How to assess the quality of garments (2014)

The Vimes example is about the fact that being poor to start with is more expensive in its own right.

Vimes does not make a stupid decision not to buy the expensive boots, they are simply more than he can afford in any reasonable period.

There is another saying "making your first million is hard, making your second million is inevitable"

This is demonstrably, dramatically false.

"The headline could be "The number of people in extreme poverty fell by 130,000 since yesterday” and they wouldn’t have this headline once, but every single day since 1990, since, on average, there were 130,000 people fewer in extreme poverty every day." https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-condit...

Both the quality and duration of life for "the poor" have increased dramatically over the last decades and centuries. https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy-globally

For a "real-time" visualization, see https://worldpoverty.io/index.html

We aren't doing as well as we'd like to be, but the world is making dramatic progress.

What may be lacking is a section on printed garments.

Sportswear is another matter. These are technical clothes, designed for performance, with characteristics that depends on the particular sport. You won't use the same clothes for mountaineering and for weightlifting at the gym.

For day to day wearing, my preferences goes to light hiking clothes. They tend to be:

- Comfortable

- Reasonably durable

- Quick drying

- Breathable and/or waterproof

- Not too flashy, acceptable in most settings

- With pockets, often with zippers

- Low maintenance, somewhat stain and dirt resistant

For a summer commute from SF to Sacramento I'll bring a waxed cotton raincoat. After all, that's what all the people wear in that city that is famous for rain.

Or I can take a deep breath, admit to myself that I'm not a domain expert, and forge a relationship with someone who is.

This expert will use clues from the relationship to help me choose a garment. Maybe they find out I'm generally never in the elements for greater than 5 minutes. So they show me this dinky little windbreaker that is so light it can actually fit in my pocket. They explain how it isn't actually waterproof but it has a treatment that makes water bead off, and the ease of shaking it off and small size might be a decent tradeoff given my situation.

So now I'm carrying vastly less weight with a useful garment. I never would have chosen it on my own because my non-expert brain fixated on the word "waterproof" as if it were a boolean. Meanwhile, the domain expert measured the time it takes for water to penetrate the seams and found it plenty long enough to meet my needs.

> Anybody wants a nice, not-bulky, warm winter coat: buy it in Canada.

The current trailblazer is almost certainly Patagonia's micro puff jacket which uses a synthetic fill that AFAICT reaches the warmth-to-weight ratio of down. (Added potential benefit that the synthetic fill would continue to insulate if wet while down won't.)

Patagonia is a U.S. company, so you missed out on the latest greatest by choosing based on country conditions.

I'm being super finicky, and of course there are Canadian-made non-bulky winter jackets. But this thread started with someone wearing cotton in the summer heat. Such a person can just as easily buy a cotton hoody in Canada.