Category: Consumerism

I wonder if this is the start of a trend… a 3 lb. laptop with huge screen and medium (2560×1600) resolution: LG gram 17″.

Could this be the perfect device for seniors? With eyes older than 50 years, 4K resolution on a 13″ screen is not all that useful.

Maybe this particular laptop isn’t the one, since it lacks a touch screen (I don’t need the convertible fold-over feature, but I don’t think I can go back to a non-touch laptop), but I’m wondering if it shows a future to which we can look forward.

As with other computers these days, I’m mystified by the small amount of RAM (16 GB) with which this thing is set up. My 32 GB desktop right now shows that 19.4 GB is in use. Google Chrome accounts for 6 GB. CrashPlan backup software is using 3 GB (it needs this if you have a lot of disk space to be backed up). Microsoft Edge is using 0.5 GB. Adobe Acrobat is virtuous! It has a bunch of big documents open and is consuming only 147 MB.

Given that processor performance has more or less stalled out I would expect a modern laptop to be available with 32 or 64 GB of RAM and 1-2 TB of SSD. A SanDisk 2 TB drive is $250 at Amazon. The 16 GB of RAM that LG includes is less than $100 at retail on Amazon. Why buy an expensive package, screen, and battery to go with a puny RAM and SSD?

Readers: Can bringing the weight down to 3 lbs. and the package size down to where 15″ laptops typically are revive the moribund 17″ laptop category?

Here’s a conundrum… given that dishwashers haven’t changed in the past couple of decades and fundamental detergent chemistry hasn’t changed substantially since 1946 (source), why wouldn’t all dishwasher detergents have converged to essentially the same formula? Or maybe there would be three formulae: soft water, medium water, hard water.

Perhaps detergents actually are all the same, but there is money to be made in fancy packaging and convincing advertising? If so, why does Consumer Reports rate detergents on a scale from 19 (Cascade Complete Gel with Dawn; looks like Procter and Gamble might need to spend more time in the lab and less time making toxic masculinity commercials for its Gillette division) to 85 (Costco’s Kirkland Signature Premium pacs, which might be Finish Powerballs in disguise? Finish rates 83).

Maybe it makes sense that the eco brands such as Seventh Generation and Ecover perform badly. Or the Trader Joe’s absurdly cheap (about 1/3rd the price of Costco!) pacs aren’t great (though nowhere near as bad as that Cascade gel product, above).

But why wouldn’t similarly priced pacs from the bigger vendors all be formulated essentially the same? How is it that the folks who make Finish know something that the chemical engineers behind Cascade don’t know, or vice versa? Even products with similar prices from the same company performed differently.

[Separately, if Consumer Reports is right, you should never ever buy dishwasher gel. A Palmolive eco+ was a mediocre performer and all the rest fell on a spectrum of bad to worse. The top-end Costco pacs were the best performers as well as about 1/3 the price of the top-end brand name pacs.]

It makes sense to me that a Tesla and an Audi electric car will be different. But why should dishwasher detergents be? Everyone wants the same thing (clean dishes).

In https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2019/01/24/gillette-versus-dorco-shaving-test-2/ the one thing that seems to give Gillette a slight boost over the Korean-made Dorco blades is that flexible head on the Gillette handle.

What if one could buy third-party blades and put them on the Gillette handle?

Schick offers just such a product: Hydro Connect. I ordered some yesterday and will be offering a report!

(These seem to be tough to obtain from retailers, though it is easy to buy them direct from Schick. I’m wondering if retailers are afraid of getting entangled in litigation, e.g., “P&G’s Gillette sues Schick maker Edgewell over razor blade design,” which notes that “Procter & Gamble Co’s (PG.N) Gillette unit on Monday sued the maker of Schick razors for the second time in 13 months, seeking to stop its sale of razor blade cartridges designed to fit Gillette’s Fusion handles.”)

Continuing research in response to the controversy over Gillette’s recent “toxic masculinity” ad campaign … (see Test 1)

Test 2:

• two days of growth
• shaving in the shower
• Edge shaving gel
• Dorco Pace 7 on right side of face
• latest and greatest Gillette Fusion 5 ProShield with Flexball on left side of face
• second shave for each cartridge (first shave was Test 1)

Results: Indistinguishable feel and capability of the two blade cartridges. Equal resulting smoothness of face on both sides. No nicks from either system.

Winner: Gillette by a hair(!), due to the Flexball (introduced 2014), which seems to reduce workload slightly.

[Bizarre: in their zeal to be the wokest of U.S. consumer goods companies, Gillette has neglected to be orthographically consistent with their only potential advantage over Dorco. Parts of their web site use “FlexBall” while other pages include “Flexball”.]

Related:

• P&G, the conglomerate that owns Gillette, has one African American executive (see their leadership team), who happens also to be their Chief Diversity Officer. Perhaps the next video can lecture American consumers on the subject of racial diversity. (They can partner with Apple!)
• Prior to Gillette’s public awakening, the company was criticized by the righteous: “Gillette’s New Razor Is Everything That’s Wrong With American Innovation” (New York, heaping scorn on the Flexball)
• Gillette has a record of, at least indirectly, assisting the undocumented: “Illegal Immigrants Hired to Shovel Snow at Gillette Stadium” (NESN)

We have a 10-year-old Buderus GB142 wall-hung gas boiler that is suffering from myriad corrosion issues. The HVAC service folks recommend either dumping in $3,300+ for a “major renovation”, including replacement of the manifold and everything connecting to the boiler, or spending $15,500 (minus $2,750 in rebates under the poor-renters-should-subsidize-rich-homeowners political theory that prevails in Massachusetts) on a new 150,000(ish) BTU high efficiency system.

Does anyone have experience with these beasts? Are they worth fixing? Are we going to pay $3,300 now and then $15,500 a year from now when something else blows up?

Also, if we do decide to replace, Lochinvar or Bosch? (presumably we don’t want to go back into the Buderus money sinkhole, though on the other hand Bosch liked them well enough to buy them!)

Note that my glorious plan to replace this with an old-style standard efficiency boiler ($2,000 part every 20 years) seems to be impractical. It has to go into a small closet (no basement in this house due to architectural genius back in the 1960s) and the latest code would require fan-driven make-up air. So it wouldn’t be any cheaper than having a high-efficiency unit, according to the HVAC guys (and, for some reason, everyone who comes out to fix boilers on Christmas Day or crawl around in attics in July seems to identify as male; where is Hillary to address this injustice?).

[Separately, this is a great illustration of why official CPI is grossly understated for homeowners. The cost of maintaining a house has skyrocketed (very labor-intensive in a country where a worker can cost $30,000/year in health insurance premium before the first dollar of wages has been paid). The cost of paying real estate taxes has gone up dramatically (and about to go up 30% more in our town due to the approval of a $110 million school project (to renovate a school building occupied by 440 town-resident K-8 students!)). None of this is reflected in CPI (background) because they look at what we would pay to rent our house if we could find a landlord sufficiently passionate about losing money to want to buy it, maintain it, and rent it out.]

Update: Readers commented about what a rip-off the above quote was, for the Lockinvar 155,000 BTU boiler and associated fittings. So I got a competitive quote from a regular plumbing contractor who is excellent: $20.750. And I got a second quote from a friend’s heating guy: $15,000 plus or minus. Apparently this is the price in the Boston suburbs. We decided to go with the HVAC company’s $15,500 plan. Typical Americans can’t afford to live in America, is my conclusion. It just looks like we can because we’re using legacy infrastructure that hasn’t worn out or fallen down yet.

A friend’s new two-refrigerator kitchen:

Due to the fact that we think children will be poisoned unless they are fed organic home-cooked meals (not to mention sliced fruit and vegetable snacks offered every hour by their grandma), there is a crazy amount of cutting going on in the kitchen.

This has led to some practical research on knives. Here’s what I have figured out so far…

• Wusthof Classic 4.5-inch knife for cutting most fruit (not the crazy expensive Classic Ikon)
• Kyocera 4.5-inch ceramic knife for cutting tomatoes, which simply do not yield to the Wusthof (you’ll have to buy a new Kyocera every 3-12 months because they break easily)

The Shun DM0700 Classic 3.5-inch paring knife seems to be popular for small fruit cut by small hands, but the Wusthof’s extra length is better for most things and the Wusthof is more idiot-proof with a rounded edge at the back of the blade near your hand. (I do love the big Santouka knives.)

[That there do not seem to be any good American-made knives, at least not at a competitive price, makes me wonder how the political debate about America’s biggest problems still contains statements of the form “We should do X the way that Country Y does X.” (example: New York Times story suggesting that the U.S. health care funding bureaucracy be torn up and rebuilt like Singapore’s so that we can cut spending from our 17 percent of GDP to their 5 percent) If we can’t compete in a straightforward market such as paring/utility knives, why do we think that we can do stuff that other countries do?]