We had all the info yesterday, kid was a terminally online groyper. If "the left" can do nothing and still be blamed for everything, what exactly is the way forward?
One way forward is to stop all this ridiculous left/right dichotomy. It looks like the fascists have taken over the USA, so there's only Trump-adorers and everyone else. There's actual masked men rounding up people of colour on the streets, so it's not like the fascism can even be denied.
That's the answer, but the question was rhetorical for the person I was replying to. The outgroup is getting larger, yet people are failing to acknowledge that all the accusations at this point are just bad faith, surface level excuses for said fascism.
While it's true that they aren't designed to not last as long, not lasting as long is a side effect of their design decisions.
The primary reason for the tendency of clothing to wear out faster is the textile manufacturing processes allow for the production of thinner fabrics at a cheaper cost per yard. As anyone who sews or knits can tell you, thinner fabric wears out faster. It allows companies like Zara, H&M, Walmart, Rack, et al to sell their product at marginal cost increase for higher YoY profits with a faster replacement cycle.
Furthermore, it's a plainly stated business strategy of fast fashion that fungibility and the production of disposable consumables is core to their business. As that type of fashion cannibalized market share from more traditional brands that banked on quality more than affordability in the 90s, those same brands responded by creating separate imprints ( Off Fifth, Rack, et al ) or just wholesale adoption of the approach ( e.g. H&M ).
Fast forward to 2025 and we're having a conversation about whether or not the quality delta in clothing is real or a Mandela Effect. The reality is unfortunately the more banal "number go up by any means necessary" explanation.
Mostly agreed. This is what I meant by them not necessarily being lower quality. In many ways, it is a by product of the race to super thin threads. Which, amusingly, used to be a sign of ultra high quality. :D
And clothing has always been a consumable. Always.
Late to this party, wanted to add something here. Wholly agree with your perspective.
The counter-trend to this is the structural-first approach to TS, which eschews return types, and uses mechanisms like the 'satisfies' keyword to ensure that the type evaluates against known symbols, while maintaining the language-server inferred type product in all contexts. The tl;dr goal of this method is to make code that presses compiler-safety at every edge.†
Inversely, the JSDoc method sees you explicitly define everything, and what you save is writing a d.ts file (sometimes). You can pass the TS compiler over it, but it's not going to give you the incremental typing benefit. What you get are a bunch of black boxes with a published contract and a pretend-really-hard approach to typing.
That is frequently fine in cases like libraries. What I worry about is your average dev†† assuming this objectively traction-control-off approach to writing JavaScript approach is good, or rigorous. I don't doubt the svelte team is perfectly capable of writing code in this mode of delivery, and has an armada of tests to back up the proposition. The average dev always opts for easy, and therefore will take to this approach with gusto, but balk at the testing that is necessary to make up for some of the blackbox behavior (blind calls, function internal any, implicit unknown passing that TS would reject, et al) that may not be fully consistent with the behavior the purported type signatures suggest.
†for the sake of argument, I'll define "average dev" as people with a few years of experience still feeling out their place in the industry, and the 9-5 contingent who may or may not own a computer at home and like that paycheck.
††I don't necessarily rep this approach, it's just the other extreme*
- A scarcity based mindset would argue that more life is inherently bad, see Malthus.
- A longtermist would argue that more life at any cost is better because it increases the statistical likelihood that some good would happen even as it increases the scope of potential catastrophe.
- An existentialist would argue that a life of captivity, born to die with no right to self-determination is not a life worth living
- Socrates would likely argue it doesn't matter because the chickens and the cows won't examine their life to extract any meaning at all
- Utilitarians would say people are getting fed either way, so go for the most efficient means.
- etc etc
This is a question of subjective valuation, and as such will never have a definite answer. It will also be subject to whatever framework the reader subscribes to.
The questions surrounding environmental impact, scale, food pipeline stability, et al are more measurable and able to deliver a quantitative "better or worse" conclusion given sufficient framing. To my mind that makes them more interesting.
