A guide to the typical terms used for greenwashing in the clothing industry.

The best way to reduce the waste made from making your clothing is to stop the frequent purchase of clothing. If you wear each thing you buy on at least 50 days, you will buy far less than most people do in the wealthier countries. You'll also save a lot of money.

Texas is considering many new laws to punish fraud in voting, which almost never happens in the US.

I am sure this is blowing smoke so they can claim a fire exists, but I susepect it is worse than that.

I think these bills are in fact intended to create opportunities to intimidate voters — voters who belong to disprivileged groups and probably vote Democratic — by making false accusations and threats. For instance, the "marshals" could make false accusations on election day to drive voters away.

Almost 500 species of animals, mostly coastal species, have colonized the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Big Tech asks Australia to change copyright law to permit machine learning systems to scan copyrighted web sites to construct language models.

Copyright should allow people to study copyrighted works to learn from them, as a matter of basic principle. That includes adducing patterns in how language is used.

If people want a law to prohibit studying works of text or art to make programs that generate text or art, this should be a separate law so that it doesn't mess up other uses of studying works, or other ways of reusing aspects of works. We must not let Big Tech add copyright restrictions, since they will design it to give them more power over us.

US citizens: phone your senators to oppose the "EARN-IT" bill that would prohibit end-to-end encryption and require most online services to scan, for the government, all material they get from users.

That's what Congress is considering once again, after it was shelved for public opposition in 2020. Now they are trying to rush it.

I think this would require services to require users to run nonfree software in order to use them.

The bill is so extreme that if people communicate through an encrypted service, and then commit a crime, that would be grounds to prosecute the service. Why go off the deep end? I speculate that they figure to drop them (as a "compromise") while keeping the basic outrages.

I found a campaign to contact senators to oppose this bill, but I can't use it or recommend it, because it requires running nonfree Javascript code. Web sites and services should be usable with Javascript disabled.

Why not make an exception and run the nonfree software "for a good cause"? Because once you make that kind of exception, once you allow a pervasive injustice to become part of how you fight other injustices, you've effectively legitimized that one.

Those web sites could have been designed to function even with Javascript disabled, and they should be.

The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.

If you phone, please spread the word!