Comments by "Joe R M" (@joermnyc) on "Levi Hildebrand" channel.

  1. My wife wanted one, but an animal sanctuary we follow came out with their own Stanley-like bottle, and we figured $45 for a Stanley, or $35 to help out a charity. What did her co-workers say to her, “oh, it’s a FAKE Stanley.” Really, workplace bullying over a charity water bottle?
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  2.  @calvinasinhobbes it’s not cheap, everything breaks sooner because everything needs a computer in it. Older all mechanical appliances are better for repair. Now it’s, “well the motherboard is shot, and they don’t make this particular one anymore so the whole unit is dead.
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  3. My father’s cousin’s college age daughter is named Alexa, being in a house with an Amazon smart device gets very confusing for her and it.
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  4. Back when I was in college in 1998 after a college radio conference in the city we all piled into in car and drove to Alphabet City. Next to this great little independent record shop on Avenue A (that’s not there anymore) was this place selling lots of oddball stuff (also not there anymore). Including this brand of scents called Demeter, which had some …interesting odor choices like Grass, Dirt, Rain, Sea, etc. Dirt actually not that bad, a subtle musk, earthy, and it wasn’t too pricey for a poor college student like me. But the brand disappeared after a few years. Man everything I m remember from those days just vanished over the years, but I’m still here.
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  5.  @noob19087  I guess hard brushes are for cleaning the grout in your bathroom?
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  6. As a teenager I bought a set of Craftsman Screwdrivers from Sears. Craftsman’s lifetime guarantee was the best around. A few years later the smallest flathead one chipped at the blade end. I took it back to Sears and they took about 10 minutes to figure out “oh we still sell that set.” So they pulled the same screwdriver out of one of those and just gave it to me and returned the broken one with the rest of the box. 🤷‍♂️ Of course now I have no idea since someone else owns the name and Sears is gone.
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  7. Visiting Bulgaria we experienced real mountain mineral water… there’s so much of it they have public taps where you can fill up bottles for FREE all over the place. Yes you can buy it prebottled (and in naturally carbonated too) and it’s like less than a dollar for a really huge bottle (like 3 liters.) (the main reason for buying bottled are the pink cap bottles, those are “low mineral content” for children.)
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  8. I’ve mentioned it before, Bulgaria (where we adopted our daughter from) has so much natural mineral water sources that you can just fill up for free from public taps. Some sources are actually naturally carbonated as well.
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  9. When my wife lost her job earlier this year we did a subscription clean out for anything we could do without, basically we paired it down to Amazon (free shipping, so it pays for itself… eventually) and YouTube Premium because our daughter uses the music app and sometimes the ads were inappropriate for a 10 year old (even when she was listening to kids music.))
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  10. You know some of the truck drivers will just park across 3 of the small car spaces.
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  11. Here in NYC there’s “Housing Works” a charity that runs thrift shops to help with HIV/AIDS and homelessness… but pre-pandemic they were exposed for attempting to union-bust their employees who had legitimate concerns about pay and workplace safety and tried to organize into a union. There was one of these by us, but the only time I went in there was because they had an old Univox hollow body electric guitar in the window… nobody knew anything about it, didn’t know if it actually worked, wouldn’t let me come back to test it out, and a quick check on Reverb showed that they were charging way above market rate for it. That shop closed during the COVID (they removed all the items and left the store empty for months until they lost their lease… now it’s a giant nail salon)
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  12. Bulgaria has so much mineralized mountain spring water, they have taps everywhere for people to just fill up with free water. Some of these natural sources are naturally carbonated too. (You can buy it prebottled in stores, and it’s crazy cheap, 2 liters cost like a dollar.) Have the cheap Sodastream machine for a while, that CO2 canister seems to last a LONG time as I haven’t had to replace it yet, but we did need to replace the bottle (it has an expiration date!)
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  13. A celebrity changing human behavior (tanning is suddenly cool) reminds me of the early days of photography. No one is smiling, because smiling for a photograph wasn’t a thing until Clark Gable was photographed smiling at a movie premiere. Suddenly showing your teeth to the camera was cool!
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  14. Some brands sell cinnamon flavored toothpaste. Be careful some are “cinnamint”.
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  15. I have seen people get in their car, drive to the end of their street, get out, drop outgoing mail in the mail box, and then drive back home. 🤦‍♂️
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  16. I’ve used Toms of Maine because they explain where they source ingredients from, and what they do. I don’t understand the weird “Flat earth”-ish “fluoride is evil” thing, though it does help to know that if you have kids, and they have baby teeth, do use kids low fluoride toothpaste, as too much fluoride can make their adult teeth permanently brown for some reason.
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  17. Depending on the writers, the replicators in Star Trek are actually tied into a waste reclamation system, but it’s at the molecular level and very sanitary. Basically it’s an instant 3d printer tied into the garbage (sometimes they’d show someone putting empty plates and cups back in the replicator and hitting a button and the replicator takes it back) and sewage system on the ship in a probably closed system. Definitely still Sci-fi compared to today’s tech… unless you live on a submarine, or the space station.
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  18. Sometimes we stop at a local “Loft” outlet to see just how much of their clothes are plastic and really thin feeling… which you’ll would think is a huge red flag, but the place is always busy and people buy it… I feel like George Costanza when he found out the Yankee’s uniforms were Polyester (though in all fairness the technology in sports undergarments has evolved a lot since then, and the uniforms don’t rip when sliding, can be cleaned pretty easily (so much stuff on the field can stain, grass, dirt, the sticky pine tar stuff they use on the bats, etc), and on hot and sweaty days players will switch out the shirt in the clubhouse partway through the game.)
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  19. Well his background is Dutch… I think.
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  20. I did that one year and had a lot of pumpkin spice pancakes all winter. 😋
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  21. I mean my grandma’s old dining room sideboard was really nice, but I couldn’t take it at the time (it was humongous, even where I’m living now I wouldn’t know where it would fit). She was moved into a nursing home as she was no longer able to care for herself… my dad and his siblings sold her house and divided up the proceeds to invest for her (future) great grandkids. She actually lived long enough to met one of them before passing away at 94 years old. If she was still somehow alive today (she’d be 110) she would have 10 great-grandchildren (from 5 grandchildren)!
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  22. I’m best reminded of the mistakes that can be made at a shopper’s club bulk buy place by that episode of “Seinfeld” where Kramer bought so much food it barely fit in his old clunker of a car and he was desperate to eat/get rid of it all before it went bad. “Sunk Cost Fallacy” is exploited by so many companies (from mobile games to these stores.)
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  23. My wife actually switched to their Caramel Apple options, she thinks it’s better than pumpkin spice.
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  24. My wife was interested in one of those European river cruise trips… yeah we read the itinerary… It’s like they rush you around the city they’ve stopped at because if the boat isn’t out of there by sundown it turns into a pumpkin. 😂 No thanks we’d rather explore at our own pace and just use rail to get between places (and maybe a ferry).
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  25. My office has separate blue recycling and trash cans (and a can for the giant paper shredder truck that comes once a week). Yeah ,the custodian dumps the blue can into the same trash bag as the trash. We’re told it’s “sorted offsite”… Is that bullshit, who knows? 🤷‍♂️
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  26.  @ZackGarcia-ci2by  save a fox rescue based in Minnesota. They rescue fur farm animals.
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  27. We had to return an LL Beam rain-jacket because the inside lining disintegrated under normal use. LL Bean admitted it was their fault and replaced it with a newer model.
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  28. These always remind me of my last year in high school in 1998, when those “toe socks” came around, because on our senior trip to Virginia one of the more popular girls wore rainbow toe socks (she took her shoes off on the long bus ride). Yes we went to Richmond, VA to see Kings Dominion and Six Flags… Yeah I voted to go to Montreal, but I guess extreme roller coasters beat getting to experience a new culture, and country to dumb teenagers 🤦‍♂️. Though honestly Virginia was about as far from NYC as I felt we could get as we were treated like we were from outer space by the locals!)
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  29. I don’t drink coffee, but I’m weird like that.
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  30. $4000? I think you’re paying extra for all those returned mattresses… We got an IKEA memory foam mattress for like ten times less. No box, but it was in the same squished burrito shape… honestly that makes moving it around easier. But they point out it will take about a week for it to fully unsquish, so you have to wait to see if it’s actually comfortable.
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  31.  @derekriethmeier4366  actually there are several major holidays in China, and pre-pandemic times you’d hear about massive crowding on the railways as people were trying to get home to family… and then get back to the cities after the holiday.
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  32.  @sarahpavis1303  we bought it to support the charity, I actually didn’t know the price of the Stanley at that time.
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  33. I’ve always said, if you really want to ensure that your food is organic is to grow it yourself.
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  34. Antiques Roadshow had a Rolex Submariner that was several decades old, had all the original packaging and the invoice. It was factory refurbished, but the owner was smart enough to not replace the face (or the bezel, I can’t recall, but replacing either would have replaced the original face either way) as the entire value in that particular watch was the unique and rare face, that would have been replaced with a more standard version. Can’t remember the valuation, but it was a HUGE number.
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  35. It’s not just sunglasses, it’s frames for prescription glasses too. Rather than pay almost a grand for 2 pairs of glasses with transitions lenses (bright sunlight is not so great for my eyes), I checked out online glasses places and picked Zenni… got pretty much the same thing (couldn’t find polarized transitions, is that not a thing anymore?), but for $250 for 2 pairs. (My daughter wrecked my old glasses, best to have a backup. So far they are holding up about a year later. I never liked the plastic ones, always get metal.)
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  36. The coyote thing is not cool. Honestly I don’t know why animal fur is still a thing in the 21st century. There was a fur shop in our neighborhood and I was so happy when they went out of business. (Most furs are from farmed foxes, or mink/ferret related animals, and fur farms are nightmare fuel.)
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  37.  @Dexcalibur420 only in American school cafeterias.
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  38. Never really bought from either brand as I thought the prices were too high for my budget, or that it was too popular (never a fan of wearing a prominent brand logo like I’m an athlete or a race car driver). I do think they found their own way to help the planet, albeit on different paths, and they remained friends for a long time. Not sure if Zappos footwear web-superstore is available in Canada, but I noticed their search filter for Features now includes “sustainably certified”, which is a nice change, though the options available are limited right now.
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  39.  @vulcanfeline  George Carlin was right decades ago, there are no bad words, bad thoughts, bad intentions and words.
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  40. I think the thing that helps on the go listening is wireless headphones now have apps with EQs, so if there’s too much bass, just mix that down in the app. I was resisting going wireless until I went through 2 pairs of lightning connector headphones in 4 months becacuse why is the cable on bottom of the connector? It get’s pinched in my pocket and eventually something breaks, and it’s not like old school headphones where you can go to Radio Shack, buy a new plug and solder it back on. How hard is it to have the cable come out of the side, with proper strain relief as well. (This was Symphonized brand of wooden shell earbuds, they sounded amazing, but bad connectors, and of course that kind of failure is excluded from the warranty.)
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  41. Try riding a crowded rush hour subway train in the summer… with no air conditioning. You’ll be singing the praises of deodorant after that. Edit: I actually knew someone that had overly sweaty hands in college. Like she couldn’t touch a piece of paper without it getting soaked. She had to get Botox to solve that problem.
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  42. Best advice was, if you need a storage unit you have too much stuff. Better to sell it, give it away or just get rid of it.
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  43. I got an LL Bean gift card years ago. Bought a dark green stainless steel bottle that was on clearance. About half the green has worn off and I will probably wear the rest off (maybe the poor quality of the finish is why it was on clearance?). It's fine because then it will be just a blank stainless steel bottle.
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  44. My office did buy chairs that suck… it reminds me of my dad’s old Chevy with vinyl seats… it’s too stiff, the back doesn’t move more than an inch and to adjust the arms up and down there’s a rotary dial??? I kept my old chair.
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  45. We use Agave Syrup, or if we can find it Golden Syrup from the UK. Corn: the Corn lobby in the USA is insane. We use so much arable land for animal feed and corn ethanol it is CRAZY! This land could be used to grow food for people.
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  46. I was in Seattle a good number of years ago, waiting to cross a street when a group of women were out power walking. One of them was saying how she didn’t like Starbucks, wouldn’t give them her money and would only drink Seattle’s Best (coffee). I wish I had the chance to tell her that Starbucks ate Seattle’s Best, they’re the same company.
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  47. Close to where I grew up in south Brooklyn is a strip mall at the end of Bay Parkway (it was right on the bay, so 100 points for accuracy), a few buildings were in the corner of the giant lot on the street, but everything else was on the far corner. Taking the bus dropped you off by the Wendy’s on the street corner. Then you had to hike across the giant lot. Usually I was there to get new glasses, or to get something from Best Buy. One time I saw a car with a huge set of keys in the lock of the trunk. Keys like a janitor would have. I thought, “either it’s a careless person, or a trap.” Came back out from picking up my new glasses and yep, trap. A bunch of cops swarmed that bait car when someone grabbed the keys.
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  48. We use Seventh Generation’s ultra concentrated down detergent. Same number of loads as the giant jug, but it’s smaller than a bottle of dish soap. (Most of that giant jug is apparently water, which makes no sense since you’re washing your stuff in water already.)
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  49. In the US there are stores called Rent-A-Center and Aarons, that will rent you almost anything for your home (couches, big TVs, refrigerators, etc)… but it’s actually a huge rip-off and they are banking on the customers not realizing that until they sign the lease contract.
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  50. The whole “robotic disassembly” thing is really just to recover some of the harder to obtain metals (and gold) in their phones and iPads. Those can be recycled, saving Apple money.
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