The transition in men’s wear is a combination of cultural inertia and aversion to change combined with a certain attitude toward how things should be, i.e. simple. Just because fit grades have not been numericized does not mean they don’t affect comfort to the degree of wearability. I know I specifically shop for “relaxed fit” and eschew the “standard fit” in Wrangler jeans.
Hip, butt, and thigh fit is a larger spectrum in women’s pants than men. Men will just let them hang. Women will obsess over whether their butts look fat. How high is the waistband, does it sit on their bellybutton or below the top of their asscrack? Do they want to wear them at the midthigh or past the ankle to hide the high-heels they’re wearing to pretend they are taller?
In short, men accept a significant lack of control over how their clothes fit in exchange for simplicity in shopping, whereas women retain extensive control over clothes fit at the expense of any kind of sensible system of correlating between brands.
Trust me, if you ever find yourself in the situation of “all clothes are cut exactly the same and none of them fit comfortably”, you will wish for some greater level of variability and corresponding sizing paradigm for off-the-shelf items.
Because it’s tissue for the bathroom, i.e. restroom, i.e. using the toilet? Because it’s euphamism overkill?
Because only rich people new the secret, handed down from father to son, of where you could buy a monocle?
I’ve been looking, casually, for the last 25 years. I wear glasses where the right eye is flat glass: I’ve always wanted to try a monocle. Are there any closet monocle-wearers here that can point me to an online source?
I don’t wear a monocle, but I have once, somewhere, that I made when I was an optician. A couple of things about monocles you might not realize. One, it’s nearly impossible to wear it for extended lengths of time. You have to constantly squint to hold it in place and those muscles get tired after a while. For that reason monocles are mainly used as reading glasses and aren’t particularly useful for nearsighted people. The other thing is if you have astigmatism it could be difficult to keep them focused. Depending on how much cylinder power there is there’s only between 2-7 degrees of tolerance for rotation.
It’s the lowest n-gram (think pentagram) that can be made with just line segments connecting each point, making it pretty easy. A hexagram is easier, but it associated with Judaism. Anything larger gets unwieldy to make look regular.
As for why we use n-grams to represent stars in the first place, I can only guess it’s because they kinda look like dots with smeared points from them, and the n-grams are the simplest shape that approximate that. (I’d say they look more like asterisks with large dots in the middle.)
Regarding why fish isn’t meat, I think it goes to the Catholic rules about no meat on Friday (now observed only during Lent). Since Jesus had disciples who were fishermen, the early church didn’t want to cause economic hardship to the descendants of Jesus’ friends so they exempted fish from the meatless Fridays.
I think we look at windows after thunder to reassure ourselves that they’re still there and weren’t knocked out by the sound wave as well as look for lightning flashes in order to gauge how the storm is progressing.
No problem – I only ever wanted to be able to read tram (or bus) destination boards, and for that, 1 second would be enough. As it happens, I also can’t buy glasses that fit, so the added inconvenience of a monocle is compared to the disfunctional inconvenience I experience with a normal pair of glasses.
The traditional upper-class git with a monocle screwed it in to glare at small boys or to recognise strangers, and that’s the kind of model I had in mind, rather than close reading.
Myopia is much more prevalent among those who did not spend significant time outdoors during childhood. Two hours of day of being outside means four times less likely to develop nearsightedness. This is because as the eye grows it uses feedback of the bright outdoor light to keep the right amount of distance between lense and retina. Hereis an article about it with some links to a few studies.
Since in the past only rich people could afford homes large enough for their children to spend most of the day in and artificial light to see by, rich people’s children were more likely to get myopia.
My dumb question: how can there be a global financial crisis? We invented money, for fuck’s sake. It’s just a token of exchange for stuff. There’s not suddenly less stuff in the world, so how come everybody is poorer all of a sudden? Planet Earth isn’t in debt to the Martians, so what is going on?
I swear, as long as I live I will never understand economics.
The simple answer is deleveraging but that involves explaining the money multiplier. To be unduly cynical about it, you can look at the financial system as something of an imaginary creature. Most of the money floating around is created by banks when they make loans. That’s due to the nature of fractional reserve banking. Since most of the money you THINK you have in the bank is really on loan to someone else and their money is in turn loaned to yet another person, that’s how a few dollars multiply like rabbits to many dollars.
The problem is what happens when loans get called in - de-leveraging. Now the system works in reverse and suddenly the amount of money in the system starts to contract. People are forced to sell assets like stocks and real estate to pay back loans and do it at sub-par prices. This process then tends to feed on itself until you hit some natural equilibrium or you have central banks step in to provide liquidity.
Not really. If you use the imaginary fairy dust to buy a Lamborghini and there’s a financial crisis, the car doesn’t necessarily disappear. You might be forced to sell it at some absurdly low price to pay off other debts or to pay off the loan you took out to buy it in the first place, but Lamborghini got money to build the car.
(hijacking the question slightly)
Well, there’s not. Which is why in some countries it is called the Great Financial Crisis.
China and Russia didn’t have a financial crisis. Australia didn’t have a financial crisis. And although Australia was affected by the Euro/American GFC, it was largely protected by trade with China.
That’s true, and I’m pretty sure you can add Canada to the list as well. And while I’m not really that familiar with the effects of the crisis outside of the US, I think the point of calling it ‘global’ is the fact that these days, financial markets are global in nature. So when the credit markets seize up and the system starts to deleverage, as it did in 2008, the effects cascade through the system and it affects everyone, either directly or indirectly.