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aeonik

SmarterEveryday is trying this right now too.

He details all the challenges, and it's a pretty good watch.

The grill brush they made is a bit on the expensive side, but I bought one.

https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY?si=TP1ez9tIEkpEu1Xf

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What immediately sprung out to me is that Amazon isn't held accountable for selling goods that directly violate patent laws, which should protect small business and reward innovation.

The current US administration claims to be concerned about domestic manufacturing and so on, but hasn't even mentioned this issue at all.

I was going to manufacture a line of useful products here in the USA, but decided against it. I'd release the product, then a month later counterfeits would be on Amazon for 10% of the price.

As a small operation, there are 0 affordable resources at my disposal to fight IP theft.

Right, as a small operation patents are rarely worth your bother. You might eventually win in court with a patent, but by then your company is bankrupt. Just make the thing, and hope that you can develop a good name and reputation for quality that keeps you afloat, even if you only are 1% of the market, that can be a lot of money. Avoid selling on Amazon where you are more likely to be noticed by cloners, at least until you already have a business.

I thought Walmart was infamous for making a house brand of competitor products.

You're probably thinking about Target and their Up and Up label where they do that. They also place all of their knockoffs right next to the product they are imitating.

The US textile industry was built on ignoring UK patents though :)

So one past illegal activity allows future illegal activities?

precedent is a real thing, de jure and de facto

No, but it does make people crying about competition very difficult to sympathize with.

Exactly. All that whining about "intellectual property" is at best funny.

Especially since the US patent office is mostly known for allowing anyone to patent anything, even if there is prior art from the Mayan and Roman empires.

The 19th century US cotton industry was built on far worse crimes than patent infringement.

Indeed, but patent infringement too. Although the Cotton Gin was patented, Eli Whitney famously was unable to enjoy those protections. Imitations sprung up all around.

Similarly: though William Jarvis wasn't the first American to import Merino sheep, he was the most successful because he was able to utilize an ongoing war in Spain to circumvent around the Merino export ban in the early 1800s and get a ton of them over here, too. He was even a diplomat to Spain and probably knew better, but did it anyway.

> What immediately sprung out to me is that Amazon isn't held accountable for selling goods that directly violate patent laws, which should protect small business and reward innovation.

(IANAL) This may fall under a DCMA-like concept where sites are not responsible for 'user content'. The 'user' in question is the vendor and their 'profile' of sellable items is the content. Similar to how eBay is not (?) responsible for the items put up for sale.

(Not saying this is (morally) right, just describing the situation. I would really like to see some accountability as well.)

Which is funny because he could drive a stake through Bezos' heart with some sweet FTC rule making.

As far as I can tell, consumers have never benefited from patents, and they seem blatantly anti-competitive. Perhaps if only "small business" (whatever that actually denotes) were allowed to hold them it might make sense, but we all know that's not even remotely how patents are wielded today.

Personally I strongly prefer knockoffs. Same quality, but cheaper.

well innovation is where it helps consumer. Innovating new products over time, patents give them some runway to make a profit assuming one can defend those patents. why innovate the next iphone equivalent if someone is just going to steal your idea and make it in china for 1/4 the price

It was not patents that helped the iphone succeed, it was a massive river of cash and keeping the development mostly secret. All patents ensured was that android operated in a visually slightly different manner.

Anyway, where is all this "innovation" that's supposedly worth caring about? It seems to me that patents stymie innovation by holding competitors hands behind their back (or even in the case of medicine, holding it off the market).

> patents give them some runway to make a profit assuming one can defend those patents.

I'd be shocked if this actually described even 1% of patents issued.

Anyway, yea, fuck all intellectual property except maybe the first ten years of copyright held by actual humans.

> si=TP1ez9tIEkpEu1Xf

PSA: the si parameter, along with pp, are for tracking purposes. Consider trimming them when doing a copy-paste if possible.

I watched this and my cynical takeaway was he was trying to make an appeal to emotion. Why buy from China when we can support the good people of Alabama? Their elected senator just called me a rat. Why should I support Alabama over China? They both seem like foreign adversaries to me. At least China is making a sincere effort to reduce their carbon emissions.

I thought it was a good video, but similarly I had an issue with how he discussed the loss of the skilled trades and professions in the US. He did a good job highlighting that these jobs are rare, don't pay well and are important, but he made it seem like we all just accidentally stopped investing in local manufacturing, or that we just let those skills erode. Leaders at these manufacturing companies moved things over seas, laid off the skilled workers, busted up unions, and overall sold off this skill set in order to sell cheaper products and make more money for themselves.

> Why buy from China when we can support the good people of Alabama? Their elected senator just called me a rat. Why should I support Alabama over China?

He just happens to be in Alabama, but the principle applies to someone in Massachusetts or Hawaii as well.

Same. Got one as a gift for someone.

There was a book making the rounds recently that also details some of the discussion around skills being the thing the west exported: https://appleinchina.com/

The author readily admits in a podcast that while Apple plays a big part in the story it's a clickbait title because no one would buy a book titled something along the lines of "supply chains and China."

Decent (if superficial) interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAj9zB4vaZc

The interview he does on the Odd Lots podcast is a lot more in-depth, and I found it a great listen:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/5gJazFZZaZ0OGKf516XpeO

It's an interesting video, on the other hand it's also 80$ a piece. And I'm pretty sure they do not recoup R&D with those prices on reasonable compensation rates...

Corporate R&D is a tax write off per section 174.

Not sure if that does help you though. A business that only exists because it doesn't have to pay taxes kind of shouldn't exist in the first place. At least not as a business

> is a tax write off per section 174.

Was. I'm not sure if the new bill restores it.

How does it compare to a wet rag with tongs?

One of the main issues they raise is that the bristles on common brushes can be left behind and are difficult to pick out of food, so the wet rag probably exceeds expectations in that way.

Grill brush bristles in your food are the "they went on a vacation and brought back flesh eating bacteria" of the culinary world. The fear-mongering greatly exceeds the danger.

Edit: There are approximately 130 ER visits per year[1] on account of grill brushes. Mowing your lawn (something else people do on about the same frequency in the summer) is far more likely get you, as are god knows how many other things.

[1] https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/ama-press-releases/ama...

Even the plastic ones leave bristles behind and aren’t much fun to chew on.

Risk / reward tradeoff. There are other options that are as good, as cheap, as easy.

Why pick one with a significant, unpredictable, often unknown flaw. Where if it happens you end up needing major surgery?

It may be rare, but it happened to a friend of mine while we were eating at a restaurant.

That’s definitely enough numbers to change to a different bristle. Basically no effort to change a bristle. If you had to free climb a mountain to get a new bristle, then I would understand.

And think of the number of people who found a metal bristle in their mouth and didn’t go to the ER. It has to be many many multiples of the number of ER visits.

>That’s definitely enough numbers to change to a different bristle.

Ah, yes, magical plastic molecules. Exactly what I want between fire and my food.

I'm just about the last person to give a crap about microplastics but cooking temperatures and long weird hydrocarbon molecules are where I draw the line.

>And think of the number of people who found a metal bristle in their mouth and didn’t go to the ER. It has to be many many multiples of the number of ER visits.

This is true for just about everything.

There are other options than plastics I’m sure..who uses that any more.

Lawn mowing seems like one of the more dangerous things that a typical person does. It's the snow shoveling of the summer.

It's several orders of magnitude more likely to land you in the ER. I chose it because like grilling, it's done "about weekly" in the summer and most people don't think much of it.

Given how simple it is to avoid that issue, I will. I can reduce my chance of ingesting a bristle from “minuscule” to “zero” with no downsides. So why not?

Why take the risk when grill stones exist?

Since I read about bristles in food after cleaning the grill, I've always been checking for remnants after brushing. I never found any. And I wonder: how are those remnants supposed to get into your food? They are metal, so don't they just fall down into the grill, if any break off? Maybe glued into old fat and other gunk? But you want that gone, too, right? Also, don't you use a rag to clean off other dirt, and wouldn't that make sure that bristles are gone?

Is this a myth or actually a problem? Some commenters do call it fear-mongering here, so what is it?

I also think I never read anything about this except in US media, so does this not happen in other countries? Different brushes? Different cleaning habits?

A bristle can get stuck to some gunk that isn't successfully removed and be in parallel to a bar roughly underneath it. There's no real reason to take risks of excessive hygiene given that hospital admissions occur and simple tools are going to give you a functionally equivalent meal.

Good discussion from 2016, I think it was Canadian surgeons that made the recommendation and there's at least a couple of comments where people have talked about real-world experiences with bristles.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12409425

Or scrunched up tin foil at ~$2 / 100 ft.

Look, I love Destin, watch all his stuff recommend it all the time.

But I'm never going to buy this product, it's just too expensive for what it does compared to the alternatives.

And I know he knows that. He's clearly at least 'not stupid'.

So something isn't squaring with this.

> So something isn't squaring with this.

Lots of smart people get hooked onto extremely specific solutions that aren't even improvements.

I saw it in software development with many things (VIPER and SwiftUI both reduce development velocity compared to MVC and old-school Interface Builder); I've seen it with Musk trying to do tunnels even when roads would be cheaper and safer; there's also (infamously) Juicero; and in the UK in the 80s there was the Sinclair C5.

That said, is this really an example of that?

Myself, I barely use my electric barbecue, so I don't know the best way to clean things (it's not yet become dirty enough to bother cleaning). But I have seen the brushes he's complaining about, and I have not previously considered using tinfoil, so it's not a completely crazy idea that people might want a better brush.

I use an oven cleaner, spray it on, leave it for half an hour or overnight, and stuff just comes off when you wave a cleaning cloth at it. Highly noxious though, probably responsible for insect collapse etc.

Some people care about how reasonable a price seems even if they can easily afford something, because it's important to them to feel like they're getting a good deal or at least not getting taken advantage of. They're happy to accept some level of inconvenience or discomfort if the savings are big enough, even if they don't particularly need the money

Some people care more about getting exactly the right thing, even if the value proposition is weaker. They'll pay significantly more for apparently trivial differences, because they don't want to buy something they're not happy with; they're spending money anyway and why put up with something they don't want if they can afford something they do want?

Neither of these people are strictly unreasonable.

I was about to link the same thing - excellent video. It was very insightful and a bit scary to see just how hard it was to get seemingly simple manufacturing done in the US now.

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