Russian infra doesn’t suck that much, I guess it was overbuilt in soviet times. Armenian, on the oner hand… But they’re “societally prepared” in the sense that repairs are quick usually, and there are even some upgrades recently.

I had a Russian friend tell me that the Soviet mindset was to overbuild.

He said they tended to build “two of everything,” which is why there’s so many sets of two.

If one craps out, the second can be used in its place, or scavenged for parts.

Gas-powered cars are indeed much cleaner, they are very popular in Armenia because of favorable pricing compared to petrol. And while air in cities here may not be very clean, it's generally not because of cars: people burn trash in winter and there are a lot of dust in the summer.

Thankfully many new cars are Chinese EVs and most people are installing solar panels, and it doesn't seem to be environmentally driven at all, just economics.

LPG cars are also very popular in Poland, because of fuel prices. Not sure about new cars, but if you buy a used car that hasn't somehow yet been converted to burn LPG, the conversion is pretty much the first thing you do.

Natural gas heating is not the problem in this case, it burns very cleanly with semi-modern heaters. The pollution is from coal, wood, and especially all kinds of trash (plastic, painted cardboard, pieces of various engineering wood products).

I'm the US, one presidential administration spent some effort to also squash natural gas.

There are now inexpensive Japanese-style knives from China. I have a couple of surprisingly well-made Xinzuo-branded knives, each under $50.

I got one few months ago. Still haven't even had to sharpen it, I'm honestly pretty impressed

what steel is it? Best edge retention I've seen is Aogami Super.

From what I know Chinese copies focus more on the VG10-like steels.

the name of knife was HEZHEN Master 8,3" (B30)

Seems like some VG10-equivalent from various pages advertising it

VG10 edge retention isn't that amazing in my experience, and it's harder to sharpen than carbon steel. Burr feels gummy rather than crisp, and carbon steel goes as high as 65 HRC vs 62 for VG10.

It's sad that the market is flooded with high-performance stainless steels which are inherently worse and more expensive, just because the average person is afraid of rust and knife maintenance.

Do you have a recommendation for an inexpensive one? I’ve worked with OceanOptics Flame series, but they’re not exactly cheap, and their software was crap.

Best of breed design!

There’s growing consensus that with uv python tooling finally became good enough in terms of both speed and functionality, no need to choose one or the other (like, poetry had functionality but was extra slow).

The bezel is kinda functional on these watches, also they need it for huge water resistance. This Pebble is more comparable to traditional dress watches which don't have a prominent bezel.

30m (3 bar) basically means splash-proof, not even your stated 1m (activity while submerged, I suppose). Like, 30m is IPX4-5, 50m is IPX6 (very rough equivalence), so 30m is the barest minimum expected from a watch.

While this article looks insightful and mostly fact-based, the source is suspicious as it has at least one highly conspirological antivax post: https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/how-much-damage-has-mass-...

It seems very pseudoscientific, within one or two sentences it's already veering into fringe material.

Half way through the mask seems to slip and it was the vaccines all along.