201–210 of 245 posts
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That would limit career prospects in many fields.
It’s definitely true. I’m basically a T shirt and shorts guy and my son once told me it is a “flex”. I was surprised, and it really opened my eyes.
as opposed to what? having to wear a suit and tie?
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When I was still going through life as a man, I had two dozen white dress shirts (12 short, 12 long sleeved...), three pairs of pants, a suit and summer and a winter jacket. The shirts would still be fine after wearing and washing them a hundred times or more. I replaced them at a rate of four a year... After coming out as trans, getting a new wardrobe was fun, but... It's been a year, and some dresses really fall ap…
Would gothy-style, belt-heavy designs work well here? I imagine Victorian women didn't rotate clothes at the rate implied here. This seems just ... bad
(The first dress my wife gave me was one of those, a large, red early medieval style dress. It is incredibly solid, but it makes me feel like an extra from Handmaid's Tale.)
The article describes a world of affluence, reaching deep into the poorest parts of Africa. Gone are the days when people would have to be naked when they washed the only piece of clothing they owned. Somehow this eradication of third world poverty is bad. Because everything is bad if you want to think of it that way. Just one point: Clothing ending up in landfills are a form of carbon sequestration.
Yes. We're using the poorest parts of Africa as garbage dump. We're not helping these people prosper, quite the contrary; we're destroying local economies.
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Is affluence having things or having work? One of the first big and important sectors for developing nations is tailoring as it is a manufacturing sector that everyone has a need for and requires minimal skill and material. Dumping huge amounts of unwanted clothing on relatively poor countries effectively eliminates one of the most important rungs on the development ladder.
Affluence is having things. The real affluent don't work at all. The clothing can't both be unwanted and outcompete local manufacturers.
Of course it can. You can have a vast mountain of worthless fabric that's not wanted by anyone and still have enough usable and useful pieces of clothing besides that to destroy any local manufacturing.
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Would gothy-style, belt-heavy designs work well here? I imagine Victorian women didn't rotate clothes at the rate implied here. This seems just ... bad
There's no benefit in producing robust clothing that can be washed and worn over many years if the populace at large is unwilling to pay for that robustness. You'll just spend money to get provide a feature very few people actually care about and you'll hurt your competitiveness. Much of the population was trained to be good little consumers and that's just what they are doing.
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In case she is open to discussing this, it's a fairly common problem. It can be resolved by finding another source of praise, for example volunteer work or teaching, or exceeding in extra activities in her field. She is not needing new clothes but attention, and there are healthy ways to achieve that. Experience: my own (as a woman) and various friends over the years.
Hey please have a look at my reply above. My wife would definitely love to make better friends to talk about something other than clothes/earrings. As a woman how do you handle such situations when your self worth is evaluated by the newer clothes/things you wear as opposed to talking about your success in your career?
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In case she is open to discussing this, it's a fairly common problem. It can be resolved by finding another source of praise, for example volunteer work or teaching, or exceeding in extra activities in her field. She is not needing new clothes but attention, and there are healthy ways to achieve that. Experience: my own (as a woman) and various friends over the years.
Hey please have a look at my reply above. My wife would definitely love to make better friends to talk about something other than clothes/earrings. As a woman how do you handle such situations when your self worth is evaluated by the newer clothes/things you wear as opposed to talking about your success in your career?
Is it possible your wife has lower self-esteem? It becomes a vicious circle, as you seek ways to increase it using the best ways you know, until you become self-aware enough to step out of the pattern. Does she have opportunities to be praised by other women for non-material or visual qualities? We all need this.
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Clothes are a small source of CO2 emissions compared to transportation and electricity. > Just as the pandemic accelerated global cooperation and change No, cooperation has gotten worse . Look at how many countries want to repatriate industries so they're not dependent on others. > Today I do all my shopping considering what it would be like to burn it. Car shopping would be so much fun. I'll just leave that one ther…
Haha, the trash issue actually did help my consumption. I didn't have much of a choice at the time, so I lived like I was camping and did manage to keep my trash down to almost nothing. I had a laptop, clothes and some gadgets. Many drinks come in bottles which really do get re-used. I can get meat and veggies at the market with no packaging. Certainly, burning trash isn't good for the environment though. As for chea…
I don't think there's anything special about clothes that make them particularly hard to dispose of, unlike e-waste. My municipality has warnings specifically for e-waste, but none for clothing. The non-cynical view of why we ship ewaste and/or clothes to china is that they're valuable on net, even if 80% of it or whatever are thrown away. You see this with e-waste. They're not just imported into the country and then dumped in the nearest river/landfill. They're sent to a recycling center where scavengers pick through them to recover what's left.
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Haha, the trash issue actually did help my consumption. I didn't have much of a choice at the time, so I lived like I was camping and did manage to keep my trash down to almost nothing. I had a laptop, clothes and some gadgets. Many drinks come in bottles which really do get re-used. I can get meat and veggies at the market with no packaging. Certainly, burning trash isn't good for the environment though. As for chea…
>The origin countries may have logistical difficulties with certain types of things which would otherwise go into a landfill. Throw one shirt into the landfill? Fine. Bring dump-trucks of clothes? Maybe now we have a problem. Same for E-waste (also an issue here in the form of used computers which are barely usable.) I don't think there's anything special about clothes that make them particularly hard to dispose of,…
Watched an interesting video of how H&M are dealing with textile waste:
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The answer is "yes". This is part of what makes America (and the rest of the world) so rich compared to the past. A while ago I was looking to buy a small knife for the kitchen and I found a whole pack of them. The average cost of each knife was 60 cents. The meal you prepare with that knife is going to cost more than the knife itself. That just blew me away. Imagine showing this kind of wealth to somebody from the m…
> Imagine showing this kind of wealth to somebody from the medieval period. modern industrial production is mind bogglingly large scale. It required over 200 years of continuous investment (in aggregate) to achieve, however, so it was not cheap. And we reap that progress today.