HelixDab

THIS is what's going to bite him in the ass.

This is a huge case. It's going to take hundreds, if not thousands of billable hours. Any attorney that's competent that takes this case has to know that they're probably not going to see even a fraction of that money, meaning that they'll be without income for a long period of time. A competent attorney that's not ideologically motivated and independently wealthy is unlikely to be able to take the case. (An _in_competent attorney that doesn't realize this fact might take the case, and then not be allowed to withdraw from the case by the judge.)

Second, Trump has a history of running his mouth in public. The attorneys that are going to be defending him need to have national security clearances in order to be effective counsel. If Trump talks about the cases in public, he could cost his attorneys their security clearances, which would not only impede their ability to defend him, but could also prevent them from being able to defend similar clients in the future. If I was an attorney, that would be a really big fucking deal. Not only would I be unlikely to be get paid, but there would be a real risk that Trump could harm my ability to earn income in the future.

If I was a competent attorney with a track record of defending this kind of case, this case would be radioactive.

Just a thought that's gonna disappear into the aether...

The amount Huff-spez was going to charge Apollo was the opportunity cost, not the real cost. That is, they figured that each Reddit users was worth X amount each month, give or take, in revenue that could be generated from tracking and advertisement. That actual cost per user was more like 5% of X. If Huffspez was being honest and transparent about this, he could say to users, hey, if you pay X per month, we'll turn off all advertisements, not sell any of the data associated with your usage, and stop tracking you as much as possible and still have our site work. (I know tracking can't stop completely, but it can be reduced.) But that's not what is being presented to end users; they're only being given the ability to use the official reddit app.

Then again, the promise of cable television and streaming services was that we would pay for the service, and not be force to watch ads. And then companies figured out that they could be more profitable by also selling ads, and then requiring subscribers to pay even more to reduce the number of ads. So any claims from Huffspez that you could subscribe and not be tracked etc. would have been, rightly, viewed with derision.

I can't go back; they banned my account, after 12 years, and a few hundred thousand karma. I like to think that, in some small way, I helped make reddit a better place than it had been. And now I couldn't contribute, even if I wanted to.

But really, why would I want to? The point of contributing to a community is to make it better for everyone. Huffman/spez has made it clear that these contributions are not valued, even though they're the currency that allows them to make money by selling advertisements.

Oh, and I think that more linen is being grown now, since flax seed and flax oil seems to be more popular as general food items now. I use a lot of flax meal when I make my grain-flour-free/sugar-free banana bread, because it helps prevent the 'bread' from feeling excessively dry. So maybe we'll start seeing more linen in the market as a byproduct of the flax seed and oil production?

Linen is also a lot easier to work with. Hemp wovens are not very stable at all; the fibers slide around on each other, so you can easily end up with skewed pattern pieces. It also ravels easily. The 14oz hemp twill I've got is quite nice, but it's a challenging material to work with if you're used to 10-12 cotton denim.

I believe--IIRC, and it's been a while--that Tencel is either a specific process for making rayon, or is a brand. What you should be looking for in rayon that makes it better is closed-loop manufacturing. But US product labeling doesn't require that kind of information; you'd have to ask the company that made the apparel, and they'd have to ask their mill or reseller.

Finding information about how green any part of the sewn-products industry is is very nearly an exercise in futility, unfortunately; companies don't have to have the information, and they don't have to disclose it.

That reminds me - I need to donate to Wikimedia.

It's not that simple. The fabric most commonly made from bamboo is rayon, and rayon can be made from any cellulose fiber. Most rayon processes are actually pretty awful; they produce a lot of waste that's not great for the environment. Rayon--regardless of the source of the cellulose--is weaker than cotton, and tends to tear very easily when wet. You can process bamboo in a way that is much more environmentally responsible, but then you get a fiber that's more like linen rather than cotton. But very little bamboo fabric is made that way.

Overall, hemp is probably the most environmentally friendly fiber out there. It's not perfect, but it requires less pesticides, can be used as part of crop rotation (for the few farmers that do rotate crops), and needs less water to grow. It also grows in more climate zones. The fibers are harder to work with, and water is usually required to process them to a useful state, but you get very long staple fibers that are quite strong.

I suspect that it's not quite that simple. AFAIK, Reddit simply isn't profitable, and they need to make it profitable. Or at least break even. Reverting to mean isn't the answer, because they'd just keep losing money. But I don't know what the real solution is. Obviously they advertise, but people using the non-official apps don't see those, and people that use the old.reddit.com with layered ad blocking scripts also don't see ads; that means those users are costing them money, and not earning them any money.

I don't know what the solution is. Pissing off and losing a massive segment of your user base cuts costs, but also cuts your potential ad revenue.

Eh, sexuality is political though. It's easy to think that it's not, or shouldn't be, especially if you're straight and surrounded by other people that are also straight. The personal is always political, and the political is personal. Most of use don't have to worry about needing a space of refuge because we conform well enough to the majority viewpoint that we're not constantly in tension. The mere fact that someone has a different skin color than me shouldn't be political, but we've got centuries of racism to one degree or another demonstrating that it is.

I understand what you're getting at, and I agree that sexuality, gender identity, skin color, etc., shouldn't be a problem for everyone, or anyone. OTOH, I also think that certain worldviews--such as the idea that black people should be forcibly expatriated to Africa and Jews should be murdered, and that both of these things are morally correct--should be both politicized and excised from society. I'm fairly libertarian, in that I think that what I do as an individual that doesn't cause direct, immediate harm to other individuals shouldn't be an issue. But borders get mushy and slippery, because no one exists in a total vacuum.

Anyway. Shit's complicated.

I'm not sure that you can separate the concept of safe spaces out from politics, in much the same way that you can't separate your individual identity from politics. I'm not saying that they're a bad thing, but I do think that they're inherently political. People tend to want to segregate into spaces where they don't have to constantly keep their guard up.