Being from a place where showy displays of wealth are expected, one of the things I like about Americans is that such displays are considered distasteful. My friend got married recently and despite knowing his fiancé for years it wasn’t until the wedding I realized her dad was worth half a billion dollars. Even then the wedding was very low key.
I don't like shiny things myself either. They look tacky. If I had to have a metal fence/ing I'd go with black wrought iron --maybe a muted fleur de lis motif.
If you must use stainless steel, it has to be nice simple lines coupled with cement slab or granite and no tubes.
America obviously has myriad subcultures. I meant “American” in a generic sense, which I tend to think of as Massachusetts or Iowa rather than Los Angeles. (Same way when folks say “German” they are probably thinking of Bavarians and not Berliners.)
I would argue Bavarians are as much outliers as Berliners and the real typical German must be from some town in North Rhine Westphalia given it contains a third of the population
LOL this is very highly dependent on where you are. The values around "showiness" that you describe are largely New England and Upper Midwest. Go to Miami or Dallas or Los Angeles and the situation is 180 degrees opposite, with people leveraged out their ass with credit card debt to fund a car that they can't afford.
though I find such in-your-face display of wealth crude and unbecoming I do appreciate this as an expression of individuality and not bowing to pure property valuation market forces we seem to be driven by here in California suburbs. I'll take this over HOA mandated uniformity anyday.
Makes me think of Korean chopsticks. They're all stainless steel. At first you think, "that's weird, they're supposed to be wooden." Then you realize stainless steel makes much more sense. More hygenic, reusable, durable, looks nice. I like the aesthetics of wooden chopsticks, but they aren't as practical as metal. Can't say I like the aesthetics of a rusty chain-link fence; I'd rather go with the stainless.
This also reminds me of how after WW2 we seem to have forgotten how to make things look nice. Older architecture often had ornate detailing. Even traditional houses and clothing had details to accentuate its visual appeal. But look at houses rising up in cities lately and they look like giant Ikea filing cabinets. I appreciate the detailing on these fences.
I don't know why people are giving you crap. Metal chopsticks just aren't as nice. They don't have as nice a feel. For some reason I don't care about that when I use a fork, but I sure do with chopsticks. Maybe just because I'm used to wood.
Yeah, I'm not sure. Forks don't give me the same grief. Maybe it's the curved shape/entry angle.
Also, stainless steel chopsticks are needle like at the ends and have very little surface for friction to pick things up, so they're kind of dainty in that respect --I struggle to pick up a good bite.
Looks like there are steel ones with textured tips. The engraving doesn't look very pronounced, so not sure if there'll be much difference. I wonder why no ones makes them outright knurled--shouldn't be any harder to clean in a dishwasher.
Well, once you add engravings and other texture stuff to make your metal chopsticks grippier, they are become grippier for bacteria. Thus eliminating one of the justifications brought up in favour of metal chopsticks.
Yeah. Also - it makes perfect sense in retrospect, but I was surprised to learn that wood tends to have decent antimicrobial properties. We had it right 10000 years ago, it's a great material for cutting boards and utensils.
Wouldn't that be another case for knurling like that common on metal knobs, where the grooves are too large a scale to trap clumps of bacteria? It'll prevent mechanical scrubbing, but if a dishwasher is acceptable for cleaning between fork tines where the surfaces are blocked from direct spray, then the shadowed parts of a knurled surface shouldn't be a problem. Total surface area would of course increase, but only around double.*
That'd be all, but I found something interesting when trying to look up what threshold of roughness is too coarse for trapping bacteria. Didn't end up finding that; the interesting fact is that despite bacteria growth increasing in most surfaces when deviating from a smooth polish, stainless steel actually exhibits less bacterial growth when roughened very finely, on the order of tens of nanometres of Ra (mean absolute deviation of height of a cross section from the mean line, though it seems the fractal nature of roughness means the order of magnitude of measurement depends on the measurement method). That's according to [1][2] and their citations; one of them gives an explanation of the cell membrane being limited by bend radius, so that when roughening a surface at a sufficiently small scale, the contact area bacteria can make decreases rather than increases.
No idea about the implications of nanoscale surface finishing on gripping food, though.
*nerdsnipe: By what factor of cut angle, pitch, and angle between passes does knurling increase surface area, if knurling is modelled as an extrude-cut along a line of a triangle wave profile into a face of the raw material, followed by a second pass of another at an angle to the first line, and completed by rolling the resulting face into a cylinder? The simple case of a 90 degree cut to full depth in only one direction increases profile length (and thus surface area) by sqrt(2), but does a second cut make something elegant like a tidy factor of 2?
> This also reminds me of how after WW2 we seem to have forgotten how to make things look nice. Older architecture often had ornate detailing. Even traditional houses and clothing had details to accentuate its visual appeal.
It's a matter of labor cost. Those ornate details look nice, but they're expensive to create, and expensive to maintain. When those details were popular, there existed a surfeit of skilled manual labor. Over time more complex aspects of construction shifted to or were replaced by pre-fabricated components, and manual labor became increasingly less skilled, or perhaps a better way of putting it is more specialized to working with pre-fabricated components.
Ask someone who owns one of those old San Francisco Victorians--at least those which maintain the original aesthetic--how much a simple paint job costs. It'll quickly become obvious why so many were plastered over, covered in asbestos tiles, etc. Ditto for internal renovations--few people end of replacing waintscoting or other detailing, and those that do try to preserve some of that detail typically end up using faux, pre-fabricated components that lack much of the depth and richness. Labor costs are just too expensive to spend on those sorts of purchases, even for multi-millionaires.
And those costs only continue to increase as knowledge and experience disappear. In the 21st century, most of that skill is pretty much gone forever. You can find people who know how to do these things at a technical level, but few to none that can bang them out as efficiently as people 100+ years ago who did it daily. The whole labor and supply chain ecosystem is simply incomparable.
This is not quite true. A major factor that led to styles such as Queen Anne Victorians was cheap, mass-produced ornamentation. Prior to that, a lot of detail had to be done by hand. That meant that a Queen Anne might cost considerably less to build than a less ornate Italianate.
However, the biggest issue today is not a lack of ornamentation. Rather, it is a lack of thought. So many homes are now made without proportion, balance or scale. For instance, pull up a picture of a Victorian and, in your mind, strip away the ornamentation. You'll find that things just feel right, such as the size and distribution of windows, the height of each floor, the roofs, etc. So much of that is missing today, but it would be an insignificant cost to address (before a building is built).
I think of it similar to food. There are some amazing things you can only experience at extremely expensive restaurants. But you can also find amazing food for a couple dollars. It comes down to similar things such as balance. Very simple food that is prepared the correct way and balanced can be both cheap and absolutely delicious. But too many people don't care, so you rarely see it.
>It's a matter of labor cost. Those ornate details look nice, but they're expensive to create, and expensive to maintain. When those details were popular, there existed a surfeit of skilled manual labor.
Yes. The lower class used to be much poorer than it is today, and the middle class much richer. Remember, through the late 19th century, most upper middle class families could afford to have a live-in maid.
It's a small local woodshop/blacksmith/potter/logger/apothecary/farm/Victorian village that specializes in yesteryear craftsmanship and woodworking. They make their own coal for the smithy, create their own wrought-iron tools, and also do woodworking with a lot of treadle-powered antique machinery. They're one of the few specialist places that can still professional restore Victorian and other old architecture. It's totally a labor of love, in addition to being a tourist attraction and continuation school for kids interested in manual crafting.
Reminds me a lot of the communities that try to restore abandonware via emulators and such... that rare combination of nostalgia, technical excellence, and thorough professionalism. It's so rare to find that in today's throwaway culture.
Metal is probably a little more durable, but wooden chopsticks are plenty durable as well as hygienic and look great. Wooden chopsticks are also easier to use and don't transfer heat.
Calling metal chopsticks more practical is highly dubious given everywhere uses wooden chopsticks and basically only Korea uses metal chopsticks. Moreover, even in Korea wooden and bamboo chopsticks are also used.
Biochemist here: yes, wooden chopsticks are probably hygienic enough for all intents and purposes. However, metal chopsticks have a smoother, non-porous surface, and therefore will be inherently a less friendly environment for bacteria. Some metals further have antibacterial properties.
Actually, wood also has antibacterial properties which make it more hygienic than plastic for example. Probably not more than stainless steel though.
edit I'm curious to know why I am being downvoted as I thought the antibacterial properties of wood vs. plastic for eg. cutting boards were a well known thing.
You probably considered this, but most wooden chopsticks are also heavily lacquered or otherwise sealed. I would assume the porousness is dependent on said sealant.
> This also reminds me of how after WW2 we seem to have forgotten how to make things look nice.
We did not "forget". Take a look at what wins architecture awards [1] (or what they build when budget isn't strict) - "nice" is actively thwarted. The exact same happened in art, where one cannot hide behind "cost".
In all seriousness... try a high-quality spork sometime (like one of those titanium or steel ones), especially if you're eating Asian food like bowls and stir-frys and such. You'll look ridiculous, but they work SO much better than chopsticks, spoons, or forks for meals that mix loose grains, sauces, and vegetables.
Chopsticks may be more traditional, but they really aren't the most usable for a lot of food types.
I live in Singapore these days, and people seem to be using a combination of fork-and-spoon for most meals; especially rice. Chopsticks are mainly used for noodles.
Singapore is absurdly rich by global standards. Dishwashers are rare: it's a combination of eating out being really popular and perhasp many people having maids.
Thus basically the only (domestic) dishwashers in the country are high end contraptions mostly acquired by expats.
"...she felt more comfortable in a home with a stainless steel door."
There's a lot to be said for metal doors.
Even at the low end. HUD housing projects used to have concrete walls, steel doors, and good deadbolts. This made break-ins really hard. There are videos of cops trying to break down one of those with a battering ram, and giving up, exhausted.
It’s funny because the English have a very similar version of this, but it’s way more understated and much more about displaying upper class taste than it is about displaying wealth.
If you see a rusted steel edge to someone’s lawn you can bet your host knows the name of every plant and your cup of tea is probably coming with a saucer.
I use polythene for the same purpose. Might not be as fancy, but achieves the same thing.
That said, I do miss the style of house in the town
I grew up in, where front doors often had stained glass, and verandahs some extra wrought iron flourishes.
I wish I could name the style, but here's a (poor) photo demonstrating the wrought iron flourishes at least.
Really? That's a class symbol in the UK? I see these in the US all the time at new constructions that have that "hipster starter kit" look, those iron-and-wood Chipotle homes. Typically they also seem to start falling apart within a few years, with edges poking up and threatening to stab unwary pedestrians, etc.
I never thought of these as a status symbol. I do see them a lot, only in the NYC area, and to be perfectly honest I think they’re tacky! Stainless steel makes a lot of sense but I just hate the way these things look.
53 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] threadIf you must use stainless steel, it has to be nice simple lines coupled with cement slab or granite and no tubes.
I think this very much depends on where you are, how recently said person acquired their wealth and how. Miami wealthy are very different from Omaha.
This also reminds me of how after WW2 we seem to have forgotten how to make things look nice. Older architecture often had ornate detailing. Even traditional houses and clothing had details to accentuate its visual appeal. But look at houses rising up in cities lately and they look like giant Ikea filing cabinets. I appreciate the detailing on these fences.
It might be due more to inexperience or an isolated incident being a higher percentage of your experiences due to less overall usage.
Also, stainless steel chopsticks are needle like at the ends and have very little surface for friction to pick things up, so they're kind of dainty in that respect --I struggle to pick up a good bite.
https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=...
That'd be all, but I found something interesting when trying to look up what threshold of roughness is too coarse for trapping bacteria. Didn't end up finding that; the interesting fact is that despite bacteria growth increasing in most surfaces when deviating from a smooth polish, stainless steel actually exhibits less bacterial growth when roughened very finely, on the order of tens of nanometres of Ra (mean absolute deviation of height of a cross section from the mean line, though it seems the fractal nature of roughness means the order of magnitude of measurement depends on the measurement method). That's according to [1][2] and their citations; one of them gives an explanation of the cell membrane being limited by bend radius, so that when roughening a surface at a sufficiently small scale, the contact area bacteria can make decreases rather than increases.
No idea about the implications of nanoscale surface finishing on gripping food, though.
[1] Ctrl+F "surface roughness" https://doi.org/10.3389/fbioe.2021.643722
[2] https://doi.org/10.1021/acsbiomaterials.7b00544
*nerdsnipe: By what factor of cut angle, pitch, and angle between passes does knurling increase surface area, if knurling is modelled as an extrude-cut along a line of a triangle wave profile into a face of the raw material, followed by a second pass of another at an angle to the first line, and completed by rolling the resulting face into a cylinder? The simple case of a 90 degree cut to full depth in only one direction increases profile length (and thus surface area) by sqrt(2), but does a second cut make something elegant like a tidy factor of 2?
It's a matter of labor cost. Those ornate details look nice, but they're expensive to create, and expensive to maintain. When those details were popular, there existed a surfeit of skilled manual labor. Over time more complex aspects of construction shifted to or were replaced by pre-fabricated components, and manual labor became increasingly less skilled, or perhaps a better way of putting it is more specialized to working with pre-fabricated components.
Ask someone who owns one of those old San Francisco Victorians--at least those which maintain the original aesthetic--how much a simple paint job costs. It'll quickly become obvious why so many were plastered over, covered in asbestos tiles, etc. Ditto for internal renovations--few people end of replacing waintscoting or other detailing, and those that do try to preserve some of that detail typically end up using faux, pre-fabricated components that lack much of the depth and richness. Labor costs are just too expensive to spend on those sorts of purchases, even for multi-millionaires.
And those costs only continue to increase as knowledge and experience disappear. In the 21st century, most of that skill is pretty much gone forever. You can find people who know how to do these things at a technical level, but few to none that can bang them out as efficiently as people 100+ years ago who did it daily. The whole labor and supply chain ecosystem is simply incomparable.
I sure wonder if serf hovels had those ornate details. Something tells me it mostly showed up on a small fraction of structures.
However, the biggest issue today is not a lack of ornamentation. Rather, it is a lack of thought. So many homes are now made without proportion, balance or scale. For instance, pull up a picture of a Victorian and, in your mind, strip away the ornamentation. You'll find that things just feel right, such as the size and distribution of windows, the height of each floor, the roofs, etc. So much of that is missing today, but it would be an insignificant cost to address (before a building is built).
I think of it similar to food. There are some amazing things you can only experience at extremely expensive restaurants. But you can also find amazing food for a couple dollars. It comes down to similar things such as balance. Very simple food that is prepared the correct way and balanced can be both cheap and absolutely delicious. But too many people don't care, so you rarely see it.
Yes. The lower class used to be much poorer than it is today, and the middle class much richer. Remember, through the late 19th century, most upper middle class families could afford to have a live-in maid.
It's a small local woodshop/blacksmith/potter/logger/apothecary/farm/Victorian village that specializes in yesteryear craftsmanship and woodworking. They make their own coal for the smithy, create their own wrought-iron tools, and also do woodworking with a lot of treadle-powered antique machinery. They're one of the few specialist places that can still professional restore Victorian and other old architecture. It's totally a labor of love, in addition to being a tourist attraction and continuation school for kids interested in manual crafting.
Reminds me a lot of the communities that try to restore abandonware via emulators and such... that rare combination of nostalgia, technical excellence, and thorough professionalism. It's so rare to find that in today's throwaway culture.
Metal is probably a little more durable, but wooden chopsticks are plenty durable as well as hygienic and look great. Wooden chopsticks are also easier to use and don't transfer heat.
Calling metal chopsticks more practical is highly dubious given everywhere uses wooden chopsticks and basically only Korea uses metal chopsticks. Moreover, even in Korea wooden and bamboo chopsticks are also used.
edit I'm curious to know why I am being downvoted as I thought the antibacterial properties of wood vs. plastic for eg. cutting boards were a well known thing.
Here is a paper about it:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31113021/
My point was simply that wood also has antibacterial properties, like steel, and probably shouldn't be considered less hygienic.
We did not "forget". Take a look at what wins architecture awards [1] (or what they build when budget isn't strict) - "nice" is actively thwarted. The exact same happened in art, where one cannot hide behind "cost".
[1] https://twitter.com/arch_crimes
Eh, they are much harder to use than bamboo or wooden chopsticks: stainless steel has a lot less grip, because it has less friction.
(If you are good enough at using chopsticks, it doesn't matter too much.)
Chopsticks may be more traditional, but they really aren't the most usable for a lot of food types.
Singapore is absurdly rich by global standards. Dishwashers are rare: it's a combination of eating out being really popular and perhasp many people having maids.
Thus basically the only (domestic) dishwashers in the country are high end contraptions mostly acquired by expats.
https://archive.ph/3ePef
There's a lot to be said for metal doors.
Even at the low end. HUD housing projects used to have concrete walls, steel doors, and good deadbolts. This made break-ins really hard. There are videos of cops trying to break down one of those with a battering ram, and giving up, exhausted.
If you see a rusted steel edge to someone’s lawn you can bet your host knows the name of every plant and your cup of tea is probably coming with a saucer.
https://www.harrodhorticultural.com/harrod-steel-edging-pid9...
That said, I do miss the style of house in the town I grew up in, where front doors often had stained glass, and verandahs some extra wrought iron flourishes.
I wish I could name the style, but here's a (poor) photo demonstrating the wrought iron flourishes at least.
https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/lyttelton-nz-feb-25...