regular basis, you probably don't need a tool that's designed specifically for cutting sheet metal.

I wouldn't call myself a scissor snob but I do a lot of DIY things, my career is in technology, and I do a lot of camping. So I own at least like a dozen pairs of scissors and have used a bunch of other hand-held cutting tools.

Just to add on to this:

Think of a thermos like normal cup with a lid and a blanket wrapped around it.

The lid prevents hot air from escaping, hot air escaping makes room for more hot air and steam that then escapes, and the lid basically just keeps heat from escaping through that series of events.

The blanket (usually a gap of air between two layers of metal, but sometimes glass, sometimes styrofoam) does what blankets are made to do and doesn't transfer heat, so the heat inside the cup doesn't leak out through the blanket much.

This is what keeps your beverage hot - the fact that all the ways heat usually leaks out of it are sealed up well, so it takes a lot longer for the heat to leave the liquid. Same thing with cold beverages - the protective barriers of the thermos keep the heat outside of the cup from getting in.

This also means you can enhance any thermos or cooler with your own blankets. Literally wrapping a cooler in a blanket will keep the stuff inside cold much longer than any amount of engineering plastic into a layers of foam (which is basically how most coolers work - they use plastic foam as a blanket). Similarly, putting your thermos inside of a blanket will keep it better isolated as well. I have no idea how long you could expect to keep something hot, but with enough blanket you could conceivably get days out of it.