Are there any common household items or products that you think are designed incredibly poorly?
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I had some plastic clothes-pins that became severely degraded from uv sunlight.
Wait until you hear about PEX piping.
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Wide foot owner here - can confirm shoe and sock should come in multiple widths not just lengths
Shoe sizes need to go too. Just measure it in centimeters.
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I’m incredibly confused about how you’re supposedly to measure liquid laundry detergent with the cap.
You just gave me a stupid idea. First measure out the exact volume of detergent you need for one load - eyeballing it I'd guess 20mL (I'm notoriously terrible at eyeballing volume, so, grain of salt) - then get a 20mL syringe and some IV tubing (it's got one-way valves, so when you connect a syringe to it and draw up, it pulls from on side of the line; then when you depress the syringe back down, it goes out the other side). Tie something heavy to the intake side of the line and throw it in the bucket of detergent. Run the other side of the line to just above the detergent receptacle if your machine has one; or near the door for you to just aim it.
Load clothes; pull syringe, push syringe, close the door, run the machine. No detergent dripping all over the place!
...detergent is probably too viscous as-is to go through IV tubing at an acceptable rate, so you'd probably have to dilute it with water first to thin it out, then adjust the amount you pull accordingly.
The pumps they sell for coffee syrup dispensers maybe.
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Why would a permanent lamp be socketed at all? If it's permanent wire that shit properly.
Indeed! In my example, I have this IKEA LED Strip above my kitchen working area, and the power supply is integrated with the plug. There are multiple choices for power supply, but to my knowledge all of them are socketed.
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Why the hell do i have to know which way to put the batteries in at this point ?
Batteries have a plus and a minus, the spring is generally the flatter end which is generally negative, they’re designed that way to be stackable, although we could probably come up with a slightly more intuitive design.
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Anyone got good knife recommendations I'm in the market right now??
General purpose for meats and veggie cutting.
I'm currently using a victorinox fibrox. It's great but loses edge rather quickly requiring honing each meal and sometimes during cutting of ingredients.
Zwillings Four star is great!
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Yeah, why do people blow their noses into PAPER when you can just go to the bathroom sink and hork in your hands, and then wash up afterwards??? Why would people walk around with dried boogies on they face when they can wash?? Why? Why, Mister Anderson, why, why?
Because it is not always possible... Also, take your time to clean the sink afterwards or you might get in trouble.qith you SO (I am speaking out of experience).
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I'm going to go with that horrendous, non-absorbent, 1/8th ply toilet paper that gets stocked in public and office bathrooms.
I'm on Team Bidet now, so it doesn't bother me as much as it once did... but the stuff should not exist.
I'm guessing that one day, the people who buy the stuff will figure out that it they're not winning if it costs one-third the price of normal TP when everyone has to use ten times more of it, but who knows when that day will happen. Because it hasn't happened yet.
Even with a bidet that paper socks. Drying off you ass with it leaves so much paper crumble everywhere that you'll need the bidet again...
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Just dont try to spray up your ass, its pretty hard but you dont wanna.
But now you only use 3 or for squares of TP to dry off instead of smearing shit all up your asscrack until the point you've been conditioned to believe is clean enough.
One problem though, shitting at your workplace or anywhere else will be insufferable. My LPT is to take one of the better hand towels and wet it in a sink before hitting up a stall. Thank me later.
A water bottle with a sport cap is a sufficient travel bidet.
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The pumps they sell for coffee syrup dispensers maybe.
Ooh, that would for sure handle viscosity better than IV tubing. Good call!
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For example, I'm incredibly confused about how you're supposedly to measure liquid laundry detergent with the cap. At least the kind that I have sits on it's side, so if you measure it with the cap it just leaks everywhere and makes a mess.
Or at my parents house they have a bag of captain crunch berries that has a new design, where instead of zipping along the top of the bag like normal, it has a zipper in the front slightly beneath the top. That way when you poor it you can't see what you're doing cuz the bag is in the way. Like what the heck who's idea was that?
cups, glasses, bowls, anything that doesn't have a spout and makes a mess every time you transfer liquids
Every time I spill something I'm reminded how much better lab glassware is (beakers etc)
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Don't use a mist humidifier. They suck. Use an evaporative one and add bacteriostat to the water.
Mine is a tub of water with a wick in it. It has a fan that blows air across the wick. That's it.
i have a venta lw45. same principle, but instead of a wick, it has these rotating disks that the water sticks to (with a little soap in the water). Works incredibly well, still uses next to no energy (<8W) and the disks are super easy to clean. It's a beast, goes through 9 liters of water in a bit over a day. All the parts are easily accessible for maintenance and there's replacement parts if anything ever were to break (though i havent needed those yet).
the disks are especially nice when you have hard water, the calcium can be a pain to remove from a wick, but you can put the venta plastic disks (and lower housing, if you can fit it) in the dishwasher to get them good as new. And calcium does not stick to them weld, so a quick rinse under a strong showerhead is usually enough to clean the disks. Definitely one of the best appliance purchases i ever made.
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A lot of toilet paper holders are secured to the wall with drywall hangers. An L-shaped one-piece one is basically asking to be torqued right out of the wall.
I'd tend to chalk that up to user error, if you're putting enough force on your toilet paper holder to pull it off the wall you're doing something besides just pulling toilet paper off of it or maybe you installed it with the world's shittiest drywall anchors
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I just came over here from reddit. I’ve got some things to learn. Cut me some slack.
A fellow migrator, don't worry, things here seen to be better.
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Roll the bag. Flip the box upside down. Put it in going up. Hold it in place and flip the box back over. Gravity holds the bag closed. This is a bad idea if anyone else accesses the box and isn't on the same page as you.
The gravity-assisted bag roll is a staple for me. Cereal, bread, veggies, anything too big for a bag clip.
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Wine bottles. After thousands of years of drinking you would think humans would develop a bottle design that doesn't dribble down the side after pouring.
If this is a regular issue for you I'd recommend a decanter or at least a large carafe. It solves your problem, helps the wine to 'breathe' and looks fancypants as balls.
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I agree with you, but I'm not sure how great it would actually be.
I don't know much about it and I suspect others will be along to correct me in a moment, but wasn't this a feature of soviet era communism?
As in, capitalists all compete in a free market to produce the best chair for the lowest price. Communism is more efficient because we just direct a factory to make 2 types of chair, standard and deluxe.
Capitalists compete to make the most money by convincing customers to pay as much as possible for a product that's as cheap as possible to make. The competition argument works in areas that are white-hot with innovation but can anyone honestly say the office chair of 2025 shows thirty years of innovation over the ones from 1995?
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In the UK it's mandatory, ostensibly to prevent deliberate overdoses. You can't buy a big bottle of acetaminophen.
In part because they call it paracetamol.
I don't think I've ever seen packaging as described in the UK. Normally they're packaged in individual blisters that can be pushed through the foil covering in a single step. I'm not sure about this 'peeling' action that's described.
Also, for what's it's worth, medication in the UK is publicly known by it's International Nonproprietary Name rather than brands, so for the most part people will ask for 'paracetamol' rather than Deludomex
or whatever. 'Acetaminophen' is a new one to me, though. -
Capitalists compete to make the most money by convincing customers to pay as much as possible for a product that's as cheap as possible to make. The competition argument works in areas that are white-hot with innovation but can anyone honestly say the office chair of 2025 shows thirty years of innovation over the ones from 1995?
I'm not going to engage in a silly argument about the merits of communism as opposed to capitalism.
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For example, I'm incredibly confused about how you're supposedly to measure liquid laundry detergent with the cap. At least the kind that I have sits on it's side, so if you measure it with the cap it just leaks everywhere and makes a mess.
Or at my parents house they have a bag of captain crunch berries that has a new design, where instead of zipping along the top of the bag like normal, it has a zipper in the front slightly beneath the top. That way when you poor it you can't see what you're doing cuz the bag is in the way. Like what the heck who's idea was that?
Alec from Technology Connections is known for his extensive rants about household appliances: https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections
As for me, I'm just trying to avoid things in general, and things I don't enjoy in particular. Perhaps the only things that I find annoying at my home are:
- An awful flow-through gas water heater, which requires me to wait for like a minute before water gets up to temperature every time I need hot water (I'd go with an electric one myself, but unfortunately I'm a renter for now). It's also a poor design because it's going to fuck over humanity in a couple decades via climate change.
- Packaging on almost all processed food. I don't need everything I buy to be in a plastic bag. It's an incredibly poor design because it is almost always non-recyleable, either because it has a thin foil layer or it's a mix of plastics or both, filling the landfills forever and contaminating everything with microplastics.
- Poor window frame design, combined with inevitable building settling, has resulted in a cracked window twice within the last year.
I have many more gripes about things, some of the most prominent:
- Most modern smartphones just suck. Gimme back the headphone jack, an SD card slot, and a back that I can open with my fingernails! (thankfully my current phone has all of those despite being only a couple years old and very cheap)
- Generally everything that has a battery which I can't replace
- Bluetooth headphones without a headphone jack or at least audio-over-USB are an awful design, it would cost the manufacturer like a dollar do add that functionality that can come in really handy and yet they don't
- Fuck clothes without pockets!
- Cheap plastic crap from wish.com or similar that's designed to fail after one use, it just shouldn't exist. I hope CPC bans this shit soon. (although I find it fun to pull out broken christmas lights from recycling, fix them and then get free christmas lights for every New Year's)
- "Teflon" or similar frying pans. Just get a cast iron one. Lasts forever, doesn't poison you, also allegedly enriches your food with iron
