Yesterday I was kidnapped by Witch’s Daughter to attempt a big push to finish. Which was odd, since I thought I’d have to finish editing the first 9/10 before the last three chapters consented to be written. Anyway, they’re done for a value of done that includes a lot of square brackets with “They resolve the thing with the griffins” — and by the way, who in living heck allowed me to write a story with a mythological species that has at least four valid spellings? To which I add, of course, my plethora of invalid. my poor copyeditor. She’s getting white hairs — which I hope to fix today, so it can go to the structural editor, while I keep pounding on the wording itself, and resolving tiny discrepancies like “What happened to her magical stones” from front to back.
Good news, the end is near. No, not that end but getting this novel written, which considering it was started almost 15 years ago is something. (Yes, Rogue magic will be done too. I HEAR you. Trust me.)
However the side effect of my sitting at my desk — actually since it was the weekend, I sat on the recliner on the family room, while my husband watched stuff, but never mind — all day is that I did not do any dishes. I’d put dishes in the dishwasher Saturday night which I — naively — thought were done. But because I still had to feed us on Sunday, and because we found a bunch of dishes that were supposedly done, but weren’t (look, I was unloading late at night, okay?) means there’s a pile on the counter.
Two things to add to this: the dishwasher is practically brand new. It might be a year old, or a year and a couple of months, but not much more than that. And it’s top of the line, because we didn’t want problems because they interfere with my work. And it’s been washing badly for about two weeks. Which …. I figure I would need to deal with but not yet. Actually I specifically meant to deal with it next week, since this week was ‘fun with doctors.’
Now I have a pile — and I mean a pile — a dishes to do this morning, while I also have to finish Witch’s Daughter, sort out the books and set up for Confinement, where I have a sales table (The Little Pickle will sit at it most of the time, honestly. But–) and do all the laundry so we don’t attend the con naked. (NO ONE WANTS TO SEE THAT.) And also the inevitable stuff that will come up (It’s this month, I swear. It’s been a month of years.)
One of those would normally be a day, but I’ll do as much as I can, and try to do more tomorrow….
But I have one question: What happened to things that just work?
I realize I might have a force field around me that does things to machines. Perhaps mom was right discouraging me from becoming a mechanical engineer but REALLY!
The washer and dryer are speed queen — again, we didn’t want problems, so we paid more… — and we’ve already had a repair call a few months ago, because something went wrong with the timing and the washer loads were taking longer and longer and longer. What did we do wrong? Nothing. “It’s something that happens to this model.”
I suspect what it is is a bunch of stupid “environmental” regulations under the Autopen. Because their ideal is to have the machines work not at all, so only the self-proclaimed elites who have servants can afford not to stink or spend half their lives at the kitchen sink.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve had it up to here — indicates a point well above her head — with stupid environmental rules that nerf the functioning of our household appliances.
I grew up where no one had household appliances and let me tell you housekeeping even for our little family of four was a full time job. Even with a girl who came to wash dishes after dinner and a cleaning lady doing dust-and-vacuum on the weekend, mom did so much on the house, just to keep it functioning that I’m still in awe she also managed to run her own business, and a successful one too.
And the worst part of all this is that there is no point. No, I don’t mean the climate scam, that everyone suddenly is actually admitting was a scam. I mean if it weren’t a scam none of this would still make any sense.
Look, the low-flush toilets — which I see a point for in say Colorado or Idaho, or Arizona or other states with low water — are now better, yeah, (but they’re not so low anymore) but for years what low flush actually meant was “either fill a bucket and throw it in with force, or stand by the toilet, flushing, and flushing, and flushing” Which in the end, I’d bet you amounted to more water.
And the last few dishwashers we’ve had — a reason we went with this one, which actually doesn’t have that problem — had so much insulation to save electricity on heating the water that we ended up having to do three or four loads for a normal dinner for our family. (Yes, I cook from scratch, but I’m not older son. I don’t use that many pots and pans.) In the end, of course, it took five hours to do the dishes, and used a lot more electricity.
So the supposed point of it was never served. It just “sounded good.” That’s it. Which to be fair, is the way of things done for and by the government.
If the Earth really needed saving — no, it doesn’t. Your soul might need it. The Earth doesn’t. Stop confusing geology with religion — the government would be the absolutely wrong way to do it.
Besides the pervasive “do it so it looks good” which actually hurts things, I swear there is a spirit of hatred for everything human and for the masses they supposedly serve.
They want us smelly and busy at our kitchens, which they’ll soon declare need to be a fire in the middle of the room, with a hole in the roof above, and swishing the dishes in the nearest river, once they ban soaps and detergents.
And I’ve had just about enough of it. If feminism and women liberation meant anything, instead of trying to shove us into male dominated professions whether we want to be there or have a talent for it or not, they’d stop the bureaucracy’s attempt to shove us — and a lot of men — into the role of medieval serfs, tied to homestead and field, unable to do anything else.
Bah.
I’m going to go do the pile of dishes, and swear a bit to clear my head now!
According To Hoyt 
But but… The Government Always Knows Best!!!!! [Very Big Sarcastic Grin]
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The Reader gives that statement 10 Faucis. And Faucis are a log scale of falsehood.
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Does the Reader need a refresher on the meaning of “Sarcastic/Sarcasm”? 😉
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Nope. The Reader asks if the Dragon does?
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I have had best luck with buying the commercial versions of Maytag appliances whenever possible. The washer and dryer look very bland, have no digital components and other than occasional cleaning out matted dog and person hair require no maintenance for past 14 years. The HVAC is 30 year old TRANE (you know, nothing can stop…). Have to get the coolant from Mexico if it ever requires more.
We probably share certain skills, like the ability to crash any self checkout, gym equipment, gas pump or ABT with a touch screen by just looking at it.
I can not edit my own writing. I am great at anyone else’s if I have had enough sleep and then caffeine (in that order). Good luck.
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No. Your trick is that it was 14 years ago….
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I’m really torn about our kitchen refrigerator. Downside: It’s a fugly beige GE side-by-side which has far too few cubic feet of capacity, especially the freezer, for its footprint. Upside: It came with the house and probably will be running until five minutes before the heat death of the universe.
My wife (who probably has a point which I have not yet identified, that being how these things usually go) has vetoed moving it to the basement or garage when we replace the kitchen appliances en masse…someday if we’re all spared.
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Last time we had an appliance repairman in, he told us to hang on to our old fridge as long as possible.
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Hang on to that repairman, too!
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https://www.homedit.com/refrigerator-paint/
Just sayin’
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One handy trick for copy-editing yourself is to look at it –after doing something else for a while–in a different font-face, font-size, and line-length. It keeps my lazy brain from going “meh, don’t hafta look too close cuz I’ve seen it already…”
Not that I write anything that needs that much attention.
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why everything breaks, financialization.
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Fingers crossed. Our dishwasher is our last Kenmore appliance, bought and installed around 2006 (I think). Already outlast last Kenmore dishwasher. Beyond it is a PIA to replace, I do not want a “modern” dishwasher headaches.
Switched to GE with washer/dryer this last round, as Kenmore not available locally when those needed replacing. They do have electronic controls, one step up from dials. That and no large center agitator (love!) which helps on the unbalancing issues. Doesn’t prevent totally, but helps. First set we got 17 years out of. Second two sets 12 years. Our oven/stove lasted 30 years with a number of heating element replacements. Suspect current one isn’t going to last as long, if only because replacing the heating elements are going to be a problem (sealed in the oven and glass stove top).
Environmental “friendly”, just means running more loads of dishes or laundry, depending on which appliances. Because can’t run as full. Saving water settings are laughable. I just push the button that forces using higher wash and rinse water levels.
Low water toilets? In Oregon? Or Florida? (Mom and I were in Florida last October.) That is laughable. Our home toilets are circa 1973 (when the house was built), so no problem and with the killed regulations, we can replace with non-low-water, if we have to replace them. The hotel toilets were new low water. Do not get me started; it was bad.
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Low water settings can reduce the stress on the motors, bearings, transmission, etc.
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Bah! Dishwashers are good for a final very hot application of hot water, soap, and rinse. And dry in the rack.
Clothes washers . . . Well, I’m glad a had a really old one back when I had horses and small children. The new one is usually good enough for an older couple.
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We prerinse everything that goes in the dishwasher (and do not give it pots and pans), do a “quick wash” and air dry. This time of year, it takes 90 minutes on the new dishwasher, the old one ran about 100. I unload in the morning, and there’s a tiny bit of water on a few dishes; very predicable as to which ones.
FWIW, the previous dishwasher was a 2014 Frigidaire Gallery, AFAIK, top of the line. It had some issues with our funky water (too thin to plow…) and some kinds of detergent, but an easy-to-install fix cured that. That fix was put in later production.
Last year, it was getting a bit funky; the detergent/rinse agent dispenser was getting worn, and we had it swapped. A few months later, the mother(redacted)board died, preventing a start. Not under long term warranty (Frigidaire/Electrolux stopped bugging us at 10 years) and driving out to fix is a minimum of $100, so we bought new.
Again, another Frigidaire Gallery, but this time, not quite the top model. (They said their records showed one in the distributor’s warehouse, with low confidence it would be real.) So, second line. It shares most of the good features. With two of us, we get two full days of plates, cups, flatware, and bowls. We still prerinse and use the air dry, and that’s the same.
Two downsides: 1) The silverware basket was either designed by somebody who never used it, or was a bit of a sadist. There are 6 bins, and holes to let the water around. For the above reasons, some of the holes and slots make it incredibly difficult to get teaspoons out. I don’t get creative in doing it, but it’s annoying.
2) The top rack needs extra force to get it in the proper wash position. I do it by pushing at both sides. $SPOUSE can’t reach that way, and pushing in the middle (it’s worse when the tray is full) gets some interesting comments. I think part of the problem is that the top rack is very flexible. I don’t miss the stemware fixture on the old one (we never used it, and it left mugs with a pool of water), but that could have been removed. Not enough pain to worry.
If you consider the dishwasher, give it a close look. I never got to see the inside of the top end model.
Our gas range gave us one problem last year. The ignitor element (electrical substitute for a mileage cost for service, but the part was fairly inexpensive. Not bad for a 2012 range. If it happens again, I could do the swap.
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The only problem with our dishwasher is the silverware basket. On our third one, counting the original. I took way longer to replace the original basket than I should have. I don’t deal with the soap dispenser these days. We use the pod type.
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We’re not pod people, but use the Cascade Gel. One bottle runs us 4-5 months, and the rinse aid, about a year. We tried Gain, but it does horrible things with our well water. Grey crap everywhere. I had to clean out the (sole) sweep arm for the original dishwasher (the house manufacturer used bottom end appliances) and that was a thrill and a half. We gave the Gain to a lady who lived in the city; F-Falls has decent water.
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I’m tempted to just blame the likes of Gavin Newsome.
We always knew that his behavior could be explained by illiteracy and the sort of IQ which gets a low score on the SAT, or drug fueled insanity, or he is a pedo taking dictation from the CCP.
I could buy that he is ignorant, but he was apparently deliberately talking down to his black audience.
Which is worse, because he is closely related to Nancy Pelosi, and she has been involved in federal education funding for literally four decades. It would be unsurprising to discover that education policy at the natioanl level is set by the insane and the ignorant. (In fact, the number of eighty year old politicians implies that the last thirty years of federal tertiary funding has been wacky, because in the 1960s the statistical training was much worse in most tertiary programs, and a lot of fields today pretend that including stats means that the research is valid. )
Anyway, academia is where we ‘train’ policy makers, and where we ‘train’ machine makers, so the policy of machine design might possibly implicate the universities. Or relate to gross mismanagement and fraud in those places, at the behest of politicians.
Susy Rice is talking about reprisal for folks violating her faction’s policies and principles. Which were not things they obtained voluntary consensus and buy in for.
Anyway, the left green nonsense probably does not manage to be fractally awful over the full space of machine design. There are a lot of apparent woketards who still seem to make machines that work fine, or at least work at all. But the drum circles for tinkerbell are bad about worrying whether machines will work for people outside of whatever stage they currently focus on.
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You can’t blame Gavin, as his focus groups have apparently led him to the winning strategy of owning up to being a moron, which as we know is one of the core protected classes in the D hierarchy.
So blaming him would just be mean.
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Ugh. Don’t even get me started…whoops, too late.
Most of the appliances in my home are either original to the property (so not quite 25 years old) or were replaced within a few years of construction. Only exception is my dryer: the GE that was here when I bought the place died last fall and I had to replace it with an LG. Not my choice: from what I was able to determine the broken part(s) were no longer in production and the newer versions weren’t compatible with my 18-year-old model. The LG is all digital vs. electromechanical like the GE was, and works fine…except it usually get my shirts and pants completely dry. Sheets, towels, and underwear, no problem; but the collars and cuffs on my shirts almost always come out in a state ranging from still-quite-damp to still-very-wet. So I have to run them through once on program dry and again on time dry (even when I set the dryness level on Program Dry to “Very Dry”).
Meanwhile, I’m praying everything else lasts for quite a long time and/or can be fixed when it does break. I had a HVAC tech come out to examine my furnace and A/C shortly after I moved in, and he said the units I have are a) pretty much bulletproof and b) easily fixed, to the point where they keep most parts for them on the truck so any problems can be fixed same-day. The one exception is my AC’s compressor. If that goes, I’ll have to replace the whole unit. Reason being the refrigerant they use was banned by the EPA a few years ago, and while they are still allowed to refill refrigerant on exiting units, they’re no longer allowed to stock, sell, or replace compressors that use the old refrigerant. So if the compressor goes, I’ll have to replace the whole system…because my furnace isn’t compatible with the new refrigerant…because the new stuff that the EPA mandates everyone use is apparently highly flammable. What bozo thought THAT was a good idea?!
My folks built their current house…7, 8 years ago, I think. They’ve already had to replace most of their appliances at least once since the house was built. I think the refrigerator and maybe the microwave are the only ones that have survived since the house was built. And that includes their AC system. Their dishwasher is a joke: takes ~3 hours per load, and you have to hand-wash everything before you run the unit otherwise your dishes & silverware won’t come out clean…so what then, I ask, is the F***ING POINT OF OWNING A F***ING DISHWASHER IN THE FIRST F***ING PLACE?!
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I do not pre-wash the dishes. I do soak and rinse. But that is more because we rarely run the dishes every day. The dishwasher has a pre-rinse and hold cycle. Why? I have scrape and use the garbage disposal anyway. We did replace the garbage disposal when we did the countertop, new sink, and faucets. Just made sense. The new sink and faucets triggered the new countertop. I love my single faucet/spray combo, and deep single steal undermount sink. Came with some extra accessories combos through Costco.
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The suites hotel (Homewood) I use when over the Cascades for reasons uses a low-midrange GE dishwasher. Digital controls. If you let it do the speed wash and air dry, it’s pretty fast. I think the full wash (normal) and hot dry is around 2ish hours. (I think; launched it as I was checking out.)
The first time I ran one (they had done a renovation, dumping the noisy mechanical timer units) it was set on “heavy” and that took 240 minutes.
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The regulation banning safe refrigerants was, according to WikiP, inserted into the must-pass COVID relief bill. The replacement is … get this … isobutane! Yes, a modified version of lighter fuel.
Halogenated refrigerants have only two carbons (not four) but heavier atoms of chlorine, fluorine, or bromine around them, which bond more tightly and are harder for combustion temperatures to knock loose to allow replacement by oxygen.
Read about the Grenfell Towers disaster in England, the unholy offspring of sky-is-falling Gaia worship and government housing. I wonder how many of the Gaia worshippers would say this massive human sacrifice was worth the cost.
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Lots of blame to go around— there’s also a bunch of stuff being made in China, and thus not actually fitting the ordered specs unless they were hovering over the quality control, and there’s that a lot of designers weren’t actually taught to design/are H1B/ were hired for reasons other than ability.
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And then there’s the helpful parts buyers who substitute parts to save pennies, with no mechanism for clawing back their performance bonus if those parts have the quality one might expect from overseas low cost manufacturing.
The supply chain always leading to some third world sweatshop means any of the old school electromechanical gizmos are no longer the super-reliable items that they were when they came from a factory in rural Illinois.
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There was a brief period (in like 2016 to 2020) where dishwashers were allowed to have decent wash rates and times. The administration of the Turnip in chief overturned that. I have one of those and it has a 92 minute cycle that works pretty well. It replaced an early Obama period Bosch which honestly was one of the worst pieces of excrement I have ever owned as an appliance. The current GE model was literally half the price of the stupid Bosch (which also had a 2.5 hour quick cycle ?!?). As far as I can tell the fancy Euro appliances are junk as they are even MORE into the stupid water/energy conservation nonsense.
As for toilets there are two problems. First going from 5 gallon per flush GPF to 3.5 GPF (mid 80’S?) to 1.5 GPF (mid 90’s) has been a catastrophe. the 3,5 GPF worked MOSTLY. The 1.5 GPF are hopeless. There were some high end toilets with 2 flush modes, one 3.5gpf and one 1.5gpf they are unfortunately expensive and kind of engineering nightmares.
And the thing I hate is the valve systems for the toilets. The old float and flap system worked pretty well. It had a tendency to leak a bit especially as the flap got older and more rigid. So California made the companies add lots of little doojangers (plumbing term) to try to catch and stop those leaks. And plumbing manufacturers, not wanting to have two of the same item made, adhered to California standards (just like the cars). The issue is that each little tweak made the valve more complicated to install and added a new failure mode to the system. The doojangers they added do poorly in hard, high mineral water, like much of the Northeast has. So now instead of a valve lasting 8-10 years and leaking a little after 6-7 it plugs up after 3-4 years and leaks almost from installation.
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Just putting the tank above the commode at about head height would make it flush better with less water. You know, like they used to do 100 years ago? ‘New!’ is not necessarily better.
———————————
Jordan Peterson: “If I told you to cook in the bathroom and shit in the kitchen, that would be a new idea. Doesn’t make it a good one.”
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And if you include a pull chain, any potty trained cats can also flush….what? A member of the extended family who died before my time allegedly taught his cats to do that.
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Way back in the late 70s, one of those TV news shows like 60 Minutes showed a potty-trained cat. The guy had a lever-like doohickey on the back of the seat, so the cat’s (apparently hard-wired) “covering up” behavior flushed it.
I set out to replicate that, beginning by suspending a litterbox over the water to get the cat used to getting onto the toilet. Alas, what with 3 roommates and one toilet, the needed consistency was not available.
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I live in an older development in FL where they used clay wastewater pipes.
Obviously, since the longest of those are 8 ft, they have a lot of seams.
And the soil is mostly sand so less stable over time than most places, and pipes shift a little.
Combine that with 1.5 gallon toilets and you have a recipe for buildups at joints requiring frequent use of Main Line cleaner or, when that fails, power snaking.
I finally got things under control by at least weekly filling the shower (it has a wider drain than the sink or tub) nearest the cleanout with about 5 gallons of water, and releasing it all at once, using the handheld shower to make the vortex stronger.
Since that works, it appears that if we could still use traditional toilets we wouldn’t have had a sewer problem to start with.
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The cheapass toilets in the OEM manufactured home were a nightmare, and got swapped out for midrange American Standards. I think those were 1.6 GPF. So-so performance.
We did upgrades to both bathrooms; 1.6 GPF American Standard Champion toilet, and in the second bath, a 1.28 GPF version of the above. One trick: both of the toilets are “comfort height”. I noted at Home Desperate that the higher seat toilets had a better flow rating than the standards. My old knees appreciate it, and the solids go where they should on the first try. (These use a pull-up valve. The newer one is at least 10 years old, and the other is older. I have not had to fiddle.) No downsides, though they get stained from our iron/sulfur/lime water. A chemist friend told me the only thing that dissolves those stains destroys the glazing.
Recommended. It’s great sh!t. :)
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Unless you are a child or a literal midget, I don’t understand why anybody would *not* use comfort-height toilets.
Also, the companies that make them are very very aware that people hate the low-flow, so they’ve had hydraulic engineers continuously improving them and they work a lot better than they did 15 years ago.
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They do yes. They still suck for the plumbing, but they are much better.
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Fortunately, the rebuild is quick and easy.
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No, no! You can’t put dirty dishes in the river; you’ll kill the fish! ☹️
I will never believe they’re the least bit serious about saving water so long as they continue flushing toilets with drinking water. RAH knew better back in 1966; in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, toilets were flushed with gray water.
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I have seen new homes (very high end) in the U.S. southwest built with grey water plumbing and storage built into the house, for just such use. Absent that the best you can do is use it on plants.
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I killed a lawn watering from the washing machine outflow. Needs serious dilution.
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I think the last thing I read suggested routing the outflow into a fairly deep gravel bed next to the thirsty plants. I never did plumb that up, as it kept getting more and more complicated, plus the drought ended.
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Only use the rinse cycle water on plants! Not the wash cycle.
For real savings, we should save the rinse water and use it for the next wash cycle. That would cut water use in half.
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Oddly enough that is how the commercial units work.
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I wondered why toilets were flushed with drinking water way back when I was a teenager. Was told, city doesn’t want to provide two water pipes to every house. More expensive than it’s worth, and too much risk that people will connect the wrong pipe to the kitchen faucet.
BUT… when I was a teenager, we lived in a place where water was very expensive. So my parents put used bathwater into buckets, and we were instructed to use those to flush the toilet, and only use the flush handle when buckets were not available. (We also practiced “if it’s yellow, let it mellow; if it’s brown, flush it down”).
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Mid-70s, there was a water shortage in my California town. We hippie-ish boomers cooperated whole-heartedly, and saved so much water that, months later, the water company complained that the reduced usage had cut too deeply into their revenue.
So they raised their rates.
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What has helped my older dishwasher unit’s performance is using the absolutely most expensive flavor of detergent packs. They used to put all the good stuff in their main line offering, but they discovered they can pull ingredients from those and then get a premium for one that actually works.
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We use the most expensive ones.
BUT the problem is not performance, it’s that it’s NOT FILLING WITH WATER.
And I think the performance issues is that water was slowly restricting. Before that it was great. This started a couple of weeks ago.
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I had a long and ultimately unsuccessful quest to replace my ~30 year old dishwasher over the lockdowns. Since they only are made in the Middle Kingdom they were on back order for 9 months, and when one was finally delivered in a pristine box it was crumpled across the stainless door like a beer can (“no bueno” says the second GE delivery guy unpacking that box on my front porch).
They eventually just cancelled on me, so I went looking for parts for my old whirlpool which was spraying pretty anemically. I found the motor pump unit, but it was hellishly expensive. The next module up, though, which included a new motor and pump assembly as well as a bunch of valves, the spinny bit for the bottom of the washer, and basically a foot circle of the tub lower deck, was actually a lot less expensive, and in the end was easy to replace. So I now have all new mechanical guts in an otherwise working 1990s dishwasher for a whole lot less than a new one.
From what I’ve seen that is a major difference between the older stuff and today’s: repairability. As long as there are parts around I intend to keep my old school tub clothes washer and that dishwasher.
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I found the way Speed Queen does their washing machine settings kind of interesting. There’s a “Normal Eco” setting, and then all the ones that actually work. The folks at the appliance store were very frank in saying “don’t use that setting if you want to get anything clean, it’s just there to meet efficiency regulations” and the user manual stops *just* short of saying the same. Certainly doesn’t treat “eco” as the setting you’re actually going to want to use. All the other washing settings have selectable auto-fill and deep-fill modes. The auto-fill uses internal sensors to select a water level appropriate to the amount of clothing you’ve loaded — and their definition of “appropriate” is quite generous. Haven’t yet felt the need to go deep-fill, and everything gets thoroughly cleaned and rinsed.
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Yes. It works great. What I disliked was the washer timing going slowly off till it was taking forever.
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Ormondroyd’s David and the Phoenix wrote that the individual spellings for griffin/griffon/griffen actually applied to different creatures. In the book, the two visit several examples.
I am pleased to have found the book on line, and am enjoying rereading it.
Hm. I think I had other things to do today. Oh, well, couldn’t have been important …
Long ago we established a habit – $50/month goes into a separate savings account for ‘appliance replacement’. So when we have needed a new dishwasher or freezer or whatever, there’s a cushion for the budget. (Didn’t need it as newlyweds, and couldn’t have afforded that set-aside then, either!)
New house came with 2019 dishwasher and stove; we moved our refrigerator, freezer, washer and dryer from CA, so those are at least 10 years old. Fingers crossed, as one does when tempting fate.
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Between planned obsolescence and government dictates it’s hard to find any appliance that actually works and if it does it usually won’t work for long. I blame the .gov more than the manufacturers, the people making the stuff want you to come back and buy more of their product, .gov doesn’t care. I think you’re absolutely right about them wanting to reduce the bulk of the population to dirty, smelly serfs. Doubt if they even want you to have a real fire to cook over, rather have people dependent on unreliable electric power (that they can turn off whenever they want). Letting the serfs have fire is far too risky in their minds.
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When the son and new wife moved into their house back in November, they went shopping for a washing machine. Wife found the one she wanted at Home Depot – but the son nixed it, he didn’t want to keep feeding it with quarters.
I’m sometimes of the opinion that is the way to go, though – just buy a commercial model that is supposed to stand up to the poorly trained masses can abuse it with. (Told him that he should have gone with it, and called it their “dinners out savings account.”)
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Hmm, when Mom was in a retirement home, the laundry room used commercial machines, but the dollar amount was set to $0.00. I’d assume the required amount is fairly easily adjusted.
Nice piggy bank idea, though.
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It should be.
Also, the washer and dryer in my apartment complex were recently switched over to an app, and no longer take quarters. So you don’t even need to have unused coin slots.
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As I get older, I use paper plates more. Doesn’t rule out the need to run loads of pots and pans (and remember whether I ran the dishwasher after loading it, which is not a given), but it’s one less thing to wash.
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How I do hosting. Paper plates. Fancy, heavy duty, version. They do not need washing. Just make sure to save the silverware, and toss. Almost everything else can go in the dishwasher (everything except the roaster; that won’t fit).
We do have China, but it is so old, it has to be handwashed. (Hand-me-down from in-law maternal side grandfather. Approximate age? 126 to 136, or older. Not particularly good shape, even though zero chips.) There is a reason we didn’t put China, or silver, on our wedding registry. Other reasons too, but primary one “didn’t want to bother”. Didn’t want to take this set, either.
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Our china has gold decoration, but UNDER the top clear layer of glaze. Perfectly dish washer safe for 50 years now, not that it has been used all that much.
We had purchased a service for 12 of sterling flatware plus some extras, back in the early 1970s. Last week, made an interesting decision: neither my son by himself nor my daughter’s family is ‘formal dining adjacent’. I’ll probably never use it again, by myself, and we had not used it much since we moved up here.
So, I took it into Eugene to a metal/coin buying shop and sold it.
Got about 60% of the .999 silver spot price (sterling is .925). I had hoped for more, but, eh, que sera. Nearly 4 kg of sterling in the set. No interest in the shape, only the metal.
Also had bought some Franklin Mint proof sets and other things; store bought the silver and refused the base metal coins. Counter guy exercised his thumbs a lot looking up the silver content and mass of the coins on his phone.
I have been turning silver into Freedom Seed dispensers this last week. But can’t make argent seeds to affect were-critters and vampires any more.
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My dishes are done by hand. No microwave, don’t need it or want it. The washer/dryer are about twenty five years old or so (definitely old enough to drink) and the stove about the same. No issues with any but the stove, and that’s a known thing that just needs new plugs that I can get from the auto parts store every few years or so.
The pipes are old enough to have fought in both World Wars, but they still work. The bricks are a smidge older. The timber is creeping up on the century and a half mark. The floor creaks, hardwood that I ain’t interested in replacing, with carpets here and there where it makes sense.
Old stuff needs regular maintenance to just work. But as long as you do it? Metal fatigue will eventually get ya, and entropy’s a right cranky old beach herself. Keep on keepin’ on is the way. Nowadays it’s getting harder to get parts for some of the old things, but the Great Replacement is still a good decade or three off, by my mark.
Partially, and practically, the old things that just work nowadays are the ones that stuck around. Sure, there were cheap plastic crap things back in Ye Olden Dayes when dinosaurs roamed the lot out back and we killed our mammoths with out mighty fists and bare teeth. Survivability bias or whatnot. That being said, there’s something to new things. Internetty things that are quite useful. Cars that last longer than 100k without needing a major metallic surgery. Cell phones that those of us what are old may or may not have a hate-hate less feeling for (’cause it sure as heck ain’t love).
People will still be people. We’ll improve a bit, screw up a bit, swear a blue streak and try again. The whole building upon what came before is a very human trait. Hard to stamp out, though some cultures are very insistent on doing so.
Chin up, folks. The new crap will eventually break. Better stuff may turn out to unexpectedly last, planned obsolescence be damned. Babies will get born. Kittehs will demand noms, naps, and scritches. Bills will get paid. And, by and large, humanity will wake to see the sunrise tomorrow.
We can still cuss up inanimate objects, though. That’s just tradition.
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for years what low flush actually meant was “either fill a bucket and throw it in with force, or stand by the toilet, flushing, and flushing, and flushing” Which in the end, I’d bet you amounted to more water.
I figured it out – it does add up to more water, but only for the occasional solid – maybe one out of every five to ten flushes? – that requires two or three (or four) to go down. All the rest of the time only one flush is necessary, so the average water usage is (probably) less.
Now, that may or may not account for whether the water amount is adequate to get the solids all the way into the city sewer, or septic tank… but I guess they probably figure the rest of the household’s water usage compensates for that.
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Oh, heck, no. toilet paper needed three flushes.
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I do know a man who kills wristwatches. He wears one for a week or two, and it stops keeping proper time. I’m talking about wind up watches. If he gives it away to someone else, it works fine.
OTOH, I have observed my dad to POINT at a fuel injector and it stops sputtering. “Dad, I’ve been out here trying to start this thing for hours! What did you do?” *shrug*.
Plot for a fantasy novel?
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In IT we call that the sysadmin effect. Hardware or software problems that absolutely cannot be replcated when the sysadmin comes over to investigate your issue.
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There are two fundamental particles, as yet unproven by science to exist but everyone knows they exist. They are antiparticles of each other, like electrons and positrons. Their names are fixons and breakons. Most people emit very low levels of one or the other, so low that they don’t have much effect on the world around them. But some people emit much higher levels of them. People who naturally emit fixons tend to gravitate towards tech-support and/or repair professions, because they just find them easier than most people do.
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This also explains why tech support over the phone is SO much more difficult than doing it in person. Because the fixon emitter is miles away from the machine in question, while the breakon emitter is sitting right next to it.
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Who remembers Theodore Sturgeon’s short, “Uncle Fremmis”? Fremmis had a real knack for Percussive Maintenance…
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It’s been done.
Can’t recall where or when; sort of sounds like a Kelvin Throop plot, but pretty sure not.
Conceit is that all the human mechanical stuff works by magic. This was discovered when Earthers sold construction equipment to a planet, and when the humans left, all the machines refused to work.
Solution was to hire someone to live on the planet – not doing anything but being within about 10,000 miles of the machinery.
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I had an uncle who had the wristwatch problem. He tried everything up to high-reputation, expensive watches, and they still only ran for about a month and could not be repaired. (This was before electronic watches.) His solution: buy the cheapest Timex watches he could find, a dozen at a time, and when they stopped, throw them away and start with a new one.
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I kill watches too. Didn’t use to. Must be a post-puberty power.
Did you see the gas station attendant plus movers with moving vans, do the rescue of the kidnapped little girl?
They just parked with intent until the police got there. Very smooth.
OTOH, this would not have worked if the kidnapper lady had been the murder/suicide type, but luckily she wasn’t. And it was a very good tactical move.
The moving van company president announced how proud he was of his guys. I don’t blame him. He must have been bursting his buttons.
https://www.sunnyskyz.com/good-news/6088/Unexpected-Heroes-Step-In-To-Help-Save-Missing-3-Year-Old-Girl-In-Phoenix
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The QuikTrip guy was actually a security guard. It’s one of those big gas stations with lots of pumps. The video is from the parking area out back of the gas station convenience store, which is also a fairly large area but apparently has only one exit.
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I kill watches too. I managed to take out an Omega chronometer, even the watchmaker was impressed. THey say it’s my body chemistry, but who knows?
in other news Hernando De Soto, the free market economist not the explorer, has been named PM of Peru. The world continues to heal.
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I once held my my dad’s watch for two minutes while he washed his hands. Just held it. It never worked again. I was ten. To this day he thinks I DID something. I just held it.
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My omega survived till my thirties. Then went the way of the others.
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How long before someone figures out a way to *print* (some assembly likely required) appliances?
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Or just parts?
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Some parts, plastic will work for. Others will have to wait until some engineer (or team) puts together a practical, consumer-grade metal printer. The tech exists already, but it isn’t practical or cost-effective (yet) at the consumer level. And still other parts will need a combination of plastic and metal, which is a whole new level of engineering challenge to put together into a consumer-grade 3D printer. Even when printing your own metal parts becomes practical at the consumer level, I believe some parts will still be more cost-effective to make in a conventional factory, e.g. parts made of four or five different materials.
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FM and I talked about this a few months back (and there was a meme here a few weeks ago that made the same point): There’s just got to be a HUGE unsupplied demand for “America’s Bilt-2-Last™” appliances — built in the USA with 1920’s designs (i.e. before number-crunching, pennywise weasels thought up Planned Obsolescence) using modern hi-precision manufacturing techniques.
There is NOTHING I need from a stove or fridge or washing machine that can’t be done with purely mechanical controls (and Freon!)
Big, beefy motors; bimetallic thermostats; mechanical clocks driving camshafts… y’all get it. When it comes to appliances, “Smart” is Dumb.
We also homed in on the EPA as The Entity “protecting” us from durable appliances with a Mean Time Before Failure of decades.
Can we dun Trump with “suggestions” to get this to happen? (Also, let’s keep noodging Nuclear Energy and Secure Elections to the top of his mind.)
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MAGA
Make Appliances Great Again
\- and
Make Automobiles Great Again
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Make Agencies Tiny Again, Lose Our Shackles!
¡MATALOS!
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PLEASE.
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Re low-flush toilets, I’ve seen toilets with two flush handles or buttons (far more often two flush buttons, very rarely two flush handles but I have seen it). One would release a small amount of water, for flushing liquids. The other one would release the entire toilet tank, for flushing solids. THAT’s a low-flush design that would make sense, putting the decision in the hands of the person who knows which volume of water is needed. But regulators, by and large, don’t trust people to be sensible: if people were sensible, we wouldn’t need regulators (they’re right about that, actually), and then where would they get work? So they write their regulations as if everyone was the most idiotic person they know. Yes, there are idiots out there. But most people are not idiots.
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Alan “Uncle Al” Schwartz pointed out, some 30 years back, that a toilet with a slow leak at the flap valve would let clean water into the bowl slowly enough that a layer would float atop the Mellowing Yellow like a pousse-cafe, keeping any odor sealed in and eventually pushing all non-solid evidence down the drain.
IIRC, he was unmarried.
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I first met the two-flush option in Australia in 1989, followed by some in parts of Europe in the post 2005 era, although not many. It is more logical than the micro-flush US version.
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For a while in DFW, I’ve seen two position flush handles: up for liquid, down for solid.
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There was something I read in this past year to the effect that the human suffering (and particularly the First-Worlders’ suffering, at every level possible) is the actual point of everything the Environmentalist set does. And not just in the ontological sense in which the purpose of a McDonald’s proprietary ice cream machine is to employ the (even more proprietary) repairman, but in the “someone said the quiet part out loud,” sense, and the Earth would Need Saving from Western Civ whether there was an Earth to save or not, so long as they had Western Civ to save it from.
Gaia ism Delenda Est.
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There was something I read in this past year to the effect that the human suffering (and particularly the First-Worlders’ suffering, at every level possible) is the actual point of everything the Environmentalist set does. And not just in the ontological sense in which the purpose of a McDonald’s proprietary ice cream machine is to employ the (even more proprietary) repairman, but in the “someone said the quiet part out loud,” sense, and the Earth would Need Saving from Western Civ whether there was an Earth to save or not, so long as they had Western Civ to save it from.
Gaia ism Delenda Est.
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So, at the time I trash talked old Gav., I had completely lost track of my sense of what any of the university scores actually meant.
I’ve looked some stuff up, and maybe it makes him even worse.
So SAT and ACT are for undergraduate admission, and GRE is grad school admission. (Excluding the folks like Law, Medicine, etc., who have rolled a lot of their own more specialized stuffs.)
About 45% of SAT test takers this year are 990 or below in 2026. In particular, 14% are 600-790. I submit to you that if the less than 790 people cannot read, we are failing our nation’s highschoolers.
I can absolutely believe that we are failing our nation’s highschoolers. I can absolutely believe that we admit a lot of people who need serious remedial work.
One recent year, the average score was 1030. 960 is not /that/ much less.
Gavin would have had the exam some years back.
The undergraduate tests have an Asian bump, and also those lower black scores, but I kinda have a hard time caring about averages so close to the over all average (1). If you look at state by state trends, in general, if less than all of the state is taking the exam, then the scores are significantly higher. Which you would expect from self selection.
If prep is big, and if self selection is big, then a smaller variation should not be having /that/ much effect on long term functioning as an adult in society.
The GRE scores are also interesting. US nationals score higher on verbal, and on analytical writing, as you would expect. Foreign scored higher on quantitive, which you would also sorta expect.
We also had a drop in GRE takers after covid, which sorta makes sense also.
I doubt Newsome’s honesty, but all he really argued is that he is a poor provider of oversight over California’s public tertiary schools.
Actual dyslexia? Meh.
Actual illiteracy? Potentially, an executive can have people read to them, so potentially not disqualifying. but, if he is on twitter, either he can read, or he should not be posting to twitter.
What is disqualifying is being so far up the rectum of the California ‘muh mental disabiltiy’ crowd that he thinks this is a good play. (By that, I mean the activist elites. )
I’m skeptical of how useful these standardized tests were before, but trying to score points off them in this way did not make the tests more functional.
(1) Okay, the ACT difference looks worse than I remember the SAT difference looking, but who takes what is not uniformly and evenly sampled.
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He’s apparently been bringing up the dyslexia thing for a while now. For example, people have noted dyslexia hashtags in tweets made over a decade ago.
On the other hand, Instapundit has a bit up right now about a reporter who asked his X account for more information about his dyslexia, and the response literally was “Respectfully, f*** off.” A belligerent response to a fairly straightforward question about something that the respondent himself chose to introduce into the public sphere tends to make one say, “Hmm…”
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