I only ever hear about Shein in a negative light. It's never been entirely clear to me why Forever21's and H&M's disposable clothing is somehow morally superior to Shein's.
They are remarkably less disposable. That's how bad Shein is. I worked in the industry in a past life and I've seen how the sausage is made. Shein has got the nastiest sausage.
Anecdotally, I have heard that there is three towns where a predominant amount of Shein clothes are made and while people are free to leave, they’re paid in “company bucks” akin to company towns in the late 1800s/early 1900s US.
They steal designs from independent fashion designers (because designing their own clothes would cost too much I guess). It's also the volume with Shein. They produce so much crap at such low prices and it's all just dumped into an already struggling environment. Shein is far from the only one, but it's the most obvious and well known example.
I think people just look at the price and assume it must be terrible, somehow.
Fast fashion gets a bad rap because of the assumptions about consumer behavior and labor. Almost all clothing is terrible for the environment and for the people manufacturing it, anyway. I have many H&M items that are nearly a decade old and are still wearable.
As long as the piece is durable, it should be fine.
I might be extreme, as I prefer fewer stuff of better quality, that last years. Like a pair of jeans that I can wear every day for years.
I still have a few things from F21 and H&M that I bought 7-10 years ago. Definitely the exception and not the rule, but I don't think any Shein clothing can last even a fraction as long as that.
Why the "but cigarettes"? Is it harder than the other substances to shake, or are you more interested in maintaining consumption? Really curious. My dad's smoked cigars for nearly 60 years, and he's never been able to quit.
From talking to people who have been long term quitters, the urge to smoke never leaves.
My dad told me about smokers in the B-17s in WW2. They'd fly at 35,000 feet in unpressurized airplanes. There wasn't enough oxygen to keep the cigarette lit. So what they'd do is take a breath from the oxygen mask, blow it on the cigarette, whereby it would burn like a torch. Then they'd take a puff. The cigarette would begin to sputter and die, whereupon they'd take another breath from the oxygen mask, and the dance would repeat.
After the war, things were pretty bad in Germany. People would follow GIs around, and when they were done with a cigarette, they'd flick away the butt. People would rush to grab the butt, from which they'd harvest a few grains of tobacco. Eventually, they'd get enough to roll into a new cigarette, and sell it.
That sentence caught me, too. The fear of Google downranking AI-generated content with its left hand, while creating and promoting its own Bard bot-generated content with its right hand. Can an ai-generated snake choke on its own tail? Or is it tails...
"The tech industry's mistake was all collectively setting up shop in a small handful of trendy, dense, expensive cities and not investing in housing, transit, or otherwise doing anything to improve the collective quality of life of those cities."
Hat tip to you, Legitster. Louder for the expensive seats upfront.
Say what you will of the robber barons of old, but if you tour the cities of the midwest you will see testaments all over of how they at least tried to improve the livability during their time. They built affordable housing, libraries, bus depots, schools, etc out of their or their company's profits just so they could attract people to, like, Bloomington Illinois.
Opinions like this drive me bonkers. The mass movement to remote work wasn't an "experiment" we all "opted into", it was a necessity driven by a global pandemic. Putting the narrative on equal plane as "choosing avocado toast" makes my blood boil. We went remote because we had to. We fled cities because we had to. It was our civic duty to "flatten the curve" and save lives. My hat for a bit of nuance and grace.
That's because certain types of CEO feel a need to feel relevant by getting media exposure. They are not the majority. They are a small minority. But these certain types, whenever they feel just a little bit irrelevant, they run to a microphone and start blabbering the most inflammatory statements that they can think of. And then they get the attention they crave.
Even if this CEO's opinion was precisely the one that he expressed, it makes no sense at all to express it. Why would he potentially damage his company's standing by making unnecessarily inflammatory statements? What is the benefit for OpenAI from this?
His full quote: "I think definitely one of the tech industry’s worst mistakes in a long time was that everybody could go full remote forever, and startups didn’t need to be together in person and, you know, there was going to be no loss of creativity,"
To give him credit, he was saying something a bit more nuanced it just got chopped up by the headline.
