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Antonia Malchik's avatar

I love how you put this together, heartbreaking as it is (I get queasy thinking about how much the house + property across from me just sold for in Whitefish).

A long time ago I did a work-for-hire gig writing a 6th-grade math/social studies textbook on the Great Depression. I had to find lots of numbers for the math problems. The research was *fascinating*, especially the details on inflation, prices of necessities, the explosion of credit to buy new luxuries like radios, and how Social Security was designed in its midst to get men to work and women to marry (has not been updated BTW!). Also an NYT front-page article on Eleanor Roosevelt making the case for housewives to get minimum wage. And the parallels for our times were pretty stark (this was a couple of years before the 2008 crash).

In other words, these numbers tell a big story and make me sad :(

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Lauren's avatar

I've dove into the world of sewing reddit and instagram over the past few months, and it has really opened my eyes as to a) the amount of labor that goes into making a garment, even accounting for industrial process and b) how exploitative fast fashion is. Layer on the environmental impacts of some fabrics and you find yourself attempting to make your own wardrobe and buying 50$ fair-trade organic t-shirts.

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