- There are cheaper alternatives to both the razors the author is showing.
- You don't need to shave every day, especially with 2024 social norms, you choose to.
- Nobody forces you to use a disposable razor. You can use a straight razor. You can use an electric shaver. I use both. But it turns out disposable razors saves your from cuts and learning technics and people want that.
- So you really pay £40/year (which is not huge) for the convenience of a disposable razor, and not even the cheap ones. And the fact you want to shave every day.
That reads like an Ad, except I don't know what OP is selling.
It turns out, properly engineered and precision machined safety razors saves you nicks and cuts and is a better shave than disposable or electric shavers. These razors angle the cutting edge at a certain angle, and has very little jiggle. You can still nick yourself applying too much pressure or slicing sideways.
You pay for it, of course, in the initial investment.
The author went on to list other examples, such as Kureig pods. Maybe he is trying to unsell some things.
> It turns out, properly engineered and precision machined safety razors saves you nicks and cuts and is a better shave than disposable or electric shavers.
Best in class (and should be multiples more expensive IMO): hensonshaving.com
That was what I got but I didn’t want to turn it into an ad or cult, even though their product makes it easy to do so.
The way I think of it is that, unless I lose mine’s, it is easily something that can be passed down as an heirloom or legacy for my kids (though I would probably outfit them with their own when they need it). There are not many things made like that anymore.
Got one, but I find Merkur handles (a more established make) to be better. That's not to say that Merkur will be better than Henson for everyone, but it's not reasonable to say that Henson is best in class.
Can you explain? I assume the blades become blunt over time, how does it work?
Also, the ones I use have some sort of green line on it which releases something that makes the shaving more pleasant. When that runs out, the shaving is less pleasant.
And since we are there, I'm in the market for an aftershave that smells great to my wife (mild, not strong) and that is not painful to put on/ok for sensitive skin.
Really hard to shop for these things online and even in shop, one has to smell them.
Henson is a safety razor, so the razor are disposable after about 4 - 5 uses (sometimes shorter). These razor blades do not come in a cartridge, they don't make their own blades, and encourage you to try different blades from different manufacturers. They are much cheaper because there is no cartridge, and all safety razors come in the same dimensions and cutout, making them interchangeable. You are not locked-in to a specific vendor.
The Henson handle itself is engineered so that the razor is bent to a precise angle that the designers determined to be the easiest to use by beginners. There are protrusions so that when you seat the razor, it does not jiggle (which is the opposite of what many disposable razors are advertising now). The handle is screwed in so that when you tighten it all the way, it produces that angle. This is all possible because the manufacturer is a custom, high-precision manufacturer of aluminum and titanium aerospace parts, and I guess some of the engineers got tired of the shavers they were using. They used a medical imagining device to measure how much of a difference this design makes (by detecting inflammation on the cheeks after using their device and other designs). The handle is what you pay into, and the inexpensive razor blades is how you recoup your initial investment relative to disposable razors.
Henson has a bunch of public youtube videos out there to explain (and market) this. Like anything, not everyone will like what they use. This works well for me. They are also unisex, so my wife also uses it. Whether they work well for you is another thing.
I use feather double edge safety razor blades and swear I get cut by looking at them. Always on my hands though so I try not to touch them using a wash cloth and toss them after 3 shaves.
Get a sampler pack of blades and see what suits your face best. No point in paying a premium for Feathers if they don't work for you. For me, Feather and Derby work well, while makes like Astra scrape a bit.
Since I have switched to Feather DE blades, I do not even bother anymore to use shaving cream or foam. The blades are so sharp that even dry shaving works fine.
When I used disposable razors, the frequency of cuts was orders of magnitude higher than with Feather DE blades.
However I use a relatively expensive adjustable razor handle, and it must be set to certain gradations, to ensure that the blades do not happen to cut the skin.
You can make "disposable" razors last a very long time by rubbing them on a piece of old denim in between shaves. Most of the wear on razors comes from oxidation from air and water vs. cutting hair. I believe doing this helps remove the oxidated spots. This means I can make a pack of them last 12-18 months, and I only need a new razor when the plastic/silicone housing and pads break.
Reading the other comments I should still probably invest in a more permanent razor though.
> - You don't need to shave every day, especially with 2024 social norms, you choose to.
Regarding 2024 social norms: the world is a big place and not everyone lives in the US or Western Europe.
Also, people have extremely different beard growth rates. I'm in my 30s and believe I personally still haven't met a man whose facial hair grows quicker than mine does. I can shave in the morning and by 6PM it no longer looks clean whatsoever. Yet there's many men who can't grow one even if they'd like to.
> But it turns out disposable razors saves your from cuts and learning technics and people want that.
They're also useful for those with disabilities or other issues that make it difficult to use a straight razor. I'd love to use one but have tremors if I hold my hands/arms in certain positions, rendering it unfeasable. We're definitely a small minority though, for most I'd recommend the straight razor.
>You don't need to shave every day, especially with 2024 social norms, you choose to.
different people have vastly different shaving needs, you can't put everybody in the same box like that. learn to be curious about other people's experiences, and their reasons, you can choose to too!
Many takes in this thread are people not realizing this and having a really narrow view of what people are shaving, and why, and what might or might not work for them--inappropriately generalizing their own constraints and desires to others.
>I am curious what the needs would be with regards to shaving?
thickness of individual hairs. density of follicles per unit area. hair growth rate. color of hair. do you get a 5-o'clock shadow? how about a noon shadow? how about just a 3 day dusting if you look close enough? do the people hiring you already consider you swarthy? does your neck break out in razor burn if you shave too close, putting you a day behind from the get go?
>really does seem more like a personal choice, social norm dependent topic
social norms are not personal choices, and what you call curious is what I call obtuse, but that's personal preference (based on norms I've observed). Two words for you to carry away from this, son: pseudofolliculitis barbae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudofolliculitis_barbae
Going against social norms often comes at a cost. Many people have enough other things going against them that they need to get whatever small advantages they can.
I'm not sure that anyone is suggesting that it isn't their own responsibility. No one is saying that someone else should have to shave them or something.
>You don't need to shave every day, especially with 2024 social norms, you choose to.
Only if you're a software engineer at a company with no dress code. Many professions you simply MUST shave every day (ex. military, firefighter). Even the first company I worked as a software engineer for in 2005 required men to be clean shaven for work. In 2024 the New York Yankees STILL require their players to be clean shaven on the field.[1]
Beyond that, facial hair growth rate is highly variable.
Indeed. You could buy https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/251618381, for instance, which is a perfectly good razor and costs 70p per unit. Assuming one lasts you a week, that's £36 per year. Many people could make one last at least a fortnight, which brings the cost down to £18 per year.
Is it worth £8 per year to save the hassle of dealing with a classic double-edged razor? Yes, of course it is. This is a very strange thing to get upset about.
I have a Dorco that I've used for years along with a double edge. The Dorco cartridges are pretty cheap and the double edge was used.
Also, yes, you probably do not have to shave everyday these days. I can get by with 2-3 a week if that and still not look messy. Even if I did I feel the Dorco with the double edge is not that expensive.
The way I see it, 90+% of the price of Bitcoin might be speculation, scams, black market, whatever you dislike the most. The rest is honest value for the only robust asset that can be exchanged across any border and is not subject to the whims of governments and bureaucrats. It is the "digital currency for the Internet age" Milton Friedman was describing in 1999.
(Insert 50 pages long disclaimer here for the HN pedants wanting to point out it's all a scam, that it's not a currency, that it is actually subject to the whims of governments, that it has no value, that it boils the oceans, that it is not the only cryptocurrency, etc.)
Yeah, I have the same issue - I cannot use Paypal nor IBAN to donate to KDE, but I have money in crypto that I could've donated them, but I literally cannot. Too bad the German laws are set up this way (https://kde.org/community/donations/others/ - "KDE e.V. does not accept donations of "crypto" coins: Bitcoin, Etherium, Litecoin, Dogecoin, and all the others. The tax regime that covers German non-profit associations considers those coins a form of speculation which would endanger our non-profit status, so regretfully you cannot donate them directly. Cash out and then use a traditional method to donate.")
Remind me of the florida keys syndrom where each generation think it's a great fishing spot but doesn't have a frame of reference for how much the fishes actually became less numerous and smaller:
I get this feeling a lot when reading old books. People used to be…more interesting? Or at least there were more interesting places like Paris in the 20s. Today the “artistic” hubs in the world feel boring compared to NYC in the 80s or Paris circa 1890-1930, but you wouldn’t know it if you didn’t read the older books.
Because we are more socially interconnected, so the strings of society that keep us connected are also the ones constraining us. The "risk" of non-uniformity outweighs the gain for most people.
Back then, doing something that society deemes risky/provocative/condemns, as an artist, a musician, a politician would be seen or heard only by the people present, everyone else would have second or third hand accounts of it, and that would be maybe tomorrow, maybe the week after, maybe the month after.
You could get drunk in a tavern, get in a brawl and paint the owner's wife posing as a nude boar. The people who would know about it first hand would be only the people who directly saw it. Your boss wouldn't hear about it unless he is in direct contact with the people there, which would be rare.
Nowadays, getting in a brawl would end up with someone calling the cops immediately, someone posting it on instagram, someone calling your job to get you fired with probably a dozen articles next day "drunken fool fights local bar owner after insulting his wife".
These social constraints, the speed of information and the interconnectedness of it all is constraining us into uniformity, as behaviour against the graph is more and more ostracised - unless you have enough social capital to afford it, at which point it is rewarded.
So of course we are less interesting - we are being forced into uniformity.
it's material and political. the most interesting people have enough resources to focus on non-survival tasks, and the individual or collective ability to act freely. today, people generally have higher expenses, less free time, and there are more cops. you'll still see interesting culture among
1. cities where living expenses are generally high, so discretionary spending is low, but a subculture has successfully secured low-cost housing or workspace somewhere the cops can't easily go.
2. rural areas where wages are generally low, so discretionary spending is low, but a subculture has successfully exploited region-exclusive exports or experiences somewhere the cops don't bother to go.
3. wealthy people
4. indigenous people that have resisted the incursion of wage labor and state power
All three statements are manifestly true. I'd only add that free time is bi-modal; under- and over-employed with few people (in the USA) having "just right" work-life balances.
The role of alcohol, drugs, and other mind-altering substances in history can't be ignored. A lot of these fascinating people were intentionally and unintentionally drugging themselves.
Clay Shirky argued in Cognitive Surplus that excessive gin consumption was because those people were bored. It stopped when their job opportunities opened up.
IIRC, he was optimistic that media consumption would similarly dry up once people had more compelling options.
That's just a property of the fact that the interesting people all know each other and the uninteresting people don't know them. In some sense, Sam Altman, Emmett Shear, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Paul Graham, Elon Musk, John Carmack are in a shared sphere. And they are interesting whether you think they are smart or not.
You don't hear about John-Pierre Duvage from the coffee shop because he wasn't interesting. In the future, they will talk about the places where these people met.
Groupies always wonder where the musicians are. The musicians find each other easily.
Those people you mentioned are interesting and intelligent but I wouldn’t call them artistic, or diverse intellectually. And more importantly they aren’t “a scene”, in a physical place, like Paris or lower Manhattan were.
Their sphere almost certainly include the rest that those outside barely know of. For every well-known Aella in the group, there is someone more strange and esoteric with local influence only within. The strange and interesting are never as legible to their contemporaries as they are to those who come after because one's influence is only clear after one has sufficiently influenced.
A thing that strikes me is that people in the Bay Area frequently claim that it has nothing interesting, but my friends hosted a 30-person event locally that had musical compositions, art, and talks about all sorts of things. A local festival. No one outside us knew. I suspect that, like us, there are numerous groups of people out there and that this sort of stuff is common. Only those with breakout ideas make it out, but the groups themselves comprise individuals who, if you teased out their tales, would make good stories.
If my friend groups span libertarian billionaire techies and union working-class ironworkers, I must assume that the rest of these groups are similarly diverse.
For my part, I have found the Bay Area a fascinating place full of fascinating people. I am thankful to have found my way here. Sometimes I think not even Moll Flanders has lived more exciting a life than many of those I have met here.
> I get the sentiment, but also, for many the work place is a socialization hub.
> And what OP argue about is a direct consequence of that: small talks, serendipity, politness rules, etc.
You can do that while following the same rules of politeness and small talks.
For instance I had a colleague who used to put "Hi" or "Good morning" messages several times a day on my teams chat.
He could be as polite saying and include small talk in a single message:
"
Good morning prmoustache, do you have some time to help me on project BLABLABLA, I need assistance regarding setup of FOO in a BAR context. Mr John Doe told me you had experience with that. Here are the errors I get.
<some snippet>
If you have some time now we can maybe do a quick call, otherwise can I schedule some time?
By the way, how is the weather in Spain today? Did you enjoy some nice time on the beach with your daughters?
"
This is polite, include all the info I would need, some small talk, would give me an idea on how much time I might need to dedicate to that to give assistance, if I have to check some info in my note/wiki/whatever and either decide to stop what I am doing now and help him immediately or ask him to schedule a meeting later during the day or week. And maybe I have the exact solution and I can point him a link that will help him directly.
People who usually don't go straight to the point either do it:
- for cultural reasons
- by ignorance on how to work effectively with remote worker
- or because they want to brute force their way into you.
Small talk is fine, but when someone isn't willfully trying to engage in small talk and just is walking through a ritual to ask me a question, it seems better to skip the ritual and get to the point. Instead of "Hi [name]", them waiting for me to reply, me waiting for them to reply, and them sending their question, they could write "Hi [name], [question]" in their initial message. There are no disadvantages to this and plenty of advantages.
Ignorance? I sub to several substacks via email, and just today (just now, from you) learned that the platform supports RSS feeds :) Off to substack I go! It’s become overwhelming.
I've been wanting split view in FF for a long time, so I'm going to try this right now
And I know somebody, somewhere, is going to argue that it should be the job of the desktop.
I disagree.
I don't want to have to create each context I want things to exist in, and manipulate that carefully.
I like automatic context. That's why I like tabs in my browser and not a thousand windows. And that's why I enjoy my split views to be inside the tabs I just created.
That's a sidebar, they're not the same. It requires hacks to change the dimensions to a true split, and the things like zoom and extensions don't work the same in it. This is a half-measure at best.
A lot of legitimate Firefox Addons say that. Just means Moz can't manually review every single extension if they want to allow their users a good extension experience...unlike developing Chrome extensions
Or don't waste your time, given Mozilla management does whatever it or Google wants? Just like with Google, nobody works on anything that won't help get them promoted?
There are decade-old "everyone agrees this sucks, please fix it" bugs in bugzilla that are ignored because nobody in management or development cares. It's not sexy, can't go on their resume, it won't let them give presentations at conferences, or get them on people's podcasts, or tweeted about...
- You don't need to shave every day, especially with 2024 social norms, you choose to.
- Nobody forces you to use a disposable razor. You can use a straight razor. You can use an electric shaver. I use both. But it turns out disposable razors saves your from cuts and learning technics and people want that.
- So you really pay £40/year (which is not huge) for the convenience of a disposable razor, and not even the cheap ones. And the fact you want to shave every day.
That reads like an Ad, except I don't know what OP is selling.