Overkill objects for everyday life
neil.computer
neil.computer
Quality consumer goods are better in two key areas. First, they are replaceable. I don’t want a military grade mixer in my kitchen if getting a broken whisk or motor on it is going to require me hunting all over eBay for the specific part hoping it’s available. I was very excited at one point about the idea of getting a commercial dishwasher that can run a load of dishes in like 90 seconds. Problem with those is that you can’t go to Lowe’s and get a replacement part when it acts up. You have to call a restaurant equipment servicing company and pay them what a restaurant with a broken dishwasher would pay. Or more because you aren’t a frequent customer. Sure, maybe it’ll break less but here’s the thing: my modern LG dishwasher will be more convenient to use and if I get 10 years out of it rather than 20 I still spent only $1000 on the top of the line one rather than the $4k on a 10 year old used commercial unit that I will struggle with the entire time.
Second, consumer goods are replaceable. I am used to my Kershaw knife. I broke it yesterday. I can get it serviced by the manufacturer or get a brand new one, or both. If I buy some special forces surplus knife and chip the blade I am either done with that knife or I’m taking it to a specialist or I’m buying a new one. Knowing that I can replace an item I’m used to when a one-for-one replacement is a comfort. Obviously that doesn’t work for everything but it works for items that are made by high quality manufacturers.
Bonus: a military grade mixer is going to suck to make high end pastries because it’s geared towards making mashed potatoes for the troops. I feel like the author is romanticizing ma class of products that in reality aren’t all that amazing except in a couple of key areas that to most consumers aren’t as big of a deal. So while it’s possible that, as the author states, the average consumer is an idiot, I don’t see much evidence that the author is much ahead of the pack here.
Paying a bit more for a better item which can be repaired or serviced for a very long time makes it cheaper in the long run in my experience, because you buy it once and for life.
I love "overkill items for everyday life" point of view, but it comes with trade-offs for noise, ergonomics, size, replaceability and such. You can get a very good blade from Victorinox or Leatherman. If you fancy good steel, you can get a high end, forged German steel Victorinox chef knife and use something frighteningly sharp and handsome at the same time.
If you want a good heater, you can pay twice the price and can get a Fakir Hobby premium space heater and can use for 30+ years (we have two).
The list can go on.
Anything "professional", "military", etc. comes with the potential downside of it being someone's job to maintain and service it. Qualitative differences usually come with trade-offs - and if it's not your job, it might not be better to try.
If I break something or need more bits, I can always go back years later and get a matching piece.
Except that there isn't a good way to distinguish between something that is expensive because it has quality construction and something that is expensive because it is a brand name.
Searching for information online is nigh-useless due to aggressive SEO on the part of advertisers. Sometimes I can get lucky and find an enthusiast forum, but those are harder and harder to find.
Online reviews in general are effectively anonymous. Amazon reviews might not even be the same manufacturer, let alone the same product. Newegg lists different firmware versions under the same product ID, so compatibility reviews are useless.
The best thing I've found is to reach out to a group of friends and hope that one of them did the research previously, or can at least steer you towards/away a brand. This doesn't scale, and any approach that does scale is at risk of being overwhelmed by advertisers and other bad actors.
This thing is built like a fucking tank, it will never ever ever fail.
Compare that to the same model sold outside of Japan, and it's most likely made in Indonesia and the quality is nowhere near.
Except being built like a tank, Japan made one also vibrates less and more comfortable to use.
( And somehow he is Canadian but speaks a little Cantonese )
He's a private dude, but I think his wife is french-canadian and he's at least bilingual. And from what I've gathered he has to have done some kind of mechanical engineering for a LONG time. Dude knows his stuff about anything mechanical.
His teardown of the Juicero is pure gold: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ
It's an amazing insight into a startup with endless amounts of money, bunch of really smart people, but no real business model. =)
HiFi gear is one of them. My CD player (from Yamaha) and speakers (from Heco) were cheaper when compared to other brands, but they're at least equal with their qualities, and they proved themselves over the years.
Similarly, if I can get 90% quality of a Wusthof by getting a Victorinox Grand Maitre, I'm OK with that.
I've also found out that technology has improved dramatically in certain categories. I've bought an entry level Sony BT headphones (Sony WH-CH510), and the sound quality for that price is unbeatable. I have much better headphones, but for something which I can grab and go, it's unbelievable. I had to pay thrice the price for that sound quality 10 years ago.
I'm talking about Grand Maitre series [1], which are "Made in Germany under supervision of Victorinox" and are forged steel. They're nowhere near €35. I have a 15cm Grand Maitre Carving/Utility knife, and that thing's sharpness is scaring me sometimes. It's virtually equal with another handmade, hand forged set I have, and both blades hold their edges extraordinarily well.
OTOH, America's test kitchen has found that these €35 Classic knives has some extraordinary steel for their price, under an electron microscope. I was unable to find the exact video, sorry for that.
[0]: https://www.victorinox.com/global/en/Products/Cutlery/Chef%2... [1]: https://www.victorinox.com/global/en/Products/Cutlery/Chef%2...
About 8 years ago I bought the cheapest catering/professional microwave/combioven I could get my hands on. I did this because I got tired of consumer units with overcomplicated UIs designed (apparently) by unregenerate misanthropes, rotating dishes that are a pain in the ass to clean, overzealous bleeps that go off every 30 - 60 seconds after a cycle is finished, peeling enamel, corrosion issues, and that are too small on the inside.
Consumer grade microwave ovens all, as far as I can tell, universally suck in one way or another that my commercial grade microwave doesn't. The thing is bomb proof. The only thing that's gone wrong in 8 years is the internal bulb. Everything else is rock solid.
This is, however, a rather different proposition to buying a food mixer that was manufactured in 1948. I can get spares for my microwave or, at this point, buy a new one and recycle the old without feeling I haven't got my money's worth. I'm going to struggle with the 1948 mixer and, like you, I don't want that.
Others have highlighted that commercial grade dishwashers and fans are also probably bad ideas. I've run into similar issues with UPSs: none of these things seem designed to run in an environment where fan noise is going to cause a serious problem (nobody seems to sell a completely silent UPS - it's really daft).
Likewise, if you buy a rackmount server instead of a desktop computer you may be surprised to find that the fan noise is extraordinary.
Honestly, the main thing is to do your research before making a purchase so that you buy something that's really going to suit your requirements, whether that's a consumer grade or "professional grade" piece of equipment.
Just made for a different kind of gig than your usual consumer grade camera
See, this is weird. The cheapest microwaves you can get have two dials, one for temp, one for time. Why not buy one of those??
I imagine two reasons: first, the market seems to have decided that simple microwaves must be small microwaves. If you want to heat anything larger than a bowl of soup you’re gonna forfeit the dials.
Second, most of the time the dials also suck. Want to heat something for 2 minutes 30 seconds? Good luck with that on a cheap microwave that shows minutes in 5mm increments with 2.5mm of play in the dial.
It's 1.2 cu ft which is on the bigger end and much quieter than the microwaves I'm used to with some sort of ventilation system that keeps going until you've retrieved the food. It's definitely more precise than the cheaper commercial microwaves I've seen without losing any of the "smart sensing" features, if you care for those.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Breville-BMO850BSS1BUC1-countertop-mi...
Maybe I'm living in the wrong area of the world, I've never seen a differently sized microwave no matter the price category. They all are about large enough to fit a decently sized dish. Sure, the pizza from the local place won't fit, but that's not a microwave problem then.
> Want to heat something for 2 minutes 30 seconds?
Not really. In the 15 years I've had my ~$35 microwave (without a single issue I might add) I was never in a situation where I'd need much precision. Not to mention with every microwave, no matter the model, you need to have a feeling for how long to heat what in the first place. A lot of precision comes from that rather than beeping second counters.
A quick look at the Amazon search filters for 'microwave' will tell this story - there are some that would fit the whole pizza and others that wouldn't even take your dinner plate.
No cooking really works like this. Set the microwave timer for 30 minutes and set a timer on your phone for 2 minutes. After two minutes, pull the microwave timer to zero to stop the microwave and check the food. Decide whether or not it needs more time and chuck it back in, pulling the timer to 30 minutes again. After you count off 30-40 seconds in your head, pull the timer to zero and check the food. Rinse/repeat as necessary.
The timer isn't there for anything more than a safety to make sure that the microwave doesn't stay on forever if you forget about it.
Once you know how long something needs to be cooked and at what level - say, a mug of your favorite soup - you can just throw it in, put in your usual settings, and have something that's ready to eat when it dings[1]. A few seconds either way can be the difference between "needs more time" and "oh dear god my mouth is on fire."
There's a reason one of the first "smart" features microwaves added was customizable presets.
1. This is, incidentally, how microwaves are used in restaurants too. Nobody's guessing.
Just open the door.
I have a Moulinex 800 W microwave with a turntable. It has a non-linear timer dial so that short times are easy to set. Five minutes on that dial is 180 degrees but from then on an extra five minutes is only 20 degrees up to a total of 30 minutes. The power knob is continuous and spans 270 degrees (but the actual power regulation is a simple on off duty cycle control).
I inherited it from my mother thirty years ago and apart from the internal lamp failing it works perfectly.
Moulinex still make microwave ovens with similarly easy controls.
No, but "cheapest" usually does.
It takes quite some research to find single-purpose devices, that are tailored for a specific use case - and are not overburdened with often unused features. There‘s not enough metadata out there on ecommerce sites to filter for that.
Take the microwave example: I‘m happy with the Samsung MWF300G microwave which does just one thing (heating stuff) really well in a very straightforward way:
One haptic dial for duration. One for Watt. And a simple display for time.
Just use the duration dial to set the time. That‘s it. You‘re done by turning your hand just once.
It starts automatically. No start button needed. No program selection. No stop button - just dial it back to zero if needed.
Commercial grade. No rotating dish but still warms everything nicely. Pain for defrost but honestly I just don’t defrost stuff much.
[1] Sharp R-21LCFS Medium Duty Commercial Microwave (Dial Timer, 1000-Watts, 120-Volts) (Update of R-21LCF) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BDF5ZNS
First of all, the sound design is criminally bad. Whenever you touch the controls it lets off an obnoxious beep that is way too loud for a home environment. It should of course be completely silent, except a pleasant sound to let you know it is done, and of course, like other reasonably designed home electronics, it should allow you to adjust the volume or turn the sound off completely. (Imagine, for sake of argument, that your iPhone beeped whenever you touched it. It would be bizarre. Why would you want that in a microwave oven?)
Second, the controls are flimsy and glitchy. If I try to increase the time slowly or by a small amount, the value tends to jump erratically up or down by some random amount. I need to firmly push the dial inwards while turning to avoid this.
Third, except for the noise pollution of those beeps, it also brings in more light pollution in my home, through a blue blinking seven-segment display that insists on always showing the current time. This is a bad feature that is irrelevant to the purpose of the microwave, and I would prefer to turn it off.
Finally, I hate the way it looks. Silver-coated plastic, reflective blacks and blue LEDs looks good in a cheap sci-fi flick, not in a home. What’s funny is that the inside actually looks pretty nice, a navy-blue metal with an organic white splatter pattern.
haha! I try to keep myself to one complaint or less per day, and ten cuss-words or less per day. The days I break my cuss-word quota are the days I use the microwave.
Hell, yeah, they are. They're rarely designed for aesthetics. "Do one thing, do it well, and lowest TCO."
https://westwardsales.com/falcon-ssg1.5k-ups
I bought it because the late writer Jerry Pournelle told me to.
$50 consumer-grade products are almost always "crap," but you're making a sweeping generalization across dozens of product lines in 2 brands without offering any evidence or proof that you used appropriate products for the task. Fans on most UPSes only kick-in when their inverters run during an outage or a test for cooling.
I happen to have an SMX1500RM2UNC with humidity and dual temperature logging. It's floor or rack mountable, uses commodity batteries in a repairable pack, expandable, remotely manageable, logs details, works like a champ with under-voltage and other edge-case transfer conditions.
A writer is extremely unlikely to be an expert on backup power supplies anymore that I am an expert on coronary cannulas. Appeal to authority or an anecdotal testimonial is flimsy support, at best.
Sorry for your loss, but you might be wandering into the weeds on this one.
"I suspect that the metering of the capacitor voltage is slightly wrong on this model of UPS. We've seen this error a few times and the units have performed fine both before and after. Its to do with checking the voltage rise on the cap on power on / battery supply. I think it meters out of tolerance and throws the fault when perhaps either the centerpoint is skewed or the tolerance is too fine."
As a home-gamer, this one works for me. :'D
Even if either one or both were also a principle engineer for Intel, that'd still be a spurious, appeal-to-authority because they weren't a modern enterprise sysadmin, IT manager, or equivalent with visibility into what works and what doesn't in the real-world at scale.
Lionization in one or two domains for a limited time doesn't breed domain expertise across other areas for longer times. For anyone to be called, or call themselves, a polymath within the past 100 years is absolutely absurd. There are too many bifurcating domains splitting and branching too quickly for anyone of integrity to claim to "master" and stay in mastery of them.
I don't really care who they are: if they don't have sufficiently-current experience with enterprise-class gear, then random people have absolutely no place making claims about UPSes with supposed endorsements from dead dudes.
CyberPower OR2200PFCRT2U PFC Sinewave UPS System, 2000VA/1540W, 8 Outlets, AVR, 2U Rack/Tower, Black
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B003OJAHW0/
Note the sine wave is key. And is 120V 20AMP, so do not run on a 15A circuit.
And if you’re draining the battery, then you should pay attention to all that noise and be in the process of shutting everything down safely, so that you can survive whatever caused the power outage in the first place.
The point of a UPS isn’t that you keep running for days regardless of the fact you’ve lost power, it’s that when the power does go out you don’t lose all your work, and you’ve got a few precious minutes to shut everything down safely.
If you don’t use a piece of equipment the way it was designed to be used, then that is all on you, and not the equipment that you are failing to use correctly.
Note that APC is owned by Schneider, a company that specializes in making the really big UPSes of the sort they go into data centers and are used to provide short term power for entire buildings. They know what they’re doing.
The other obnoxious thing is most of what's marketed as "professional grade" to consumers is junk that no commercial kitchen would use. It's just marketing.
You can get some interesting specific stuff on say webrestaraunt store, but you gotta be mindful of the above aspects imo.
That is not what the article is about though. He buys actual commercial / industrial stuff that is indeed more rugged.
I was very fond of the commercial potholders from there, but didn't know where to get some of my own since they closed all the stores.
Then one day through the magic of the Internet, I found a supplier of almost the same thing, albeit with their own logo on it.
(I'm pretty sure I bought them from Wasserstrom, but I just checked and I can't find them)
Unfortunately it doesn't look like they're selling much equipment-wise in my local store anyway. Just paper towel, plates, masks, and garbage bags.
Now that people are discussing it, I do want to find out if there are former air force pilots reading this who can corroborate or refute my hypothesis: I suspect long-duration mission bombers like the US B-52 and B-2 have pilot seats especially tuned for extended operational comfort, even more so than commercial airliners (passenger or cargo), and it would be interesting to test my hypothesis that those would make excellent office chairs for coders. Someone makes these from old pilot seats [1], but I'm specifically interested in pilot seats from airframes that routinely perform round-trip trans-Pacific routes.
I personally wouldn't routinely use such a seat for more than say 10-12 hours at a time, but if it is proven to still be comfortable after someone uses it for that long, naps for a couple hours in it, and uses it for another long session, then it is likely going to feel very comfortable to me. And maybe the safety harness will help me maintain my posture instead of having to remind myself every half hour to check it.
Though honestly, I think it's actually a solved problem. I just buy aftermarket Recaro seats. They know what they're doing.
OEM GT sedan seats are probably your best bet. Big Lexus, Mercedes, etc. sedans.
I heard something interesting about ejection seats on tv.
The canopy cost up to a million dollars.
There are personnel who main job is making sure the ejection seat is working properly.
If a pilot needs to use the ejection seat, he, or she, has a 9 out if 10 chance of survival.
The spine will compress 1/2" after that emergency handle is pulled, and they said the shortening of the spine is permanent.
If I had the room, and was offered a small commercial Hobart mixer at a rock bottom price, I would buy it.
I worked at Marin Bagel factory in college, and that mixer was the only thing I liked about the job. The owner didn't like me, so when he was in a bad mood, my job was rotating the freezer. Imagine 5:30 am. Cold outside. A bakery where talking was discouraged. Climbing into a packed 10 x 20 foot packed to the door with frozen food. 1 foot of clearance on top of the food. Then rotating everything. Worst job ever. It wasn't the job, it was the owner.
Sorry about my ramble.
Here is a kitchen scale I bought. Made in Switzerland, no less. It’s bloody beautiful: https://neil.computer/notes/mettler-toledo-ml3002e-teardown/
Does that mean all consumer grade stuff is bad? No. Leatherman tools and 3M consumer grade stuff is usually great. Nalgene bottles. Does that mean all pro quality stuff is great? No. I’ve bought restaurant quality containers, made in California, no less, but are not BPA-free.
My philosophy is quite tangential to the points you’re making:
- Search for stuff in auxiliary / parallel industries.
- Used surplus stuff is usually below consumer grade prices even if it was slightly worse, you're still equal. 9/10 times it is actually the opposite - 10x the quality, performance and durability of consumer grade crap on Amazon.
- Some cheap crap is actually good. Victorinox $30 knife is excellent value and used by professional chefs. The same cannot be said for an outdoors knife, you want it to be overbuilt. Cheap $30 outdoor knives would not stand a chance. Always buy generic drugs, they're exactly the same.
There are atleast 100 more examples I can write about that were a net positive buys. Just last week I bought U-Line tape dispenser. Same price as consumer grade ones, so why not?
- Orthogonal search usually yields frugal jackpots. No one would ever find any use for the life raft bag in the marine parts store.
Average consumers want stuff that is objectively worse for them. Touchscreens were an excellent idea for a phone, now they want it everywhere in their cars. Overall, with the throw-away culture consumers are addicted to, it’s hard to not blame them. Have you ever dealt with customer service? You might be surprised. We are soooo addicted to wasteful culture. You’re just promoting this and doubling down on it.
Let’s see in last 20 years: Quality went downhill, durability is an after thought, repairability is non existent and consumers want bigger box - literally larger than the item because they choose it based on how good the box looks. If it were any other reason, it’s a waste of packaging and businesses know this. Businesses are not looking to waste money on extra packaging unless it led to better sales. This is a direct evidence of the utter shitshow consumer culture embodies.
Anyways, I fancy things that are engineered with deliberation and specification. Tested and qualified against requirements. Usually military, aviation, marine or medical grade goods are designed and engineered in such a way.
I remember looking at ToughBooks because their shells are amazing. But what does that do for me if inside it has a 10 year old computer?
You gotta compare apples to apples.
Meant in jest: I find your lack of faith [1]...disturbing [2].
That said, I have found marked differences even in "consumer" duct/duck tape offerings at big box stores. Adhesive properties, abrasion resistance, UV resistance, backing laminate strength, vibration tolerance, and so on, have converged my choices these days to Gorilla and 3M brands, and only give other manufacturers that show up in the big box store shelves one chance with one sample roll.
[1] https://tapeuniversity.com/industry/industrial-mro/what-is-t...
...were originally lab equipment. The company pivoted to consumer goods after their products had already become popular as such.
I'm sorry to say. This is false.
This will be a bit technical but often, generic drugs are a racemic mix (both L and D conformations in some mixture) where as a branded drug may be a specific conformation or specific racemic mix (e.g. 75% L, 25% D.)
The issue comes from the fact that L-conformations may have different (better, worse, otherwise) effects than the D-conformations.
TL;DR Not all generics are the same as their branded counterparts and they might effect you differently. Caveat emptor.
Given that we know (like you point out) that different enantiomers can have very different effects, it seems particularly dangerous for generics to be marketed as alternatives to the branded drug when, in some cases, they really are not.
There are a few different types:
Achiral, no change Levorotary (L), Rotates anticlockwise Dextrorotary(D), Rotates clockwise
The reason that it matters and what I was talking about above is that the sites in your body that a drug interacts with aren't universal. So if you have a (L) version of a drug that might have different effects and interactions than a (D) version.
A 1:1 mix of both (L) and (D) is called a racemic mix.
When you are talking about Brand name drugs, you're typically discussing a particular mix (e.g. Adderall XR is a 3:1 (D):(L) mix) or a particular conformation. That is not necessarily true with generics which may have a different ratio of (D):(L).
To give an example of how different the effects can be: Penicillamine (L) is used in the treatment of primary chronic arthritis. Penicillamine (D) not only has no therapeutic effect, it is highly toxic.
Here's a link to some Wikipedia pages on it if you're interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirality#Chemistry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racemic_mixture
Do note that this is a bit of an oversimplification, but it's 3AM here so I hope you can forgive me.
If generic drugs have a different L:D ratio and L molecules have a different effect than D molecules, then surely the generic has a different effect and result than the brand name which would make or the other work better. Wouldn’t that come up and be an issue leading to either reformulating the generic to better match the brand name, or pulling the generic altogether?
I think, as a layman, Thalidomide is probably a good striking example.
One chirality does what it says on the tin. The other causes babies to be born missing limbs and with other birth defects.
In theory, if we could produce Thalidomide with only the correct isomer, it would not only be effective but 100% safe for pregnant women.
Lots of comments are talking about the extremes but most reasonable people can figure it out. Obviously don't use an industrial appliance that operates at 90db, requires high voltage electrical, and needs 2 hours of daily maintenance to make your coffee; but that liferaft bag is brilliant. Also nice industrial design on the site!
The commercial version of the electric Ford F-150 has a reasonably sized touchscreen in the center of the dashboard. The consumer version has a huge 18 inch touchscreen which sticks up above the top of the dashboard, and looks silly. This replaces the large number of single-purpose knobs and buttons in the commercial version.
Which I think was the point of TFA: he wants to show everyone he appreciates overengineered stuff.
Large organizations like the military would probably be happier with an item that needs intensive inspection, servicing, and repairs on a very consistent schedule, but is absolutely guaranteed to work within that operational window than they they would be with an item which is low-maintenance but has an unreliable service lifetime. A maintenance schedule can be planned around and budgeted around so that it doesn't affect operations. A random outage or failure is expensive, and can only be planned around in a probabilistic sense.
As individuals, we don't have the time or knowledge to do all of the inspections and repairs to maintain an "industrial grade" system at a level that makes it worthwhile. We need stuff that "just works" for some unspecified amount of time, and we accept the cost of random failure and replacement as a tradeoff, since most failures in our lives don't involve the loss of human life or millions of dollars. The exceptions, like cars, tend to be engineered more like the former category, and can only really function reliably in the context of a larger organization (regular maintenance at a specialized repair shop).
So it's not really a spectrum of quality from cheap and unreliable to expensive and indestructible. It's actually a spectrum of logistical overhead from individual use and low upkeep to multinational organization and high upkeep.
The reason commercial dishwashers run so fast is that they sanitize dishes, but do not remove food from them. That is done by a restaurant employee. Home dishwashers include soaking and scrubbing to remove food, which takes longer.
https://www.reddit.com/r/answers/comments/no3c9j/why_do_comm...
For example, a Ford Focus or Chevy Malibu is a lot more reliable and cheaper to maintain than a fancier and more fun car. Loads of third party parts, etc.
Regarding the mixer, I understand they changed the gears to plastic so they would strip without damaging the motor. Easier to replace a cheap set of seats than an expensive motor.
This is extremely unlikely - military/industrial-grade stuff is designed for heavy duty cycles and decades of use. It is extremely unlikely that you'd see it even hiccup in decades of consumer use.
If you did need a part, the mfgr will have it, because, unlike consumer crap, these products have lifetimes measured in decades, not quarters.
>> is going to suck to make high end pastries because it’s geared towards making mashed potatoes for the troops
not unless you have some specialty unit. And if that is the case, get the industrial version designed for chefs to make industrial quantities of high-grade pastries
And hobarts are industry standard mixers for the food industry that vary in size from 5L to volcanic caldera. But they are built like a tank and easy to repair with plenty of easy to find spare parts. A lot of bakeries that make really high end stuff probably have the exact same hobart inside. Probably not that ancient as the one on the pic, but those things barely changed from their inception.
And with interest of cooking increasing a lot of restaurant gear is finding its way into home kitchens. Nothing sears a steak indoors better 3500W induction hob with big cast iron skillet on top.
And if cooking on a wok - having 120k BTU burner makes it much more pleasant and smooth experience.
Interestingly with gas burner efficiency - 120k BTU in gas are just a tad more powerful than the 3.5kw induction.
There is good reason why Alton Brown always says to obtain things from hardware and restaurant supply store.
And let's say in consumer ovens that are not built to gastronorm or hotel pan specs finding additional trays, sheets, grills etc that fit is PITA.
To my knowledge most people campaigning for Right to Repair don’t want change the designs of the things we currently buy.
They just want to stop companies banning their suppliers from selling spares to consumers.
That is, most things are already reparable enough but certain firms are going out of their way to stop that happening.
How is that possible to enforce?
If a company comes up with a design that is less serviceable than its competitors, but has other advantages, is it forbidden from selling its new design?
If a company comes up with a design that is more serviceable than its competitors, are all the competitors now forbidden from selling their old design?
I'm probably missing a load of other tricks, but just doing the above would go a long way to ensuring products can be repaired reasonably.
No, I definitely think that the verification on the parts to make sure that they are original should stay, but it should not disallow non official parts to be installed. Because, if I want to replace a part with an original, there should be a way to verify the part is not counterfeit, and I think it would be super beneficial for consumer if the part was able to verify itself as genuine. But, I should also be able to install non genuine parts as well.
Obviously this also implies that to create a replacement part you don't need to ask the original manufacturer for permission. A "third party signing" key should be publicly available.
ProTip: Odds are there are 10k bars named ka-bar or k-bar founded or operated by current or former Marines.
This won’t bother anyone in the US I guess but a fixed blade military knife like that could get you into legal hot water fast elsewhere.
In the UK, you could take it camping or fishing but if you divert to the shops on your way and get caught with it you you could get a mandatory prison sentence.
Even if you leave it in your car the whole time.
Where as a simple Victorinox Swiss Army Knife with a friction folding blade can be taken almost anywhere without a reason. That makes them a much better bet for an international backpacker IMHO.
This is the same for many other countries too.
https://www.bakedeco.com/detail.asp?id=51771
They don't list the weight or dimensions, but Hobart makes a modern version:
https://www.hobartcorp.com/centerline-20-quart-mixer
This 20 quart mixer is 33.3" high and weighs 189 pounds (204 pounds in its shipping crate).
A great unit for a commercial kitchen, maybe not such a good fit for typical home use!
I’ve done a dishwasher repair, 1 dryer repair and 2 fridge repairs here, and a washer repair at my in-laws. Every case was a consumer-brand unit and every case the local home center was not capable to supply the parts from stock, so it became and “order online and wait” anyway. (For the washer repair, a local appliance parts store had the parts on-hand at ~$215 vs $55 online, which I politely declined.)
That mixer likely won't handle a small load (as in, a single family sized loaf).
Spot on though about some of the stuff. That knife is nice, although being edged on both sides is a liability.
No, it is plain wrong. He recommends borosilicate beakers for beer. I think he never worked in a lab: borosilicate beakers break. Their thermal expansion tolerance is a non feature for cold beer: when did one of your beer mug broke because you served yourself boiling beer?
> Does your glassware meet ASTM Specification E960, Type II requirements? Is it manufactured from 33 expansion, low extractable borosilicate glass conforming to USP Type I and ASTM E438, Type I, Class A requirements? I didn't think so.
I call that hacker syndrome, when the typical hacker thinks a long line of impressive specs and numbers matter, because he has no idea of the customer requirements.
> Used to contain a life raft. Now, my groceries.
How easy it is to clean when there is a spill? How easy it is to replace? I have carried BRICKS inside the nylon woven bags some supermarket sell for $1.99. Rinced with water, ready in 5 minutes.
> For less than $100, I can buy a short USMC Short KA-BAR or a real M9 from Ontario for $150. This is the real thing, used by the US military.
Show off!!
If you want something to bring in a fight, get a Mark 1 trench knife: has brass knuckles for punching (and limit the risk of dropping your knife), a long thin blade for more lethality (easier puncture wound regardless of angle than with a wider blade). And in the kitchen it is ideal to break walnuts :)
Of course it does not look "nice" - like carrying bricks in a nylon supermarket bag. It is about knowing the needs you optimize for.
In my dad's lab in the 1970s, they used to make coffee in a large Erlenmeyer flask and filter it under vaccuum with a Buchner funnel. The safety director eventually banned it and made them buy a Mr. Coffee.
A simple example would be gloves. What would be the pro version of a glove? The ones used in steel mills? If you want a glove for riding a bike, you’re better of with regular biker gloves. If it’s a glove for winter, maybe skier gloves and so on.
For example, Ansell HyFlex gloves are standard issue in Amazon warehouses and they’re awesome for chores around the house too. They fit really well (and come in more sizes), they’re durable, and they are comfortable to wear for extended periods of time.
[1] https://www.deltaplus.eu/en/article-details/-/article-detail...
it does stand a bit taller and weight about twice as much.
For dedicated dough makers - spiral, fork or diving arm mixers are the standard. But planetary mixers are good if your dough is side affair or you need to whip some eggwhites from time to time.
Every knife was dull and identically serrated like a budget steak knife, despite presenting as a comprehensive set of chef knives. The whole set was almost completely useless.
Sunbeam is not the reasonable quality brand it once was back in the Sears days, stay away.
The mixer I have is a hand-me-down from probably the 1970s. (Model 1-7A, in "beautiful" almond color scheme.) Still works perfectly.
I have some older Craftsman tools that seem indestructible, and I really hope they are, because you can't get replacement parts or support for pretty much any Craftsman tool any more (even the newer ones).
Other items tend to be designed for people who can put more work in regular cleaning and maintenance. You could buy a commercial espresso machine and coffee grinder to make yourself coffee every morning but the machine is designed to warm up at the start of the day, pull a lot of shots, and get thoroughly cleaned later. You will still need to warm it up and make sure it is behaving well before your coffee and you’ll still need to properly clean it afterwards.
It is excellent.
I think I read that the + model has a redesigned ground container to tackle the static issue - had seen some mention that static was more of an issue with the older “non +” model
It doesn't matter if "burr grinders suffer from static build up" when they're categorically far better than anything else when it comes to grinding.
STOP! Don’t Dump It – Fix It!
(Paired with a Moccamaster)
Wasn’t willing to pay even more for one with a scale
I always grind to measure, in which case I don't need timer.
I've had a few friends whose only experience with a manual grinder was a Hario Skerton or its clones, and get turned off manual grinding because of how bad the experience is. The pricier hand grinders have much better UX.
I have come to really, really resist buying plug-in kitchen gadgets. I have a few, such as a toaster and a kettle, that I actually use. For anything else I've found that they just end up living in the back of a base cabinet and I forget that I have them.
It looks like 1zpresso and Timemore are readily available, at least, and the 1zpresso JX Pro is top-of-the-line.
Have not tried this myself but I was told by a professional this is way cheaper and better than any automatic grinder below USD$1000, if you’re spending around $200 for a top end hand grinder
Grinding coffee beans manually helps me get that little bit of arm exercise though.
There are also other niceties that proper electric grinders give you.
Dropped in a new set of burrs and have an unstoppable overkill grinder with a huge motor and all metal parts
If you are on a budget and don't want to spend £500 ($700 + tax and shipping) on a niche then you can usually find used smaller commercial machines. Research the burrs they use and see if you can find new burrs, this way you can spend probably somewhere around $200 on what would function like a brand new high quality burr grinder.
Yes Baratzas are great grinders but they are not one-size-fits-all depending on what kind of coffee you make. For example Baratza Encore is everyone’s darling with good reason (I have one and I use it for espresso every day!) but it’s not a great espresso grinder because fundamentally speaking its tiny motor just doesn’t have enough torque to drive big burrs, so it has small ones. Which means when you grind at espresso sizes it’s going to lose its tight spread and it’ll output some grains that are too big for espresso, some are too small and some are just right. Since espresso is very dense coffee, this is something that is very clearly tastable even to a skeptical non-expert like me.
This spread of grain sizes is something to some degree any grinder does, but grinders designed for espresso have tighter spreads, so they provide much more of the size you want (so your water can actually pass through) and much less of what you don’t want.
Incidentally this is something I like about specialty coffee industry compared to other connoisseur stuff like wine. Wine experts walk around talking about the earthy aromas, if some coffee ‘expert’ tries to do the same, someone in the audience busts out a refractometer and says ‘aight, let’s see’.
It’s still a money pit, but it’s at least on a much more scientifically solid ground.
I’ll add a pointer towards Mazzer grinders too.
The key is to buy them when they are described as broken, then they are very cheap. As far as I can tell they are almost never broken as such. Either something inside needs plugging back in, or the on/off switch needs replacing (it’s got spades on it, so just plug a new one in).
They are nearly entirely metal, with the few plastic components readily available.
The are quite easy to sand and repaint too, so you can match them to other bits of equipment or decor. The correct colour choice is a 1970s orange.
Other examples of overkill objects I like are some commercial vacuums for clean room environments with spectacularly good filtration and seals, therefore no itching if you are allergic to dust (e.g. some Nilfisk made in Denmark). Or industrial fanless PCs which are sealed and have fantastic copper coolers (e.g. Compulab, Tranquil and many others).
A lot of products even in the supposedly "disposable" everyday category people buy for lower prices have maintenance instructions that would significantly increase their lifespan if actually followed. Misuse resistance means consumer products generally still work if you skip maintenance the manufacturer told you was necessary (which industrial products might not), but it may shorten the product's lifespan, increase operating costs or reduce performance.
My friend owns a dishwasher. Recently little specks of dirt were left on plates sometimes after the wash completed. Guess what, there's no salt in the softener re-charge. So that dishwasher is soldiering on with hard water instead of soft, and it no longer gets things clean. Fill the salt back up, and sure enough the machine's performance quickly improves. I'm sure lots of people are shouting "That's not maintenance". Well, it probably depends how you look at the problem. From his point of view he purchased "all in one" dishwasher tablets which said he didn't need salt. If he'd examined them very carefully they admit that actually you might still need to add salt periodically, but that wouldn't be very "all in one" so it's not emphasised.
It’s not the same as the rinse-aid, which reduces the surface tension of the water so droplets won’t stay on the dishes (i.e. a surfactant).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion-exchange_resin#Water_softe...
If they do, it's usually a compartment at the bottom of the thing with a sealed screw-cap.
Oh, and don't bother buying "dishwasher salt", just buy medium-grain table salt, it's 10x cheaper.
Is it the same thing?
But in another sense, "No". The people selling you table salt know it's for cooking and eating not to run a water softener, so they may tweak the product for these purposes. The product should be labelled, but we saw earlier that people don't read the fine print.
For example isn't it annoying when the little grains of salt stick together in a salt shaker? In some environments it's difficult to prevent plain salt from doing that, especially if it sits in the shaker for a few weeks because you (sensibly) don't use extra salt in most food. But an anti-caking agent reduces this problem while not making any difference (in a tiny quantity) to the taste or dietary effects of the salt. A water softener does not need anti-caking agents, so the manufacturer recommends using dishwasher salt.
Another example: Humans are supposed to have the element iodine in their diet. Some countries historically had a big problem with insufficient iodine, and so the "ordinary" table salt in those countries is laced with (a tiny amount of) iodine. Result: Fewer children with mental development problems. A water softener has no need for iodine, maybe it makes no difference, it clearly can't help, hence, the recommendation specifically for dishwasher salt.
I spoke with a very nice person from Dell via Twitter who out of personal interest went above and beyond to help me calibrate that XPS, but no luck. Booting Windows is enough for fans to reach max speeds and thermal throttling to begin.
Yeah, the Dell is not that problem, but just saying for others that other brand/model laptops with the same symptom might be easy to fix.
The windows refresh joy typically lasts about two weeks and then the jet engine starts again, laggy, some long waits - something in some windows apps/drivers it really does not seem to like and I havent tracked it down yet.
we don't care really, they are still great. Besides, they don't break much (typing this on mbp 2015 while waiting for m1 16" to happen)
I'm writing from a Dell Latitude 7390.
If this had the trackpoint, ThinkPads would be dead to me.
It's 99% perfect. So much so that I'm thinking of gettin an exact replica as a personal laptop.
I’ve been using a 2012 MBPr that still works great/is pristine, other than losing some rubber feet.
Having a user friendly OS with *nix-ish tooling in a high build quality package is (debatably) only available from Apple. I will happily upgrade to an M1 MBP once the next gen is released.
I mean I want to believe Macs are skookum devices but they're really not the best.
Assuming Apple has figured out recent design issues, I'll be interested to see the longevity of the current generation. It seems like the thermals on the M1 are fantastic, which should minimize non-mechanical failures. Time will tell I guess.
Why would I care? If it breaks, I tell my company to pay the repair bill or buy me a new one.
Yeah, you pay a premium in terms of price for that, but it's a no brainer imo.
That said, I have a lot of Dell hardware I like too. I still use two 2407wfp wide gamut monitors on my gaming PC and don't see any reason to change them until there's a 4k monitor I really want. They're bulletproof, and I even bought them used off Dell's outlet site.
One of my other friends had a Dell service business for a couple years, so I'm definitely familiar with how it all works. He uses macbooks these days too.
Working with smaller / early stage startups I've never had an IT dept that I could pass it off onto.
When you repair the device yourself you are independent from such a service. You could get hardware parts from any store you like and you might have some replacement parts at home.
Don't get me wrong I don't think that applecare is bad, but I do think it is better to have more options. Therefore I think it is best to have something like applecare plus the ability to repair the device yourself if necessary.
Maybe I’m doing it wrong?
An extra $150 external backup HDD is worth any crash at work, get your company to get it for every dev.
Even if they buy a new one, how long will it take you to set it up from scratch?
Meanwhile, any other vendor will have competent technicians available almost anywhere (with a support package maybe even 24/7/365), who will be able to at worst transplant your storage media into a working machine while they refurb your old one. The downtime can be shorter than a big Windows update.
Consequently, most failures are "repaired" by swapping the motherboard, and so your flash drive contents are gone.
Happily, you are using Time Machine (right?) and so you plug your backup drive into a spare machine, do the restore, and you're back to where you were an hour before the disaster. You do the same again when your newly repaired machine comes back from the store.
Yeah, it sucks more than swapping an SSD. But hey, you knew that before you bought a shiny, thin, light Macbook.
Paying for people and equipment to can safely swap a motherboard and reassemble the laptop is not cheap, but it's not expensive.
Paying people who can diagnose a fault in a modern motherboard, do the board-level repair, test it, and turn it around to the customer doesn't make sense. Do a quick board swap and be done with it. Maybe forward the faulty board to some central facility for refurb or at least analysis to find out what's breaking in the field.
This isn't unique to Apple -- very little consumer electronics is repaired because it isn't worth the cost.
Now Apple makes the choice to solder everything on the motherboard (both for size & weight, and likely reliability reasons too). That means even peripheral failures junk the whole motherboard. But that's a trade-off they, and their customers, make.
While Louis Rossmann [1] is well-known in the US for basing an entire, profitable small business around boards' component-level repair in one of the most unforgiving retail service markets in the US (NYC midtown Manhattan) [2], there are hundreds of shanzhai and tens of thousands of more generalized repair shops in China [3] who also demonstrate that with sufficient specifications and parts availability, what appears "basically impossible to repair" becomes the start of a journey towards a cradle-to-cradle ecosystem.
Apple has led the industry in the past, and is hopefully leading the way towards such a cradle-to-cradle future. I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that their recent designs that are perceived by Rossmann and others as anti-RTR (Right To Repair) are more unintentional side effects of their rapid vertical integration design strategy (the A* and M1 processors being only the most visible part of the strategy).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Rossmann
[2] https://www.rossmanngroup.com/
[3] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-broke-my-phones-screen-awes...
Personally, I don't think I've found anything that beats Apple's laptop trackpads, and I think that my UX matters more than repairability.
Then again, I'm still using a 2013 MacBook Pro with an upgraded NVMe SSD.
Although personally, the lack of a touchscreen on any of Apple's laptops is much more of a dealbreaker for me and despite working remotely, I really don't use a trackpad for work all that often. I imagine RSI would be unavoidable if you used it constantly, wouldn't it?
I never considered the RSI angle about the attraction of touch screens. I still have exactly zero desire to do serious work on a touchscreen where I’d have my fingerprints overlapping the display. Plus, I imagine touchscreens would be less ergonomic than a trackpad in a normal laptop form factor.
And yeah, I totally get not wanting to use Windows on a daily basis - win10 is a mess and I really only keep it installed for Adobe software and a few games. But the hardware of "Windows" laptops is quite competitive with Apple's these days.
On any OS you use it’s possible to have both a long-term backup and a bootable drive clone that is synced from your internal drive and updated on a schedule. I haven’t needed to use it often, but when I did it was priceless to be back up and running 30 minutes later without having to waste two days setting up a new machine or losing any data.
Unfortunately, it seems like the Apple Fabric storage system on the M1 laptops broke bootable backups, and it's possible that Apple has no plans to fix this:
https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/05/24/apples-moves-poin...
Trackoads are one of those items that I don't know of a good way to compare them, because most differences become unnoticeable habits over time. Sure, there's an obvious difference between a 20-year old copier whose buttons require a small hammer to activate and modern capacitative touchscreens, but beyond that I can't tell much difference.
Definitely if I use the trackpad on a new computer or on somebody else's computer, it feels wrong. The mouse moves to quickly or too slowly. The mouse continues moving after I thought I lifted my finger up, or stops slightly too soon. But those feel more like acclimatizing to a particular set of device parameters, rather than there being anything actually better or worse with the device.
I am using my unibody ASUS from 2013 with upgraded SATA SSD.
A completely unrepairable tool that is in service a lot longer for way less maintenance? I take that any day of the week.
And here’s the thing, I don’t really care that you can repair your Dell. I wouldn’t be able to do so without putting in a lot of time and it would be a little stressful. Reducing that time requires a significant investment.
The other failure mode I've seen is that a RAM module will fail to be recognized or cause a POST error, and the computer will not boot until it is replaced.
Neither happens often, but I've seen each of these more than I'd like. I could imagine both issues might possibly be less likely with a solid soldered connection vs. a port which can become damaged or dusty, but I don't have enough experience with soldered RAM modules to be able to say anything about its reliability.
This is how it works on most industrial job sites - your drill breaks, you go to the locker and check out another one. When the Hilti guy comes around, he collects the broken ones and they get serviced or replaced.
Meanwhile, my business laptop, the one the company provides me, has been macbooks for the most part, recently I've got a dell latitude. The latitude is one of the worst laptops I've had, bulky, heavy, noise. Yet, in terms of performance, I can't say I really see any differences in my day to day usage. On top of it all, the bluetooth is constantly causing issues, which I've never had with any of my previous laptops.
What do you like about the dell latitude line?
(0) Same goes for ThinkPads, not every ThinkPad is equal, even if it's the same one.
Which is totally fair, everything is fair. I'm not a negative person. (I think.)
Commercial dishwashers, esp. the fast cycle ones beat the living light of any mugs/plates/etc. unless they're plain white.
They use way more pressure and heat, and resulting clean is much more aggressive, shortening life of everything inside them. Only plain glass and plain porcelain came out relatively unaffected. All decorations doesn't stand a chance.
This is why some mugs denote "Safe for normal dishwasher use".
I want one.
The reason those big £3000+ machines are impractical for the home is not the cleaning or even the warm-up time (as both of those factors are the same for any espresso machine even the home ones) but rather with the fact that the bar grade espresso machines expect to be plumbed into a reverse osmosis filter and take up a shitload of space.
Commercial machines may need a little bit more time to warm up but I still let my gaggia warm up for around 15 minutes before I use it otherwise I find consistency falls and I just get frustration.
Regarding cleaning, the process is the same for home machines and just needs to be performed less often (I do this around once every week depending on use. I pour 1-4 shots a day every day). There are powdered detergents which are used to backflush the group head and solenoid valve to clear out coffee oils, this process takes about 5 minutes to perform and doesn't require much manual effort except for clearing out the drip tray and wiping things down a bit.
When it comes to cleaning the boiler, this isn't done by disassembling the machine or anything crazy like that. An acidic solution of usually some combination of primarily citric acid and/or potassium bitartrate is added to the water reservoir, the boiler is then flushed to get the solution in the boiler, I will then usually leave it in for 15 minutes with the boiler turned off to prevent water from boiling (to make sure all areas of the boiler are in contact with water at all times). Then this gets flushed with clean filtered water to get rid of the acid.
This process takes longer but also doesn't require much work.
Anything under £600 will give you mediocre espresso (due to grind inconsistency and temperature stability problems) or fauxpresso (any pod machine or bean to cup machine basically maxes fauxpresso, there are very expensive commercial grade true-espresso bean to cup machines but these, even when dialled in correctly, still usually make a mediocre espresso).
Any machine (even the fauxpresso ones) will likely require almost as much cleaning effort. Any manufacturer which claims otherwise (especially for bean-to-cup machines) is just trying to reduce the lifetime of your machine so it fails out of warranty and you buy another one.
There are also the lever espresso makers like the Flair or Cafelat Robot, which are cheaper, more robust (no fancy heating elements), but also a bit more troublesome.
Mine did approximately 15,000 coffees in the 20 years of use it had, and had one service for about $US75. It’s still around as an emergency backup.
It’s shown in the wiki. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rancilio
I distill brita filtered water and then re-mineralise it by adding solutions of various minerals in specific quantities. Although not everyone has the time for that. I think brita filtered water and a good regular descaling cycle should be more than enough to make any machine last a very long time.
It is. But with home use you don’t pull 300+ shots, it can be cleaned less. I have a 20 something year old Cimbali and it’s just great. It’s on a smart plug to turn on early and warm up.
It had a load of leaks and I decided to upgrade, but first talked to the local agent. He gave 4 washers and said try them.
20 mins later it’s completely fixed at a cost of $0. That’s the only repair it’s had in the years I have owned it. I thoroughly clean it every few weeks.
Time is important in cleaning, and home dishwashers take advantage of that by running for several hours at low power, it is not like you are going to need these plates immediately after you have finished eating.
About commercial espresso machines, another thing to consider is that these machines usually require plumbing. There are high end home espresso machines that are also built like tanks and will serve you better unless you are planning to pull hundreds of shots a day. Commercial machines have an advantage when it comes to temperature stability because they are so big and heavy but smaller machines are still able to do an impressive job.
> and it’s designed for an environment with lots of ventilation
Speaking of, you know what the #1 thing I would design into a residential kitchen if I were building one from the ground up? A fume hood. Just a literal chemistry-lab fume hood box, but where the shroud folds away and the base of it is an induction cooktop. (In other words, it's just a really fancy above-the-range ventilation system.)
Imagine what you could do with that:
• No fear of burning your food setting off your smoke alarm — just drop/shut the shroud around the cooktop, and all the smoke would definitely be going out the vent, not into your house.
* You can grill indoors (with e.g. a Hibachi) with no fear of CO / CO2 poisoning. (Just shut the shroud while the food cooks, and only open it at the end. As a bonus, the extra airflow will make the grill into a convection grill!)
* You can vent your kitchen (and through it, the rest of your house) really quickly, if you're e.g. clearing something rotten out of your fridge.
* You can do real chemistry to make stuff, if you like. For example, given a fume hood, it'd be safe to make a CO2 generator to refill your soda-carbonator gas canister.
* Landlords would no longer have to worry about their tenants turning a house into a meth lab, because even if they did, the house would in some sense be safe to use as a meth lab, with much lower risk of volatile chemical explosions.
Laboratory-grade flooring: epoxy resin. Durable protection, withstand frequent pedestrian traffic. Slip resistance. Impermeable, non-absorbent surface, resists chemical exposure. Low maintenance, easy and economical cleaning and sanitizing properties.
Floor drains and gullies with oil/water separator.
Compressed air supply.
Chilled water supply.
Overhead service carriers for power, chilled water, hot water, natural gas, and air.
Lab-grade furniture, especially countertops.
All packaged in a proven layout taken from modern submarine galley designs.
This isn't from a lab (but from a sushi restaurant), to indicate I don't have a "kitchen as lab" fetish: circulating water Teflon-lined raceway behind all counter runs catches debris that is diverted to a auto-turned compost pile, and the excess moisture of the pile drained off to crops, which in turn drain off to an aquaculture pond.
I could go on, but my ideal dream kitchen would at first glance would probably look like a very cramped lab. "Modern" residential kitchens cause me all kinds of unnecessary movement and labor for my specific use case.
This can't be overstated. There's a lot of overlap between safety in labs, and safety in (especially professional) kitchens. Heck, there's more danger in kitchens with how familiar people are with processes, causing them to lower their guard.
The biggest parallels are probably the slip resistance, and the protective clothing. If you weren't aware, most chefwear is super easy to remove, has a hydrophobic coating, is not tight-fitting, usually layers over itself where it fastens, and often uses fasteners that are completely separate from the garment. (all of these examples are a result of me thinking about the dangers of scalding-hot fryer oil as in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOk2Akqb3CI)
I think lab coats and chef jackets are similar, but one targets corrosive liquids, and the other targets dangerously hot liquids.
TL;DR: get some labcoats, teflon pants, protective shoes, and eye protection for your kitchen.
I've had my fair share of actual 12.9 steel screws from Amazon that are actually 12.9 steel, and my fair share of 12.9 steel screws that were actually made of cheese.
Plus... this is something maybe only a CAD user can understand - McMaster Carr provides an outright sex bible of importable 3D CAD objects.
Like, I really thought my CAD instructor in University was joking when they said McMaster would be your Bible if you're ever designing in CAD for hobby/industry. Then I got a job, and holy shit were they right. So I like to think whenever I pay slightly more on McMaster for what I could get on Amazon or eBay, I'm supporting the bible for all of the goodness it's given me for my hobby designing and in making actual work less stressful as well.
Luckily many suppliers are doing this. Misumi for example has plugins for CAD packages like Solidworks that even generate CAD parts for parts with custom configurations (like aluminum extrusion cut to size) so going from assembly to BOM to purchase order is a few clicks.
I only run it at night, and I put it in a window in another room, facing out with some material around it to make a snug fit. The result is a steady breeze coming in the bedroom windows at night and a muted hum from the other room. It makes regular plastic box fans look like a joke. It easily moves 10x the air on low as a plastic one on high.
This approach greatly reduces the number of nights we need to use the AC in early summer/early fall in NYC, when it’s warm but not so humid as in July and August. I’ve tried the same thing with a plastic fan and it’s way less effective...we can come home to a hot stuffy apartment on a Sunday night after a weekend away and have it totally comfortable inside in a matter of minutes.
it's almost always a good idea to buy the professional-grade items you've used at work and know are awesome, it's almost never a good idea to buy a professional-grade item sight-unseen unless you know there's a local used market for it.
At one point, years ago, my brother and I considered creating a web site that explored these kinds of high-integrity options, and acted as a directory and maybe a review site as well. A site that evangelizes high-quality, well-engineered items that are easily integrated into a home and provide much greater longevity without costing a fortune. "Overkill" is probably too strong a term for the idea.
Impossible to break, engineered to was several loads every day, etc. But they’re not cheap.
Crummy valves break. Most builders use the cheapest crap they can get. They save a couple thousand dollars building a house but replacing the $2 crap can sometimes cost a fortune. One of the worst offenses I have had to deal with is the use of C-PVC pipe which is brittle and will eventually crack or burst.
Ideally, the site I thought about would be to educate folks about the kinds of things, components, they should specify when building or remodeling.
For example, Festool, Makita, and DeWalt offer awesome products but are very pricy. All the tools from the DIY shops are rubbish. Things from Bosch are slightly better. But these are all expensive. Meanwhile, the tools from Lidl around €30-50 price point are quite cool.
Nowadays youtube channels like Project Farm have kind of replaced that niche, I could see a channel dedicated to hands-on reviews, funded by affiliate links. I'd watch long videos on several of the topics you mention above...
What light switches do you use?
Longer form: there are three major manufacturers of switches and receptacles: Hubbell (Bryant), Leviton, and Pass&Seymour-Legrand. Hubbell is generally the highest price and quality. Leviton switches just feel "right" to me. I don't care for P&S much even though there's nothing wrong with them. All are completely interchangeable except for small visual details. This is really only noticable on wallplates (Hubbell stainless wallplates look the best -- and they're 302/304 SS so they don't rust in bathrooms like the 400 series trash at HD) and, if you mix them too nearby, switch rockers.
Pick your brand, then get their PDF catalog and find some part numbers. (There are plenty of other ways to do this, I just find catalogs effective.) You want "frameless" switches if you're going down this path: "framed" switches are the consumer junk you're running away from. (I dislike Decora -- I think it's harder to operate in the dark, and that's kind of a thing for light switches, but if it's your thing, go for it.) You'll find many possible part numbers to pick from. You want ONLY things marked as "Fed Spec" (more formally W-C-596). A lot of lesser stuff is "Spec Grade", which is a cop-out for "we think this is up to spec but we didn't actually list it". "Fed Spec" means "yeah, this one's good". (I will accept "spec grade" for oddballs like weird configurations -- it's not like they sell a ton of those -- since it really is decent, but don't settle for that on your main switch or receptacle, because you don't have to.) You can buy the cheapest things that are actually Fed Spec and you'll be golden.
You don't need the high-end Extra Heavy Duty stuff unless you're outfitting a shop or something. And you probably don't want Hospital Grade with those annoying pull-out forces, ugly green dots, and hospital prices. But none of those will hurt anything but your pocketbook, if you are so inclined. You'll just never appreciate them.
You should, for receptacles, get the ones that are Back And Side Wired. That means the side screws and the holes on the back, with the screw needed to grab the holes (i.e. not those horrid stabby-only holes on the super cheap receptacles). I made this mistake (Leviton BR15 vs CR15) and regretted it during install. Oh well.
If in doubt, look for the part number with the most color choices. It's probably popular for a reason. And don't forget that neon ("pilot") switches exist. They make understanding 3-ways and finding the staircase light in the dark way easier. Especially if the staircase lights are 3-way. Worth every penny!
Now that you have some part numbers, you just have to buy them from a trade supplier or industrial supplier and you're done! One place that's reliable is Zoro. They even used to have great pricing when they still offered coupons; seems those are rare now. But anywhere that's not big-box can sort you out.
Oh, and if this is your first time doing this, get a #1 square or Robertson screwdriver. No, not just a bit, you'll use it more than that and it's slimmer this way. The recesses on these things accept multiple bit shapes and I find that one by far the easiest to work with in that recess (due to the multiple-shape thing it's not great at holding any of them...).
This YouTube channel has recently done a number of great teardowns of electrical outlets (receptacles).
Go with Commercial grade.
I would add, if you can afford it, install AFCI outlets as the first outlet in the circuit, or an AFCI breaker in the circuit panel. These are required for residential (non-commercial) bedrooms for new construction in the latest revision of the NEC fire code recommendations, but they are way more expensive than you'd expect to pay for the he dead-simple outlets.
I'm going to go get some catalogs and start shopping, I might just be replacing all the light switches in my house in a few weekends from now :)
You probably wouldn't want those on frequently-swapped outlets, though.
The only problem is that I forget to turn it off in the morning. Out if sight out of mind. Switching it to a timer is on my list.
Then you can turn the fan off after a period of time, at a specific time, at a certain temp etc.
It risks over complicating things though.
The fans were about 1 inch on a side but between them they sounded like a fully loaded 747 spinning up.
It's not even That loud though
Some of the older dual Xeon servers on eBay were tempting, but the noise/power draw made it a non-starter.
Right now, I have a silent 4U rackmount GPU server running 24/7 in my living room, cooled just fine by a 120mm Noctua fan (plus a silent consumer ATX PSU fan).
I also have a commercial 1U Atom server that I've adapted for living room. The Atom and mirrored HDDs are passively-cooled (though you can also get Xeons in the same chassis). The Flex-ATX PSU was loud, but I opened it up and soldered in an effectively silent Noctua.
The noise-no-object jet engine servers are a problem, especially full-depth 1U ones with a phalanx of jet engine fans. But people have had some luck removing fans and replacing some of them with quieter fans, or liquid cooling.
The Dyson fans tend to have a particularly quiet sounding noise profile compared to their volume of air displaced at low to mid power in particular, and also are far quieter and low powers than traditional fans.
They're not worth the money they cost, but there's a lot more nuance than this presents.
Commercial gym equipment, on the other hand is more expensive, much heavier, and doesn't bring many advantages over a high quality consumer product. If you're running a gym where thousands of people use it every year the extra weight and cost makes sense but for a single person it's just a pain.
This sounds like a cool hobby and conversation starter. But it's hard to take the author seriously when he proselytizes on the practical virtues of buying ejector seats over retail chairs. Industrial goods are often built for very specific use-cases. If those use-cases don't align with your own needs, you're just paying a lot of money for something you don't need. And often, something that fails to deliver on your actual needs.
> The entire consumer market is rotten. TV? It's going to come with smart apps. Get one from NEC that's meant for commercial use.
A TV has the potential to be a lifetime purchase, but the software on it can render it obsolete. I can always plug my streaming device of choice into the back of a "dumb TV."
I just want a frame that I can send pics to, or that pulls from google/dropbox/whatever shares, and maybe turn off when it's dark.
https://www.samsung.com/us/televisions-home-theater/tvs/the-...
you can still buy 30year old speakers for 200-400 and consider it as a buy it for life purchase.
If you mind the gap between your knees for the controls too much, look for an Airbus seat. They also have nice armrests because the stick is on the side.
He pointed out that virtually every single element in the $60+ million aircraft is engineered for flight and occupant safety, and to be as light as possible.
For example, I have an old '97 F250 that is as basic of a model as you can possibly get. Regular cab, bench seat, manual everything from the windows to the transmission. It is a beast and will take whatever you give it. It is simple and easy to fix when something breaks, but it is also crazy loud, rough, and uncomfortable to be in. Perfect for getting work done, but for a cross-country trip with my wife and kids I would opt for the minivan any day.
It is just that from personal experience, a road trip with small children has enough rough edges that road/engine noise so loud that the kids can't sleep does not have to be one of them...
Much less so on a Tuesday night after a stressful day and your goddamn window won't close even though it's raining and you can't play music because the stereo only takes cassettes and you're not gonna listen to that one fucking Hall and Oates tape again and there's no heat and your neck is sore because the headrest is made of plastic and....
Creature comforts are most important when you're not thinking about them. I don't ever want to get in my car and think, "ah, this is what it means to be human! this is REAL!"
I think there is a romaniticization of suffering. I also wanted to show my merit, my worth in some way. I had grown up in a very cushy environment, and I was trying to prove something.
Going back in time I would advise anyone against your belief. Anyone who reads this, please don't make the mistake of living a rough life for whatever inane purpose you can think of. It will not make you a better person. It is as stupid as it sounds.
It always warms my heart to see my fellow citizens in one of the wealthiest societies in the world, walking and biking to work in the rain and wind that is Danish winter. Or when you go to the beach when the water is 12 degrees and there are already families there, splashing around. That fills me with hope.
Driving a climate controlled car 3 blocks to the shop is not the pinnacle of civilisation.
In what way scientifically speaking does biking specifically in the rain make you a "better person"? Biking can definitely help with your health and is certainly a good way to get around, but the rain can obstruct your vision and could cause your breaks to lock up if you had to stop suddenly.
That’s why people brag about waking up at five and hiking up a mountain before breakfast, and that’s why we have all those sayings, which obviously don’t apply to heart attacks.
But maybe it’s a cultural thing, it seems a lot of Americans aren’t ashamed of driving 3 blocks to the store to get milk.
This is very unfair - the average cobsumer is purposefully mislead on a daily basis, for example applle forbids apps from informing consumer that 30% of their donation to a charity is taken.
With industrial goods, there is a whole department who's job is proqurement and to know what they are buying. And lets not pretent no funny business ever happens there either.
But lastly, some consumer good are better - DSLR's beat any industrial cameras, and commercial dishwashers are a toally different beast, unsuitable and dangerous to a naive user.
They products might be good, but their methods are ruthless - they are wanna-be like mexican cartels.
On the laptop side, they're using ThinkPads.
Kind of difficult to take a cut of payments you explicitly don’t allow on your platform, isn’t it?
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/136983/would-apple...
I don't use Facebook so I don't know if that page is misleading, but it certainly looks like you can donate money (in the legal meaning!) through Facebook's iOS app.
I think most of the recent takes were about Twitter's tip jar that would potentially let you send money to nonprofits. But, Twitter so far has avoided using the word "donate" and its legal implications.
For me the biggest concern is that people want this to happen and even would go as far as say that people get a perverse sense of satisfaction from Apple's unfair behavior. Because it validates the widespread pessimism and 'everything is broken' mentality that is normalized nowadays
I like that.
But then it goes south from there, the author seems to believe that anything that isn't from the USA military must be crap:
> Made in the USA from military grade [...] preferably a military supplier [...] This is the real thing, used by the US military. [...]
> Consumer goods suck. You keep buying them. [emphasis theirs]
> The average consumer is an idiot, so the bean counters keep milking them.
So we're idiots for buying a regular knife instead of some military variant that makes you look like, well, someone who would carry a gun as well? Or regular napkins rather than some special cleanroom rated upgrade? I think I'm good, thanks.
I mean how many military equipment companies can you sustain with a country the size of California? Whatever your answer, above a certain pay grade, all employees come from a single engineering school anyways.
If you’ve ever looked into military procurement, there are a number of MIL standards and a specific list of requirements. If the product meets specifications and testing results, picking anyone but the lowest bidder accounting for other “soft” commercial aspects such as company stability, leadership, and book health; would be foolish and irresponsible.
I’ve seen several comments here that “military” grade means lowest bidder. That’s optimal.
Look at it this way - consumer market is completely unregulated, no specifications and lots misleading terminology. Any Military would crucify you for fraud.
Is it perfect? No. Is it close to perfection? Yes. Also look into medical grade things such as scissors.
The right term is “optimal”.
These are all better in most cases:
Medical grade
Military grade
Industrial grade
Cleanroom grade (for some items)
Marine grade
Try looking into it.
E.g. British wire cutters, German parkas, French boots, etc.
I’m a huge fan of buying high quality gear that’ll last forever - do you have any ideas where to shop for these?
If they mean something else, I’d also be curious.
The demand became so great after September 11 that several outdoor gear manufacturers pivoted entirely to military products—Dana Gleason and Wild Things, among others.
In the market, competition is strong. In the military market, your connections are way more valuable.
Perhaps a happy medium? Maybe not $1500 Damascus knife, but maybe a nice Wüsthof so you're not throwing so much out, and damaging the environment.
And at that point, may as well keep sharpening them. What's the point of having a Scandi grind carbon steel blade if you don't sharpen it? There is literally no easier geometry or grind, and who cares if you scratch it a little?
I don't feel bad losing it (haven't) or breaking it (haven't) either. But taking a dull knife, letting it get duller, then tossing it, really doesn't sit right with me.
You need good enough steel to take and then hold an edge. So it can not be super cheap steel with big particles, as you will never manage to get that knife sharp enough to use. On the other hand, super hard hrc+++ cheapo knives will also not do much for you. First, because they are rarely sharp and second, because in a kitchen environment where not every cut is going to be perfect and nice to the blade, the blade is going to be effed. It's gonna be sharp for lunch and a disaster by dinner.
However, you are right that good knives for very little money are available. I have been using several Victorinox knives that are plyable and robust. They can be made very sharp without much effort, and stay that way for reasonable amounts of time.
And that's the point. I don't really need to throw them away. They don't really look fancy, true. But they are in daily use since... six years? Eight? And the price difference to supermarket knives was probably 10-20 euros/dollars.
Edit: And I say this as someone who has a random assortment of sharpening/honing utensils and really only barely knows what he is doing with them.
Good midrange, perhaps not necessarily Wüsthof (aka the macrobrew of European knives), but other proven knive brands, is a very good option for people who don't do Sashimi every day.
For what it’s worth - I’ve also bought overkill items and they’ve turned out to be a disaster. For instance, for the TPI fan in the example - I had to get an industrial fan controller because it was too damn loud and restaurant grade containers that are not BPA-free.
This does bring up a different issue though, which is that any time someone uses a hypothetical example to illustrate a point on the Internet, responses end up picking apart the example instead of the point itself.
> Drop the toy, or the relevant toy component, five times through a height of (850 ± 50) mm on to a 4 mm thick steel plate with a 2 mm thick coating of Shore A hardness (75 ± 5) as measured according to EN ISO 868 or ISO 7619-2 and which is placed on a non-flexible horizontal surface.
> Prior to release, orientate the toy in a position that allows the most onerous impact onto the coated surface of the steel plate.
(850mm is 2¾ ft.)
More seriously, I think some of these regulations do prevent the lowest-quality stuff you might find in the USA being legally sold in the EU.
Orienteering is a deep enough subject to be a tool, hobby and sport. Recommended skill, just for the entertainment value
On the whole, I'm pretty damn satisfied with the overweening cradle-to-grave nanny state, making sure you get at least the rudiments of basic life skillz and all.
It is so pleasing to use this site and it is simultaneously full of utility as they stock a wide array of fixtures and hardware that are difficult to search for elsewhere.
If you place an order before noon (typically) the box of goods will be in your hands the next day.
The user interface is a wonder. It's too good to be true. In fact, using the UI actually saddens me because you know some kid who thinks they are a design genius is going to get hired there and "improve things". It's almost a physical law.
Will I ever find the rs-232 transceiver that I need on Amazon? Unlikely.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/shutupandtakemymoney/comments/15jwv...
Apparently it is an ASP.NET app, served by IIS, cached on Akamai's CDN. Not quite what you're going to see on your average HN blog post.
The clarity of information presentation is unparalleled.
I just fear one day some new intern, engineer, designer or manager is going to join and ruin it. It will be a sad day.
Interestingly, Far Eastern sites I've seen, even MRO and procurement-oriented sites, but especially consumer-facing sites, tend to be extremely information-dense. To my Western site-accustomed sensibilities, they feel "too busy", but after awhile I understood the aesthetic (calligraphic script languages tend to have a higher information throughput per unit area than alphabet-script languages, and this seems to bleed over into aesthetics as well).
I'm into old school espresso machines, and there is a robust market (and some fascinating refurb videos) for older, lever espresso machines - the quality and design is just much better than any consumer-grade equipment that is sold today.
I know I am not alone in saying that I would happily pay a 2-3x premium for any appliance if it were engineered properly and actually left out all the ridiculous technological bullshit it never needed in the first place. To this day, no one at Best Buy can explain to me how WiFi helps me clean my clothes better or faster.
Also consider the current economics around the chip shortage... Relays, A/C induction motors, electromagnets, switches and all other essential macro-scale components required for building a washing machine or clothes dryer can still be built by human hands in any factory on earth. Not only are all of these things available now, they are arguably the superior engineering choice when making something intended to deliver value to the end user.
Let's take an object I'm quite familiar with: an espresso machine. Some like the classic Rancilio Silvia are 100% electromechanical. It's nice and simple, but there are downsides:
* Temperature regulation is very coarse, because it's done with thermal relays.
* There's no timing. All manual.
* There's no water sensor.
* There are potential failure modes.
It's a machine that'll be happy to try to keep pumping nothing until the pump burns out, and that produces variable results depending on the user's timing and precision. Popular add-ons include a PID controller to fix the temperature regulation, a pressure gauge (analog is fine there, but digital could also be used for safety), and a stopwatch.
Once you look into coffee forums frequented by the fans of well made coffee, you see that one really sought after thing is control and precision. Precisely controlling the grind, the amount of coffee, the amount of water, the temperature and the timing. Notice something? It's all stuff that electronics excel at, and humans suck at. Controlling timing, weight and water flow is a perfect task for a machine, which it can do with impeccable precision.
And along with that stuff, it can improve safety eg, by noticing things like "The heater has been on for a minute yet temperature doesn't seem rising -- maybe the sensor is broken". Plus quality of life thing like warming up on a timer, and automatically turning off afterwards.
The issue isn't with electronics but with electronics being applied in the wrong direction.
This is also an issue with IoT in general. The internet functionality replaces basic functionality instead of being built on top. No, I don't want to wash my clothes with an app! But I would not mind the fscking machine to shut the fuck up at night and remind me in the morning to empty it. Not a hard thing to do. Same with e.g. light switches, if there's no internet it should still work, some don't, awful.
I'm the proud owner of a La Peppina espresso machine (image: https://www.home-barista.com/levers/my-first-lever-la-peppin...). It makes great espresso, but it also keeps a kettle of boiling water suspended on a relatively small pedestal where you push down on the lever next to it. I'm glad I own one because something like it will never be produced again.
This?
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/79/82/72/79827236408416d55d8f...
A lot of the reliability concerns from tools of the past are frankly quite well justified, and to this date we continue to sell and produce tools that are dangerous if not properly operated.
Of course, an open boiler means there are a lot more potential safety issues.
Here is a link to NEC's commercial displays https://www.sharpnecdisplays.us/products/displays#2
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/amazon-devices-will-...
https://frame.work/blog/in-defense-of-dumb-tvs was posted here recently (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26273169) and concluded that Sceptre, an inexpensive brand sold at Wal-Mart, was worth a shot.
An example from Samsung: https://www.cdw.com/product/samsung-678u-series-55-4k-uhd-le...
https://www.sceptre.com/TV/4K-UHD-TV-category1category73.htm...
https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-55-4k-conference-r...
The down ide is that they are up 25% in cost over 2019 but
Things like contrast ratio, how well it does dark colors in a dark room or fast intesity refreshing (like 60Hz "fast") may be questionable. It probably also expects super consistent and clean power...some houses dont have that.
Sure you could make it a giant Dakboard with a giant static image and not really worry about burn in for years.
Ultimately. I went with a cheap panel from say costco and a roku on a separate vlan (so my overkill is a network that can do vlan segmentation). Ultimately the roku TV's can scan themselves to death and report that they are on a network with other roku TV's all they want. Or you could just get a cheap-o smart TV and hook up the appleTV (cost came into play for me). I do have some LG smart TV's, one died within 3 years already...Meanwhile my Samsung 55" Plasma from 2008 had taking a direct lightning strike that took out the others and keeps on ticking. (and resulted in the TCL roku and LG tvs being installed).
So all of that is to say. I just go cheap panel that i dont mind replacing. And just keep them isolated entirely.
So why go to the trouble of not having the smart menu stuff rather than just not using it?
Ultralight hiking adds an interesting forcing function to gear - correctly “built” (as in not overbuilt or under built). Bring the gear which matches the need. In essence, the complete opposite sentiment of this post.
Your point still stands, though. I had a military pack and couldn’t believe how heavy it was even when empty. Ultralight hiking gear is pretty amazing and optimized for an entirely different goal. That said, I still feel like specialty gear like this is a different class than the average consumer stuff.. closer to industrial or military in design than Amazon junk.
Ka-bars are kind of a meme. They are made fairly cheaply. You won’t find knife enthusiasts (eg USN) recommending ka-bars.
Still like to carry a knife, though!
With the hiking I like to do, I hike all day, boil water for food with a canister stove, and pass out. So I optimize for weight - less weight = more miles (and is much more comfortable).
I don't generally need a knife in my daily life either, but I still carry one at all times. In the same sense that I often wear a seatbelt, despite hopefully never needing one, and having driven many hundreds of thousands of miles without one ever proving useful.
It's just when it comes to hiking vs. backpacking, the calculus of what to carry changes significantly because when backpacking you implicitly are carrying much more junk than on a hike.
For me hiking is much closer to a long walk in civilization than backpacking; I encounter more people, and carry my knife just like I do around town. Hiking is actually especially unique since it tends to be done civilization adjacent, and for some idiots that's the most accessible source of cover for criminal fuckery or desperate homeless living.
A lot depends on the wildlife you could expect to encounter - a pair of micro scissors weighing less than a ounce won't be useful against even a smallish dog went feral. (Lots of stray dogs around the places I live, not all of them good boys)
Having a rugged piece of metal that you could use for defense, prying stuff apart, lever, axe is a must for me. Especially one that is easy to re-sharpen with a simple rough whetstone.
I go hiking with esee 6 - it is comforting to know it is there if the going gets rough since it is nigh indestructible
I'd prefer if commodity things, like computer mice, were made to last, and not $5 pieces of cheap plastic that end up in landfills. But I'm the person who complains about the tons of cheap plastic trash sold in 0.99 stores while able to afford $500 mixers.
I wish there was a happy medium, where society didn't demand China produce plastic stuff that turns into trash within a month, destroying the environment exponentially.
If you really want to rewire your house to mix 20 gallons of dough at a time...go for it I suppose. But do the homework first.
You could get a 3 phase commercial standby genset installed and have the remote annunciator for it mounted next to whatever monster 3 phase stand mixer in your kitchen. All in all this would run you ~50K USD.
Every day people spend far more money on way stupider bullshit than what I just proposed.
I did the same with our microwave when the door close sensors failed. The internet has made fixing things infinitely easier, as spec sheets and part suppliers are available to everyone.
https://www.electrolux.dk/kitchen/small-kitchen-appliances/k...
I immediately recognised the design from the pictured mixer. Turns out they are the same company, different branding. Now owned by Whirlpool.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KitchenAid
TIL, FWIW.
If you’re lucky enough to live near one that lets consumers buy food, too, that’s great. 20 pounds of very high quality pasta for like $8 or $10.
Also caught some lovely cheap "disposable" paring knives that have served in our kitchen for several years and still going strong.
The overkill options...well, they're not made for home, which actually makes them worse for home use cases. Sure, a La Marzocco Linea can pull a thousand shots a day with extreme consistency and temperature stability.
My Lelit Bianca can't keep up on volume, but it is smaller, reaches operating temperature more quickly, and is temp stable for the number of shots I pull even with a dozen people over for a party. It uses a standard electrical plug, it has a consumer-grade warranty, and it's relatively easy to maintain for a regular Joe like me.
So sure, a commercial version of a thing might be more robust, longer-lasting, etc., but what tradeoffs are you making to achieve those characteristics?
I see what you did there...
I replaced it with a smaller Vornado [2]. Powerful, nearly silent (can't hear the motor, only the blades), with a durable sealed-bearing motor. Much better.
[1]:https://king-electric.com/products/high-velocity-air-circula...
[2]:https://www.vornado.com/shop/circulators-fans/293-heavy-duty...
If it's cold my HVAC would cycle and would get temperature swings. I installed a vornado space heater and it worked wonderfully. It had a continuous air flow and would keep the temperature in the room very stable.
And then it wore out and I got a new model with electronic controls, which didn't work so well. The original had mechanical controls and were set and forget. I believe the electronic model would reset after a power failure, and would have a timer that would turn it off after using it for a while, both non-features.
For anyone needing to churn out flat dead trees more than once a week: I recommend getting a used flagship color laser printer with a low page count and in good condition instead of an inkjet printer. No more running ink, no more calibration pages, no more dried-out ink cartridges, and no more overpriced supplies.
Sure, you can get smaller enterprise laser printers of many brands for cheap, but the smaller you go, the less repairable they are and the more expensive they are to operate.
Some of the cartridges I use go to multiple tens of thousands of pages. I never have had a paper jam on anything other than a printer with bad grabber rollers or cheap desktop models. Some of my printers have auto-stapling and collating. Basically, I never need a FedEx Office store unless I'm out-of-the-area.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it feels fine even if you sit in it long periods of time. However, I'm sure that it only comes in one size, that size being the right size to pilot a plane with an ejector seat. Anyone too big or small wasn't considered in its design because they'd never make it into the relevant flight program to begin with.
My point is, consumer objects have to be designed a bit more inclusively than that, to be able to sell to a wider range of buyers. That big Hobart mixer is in the same boat: It's designed for people who wouldn't have gotten that bakery job if they couldn't work with a large, heavy piece of kitchen equipment.
Some ejection seats are supposed to be sat in, continuously, for over 10 hours. While letting you still function.
That said, the cockpits tend to enforce certain posture.
What is functionality though? What is pizzaz? When are they the same and when are they different?
E.g. the famous Emeco 1006 chair, which won a contract to supply the US Navy by being thrown out a window and not breaking. It became a design classic, and now sells for $600 each. It gained a kind of following, which is in part based on this history. But is that durability especially functional for your home or restaurant environment which isn't on a warship? Do you think you're going to use your chair as a hammer some days? Or is fetishizing something used by the military and extreme durability its own form of pizzaz?
https://www.dwr.com/kitchen-dining-chairs-benches/1006-navy-... https://www.emeco.net/variants/emeco-1006-navy-chair-brushed... https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/77-steps/
If I knew it would be handed down for generations of my descendants, then I absolutely want that durability. A tremendous amount of economic and environmental harm comes from unnecessary product acquisition churn over generations at the scales of populations we're currently dealing with. If I can equip my descendants (who are likely to at best propagate at barely replacement rate with current socioeconomic trends that seem resource and energy-bound and unlikely to change until fusion or similar energy breakthrough is made) with 50-80% of their material goods throughout the stages of their lives and eliminate their capex, that is a hell of an advantage of confer compared to previous generations' patterns.
However ... there's plenty of solid hardwood furniture which can survive multiple generations of regular use, but which would not survive being pitched from an upper floor window. And arguably, depending on sourcing, wood has a better environmental footprint of aluminum, which involves open pit mines and energy-intensive refining.
I get the draw, but comfort in these seats is mixed. You should be able to sit in them for a few hours, but remember that the foam is dense enough to handle 7Gs.
Being able to instantly & remotely measure the temperature of anything (with reasonable emissivity characteristics) is like a super power. There is nothing in my kitchen or grill area that can exceed the range of the IR sensor on this unit. There are only a few things that have problems with direct sampling. I cook almost exclusively with cast iron, so IR readings are always dead accurate.
The unit runs on a single AA battery, has a backlight, and somehow still hasn't needed a new battery since I bought it 4 years ago (used almost every day).
I had to cook in someone else's kitchen not too long ago, and found myself going insane at not being able to tell exactly how hot the oil was in a pot used for frying.
Laser pointers marketed as cat toys are often tiny little things that require annoying & expensive button-cell batteries.
My infrared thermometer / cat toy has a pistol grip so it's easier to hold, and runs off a 9V battery that lasts much longer.
You screw it to a piece of plywood and get a car battery to power it, and you've got a 26 way adjustable seat with lumbar support, seat heaters and seat coolers, and all the other fancy features of a car seat. And it's usually made of super durable easy to clean materials. You get a swingarm to hold your keyboard and monitor and you're all set with the ultimate chair.
But it takes a ton of space.
at least in 2012 or so, digikey still had call centers in minnesota and the upper peninsula, and still taught all their call center reps the nato alphabet. There is nothing more crisply charming than a call operator who sounds like Bobby’s mom from Bobby’s World reading you back your resistor SKUs in flawless and rapid phonetic alphabet.
It's a shame; as far as I can tell, the only reasonably-priced source for bulk machine screws that I've been able to find was Aliexpress/Alibaba (depending on quantities), and even that has gone to shit with the new import tax rules. (I'm not opposed to paying import taxes. I am opposed to paying a €20 processing fee in addition to €0.30 tax for €1.50 worth of stuff)
Don't they have similar sites for other EU countries?
https://shop.libbey.com/collections/beverageware/products/ba...
Only major downside is that shipping is expensive (unless you join their Amazon Prime equivalent, which is $99/month and doesn't really make sense for a household). I think my last order was around $30 s&h on a ~$200 order.
My workaround is that I save up a big wishlist and then order from them about once a year, and get friends & family to tack on any items they want as well.
Flea markets are also another great source for well built items. Have had great luck buying industrial grade tooling and electrical test/measurement equipment there.
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/12/02/more-dakka/
All things considered, I would love to see more people put together their own lists of ways you can do better than the consumer default. I'm sure there's plenty of opportunities of this kind.
The consumer approach would dismiss getting a professional fitting as overkill and unnecessary but they really limit their enjoyment.
That said, smaller binos are fine in most circumstances. I often carry pocket 8x23s around, or even a small monocular, just in case.
Now, that's the countertop model, so it only weights 189 pounds, and it's a steal at $6000. Sounds expensive, but it'll last forever, unlike my shitty Kitchenaid mixer that's only worked flawlessly for 30 years, and that I can store in a cupboard and put on the counter without a forklift.
My advice: save a few bucks by learning small appliance repair and buying a banged up mixer from a defunct restaurant a couple towns over! Bring a couple friends and some tie-down straps.
> For fun, sort by highest price first.
To the general point, I once had a long conversation with an ex-engineer who was selling select European furniture in the US. He was adamant that most American consumers pay no attention to build qualities, and are sold shoddy "night-shift" versions of pieces that have e.g. metal channel reinforcements in Europe, with the shoddy versions certain to show sag etc in a few years.
One specific option is to buy a sofa in a showroom in the US, then immediately go in and reinforce it with metal brackets and/or channels. A higher-end version of Ikea-hacking.
A good example of being locked into a bogus design is old Humvee turn signals. I have never once had a turn signal on a car fill up with water like a little fishtank, but when PMCSing Humvees I would run into this from time to time. IIRC you had to drill a hole in the bottom to let the water out.
Another case is SINCGARS radios. I don't know if they still use them, but god help them if they do. You had to load crypto on them using arcane magic that almost nobody knew how to do, including me, and I took the 2 week class. If you didn't have the crypto set up properly you couldn't talk to people except on the emergency channel in the clear. I can't count how many times we weren't able to talk to each other because the radios were all screwed up, there was a lot of resorting to cell phones when they were available. You would think something as fundamental as radios would be figured out and fool proof, but in my experience off the shelf walkee talkees would have been far more effective, although not as secure in theory. In practice the mujahideen aren't intercepting and exploiting US communications, but they certainly benefited from the radios being dicked up half the time.
Whenever I see a chance to buy old industrial grade stuff I use it. Nearly everything they used to do lasts forever. If you want to find the same quality now it either not available or you pay through the nose. Granted for many things we probably do not care all that much if they last 3 years or 30.
My recipes requires adjusting, but once I fixed them up, they were great.
Though -- I'd argue that using a bandsaw for blisterpacks isn't overkill; it's the safest way to get them open.
You can also use a bandsaw to cut a sliver off a sheet of 16ga steel and use that to light a cigarette. It's truly all-purpose
Does the USMC still use 'bayonets'? Yes, in certain circumstances they're issued--but it's not common, and it's not the Ka-Bar, it's another brand (I forget which one).
TL;DR: Ka-Bar 'USMC knives' are a marketing gimmick.
Also, a used Oshkosh M983 as a soccer mom grocery getter. Whenever anyone cuts her off and gives her the finger, she simply shifts into 8x8 mode and drives over them. crunch crunch-crunch /s
The mixer is hipster ridiculous but hilarious. In practice, you can get a Kitchen Aid for $200.
I have my grandparent's Kirby G3 and found the older real HEPA replacement bags (not the new crap ones that dropped the certifications and may not perform as well). It's not an industrial movie theater vacuum or an ice rink zamboni, but it's more of a tank than a Bose, I mean, Dyson or a Samsung piece of plastic.
Speaking of which: if you live in a climate where it snows and freezes, a Zamboni in the garage is essential to making the local kids street ice hockey tournaments happen.
I think they're a no brainer for riders, be it motorcycle, bicycle, or horses. If it's not a bad spill, you can cancel, but opt-out is far superior to opt-in for this scenario.
It's biggest problem is that sometimes I forget I have it, then fix what I was doing in few minutes. Also I sometimes forget to charge it, as it holds a charge for years in my practice.
Spoiler alert: most of my tools are the cheapest I could find.
Edit: In other words, cheap tools aren't just less durable, they often do a worse job (or at least make it harder to do a good job).
Using cheep tools gives you a freedom to experiment and know the limitations of the domain area and then invest in things that you exactly need without the risk of overpaying or underpaying, all for a minimum investment.
I've bought for example some Swiss army surplus towels for a bike trip. They were really good (small, durable, functional, beautiful) but a bit too small so you couldn't wrap one around yourself.
They probably get the surplus stuff almost for free, from all around the world. I think it's great, making something desirable out of waste.
Having served, I think a lot of military equipment is really bad, especially clothing. It's bought not by the users but by the organization.
But the bags are bigger.
These days they're notorious for shipping backlogs (my lab ordered things 5 months ago and still hasn't got them).
For me, a hammock beats an office chair any day.
I also had a brief recall of the generally med to low quality of home goods my great grandparents would buy from Sears or Montgomery Wards for the kitchen. 1950s 60s 70s. Compared to what my parents bought in the 80s, 90s— over the top quality you would get at Macy’s or, if you had one nearby, a restaurant supply store.
Nobody "needs" a solid aluminium billet NMC ground down to high tolerance shape mac). The ThinkPad experience, is defined as a sell-job on "you need this"
But, anyway, the punchline isn't why I'm writing this: I'd just ignore that if there would be nothing interesting here. What actually strikes me is "I don't think corporations/businesses are to blame" part. I mean, I don't care whom to blame, this is counter-productive. But I've been thinking about that lately, and I cannot let go of the idea that customers being that horribly misinformed is a real problem. This isn't something given. Customer disinformation is an active pursuit of corporations. And, you know what, if I spend a few weeks on the problem, I think I can get an idea of what do I need from a microwave. But everyday I am "choosing" countless stuff just by selecting the "most trustworthy" package. I have no idea what toilet cleaning products should contain, what actually makes them effective and if there is any difference besides the price. I know that 80% of everything written on toothpaste or shampoo package is a lie, but I have no idea what isn't. And this really shouldn't be that hard, people should have at least somewhat clear idea of what is essential, and what is just their preference. Whole markets exist simply by virtue making it a customers' habit to buy their stuff, without knowing why they do so.
This isn't anything new, of course, even though every generation tends to think that nowadays ads are especially horrible and misleading. But given how much some jurisdictions appear to care about fair treatment of customers, I think more money could be spent by governments on countering corporate activity in this area, not helping them. Not necessarily by forbidding stuff, just by sponsoring studies and keeping folks informed.
Excuse me?
This is why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5v8D-alAKE&t=833s
If you're older, like really old, you can actually remember a time where products were of a much much higher durability before the industry figured out that low durability products were more profitable.
So in actuality some of the suggestions on that site aren't necessarily overkill as industrial products aren't deliberately engineered to fail.
Engineering is an exercise in prioritization. If 90% of consumers buy the cheapest blender on the shelf, the blender made with the cheapest materials wins. Hobart still exists, and still makes good blenders. Consumers just started buying new designs that were more cost efficient.
If you look at the prices of mid twentieth century appliances in some old periodicals, and adjust for inflation, they’re about the price of commercial appliances today.
Before value-engineering, people didn’t have a kitchen full of appliances, they went without.
Value engineering is often criticized, but the plain truth is that it is primarily responsible for the high standards of living we enjoy today.
yes, you could argue that making this fuse replaceable would add $0.05, but we all know that its not because 99% of the purchasers wont crack it open, figure out whats going on, and short the fuse.
you can argue that by keeping the volume up shop vac can lower prices. but i dont think you can argue that efficiency has been gained.
The number of consumers who buy a shop vac based on whether it has a socketed fuse is negligible. It’s simply a feature with zero commercial value. It’s all cost with zero benefit.
Only because a good chunk of the true costs are externalized. If the vendor would have to pay for disposal of their product, suddenly that socketed fuse would become a cost-cutting measure.
If these types of features mattered to consumers, then one would expect we’d see success from the companies who prioritize it. These companies and products do exist, but they are niche.
What consumer wouldn't want a vac that can be fixed easily by putting a new fuse in a socket? The issue is the consumer doesn't know about this possible fix. The Company Engineers this fact into the product AND into the marketing and into the warranty length. Common sense. A human is irrational and lacks knowledge, but a human made aware of his irrationality will usually choose the rational choice.
Companies are just taking advantage of a consumers lack of knowledge, awareness, and intelligence. If you were perfectly aware of two competing vacs and all the actual technical specifications of course the one with a replaceable fuse would be counted as a positive feature.
The problem is that companies that try to market the fuse as a feature will have a hard time communicating this fact to the consumer especially. Thus it is in the interest of every company to engineer shorter lifespans into their products as consumers can't see past 2 years at the point of sale.
Industrial products on the other hand are usually massed purchased and reliability is measured from an accounting perspective. This makes industrial owners more knowledgeable and able to make more rational choices as they have quantitative metrics that effect their profits during accounting time.
For the 99% of people who don’t attempt electrical repairs on their vacuums, that fuse socket would be sitting inside of a vacuum in a landfill.
Drive around any US suburb on trash night and pick up a couple of appliances. Most of them either still work 100% or have trivially fixable issues. People (US consumers especially) don’t fix stuff.
Don’t get me wrong, I love fixing things myself. I’ve probably saved $10,000 over the past 5 years by fixing things people were throwing away instead of buying. The ease with which this is possible to do demonstrates how few people attempt repairs themselves.
You joking? You realize houses and cars have socketed fuses that can be replaced almost turnkey. This is a simple solution to build into the product a UI that let's the user know a socket was blown and allow the user to replace a fuse like replacing a AA battery. FUSES are designed to fail and be replaced. Making those FUSES inaccessible is ALSO a design choice because it's contradictory.
There was a point in time where every phone had a replaceable battery. You think that replaceable batteries disappeared because companies wanted to save costs? Sockets for batteries have been part of the design philosophy for consumer products for decades, the fact that these sockets are removed from phones is not a cost saving measure.
This issue is much more widespread than you think: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4
Phone batteries are designed to be replaceable. They’re internal because of design considerations, not cost. In fact, nearly all cell phone batteries are secured with removable adhesive because they’re specifically intended to be replaceable.
Homes have circuit breakers (fuses haven’t been mainstream for a while) because the load is not predefined, and can be occasionally exceeded by the end user. This is not the case for a consumer appliance with a known load. An unexpectedly high load is an indication that another component has also failed. There’s some diagnosis that should be done when replacing a fuse on a system with an unexplained over current situation.
Making something that is designed to fail and be replaced (fuses) inaccessible is a contradictory design philosophy... Unless this design philosophy is INTENDED to make the product fail. You place a component designed to fail inside a vac and make it inaccessible then that means you are designing the vac to fail.
Phone batteries are not designed to be replaceable this is a lie or pure stupidity. You realize that glue or adhesive is not designed to be removed right? It's designed to be permanent. Screws and socketed components are designed to be removed.
Additionally the iPhone isn't even designed to be opened. It's extremely hard to open that device and it's completely obvious the reason is because that device is designed to both fail in a certain time frame and only be serviceable by apple technicians. Here's how easy it is to "replace" a battery you claim was glued into the phone as a design decision to be "replaceable": https://youtu.be/gkCyl7kRGns
>My above point is was that cost is an example of an engineering tradeoff, not that it is the only engineering tradeoff
Who in the universe isn't aware that tradeoffs outside of cost don't exist? Kind of useless if the point is to obvious. How about you address my point in the fact that deliberate decisions were made to make products fail and that these failures are not design tradeoffs.
A thinner phone for an irreplaceable battery in the iPhone is not actually a tradeoff. In fact if you look inside the phone they very much could've screwed the battery in without increasing the thickness of the phone.
You realize that Steve Jobs once said the iPod was designed to only last a year?
1. Cars cost 600x what a shop vac does, so more people attempt to fix them.
2. Some fuses in cars are, in fact, not socketed. Particularly for the higher-current and more dangerous circuits where unexpected overloads are of a greater safety concern and are less likely to be due to fluke events. For instance, fusible links[0]. It would certainly be possible for automotive designers to design a socketed fuse in place of a fusible link, but the cost to do it would be 'high' relative to the frequency of failure, the risk, and the likelihood of user-serviceability. Again, an engineering trade-off.
[0]: https://m.roadkillcustoms.com/understanding-fusible-links/
> Do cars have unexpected loads?
Yes, every car I've ever been in has accessory circuits that a user could easily overload. And I have done so myself many times. Also, there are a lot of electrical parts on a vehicle with limited lifetime that are prone to mechanical failure: relays, bulbs, accessory actuators, etc. When these items fail, they can stall/short and cause an overcurrent condition.
You wouldn't throw away a $30k car because a bent pin on a $1 tail light bulb shorted out. You'd replace the $0.10 fuse and get another $1 tail light bulb. But, you'd probably throw away a $25 blender when the $18 motor laminations short out, because the failure would cost more to fix than the entire product is worth, especially if you're paying labor to fix it.
Fuses exist to fail when some other failure condition happens. Many failures on a car are economical to fix. A blender is totaled if nearly anything happens to it.
> Phone batteries are not designed to be replaceable this is a lie or pure stupidity. You realize that glue or adhesive is not designed to be removed right?
Mainstream phones (iPhone, Samsung, etc) are typically designed with adhesive that has removal tabs which deactivate the adhesive and allow someone to remove it cleanly. They could simply leave this feature out if they didn't want it to be replaceable, but they didn't. Their intentional adding of this feature is evidence that they do intend for the battery to be replaced. Example: https://guide-images.cdn.ifixit.com/igi/yAxAcOuZkVKD1xAY.hug...
> Additionally the iPhone isn't even designed to be opened. It's extremely hard to open that device and it's completely obvious the reason is because that device is designed to both fail in a certain time frame and only be serviceable by apple technicians.
It's hard to open as a result of the design/engineering trade off. Just because it's hard to open doesn't automatically imply that someone must have plotted to make it hard to open. It just means that end-user serviceability wasn't a high-priority design feature. It's hard to open simply because glue is a cheap way to make something thin, waterproof, and cheap to manufacture. If Apple really wanted to waterproof their device while intentionally make it unserviceable, the electronics industry has way better ways to do that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potting_(electronics)
> Who in the universe isn't aware that tradeoffs outside of cost don't exist? Kind of useless if the point is to obvious. How about you address my point in the fact that deliberate decisions were made to make products fail and that these failures are not design tradeoffs.
Your point is valid for instances of proven malice, but one should not assume malice where a valid alternative explanation exists.
2. Fusible links are designed that way for safety. The hood of a car is designed to be opened so that even a fusible link can be fixed.
3. When I asked: Do care have unexpected loads? I answered that question right after I asked it. The question was rhetorical.
I'd rather replace a fuse in a 25$ blender then buy a new one. But either way, you wouldn't throw away a $100 dollar vac or a $500 dollar iPhone just because a $0.10 fuse shorted out.
>Mainstream phones (iPhone, Samsung, etc) are typically designed with adhesive that has removal tabs which deactivate the adhesive and allow someone to remove it cleanly.
True. BUT these batteries are still extremely hard to remove as they are locked into the case. They were designed to be hard to remove so that apple service people can repair the few phones that statistically beat the warranty.
We both know that the iphone is basically designed with a battery that is so hard to remove that it can be basically classified as not removable by the average layman. Very different from the way all phones use to have removable batteries.
>It's hard to open as a result of the design/engineering trade off. Just because it's hard to open doesn't automatically imply that someone must have plotted to make it hard to open. It just means that end-user serviceability wasn't a high-priority design feature.
That's my point. How do you know it's a tradeoff? How do you know it's not a design decision? Basically Apple is incentivized to make the phone hard to open. Additionally all apple policies of "repairing" a phone basically make "repairing" the phone cost as much as buying a new one. With every policy surrounding the phone is positioned, it's more than likely that the decisions are deliberate.
>Your point is valid for instances of proven malice, but one should not assume malice where a valid alternative explanation exists.
My point is valid for instances of suspected malice. The motive exists. Do you trust someone trying to sell you a new crypto just because there's no evidence of malice and that an alternative explanation exists? No. It's stupid to believe there is no malice.
It is far wiser to assume malice exists wherever profitable incentive exists, such is the nature of business.
I did this with office chairs. I was buying a new mediocre chair every few years before finally buying a Herman Miller several years ago. It was expensive compared to anything else I'd owned, but (1) it's an order-of-magnitude better chair, and (2) I had probably spent about the same money on several crappier chairs over the prior decade. I am still sitting in this chair now, and it's still just as good as the day I bought it.
If you’re often using a computer chair (as many of us do use in a commercial setting), you probably legitimately need a chair with a high duty cycle.
Meanwhile, I have a $7 toaster that’s 10 years old. I don’t make toast very often. Even if my toaster fails today, a low-end commercial toaster wouldn’t pay itself off over my lifetime.
Poor people also have alternatives. Much of the world doesn’t worry about the repair bills for their clothes dryer or their dishwasher, because they hang their clothes on a line and wash their dishes in a basin.
No. Of course, a part of potential lifetime loss is due to price. Manufacturing a case in plastic instead of carbon fiber is simply far cheaper and most consumer will go for that. However, we see cheaped out components even in high-priced or prosumer gear, while the existence of this market already pretty much proves that price is not everything to every consumer. Additionally, there are many examples of behaviors that save no money or are actually more expensive, but help the bottom line by forcing people to buy new (see the Phoebus cartell [0] or the slowing down of older iPhones by Apple).
Even the “slowing down of old iPhones” is an example of that. This was a bug fix for crashing due to current demand that exceeded the battery’s capability.
The statement we can make that is very realistic is that companies are incentivised to do do "planned obsolescence" and because of this "planned obsolescence" has happened, is happening and will continue to happen in the future.
But it's also possible that the material isn't cheaper at all, but the manufaturer gains because if the part wears out sooner they can sell a replacement sooner. That isn't a case of "consumers prioritize price".
For instance, manufacturers have tried to sell printers which refuse to print when there is still quite a bit of ink left in the cartridge. Printers which refuse to let you use all the ink are engineered to fail, but they aren't cheaper than printers that do let you use all the ink. The manufacturer is relying on the fact that obtaining good information is costly; testing printers to rigorously prove this takes resources, and even when it gets discovered, many consumers won't know that the printer is doing this, so they won't use that information in comparing otherwise similar-looking printers.
Yes, and prioritizing price is short term and stupid. Prioritize total cost instead and buy high quality items, it's much cheaper in the long run.
Also, high standard of living is not about having your kitchen "full of appliances", it's about health, education and security.
Many of the products and services that people buy to support their health, education, security, etc have been made more accessible by value engineering either directly, or in their supply chain.
There's nothing in the universe that stops a feature that meets a design goal of lowering value from also meeting the design goal of planned obsolescence. So it's 100 percent possible that a company still has two design goals: making a cheaper product and obsolescescing that product.
So if you claim that it's basically not happening. Tell me in what way is a company not incentivised to plan the early obsolescence of a product and what evidence do you have that this is basically not happening as a deliberate design decision?
Your evidence is only an example that a company can both meet the goal of obsolescence and lower value with a singular feature of cheaper materials. I have stated that this is not evidence because a company can still have the design goal of obsolescence while meeting that goal with a singular design feature intended to make the product cheaper as well. You need to counter this reasoning because it invalidated your evidence.
The broad root claim above that "Consumer grade products are deliberately designed to fail." is the assertion with insufficient evidence. The video attached to that claim has a few valid examples, but a few examples over the past century is not indicative of the current state of the entire manufacturing industry... especially when there is a textbook engineering practice that does explain the same.
You are missing the point. I am claiming that ONE feature can be built to meet TWO objectives. One for value engineering and the other for planned obsolescence. That would make NEITHER of the two objectives a side effect.
Example: Airplanes are painted with colored paint both to prevent the metal from degrading AND to give the plane a better aesthetic. ONE feature meeting TWO objectives.
>The broad root claim above that "Consumer grade products are deliberately designed to fail." is the assertion with insufficient evidence. The video attached to that claim has a few valid examples, but a few examples over the past century is not indicative of the current state of the entire manufacturing industry... especially when there is a textbook engineering practice that does explain the same.
My broad root claim is that the practice has happened, is happening and will happen.
My evidence for this is examples of this actually occurring. And real incentives for this practice to exist.
I made no claim about how widespread the practice is. That is more your claim. Your claim is basically saying that the amount of entities practicing planned obsolescence is so minuscule that it's basically negligible.
Your evidence for your claim is that value engineering exists in a text book. That's it. You know what else exists in certain text books? How crypto works. Does that make crypto frauds and scams negligible? No.
No doubt your claim is hard to prove, the burden of proof for you is astronomically harder than it is for my point. But then think about it... why do you hold strong opinions and stances on topics that are almost impossible to prove?
Healthcare, maybe I can see it, but not really. The proliferation of single use stuff in hospitals for example seems like a different thing than cheap bicycles and shoddy clothes that last a single season.
Maybe I misunderstood what value engineering is, but I don’t really see how the philosophy behind cheap consumer goods is very related to those things.
It can be, to a point, but most developed societies have schooling systems that use various types of supplies and equipment in the course of education. More affordable transportation, facilities, supplies, and equipment is generally good for students.
> Healthcare, maybe I can see it, but not really. The proliferation of single use stuff in hospitals for example seems like a different thing than cheap bicycles and shoddy clothes that last a single season.
Well, yes, those are very different things. But, cheap disposable medical supplies both lower barriers to access those things. Not only does this mean that someone who is low-income might be able to more easily access something like, say, an oral thermometer ... but it also means that things like equipment with a high infection risk can be disposed of instead of reused. Many hospitals, for instance, have started switching to disposable surgical tools, because that's now a possibility, and it decreases infection risk.
The bottom line is, cheap stuff enables more people to have more tools at hand to solve problems.
The iphone not having a replaceable battery is a design decision, it doesn't make the phone cheaper.
You are taking two independent phenomenons and trying to group them together as if they are the same phenomenon. Yes making a product cheaper has the side effect of reducing its' lifetime but the video and what I'm talking about is DIRECT engineering decisions for the purpose of shortening lifetimes NOT making things cheaper.
You obviously didn't watch the video.
The “fashion” argument is particularly silly. Fashion and style are concepts that have existed as a part of human nature longer than manufacturing, corporations, or even money itself have even existed.
Having the latest flashy accessories to show off to potential mates is something that was literally invented (at least) 75,000 years ago by Neanderthals, not GM or Apple.
Did I say they weren't interdependent? My response to you LITERALLY stated an interdependency.
Also when does "design" being an engineering constraint have to do with anything? Are you talking about aesthetic design choices made by an artist/product designer that an engineer has to take into account? You should be more specific because engineers "design" solutions around constraints as well, and the statement makes no sense when viewed from the engineering perspective.
>The “fashion” argument is particularly silly. Fashion and style are concepts that have existed as a part of human nature longer than manufacturing, corporations, or even money itself have even existed.
What fashion argument? You say the "fashion" argument is "silly" but I'm over here thinking, what "fashion" argument? I NEVER made such an argument. What's silly here is that you're talking about some weird imaginary tangent that I never even touched upon.
If you actually did watch that video or even read my posts I'm thinking you read it really quickly and you skimmed that video. I think you skipped some words and sentences and made a huge assumptions about what I'm talking about.
>
The part of my response that you didn't even address is that I'm saying FAILURE is engineered into the design DELIBERATELY. It's not a side effect of creating a cheaper product. It's a actual design choice making the consumer more likely to buy a new product.
You realize that the filament for those bulbs weren't picked because the filament was cheaper. A deliberate R&D effort was created to pick filaments that were roughly the same cost but failed quicker. That's counter to your entire argument. R&D costs money so costs are actually INCREASED to make the product fail quicker.
An aspect of planned obsolescence I don't see discussed much is the built-in incentives for factories (giant sinks of capex) and how we conceive manufacturing in general to lead the cart before the horse in our current dominant economic paradigm. They and their logistical tail including the staff are so expensive to re-tool and re-skill that it leads to many perverse incentives. There are vanishingly few US anvil and vise factories left because they made such a good product up to and into the 20th century that when industrialization's per capita saturation curve inevitably flattened, their market nosedived as their products were literally outliving their initial customer base. Entire manufacturing ecosystems are built around trying to avoid that outcome, and it is nearly impossible to a priori tell whether an industry in a nation is hidebound avoiding necessary technological change or undergoing another anvil and vise experience.
I have some hope in automation and cell-based flexible manufacturing though I strongly suspect the economic case for both is not nearly as straightforward as the narrative exposed to laypeople like us makes it out to be. I think we're missing quite a few pieces of the puzzle (design-to-floor-changes automation being one example) before we can tell the story that the flexible industry/factory narrative would like to tell.
[1] I'm carefully trying NOT to slight kube-system here. There is only so much attention any one individual can apply to any given context. The situation could easily be reversed between kube-system and you in a different context. We need cognitive density in all the wide-ranging human endeavors our species engages in, there is room enough for everyone.
In the arena of the internet I wouldn't worry too much about slighting people. It's all fair game, they can "slight" you too. This necessity to be overly polite over moderately polite so you can avoid hurting someones precious feelings is overblown on the internet. First of all the feeling will pass, second of all it's the internet, you're anonymous so the chances of permanent damage is basically zero.
Worrying about slighting someone hinders you from getting your point across, it also stops the other party from emotionally engaging with you. Conflict often fuels the fire of a debate giving the opponent incentive to try to expose every single logical flaw in your argument.
The internet is the perfect arena for this kind of heated discussion. It also goes both ways. If I have a wrong idea that I think is right, by god I will fight for that idea to be right until all possible logical alternatives are decimated and even then I'll only admit that I'm wrong 5 years later. Still my efforts allowed the other party to strengthen their arguments and expose flaws in my arguments and the discussion is open to public record. Even more important my attempts at vindicating myself could actually expose a real flaw in other parties argument, thereby maintaining a healthy dose of scientific doubt.
My philosophy is don't try to deny your own human bias. Be aware of it, and revel in it. You and others were naturally selected to have this bias because it helped you survive. Trying to deny it and be above this base emotion could hinder your competitiveness in the game of life.
I am referring to:
>> The iphone not having a replaceable battery is a design decision, it doesn't make the phone cheaper.
>> You are taking two independent phenomenons and trying to group them together as if they are the same phenomenon.
>What fashion argument?
14:25 in the video. :D
> The part of my response that you didn't even address is that I'm saying FAILURE is engineered into the design DELIBERATELY. It's not a side effect of creating a cheaper product.
Yes, there are examples of this deliberately happening. However, there are reasons why it happens as a side-effect of the engineering process, and this is an exponentially more common scenario (because it is common engineering process!).
This is a total and deliberate lie. The video came out march 2021. There is no way you watched this years ago. You didn't watch it at all. I recommend you actually watch it.
A product category exists at around $450–500 and there are plenty of household who do without. It gets value engineered down to a $100 product and sees mass adoption. However, 90% of the market for the original $500 product also chooses the half-broken $100 version, leading to the $500 quality moving upmarket (such that it now costs $1000) or disappearing altogether (or moving to a commercial appliance that is unfit for household use).
When I was a kid, something like a preset for popcorn, or a turntable, was an a feature you’d get on a very expensive microwave.
Many luxury features of yesteryear are now standard.
> value-engineered wares for people who don’t care
You say it like there is a choice involved here. There isn't. This is something that needs repeating - customers choose out of what's available on the market, not out of the space of all possible products. So all products that are hard to make and sell yourself are primarily vendor-driven.
If a market bifurcates like this, I can't announce my preference for the missing middle at all. The split may have happened against my preferences, or it may have happened before I cared, or it may have happened before I was even in the market for that product category. But once it happened, people who'd prefer something better than barely-fit-for-purpose can't get it.
> high-quality end becomes higher quality and three times the price it used to be
If it becomes higher quality. As you mentioned higher up, it frequently becomes different, as it's no longer targeting a large audience.
> The choices of other customers deny you the continued availability
Yes, but again, what choices? These things stick in a feedback loop, a self-fulfilling prophecy. And it doesn't take people choosing the lower-tier option. It takes a company choosing a somewhat lower quality this year than they did the last year, because if done gradually people won't be able to quickly tell (the very job of marketing is to confuse customers about this).
I hate "revealed preferences", I consider them mostly bullshit given the lack of actual choice - but if we want to frame the situation like this: the bifurcation doesn't require that most of the middle-tier consumers "actually prefer" the cheaper option over the middle one. A company will attempt this even if it meant losing middle-tier customers altogether, as long as they believe the expanding lower-tier customer base will make up for it.
What's even more maddening is the interplay with economies of scale - the middle-tier product could've gotten better and cheaper over time, if its broad customer base wasn't stolen by the low-quality option. So the households that couldn't afford the quality option yesterday, would be able to afford it tomorrow - and today would be making use of used ones, because there is such a thing as a market for used goods, which works best when items are durable. But companies often do try to sabotage it, too.
Also: the downwards quality spiral doesn't stop at a reasonable point, it stops at the lowest point where the customers can be duped en-masse, unless stopped by regulatory means either. I'll happily argue that, for most products, the lowest-priced options shouldn't exist in the first place, because they deliver negative value (after accounting for total use costs, with possible future replacement, which most people don't) and endless frustration. I see them as an environmental disaster.
And I’m not saying this sarcastically, many wildly successful businesses have been built on finding untapped markets that established players have missed. There is always room for improvement. The question is whether that improvement is strong enough to change people’s buying decisions.