Personally I love oranges but cant stand orange juice.
People rip on US electricity standards all the time, from voltage, via frequency, to the NEMA plugs, and for good reasons. But the most disgusting thing about it all is this:
US breaker panels are fugly. Sure, they work just as well as those from the rest of the world, but they’re aesthetically displeasing.
Two representative pictures I found of an average panel just now;
US:
EU:
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Why is everything sideways in the American one? From the numbers on the switches to the warning labels.
It’s done that way so the breaker box will fit between studs that are 18" on center, which is standard for USA residential construction.
You generally only see breakers on din rail in the USA in industrial equipment.
That makes sense.
2 big reasons for that:
- Fits better between studs as the other commenter stated
- Easier and cleaner to route the 2 power phases. US plugs are famously ~120V but what many don’t realize is that’s a single phase of 120V, and there’s two phases that go into the breaker box. By combining the +120VAC and -120VAC phases you get a full 240VAC for higher power appliances like stoves, dryers, heat pumps and electric vehicles.
Wait… what do they look like elsewhere? They’re the same where I am in Canada…
US and Canada largely have the same power generation/delivery standards.
Is that EU picture supposed to look more aesthetically appealing than the US one? Because I flip a switch on the US panel and feel super serious, like Kurt Russell about to flip the switch on all power on Earth. I look at the EU picture and think of the electrical outlets behind the teacher’s desk in the 80 year old school building I attended.
Yeah, we quit using Frankenstein levers two centuries ago.
I contrast, that tense Jurassic Park moment when you flip a US breaker switch is probably the only thing I enjoy about them.
This is the kind of unimportant but fascinating thing I wish we had a community for.
Just… hundreds of people around the world posting their breaker panels.
wait, how do you route cables in there? is there just a massive bundle right through the middle?
I’m Australian, but some of the older switchboards in industrial installations are similar in appearance to the top image.
The middle would have a busbar (or three if it’s a three phase panel) that connects the circuit breakers to the main switch. The cables are connected to the far left and far right sides of the breakers.
It could be different in the US, though, if anyone with more relevant experience wants to chime in.
Edit: looking back at the top image, I’m reminded that the US uses split phase in some places, so that top panel likely has two busbars down the middle.
Varies with installation type, age, and scale, but one common approach is to daisy chain the breakers via rails that carry each phase. I couldn’t find a good picture, but basically the rails and breakers are standardized so that a row of breakers will line up with the-rail terminals, so when you connect the rail to the mains you’re good to go. On the output of the breaker it’s common to use cable ducts to keep everything nice and tidy.
EDIT: Found a picture:
american version would probably only have two phases at best, and possibly just one
Every building receives 240V and splits it into a pair of 120V phases. Three phase power is basically only installed at large industrial sites or very specialized shops.
here if you need anything over certain power (6kW; depends on country i guess) you need a three phase installation, and even if you get single phase, it’s really handled as three phase split between single phase customers (a block gets three phase supply, then splits flats in three groups, each group gets connected to one phase). this gets supplied by a distribution transformer that might serve somewhere around 200 people per (in residential areas)
i understand that sometimes americans also get distribution like this, with 208/120 three phase coming from substation, without 240v available
Wait, does that EU panel have extra space for labels? That is sexy and now I’m jealous.
Probably stereotypical, but I find well done steaks to be a total waste.
I rarely cook steak, but when I do I go to a butcher and get something quality and fresh. Normally I don’t care how other people enjoy their food, but when I take the effort to get quality steak and someone at a family get together asks me to cook until the steak is grey in the center it just deflates me. Logically I know that if everyone is happy with their food it doesn’t matter, but personally having to mangle a steak so it has the taste of ground beef just goes against every cooking instinct I have.
I’ve learned that when certain people are coming to a holiday cookout to just cook burgers or BBQ instead. Everyone is just as happy with what they get.
I consider myself openminded and tolerant.
I once heard a fellow say he was from Minnesota and he thought ketchup was too spicy.
Outwardly I stayed calm but in my heart I wanted to burn the heretic.
I fairly recently moved to Minnesota and I love very spicy foods. I just have to accept the fact that everything people here tell me is spicy is going to be very tame. People that get to know me have started saying “really spicy… for Minnesota” lmao
Do they have black pepper on the tables?
Generally yes, that’s peak Minnesota spiciness I suspect.
Thanks.
I’m in Minnesota, and I can confirm there are people who think ketchup is spicy.
The first time I encountered “ketchup is spicy/a hot sauce,” I thought it was a joke. Then I also learned that there are truly bland people who think salt and pepper is “too much”.
I live in a very weird state.
I once gave a coworker a bit of prosciutto. She told me it was spicy.
Overall, this may also be related to a persistent refusal to distinguish between spicy and spices.
I’ve known a few midwesterners like that, they likely grew up on “natural flavor” and never add anything to their food and eat the blandest possible interpretations of real foods, and since their taste buds aren’t used to any real flavor anything cooked with flavor is extreme to them
I once heard a US Southern expression.
“Food so good it’ll make you slap your mama.”
You comment brought that to mind.
That’s the name of a cooking spice I use often!
What leads to this… genuinely curious.
If you go back far enough, there’s a lot of Scandinavian heritage in Minnesota settlers, especially Sweden and Norway. Historically, Scandinavian foods lacked spice because there weren’t a lot of spices that grew there. The settlers brought the palette that comes with that with them.
I grew up eating what most people consider very spicy food. I don’t care what level of spicy other people are comfortable with, but I’ve found that amongst certain types of people I have to be discreet about my preference for spicy food. Some people find it a novelty to gawk at which is just awkward.
I feel you. As a kid I thought I hated steak. Turns out my mom always cooked it well done. The first time I had a properly cooked steak it blew my mind.
I don’t eat meat at all anymore, but growing up, whenever we had steaks I would always prefer it well done. It wasn’t really that I enjoyed it that way though, just that I did not like the flavor and texture of steak even cooked perfectly, my father did and kept making me eat it, and cooking it to a crisp and then covering it with ketchup and paprika was a way to make it not taste like steak anymore.
I simply do not find well done steak to be an inferior taste, just different. I don’t really care it’s like eggs. I like them all ways.
I usually do medium rare when I’m the one choosing.
Pancakes are fragile narcissists. You need a WHOLE FUCKING INTERNATIONAL HOUSE TO SLAKE YOUR EGO, YOU THIRSTY, PATHETIC BREAKFAST FOOD!!
You’re nothing, nothing, compared to the waffle!
I like the ungrounded North American electrical outlet and plug design (NEMA 1-15). It has no safety features, but it’s very compact, and very easy for device manufacturers to create folding plugs for USB power supplies and the like.
Caramel is the soft kind that usually has butter in it and carmel is the hard kind of only melted sugar. I will instantly correct anyone who uses them wrong.
Deck PCs combine the worst of both worlds, they are too cumbersome to be a proper handheld, and too underpowered to compete with desktop PCs.
English language pedantry hot take? As long as a reader can understand, spelling a word the way it is pronounced is more correct than spelling it the way a dictionary spells it. The word only ended up in the dictionary spelled some way in the first place because some people were already spelling it that way. But it doesn’t mean their choice was correct then and forever. Let language evolve.
I like this one, yet I mildly disagree. In my opinion, being that English spelling is already a complete disaster, standardized orthography is important in order for the widest range of persons to maintain comprehension.
However, I do believe that correcting people’s spoken English is ridiculous, especially if it’s their mother tongue. Language evolves, not everyone is meant to sound like some asshole from Cambridge.
In my experience, my French relatives are even worse for this, correcting their young children to always say oui instead of ouias, or asking us to say fais attention ! (written form) instead of fais gaffe ! (Informal, how people talk in familiar settings) when in the presence of their child. Nah bro I’m not going to pretend to be bourgeois just so you can feel superior.
The whole english writing system should just be nuked and started over from a phonetic alphabet, and same for any language that has a written form that’s stuck so far behind in history it barely has any connections left to how it is written. It’s insane to constantly waste so much time, effort and resources because the language has naturally evolved so far from the version the writing system still clings to
In this case, how far do we go through? Do we basically eliminate the letter ‘c’? Do we re-add thorn and eth? So many possibilities, but I doubt we will ever see it come to fruition in our lifetimes. There are too many people who are obsessed with tradition in the world.
Oh killing c would be a good start, since it’s basically entirely replaceable with k and s. I wouldn’t go as far as opposing all tradition though, since there’s no reason to fiddle with traditional letter systems if they still fulfill their purpose well enough. Like sure, for example japanese could be a lot easier with eliminating kanji, but there’s significant cultural background and meaning in those that’s worth preserving - and everything can still be written phonetically when needed anyway.
English alphabet on the other hand does not have such meaningful tradition in it that couldn’t be preserved with just at least tweaking the usage a bit to be more phonetic, as now it’s already become basically half-way gibberish (fish vs. ghoti). I don’t know french well enough to shame it as harshly, but it’s writing system could definitely improve with a bit of nuking too
The saving grace with French is that when you read a word, you can (almost always) divine its pronunciation immediately. I’m not saying a reform isn’t in order, as not pronouncing half the letters in a word seems kinda stupid, but in my opinion English is several orders of magnitude worse. My spouse, who practically learned English through me while we lived in an Anglophone country for almost a decade and is quite fluent, still can’t spell worth a shit.
And even us native speakers have to guess the correct pronunciation of words we haven’t heard before, which is insane. When l was young I was a voracious reader, but having never heard many of the more uncommon words spoken before, I often internalised the wrong way of saying them.
Fuck it, I’m on board. Let’s gut this thing and start fresh.
Yeah, I can understand being illiterate in something with a very complex writing systems (like chinese), but english has no excuses. Every language that’s standardized will have their own problems as fluidity of language and strict systems don’t exactly work that well together, but what english has going on would be so simple to improve even with just slight changes!
Masha Bell has analyzed 7000 common words and found that about 1/2 cause spelling and pronunciation difficulties and about 1/3 cause decoding difficulties. (from wikipedia)
lemon baked goods taste like vomit
Many programming languages allow “trailing commas”:
my_list = [ 1, 2, 3, ]This is wonderful because you can treat the last element like the previous ones instead of having to make an exception. I use it all the time, even when it provides no benefit, and I think we should even start allowing it in natural language.
There are many entirely-valid ways to write out the sound of laughter including endless variations of “heehee,” “heh-heh,” “hahaha,” and more, but I believe “hehehe” is just incorrect.
Saying “bless you” for sneezing is the most bothersome human interaction (to me) that serves literally no purpose but people pretend that it does to justify doing it out of habit. And, oh boy, have I gotten so much shit for it.
You inspire me. I love banana-flavored things, but I don’t like bananas.
I’m the opposite, except for banana cake, can eat that all day every day. But banana flavour sweets, milk/milkshake etc. you can keep, tastes disgusting to me, even a hint of it in a milkshake ruins it.
Why say normalcy when you have a perfectly good normality right there?
Horsepower is a stupid way to measure how powerful a car is. What is this the 1800s?
If you’ve never worked on a holiday you shouldn’t be allowed to go to stores and restaurants on holidays.
