This made me want to ask my landlord if I can run some PVC through the ceiling. This has made me think a lot about the marketing of products and how I have little ability to discern what is a meaningful feature/metric. Whatever is plastered on the box looks compelling and important.

Tangential but I saw a frozen pizza box advertising 2-1/2 feet of cheese in the crust. At first glance I was thinking “that’s a lot of cheese” but I started thinking about what it actually meant. It’s a 10” pizza so I’m assuming the 2-1/2 feet just comes from the circumference but just knowing the circumference of the pizza shouldn’t make it more appealing. I don’t measure the food I eat in inches or feet- if anything it would at least be a multi dimensional measurement that could represent the volume of cheese (or more commonly the mass). 2-1/2 feet of cheese could describe both an unnoticeable and lethal amount of cheese depending on the width and depth. It’s just meaningless.

My point is: this article has made me look more closely at product advertisement, as it’s influencing an emotional choice to buy a specific item rather than presenting truly empirical results. My rugs are impossibly dirty and I’ve eaten too much cheese

This is very thought provoking!I really enjoyed the section speaking on how many technological changes are framed as upgrades while being less effective. It’s also cool to DIY these projects and reintroduce this improved tech for such low cost.

I stood in the middle of the living room holding a hose and I thought: I have owned vacuums my entire adult life and I have never once used a vacuum. This is an essay about entropy, I think.

I have been disgusted by the carpet in my rented spaces for years. I have a wool rug in my office that is impossible to keep clean with my stick vac. This brought back memories of carpet lines I haven't seen since childhood. I used to love laying on a freshly cleaned carpet, and now I cringe at the feeling. I had never really given it much thought, but would have assumed that I was the one that changed, not the technology.

I think you're underselling modern vacuums. Sure, a cordless stick doesn't work very well, but there's a lot of excellent canister and upright vacs made by names like Miele and Shark that have plenty of suction. Certainly not as much as your 750 watt monster, but I got the same sensation of using a new vacuum and seeing it pull up tons of dirt I didn't know was there with our latest Shark upright.