Who cares!

[yardsards]

but i stay silly! *←said in the most world-weary voice you ever did hear*

[fizzlepop-frog]

“but I stay silly!”

[sensiblereblogifposts]

Reblog you stay silly

[angelsdean]

like i'm sorry but we as a fandom have to stay firm on our anti-AI values. we cannot suddenly start giving AI a pass when it's something we "want to see" like destiel kisses. it's not suddenly fine. we're not going to start using AI to make fanfic scenes come to life or audio AI to make characters "say" stuff we want to hear. you have GOT to be firm on your anti-AI stance. if you start making exceptions then suddenly anything will fly. fandom is for real art and creations made by real people. no AI fanfics. no AI art. no AI rendered "bonus" scenes. no AI audio. none of it has a place here.

[whunt]

bro LMFAOOOO

[emmaubler]

[squishycalum]

:/

[vangoghstss]

This is actually v important and needs to be reblogged

[thexdarkenedxlight]

Gonna just share this:

My European Studies professor decided a few weeks ago to take a Friday and instead of following the syllabus, he spent the entire hour and a half comparing Hitler’s actions from a European perspective to that of what Trump is doing in America. He never repeated a single point, and even used video and photos like this to show the comparison.

To make things better, he had us do an in class assignment for participation points. He first played a clip on youtube of one of Hilter’s speeches, subtitled and 3 minutes long. He then played a clip of one of Trump’s rallies. Our assignment? Copy down every single sentence that matched in translation down on a sheet of paper or a word document that wasn’t repeated. The person with the closest amount to what my professor found got a candy bar.

My professor found, in just three minutes of a speech, that Trump matched 65 different phrases/sentences to that of Hitler’s translation. 

65 nearly identical phrases used in his speeches. Take a moment to think about that.

[secretunderwaterbunker]

[argonphoenix]

where the fuck did the phrase ‘fits like a glove’ come from. ive never worn a glove that fit perfectly in my entire life.

[argonphoenix]

ah. i see. el problema es el capitalismo.

[truenuke]

Took me 3 seconds to find a website where you can get custom alpaca-lined leather gloves made for $200. My guess is this is comparatively cheaper for the average person compared to the cost of tailored gloves in the past. Why do people complain about this stuff and blame it on le capitalism instead of just going out and buying tailored clothing? You can do that, you know. You just prefer the cheap stuff.

[rakiloslov]

Just took a tour around the Palace of Versailles. People actually used to live in this house and now we live in cramped studio apartments. It's enraging what capitalism has stolen from us

[earlgraytay]

@laxidaziary @unlimitedhappinessforever - you're both thinking too modern here. You're thinking of clothing as a good that you have to go out and purchase, where for most of human history it was more like food is today.

Most people today mostly cook at home, right? The person in your family who's best at cooking does most of the cooking, and how good your food is depends on their skill and the quality of ingredients you can source. Only the very rich and the very poor eat out all the time- the very rich can afford to go to a restaurant every night (or have a personal chef), and the very poor get Mcdonald's all the time because they don't have a functioning kitchen.

In the past, clothing largely worked the same way. Clothing production happened at home. If you were a peasant or middle-class, your mom or your grandma or your sister or your daughter likely made all your clothes, from scratch, with the best tools and materials she had on hand. Knowing how to sew was like knowing how to cook- if a woman didn't know, something had went very wrong with her education, and she'd missed learning a basic life skill. Only the rich and very poor didn't make their own clothes- the middle class and rich could buy clothes from a tailor, the very rich had personal tailors and modistes, and the very poor wore other people's castoffs.

So most people- rich or poor- had clothes that were, specifically, made for them. Your relative who sewed could get your measurements, and you were right there to try stuff on for her. If it didn't fit, or was uncomfortable, she could adjust it to fit better. And this got even easier with the invention of knitting, because knitting clothes inherently have some stretch to them. Your relative could make stuff that fit you, and would adjust to you if you grew or gained weight.

But even if we're talking about stuff bought from a glover- the University of Missouri has a very good compendium of historical garment prices. In the 1850s in Massachusetts, you could get a set of tailored gloves- made to fit your hands specifically- for between $30 and $50, in modern currency. Most agricultural workers made about $500 a month, so premade gloves would have been a luxury for your average joe- but they're still a quarter of the price you quoted.

This is a huge misconception most people have about the past. Mass production hides the real costs of things, inflating some prices and devaluing others.

And it really gets my goat, because the way we make clothes today is bad.

Most clothes are made badly, out of cheap fabric that's not going to last, and wind up in a landfill because no one will buy them. No one can find clothes that fit. It's a common joke/life tip that if you do find something that fits and is comfortable, you want to buy two in every colour because you won't find it again.

It doesn't have to be this way. For most of human history, it wasn't this way. We can change the way we look at fashion in general and clothing in particular; we can try to have less clothing that is made better, fits better, is more comfortable, and lasts longer.

But to do that, you have to know it's an option in the first place. And a terrifying number of people just... don't, anymore.

TLDR: Most people in the past had clothes that fit, because most people did have clothes made just for them. This shouldn't be a luxury; for most of human history, "clothes that fit" were the norm.

[determinate-negation]

[radiofreederry]

The union busting firms are scared

[esoteric-merit]

As a fine dining cook, I found work in a union workplace around a year ago. My 40 hours a week are guaranteed except for Jan/feb/mar when there’s not enough customers, I get paid almost twice what I did at any other restaurant, if I work overtime, (more than 8 hours in one day, or more than 40 in a week), I actually get overtime pay, (and it’s 1.5x my normal rate!). I get holiday pay, and in addition I get to either bank or pay out my holidays if I work those days, (either a paid day off when I want it, in addition to the holiday pay, or I get paid an add’l 8 hours at 1.5x that week). I also get two floating holidays, 4 paid random sick days, 2 paid family sick days, and 4 paid “doctor’s note” sick days, (paid out by our health insurance), as well as general allowance to take as many unpaid sick days as I want without worrying for my job security. (I’ve been told that taking multiple months off is where we start to be concerned about abuse, so if I want to do that, I can go through our leave of absence procedures instead, where I’m allowed three 2-week periods a year generally for whatever reason I want, (If my manager wants to disagree, he has to get the union president’s approval), and after that it’s up to my manager to decide if he’ll accept them). I get two weeks of paid vacation time a year, and an add’l week per year for every 5 years I work there. We get our legally mandated breaks, which, I know that sounds like a low bar, but taking anything other than a smoke break in a kitchen?!?! Unheard of! I get two 15′s and a lunch every shift! I get to sitdown and rest my legs and not get flak for it! I get a bonus at the end of the year, there’s official procedures for if my manager isn’t happy with me or wants to get rid of me, (three meetings, during which my union representative has to be present), (and getting rid of my classification doesn’t work, there’s rules for how someone ‘bumps’ other people if classifications are gotten rid of), and severance pay for when full-time employees that are downsized out of the company, there’s a pension plan, like . . . Guys, I have a 40-page handbook which details all of the rights my union has won me, and believe me, I’ve never had any of these at any prior workplace. And you know what my union dues are? $4 a paycheck. Of course I’m going to pay my union dues for all of those benefits.

[worldsentwined]

Reblogging for this incredibly thorough explanation of what it's like to actually have a contract in place at a union workplace. I reblog a fair number of posts about how people should organize, but if you're like me, you might not know exactly what that can get you until you've actually gone through the process. Every contract is different because you bargain for what makes sense for your particular workplace, and every few years you re-negotiate with the employer to improve things in the next contract, but some things (like the right to have union representation when you talk to your boss about leave or discipline) are universal.

It's worth every penny of your dues, I promise.

[a-krogan-skald-and-bearsark]

I do on call work in the fisheries. I'll work for a month solid, at good pay, then be off for at least that long.

My Union dues are something like 2.5% off my paycheque when I'm working, capped at $350 annually.

[depsidase]

[firesintheirons]

This is why I've started asking ChatGPT to cite it's sources, it's a relatively decent way to get a broad overview of a topic that I (and this is the important part) will either review in depth later or don't particularly need to be 100% accurate on. It's just a fancy web crawler that spits shit out

[ajaxgb]

Be warned that ChatGPT cannot cite its sources, any more than it can provide facts about the Greek language. ChatGPT does not store facts or sources for those facts. What ChatGPT can do is provide a sequence of words that it thinks are statistically likely to follow the prompt "Please cite your sources." If it's well trained, some of the titles it generates might even correspond to real books and/or papers!

For example, I just asked ChatGPT "How did the greek language come into existence?" and then "Please provide your sources." Here is what I got:

"A History of the Greek Language: From Its Origins to the Present" by Francis C. T. Moore. A real book exists by that title, but none by Francis C. T. Moore (who I don't think exists).

"The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences" edited by Patrick Colm Hogan. Real book!

"The Greeks: A Portrait of Self and Others" by Paul Cartledge. Real book!

"The Oxford Handbook of the History of Linguistics" edited by Keith Brown. A real book exists by that title, but it was edited by Keith Allan, not Keith Brown.

"Ancient Greek: A Historical and Comparative Grammar" by J. J. L. de Jong. 100% fake book (but god do I wish J. J. L. de Jong was real).

"Linear B: An Introduction" by John Chadwick. A real book exists by that title, but none by John Chadwick. John Chadwick is a real scholar who was involved with deciphering Linear B, so at least that's partial credit.

"The Greeks and the Persians" by John Boardman. 100% fake book (although John Boardman is a real historian of Ancient Greek art).

The second part of your post (getting a broad overview that you are aware may be inaccurate) is fine, but don't think that asking for sources will make ChatGPT tell the truth!

[jame7t]

Do we seriously have to skip both ads on YouTube now. Like we press skip on the first then we have to wait five more seconds to press skip on the second. Are you actually fucking kidding me

[jame7t]

Before one of you chucklefucks says “get an adblocker” or “download this sketchy software to block ads on phones:” this sucks because companies are doing it, not because there are ways around it. Do not be stupid on my post where I complain.

I am complaining about ads being shoved into everything because it fucking sucks. Smarmy advice will help neither of us

[prismatic-bell]

Also if that’s your response to OP’s problem, you should know YouTube back in the day promised it would be adless.

Then they added one ad sometimes.

Then they started putting ads in the middle.

Now if you don’t have your browser configured all to hell and back there are more ads in a YouTube video than on regular network television.

OP IS RIGHT.

[whatbigotspost]

I need y’all to understand that every time that somebody who makes $10,000 a year thinks that somebody who makes $30,000 a year thinks that somebody who makes $50,000 a year thinks that somebody who makes $100,000 a year thinks that YES EVEN somebody who makes $150,000 a year is the real enemy

…a billionaire wins and we all lose.

And every time that somebody who makes $150,000 a year thinks that they’re better than somebody else who makes $100,000 a year thinks that they’re better than somebody else who makes $50,000 a year thinks that they’re better than somebody else who makes $30,000 a year thinks that they’re better than somebody else who makes $10,000 a year

…a billionaire wins and we all lose.

Privilege and comfort rises with income, obvi. It’s not all “the same.” But please zoom the fuck out and look at the whole picture. The WHOLE picture.

[panoramicireland]

Scenic back roads of Ireland.

Headed cross country through County Cavan.

[shebloomedbutwontforgethepast]

And after a while you just stop. You stop watering your plants. You stop watching netflix. You stop reading. You stop replying to your friends as fast as you used to. You stop buying yourself nice things. You stop putting an effort into how you look. You stop taking care of yourself like you used to. You stop sleeping. You stop eating healthy foods. You stop petting your dog. You stop socializing.

You stop with everything. You find yourself sitting in your room for hours on end, without doing a single thing. Days feel like years. And you think you can’t do it for much longer.

[chocolate-lilies]

My therapist told me that you don’t only spiral down. You can spiral up again. So maybe one day

You water your plants for the first time in a while. Surprisingly they’re not dead yet. You remember a movie that you really enjoy and you find the energy to watch it. You feel better afterwards. Maybe you still can’t find the motivation to reply to your friends but you buy yourself a nice scented candle and read your book. You take a nice long shower and you feel refreshed, so you put on an outfit you find cool. Then after what seems like forever, you get a good night of sleep. You wake up with more energy than usual so you play with your dog. Then you cook that healthy meal you really enjoy. You reach out to a friend.

You start remembering what brought you joy. You start again with the little things. You look back on the days that have passed and feel relieved they’re over.

Remember, you don’t just spiral down. You spiral up as well, even if it takes more effort to get started.

[fuckingconversations]

Depression does not have to feel like sadness, or grief, or ‘woe is me, I am in agony!“

For me, depression was apathy. Indifference. Utter neutrality. I simply stopped caring.

And because I cared about nothing, there was nothing that could delight or entertain me. I felt no joy. No strong sorrow. No peace, either. Just… apathetic existence, persisting. It was boring. It was banal.

It was agony in the same way that being trapped in a soundproofed, featureless, brightly lit grey room for 5 days is agony, knowing at the end of the week you would not be released, only informed that you had another 10,000 days to go.

Your eyes were not capable of seeing the love in your friend’s eyes. Your ears could not perceive the joy in laughter. Your stomach could not be satisfied by food, your hands could not perceive the peace in a rabbit’s fur, and it seemed like the entire world had hemorrhaged all the things that made it good.

Being alive was a shitty test of endurance. How long could you bear a joyless existence?

Recovering from that…

It felt like color slowly being dripped into an enormous sepia watercolor painting. Sometimes color was added in areas when you weren’t looking at it. Sometimes you could watch the color bloom and spread from a little spot.

The grass feeling cool and lush and enjoyable, instead of {grass.exe}

Noticing the crinkles around my friend’s eye when she laughed, and thinking (cute.)

A cat purring on my lap, and blinking awake for the first time in a year to settle my palm on its ribs, to feel its breathing and the warm vibrations of (comfort/love/affection) and realizing it was alive and I loved this living thing!

Holding a mug of hot chocolate and taking the very last sip and realizing that actually, this was delicious. I’m sad it’s gone, I didn’t enjoy it properly.

Moments of blinking back into my own body, feeling the bright color of the world, spread out across months.

Recovering from depression felt like the slow, frustrating struggle to light a campfire on wet wood after the sun already set.

You keep throwing sparks over it, blowing, hoping something will catch. Sometimes, for a moment, something flares bright. An ember blooms, then snuffs out with a puff of smoke. You keep trying. Keep striking that flint. A bit of grass lights up, is consumed, is gone. Something, deep in the pile, is smoking. You keep trying, your knuckles hurt, you want to stop. Your lungs hurt from the smoke, and the haze of clouds made everything greyscale and shadowed no matter how you squint past it.

And then, there’s a little flame. Warmth. Light. It stays small for a long time as you carefully feed it the driest, easiest tinder you have.

It fucking goes out again! But the ashes are hot, and the surrounding wood is a little drier now, so in three or four more strikes of the flint, another spark catches. And another.

It takes forever. It’s exhausting. But eventually you have a fire that can hold onto a log, and you can see and feel and relax. The world is bright again, and colorful. Feeling came back to your hands. Someone’s cooking and it smells amazing. The moon is beautiful, your heart pulls with longing and relief. You feel yourself wanting, again. You feel your heart loving, again. You WANT to create. To play! All the things your brain just couldn’t perceive fucking slams into you like a truck. It’s beautiful, and tragic (knowing now that it was there all along, and you nearly missed out on knowing this).

Your knuckles still ache, and the fire is so hot and bright that it’s almost uncomfortable, making spots in your eyes after such a long time in the dark, but as you lay on the ground and stare at the flames, you can only think;

(I wouldn’t have this, if I had given up.)

And one day, you watch the sun rise.

[birdturgular]

[anarchocuntboogaloo]

HE 👏 WENT 👏 LOOKING 👏 FOR 👏 TROUBLE 👏

[2urban2fantasy-deactivated20241]

The euros fail to consider the form: it’s not Johnny’s hubris that is the subject of the song. It’s the devil’s, who thinks his power is worth more than simple love for a craft

[apathetic-revenant]

motherfucker there is a wholeass subcategory of the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index for stories about winning against the Devil

EVERYONE loves a good "very powerful, very evil, very smug dude gets his ass handed to him by an underdog that he massively underestimated" story.

and for as long as there have ever been stories about Supernatural Evil Entities That You Absolutely Shouldn't Fuck With, there have been stories about Okay But What If You Did Fuck With The Supernatural Evil And It Went Great, Actually. sometimes the supernatural evil entity is Literally The Devil, Yes That One, because those story frameworks already existed and it was super easy to slot the Devil into them once he came along.

idk what other cultures you're thinking of here but "what if we challenged the darkness and the darkness blinked first" was not a concept no one ever dared explore until Americans thought of it.

[rneadowsoprano-deactivated20211]

Hanging out with old people rules because after a while they trust you enough to confess to murder totally unprompted

[hiscarissima]

Wait what.

[rneadowsoprano-deactivated20211]

Sometimes old ladies had to kick the ladder out from under their stepfathers when they were girls and that’s valid

[saint-batrick]

oh, my little old lady murder story was her replacing the medication in her abusive husband's capsules with rat poison.

"back in the day, our grandmothers worked on their marriages and didn't get divorced!" nah, friend, they COULDN'T get a divorce so sometimes they killed their fuckin husbands. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[smashasaurus-rex]

My grandma murdered her first husband the first time he beat their daughter.

[sandersgrey]

[thatdisasterauthor]

My college was next to an assisted living facility and one time we went over there to draw people’s portraits so we could get practice drawing older people. The lady I was drawing idly told me that she "dealt quite handily with her first husband” while making a stabbing gesture. Five minutes later she requested I make sure not to draw her double chin. I honored that request.

[need-a-new-reality]

So when I was a child my grandmother told all these great stories about growing up in the Alaskan wilderness. Amazing bad ass stories about her and my great-grandmother. I recently asked my mom why my great-grandmother moved from Texas to Alaska in the first place. Turns out my Great-grandfather was abusive to my great grandmother for years and she lived with that until the first time he hit my grandmother, who was like three at the time, my great-grandmother got him very drunk and beat him to death then moved to Alaska to hide from the cops.

[drst]

Men don't realize their life expectancy went up thanks to divorce.

[the-bibrarian]

Figure 9.3 shows that the number of males killed by intimate partners dropped by 71.4% between 1976 and 2002. Researchers and advocates for battered women attribute this dramatic decline to the widespread availability of support services for women, including shelters, crisis counseling, hotlines, and legal measures such as protection and restraining orders. These services offer abused women options for escaping violence and abuse other than taking their partners' lives. Other factors that may have contributed to the decline are the increased ease of obtaining divorce and the generally improved economic conditions for women.

Source

:))))))))

[soleil-moon-bye]

My mom is a gastroenterologist and she once told me that the old wives' tale of people who died of "stopped digestion" was pretty much made up to cover up for women who got fed up with their abusive husbands and slipped some rat poison into their dinner (esp in rural areas). Local doctors knew who these men were (everyone knew) and the community pretty much nodded along when the death certificate said natural causes. The widow would dress in black for a couple years and basically go on with her life.

[cleolinda]

Here’s a recent article about how dire the situation was and would be again.

Though the proposal is not included in the Project 2025 policy book, eliminating no-fault divorce is one of the goals of many of the advisors to the project — an initiative put together by groups like the right-wing Heritage Foundation, to lay out an agenda for a second Donald Trump Presidency. And this is no isolated proposal. Newly minted Republican Vice Presidential nominee J.D. Vance has called no-fault divorce “one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace.”

Sounds like nobody told them about rat poison.

[thebreakfastgenie]

This racism against Haitians is really getting to me. I'm not even sure how to refer to it because I don't even want to say "eating pets thing" because they're not doing that! It's a completely made up racist hoax that the Republican candidates for president and vice-president are all in on.

[thebreakfastgenie]

#this is the most context I have for the whole thing#I didn’t see or hear anything about it before and was confused about the posts urgently saying Haitians needed protection @karleenscreativeworld

There's a town in Ohio with a lot of Haitian immigrants and the right made up a completely fake, racist story about Haitian immigrants stealing and eating pets. To be clear, this did not happen. It's completely made up. A lot of people who aren't on twitter (or maybe some corners of facebook) didn't know about it because it's basically a right wing racist social media hoax, but JD Vance was all in on it tweeting about it and he's a sitting senator who's running for vice-president and then last night Trump mentioned it during the debate. It's had some more mainstream news coverage now because of that and things like the police in Ohio saying "yeah that's not happening."

[maryfitzroy]

even worse, it was unsurprisingly started by a literal neo-nazi:

some other debunks (per snopes)

the photo going around of a black guy carrying a goose by the neck (which like first of all hats off to anyone who can capture a canada goose by grabbing it by the neck those things are nasty) was apparently taken in columbus ohio (not springfield ohio where this whole faux controversy is supposedly set) and the guy in it likely wasn’t even haitian. the video of a woman being arrested for animal cruelty and confessing to eating a cat was not taken in springfield and the woman in the video speaks with an american accent and is clearly not haitian.

the recent wave of haitian immigrants moving to springfield hasn’t resulted in any kind of crime spike. the “white boy murdered by a haitian immigrant on the way to school” story was a tragic case of vehicular manslaughter, and the boy’s parents disavowed anyone using his story as anti-immigrant propaganda.

while there has been a recent uptick in haitian immigration to the united states (and to be clear we should welcome them. the situation in haiti is dreadful) most haitian immigrants living in the united states have been here for 10+ years because they were given temporary protected status after the 2010 earthquake and then virtually nothing else was done for them (they should be offered a path to citizenship imo) many of them who originally settled in coastal cities are now moving to midwestern towns (such as springfield ohio) because that’s where the factory and warehouse jobs are and the cost of living is more affordable.

[emperorsfoot]

I just want to add that “stealing and eating your pets” is something opponents of integration used to claim in the 50s about their black neighbors

It’s the same old racism

[thebreakfastgenie]

It's been used against Asian immigrants too. A real classic old racist chestnut.

[aniseandspearmint]

I've also heard it used against Native Americans/First Nations people.

[geiser]

no lie i genuinely believe brands are so behind the pleather movement bc they can just buy cheap plastic sell it as expensive 'vegan leather' and be ready for you to return in a couple years to buy another 'vegan peeta approved™ leather jacket' bc they last like 5 minutes compared to the way leather lasts decades all the while you can pat yourself and coorporate's back for being sutainable all the while pvc (what some fake leather products are made of) has been labeled the single most environmentally damaging type of plastic and while there are non pvc fake leathers such as pu leather... its not like thats much better producing plastic pollutes and the second your pleather clothes start to breakdown (which happens much faster than you think) theyll wound up on landfills for at least a 100 years...

[starcrossed-sky]

also they love love LOVE to try and sell you "plant-based leather" that you then look at the details and it's "45% cactus" or whatever and there's no mention of what the rest of it is

it's plastic.

it's always plastic.

[sea-salted-wolverine]

Let me tell you a story.

50 years ago or so a cow died. It died in a slaughterhouse after a life on a cattle ranch. It was butchered in a meat packing plant, and it's body was sent off to a grocery store where it then became an overdone steak or a dry hamburger or maybe dog food. It was the 70s and people had only recently realized that you could put food in things that were not jello. Cut them some slack.

But its skin went to a tannery. And that skin was processed in the hide and then leather. That leather was bought by a clothing company who made jackets out of it, long leather dusters for working men and ranchhands. Cowboy shit.

The dead cow that is now a leather jacket is not technically waterproof because if you stand out in the rain for 6 hours water will eventually work its way through the seams at the shoulders. But its pretty damn waterproof. It keeps off the rain and the snow and the dust and the mud and the brambles and it doesn't melt if it catches a spark. So 50 years ago a man bought one and he wore it pretty much until he died and his wife shoved it in a closet. Decades of use, from the deserts in the southwest to the arctic, because it turns out that cowboys are wildly adaptable.

Anyway, I pulled grandad's jacket out of the closet a while back and there is nothing wrong with that coat. It does have some distinctly non-modern vibes, but more importantly it is cool as hell and looks almost new. I have seen faux distressed leather that looks worse.

The cow is still dead. There will be another cow that dies tomorrow for the same reason. But there's no market for leather these days. Its skin won't be a garment that lasts 50 years. Its gonna rot in a pile with all the others. Someone will sell a "vintage" cowboycore Americana aesthetic dark academia plastic peice of shit that will be garbage in a year. And then they'll sell another one.

[rhysintherain]

That cow, that became a leather coat?

It's probably also a saddle that another cowboy is still riding.

And several belts. Probably some wallets, several gloves, some riding tack.

Nobody who doesn't work with leather understands how much material you get from one cow. I have sides (like 1/4 of a cow) that I've been making things out of for years and there's still lots left in my materials stash.

Once that coat is too worn out to wear, there will still be lots of the leather that's still good. Someone who can't afford to buy hides will probably make smaller things from those pieces (that's how I started working with leather).

Even when every piece of that hide is completely unusable, it will decompose like it was originally going to, and shed no microplastic particles. A synthetic alternative lasts a fraction as long and sheds microplastics for its entire life.

You also can't use that synthetic leather for many of the things you'd use real leather for. It's not fire resistant, so welders can't use it to protect them from sparks. it doesn't have the tensile strength of real leather, so you can make equestrian tack out of it. It doesn't provide any abrasion resistance, so you can't make motorcycle leathers from it. It can't be used for protective equipment in sports like archery, because it would disintegrate under normal use.

Synthetic leather can only be used in place of real leather in fashion and upholstery applications, and it's not very good at either. It requires hundreds of times more material for the same applications due to its short lifespan, and it produces plastic pollution constantly.

There's literally no good argument for replacing real leather with synthetic alternatives. Even if you want to go the animal rights route, how many marine and aquatic ecosystems are you willing to sacrifice for the life of a few cows? Are you even saving cows, when we use them for so many other industries? Does a domesticated animal have more right to life than the wild species impacted by synthetic leather production?

In the long run, it's just not worth it.

[clairityintimesofcrisis]

these are the areas where plastic needs to be cut down, not your disabled friendly straws. real sustainability sometimes can be found in the pre industrial ways.

[official-nature-posts]

Official nature post