I don’t know if it’s still a thing, but for a while it was common for trendy restaurants to serve water and soda in mason jars.

This, to me, is emblematic of so much that is wrong with 21st century capitalism. Those stupid bloody fake mason jars. They are worse than a normal glass for drinking out of, and they don’t work like a “real” mason jar for preserving foods. Just a stupid fad that millions of people bought into. What a massive waste of resources.

Corell isn’t actually unbreakable, but it’s much stronger than normal glass. It’s strengthened using the same underlying concept as SuperFest (massive surface compression), but via a totally different route: it’s a 3-layer laminate of glass, with the middle layer having a SLIGHTLY different thermal expansion coefficient, so it shrinks just a bit more than the outer layers, leading to massive compression there, and subsequent super-strength.

The history of the Soviet Union is interesting here. It shows two problems here. One, the Soviet Union had problem producing e.g. enough shoes in the right sizes. There was jokes about nail manufacturers who were measured by the weight of nails they made, so they’d make one huge nail; then they’d get judged by the number of nails, and they’d make huge numbers of tiny nails. In reality, companies and people had trouble getting enough of the right sizes of nails in the Soviet Union to the end.

Two, nails and shoes are one thing. Everyone agrees they’re good and important. I read a book on Soviet books and literature, written in the 1980s. The author talks about how millions of Brezhnev’s books were printed, but nobody he talked to ever mentioned them. Incredibly popular books, on the other hand, were often printed in tiny print runs. One taxi driver couldn’t even get a hold of a copy of the Three Musketeers for his son. If the market speaks, and enough people want first person shooters, or comic books, or romance movies, or board games, or building blocks, or remote control vehicles, then they will be available. If the market doesn’t speak, then there’s a good chance what you want won’t be available. Do the powers that be think that those are valuable and important, or do they think they’re a waste of time, maybe even actively immoral?

This is not a paean to capitalism. The market has produced dangerous crap and destroyed the environment in the progress. But the market means that you won’t be standing in lines for a chance to buy shoes, and then buy shoes in whatever size is available in hopes to use them as trade fodder. It means that if there’s an audience for a genre or hobby, it’s likely someone out there is trying to sell to that audience. Trying to balance capitalism with government regulation is a simple, certainly not perfect solution, but so far it’s better than throwing everything out.

Several brands of mustard used to be sold in quite nice drinking glasses here in The Netherlands. I had a look at the “Mason Jars”, but they have the common screw lid, which does not look very nice. Several of the mustard glasses have a lid from soft plastic that can be stretched a bit and pulled over the top of the glass. That way they can be made without anything that indicates it’s previous use. The search below is not a very good one, but it does show some examples. Some are of the “mug’ model, with a handle, and these tend to be made from quite cheap and ugly pressed glass, but other mustard brands have much nicer glasses.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=mosterd++glas+plastic+deksel&t=h_&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images

There was a time that I bought a lesser quality musterd because the glasses were nicer, but after a while you have enough glasses, and then the combination of musterd quality and price become the dominating factors. I also save up some peanut butter glasses. They do have a screw lid, but I buy the 1l variant, and that’s nice in summer to keep your insides moisturized. Musterd glasses are around 200ml, and that’s a bit too small for that usage.

If you have a 1100 Watt centrifugal fan, it’s going to make a lot of noise regardless of how you design the thing. It’s just the amount of power you need to push air through a paper bag that makes it loud.

The truly silent vacuum cleaners that have the bag-less cyclone separators have much smaller motors in the 50-200 Watt range, and they’re only barely effective at picking up dust.

When the surface of the glass is dissolved away with enough pits and cavities, it leaves these tiny overhanging flakes or shards of glass that break away mechanically and float in the water.