lmao. I am going crazyyyy trying to figure out what song this is. SoundHound doesn't know it. Shazam doesn't know it. Querying ACRCloud does nothing.
send help
https://t.co/ON7zav0STq
Hi @patrickbetdavid ,
Last year, you lamented that US companies have shipped their manufacturing abroad, taking advantage of low-cost labor in other countries. This, you suggested, is why we need tariffs.
I happen to know where your shoes are made, as you showed clips of the Tuscan factory in your video. I was surprised to see that you're retailing them for $600. That's a handsome mark-up!
As you may know, many companies offer full-grain leather sneakers made in Tuscany for a fraction of the price. I've attached a screenshot of some from Gustin ($199). These are also made with a stitched-on cup sole, like the ones you're selling. Gustin's prices are uniquely low because of their pre-order business model, which allows them to cut waste. But lots of companies use the same factory as you and charge considerably less than $600.
Curious, why not make the sneakers in the United States? There are many factories still here, such as Opie in North Carolina. They retail their US-made sneakers for $428. Their business model allows third parties to work with them while maintaining a healthy profit margin. Faherty, for instance, made a leather deck shoe with them this season with a stitched-on cup sole. Their retail price is $398 — $30 less than Opie's direct-to-consumer price.
In a 2023 interview with DJ Vlad, you said that you're worth $450 million. That was three years ago, so perhaps you're worth more today. Yet all your merch is made abroad, including in South American countries such as Nicaragua and El Salvador. Even your Tuscan factory is cheaper than a comparable US factory.
On your show, you often lament how greedy executives have screwed American workers, particularly in the manufacturing sector. Would you be interested in moving all of your sneaker production to the United States and charging a fairer price? This will create jobs for US workers and allow consumers to get a fairer value.
@NMIXXOLOGIST I wish I could find the whole clip! I dug around YouTube and other sites, but Stephanie deleted her own videos and is copyright claiming other people's reposts. :(
My long covid started with psychosis around the six week mark of my infection. I was in the hospital for 14 days. So whenever I see a paper like this where they show generation of anti-NMDAR auto-antibodies, which are associated with anti-NMDAR autoimmune encephalitis, it always makes me wonder if that's what happened to me.
When I came out of the hospital they put me under the care of a psychiatrist. Nobody thought it had anything to do with long covid, they just treated me like a mental health patient. I felt awful, I was having muscle facilitations, sleep difficulties, difficulty with hand/eye coordination. I went and had a few private MRIs, which the psychiatrist took as a sign of me "regressing", that is she said I was delusional for trying to figure out what was wrong with me since the doctors already determined it (they didn't, they defaulted to some arbitrary 'depression', while also admitting they couldn't find the reason). And of course she tried to increase my meds of anti-psychotics so I'd stop trying to figure out my own health condition.
That's one area of medicine I think someone should take a wrecking ball to. The idea that someone can diagnose you with a mental illness with zero blood work, zero diagnostic markers, just one person's opinion, which can be absolutely life changing, is ludicrous. Even now I have the opinions of multiple experts including neuro-immunologists that that event was most likely related to the covid19 infection, it's still hard to change the official narrative in my file.
Some of you have forgotten that only three years ago you were perfectly capable of writing an essay, writing a eulogy, telling a bedtime story to a child, and it should worry you that powerful companies have convinced us we can’t do things we’ve been doing for 5,000 years.
@ThePhullNelson@dieworkwear@ChristopherHale Derek’s favorite fashion icon is King Felipe VI of Spain. Monarchy is a conservative institution, so that’s clearly not the issue.
No, Derek chooses not to clown on Felipe VI because His Majesty (1) dresses well and (2) doesn’t gift the Pope crystal footballs
When I was in the hospital, they ran a CT scan on my chest to look at the cracked rib. That scan found ground-glass opacities in my lungs. The pulmonologist didn't really know what to make of it, but I'm familiar enough with the literature on this that I recalled the exact papers: these have been found in otherwise healthy people years after a COVID infection.
It's not PEM. It's not fatigue. It's not a symptom on some checklist or survey dolled out by some academic who has been wasting funds for the last 15 years with nothing to show for it. It's organ damage. Try absorbing that into the IACC framework. Try staging it on a five-point ME/CFS severity scale. Try treating it with pacing and LDN. Try telling the doctor who put a tube in my chest that this is the same condition as post-EBV fatigue.
This is why the conflation matters. When Long COVID gets absorbed into a symptom-based chronic illness framework, the vascular damage disappears. The cardiac injury disappears. The lung fibrosis disappears. The strokes disappear. What remains is "fatigue and brain fog," vague symptoms that seemingly demand nothing from anyone in power.
I've just written and deleted a few versions of a thread about how there are some health conditions that are socially acceptable.
The people who have them are somehow almost canonised just because they have those conditions...
@envidreamz Also, I’m the only one in my family who masks. I KNOW I’ve been sick because of them. They won’t see specialists; I don’t know why. Maybe they’re afraid of finding out they’re mortal too.
I don’t understand why they don’t want to protect themselves, or even me! It’s insane!!
@envidreamz All the while, this crisis mirrors the beginning of the HIV/AIDS crisis. I fear it will require a critical mass of people dying and another critical mass of people demanding action before universal protective measures become normalized and cures are earnestly sought.
@jkimballcook Leo XIV is Mamdani-like because … he doesn’t interpret the Bible like a John Birch Society toadie? 🧐
His Holiness is channeling a bit of D&C 104:17-18 (the earth is full, and to spare; he who imparts not to the poor shall lift up his eyes in hell). My heart and mind say yea.
@alewis2980 @nihilists4jesus That and driving home the fallibility of the Founders. Her delivery of the Gouverneur Morris whale baleen catheter anecdote is prime content
@nihilists4jesus Also several of my conservative family were concerned about Sharon due to this gossip until seeing all the relevant posts and her receipts
Immediately they were like _oh, she cited 100% reputable sources. Turns out we have to revise our opinions of both her and CK_
@nihilists4jesus It was only after GOP assertions that CK never said ANYTHING contrary that she made the context slides for his bad takes.
She made it quite clear on that FB Story that she did NOT believe CK’s bigotry merited his death, only that he’d said bad things. (reasonable take IMO) 2/2
The incentive to make money has so twisted our priorities that people can’t believe you enjoy learning for its own sake. It ends in a world where no one knows history, poetry, myth because they see no profit in it. Disdain for the humanities reveals a total poverty of spirit.
My son is growing older now. Not a baby or even really a little kid anymore.
And I keep realizing there is a version of his childhood that I never got to live.
Long Covid took me out when he was still in my womb. It took me when everything was supposed to be firsts and softness and bonding that roots deep into both of you. Instead, it was sickness that lingers in continuous waves. Fear that never ended.
Every season feels like something hunting me. Every summer, every winter. Again and again Covid took me further down a well.
I was there, but I was not there. Just a body in the room. A mother too sick, too terrified and too broken down to give him what he deserved.
People talk about moving on from Covid like it is a chapter. Like it is something you file away and become stronger from. But I never left it. I am still inside it. Still living in the continued waves of forced infections while time keeps moving forward without me.
And now he is older. And that window is gone. I missed pieces of him that I will never get back. Versions of him that only existed for a moment in time that should have belonged to us.
I grieve something that is not visible to anyone else. A bond that never had the chance to fully form. A motherhood that was interrupted at its beginning and never repaired.
Covid did not just take my health. It took time, presence, and memories before they could even exist.
And I am still here trying to love him through the weight of everything that was lost.
A Canticle For Leibowitz is a classic early (1959) post-apocalypse novel where an order of monks preserved the last remnants of learning (the memorabilia) after a nuclear exchange turned the remains of society into book and scientist burners.
I first read it in the 80s as a mass market paperback that I somehow lost along the way. Other paperbacks from that time are yellow with age and getting brittle, but still readable.
I read it again in the late 2000s on a first edition Kindle. I eventually migrated to iPads for Kindle reading, but every couple years I would come across an old Kindle in a drawer, charge it up, and check out what I had been reading on it. They eventually stopped working entirely.
I’m just finishing reading a new Folio Society edition, printed on heavy, acid-free archival quality paper. If it doesn’t get soaked or burned, it could still be in good shape for centuries.
The ephemeral nature of digital storage does give me some pause. We can still read Sumerian tablets full of administrative trivia from four thousand years ago, but there are no known copies of some important software products from just fifty years ago.
I am a proud supporter of the Internet Archive!
@Verius92@shiori_p0n@Xort_TC I mean, you don’t have wrought iron supports in your pelvic floor carrying the weight of your abdominal cavity, right? 😅
The pelvis and glutes bear the weight when standing, and your anus also isn’t pointing straight down when standing either. (If it is, seek medical help.)