ThatCrayCrayFish

This is so precious oh my god. There’s more under the cut. Also click HERE for full-sized pics and also a vid of a chicken screaming at the wind XD 

We toss out over 80 pounds of textiles each year. These textiles are often made of plastic materials (polyester, nylon), made in unethical conditions, dyed with harsh dyes that often get put into the rivers, etc. Even a single cotton shirt releases carbon emissions and uses tons of water. 

So the best thing to prevent the unsustainable growth of the fashion industry is to make sure that your clothing lasts as long as possible. To do so, mending clothing is a must. So here are some resources to help you learn how to do various things, such as sewing a button, to tailoring clothes, or even upcycling old clothing into new styles. 

* How to sew on three different types of button

* How to hand sew on a patch on a torn pair of jeans

* How to sew up a hole in an old shirt

* How to sew a simple T-shirt

* How to upcycle old clothing into new clothing

* More upcycle and sewing techniques

* How to repair a damaged sock

* How to do an invisible stitch

* 3 different stitches to work with for different results

* How to make a T-shirt smaller so it fits you better

* How to make repairs to your shoes

These are just a few of the things that you can do in order to make sure that your clothing lasts for a long time. Nobody wants to keep buying new clothing, as it is expensive and wasteful. 

I have a family friend who worked at our local Salvation Army headquarters as a a secretary. This particular office took all the Christmas donations for children in need, put them in a warehouse, and on a designated day the staff and their friends picked through them all, taking whatever they wanted. She saw people hauling away bikes donated for specific families. Some local children had hundreds of dollars of gifts donated in their name, and on Christmas they received three cheap things, items likely not even from the person who sponsored them.

My friend quit, and I’ve not given them a dime of my money since then.

I’m a wildfire and disaster logistics specialist.

I deal with a lot of agencies who provide disaster relief.

I used to say the Salvation Army’s disaster services were the one (literally the ONE) good thing they did.

They would come in, set up a canteen trailer, make and pass out hot coffee and donated food in a disaster, usually being one of the first agencies to get there and the last to leave.

Then I found out.

Every time they did this, regardless of if they were actually invited or deployed by the agency in charge (usually FEMA, sometimes others) they would SELF-DEPLOY. Meanjng they would just show up. Ok. That’s not TOO bad, sometimes agencies have to take initiative and get there before the red tape is sorted out. BUT. They, after they left at the end of the incident, they would send FEMA or the host agency a BILL. They used one or two paid employees (usually the driver of the truck and a supervisor); and many VOLUNTEERS, but they would bill for EVERYONE’s Labor at standard federal rates. They would bill for the food they distributed even though it was all donated by another agency or private parties. They would bill for the coffee they made and the supplies. Except they would use electricity from the shelter location, water from donations or from the shelter, and in many cases, they would get the coffee and industrial filters DONATED, but bill for them at retail prices.

Smallest McDonald’s in the world

Here’s a quick handy reference list or anyone who isn’t sure:

Homosexuality does exist in almost all social species.

“Alpha males” are not a real phenomenon and in fact the most aggressive males tend to be the least reproductively successful.

“Survival of the fittest” simply means that the success of a species hinges on how well it “fits” its environment. It does not mean that stronger or smarter individuals are supposed to succeed. Those things can even be a detriment in nature by wasting too many resources.

“Race” is not a biological concept. Someone who looks different from you has the same human genes, just a different grab-bag of dominant traits.

Evolution is not a march towards higher complexity, more intelligence or even more adaptability. It’s just a fluctuation of characteristics dictated by environmental pressures and mutation. A slime mold isn’t “less evolved” than a hawk, just adapted for success under different parameters.

People didn’t evolve “from apes.” It’s more complicated than that. We are a category of ape, sharing a common ancestor with the other apes.

No human on Earth is “closer” to an evolutionary ancestor than any other. We all descended from the same one.

Neanderthals were also a “sibling” species of ours. We didn’t evolve from them.

Epigenetics does not have anything at all to do with genetic memories. It is a thing that affects characteristics like health risks, and this speculation floating around about how phobias could be related to some ancestral trauma is complete and utter nonsense.

It’s only a matter of time before such a claim is used as another pseudoscientific tool in the arsenal of people claiming that bloodlines have anything to do with the validity of one’s worship of European pantheons. “My ancestors were Swedish, and because of epigenetics I have genetic memories passed down from those ancestors, so therefore my connection with the gods is better than yours!”

saying the “male brain” works one way and the “female brain” works another way is ludicrous. for so many reasons, even beyond the obvious of imposing that tired old either/or mentality with regards to maleness and femaleness

occasionally you will read about how a study suggests that “men are naturally better at spacial reasoning” or “women are naturally better at cooperation”, but for one thing, given how early the brain wires itself and how easy it is to influence the wiring (like, disturbingly easy), and given the tremendous social expectations we face from pretty much the moment we leave the freaking womb, it’s impossible to study gender differences in a vacuum. 

like, do your findings prove that “women are better at reading faces”, or do they prove that, when you are part of a group that has been socialized since birth to be “nice”, to take care of other people, and to above all avoid making folks angry, you damn well have to learn how to read the room, and read it fast.

This is one of about 200 articles on people finding their home security and baby monitor cameras were hacked I found in under 10 seconds.

The secondary concern I have is that these enormous companies don’t really have any oversight and, again, the devices are always on. They may not save the information all the time but I’d be willing to bet you a box of donuts that somewhere out there Amazon has a collection of data that has information about the kinds of arguments that precede divorces or a ballpark estimate of the number of users with disabilities and what kind of disabilities those users have. I’m extremely leery of the ability to collect the kind of information that Amazon/Google/Apple/Whatever COULD collect even if they aren’t actively collecting it.

(however no bet, I’m just telling you as a fact the info from these devices is used to optimize sales to you and your family and to children; these are marketing information collectors that report back to home about how to separate you from your money with no concern about your wellbeing or the ethics of their marketplace)

As a tertiary concern there’s the general concept of “hackers could do a thing.” When Hackers Can Do A Thing what this usually means is “Somebody did a proof-of-concept and presented a paper on it at DefCon then we did shots” but what THAT means is that the concept is proved and if J. Random shots-doing hacker can do a thing then your abusive ex or the local police or the FBI can do the thing.

Generally Evul Hakcers are not wardriving around your neighborhood trying to connect to your baby monitor.

HOWEVER - there was a prank among certain shitheads on the internet for a while where they’d find the frequencies of unsecured baby monitors and scream through random parts of the night to disrupt infants’ sleep schedules!

If I can theoretically use a specific signal to send orders through your Alexa I could theoretically use a specific signal to send the kind of orders that get you put on a watchlist for buying bomb ingredients.

But the deal with what’s worse about google home isn’t specific to Google but crosses over into the question of how comfortable we are as a society with centralized data collection networks and what those networks do with that information.

Someone in the notes asked “what about Roombas?” and the deal with roombas is that they’re mapping your home and reporting back to the mothership with information about how your home is laid out. You know what I’d hate? I’d hate it if the cops had a map of the inside of my house. I’d hate it if I got an ad for Amazon home speakers configured for the layout of my living room.

My personal solution to this is “don’t own a roomba” but roombas are a very useful cleaning tool that could be a way for someone with limited mobility to maintain their independence. That’s a big deal, and it’s incredibly shitty that their options are “pay a high price to have someone else clean my house” “don’t clean my house” or “clean my house but allow data about how I arrange my furniture or if I get a roommate or if I built an un-permitted addition to be sent out to god knows who.”

There is right now, NOW, October 2019, Live, Real-time, an issue with Amazon’s Ring Doorbell service creating a gigantic linked network of surveillance cameras with data from those cameras being used by police. I have a problem with that. In fact I have five problems with that and so does the EFF.

The other reason that phones are a little bit different is that, at the moment, there is a very high barrier to access things like your location data or call history. There is case law protecting your privacy with your phone, to some extent.

That is NOT true of a lot of other smart devices; the technology moved faster than the law did and we’re in the same weird limbo we’ve been in since the 90s where some things that seem clearly wrong are perfectly legal (for instance, there are still plenty of places where posting revenge porn is not yet illegal - the ability to create and disseminate compromising sexual images of your ex moved faster than the law did in addressing that and for a long time the legal attitude was “well, guess you shouldn’t have shared those pictures” as though it would have been fine to sell photos of your nude ex to Penthouse or something).

Like. Fuck.

You know what scares me? Amazon has a map of Spanish-speaking households in the US.

They don’t talk about having it, they’re not talking about selling it (except as demographic information to advertisers). It’s not something that you really think about because mapping the location of Spanish speakers in the US isn’t the Echo’s primary function.

But if you consider it for a second, then logically, yeah, somewhere out there Amazon has a map of all their Spanish-speaking users and all of their addresses and let me tell you, living in the US in 2019 that is not something that I want Amazon to have. That’s not really something I want anyone to have. And there are probably a ton of people on that list who *use* amazon with the language set to English, who speak to Alexa in English, but if there’s Spanish spoken around the device it notices.

It notices how many people live in your home. It notices if you have pets. It notices what days you go to work and for how long.

If you’re a gun owner your Alexa or Google Home or Siri Speaker or whatever probably knows that you own guns. If you use drugs your smart speaker probably knows. If you’re illegally subletting to keep your rent low enough that you don’t become homeless your smart speaker probably knows.

At the moment your local police department has to get a warrant from your cell phone provider if they want to know your location. The local police department DOES NOT need a warrant to watch you walk from your home to your office by using surveillance cameras mounted on your neighbors’ front doors, in fact the local police department teamed up with the tech company to sell those cameras to your neighbors.

Basically we’re living in a world in which there is a special, extra-aggressive police force that exists exclusively to track down people of “undesirable” origins and we also live in a world in which there are massive corporations that keep databases with the addresses of their customers footnoted with their demographic information as a means of increasing ad revenue and *essentially* I’m paranoid enough that I’m looking at this and going “hey you know how bad it would have been if there had been a live-updating list of addresses hiding Jewish refugees in the Netherlands in 1943? Is there a possibility that that’s exactly what we’re doing now only it’s hidden in the fine print of your refrigerator manual in order to intentionally hide that that data is being collected?”

Like, shit, that’s just in the US - the Philippines has an ongoing crisis of extrajudicial murders by police sanctioned by the government and wouldn’t you know it, the government that’s so busy doing murders is interested in building an IoT city.

AND ASIDE FROM ALL OF THIS

TOTALLY SEPARATE FROM ALL OF THIS

The nearly universally shitty security on IoT devices is a risk to people who don’t even HAVE the devices - the Mirai botnet took down internet access for a huge part of the United States and it was totally based on “smart” devices that didn’t have any kind of reasonable security - smart fridges, smart vacuums, baby monitors, IP cameras - all of it got sucked into a botnet that targeted major internet infrastructure with a DDoS attack.

Guys, I am hackers.

I know. That’s why it’s listed as the tertiary concern - I’m not worried about Evul Hakcers pwning me.

But everything you see someone doing as a cool proof-of-concept 1337 h4x means that whatever bug or loophole or backdoor is being shown both exists and can be exploited.

Don’t imagine the hacker on the other side of the world spying on your baby monitor, imagine your estranged parent or your abusive ex or your creepy boss doing that.