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Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

I never got why people care about boiling water so fast. It comes up too when people talk about induction stoves. I mean, you are cooking, not waiting and watching for the water to boil. You are probably working on sauce for your pasta while the water is waiting to boil anyhow, or could find a hundred other tasks just in the kitchen alone to occupy yourself while this entirely parallel process continues in the background. I don't care that water takes 4 minutes or 14 minutes to boil, I'm spending the same 30 seconds hands on time with the pot of water in either case.

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I don’t know, there’s a lot of boring old dishes where boiling the water basically all wait time.

Like if I’m making real boring pasta:

1. Xm to boil 2. 10m to cook pasta 3. 3m to microwave meatballs 4. 1m30s to microwave sauce

The meatballs and the sauce both fit within the pasta cook time, so boil time is all wait.

You don't have to wait for the water to boil before adding the pasta. Add it to the cold water; it will work just fine.

If you take the time to sit on your hands its on you, but I can find no shortage of tasks at home, I could literally be doing chores constantly and still have things to do. I would go off and do stuff like wipe out the sink or take out the compost if I really had no prep work in front of me but something on the stove.

> I mean, you are cooking, not waiting and watching for the water to boil.

Of course not. It'll never boil if you watch it.

Boiling is a proxy for gets-hot-fast which is useful.

But like how useful is that even? That's what I take issue with. All this cost for a pan to heat up 2 mins faster. So many products in this world exist to simply to add a crumb of convenience and imo something like a pan heating up slightly faster is one of them. It's like, did we need to spend this engineering effort (which is a finite skilled resource) making something 5% more convenient? Did I really need to spend all that money on 5%? On something that I already don't think much of at all? That I didn't even consider a problem until a tech blog or whatever wrote an article about it? Capitalism is truly a bizarre system.

Incidentally, boiling-water taps can fix this by having a (thermos) store of hot water all the time.

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