fwiw, here is an emacs version:

https://codeberg.org/martianh/lem.el#headline-11

I think what would be most useful would be a usenet→lemmy gateway, so that rich catalog of usenet clients can be leveraged on Lemmy.

breathability is the key criteria for clothing. Polyester and synthetic fabrics are nearly all terrible at this compared to natural fibres.

Natural fibers cannot be grouped together in this way because there is a huge variation.

This is where cotton fails and synthetic microfibers come out ahead. Cotton retains water, swells when wet, and suffocates as water tension spans the threads that are thickened by the swelling. Synthetic microfibers wick moisture away, and do not swell when wet, which gives excellent breathability. Cotton is fine as long as you don’t sweat. Or exceptionally, if it’s extremely hot in some windy situations the water retention can be a plus. I used to don cotton and hose myself down before getting on a motorcycle on a hot dry day. The evaporative cooling effect worked wonders with the high relative wind. But outside of that niche, such as sports, microfibers are king which is why sporting goods shops fetch high prices for high tech synthetics. As someone who sweats profusely more than normal, cotton is a non-starter in warm climates. Evaporation from soggy cotton simply cannot keep up with the rate that I add sweat. So a cotton t-shirt gets soaked in sweat and remains wet the whole workout session, and for days thereafter.

I used to wear tighty whities which made my gear sweat. Switched to Pategonia boxers and wow what a difference in breathability.

Wool and synthetics are similar w.r.t. comfort hence the term “smart wool”. But indeed natural wool is pricey and non-vegan.

Doesn’t sound familiar, but maybe there is more than two.

(edit) just had a brief look at bombas. They seem like a great product but I didn’t see notice of a lifetime warranty.

Voting with your money works. But only when there are good options to vote for.

There are a couple BifL sock makers, but no BifL underwear makers. That’s the problem. If someone made loose-fitting stretchy aramid boxers with a drawstring that lasts 1+ lifetimes, people would pay $100/ea for them.

HUGE amounts of clothes are being trashed, many of them new; never worn. I wish I kept the link around. There were several articles in the past few years showing massive piles of clothes along the coastline of some poverty-stricken countries, with all the dyes leeching into the ocean. Fast fashion is the culprit.

Probably what disgusts me the most are political campaign t-shirts. Surely it’s the worst instance of obsolescence by design in clothing. Andrew Yang claimed to be an environmentalist yet his campaign t-shirts were made of non-sustainable cotton. Attempts to spotlight that were censored by Reddit.

If it’s OK and just doesn’t fit I donate it.

All the charities collecting clothes in my area are fussy. They want no flaws, and they want clothes to be cleaned. Apparently there is no infrastructure for repairing them or even simply washing them. Neighbors don’t bother… they just stuff a trash bag with clothes and put it out with other trash. Sometimes someone notices that and tears open the bag and rifles through it for stuff. I’ve moved into places where the previous tenant just left clothes and blankets behind. I dumped them in the clothing donation bins anyway, without washing. But it’s dicey… I could just be adding to their burden and have no idea if the clothes and blankets get used.

Patagonia boxers are made using recycled plastics and they also accept worn out boxers for recycling. Patagonia is the only boxers I have found that are very loose fitting (baggy in fact), silky feeling, yet stretchy, yet moisture-wicking all at once. Nothing like this seems to exist in Europe.

So here’s a debate: synthetic vs cotton

Synthetic boxers can be recycled and can be made from recycled plastics. But every time synthetic clothes get washed they shed microplastics which most sewage treatment centers cannot filter out. You would have to buy a special filter to attach to your washing machine. Researchers in Ghent discovered that the bacteria that loves perspiration also loves synthetic clothes but not cotton. This is why synthetic clothes get stinky fast and thus need more frequent washing than natural fibers.

Cotton production consumes absurd amounts of water (2700 liters of water to produce 1 t-shirt). And when you wash it, hang drying takes /days/ (whereas microfibers hang dry in a couple hours). So people use energy wasting tumble dryers when cleaning cotton. But cotton has the advantage of being biodegradable. You can simply compost/landfill finished cotton as long as it doesn’t have harmful dyes that leech out. There is also a cotton t-shirt that is claimed to wearable 7 times before each wash. IIRC it’s blended with silver for anti-microbial effects.

The environmental debate can go either way depending on which problem you want to focus on, but cotton is clearly lousy performing underwear considering how it retains water and gets soggy. The only natural fiber that performs well for underwear is wool (ideally Marino from what I’ve read). But the prices on that are extortionate. €60+ for one pair of wool boxers, and they’re tight fitting.

Anyway, the OP’s thesis is lost. There is no BifL boxers AFAIK.

There are BifL socks though, called “Darn Tough” which have a lifetime warranty. They have 1 competitor but I forgot the brand. Both use marino wool.

update

Patagonia plans to open a store in Amsterdam.

I have a shopaholic aunt who is said to wear things she buys once on avg. She could open her own 2nd hand shop (or if she moved her stock to Europe she could open ~6 2nd-hand shops). Many women in my family are inflicted with this disease to varying degrees. It’s a gender-specific disease that I think men are immune to.

I quit using a dryer. Hang drying will help elastics last longer. Though it still breaks eventually.

When you repair them, are you sewing new elastic onto them? i thought about just threading a shoe lace since some boxers us that drawstring design anyway.

I needed expensive custom orthotics. Of course making a costly medical modification to flimsy shoes is a terrible idea. The orthotic maker gave me this advice: buy leather shoes and make sure the inside is also leather. It was great advice because when the interior heal of the shoe is some kind of fabric it’s not long before the material forms a hole and the plastic skeleton is exposed.

I found some ugly tennis shoes (didn’t care); had 3 stripes (i think that’s Adidas). They were all leather inside and outside except the sole. They lasted like over a decade. The outer sole was the first to wear out. I can probably have them resoled.

But in general, if you go into a place that makes medical orthotics they will have the advice you’re after, and perhaps have specific recommendations.

Theoretically there is just one material more durable than leather: aramid (aka Kevlar™). Not sure if anyone is on the ball with making aramid shoes though.

I don’t really know the guy but I’m sure he is quite busy. He also runs infosec.exchange and a Threads-defederated variant of that, and an onion mirror, and fedia.io. fedia.io is on kbin/mbin and thus very buggy and he seems to put a lot of energy into chasing those bugs. IIRC he mentioned his bills are like $3k/month for one of or all of those nodes. Wouldn’t hurt to ask but the question should probably come direct from the interested admins. Maybe they could hire him.

More often than not, admins are interested in alternatives. When they hear there are no gratis alternatives, they shut down. CF is deceptively gratis. That is, the gratis plan is for relatively low consumption. When a service comes under attack which then leverages the defense admins signed up for, Cloudflare taps them on the shoulder and says: hey, you’re exceeding the bandwidth of the gratis plan… time to switch to premium. So the “free” evaporates.

Slightly more clever admins will use CF DNS and maintain their site in a non-proxied state (sparing their users from Cloudflare exclusion and over-sharing). Then when an attack hits they just have to flip a switch and CF is put into play. That switch can even be scripted to happen automatically.

Even more clever admins (e.g. infosec.pub) are very knowledgeable about how to do security properly without offloading their security problems onto everyone else.

You could fill a book on the harm Cloudflare does. To describe the walled garden, they have designed Cloudflare without a login so that people in the included group don’t even know they are participating in digital exclusion and supporting a walled garden by a tech giant. The gate is invisible. Those of us in the excluded group see a deceptive block screen that says it’s doing a security check but in reality it’s doing nothing but showing a non-stop spinner. Some people get a CAPTCHA which is often broken (always broken for me).

By default, Cloudflare blocks access to the following groups of people:

• users whose ISP uses CGNAT to distribute a limited range of IPv4 addresses (this generally impacts poor people in impoverished regions)
• the Tor community
• VPN users
• users of public libraries, and generally networks where IP addresses are shared
• blind people who disable images in their browsers (which triggers false positives for robots, as scripts are generally not interested in images either)
• the permacomputing community and people on limited internet connections, who also disable browser images to reduce bandwidth which makes them appear as bots
• people who actually run bots – Cloudflare is outspokenly anti-robot and treats beneficial bots the same as malicious bots

If you are in the included group and get access to a Cloudflare site, CF is a man in the middle who sees all the traffic. The padlock you see only means that your traffic is secure from you to Cloudflare (not to the host you think you are visiting). Cloudflare sees your userid and password, your DMs, everything. CF has grown to take ~20—30% of the web. So probably around roughly ¼ of your web activity is all seen by that one corporation which operates in a country without privacy safegards. So in addition to the above list of groups of people who Cloudflare blocks from web access, there is a group of privacy enthusiasts who block CF as they refuse to disclose ~25% of their web traffic to CF.

As for the disproportionate size, I think that is somewhat inevitable, even with a Federated platform.

It’s only inevitable to the extent that it’s inevitable that you will have admins who don’t grasp the philosophy. Admins who embrace the principles of decentralization close registration before their user count gets excessive (lemmy.ml demonstrated some restraint in this regard though some would say they should have closed reg sooner). Others will carry on, and bring in Cloudflare to supercharge the capacity which brings the problem that Cloudflare itself is centralized. They have effectively joined the centralized walled garden and brought a disproportionately large number of unwitting users into that exclusive venue. I say “unwitting” because sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world does not disclose to the users the fact that they are in a walled garden and that they share all the traffic with a US tech giant. Their greed is why there are disproportionately small nodes. It is sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world who decided to exploit all the individuals who individually decide they want to be in the same place where everyone else is, which ruins the balance and keeps small nodes overly small.

Many posts are in a Q&A format, and if a bot were to crosspost all the content here, any answers here wouldn’t necessarily make it back to the OP. Had you considered this?

I didn’t necessarily mean to imply that a bot would do the job, but indeed a bot would make sense. The purpose of copying traffic out of the centralized walled garden into a free world instance would be to feed info to those who have chosen the ethical venue. The purpose would not be to feed the giants in any way. So if it’s a personal question post that does not enrich the commons with information then the post could be removed by the bot operator. Or if the question likely provokes an interesting chat then it could be left alone. Responders who want the OP to see the response could simply mention them in the response and the OP would get a notification.

Yeah it would be nice if it were organised to some extent, like crossposting everything between the two for redundancy since each node would have different lifetimes, but get people to comment in just one. Though the rules are different. The German one bans all advertising.

I deliberately omitted those two. Notice I said “in the free decentralized world”. The sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world nodes should not be promoted because they are centralized (by two factors) and antithetical to the purpose of the fedi.

• factor 1: disproportionate size thus concentration of power by those admins over an unacceptably large population.
• factor 2: cloudflare, who currently decides who gets access to ~20—30% of all websites in the world. CF abuses their power and they marginalize several demographics of people (including poor people who live in regions where ISPs have to use CGNAT).

So I suggest not feeding those communities. It might be interesting to replicate their content here in such a way that it doesn’t link back to them.

It’s worth noting as well that Cloudflare’s breakage proliferates when CF’d nodes crosspost outside of their walled garden. E.g. if a CF-sourced image is crossposted to slrpnk.net, the image is inaccessible to me (and everyone else CF excludes) so I get a half missing post. Many people are here in the sufficiently decentralized portion of the fedi to escape abuses of concentrated power.

i’m not sure what that means in terms of the fedi architecture. I have mod privs in a few communities and there is no merge button.

Sounds like you’re not keen on futons. But worth noting that some futons can be custom made with the materials you want, and you can have a summer side and winter side. The summer side might have coconut choir or something highly breathable. It’s not BifL, but at least you can get something with biodegradable materials.

The anti-BifL swindle → no B&M shops sell replacement covers for any mattress.

Some come with removable covers so you can theoretically put the covers in a washing machine, but there is no replacement. Eventually when you need to replace the cover no one will sell the cover you need. A salesperson confessed to me that a lot of the value is in the cover and if they made those replaceable it would damage their bottom line.

Some sales people argued: you can buy a separate cover. But of course a cover needs to breath or your skin would suffocate. And because it breathes, the mattress exterior is still exposed to sweat and spills. Otherwise sheets would be the answer. You can have a cover for a cover for a cover, and in the end the mattress exterior will still get stained or rank.

So this killed it for me. I refuse to buy a mattress if the shop does not sell a replacement exterior cover. We need Fairphone to get into the mattress business.

The only socks that come with a lifetime warranty are “Darn Tough” and (AFAIK) just one other competing brand. IIRC, both are made of Merino wool.

EDIT: Darn Tough socks are a blend of Merino wool, nylon, and lycra spandex.

In any case, Marino wool must be durable if socks makers are offering a lifetime warranty on it. The only material that I would expect to do better would be aramid (Kevlar™), though that’d be quite pricey since that fabric must be laser cut.

If you look at my post, I qualified this with “if you buy a good one”.

I missed that. But that’s exactly the purpose of the thread - to identify the good bikes. The problem with modern bikes is that it’s a minefield.

Mongoose bikes are literal cheap throwaway trash bikes. This is exactly why people with knowledge about bikes try to steer people towards good quality stuff from bike shops.

It sounds like you’re saying if it’s in a bike shop, you can expect quality. I don’t think so. I doubt all bicycle shops reject all low quality bikes in their 2nd hand business. Some do though, so you have a better chance than in a dept store or grocery store (indeed even Aldi sells bicycles), but it’s still down to odds. What about sporting good stores? You can probably find a bit of everything in a large range of qualities there.

Cheap department store grade bikes are built to a price for people who rarely ride them. They fall apart under normal use and are not intended to be repairable.

Good quality bikes are very much long lasting, durable, and repairable goods. This is kind of like buying cheap fake leather boots off of alibaba and bemoaning that they aren’t as reliable as the handmade leather boots of your childhood. Of course they’re not! You chose not to buy good boots.

I have a problem with the idea of making the pricetag in input source for your appraisal. It should be the reverse. You should determine what you’re willing to pay based on your appraisal which should be blind to price. Cheap prices can reflect lack of brand reputation and high prices are heavily determined by established brand reputation which is often overplayed. I’ve also seen far too many cases where reputable brands exploit their position and put their label on cheap outsourced garbage. You can get thick genuine leather goods in Tijuana for a fraction of the price you pay for low quality leather just across the border. In the world of tools you’ll pay 5 times more for a tool but it doesn’t outlast 5 replacements.

I knew an artist who ran her own shop and made things in a large range of prices. If an item was sitting in the store too long and she wanted to get rid of it, she would increase the price and then it would sell. It works. Consumers appraise based on the price. By increasing the price, she put that item in the budget range of a different demographic.

The ultimate problem is transparency. They obviously don’t write on the bike’s description “drivetrain: proprietary”. And when a layperson looks at a good bike, they just see the trivial specs, weight, etc. A layperson can’t easily discern from one spec sheet to another which one uses more standardized parts or is more repairable. And if it’s a used bike there’s no spec sheet.

Bikes now are just so tremendously better than anything you could have gotten in the 60s.

It’s the other way around. Modern bikes are less sustainable. Unsustainable cheap Chinese bikes have flooded the market. In the past couple decades proprietary parts have become widespread along with needless excessive introductions of more standards. So bicycles are being thrown away on a large scale with perfectly good frames due to compatibility issues.

Steel frames have become less common, in favor of aluminum and other metals that are more energy intensive, and carbon fiber which significantly degrades over time.

SUGG frames are made from steel. And they make an effort to avoid Chinese components. iirc there’s only one component from China on it.

I needed a new crank, chain and sprocket on a modern Mongoose fat bike. That brand goes back to my childhood so I was surprised to find what a big fiasco that common need was. It was insufficient to simply buy a square taper crank. In the struggle to track down a compatible front sprocket, I had to go to the manufacturer. They told me they couldn’t help me because the part was no longer made. WTF? I called months later and they said they were able to track down a compatible replacement. But of course getting official the parts from the manufacturer is costly. Of course they take full advantage of the compatibility fiasco. I think they wanted $90 for another cheap quality crankset. In the end, I said fuck this, I bought the cheapest square taper sprocket i could find and took a gamble. The result: chainline issues. My threshold of tolerance was pegged, so I simply decided i will not shift into the gears that cause the chain to rub the tire.

BTW, the reason i needed a new crank was because a peddle came loose as i was peddling. The aluminum threads in the crank are soft, so it didn’t take much peddling with a loose peddle to destroy the threads. The crank is part of the sprocket (a poor design). That forced the sprocket to be replaced. Funnily enough, the damage was done when i was test riding it before purchase. I pointed out to the seller at the end of the test ride that the peddle fell off. He offered to fix it or reduce the price. I was far from home so i opted to reduce the price. We both thought it would be cheap and trivial to fix. I think he knocked off ~$50 or so. Well, I could not have predicted the nightmare from such a seemingly minor problem.