There is a generation of little old ladies who are passionate about sewing, but have no-one to sew for. Their kids are grown, and their grandkids don’t want handmade clothes. Ask at a senior center or at a local (not chain) fabric shop, seek out one of these ladies and hire her to sew for you. Or barter: help her around the house or garden or drive her to appointments or to get groceries, and in exchange she sews clothes from fabrics and patterns you choose. Or tailors used clothes to make them fit you better, or mends your worn clothes, etc.

Here’s an excellent place to start: https://tincanknits.com/collection/the-simple-collection

And “run” the heels and ball of the foot so they felt down and last longer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fKKLOUNOHU

I did a deep-dive reading and watching videos learning about sturdy and long-lasting fabrics and materials. Learned a bit about tailoring for durability, too. (For example, Duluth Trading shifted the inseams on their Firehose pants forward. The forward seams don’t rub on each other when you walk, and so the inner thighs don’t self-destruct as quickly.)

There are also a ton of excellent resources on how to mend clothing and properly care for it. And it doesn’t take much effort, really.

So now I have a bunch of older clothes, with subtle repairs, still in good shape. Sure, I’d like some sexy new trendy disposable stuff so I can be one of the cool kids - but that’s how fast fashion gets its claws into you. Preying on our magpie-like desires for shiny new things makes somebody big bucks. (And creates huge waste and exploits desperate workers.)

Buy sturdy “classic” clothes. Keep them in good repair. Fight the system.

Yep, it will be free for California residents in need, and much cheaper for everyone else. Pharma corps have been running amok raising insulin costs insane amounts. California can make their own and provide it directly to residents for far less money than they spend buying it from the companies.

They want to stop a certain type of population from declining. Can’t let them be replaced, y’know! Of course, the planet’s human population is exploding… unless you don’t consider some people to be human.

“The universe danced towards life. Life was a remarkably common commodity. Anything sufficiently complicated seemed to get cut in for some, in the same way that anything massive enough got a generous helping of gravity. The universe had a definite tendency towards awareness. This suggested a certain subtle cruelty woven into the very fabric of space-time.”

• Terry Pratchett, Soul Music

Despite claims by school officials that the adaptation had not been approved, KFDM notes that the book “was on a reading list sent to parents at the start of the school year,” so the district’s suggestion that the teacher “went rogue” seems…not true at all in the, y’know, actual sense of the word. A source close to the teacher told KFDM that the school’s principal had approved a syllabus that included the book. “There is an active investigation,” Mike Canizales, a spokesperson for the Hamshire-Fannett ISD, told the outlet.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/09/texas-school-fires-teacher-over-anne-frank-graphic-novel

Dusting cloths: tear old cotton flannel sheets into squares. You can do this to sheets in your own rag-bag, or buy sheets at the charity shop. Old towels work well, too. They can be washed and re-used for quite a while. Old cotton knits work fine, if you don’t mind waving your dingy old tightie-whities and sweat stained tees around.

Anything soft and slightly fuzzy, and if the cloth alone doesn’t do the trick all you have to do is get it damp with plain water.

No, correlation does not mean there is a relationship. That’s the whole point behind “correlation does not equal causation.”

Read some of the ludicrous correlations people trot out to illustrate it. Two things occurring at the same time do not have to be related.

And no, I couldn’t use that meaningless population statistic to make the argument that oligarchs (lower case “o”) are destroying everyone else’s ability to have a family. Arguments require data, not correlations.

people who live longer take longer to pass on their house to their children; the older generation have also used housing as an investment vehicle and/or purchased second/holiday homes; and the elderly are typically the most likely to object to new housing developments, blocking their construction.

I don’t know anyone who inherited a house.

I don’t know anyone whose parents own more than one house.

I personally have objected to a large condo building that was planned on an unstable hillside with only a steep alley for access - cuz that shit was stupid in so many ways and a disaster waiting to happen.

Where is this huge population of wealthy old people who own multiple houses, and where are all these young people who are inheriting houses?

Just maybe we should be getting pissed at job insecurity, ruinous healthcare being used to chain workers, and falling wages for the source of wealth inequality…. Pretty hard to buy a house when your boss makes 500x what you do. (He’s making all that delicious money off you).

Nice to see that Divide And Conquer propaganda tactics are still going strong. Aleksandr Dugin would be so proud.

“Ok, fellow kids! Let’s all blame our own parents and grandparents, not that tiny population of oligarchs!”

Hmmmmm… processed slurry of animal cells grown in a chemical bath vs tasty plate of beans and rice from the neighborhood taco truck.

Which is more affordable?

Which has less environmental impact?

(Something about lab-grown meat gets up my nose, and I can’t quite articulate why.)

Russia probably saw this weakness

Good ol’ “Foundations of Geopolitics” by Aleksandr Dugin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics

“Hallucinate” seems like an odd vocabulary choice when talking about an AI. It implies much more sentience than an AI can possibly have, plus the ability to spontaneously create from whole-cloth. (Which AI can’t do, at all.)

I feel like our brave new culture needs a different word for the non-sensical/inaccurate products of AI; something with the flavors of “assemble” “fabricate” “construct” “collate” “collage” “grab-bag”.

Our vocabulary isn’t keeping up with technology. Is there a linguist in the house? We need more words!

The word “privilege” breaks down into the roots for “private” and “law.”

“Jab” got adopted in the US when the disinformation memes and stuff started flooding into social media. The creators of the memes learned British English, so they used British slang.

If you are sick with anything contagious throw on a mask if you go out in public. Common courtesy.

If your immune system is compromised, you are already wearing a mask in public anyway.

If you are visiting people in fragile health, you are already wearing a mask anyway.

Fun fact: I have some foreign colleagues who use ChatGPT to get the base for their patient reports. They give very short(and non personal!) instructions, a nice text pops out, they add in the details. Voila. Their report is better than mine as a native.

In the end, how is this different than using a good Epic template? Sit down and create a wardrobe of templates and smart-phrases for your reports. It will end up as fast as those ChatGPT texts, but it will be your own writing and details that you control. Epic has several different ways to import and copy other people’s templates, too. You could even use one of those ChatGPT reports to create part of your template if you like.

A similar study (observational) found eating tree nuts reduced recurrance of cancers by 50% in cancer survivors.

Tree nuts are pretty expensive. I sort of think it’s more likely that being financially secure reduced recurrance of cancers by 50%.