I have a polyester ski jacket and I haven’t frozen to death on the slopes yet.

Have you tried falling through ice into a river yet? Give it a shot, let me know how it goes. Get it completely saturated, and then hang out in sub-zero temperatures for a few hours or overnight. If you survive, try the same exercise in the same kind of layers of wool clothing.

which is not peaceful, look it up on YouTube

Read what I actually said again: shearing is not INHERENTLY harmful. It can be harmful, on farms that are careless in their treatment of livestock. But how many videos do you think PETA is going to put on YouTube of sheep shearing that doesn’t hurt the sheep? Or do you think that maybe they’ll only post videos that reinforce their position?

then maybe don’t breed them into existence?

We’re well past that point; they already exist. Are you suggesting that we should slaughter all of them…?

You also fail to mention that all sheep go to a slaughterhouse where they are killed by stabbing at a fraction of their natural lifespan.

That’s not actually relevant to the production of wool though, is it? It’s utterly irrelevant to the wool; you could let the sheep graze and shear them annually, and allow them to die of natural causes, and it would make zero difference to the wool itself.

Source?

The vast majority of the microplastics that are going into everything on the planet are from synthetic fibers, particularly polyesters. (source) The product itself, not just the creation of the product, is harmful to the environment. Most synthetic fabrics degrade by breaking down into smaller fibers, rather than actually rotting away, so you get harm done at both ends of the produce. Natural fibers (and rayon, which is cellulose) will biodegrade completely over time. There is no way to mitigate the damages caused by microplastics; we don’t have an effective way of removing them from the environment. Conversely, carbon dioxide can be mitigated, by reducing reliance on fossil fuels, and by reforestation. (Although, TBH, we don’t mitigate it, and we’re already past the point of no return, so…)

27 times more greenhouse gases than a comparable cotton sweater

…Except that these items are not comparable, because they perform differently under adverse conditions. The similarities are in the form, not the fiber. Sure, if the extent of your exposure to weather is walking to and from your car in the winter, you’re never going to notice a difference. If you go camping for a week in the Tetons in January, you absolutely WILL notice the difference. Cotton has to be heavily treated–with Teflon, with parafin or beeswax–in order to be water resistant; wool is naturally hydrophobic. That’s pretty important when you’re outdoors in cold weather.

Cigarettes, cigars, and pipes still smell wonderful to me, and if was free and wasn’t going to kill me, I’d absolutely start again. But I haven’t had any real cravings or dreams about smoking since about four months after I quit.

Benzo withdrawal will kill you, but goddamn is it hard to kill yourself with benzodiazepines… You’d think that something with a deadly withdrawal would also be easy to OD on, but no.

I’m pretty sure I know what I smoked.

I quit because I started coughing up dark brown shit every morning; I always had some kind of congestion in my throat. I decided that I didn’t want to do that anymore, so I stopped.

No. Polyester simply doesn’t have the same properties that wool does. Polypropylene is a good base layer for moving sweat away from your skin, but won’t keep you warm when it’s soaked. Cellulose fibers (cotton, linnen, hemp, rayon, etc.) soak up water, and will kill you from hypothermia in cold weather. Also, shearing sheep is not inherently harmful or abusive; on the contrary, sheep that are not shorn may become immobile due to the bulk of the wool. Sheep have been selectively bred for thousands of years for wool production, and so failing to shear a sheep is harmful to them. Additionally, wool is FAR better for the environment overall than any synthetic fiber, which are all made from oil.

The primary difference is that Merino wool comes from Merino sheep. As for what makes the wool special, it appears to be the size of the fiber itself. The USDA has specifications for wool grades based on the size of the fiber, and Merino wool fibers range in size from <18 microns to 26 microns; for reference, a human hair ranges in size from about 50 - 100 microns. That puts all of Merino wool at grade 62 or better. Because it’s a finer fiber, each individual strand is more flexible, which makes it less scratchy. The flip side of that is that a lighter fiber means that it’s also less strong, so Merino isn’t well suited to outerwear that’s going to be used in more austere environments. Wool in general doesn’t have very good abrasion resistance, and a very light fiber will be much less so.

Any wool base layer made from sheep’s wool should keep up just fine, but a coarser wool is going to feel less comfortable against your skin. I have an old Army milsurp sweater, and the wool is very coarse; most people would not find it comfortable on their skin.

nicotine is the hardest drug to quit.

Wild. I’ve quit smoking multiple times, and thought the first week or so was unpleasant each time, but not awful. Each time I started up again it was because my ex-spouse started smoking again and was pushing cigarettes on me. Since the divorce a decade ago, I haven’t had a cigarette. And that was after about fifteen years of smoking around a pack and a half a day.

I know that quitting drinking all at once can straight up kill you, if you’re a hardcore alcoholic; I’ve known a few people that had the shakes every time they were sober.

It’s not that any one person can gridlock Congress, but that the more people you have, the more difficult it is to get enough of them pointing in the same direction to get anything accomplished.

It isn’t legal to own hand grenades in the US

Not correct. It’s an ‘other destructive device’, and is covered under the National Firearms Act of 1934. Each one would require completing a transfer form, waiting for approval from the ATF, and cost $200 for the tax stamp. …And would then be usable exactly once.

You might be able to manufacture a grenade with an ATF Form 1 approval, but I’m not positive. And, again, it’s a single-use item that requires a $200 tax stamp.

How have you forgotten Remedy, with Alan Wake, Control, and Quantum Break?

I feel like Finland might be where I belong. If only I could realistically learn Suomi…

Lots of weirdly emo ballads, TBH. The metal is good, but it’s still pretty niche from what I understand.

It depends on what you’re doing with it.

I use it solely for Ace XR, which is a dry-fire simulator/tracker. Ace XR is available solely for Meta Quest (2 & 3), so I didn’t really have many options. Unfortunately, I’m currently rehabbing a serious injury, and I am unable to practice.

For gaming? Not really. I like the PSVR2 headset more for that; it’s a better headset overall. I’m still working on getting it set up to work with my PC though. As other people have said, getting corrective lenses for a headset really makes them more enjoyable if you need glasses; it’s a pain in the ass to have to put in contacts when I want to use VR. For the Meta Quest specifically, and upgraded head band and spare battery (that also acts like a counterweight) is very nice to have.

Correct; it’s a shitfest, and it’s going to get a lot worse.

A lot worse.

Third, divorce. You will find out who your real friends are when you get divorced.

When my ex- and I were going through a divorce, they didn’t want me to say anything publicly at all. They were insistent that it wasn’t anyone else’s business, and since I was trying to make the process as painless as possible, I assumed that this was a good-faith request.

I was wrong.

I was being silent, and they were telling everyone a load of horseshit about me, and bad-mouthing me in public to every single one of our mutual friends. I lost all but one of our mutual friends; my silence was assumed to be an admission of guilt.

And what, exactly, is positive about it, that has no associated negative outcomes?

IMO, there’s no such thing as responsible AI use. All of the uses so far are bad, and I can’t see any that would work as well as a trained human. Even worse, there’s zero accountability; when an AI makes a mistake and gets people killed, no executives or programmers will ever face any criminal charges because the blame will be too diffuse.

requires a trial.

Not for people that are undocumented. People that are not in the us legally get hearings, but that’s policy rather than law, IIRC. Due process gets a little weird here, because the process in question isn’t a matter of law or the constitution.

Regardless - it’s not going to go well for anyone that thinks that he doesn’t mean them.

The denaturalization concept–stripping naturalized citizens of citizenship–is fa, far scarier than deportation. Once you can strip citizenship from a naturalized citizen, and once you’ve eliminated birthright citizenship, you’ve got a roadmap for stripping citizenship from anyone.

VPN works just fine, as long as you can set your location. I know this because some sites are blocked in my area, and I can get to them when I change my location in my VPN.

For Tor to work, you have to reduce your security settings, and allow javascript; that’s not generally a good idea when you’re using Tor. Even when you do that, the network is slow enough that videos don’t seem to complete loading. (I just checked.)

Anyone that thinks that it’s going to be only ‘criminals’ that get deported forget that crossing the border without documentation is a crime. Yeah, it’s a misdemeanor, but it’s still a crime, and the Trump administration is still going to deport them when they can.