You can add pockets to the pants you buy, too. This video by Morgan Donner is adding several examples of types of pockets to skirts, but the process is the same. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pE_nrHKd58

And there’s this one by Bernadette Banner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thlzJj1EHiY

Thigh pockets are really great for phones. You can make visible patch pockets or subtle welt pockets and you can customize to the size of your phone.

For t shirts I always sing the praises of Gettees. Tiny “factory” of half a dozen people making extraordinarily high quality and durable shirts in Detroit. Most of the people doing the sewing are former auto upholstery stitchers from the car factories. The quality is truly the best I’ve ever encountered. https://gettees.us/

Side note about pockets: Duluth Trading women’s pants have multiple ginormous pockets, and about half have crotch gussets or anterior inseams to avoid chub-rub destroying the pants.

A “final solution”, as it were.

A good place to start on YouTube is Bernadette Banner’s channel. She is a clothing historian, so there’s a lot of historical and historical recreation stuff, but she also has a few basic repair and tailoring techniques videos. She wrote a mending book that I hear is much more in-depth than her videos (I haven’t read it). https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/make-sew-and-mend-bernadette-banner/1139915226

Patagonia Wornwear has a lot of repair instructions for outdoor gear (you don’t have to buy their repair materials). https://wornwear.patagonia.com/repairs

Reddit “visiblemending” and “invisiblemending” are also very good resources.

There is a generation of little old ladies who are passionate about sewing, but have no-one to sew for. Their kids are grown, and their grandkids don’t want handmade clothes. Ask at a senior center or at a local (not chain) fabric shop, seek out one of these ladies and hire her to sew for you. Or barter: help her around the house or garden or drive her to appointments or to get groceries, and in exchange she sews clothes from fabrics and patterns you choose. Or tailors used clothes to make them fit you better, or mends your worn clothes, etc.

Here’s an excellent place to start: https://tincanknits.com/collection/the-simple-collection

And “run” the heels and ball of the foot so they felt down and last longer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fKKLOUNOHU

I did a deep-dive reading and watching videos learning about sturdy and long-lasting fabrics and materials. Learned a bit about tailoring for durability, too. (For example, Duluth Trading shifted the inseams on their Firehose pants forward. The forward seams don’t rub on each other when you walk, and so the inner thighs don’t self-destruct as quickly.)

There are also a ton of excellent resources on how to mend clothing and properly care for it. And it doesn’t take much effort, really.

So now I have a bunch of older clothes, with subtle repairs, still in good shape. Sure, I’d like some sexy new trendy disposable stuff so I can be one of the cool kids - but that’s how fast fashion gets its claws into you. Preying on our magpie-like desires for shiny new things makes somebody big bucks. (And creates huge waste and exploits desperate workers.)

Buy sturdy “classic” clothes. Keep them in good repair. Fight the system.

This reminds me of an article about journalism and the internet, from ages ago. A class was asked how they would research for a topic (it was some recent political event, I don’t remember). The class confidently answered “the internet.” The professor struggled to get them to understand that wasn’t enough. Yes, there is all kinds of stuff about this event on the internet, but how did it get there?. And more importantly, what is missing?

Sure, all the sexy AI stuff gives us goosebumps and sounds great. But how did it get there, and what is missing? Someone somewhere has to do the actual original work first, or it’s just making collages from the same library over and over and over again.

I don’t understand how it is more ethical to create an embryo from a stem cell than to create one from a sperm and egg. Both are viable, neither is a person. How are they different?

(Keeping the stem cell version in vitro past the the age when it would need to implant isn’t really a solution/distinction because we can do the same thing with a sperm-and-egg version.)

70,000 people without toilets… eeek.

The important thing is NOT to read the numbers and odds when/if it happens to you. Treatments are progressing rapidly, and odds are based on people receiving treatment 5+ years previously.

If you forget your glasses all ya gotta do is enlarge the text size. Digital is pretty groovy.

Russia probably saw this weakness

Good ol’ “Foundations of Geopolitics” by Aleksandr Dugin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics

“Hallucinate” seems like an odd vocabulary choice when talking about an AI. It implies much more sentience than an AI can possibly have, plus the ability to spontaneously create from whole-cloth. (Which AI can’t do, at all.)

I feel like our brave new culture needs a different word for the non-sensical/inaccurate products of AI; something with the flavors of “assemble” “fabricate” “construct” “collate” “collage” “grab-bag”.

Our vocabulary isn’t keeping up with technology. Is there a linguist in the house? We need more words!

“Jab” got adopted in the US when the disinformation memes and stuff started flooding into social media. The creators of the memes learned British English, so they used British slang.

If you are sick with anything contagious throw on a mask if you go out in public. Common courtesy.

If your immune system is compromised, you are already wearing a mask in public anyway.

If you are visiting people in fragile health, you are already wearing a mask anyway.

Fun fact: I have some foreign colleagues who use ChatGPT to get the base for their patient reports. They give very short(and non personal!) instructions, a nice text pops out, they add in the details. Voila. Their report is better than mine as a native.

In the end, how is this different than using a good Epic template? Sit down and create a wardrobe of templates and smart-phrases for your reports. It will end up as fast as those ChatGPT texts, but it will be your own writing and details that you control. Epic has several different ways to import and copy other people’s templates, too. You could even use one of those ChatGPT reports to create part of your template if you like.

Florida students who want to go to college in other states will need months of remedial education to catch up.