I absolutely hate low effort articles like this. Just restating the contents of a TikToc or in this case plagerizing a Youtube video (Technology Connections, aka Alec Watson) to generate content is lazy, even if you 'credit' the source you are stealing all your content from in some cursory way. Alec noticed something truley interesting and did many days of research and first hand investigation to build this content from scratch, this article just steals it outright and links to his YouTube video as though that makes it cool?
A toaster from 1949 is still smarter than any sold today
201–210 of 238 posts
Re: A toaster from 1949 is still smarter than any sold today
#202They bury the lede in the last fucking paragraph. The reason this toaster is immensely better than the toaster you have at home is very, very simple: this toaster's 1949 price would be hundreds of dollars in 2021 terms. You can still buy really, truly excellent toasters made for industrial/commercial use, or for the homes of the very rich, and they're quite a lot better than the trash people keep in their houses. And…
>You can have the good toaster, the good mixer, etc, but it sure looks like people don't actually want that. The pattern of product offerings in your average store suggests people want something affordable, and it doesn't particularly matter whether it is good at its job. I've always wondered if we could fix this through legislation that forces manufacturers of consumer goods to provide an estimate of product lifetim…
Cheap toasters today don’t have a shorter lifetime than this one. In fact, they have fewer moving parts.
Re: A toaster from 1949 is still smarter than any sold today
#203They bury the lede in the last fucking paragraph. The reason this toaster is immensely better than the toaster you have at home is very, very simple: this toaster's 1949 price would be hundreds of dollars in 2021 terms. You can still buy really, truly excellent toasters made for industrial/commercial use, or for the homes of the very rich, and they're quite a lot better than the trash people keep in their houses. And…
>You can have the good toaster, the good mixer, etc, but it sure looks like people don't actually want that. The pattern of product offerings in your average store suggests people want something affordable, and it doesn't particularly matter whether it is good at its job. I've always wondered if we could fix this through legislation that forces manufacturers of consumer goods to provide an estimate of product lifetim…
> legislation that forces manufacturers of consumer goods to provide an estimate of product lifetime according to some agreed standard
isn't this exactly what a guarantee or warranty is? we have this now, where the manufacturer is legally obligated to provide a device that performs/operates/works according to the published specification for at least that long. of course, it doesn't work since consumers will then complain about 'planned obsolescence' when products actually live up to these estimates...
Re: A toaster from 1949 is still smarter than any sold today
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
>You can have the good toaster, the good mixer, etc, but it sure looks like people don't actually want that. The pattern of product offerings in your average store suggests people want something affordable, and it doesn't particularly matter whether it is good at its job. I've always wondered if we could fix this through legislation that forces manufacturers of consumer goods to provide an estimate of product lifetim…
I want legislation that the manufacturer has to publish, online and in a conspicuous place, full board-level schematics, parts lists, and service notes for household appliances no later than the day after the first unit of a model goes out of warranty. Or that such documents are placed prominently in the packaging the product arrives in and that installers are required by law to provide it to the customer. You can se…
how do you imagine this working for the manufacturers of, e.g. hardware security modules? in fact, for any product, the manufacter can just claim the product consists of one 'part' and the service notes state 'obtain new part', adjusting for whatever level of granularity/number of parts they feel is optimal, unless you want to get into a game of definitions and semantics that will always be incomplete and incorrect and unenforceable...
Re: A toaster from 1949 is still smarter than any sold today
#205Years ago I had one of these. It slowly stopped working and my wife got sick of it. Without any way to fix it I got rid of it, which I now regret. The toaster we have now browns unevenly and is wildly inconsistent from run to run.
Re: A toaster from 1949 is still smarter than any sold today
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
>You can have the good toaster, the good mixer, etc, but it sure looks like people don't actually want that. The pattern of product offerings in your average store suggests people want something affordable, and it doesn't particularly matter whether it is good at its job. I've always wondered if we could fix this through legislation that forces manufacturers of consumer goods to provide an estimate of product lifetim…
I want legislation that the manufacturer has to publish, online and in a conspicuous place, full board-level schematics, parts lists, and service notes for household appliances no later than the day after the first unit of a model goes out of warranty. Or that such documents are placed prominently in the packaging the product arrives in and that installers are required by law to provide it to the customer. You can se…
> My biggest fear in getting a new washer/dryer is that it starts my wife and I on the same junk treadmill everyone else is on.
In my experience, the more expensive washers/driers (e.g. >$1000) are actually higher quality and last 5 times longer than the cheap, or even mid range ones.
Re: A toaster from 1949 is still smarter than any sold today
#207They bury the lede in the last fucking paragraph. The reason this toaster is immensely better than the toaster you have at home is very, very simple: this toaster's 1949 price would be hundreds of dollars in 2021 terms. You can still buy really, truly excellent toasters made for industrial/commercial use, or for the homes of the very rich, and they're quite a lot better than the trash people keep in their houses. And…
> They bury the lede in the last fucking paragraph. The reason this toaster is immensely better than the toaster you have at home is very, very simple: this toaster's 1949 price would be hundreds of dollars in 2021 terms. From the article it seemed that it's better because it has a radiant temperature sensor rather than a simple timer. Unless you're disputing that and saying it's good for some other reason that would…
Basically all toasters use temperature to stop rather than time. Am I missing something?
I actually looked for a timer based toaster for ages and couldn't find one.
Re: A toaster from 1949 is still smarter than any sold today
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They bury the lede in the last fucking paragraph. The reason this toaster is immensely better than the toaster you have at home is very, very simple: this toaster's 1949 price would be hundreds of dollars in 2021 terms. From the article it seemed that it's better because it has a radiant temperature sensor rather than a simple timer. Unless you're disputing that and saying it's good for some other reason that would…
Basically all toasters use temperature to stop rather than time. Am I missing something? I actually looked for a timer based toaster for ages and couldn't find one.
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Re: A toaster from 1949 is still smarter than any sold today
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They bury the lede in the last fucking paragraph. The reason this toaster is immensely better than the toaster you have at home is very, very simple: this toaster's 1949 price would be hundreds of dollars in 2021 terms. From the article it seemed that it's better because it has a radiant temperature sensor rather than a simple timer. Unless you're disputing that and saying it's good for some other reason that would…
Basically all toasters use temperature to stop rather than time. Am I missing something? I actually looked for a timer based toaster for ages and couldn't find one.
Some toasters have a simple timer circuit that releases an electromagnet to trigger the toast to pop up. There is usually a resister to adjust darkness that controls how long the timer runs.
The cheapest toasters apply current to a bimetallic strip that heats up and bends away from the contact causing the heating to stop and the toast to pop up. These are variable due to ambient temperature and because the bimetallic strip is still warm if you do a second batch of toast and will trigger too soon.
These are both indirect proxies for doneness of the toast, not a direct measure like the toaster featured in the article.
Re: A toaster from 1949 is still smarter than any sold today
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
I tried to make do without a toaster when I first lived on my own, because I didn’t care enough about toast to get one. Except, originally, I didn’t get anything else that could make toast, so if I wanted toast, I used a dry frying pan. And, probably because I didn’t have a toaster, I wanted toast a lot more often than I expected I would. I eventually got a toaster oven, but I almost never used it for anything other…
> Except, originally, I didn’t get anything else that could make toast, so if I wanted toast, I used a dry frying pan This made me laugh out loud. Ever so often my wife decides to reorganize and put everything away, and me being too lazy to dig everything out, resort to making toast that way in a dry cast iron skillet. Not sure about yours, but mine rarely turned out right. Usually burned the raised edges and left th…
Not to mention that that method uses many times as much energy as just using a toaster.