Double 0 Soul

..also, this made me laugh recently

I'm hearing good things about Chesterfield..

Lads.. lads, we’re exactly the same, there is a sufu look and we all gravitate towards it via sufu approved brands.. folks come along who don’t fit the mould like @Geeman Kung-fu buddy and we all laugh at their purple pointy shoes and animal print bootcuts.. our rep system guides us and keeps us in track.

Holy crap! .. that looks amazing, very tasteful build, kudos for getting it done, are you riding it or just drooling over it?

Ive got a set of those dice caps on my bench at work 

13 hours ago, mlwdp said:

Where’s Ed?

He was run out of town by an angry mob brandishing pitchforks..

He’s still lurking  @Signet incognito like 

Remember this from 2012/13?

Which makes me wonder.. what the hell are these new mods doing with their mod-dollar? we nominated them because we thought @Broark @beautiful_FrEaK and @Maynard Friedman were creatives.. they were supposed to be writing editorial articles.. i haven't seen any?.. it looks like they're doing fk all to me.. they can't even be arsed to lock the old threads

You'd probably enjoy some of John Ruskins blabberings re- division of labour @chicote c1836 but still relevant today.. i posted excerpts before in the CSF thread on DB.. to where it seems very fitting.

"In the place of factory production lines I propose, a reorganisation of work processes whereas each item would be individually crafted and adorned by hand. The value of such an object would lie in discovering its record of thoughts and intents and trials and heartbreaking and recoveries and joyfulness of success..

Ruskin, like Marx, also argued that creative labor had a humanizing effect on workers and in social life...

He observed that we humans do not, of our own accord, produce commodities with machine-like precision. Rather, some idiosyncratic imperfections appear in anything created with human ingenuity and invention. These imperfections, he argued, do not result from a lack of craftsmanship or skill but from the human tendency to err in the creative process. When a person expresses creative thought, Ruskin wrote, “he stops; his execution becomes hesitating; he thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong; ten to one he makes a mistake in the first touch he gives to his work as a thinking being” (10.192). Such an apparently flawed act, Ruskin argued, embodies imagination and skill. This is not to say that Ruskin believed that all work should contain error, but that labor must allow for, and reflect, the idiosyncratic character of the laborer.

Ruskin believed that industrial capitalism and its factory system undermined the conditions for such expressive labor. This mode of production permits workers to sell their labor, but they lack control over the product or the means of its creation. The concentration of capital in a single elite class causes the dissolution of healthful relationships between workers and their life activity, thus ending their dominion as “proprietors of the instrument” of production (263). Furthermore, as Marx explains, these industrial conditions created an ever-expanding pool of unskilled labor that become integrated as a commodity into the industrial process. Under these conditions, Marx argued, we encounter ourselves as “strange and inhuman [objects]” surrounded by “an alien reality” separate from our “species life” (87). Alienated labor thereby inhabited a bleak cultural landscape in which people could no longer fully develop their human sensibilities and intelligence.

Ruskin viewed the industrial emphasis on precision and accuracy as a kind of “slavery” by design, industrial production, he argued, “must un-humanize [the workers]” while “all the energy of their spirits must be given over to make cogs and compasses of themselves” (10.192). As such, industrial production had transformed labor into a denigrating and unskilled activity, dividing workers into parts so specialized “that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin” (10.196).

Such mechanized labor created a moral imbalance that harmed workers while benefitting the owners of capitalist, who become an elite social, political, and economic class. Once their capital makes workers little more than a commodity, the owners of capital gain a distinct advantage over them. First of all, deskilled labor makes workers increasingly interchangeable, and they also become more easily replaceable through automation. Moreover, a labor regime that eliminated inefficiencies and intelligent craft from the production process was a means for maximizing profits for those who controlled labor.

Marx and Ruskin argued that capitalists furthered their class domination by profiting from the monetary difference between the cost of labor and the market value of a commodity. These conditions of domination depended on the commodification of both labor and the value of commodities sold in the market.

Source

Thanks to the internet I’m better informed and better educated than at any point in my life but the paradox is I can’t seem to recall most of it.. I know it superficially but don’t remember the details.. because it’s so accessible my brain sees little point in storing the information I’ve just spent hours consuming.. 

The NHS saved Sarah's life.. if i can give something back.. i will!

A bit more on Paramo's ethics page.. and a little video

https://www.paramo-clothing.com/en-gb/ourethics/pfc-free.php#

Their definition of PFC free.. even washing the garment in the tap water we all drink.. also has background PFC pollution

When you first signed up here.. i was 5 or 6yrs into me no buy phase.. i still didn't have a smart phone back then, you told me doing this was like standing up in a hurricane

I have a cracked i-phone 4 now.. given to me by my elderly aunt who has since died.

More MiC repros..  it looks like one helluva jacket for £239 shipped

V.Holts A2  looking at the other photos, they don't have the Holts insignia.. so chances are, this^ is probably not the jacket you would receive

A2 also looks remarkable for £189 shipped from China

They'll never get the allegations to stick!

5Yrs ago when i became a full time cycle-commuter, i bought a Gorewear Shakedry (incredible material) .. one of my friends was nagging me because of how environmentally damaging it was.. unbeknows to me.. 'Shakedry' was due to be discontinued because of it's use of flurinated polymers which also exist in phone screens.. cosmetics and whatev's else

I tread this today https://heatmap.news/lifestyle/raincoats-pfas-gore-tex-patagonia-rei?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-gb

It looks like the entire outdoor industry are finally distancing themselves from waterproof materials

^^ "It is also because of this bond that PFAS are so stubbornly persistent — in the environment, certainly, but also in us. An estimated 98% to 99% of people have traces of PFAS in their bodies. Researchers have found the molecules in breast milk, rainwater, and Antarctica’s snow. We inhale them in dust and drink them in our tap water, and because they look a little like a fatty acid to our bodies, they can cause health problems that we’re only beginning to grasp. So far, PFAS have been linked to kidney and testicular cancer, decreased fertility, elevated cholesterol, weight gain, thyroid disease, the pregnancy complication pre-eclampsia, increased risk of preterm birth and low birth weight, hormone interference, and reduced vaccine response in children"

All good healthy stuff!

It appears that most of the beers from my local berwery are gf https://www.abbeydalebrewery.co.uk/product-tag/gluten-free/ it's only the bread based ones which arn't. you already get the best weather and the best nut butter, you can have too much of a good thing y'know!

I'm not familiar with that area @gnewix, i've just looked it up, it looks ingredible, do you live there or are you on holiday?

If you click on the page 227 tab of the roy thread.. it should take you to the top of page 227 (it often takes you to the previous page if the current page is less than 10 posts long) but if you click on the ‘13hrs ago’ link next to where it says ‘last reply by mpukas’ .. it should take you to the most recent post.

4 hours ago, Duke Mantee said:

It’s really good but a LOT stronger than yer standard Guinness

I think porters and stouts benefit greatly from an increased abv.. whereas lagers i prefer piss weak.. remember when Heineken-Shmeineken used to be 3.2% ? i loved it.. it was much nicer back then.. than the toxic 5% which it is nowadays.

7 hours ago, StuartM said:

I've worked as a consultant to the pharmaceutical industry for almost 30 years. Taking part in a clinical trial is really important and I always encourage people to take part.

The big thing is the amount of time it takes. Not just the travelling to and from assessments, but also potentially lots of time spent waiting in a clinic or trial facility and lots of, frankly, interminable forms to be completed. I'd ask questions about the protocol (the process and method by which the trial is being run) and what is expected, time-wise, of participants. Often when trials are set up now, people time how long every stage will take.

You might also want to know the stage the medicine is at. Phase 1 tends to mean early stage with small groups of participants. Phase 3 are the really large studies that are needed before drugs get regulatory approval. 

Vaccine trials can be wonderfully chill. You give informed consent, you get the jab or a placebo version, and get followed up over a long period because they have to wait until enough people in the trial have come down with the disease to see if the vaccine worked. 

Scrolling down here there's a list of good questions to ask. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/clinical-trials

Thanks Stu.. yep, it sounds like a positive thing to be part of.. trialing a vaccine against typhoid would be even more beneficial (or at least comparable) to my work trialing the Gillette Mach3

It's a 14mth trial but i only have to visit Oxford twice.. maybe three times, everything else is conducted at my local NHS trust which is a short walk from my work. I was given this link to read https://trials.ovg.ox.ac.uk/trials/vasp-sheffield along with an email from my GP ..

My only doubts.. my wife is immunocompromised, would i be contagious?

My neighbour and i share our recycling bin (he took theirs to his allotment and converted it into a water butt) i've noticed a few 0% Guinness he's put into recycle, he's trying to cut down on his booze intake.. i probably drink more than he does but i'll only ever drink 3 pints max these days whereas he'll only drink the odd one with a meal but when he goes out.. he goes out on a proper bender like he's still 18  even though he's pushing 60.. he must be doing something right because he only looks 50.. fit as a fiddle, rock climber, road cyclist ect..

We don't seem to have very much of a selection of quality zero alcohol offerings.. one thing that bothers me tho.. it's the same price as regular Guinness and most of the cost associated with alcohol in the UK is taxation? shouldn't it be half the price without the alcohol duty to pay?

Out of the Guinness varieties.. i think this Nigerian import is king, do you get this in the US B?

It's on the international food section in Tesco, rather than the beer aisle so nobody shopping for booze buys it.. therefore it gets reduced.. which is when i buy it 

They’re some proper beers!

Im starting to get pretty tired of IPA’s too.. we’ve had a lifetime of drinking the kind of beers you mentioned above so an IPA over the last 4 or 5 years have made a welcome change, nowadays I just want my beer to taste like beer again rather than some slightly grapefruity, cloudy IPA.. saying that, I had 3 pints of coconut porter from the Acorn Brewery in the pub a few weeks ago.. it was glorious!

What beers were you drinking?

You’re right.. we do deal with a lot of rain but not in the places you went to, they’re some of the driest cities in the country 🤣