Surprisingly, glass bottles are even worse for microplastics than plastic bottles! Apparently due to plastic coating on the metal cap:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0889157525005344

Kids physically can’t understand negative numbers until a certain age. The abstract thinking parts of their brain aren’t done cooking yet. Do you know what age that is?

JFC. When I was 12 I was coding in assembly language. I couldn’t understand negative numbers, only two’s complement representation. 

Sure, lots of frivolous consumer goods have gotten cheaper but healthcare, housing, childcare, and education, all the important stuff, has exploded in price.

Eh? No, the chart says housing has got cheaper, relative to wages. And childcare hasn’t gone up much

Interesting. Many things can be said about this, on topics such as:

• Connoisseurs
• Pedantry 
• Diminishing returns
• Satisficing
• Signaling

Best left as an exercise for the reader. 

When in New York recently, I noticed a vastly higher rate of crazy homeless people (mentally ill/drunk/on drugs) than in London where I live, where I have almost never seen one. There are beggars in London, but they are well-behaved.

My wife (who is American) attributes this to the much better (though still patchy) welfare state in the UK, which seems plausible.

(My own initial explanation, which may have a bit of truth to it, was that British people are just more polite and well-behaved, even mentally ill vagrants! Cf I heard recently of a woman in London who noticed a pick-pocketer had just taken her phone, so she politely asked for it back, and he embarrassedly gave it back to her. A quintessentially British interaction.)

One exception to the welfare state point: some years ago I came across a man in London standing by the road at night, quietly calling out for help; he turned out to be blind (his eyes milky white), disheveled, apparently homeless. I pressed a £20 note into his hand; he asked what it was, and was appreciative. I still don’t understand how there can be blind beggars in the UK, which I had thought were only found in Dickens novels. 

Indeed, it’s often said to be good to smile at people (in certain countries*), though I’ve never put the minimal effort into implementing this, not being a natural smiler.

I would not be surprised if adopting the habit of forcing a smile, which might soon come naturally, is an extremely easy win - to the extent of improving the course of the smiler’s life significantly. Both by improving interactions, and because psychology says acting a certain way (eg feigning happiness or extroversion) induces it in oneself.

(*Whereas in some former Soviet countries, smiling is considered a sign of being a fool or weirdo. E.g. before the Sochi Winter Olympics in Russia, hosting staff were trained on how to interact with foreign visitors, including smiling. After this training course, one staff member tried walking down the street smiling at people, but was promptly stopped by police and questioned for suspicious behaviour.)

That's just way way crazier than anything that 50 year old Americans have seen. And the main technological advances--phones, internet, social media, and recently AI--seem somehow subtler and easier to ignore

You forgot computers more generally. Which only became widely used in the 1980s & 1990s

FWIW I’ve heard the same is true of (modern classical) composers. The piece they wrote that they think is their best work (and wonder why no one performs), everyone else thinks is boring/mediocre/etc. Possibly because it involves the culmination of some novel groundbreaking experimental technique they’ve devised that no one else cares about and doesn’t produce good music anyway. A composition teacher once explained this to me as the difference between a good piece and one which felt good to write (i.e. where it felt like the composing process went well).

(Conversely, back when I used to compose, some of the best stuff I wrote was literally me staying up all night before a deadline, filling bars with crappy notes while cringing and thinking ‘JFC this is utter shite but I’ve absolutely got to get this finished by sunrise come what may or it’ll be a disaster!’)

Indeed it’s ease of first use I’m thinking of here. Noticeable when staying in hotels.

But I doubt aesthetics are relevant in the case of shower UI though - surely a good UI would be aesthetically pleasing enough. And UI design for such a simple device shouldn’t require evolution over time - could jump straight to a (near-)optimal solution

Why do almost all showers have different user interfaces, and bad ones at that? Eg unclear how to turn it on (especially if there is a separate shower head and hand-operated hose), which way is hot, and how hot the current setting is. Each shower requires experimentation to figure it out. How hard can this really be? Even premium manufacturers like Grohe fail.