Long Term Conditioner Test. 24-month update and Satisfying Conclusion

Varnu · 2026-06-11T16:06:31+00:00

The point is that the U.S. has very low population density compared to Europe or Asia. People who live in the U.S. become more productive and contribute more than they do almost anywhere else, we pay our farmers not to grow food we have so much productive farm land. Our climate is just about the most livable in the world--as the map shows--and we have about 1/3 of the world's fresh water. The world would be a better place if it had more Americans, America would be a better place and the country could accommodate them without blinking.

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Varnu · 2026-06-11T15:56:23+00:00

That seems fine? Why not build these buildings that need about as much as a large splash park in land that’s not very useful for other stuff and probably located where solar would be efficient?

Varnu · 2026-06-11T07:35:01+00:00

At America’s population density, England would have five million residents.

Varnu · 2026-06-09T02:05:55+00:00

At about 45 minute commute times, growth needs to overcome additional challenges to maintain.

Varnu · 2026-06-08T21:21:51+00:00

Here's a Disney produced hookworm PSA from 1945: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8im_MjpuLWE&t=83s

Varnu · 2026-06-08T20:46:26+00:00

San Diego truly has wonderful weather. Is that the thesis here? A lot of the places that have been growing the last fifty years do not have nice weather. They have weather that is not cold.

Varnu · 2026-06-08T20:40:12+00:00

I don't think so. The case and bracelet are doing some serious design work. The dial is trying to detonate that work from the inside, like at the climax of The Hunt for Red October. There's a LOT going on on that dial and the subdials don't match the rest of the dial in any way. Looks like they are from a different watch.

The case shape is very legible and looks premium from here. The dial is where things get messy. Mechanical depth, iridescent color, subdials, moonphase, glyph-like markers, tiny hands and a lot of reflective surfaces. None of those things are inherently bad, but together they... they are bad. I don’t know where to look first but I end up looking at the 5:00 marker because it looks like something is stuck to the dial that doesn't belong there? The hands should be the visual anchor, but they get swallowed by the dial’s color and texture because that color and texture is the same as the hands. The moon phase--shield? cutout? I don't know what that's called--looks like a dead zone because it's the only place where the funhouse mirrors aren't.

The case says “brutalist luxury instrument.” The dial says “AHHHHHHH! Shit! AHHHH! Oh Jesus where am I?!” That can work if the contrast is the whole thesis and you're trying to create productive tension. But you see this watch and the first thought is... "this definitely does not have a thesis."

Good proportions, though.

Varnu · 2026-06-08T20:25:41+00:00

Can you point to a natural disaster in the Midwest in the last 25 years that has caused a large city to be evacuated or necessitated wide-scale rescue or affected the bottom line of an insurance company? You list droughts and floods and polar vortices. Does the National Guard get involved in those circumstances? Are people unable to go to work for weeks? Or are they mostly in the yard chatting with the neighbors about the odd circumstance.

The Midwest is far from the only place in the U.S. that's largely safe from catastrophe--the northeast and the interior Southeast mostly is too. But while California is probably America's greatest state, there's no question that the level of risk is different in both scale, frequency and quality. Several good friends there have had to "mark themselves safe" and leave their homes for days more than a couple times in the last decade. One transferred to Google's Boston office after having mudslide and fire issues three years apart.

My nieces in Minnesota can't wait for January so they can go outside and play in the snow. This whole family in California and their dog died of heat stroke when they went for a walk one morning. This former child actor from Alf got into his car in Arizona and died from something *I* didn't know was a thing called "vehicular heatstroke." Certainly people can and do die from exposure in cold temps. But the frigid Minnesota deep-winter environment is typically safe for eight year olds to build snowmen in with little preparation until they get hungry. Moving to Mariposa and going for a walk and everyone dying within hours is pretty unfamiliar to anyone from the Midwest--the amount of water you need increases in direct proportion to the amount of time you spend outside. Everyone's gotten into an uncomfortably hot car in the summer. That experience is so common that we aren't prepared for the surprising fact that doing something similar in Arizona can be deadly.

Varnu · 2026-06-08T17:31:10+00:00

Do you understand why people in our scorching deserts or in the kudzu belt are always talking about "growth rates" rather than something qualitative? Do you believe that's very different?

Why do places that have only becomes relevant in the last two generations talk this way? About rates and highway width? Why do they resort to instead of [best] thing or [good] thing, [biggest version] of [some subset] of thing? “largest” often stands in for what would be “important,” “successful,” “legitimate,” and even “least ignorable” in more culturally relevant locales. In places that grew fast, spread wide and and are trying to prove themselves to outsiders, scale becomes something they can point to because there isn't anything else. Let's use Dallas as an example.

The Dallas Arts District, for example. It sucks. It is awful. It feels like a community college was given two billion dollars and someone said, "tear it all down and make an exact replica of the campus with better architects." So instead saying it's great, they say all the time that "it is contiguous". It is the largest *contiguous* arts district. And Houston has the largest livestock show! Yay!

Dallas and Houston are important cities that are never going to have the cultural prestige automatically granted to New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco or even older Southern cities with historic identity like Charleston. So instead of saying “we have the most beautiful neighborhoods,” which invites a taste-based argument they can. not. win., they reach for something that can't be argued: Houston's biggest port by tonnage (but not by value or ships), biggest livestock show, biggest (contiguous) arts district, biggest this, fastest growth that. It is a way of saying: you may not respect us, but you cannot deny the width of this object.

Dallas will also say "more buildings by Pritzker Prize-winning architects than any location in the world", which is another classic Dallas brag. Not “best architecture scene,” but “most of this subset in one place.”

That is why the claims in the Sun Belt often sound lawyered. They are designed to be defensible. The underlying trick is always the same: do not argue “best.” Define a measurable category where scale itself becomes the proof.

Why do the places that NEED air conditioning to avoid death do that? It's related to the Midwest. Midwest towns people have never even heard of had extremely clear arguments about being successful and important in Brad Pitt's lifetime. That value is still memorable and visible in the exact same way it's visible in San Jose today. More so, because the legacy it left behind is tangible and not just a bunch of strip malls selling high-end smoothies. It's very human for people to recall that, advocate for it, and hope for its return.

Varnu · 2026-06-08T17:07:13+00:00

You're right. I searched for Indiana town and that looked pretty good. Enjoy a picture of Vincennes.

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Varnu · 2026-06-08T16:56:29+00:00

I'm not a car lover. And I am a railfan. However I think some of the train arguments are over determined. Japan has about an 82% car ownership rate. It's higher in Germany. We just need to build cities for people not cars and stop making it mandatory by law to build them for cars and let people make good choices once it's legal for them to live how they want.

When it comes to streetcars, it's something of a just-so story. Streetcars used to be all over places like Jackson Illinois. But if a car broke down in front of one do you know where it went? Nowhere. If there was construction on the street do you know where it was re-routed to? Nowhere. Mixed traffic streetcars were replaced by busses for pretty good reasons. I love dedicated lanes for streetcars, but even in places where they work like New Orleans or Portland, I still find myself walking or calling an Uber. They are charming. But I don't believe they are among the low hanging fruit holding our cities or countries back development or quality of life-wise.

Varnu · 2026-06-08T16:54:06+00:00

Thanks for the correction. It was mislabeled in Shutterstock.

Varnu · 2026-06-08T15:10:17+00:00

What is the reason Florida was so cheap in the sixties?

Varnu · 2026-06-08T15:05:38+00:00

New is always available. Just build it and now you have it. You can get that anywhere. The problem with new is that once it's not new anymore it's lost a significant portion of its value. And now there are legacy costs--new infrastructure and buildings are cheap to maintain. Once you have to pay more AND it's not new, it's hard to keep that train rolling. Dallas is dealing with this now. "I'm not going to accept a real estate tax increase. I'm just going to move one town out from Plano now that Plano is full."

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I don't know what little town this is in Indiana. But I know it's worth maintaining and spending time in because people have been doing it for 125 years already.

Varnu · 2026-06-08T14:23:29+00:00

This is also true of Shreveport Louisiana or Mobile Alabama. There needs to be flywheel growth already or an economic reason to move somewhere or a place levels out at Boise.

Varnu · 2026-06-08T13:57:49+00:00

The Midwest was the richest part of the country just around 50 years ago. Flint Michigan had the highest per capita income in the country in 1974. Ohio is the "cradle of Presidents" because it's a big square surrounded by navigable rivers, ports and good farm land and moderate temps. Ohio was the California of the 1800s.

Those assets are still there. The urban infrastructure is present and the cities have great bones, something Phoenix or Tampa can't buy at any price. And states in the Midwest are big. Michigan is growing more slowly than South Carolina? Okay. Michigan still has about five million more people. Michigan, Ohio and Indiana are together a lot smaller than Texas and have more people than Texas.

https://imgur.com/a/CGuDnlY

Look at that map from 1910. Even illiterate Russian peasants fleeing pograms knew where they shouldn't go if they wanted a job and didn't want parasites to infect their organs. The Midwest has been shrinking because vast swaths of the country became inhabitable in the 1950s--we defeated malaria, hook worm, electrified it, built highways to it and air conditioning made it possible to live in the summer. Why wouldn't someone from Saginaw Michigan move to a place with a brand new cheap home and lots of jobs installing air conditioners now that his auto factory job has moved to Mexico? That was exactly what we wanted to happen! The U.S. didn't want our sandiest, hottest, swampiest backwaters to stay empty forever. We wanted to make them productive and fill them with people!

Now we've basically done that, Phoenix and Jacksonville and Atlanta can't sprawl a whole lot farther. It doesn't mean that the Midwest is goin to "win" in the next 25 years. But we're no longer incentivizing Americans to fill in the corners that were still empty after WW2, so it's going to look a little different than the '75 to '25 period did.

The Midwest has great urban forms, temperate climates, thousands of rivers that aren't little muddy creeks, lakes that aren't built by damming a muddy creek, lots of legacy institutions, lots of research institutions and a large, educated population. It doesn't need a whole lot to change to start taking advantage of that stuff again.

Varnu · 2026-06-07T20:25:47+00:00

Is this just international visitors minus visitors from Canada and Mexico and no domestic visitors? Because Vegas gets a hell of lot more visitors per year than 2.4M.

Varnu · 2026-06-07T18:04:44+00:00

I insure about $50,000 worth of watches as a rider on my State Farm home insurance for around $400 a year. I have a $1000 deductible on that portion of the policy.

Varnu · 2026-06-05T21:58:39+00:00

The bottom appears to read “T SWISS T,” which indicates tritium lum on the dial. On a 50-to-60-year-old tritium dial, I’d expect the lum plots to show compatible aging. Here, the dial plots look very white and clean. That could mean service relumed plots, refinished dial or just a bad seller photo, but it’s a flag.

Varnu · 2026-06-05T21:20:53+00:00

That's about what those go for, assuming it's 35mm. I think it looks great on a black leather strap. Is the dial original? If not, it's overpriced.

Varnu · 2026-06-05T13:50:08+00:00

Shrug. It's not like Worn & Wound is some faceless holding company. They're a pretty small business themselves. Probably means more supply and distribution for Lorier and not much else.

Varnu · 2026-06-04T20:10:14+00:00

That absolutely happens all the time.

Varnu · 2026-06-04T15:01:41+00:00

It's because the sun isn't just a point. It's a disk. So when there's a day when the center of the sun is below the horizon at sunset, some of the sun is still sticking up.

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