I'm happy that exists as an alternative for those who care about this.
I (meat-eater) am done with leather alternatives for now. A while back, I bought the official leather-alternative case for my everyday-carry Roav sunglasses, but it didn't last me very long. Frustrated with that, I ordered a custom made case with real leather, that cost me double the price, but it has been aging really nicely.
For me, paying extra for good leather, that will last longer and is byproduct of meat I already eat, seems to be the best decision in terms of sustainability. Hopefully technology will improve so that we have more options in the future.
Leather’s near-magical. It’s so resilient it’s almost hard to believe it’s real.
It’ll be cool if someone even gets close to that with alternatives, especially at a similar price, but I’m not holding my breath.
I get the impression these alternatives are mostly a replacement for bonded “leather” so far, which is such a shit material that they ought to be able to surpass it without trouble.
There are many natural products which have a similar magic. Cork, sheep wool, bees wax, &c.
And yes most alternative leathers are plastic with 10% of something in top so you can call it "apple" leather, "pine apple" leather, ... Or straight up petrol derivates
leather would be pretty darn perfect if leather shoes didn't need a break-in period.
I'm extremely weary of leather shoewear because I've suffered too many sores in my life, specially when I was a child. I'd like to have comfy shoes that last long but the break in period...
In basic training we were taught to wear in our new boots by bending the toe-half of the sole back and forth for hours, and when we went to bed, we positioned them in a folded up position under our bunk bed frames. When we went to use them the next day, they weren't too stiff. Still have those boots, some ~15 years later, for mowing the lawn now though.
Frankly, I'm not sure we should completely abandon leather.
Large mammals die all the time, and it would be more wasteful to just burn the leather, rather than use it as a durable material.
Besides, how much livestock is grown and slaughtered specifically for leather? A minute amount, presumably, but I'm willing to be proven wrong in anyone has the data.
The kinds of people who would go out of their way to buy plant-based substitute leather products presumably are also not on board with the mass slaughter of livestock for any purpose. Even if they were dying "anyway", to purchase any byproducts is to partially fund the operation and improve the economics of an industry they consider unethical.
Surely those people are also choosing not to have children, since the human population growth of this planet is what spurred the less ethical farms to exist as more economical, space-efficient ways to farm the fauna people had been farming for centuries? I also don't find the farms entirely ethical, based on the exposé media I'd seen of them. I just don't know what the alternative is, other than have products made partially with fossil fuels that break more frequently.
> as more economical, space-efficient ways to farm the fauna people had been farming for centuries? I also don't find the farms entirely ethical, based on the exposé media I'd seen of them.
I’ve been vegan for more than 15 years, i have no children but that’s an entirely separate debate, forecasts all around the world indicate a slowdown in global birthrates this might seem good at first but is not so much, it means an increase in average age of population which means lower birthrates and less people in the productive age brackets. The earth have enough resources to feed the current population many times over but not its greed, meat is incredibly inefficient as food, only 1% to 4% of the fed calories are converted into food, that without mentioning emissions, water usage, deforestation, soil contamination and the ethical problem of enslaving torturing and killing billions of sentient creatures just for sensory pleasure.
> how much livestock is grown and slaughtered specifically for leather
Yes and, I would hope that the majority of leather comes from cattle that are grown and slaughtered for meat. In that case, the amount of cattle put through the meat grinder is a function of both the demand for meat and the demand for leather, but it would be unlikely to be sensitive to both at the same time. I suspect, given that meat has so much turnover whereas leather lasts a long time, that we are meat-bound rather than hide-bound.
My daughter was very disappointed with the shoes she bought recently. They lasted less than half the time real leather model from the same brand did and cost more! They also developed creases and were difficult to polish. I am ok with alternatives when they are alternatives not replacements. It's like with vegan vs. vegetarian options at my local japanese food place. They replaced all but one vegetarian dish with vegan variants and are not bringing the vegetarian dishes back. That's not choice, that's forced replacement.
Doc Martens used to be good, but quality has declined steeply.
Their Wikipedia page will give you a good idea as to when and why https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Martens
There's a bit of misunderstanding in your statement. Most of the money made by companies in payments systems comes from transaction fees, not from interest. When companies offer you better rewards, that's them competing to have you use their credit card rather than the competition's.
Sorry to tell you but that's not true. Literally the top Google result says the contrary:
> "Out of the various fees, interest charges are the primary source of revenue." [1]
Yes, credit cards charge a large transaction fee, but wind up refunding a large portion of that back to the consumer in the form of rewards, so these days that's not the main source of profit.
They already have Facebook Pay on messenger, and WhatsApp is mostly unheard of. Maybe it doesn't make sense to launch it in the USA.
WhatsApp is however overwhelmingly used in Brazil, and highly lacking good Venmo-like apps. I did not like the Brazilian Fed getting in the way with regulations before it even launched. Sends the wrong message to foreign investors considering Brazil.
yes I think it's somewhat dated. I travel (well traveled) to the US frequently and there was basically no Whatsapp user I met. (compared to 50% of the pop. In Germany). Apparently now there are almost 70 million users in the US.
It really always baffled me why Americans were using text messaging for so long (and complaining about lack of encryption and so on)
>It really always baffled me why Americans were using text messaging for so long
Because our mobile plans gave us gigantic buckets (thousands of SMS messages per month, then unlimited) before most other countries. It was the lack of such that drove the growth of WhatsApp and similar systems elsewhere.
>(and complaining about lack of encryption and so on)
Yeah, no one does that, any more than people complain about the lack of encrypted email.
(Yes, yes, it's possible to do both. My point is that most people don't bother in the first place.)
> (and complaining about lack of encryption and so on)
Well most people here in Germany constantly complain about the lack of privacy thanks to Facebook and still don't mind using WhatsApp.
I haven't been to the US myself, but I have met a lot of internation students from the US and Canada. All of them were mainly using either iMessage or Facebook Messenger, they were really surprised why everyone is using WhatsApp here.
Anyways, actually privacy focused apps like Threema or Signal don't seem to be popular anywhere, so I don't think there is a significant difference
Most people I know only use WhatsApp specifically with friends who came from/are in other countries. Even then I personally know more people who use LINE than WhatsApp for some reason. Internal to the US, very few people I know use WhatsApp for group chats. (I expect its an age thing though, and that younger people are more likely to be using WhatsApp).
I would argue that it's only a "feature" because JS has this needless dichotomy between null and undefined so it's basically two issues cancelling each-other, but that sounds a lot like moving the goalpost so I'll concede the point.
Just to make sure, my "ninja trick" was meant in an ironic manner. In my opinion, it sucks JavaScript has two equality operators, and it's inexcusable for it to have two different null types. That fact that you can use the forer to check for the latter with less code doesn't make either okay in any sense.
Mathematics require the exact type of abstract thinking machines suck at. Machines can execute things fast, learn things fast (provided we have well stablished rules), but than can't (at our current moment in time) come up with useful abstractions to help solve new problems.
As the one who implemented Airflow at my company, I understand how overwhelming it can be, with the DAGs, Operators, Hooks and other terminologies.
This looks like a good enough mid-term alternative. However, I have a few questions (which I couldn't find easily in the homepage, sorry if I skipped something):
- Do you have a way of persisting connection information? I saw an example of how to create a connection, but it isn't clear if the piece of code has to be loaded every time you execute the ETL
- How easy it is to implement new computation engines?
- Plans of creating a command line to make it easier to execute operations?
The first time I ever saw that you could do that was in a blog post about stringing at the end of the a series of pipes. I thought it was pretty neat (and actually used it a couple times), then had problems when I couldn't figure out why my code was messing up.
for example, this assigns a ggplot to 'plot':
df %>%
na.omit() %>%
ggplot(aes(x=x, y=y)) +
geom_line() -> plot
That is really confusing in that the way most people would read it is that it is something to be plotted. However, the assignment does occur and is masked. having 'plot <- df %>%' as the first line makes it clear that a new object is being created.
We actually had to modify our style guide to prevent the '->'
Well, my friend who works with R more consistently likes it ok too. Maybe it's an acquired taste. Also, he's the statistician, so perhaps it's quirky structure relates to the data in some way a laymen can't understand.
But sometimes he just wants to loop through a list and he goes a bit crazy.
Statisticians tend to learn R in school. It's quirky structures are a major source of prototyping slowdown/technical debt. I recommend using Python/Pydata when people ask my advice in starting out. Once one learns Python then R isn't too bad to pick up.
I (meat-eater) am done with leather alternatives for now. A while back, I bought the official leather-alternative case for my everyday-carry Roav sunglasses, but it didn't last me very long. Frustrated with that, I ordered a custom made case with real leather, that cost me double the price, but it has been aging really nicely.
For me, paying extra for good leather, that will last longer and is byproduct of meat I already eat, seems to be the best decision in terms of sustainability. Hopefully technology will improve so that we have more options in the future.