Report July 2026

If you’re under 60, your adult life has been influenced by the personal computer; under 50, the internet; under 40, social media. Duped into mistrusting factual news in place of vested opinion, our attention is numbed and monetised. Algorithms suck us down rabbit holes. Disinformation polarises through crises where we’d once have united for common interest. Fed a constant stream of advertising spam, we’re farmed to spend on worthless trinkets with superficial value to corporations avoiding tax on superfluous profit.

To be ethical, it has to be across our business activities. For example, we bank with a 200–year old local government–controlled non–profit savings institution. However, we have customers with financial service provider preferences which take unreasonable fees, and their owners donate to extreme politics we cannot condone. So, we have been recommended by many satisfied customers to use wise.com with its ultra–low fees, permitting use, on their side, for credit card payments, as a lesser evil.

We also feel a moral responsibility to confront ‘alternative facts’ – nonsense; lies; bullshit snowballing like cancer within our community where we have expert access to truth.

Two areas where we continually encounter uneducated gibberish relate to rope lay and breaking strength.

Although possible to exist, we’ve never come across jute spinning machinery producing S–twist yarn. It isn’t factored by diameter, but by weight known as Jute Count in imperial pounds per 14,400 yards, regulated by the raw jute drawn slither width and spun twist.

As detailed in our report a year ago, there’s an optimum twist between obliquity and coherence, with some wiggle room in the middle. Our KI yarn grade developed and designed specific for shibari applications requiring longitudinal strength in premium quality, highly compressible fibre is twisted tighter than, say a carpet backing yarn, eg. CRT required for loose weaving.

Yarn spinning is always single–ply throughout the industry. Multiple–ply yarn is made from rewound, combined single–ply yarns, and this action results in an S counter–twist. Strands are then either made of combined single–ply Z-twist yarns counter–twisted S, or combined counter–twisted S multiple–ply yarns twisted Z. They’re then respectively twisted into Z–lay 3–final twist, or counter–twisted S–lay 4–final twist dynamic rope.

These dynamics have ZERO bearing on rope tendency to twist against itself, because recoil is generated by imbalance/s between twist and counter–twist dynamics in the construction of a rope, irrespective of lay direction. If anything, it’s the unnecessary addition of the fourth twist dynamic, commonly using multiple–ply yarns intended for twines and strings that has the higher propensity to generate imbalance.

Furthermore, we’re often asked to give breaking strengths for our jute asanawa ropes, and here we legally defer to the International Standards Organisation and its national affiliate recommendation in strictly avoiding publishing empirical data. Why? How high is a tree? What’s the weight of a leaf? What’s the volume of a wave?

The issue is that jute is a natural fibre. You can indeed measure the breaking points under load for eg. 100 pieces of rope. But the 101st may be the one with a natural flaw, totally skewing the results, and with them, safety.

Therefore, we cannot publish results, or suggest safe working loads, because if we stated for example 100kg for a product and it failed with a lesser load, litigated against we’d have no defence, and be liable.