Or someone couldn’t figure out how to turn off capslock.

Clicked to say exactly that.

When microslop withdraw all services from Israel I will pay attention. Until then, its all marketing.

This, all day long. If you need to access teams on the go (because you choose to) there is a web interface for that. Same for outlook. There are plenty 2FA options so you probably already have something that can provide 2FA without requiring you to install a microslop app to your phone. I will not accept any third party management of my device.

First up, sorry for the long response. You asked some simple questions that didn’t have equally short answers (hence the log reply) and that made me test my existing assumptions. Whether we still disagree (to me at least) matters less than that process so I’ve upvoted you as some thanks for that.

>Can you explain how it can be a biodegradable and somehow outlast everything after being pumped full of chemicals?

Firstly - the claim that leather is pumped full of chemicals is a vast oversimplification. I referred to chrome tanning in my previous comment but personally would be glad to see that gone, or proper environmental regulation brought it to those countries that do not currently have it. That would drive increased costs and likely industry and buyer behaviour towards a self correction - back towards veg tanning. Vegetable tanning relies on plant based tannins, no man made chemicals. These tannins bind to the proteins in the hide, increasing the strength of the fibres and delays decay. It takes weeks to do, whilst chrome tanning (using chromium salts) takes days to deliver a product that has a worse environmental footprint but still (IMO) better than a fossil fuel product. Arguably veg tanning produces a better product that will age and patina whilst chrome tanning inhibits a lot of that so would never be my personal preference as a hobbyist.

Leather lasts longer than most textiles simply because it has a more resilient fibrous structure (skin has evolved to have these properties and the tanning process accentuates)

To offer some real scenarios: with correct care and re-soling (leather soles, not rubber) the same pair of boots can last well in excess of an adult lifetime. I see no other natural material that can repeat that feat. A leather belt, bag or briefcase can easily be a lifetime or heirloom item with minimal care, same for well made leather coat or jacket (usually the thing that wears out in the latter is a fabric lining which could be replaced with skill and care).

Leather may take a long time to eventually break down but throughout that time, the process is not releasing microplastics, it is not poisoning water sources or wildlife.

>Also, tanning and all the resources that go into the cow make leather actually much worse than the alternatives. And that’s ignoring all the natural alternatives, like pineapple leather, or cork.

The cow will be farmed whether the hide is waste or used. There are a lot of hides that go unused just because the scale of the meat industry is vastly larger than tanning and leather goods.

I haven’t ignored the alternatives, I said before I´d love to speak positively about pineapple leather, but the plain truth is that most ‘vegan leather’ is actually PU or PVC made from fossil fuels and I hope we aren’t going to disagree that use of fossil fuels is just worse. Worth noting that many countries outlawed the term ‘vegan leather’ as it is a misleading marketing term, not a material. Sadly plant-based leather alternatives all require additional support/structure for durability and wearability and that comes in the form of plastic. Which might be animal free but its not in any way ecologically sustainable. These do not have the durability of leather and will crack, peel, break, in relatively short order. If its what you want to use then that’s a choice you have, but they aren’t (again IMO) a real alternative to leather and any environmental high ground they claim is just greenwashing fossil fuels and plastics. That said, I do personally hope that they find better solutions and the situation changes in the future.

>It’s not a byproduct. As long as it makes money, it’s a product. 

Sorry but that’s just not correct. A byproduct is defined in Merriam-Webster as “something produced in a usually industrial or biological process in addition to the principal product¨. The vast majority of leather is a byproduct of the meat industry, or to a much lesser degree of animal control. I get your point, but I never argued against their being some commercial interest.You’ve argued it is a product because it has commercial value, but that’s not what a byproduct is, thats a secondary product and it would require the hide to be worth a material percentage of the value of the animal; based on the cost of tanned hides it just cannot be.

> ...arguably the worst and most wasteful industry we have, the animal ag industry.

Animal ag is a real problem; no doubt. In fact I´d argue Ag in general is a problem for the number of people we have on the planet. Not to diminish that, but I think fossil fuel and the US tech oligopoly might just be worse for the planet and society respectively.

Seems like a reasonable position to me, though some additional nuance would be nice. Unless the hide is the primary output from a farm I don’t see that the leather industry causes deforestation.

There are already (in many parts of the world) pretty stringent controls on the impact of tanning, I know at least one tannery in the UK that draws water from the local river and return cleaner water at the end of the process and that’s including the fact that tannery does produce chrome tanned hides. Veg tanning is a longer process but the chemicals are much less aggressive, so cleansing is less onerous.

Ultimately, leather is principally a byproduct of the meat industry, occasionally from animal population control schemes (one example in know is for kudu in South Africa).
Leather is a natural, and biodegradable textile (even after tanning) that outlasts the man-made alternatives. Although I’d like to speak favourably of things like pineapple.leather they simple don’t work without too much additional plastic/rubber material that undoes all the benefit and should not (IMO) be allowed to greenwash as ‘vegan leather’.

Stay away from exotic leathers, and revisit if the meat industry reduces to the point an animal.could be raised and killed for a hide without massive economic loss on the activity.

I read that! I couldn’t find it again, didn’t realise it was you :)

Thanks!

What site/service are you buying from?

Reads for me on fennec with javascript disabled over VPN

Blocking JavaScript gets you round most paywalls and geoblocking

I still feel (without any substantiating evidence) that having ai capabilities in my OS that can act without clarit y on user permissions or controls, feels like a vulnerability that will be exploited. Any recommendations to switch to if Mint should start introducing this stuff?

Don’t want an AI to look on the internet and decide my problem could be solved by removing the French language…

Can’t say I’m behind the approach but it might help loosen the stranglehold that social media has on average people’s lives. I’d agree that anonymity enables greater levels of toxicity, but I think a greater problem is credibility. Its almost impossible on the internet today to know who is ‘credible’ and if we solved that problem a lot of the toxic content and misinformation would fall into the ‘not credible’ arena and we could treat like fringe fiction accordingly.

So a Sam Altman company is coming to solve the problem of too much unidentifiable AI slop on the internet. A problem that has in no small part, been created by OpenAI, another Sam Altman company.

Hard pass.

Sorry, you’re still not making any kind of sense. In no way does sugar compare with a product which, in use, actively damages the used and spreads toxic chemicals into the air for all around them. Nothing in my comment would make any stance against sugar remaining legal.

Turns out you are right. Formalisation of that ban as an offence was much later than I thought. https://www.gov.scot/policies/smoking/smoking-around-hospital-buildings/ gives some dates and context for Scotland to add to your Wales info.

That said, the practical difference between a policy ban vs a legal offence is mostly an enforcement question. In all practical terms on private property a policy ban is still a ban.

To my own personal experience, policy bans across the whole UK (having lived in several cities over the past 20 years and visited more hospitals than I’d care to) have been a consistent thing. Though I won’t dispute there will always be arseholes like the one you encountered just being arseholes…

Most shops in the UK selling booze already operate a policy of asking for ID from anyone who they think looks under 25, even though the legislation is 18.

Likely as not they’ll roll that policy on to cigarettes (in the few rare places that don’t already) and that would mean the subset you’re speaking about would have to be firmly addicted by the age of 11. At that point, I think this is not so much a tobacco problem, as a child welfare and protection issue and we have social care and protections that should already be addressing those cases.

I don’t see anyone in that frame getting to middle age and ID for ciggies ranking in the top 10 of problems in their life.

You forget we are not talking about the USA here. The article is about the UK where we already have a lot more food regulation than you do in the USA.
If you really want to go down the road of things proven to work, maybe start within the USA and introduce the effective firearms legislation and regulations that most of the civilised world has proven reduces per capita gun deaths and almost entirely negates mass murder of schoolchildren.

be fair, you also got the failure part wrong too.

already happened : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_(cigarette)

no different to the fact that my father got state pension at 65 but I wont get this till I am older than he was…

UK based here. sorry to tell you that your sources of information are really poor.