I think the question here is: would the labor of the artisans who make the Birkin bag be so valuable if the bag was not a Veblen good? I imagine many skilled and fastidious craftspeople working on less prestigious products have lost their livelihoods over the years due to automation & obsolescence.

I think this bag is fake. Hermes's flagship products are handsewn using a saddle stitch. A worker marks the leather using an awl and then threads two needles through from both sides. This results in a tight stitch with no holes between the stitches. The holes here suggest the bag was machine sewn.

SS Edmund Fitzgerald had a structural defect in its keel. Sailors on that ship had complained about the ship bending and flexing during storms, especially when it was overloaded, which it usually was. They had also found old keel weld breaks due to structural fatigue, which were never repaired

Just out of frame of this cartoon: a full bookshelf mostly containing Joyce Carol Oates books

Kyle Kingsbury is not a journalist. He is not an op-ed writer. He is a computer safety researcher. And he has written one of the most compelling, comprehensive accounts of the ongoing hell in Chicago that you could possibly imagine. In under 1600 words. aphyr.com/posts/397-i-...

not to be all "oh yeah well what about the OTHER awesome old timey-sounding '70s canadian shipwreck folk song" but if you pay attention to the lyrics of "The Mary Ellen Carter" it is surprisingly detailed and precise about marine insurance underwriting and drysuit salvage operations

I worked on a Canadian freighter at the time, we caught the beginning of that storm and it was bad, we were "light ship" empty going for a load of grain in Duluth and rolled for hours in the big waves! I was a 16 year old working in the galley, I couldn't believe crew were hungry, I was sea sick!

The legend lives on from the Anishinaabeg on down / of the great lake they call gichi-gami ✨

please share I want to see the flail

I often read the BOOKS, as a person who enjoys all the typical human activities!

Thanos couldn’t snap me up fast enough if she said this about me

oh my god

I feel like that was true last year as well. A lot of Dems spoke of Trump winning as an existential threat to democracy but then treated the election and post election time as somewhat "business as usual". If this is all an existential threat (which I believe it is), then treat it as such.

❤️‍🔥🧵

watching Predator and i'd never really considered before how funny it is that Arnold is emphatically like "we're a RESCUE team" and there's a guy on the team with a, typically aircraft mounted, six barrel rotary machine gun. for rescuing. you can rescue up to 6000 guys per minute with this thing

🧵⚡️

Casual reminder that the myth of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” is a cruel hoax designed to convince poor people from all walks of life that the injustices they face are a result of their own actions, rather than an oppressive system rigged against them.

Le gouvernement fédéral soutient des projets chers à l’industrie des énergies fossiles.

If you have a Dem senator and you're seeing this right now, CALL THEM RIGHT NOW and tell them NO. If you don't know anyone who would be affected by this, call them for my friend Lisa. She cannot afford insurance without ACA subsidies and without health insurance I'm terrified she will die.

satan (trying to get some satanists to leave him alone): if you wish to earn my favor you must kill four hundred uhhh ostriches. all at once. during a full moon. in canada

Are you serious? He's got no voice on the national project board from MB First Nations. We've got 30 of the 34 critical minerals and now that he's made them a national security priority, he will absolutely just take it and not GAF about Indigenous People affected. Harper's puppet doing his work.

The economy rests on the backs of the working class, who see no direct benefits from his policies. Funneling money into the pockets of the rich is exactly what Trump is doing, so I don't see an economic difference between them. He's just paving the way for PP's maple fascism.

All of this AND whatever will the Carney/Harper government do when people can no longer protest pipelines, data centres, and funding genocides? /s Thinking of Wet'suwet'en and police overreach but without the Charter right to free speech and. . .🫠

pre-writing a devastating obituary for your enemy is god-tier hating of a kind you don’t often see anymore. renaissance haterism. beautiful stuff.

I am older than gender markers on passports! How do you regulate gender? By making it a form of government ID. It has nothing to do with state security, only regulation

congrats to everyone for thinking this through before signing very big contracts to put it on every student’s device at the school or university you run

Honestly, we need politicians who respect sex workers way more than we need those who only respect lobbyists.

decimate, n. One-tenth of a friend.

It’s 100% time to gird your loins and get your head ready to fight any government that tries to bail this out when it pops. This isn’t the banks, which are essential to everyone’s well-being. It’s not even a railroad or an insurance company, where failure would harm a subset. This isn’t essential.

Great example of rhetorical criticism 🧵

“woke” is when you acknowledge that black people have contributed to the united states

God-tier sitcom character, the acting and writing are so so good

Sometimes I see people like 20 tweets deep into an argument with Grok. Like, what are you doing brother? You are trying to win an argument with a vending machine.

sometimes an Oxford comma can make all the difference

Trump and his cronies are now pushing 50-year mortgages. Buckle up. This is going to make the 2008 mortgage crisis look like the good old days.

Welcome to target. If you are neurodivergent we will fire you

Target failing to understand the message.

for the longest time ive been pronouncing them as "co-ela-canth" but its "see-la-canth"

At the heart of every woman she’s essentially a food… figure out the kind… figure out the order and you can live as a god forever

Also Dennis/Denis/Denny/Danis/Denys/Dennys 🙄. (speaking as the spouse of a franco Denis in anglo territory lol)

2008: I can't vote for Obama because he's a Muslim socialist who wasn't born here. 2025: The most popular politician in America is a Muslim socialist who wasn't born here

Just on a personal note, reporting this story broke my heart. Of all the unfathomable things Trump has done this year, putting SNAP recipients through this psychological hell tops the list. My endless gratitude to everyone who spoke to me. To all who who are suffering: I'm so sorry.

New — While some states have received SNAP benefits for November and USDA is supposedly pushing through all federal payments soon, that doesn’t erase the psychological terror of the last few weeks. I spoke with 20+ SNAP recipients in 16 states about preparing for a possible future with no food:

Flaming Hydra is a coop. All you can do with your share is sell it back to the coop (for $1), and nobody can have more than one. You have to be ready for growth to take a long time. Journalism is a public trust that should be accountable to readers alone, and that means readers alone pay for it.

Soooo it seems like the video has been taken down cause he raised enough money but Mamdani actually crowd funded his transition team money. There was a lot of criticism from the usual sources for "already asking for money" but transition teams are usually funded by hidden donors

It wasn’t a targeted raid for a particular person. Border Patrol went room to room looking for day care workers They were trying to kidnap people to whom children—some under 2 y/o—had bonded. The people who made the children feel protected, feel safe It’s sadism. And it could be coming your way