Personally I love oranges but cant stand orange juice.
People rip on US electricity standards all the time, from voltage, via frequency, to the NEMA plugs, and for good reasons. But the most disgusting thing about it all is this:
US breaker panels are fugly. Sure, they work just as well as those from the rest of the world, but they’re aesthetically displeasing.
Two representative pictures I found of an average panel just now;
US:
EU:
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Is that EU picture supposed to look more aesthetically appealing than the US one? Because I flip a switch on the US panel and feel super serious, like Kurt Russell about to flip the switch on all power on Earth. I look at the EU picture and think of the electrical outlets behind the teacher’s desk in the 80 year old school building I attended.
Yeah, we quit using Frankenstein levers two centuries ago.
I contrast, that tense Jurassic Park moment when you flip a US breaker switch is probably the only thing I enjoy about them.
This is the kind of unimportant but fascinating thing I wish we had a community for.
Just… hundreds of people around the world posting their breaker panels.
Wait, does that EU panel have extra space for labels? That is sexy and now I’m jealous.
Wait… what do they look like elsewhere? They’re the same where I am in Canada…
US and Canada largely have the same power generation/delivery standards.
Why is everything sideways in the American one? From the numbers on the switches to the warning labels.
It’s done that way so the breaker box will fit between studs that are 18" on center, which is standard for USA residential construction.
You generally only see breakers on din rail in the USA in industrial equipment.
That makes sense.
2 big reasons for that:
- Fits better between studs as the other commenter stated
- Easier and cleaner to route the 2 power phases. US plugs are famously ~120V but what many don’t realize is that’s a single phase of 120V, and there’s two phases that go into the breaker box. By combining the +120VAC and -120VAC phases you get a full 240VAC for higher power appliances like stoves, dryers, heat pumps and electric vehicles.
Yep I’ve held electrical qualifications for over twenty years and have some of the most stringent qualifications in the world, and the US shit is a joke
The worst thing is that people think it’s safer because of the shitty low voltage.
wait, how do you route cables in there? is there just a massive bundle right through the middle?
I’m Australian, but some of the older switchboards in industrial installations are similar in appearance to the top image.
The middle would have a busbar (or three if it’s a three phase panel) that connects the circuit breakers to the main switch. The cables are connected to the far left and far right sides of the breakers.
It could be different in the US, though, if anyone with more relevant experience wants to chime in.
Edit: looking back at the top image, I’m reminded that the US uses split phase in some places, so that top panel likely has two busbars down the middle.
Varies with installation type, age, and scale, but one common approach is to daisy chain the breakers via rails that carry each phase. I couldn’t find a good picture, but basically the rails and breakers are standardized so that a row of breakers will line up with the-rail terminals, so when you connect the rail to the mains you’re good to go. On the output of the breaker it’s common to use cable ducts to keep everything nice and tidy.
EDIT: Found a picture:
american version would probably only have two phases at best, and possibly just one
Every building receives 240V and splits it into a pair of 120V phases. Three phase power is basically only installed at large industrial sites or very specialized shops.
here if you need anything over certain power (6kW; depends on country i guess) you need a three phase installation, and even if you get single phase, it’s really handled as three phase split between single phase customers (a block gets three phase supply, then splits flats in three groups, each group gets connected to one phase). this gets supplied by a distribution transformer that might serve somewhere around 200 people per (in residential areas)
i understand that sometimes americans also get distribution like this, with 208/120 three phase coming from substation, without 240v available
Probably stereotypical, but I find well done steaks to be a total waste.
I rarely cook steak, but when I do I go to a butcher and get something quality and fresh. Normally I don’t care how other people enjoy their food, but when I take the effort to get quality steak and someone at a family get together asks me to cook until the steak is grey in the center it just deflates me. Logically I know that if everyone is happy with their food it doesn’t matter, but personally having to mangle a steak so it has the taste of ground beef just goes against every cooking instinct I have.
I’ve learned that when certain people are coming to a holiday cookout to just cook burgers or BBQ instead. Everyone is just as happy with what they get.
I don’t eat meat at all anymore, but growing up, whenever we had steaks I would always prefer it well done. It wasn’t really that I enjoyed it that way though, just that I did not like the flavor and texture of steak even cooked perfectly, my father did and kept making me eat it, and cooking it to a crisp and then covering it with ketchup and paprika was a way to make it not taste like steak anymore.
I consider myself openminded and tolerant.
I once heard a fellow say he was from Minnesota and he thought ketchup was too spicy.
Outwardly I stayed calm but in my heart I wanted to burn the heretic.
I’m in Minnesota, and I can confirm there are people who think ketchup is spicy.
The first time I encountered “ketchup is spicy/a hot sauce,” I thought it was a joke. Then I also learned that there are truly bland people who think salt and pepper is “too much”.
I live in a very weird state.
I once gave a coworker a bit of prosciutto. She told me it was spicy.
Overall, this may also be related to a persistent refusal to distinguish between spicy and spices.
I’ve known a few midwesterners like that, they likely grew up on “natural flavor” and never add anything to their food and eat the blandest possible interpretations of real foods, and since their taste buds aren’t used to any real flavor anything cooked with flavor is extreme to them
I once heard a US Southern expression.
“Food so good it’ll make you slap your mama.”
You comment brought that to mind.
That’s the name of a cooking spice I use often!
What leads to this… genuinely curious.
If you go back far enough, there’s a lot of Scandinavian heritage in Minnesota settlers, especially Sweden and Norway. Historically, Scandinavian foods lacked spice because there weren’t a lot of spices that grew there. The settlers brought the palette that comes with that with them.
I fairly recently moved to Minnesota and I love very spicy foods. I just have to accept the fact that everything people here tell me is spicy is going to be very tame. People that get to know me have started saying “really spicy… for Minnesota” lmao
Do they have black pepper on the tables?
Generally yes, that’s peak Minnesota spiciness I suspect.
Thanks.
I grew up eating what most people consider very spicy food. I don’t care what level of spicy other people are comfortable with, but I’ve found that amongst certain types of people I have to be discreet about my preference for spicy food. Some people find it a novelty to gawk at which is just awkward.
I simply do not find well done steak to be an inferior taste, just different. I don’t really care it’s like eggs. I like them all ways.
I usually do medium rare when I’m the one choosing.
I feel you. As a kid I thought I hated steak. Turns out my mom always cooked it well done. The first time I had a properly cooked steak it blew my mind.
Pokemon is a wild [insert word here] for IRL hunting which I do not condone. It’s literally the same premise just with cutesy characters and PG story line so that kids can become desensitized to the concept.
I love orange juice, but can’t stand oranges
This is fucked up
This is me and Ketchup. Love it, hate Tomatoes
Why say normalcy when you have a perfectly good normality right there?
Static typing can kiss my ass.
The only reason you like it at work is because you are surrounded by idiots.
Pineapple pizza is not bad when done right
“Road Works” usually means it doesn’t.
The “End Construction” signs you sometimes see on the side of the road aren’t actually protesting growth.
Go slow children ahead
For years, growing up, there were signs saying “adopt a view point” in the highway we’d drive out to see family over the holidays.
For years, I thought they were saying something about road saftey, warning drivers to look at whats coming up instead of directly in front of them. Something akin to the picking a spot on the horizon to sail towards to keep the boat straight my dad had taught me for sailing…
At some point i realized the blue signs were all guidance or info, not rules or warning. At one point I thought they might be politically motivated, like the “please dont litter” signs along that same highway- where they pleading with us to form and opinion, any opinion.
I think I was in my late teens before I finally saw one that said “this viewpoint adopted by <company>” and realized they were literally asking people to sponsor the scenic pull-off spots along the highway.
I still prefer to read them as some poor civil servant waging a private campaign against nihilism, picking the nicest bits of scenery for his message, hoping to shock the american public out of their unfeeling malaise.
Nice!
Boomer shooters > Souls-like games
Kind of diverging from your point, but I’m pretty sure that few boomers actually played what some people call “boomer shooters”.
I don’t think that Wolfenstein 3D (1992) qualifies, given what features it looks like people consider included, so probably Doom (1993) was the very start of that; couldn’t play one sooner.
The youngest Boomer, the very tail end of the Boomer generation, would have been born in 1964.
At bare minimum, someone would have had to have been 29 to be both part of the Boomer generation and played one of those early FPSes. In practice, most would have been rather older. And in the 1990s, video gaming was less of an adult hobby than it is in the 2020s.
I’d probably call early FPSes really more the province of Generation X.
But to young people, “Boomer” means “old person”. Millennials are Boomers, even GenZs are Boomers, everyone’s a Boomer now! (in the world where words don’t mean what they mean but rather how it makes someone “feel”, which ofc is subjective)
if your hair is still blonde in the sun, then it’s dark blonde, not brown.
Many programming languages allow “trailing commas”:
my_list = [ 1, 2, 3, ]This is wonderful because you can treat the last element like the previous ones instead of having to make an exception. I use it all the time, even when it provides no benefit, and I think we should even start allowing it in natural language.
Steak is overrated. I’d take a smash burger over a steak 9 times out of 10, and that 1 time out of 10 will just be because I’m in the mood for peppercorn sauce.
If you’ve never worked on a holiday you shouldn’t be allowed to go to stores and restaurants on holidays.
Pancakes are fragile narcissists. You need a WHOLE FUCKING INTERNATIONAL HOUSE TO SLAKE YOUR EGO, YOU THIRSTY, PATHETIC BREAKFAST FOOD!!
You’re nothing, nothing, compared to the waffle!
I like the ungrounded North American electrical outlet and plug design (NEMA 1-15). It has no safety features, but it’s very compact, and very easy for device manufacturers to create folding plugs for USB power supplies and the like.
