I was a night manager of a small grocery store in the 90s and in charge of general grocery ordering. I walk through stores today and think to myself “how they hell do they order with this huge variety?”
I’ve reduced the time by doing it myself since it started taking longer and longer. Long ago, I could show up and get my hair cut by the barber relatively quickly, with not much of a wait. It took clippers and a couple guards. Fast, no fuss. Now, you have to make an appointment or risk waiting 30-45 minutes. And even with an appt, it still takes much longer than the old school barbers I used to use. Clippers, then scissors, then clippers, then futzing about. Fuck that. I can do it myself in 10 minutes (I’m not doing a one length buzz cut - I do different lengths/layering) and it costs nothing beyond the initial outlay of my clippers 15 years ago. Of course, I’m getting tired of the cord and will probably buy a cordless set here soon. My hair style is freaking easy and it’s not worth all the hassle to pay someone to do it.
I totally don’t care. My location preferences are kept on. I keep Google Maps running in the background. I do not feel harmed in any way whatsoever and I get some positive return.
To get the discounts from my local Tesco, I have to use their “clubcard” which is designed specifically for them to get a full picture of everything I buy from them. To use Amazon, I have to allow them to do much the same thing and they even record everything I look at as well as what I buy.
I decided a long time ago that trying to prevent organisations from gathering data about me is a waste of effort and may, in the case of discounts) actually cost me.
As a tangent from building technology, I’ll add that carpentry and construction tools are in a golden age of utility/price. The $80 DeWalt combo you get at Ace is perfectly serviceable for a homeowner, and the professional grade cordless tools are unbelievable. Now that Fein and Festool are off patent, multi-tools and track saws are ubiquitous. You can have someone come in with lidar/GPS and lay out your entire jobsite to the millimeter. Garmin has pivoted from maps to an entire suite of jobsite management. Heavy equipment is starting to be remote controlled. You can download a site plan into a grader or excavator and it will not allow you to mis-excavate. It’s crazy.
That comes in handy for me. For example, I buy Irish Spring soap 24 bars at a time. It’s the only soap I use. I’ll get an email from Amazon asking if I want to buy more soap, which leads me to check, and yeah, I need to order it.
I have been wearing a sailor knot work bracelet for a bit. If I had to guess I’d say 2 years. Curious as to how long exactly I’ve worn it, I checked my Amazon Buy It Again page. Wow, I bought it 4/26/2020. It’s 4 years old!!
The only alternative is to live off the grid. That’s not an option I would ever choose. The better option is to take advantage of all the goodies they dangle in front in me. And the laughs on them. My wife and I are retired, we’re subtracting stuff from our house rather than adding it, and we pay off all credit cards at the end of each month so that we never pay interest. Do we in fact make the data harvesters lose a little on us? Impossible to tell, although we must be near the end of the curve. We realize every day how incredibly fortunate we are. But we also remember we started on food stamps, got into a government work program, and climbed from there. Yay government help!
For that matter – although it can be highly controversial – the SawStop line of table saws are not only extremely well-built saws, but they will also generally prevent a disastrous result from skin contacting the spinning blade:
In my family, most of us drive Hondas. I’ve never had anyone in my family drive a Honda that didn’t last at least twenty years.
I’m on my second, and I’d still be on my first if I hadn’t had to trade the Fit for a CRV when I had a kid. So I have a 2016 CRV with many years left in it.
My husband is driving a 2008 Civic into the ground.
I understand not everyone wants to drive an economy car, but it boggles my mind that some people consider ten years a good run for a car. And I’m not suffering for it. I have heated seats, keyless entry, remote start and a side and rear camera, this is basically the lap of luxury for me. The fun thing about only getting a new car every 15 or 20 years is that every car purchase features a huge boost in amenities.
When I bought the Fit in 2009 I was just astonished and thrilled to have power windows.
Yeah, I used to be “I don’t need power windows” The first car I had actually had them, when they worked ('62 Olds 98). I like that they are standard now. And we drive our cars into the ground too.
McDonalds doesn’t care about the 2 cents worth of ice and soda in the refill. They care about homeless people showing up as soon as the dining room opens, ordering a small soda, and nursing it through refills until closing time in order to create the fig leaf of being a legitimate customer. It’s not politically possible right now to kick people out selectively, so instead they systematically remove the incentive to camp out by ending refills, imposing universal time limits on eating in the dining room, etc.
Along the same LED lines, a $4 flashlight these days will blow the doors off the 8 D-Cell monstrosities we’d dig out during a power outage as a kid (which then lasted ten minutes)
I did a photo shoot yesterday at the school where my daughter teaches…full-on portrait setup with umbrellas and such. I also brought along some old cameras for fun, to take pictures of the kids at recess and in the hallways. I used an ancient 120 format 6x6 TLR camera and an old Canon A-1 35mm camera, with Ilford HP5 Plus, and the resulting B&W images are dripping with cool.
…but…
Last night when I was culling the actual digital photos of the portraits I was stunned when I zoomed into the eyes of one kid and realized I could see the details of the individual braces from both of the umbrellas reflected in his eyes, Every photo was dead-on crisp, partly owing to a locked-in portrait lighting setup, but mostly because of amazing camera gear (from 2017 at that!) Digital photography is so much better than what ordinary people used to have available.
(The B&W photos still are more awesome though, in my opinion. Film still has something special that digital hasn’t achieved.)
I’ll push back on this one a bit. Old metal roofs lasted a lifetime too, and new ones are fantastically expensive. They do look nice though. Vinyl windows are total garbage, they warp in the heat and need replacing after usually 20 years at best. Fiberglass windows are much better, as are modern wood or aluminum-clad wood windows. Cement board siding is good, but the vinyl siding you find on a lot of houses is cheap garbage too. Corian is just plastic, and it’s bad for kitchens because it scratches and can’t handle heat. It’s better than laminate I guess, but you’re much more limited in color/design. I can’t argue that PEX and PVC are better for plumbing, but they do need a bit more care when insulating for sound or temperature. Cast iron drain pipes are naturally quiet, whereas PVC needs some insulation.
Nearly every building component nowadays is a composite material. They have some advantages over natural materials in stability, size, price, and perhaps even longevity, but they have no reusability or recyclability. Concrete, wood trim, wood framing, and brick are the oldest materials still in general use, but even the latter two are being supplanted by manufactured wood products like LSL (Laminated Strand Lumber) and thin lick-and-stick brick and stone. Sheathing and subfloors are plywood or OSB instead of planks. Walls are drywalled instead of plastered. Exterior trim is increasingly made of foam or composite wood. Pipes, windows, siding, decking, railings, countertops, cabinets, and flooring are increasingly just plastic, usually PVC. Vinyl flooring is taking over hardwood for instance. Roofing is asphalt/fiberglass instead of wood, slate, or tile (the latter is still pretty common in desert climates, but there’s plastic versions too). Structurally we’ve learned a lot about how to build without things falling down, but it’s still done very cheaply.
That would’ve been at the end of their life when the tracks and cars were worn out and rundown. They were also increasingly stopped by crossing (or parallel) automobile traffic. Prior to the proliferation of automobiles, street railways and interurbans only had to stop when they were picking up or dropping off passengers, or if they had to throw a track switch. Once outside the central core of the city’s downtown, the streets were effectively empty, and the rail vehicles didn’t need to stop for any other traffic or street crossings. There were no stop lights or stop signs. Average speed of streetcars in the US around the turn of the 20th century was 10-12 mph. That doesn’t sound like a lot, partly because streetcar vehicles themselves weren’t geared to run all that fast (interurbans and later streetcars were), and because it includes pickup/dropoff of passengers and layovers. However, today’s urban buses dealing with those same things, plus automobile and truck traffic, plus stop lights and other traffic controls that didn’t existing a century ago, generally average only 7-8 mph.
Good one, except mine is Mazda. I’m on my second Mazda3 hatchback and I’m always on the DL lookout for the third. That’s not because there’s anything wrong with my current car but that I’m confident that my next car will be the same kind but newer.
I actually wish I’d brought the subject up a little differently. Cameras as computers, and rapidly improving ones at that, are phenomenal. But all sorts of computers are phenomenal and improving. I hardly needed to point that out.
What really impresses me about newer cameras is that the lenses are so much better than before – and they’re not an electronic phenomenon, or at least mostly not. They’re precision glass surfaces, and precision manufacturing to hold and move them all just so. People have been working on improving optical designs and manufacturing for a lot longer than digital computers. Your Canon A-1 has been made since 1978 and so have many of its lenses; by this time a huge amount of science and engineering had gone into lenses, whereas microprocessors had only been sold for 7 years. It’s amazing how much better the already highly developed technology of camera lenses became since then!
When I had my equipment set up but before the kids came down to the gym, I used my Mamiya C220 to take this shot of the gym, on Ilford HP5 Plus 120 film…If I told you this photo was taken in 1975, you might believe me, but I took it on Thursday. I love the look of B&W film.
Kitchenaid stand mixers. Still built out of metal, weigh a lot but they just work and work well and close to indestructible. Almost no plastic. So versatile and useful in a kitchen (and for more than just mixing things in a bowl). There are some things you just do not want to try making without a stand mixer.
I think they have gotten a lot more expensive though. Luckily I got mine eight years ago. Wasn’t exactly cheap back then either but less than it is now.
