This is true.

My partner and I are currently having a laugh because a couple years back I bought a fancy expensive set of ceramic coated pans. Best ones on offer in the store at the time. Coating applied with plasma vapor at 40,000°F or some such nonsense, hard as diamond, good for use with metal utensils, coating guaranteed for life, yada yada. Good brand too (Calphalon). I said the tech on these is amazing and the coating has insane hardness and it will last forever. Partner laughed and said I fell for marketing BS, all non stick pans degrade.

Guess what happened? The nonstick ceramic coating started rubbing off in some places. I’m quite annoyed. Partner laughs at me.

Meanwhile go on YouTube and there’s videos of people restoring cast iron skillets from the 1800s to like-new condition.

Glad to help :)

Metal hot. Make food hot.

Think a bit deeper. How quickly is that heat transferred, and at what peak temperatures? Does the metal keep any heat of its own and impart that into the food, or does it just convey the heat from the burner to the food? And how quickly does it do that?

but my wife seems to think cast-iron is necessary for certain things (searing a prime rib roast, for example.).

Look at the thermal mechanics of this.

Take the cast iron pot. You can throw that on the stove and let it get ripping hot, like the metal itself is carrying a ton of heat energy. When you put the prime rib in it, the metal dumps its heat into the meat much faster than a flame alone would. This helps you get a strong sear on the outside, without dumping in too much total quantity of heat to cook the meat on the inside more than you want.

then I gotta figure out gas vs. electric vs. induction vs infrared…

Heat can be transferred 3 ways- conduction (flows between two touching objects), convection (hot object heats air, air blows against cold object, air heats cold object) and radiation (hot object radiates energy through space and it warms cold object).

Electric- coils get hot, the pan touching the coils transfers heat by conduction. Downside is uneven heating- neither the pan nor the coils is perfectly flat so you get hot spots.

Infrared- coils under the glass get hot and radiate heat through the glass. This works pretty well.

Induction- coils under the glass but they don’t get hot. Instead they create a magnetic field modulated at low radio frequencies (15-150 KHz). This fluctuating magnetic field interacts with any ferrous metal close to it, creating small but powerful eddy currents inside the metal and thus heating the metal up. So the stove doesn’t create any heat at all, it’s the pan that actually gets hot. This by the way is neither conduction convection nor radiation, because heat isn’t being transferred, it’s created inside the pot.

Gas- flammable gas (usually propane or natural gas, which is mostly methane) burns creating high temperature exhaust gases that rise against the pot and thus heat the pot. Many chefs like this. Gas stoves should ideally be used with an overhead hood as gas stoves have been proven to drastically reduce indoor air quality.

Of the options- induction is usually the best these days, because it’s the most efficient, cleanest, and also in many cases has the highest output (in terms of watts of heat pumped into the pot).

When cooking, you want a stove capable of very high output. The more output you have, the faster it will boil water for example.

Exactly!

If releasing a list of people who raped children would hurt those people, then I say too fucking bad maybe they need to be hurt a little bit.

There a saying-- only do one crime at a time.

This guy was growing weed and doing just fine at it. Only because he decided to steal power also, he got caught.

If only that was a legal cause of action…

What’s there to sue for? Companies shut down product lines and brands all the time.

Or that Ukraine is holding them off with basically scraps of obsolete Western military equipment, very little first line hardware. Attack Europe and you find the full weight of NATO’s first line military hardware shoved up your ass. Somebody pushes a button somewhere and a few dozen Tomahawk missiles destroy your ability to wage war in an afternoon. Nukes not even needed if every airfield and military supply depot within 500 mi of Europe is a smoking crater.

Except the Democrats have basically just announced they are going to do nothing because their efforts wouldn’t go anywhere. So better off not trying.

And this is why I have no faith in Democrats. When it comes time for the fundraiser they are all red alert sound the alarm Trump is destroying our country, when it comes time to actually fucking DO anything it’s excuses and business as usual.

If the guy literally did order a war crime, then file the fucking paperwork and dare the Republicans to quash it. Make sure that every one of them who fights against this does so publicly, on the record. Make sure they know that if/when the truth comes out, be it tomorrow or years down the road, their vote today will be known to the world. And they can bet their asses that ‘senator whatever chose not to investigate war crimes’ Will be part of their opponents’ campaigns.

That’s why I said, different approaches.

My approach is targeted at somebody who just wants to get clean as quickly as possible, and the machine can help them do that faster and with less effort than a manual shower.

If you are going for luxury, or if you need help doing it like an elderly person, then the sit-down submerging spa is absolutely the way to go.

How so?

I think there’s two different approaches to this. This chair is obviously designed as a luxury experience, as the process takes a full 15 minutes.
My idea is designed for efficiency, to reduce the amount of time it takes to bathe in the morning without reducing cleanliness.

Interesting idea. Seriously over-engineered though.

If you want a ‘human washer’ you don’t need a $350k fancy chair with heart rate monitors. Just take a page out of the automatic car wash.

Human stands in a stall. Shower allows human washing of hair and face. Then just hold arms out making a diamond in front of you (think TSA body scanner position, but with arms forward instead of upward) and a 360° robotic sprayer starts at the neck and goes down spraying soapy water, then back up again with a slight up angle to get the groin and armpits. Shower comes back on to de-shampoo hair, then the same 360 robot does two passes with clean water to rinse everything off.

If you get fancy with machine vision and body position sensors, the 360 wand could flip 90° to do the hair and would be angled backward a bit so it doesn’t get water or soap in your face.

You could build this for a lot less than $350k. And instead of $1500 worth of body sensors you have a $50 waterproof emergency stop button.

We used to be. The rules changed about 10 years ago.

I’d rather have 120v wiring I can do myself than 240v wiring that I have to pay someone $hundreds just to replace a light switch.

A lot of big appliances require higher power. Dishwashers, clothes dryers, fridges.

Here in US dishwashers and fridges run on <1500w. A fridge should only use a few hundred watts tops unless it’s horribly inefficient. A dishwasher needs power for the heating element but ours do okay on 1500w, although yours probably heat up faster. We use a different plug for clothes dryers, usually a NEMA 10-30 or NEMA 14-30 (30A at 240v), sometimes NEMA 14-50 (50A at 240v) for really big stuff like EV chargers.
Our power is split phase (two 120v legs, 180° out of phase, so either phase against neutral/ground is 120v, phase A against phase B is 240v). So with those plugs you either get both legs and ground or both legs plus neutral plus ground.

Some powers tools, drill press, plainer

Almost all US power tools run on 120v 15A.
There’s a few really big ones, mostly designed for professional shops, that need some flavor of 240v, usually with a NEMA 6-15 outlet (like normal US outlet but pins are horizontal rather than vertical). These outlets are uncommon outside of wood shops.

I never worry about load splitting,.

The only time I’ve ever even considered this is a. charging my Tesla on 120v, or b. running a space heater and a hair dryer at the same time in the bathroom. :)

Bottom line- yeah NZ system has higher power density but I don’t think the benefits outweigh the loss of ability to work on it yourself.

Okay but that’s more talking about the benefit of a 240v system. The question here was the benefit of the giant UK plug. Personally I would argue that 240v to every receptacle is not a major benefit, because very few devices require 3kw+. And in exchange you get a somewhat more hazardous system.
I am curious if homeowners in NZ are allowed to work on their own wiring? Here in the US you are…

It boils down to this: If you support the direct will of the people in choosing a candidate, you probably like RCV. If you want the party to have significant influence in choosing a candidate, you probably don’t like RCV.

It is possible the Democrats are realizing that their establishment selected candidates are not competitive against modern Republicans.
It’s also possible they are considering somebody more radical but want plausible deniability about how that person came to be elected.
Or it’s possible they are just out of ideas. Or maybe all three…

Amazon is a total mess.

If you want a quality item but don’t know what brand you want, it’s near unusable. All the results are random Chinese vendors with what look like random names, half of them are rebadging the same noname Temu-quality crap.

It’s gotten to the point where I Google for product recommendations or look at YouTube (keeping in mind that 90% of them are sponsored ‘unbiased reviews’ of the product in question) rather than searching Amazon.

Of course then you get the brand name stuff sold by random grey market resellers for $5 below Amazon’s price so they claim the buy box and you get a product where the mfr won’t honor the warranty.

Your understanding is correct. It’s actually a very simple calculation: volts x amps = watts. Watts is the amount of total work done. So to use a water pipe analogy, imagine you have a pressure washer. Volts is the pressure in PSI. Amps in the flow rate in gallons per minute. Watts is how quickly it cleans your sidewalk. Thus, the 500 PSI pressure washer that can put out 2 gallons per minute does about the same amount of cleaning as the 1,000 PSI pressure washer that puts out one gallon per minute. However, as long as the hose can withstand the pressure, pushing out 2 gallons per minute requires a larger diameter hose.

It’s the same way with wiring. The capacity of a wire is measured in amps. So if a device needs say 1200 watts, feeding it was 240v instead of 120v means you can use thinner wires everywhere. Including in the transformer that powers it.

However, this type of gain only really makes a big difference when you get into very high power consumption devices. An electric kettle that takes 1500 w, in the US you are almost maxing out a single 15 amp outlet. In the UK the same kettle is using less than half of the outlets capacity. (Of course they just make a kettle that has twice as much output, because the Brits don’t want to wait for their tea). Amusingly, that 3 kilowatt tea kettle is one of the only places where you get a real perceptible advantage from a 240v system.

This is exactly it. Back before Black Friday was a household name that appeared in advertisements, there were some real good deals to be had, especially if you were willing to go before noon. That’s where you got rushes of people banging down doors at 6:00 a.m. for the very best deals, but there were plenty throughout the day.

Then Cyber Monday became a thing. Then it became Black Friday week.
And in the process it lost all meaning. It’s no longer anything special, it’s the same deals you get on many other major holidays.

So I just don’t bother anymore. Like I’ll grab something if there’s a good deal but I don’t put much special attention into it anymore because there’s no point.

… How is that the case? You’re multiple loads end up with a cubic foot of plugs and receptacles. Like imagine I want to plug in a computer, two monitors, a printer, a desk lamp, a cell phone charger, and a laptop plug. None of these devices use more than 100 watts. In UK you need seven of those ridiculous giant plugs for all this. Even with a power strip it would be physically huge.

In the US the power strip that would run all that stuff is barely a foot long.

I have used power strips all my life and never once has one caught fire.