Are there any common household items or products that you think are designed incredibly poorly?
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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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A water bottle with a sport cap is a sufficient travel bidet.
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Ooh, that would for sure handle viscosity better than IV tubing. Good call!
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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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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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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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A fellow migrator, don't worry, things here seen to be better.
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The gravity-assisted bag roll is a staple for me. Cereal, bread, veggies, anything too big for a bag clip.
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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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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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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. -
I'm not going to engage in a silly argument about the merits of communism as opposed to capitalism.
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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
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Then why bring it up and say someone will correct you if you're wrong?
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Can I ask where everyone is from? I'm in the UK, which uses 230v, and even cheap-ass LED bulbs last forever. But a lot of the bulbs are rated for both 230v and 115v so I'm wondering if those same bulbs are being sold in the US. If that's the case, they'll need to pull double the current to manage the same output which is far more stressful on the electronics than higher voltage with lower current.
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Old mate didn't provide any fascinating insights into the manufacturing practices of soviet era communism, they just trotted out some meme-level anti-capitalist vibe-based hyperbole.
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A bridge rectifier circuit for each battery slot would solve the issue and, at the low currents of things like remote controls, would be pretty tiny and introduce inconsequential power overhead bbbuuuuuuuuu-uuuuuu-uuuuutttt it would cost money, precious pennies per device. And it would be tricky to market it, educate users, and so on. Such things are too good for this world.
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My laptop doesn't have dust filters, but the fan almost never runs anyway. Like the heatsink is way overbuilt for the CPU it's attached to. It's actually quite nice. I've never seen it hit 70 degrees. I've cleaned it maybe three times since 2016. It really only spins the fan up when I'm watching 60 fps YouTube videos or playing games. And even then, it kicks hard for a very short time and shuts off again.
And again, I bought this thing nine years ago. It's just a little Acer. And it's not even a nice one. I paid like 500 bucks for this thing.
Now, my wife's MacBook that she games on....yeah, I need to figure out how to get the back off so it can get a proper dusting. Fuck you, Apple. Let me work on my stuff, dammit.
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I switched to using a microplane (or similar super fine grater) for garlic a few years back, it's far easier to clean and I like it for ginger, nutmeg, hard cheeses etc.
