So there isn't a free lunch in life but you can fight back against financialization. In the case of a Twinkie follow this guide to make a proper twinkie at home: https://youtu.be/lD2OOTx2G9k?t=592
You will be spending your time but you basically "reverse" the financialization of the product in a way. You could also pay someone to make it for you but then you'd be spending more money (again no free lunch so you have to pick what you want to sacrifice: your time or more money)
I've been trying to do more of this at home to cut out anything processed at home but I have to accept that given limited time I have to let some food items I used to enjoy just go by the wayside.
I've also been trying to do this elsewhere such as "home cooked software" thats tailored to me only and does not include ever increasing junk I dont want.
A lot of the nationwide products that got started a century ago were first produced without any artifical ingredients. Until years later as each additive creeped in. I imagine a lot of them under persuasive sales presure from the vendor of the additive.
Doesn't mean they were not yet seriously processed or truly the healthiest to consume.
Thats one of the points im trying to make. Incomes have stagnated, people at the lower end already were kind of splurging, now they cant justify it at all. So further cost reductions have to go into the product. COVID also masked the ability of companies to just extract more profit out of the product due to the price shocks that never went back down.
I am not sure if this is still the case, but up to 20 years ago, these were typically shut off in May-June to August for “maintenance” which resulted in a prolonged period of no hot water in apartments.
In Moscow? Never. It's been usually a month in soviet times, two weeks max nowadays, usually sometime in late June - early August.
edit: also on heating question - Moscow's electricity is provided by 40 or so big gas-fired steam turbine generator plants, about 10GWe total. District heating serves as cooling for all this power generation.
I worked at a now-defunct defense contractor with the typical inefficiencies of hyper-secrecy and government waste.
A friend once asked, "aren't you conflicted that you're helping kill people?"
At the time, that question put serious doubt in my head. But years after, I realized all the inefficiency slows the machine down. Combine this with negative public opinion, and you've got the perfect machine for creating work that results in busy-ness and reduces actual battlefield harm.
I frankly can't see how someone can look around at the world in 2026 and come to the conclusion that "military" == "automatically bad." There are bad actors in this world who would be more than happy to kill you and take your stuff because they feel like it, and these days some of them run countries.
Yes, but some of them run countries where we live in (and therefore working for military contractors in this country is literally helping kill people to take their stuff). This includes US where tech is so heavily concentrated.
I studied Turkish for a few years and remember thinking it could make an interesting programming language (due to the grammatical/agglutinative features). I was gonna call it Ç, but I was never seriously going to make it. Happy to see someone went for it!
In my 40s now, I can recall dozens of "we should..." statements from myself and others. Typically, these statements were driven by some personal mishap, and the statement is basically forgotten (because it was never a big deal to begin with). But occasionally, some well-read/educated (often with a philosophical bias) will allow a small complaint to consume them, forcing them to write extensively about it, while the world continues to change at increasing speed.
But there's a huge market for this kind of writing: it's all the other people that have similar thoughts but not the time to actually write it.
I once rented a "kei van" in Japan once. I think I remember seeing similarly utilitarian trucks, but forget what they were called. I found the kei vans very practical.
I have one. Four wheel drive, turbo, 660cc little motor. There's even a cute "bashguard" built in to the oil filter, which is hilariously the lowest thing to the ground. No frills. Knobs control everything.
I love it. Full-flat back allows for camping in your car (I'm just over 6 feet tall.) Three bicycles and three people can fit. Wood, tools, DIY... And it is tiny, so it is easy to drive and park.
It doesn't like driving faster than about 110km/hr, but that's good enough for me.
The utilitarian trucks you are talking about are k-trucks, or kei-trucks. "Kei" just means "lightweight."
On that note, kei car minivans like the Honda N-box are just about the most practical car you can buy for your teen offspring - 4 seats and a ton of boot space.
I got a drying closet. It's basically a heater in a tent with a few vents. It takes almost twice as long as a similarly sized tumble-drying machine, but absolutely nothing but warm, moist air is exhausted into the room. I even use it to supplement a space heater.
I personally find this opinion typical of HN readers, and I argue that successful influencers/pretty-people can easily beat more serious professions in terms of economic value, because the vast majority of people are more human than the average HN reader.
I hate ads until I need them, then I complain that the algorithms still suck. My wife recently reminded me I have to give Shopee time to surface good options when I don't have the exact words. I expect this to improve as their models improve.
I rode Waymo in SF recently and was impressed at how calm it was. We just got in and a guy on a bike was riding in the opposite direction, and the Waymo just stopped and waited for him to yell something, and we went on our way.
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