341–350 of 575 posts
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Counter anecdote, I've had gas mowers survive decades and EV electrical equipment (in this case, a chainsaw and a battery pack for a mower) both die within 14 months of purchase.
Counter counter anecdote, I was just tidying up the yard with my 18V whipper snipper and contemplating the fact that I bought it in 2012 and it hasn’t skipped a beat.
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Costco vets their products very well, if I see something at costco and its something I need I just buy it. No need to research and I've never been burned. They only sell good quality stuff.
Check their tomato paste. It turns out that nearly every tomato paste in Australia comes from Xinjiang in China, including those marked as Australian or Italian. Simplot (Leggos), the big US company, was the worst offender, so it's possible that tomato paste in Costco's US stores has been produced in Xinjiang using slave labour, irrespective of what the label says. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-27/australian-to…
I think that might be a bit of a strong assertion, from your article there -
"It analysed 221 processed tomato products from 39 brands, including paste, passata and diced tomato.
Twenty-two per cent of the products failed country-of-origin testing, while a further 6 per cent were flagged for further testing."
So while 28 percent is scandalous, and those companies need to face consequences, the other 72 percent seem to be genuine.
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interesting bit of information: most EV mower companies now do not provide replacement parts - if a mower dies within warranty, a 'certified' warranty repair shop does basic troubleshooting, and if it's beyond a piece of cheap plastic, the mfr just ships a new mower to the 'repair shop'. Once out of warranty, you're on your own.
My electric mower has lasted longer than the gasoline mower before it, which literally had plastic valves inside the carbeurtator.
30 years ago a friend of mine did the mold for a lawn mower. They put an engine on it and it ran for 120 hours before the deck failed. It took 7 more tries until the deck failed after 80 hours. Commercial mowers are expected to run over 1000 hours.
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Thank you for reminding us that electric mowers are garbage.
I mean, not all of them? Mine's a fancy-pants Stihl battery mower, but it works quite well and has been doing so without problem since I bought it ~4 years ago. The other battery stuff from the same brand (trimmer, chainsaw, kombi-tool) have the same story.
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Check their tomato paste. It turns out that nearly every tomato paste in Australia comes from Xinjiang in China, including those marked as Australian or Italian. Simplot (Leggos), the big US company, was the worst offender, so it's possible that tomato paste in Costco's US stores has been produced in Xinjiang using slave labour, irrespective of what the label says. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-27/australian-to…
The above thread was about quality issues, not ethical issues such as “slave labor” (a term somehow reserved for certain countries, even though most countries use unfree prison labor, including the US and much of the EU).
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Clicked on the link, ready to buy one. “Contact sales”. Ew. No thanks.
We are literally new and only available in Barcelona at the moment which I mentioned in my comment as well. Not sure what's eww about that?
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Just being realistic here; many of these are of Chinese make so how exactly would you stop it other than blocking them from being sold. They certainly don't advertise to the big box retailer that buys them "and it uses the customer's internet connection for fraud." Hell, there's a section of comments that would probably going "hey, RELAX guy" because it's not US companies doing this. For any American companies that d…
The FCC tests electronics for radio interference. Perhaps they could test electronics for Internet behavior like this too? Some manufacturers will try to cheat on the tests, but we have AI security checking now, so maybe that would make it harder to cheat?
(I’d be open to a rule that devices must allow users to wipe the devices and install their own OS.)
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We are literally new and only available in Barcelona at the moment which I mentioned in my comment as well. Not sure what's eww about that?
The "eww" part is that normally, anytime you see "talk to us for a price", that means someone is charging an absurdly high amount for the good or service.