It’s okay for some items to be “wear items” while others are held to a different standard.
I think there has definitely been a huge increase in the use of merino wool. It’s nice and soft, doesn’t stink, and handles moisture well, but the fibers are so much smaller than most other types of wool, that they aren’t nearly as durable or warm.
I have wide feet, and I can’t stand having my toes squeezed. What you want to look for is a boot with stitchdown construction. Your most common decent boots have either a storm welt or a Goodyear welt (basically the same thing, but storm welt is better in wet conditions). This involves the upper material wrapping most of the way around your foot and stitching it to the welt (a strip of material around the perimeter of the boot) and the midsole. The welt is then stitched to the outsole. Replacing the outsole then just involves popping those stitches. A cross section of the boot turned sideways looks like a “þ”.
Stitchdown, on the other hand, rather than wrapping in on your feet, turns outward before being stitched down to the midsole and outsole. This results in more of a “D” shape, which is nicer for wide feet.
Not to shill a particular brand, but Jim Green has a lot of good boots (of the work and casual variety) as well as shoes that have a nice, wide toe box, and would be repairable/resolable by any cobbler.
It depends on the level of humidity. In really humid areas, the dust basically fuses to surfaces rather than sitting on top of it. It’s a lot more annoying to clean.
In addition to what others said, they likely have different percentages of livestock. Beef vs. Dairy vs. Sheep, etc
Tbh, I don’t think I’ve ever seen hormone treated milk for sale in the US. They always say “not treated with rbst”, then have the disclaimer that rbst does not produce significantly different milk.
I just assumed the hormone treated cow milk was used for making industrial foods like cheezit cheese or something.
As others mentioned, the geoguessr community has a lot of resources, but it’s largely focused on locations on streets (cause the game is built on Google streetview). Things like streetsigns can really help narrow down a country.
As someone else mentioned, Open Source Intelligence (OSInt) is what you want to be looking for. Investigative journalism sites like Bellingcat actually show their work, which is really cool. For example, they wanted to find the location of a massacre in ethiopia, so they used an app called Peak Visor to match the topology of the mountains in the background to triangulate the position. There’s also tools to use the angle of shadows and things like that. They have tutorials on their site.
Relevant and interesting if you’ve never heard the story.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/great-feather-heist-180968408/
Your mistake is in what you are making your comparisons to. You can’t compare your solid wood bookcase to an Ikea cardboard bookcase, you need to compare it to the fancy brands that actually do make things from solid wood.
The rare occasion that “the thing” ends up being exactly what you needed is incredible, though.
Costco sells them as dog treats
This book describes it well, I think, around page 32.
Basically, helping others keeps you sane.
That sounds awesome. There seems to be a bit of a gulf in investment between getting a few panels to charge a backup battery or run some devices while camping, and actually doing a proper home integration. I’m in the midst of that gulf where I can generate more than I can easily store and use later, so I’d like to find some worthwhile uses for direct use of solar energy.
Don’t know if you’ve seen it before, but here’s an interesting article about direct solar.
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/08/direct-solar-power-off-grid-without-batteries/
The term that people should look out for is “creamline” or “cream-top” milk. It’s whole milk that is unhomogenized. It basically separates in the bottle, so there’s a layer of cream floating on top of skim.
I couldn’t say for sure, but I’ve heard it’s better for making cheese/yogurt/etc.
Personally, I wouldn’t buy it just for drinking cause I don’t think it lasts as long.
Did you manually switch it on once your battery storage was full?
What kind of heating element did you use for the water? What type of control system to send power to it?
Crossbow bolts and modern arrows are not something you could produce more of in an apocalyptic scenario. A trad bow can use wooden arrows, but producing arrows capable of taking down large game is quite a challenge, and not something you can just go out and do in a pinch with a pocket knife and some sticks.
Arrows are reusable, but as someone who bow hunts, 100 bullets would probably last longer for me than a dozen arrows. If you miss your target, you can easily lose an arrow, or break it on a rock, break it on bone, break it by hitting your own arrow. Damaged arrows are really dangerous to try to use.
I see where you are coming from, but I think there are better ways to handle those issues than blanket tariffs. For example, you can get clothes from Bangladesh for cheaper than Norway because Bangladesh pays workers much less, (probably) has much lower environmental regulations, and the focus is on price over quality.
Adding a tariff to goods from Bangladesh would not improve the goods, it would just squeeze the business to cut even more corners to remain competitive, and likely put a lot of poor people out of work. Additionally a tariff on goods from a country is likely to be retaliated.
If the end goal is reducing production of garbage products at great impact to the environment and the workers, laws can focus specifically on those factors. We already place antidumping and counterveiling duties on goods that we deem are priced with unfair business practices, why not do more of the same for unfair labor practices, or environmental practices?
If someone can pay Ethiopian farmers a fair wage to produce landrace coffee (where it grows natively), and the environmental costs of shipping it to the US are accounted for, I don’t think it should be arbitrarily upcharged relative to monocrop coffee grown in a narrow band of expensive former rainforest in Hawaii.
I hear you on the streaming sticks. 10 years ago, you could throw a Chromecast in your suitcase, plug it into a hotel TV, and cast anything you wanted from your phone. Now, if you try to do that, you have to set the Chromecast up through the Google home app, tell it what “room” it’s in, but then you can’t cause you arent at your “home”, so you have to set up a new “home”, and then that doesn’t usually work, so you just quit and read a book instead.
As a non Australian, I didn’t know wittenoom, but I’m pretty sure I know of it from the old videos of asbestos shoveling competitions that went around a few years back.
I think the smallest Australian town I know is oodnadatta, but I don’t know why I know it. I also had to look up if “nullarbor” was a city, or just a place name, so idk if that counts.
https://www.goral-shoes.co.uk/products/the-smugs-horween-natural-pre-order
Certainly out of my price range, lol. To make a long story short, though, sneakers (and all other athletic foam-based shoes) are inherently not durable, nor designed to be. To get long life out of footwear, you really need to wear more traditionally constructed (i.e., no foam) shoes or boots for 95% of the time, and save athletic footwear for when it’s needed. You don’t even really need foamy shoes for all athletics.
I’m lucky if I can get 700 km out of a standard pair of running shoes, but foamless (or foam-lite) “barefoot” shoes like xeroshoes have a 5000 mile warranty.