SirEDCaLot

How so?

I think there's two different approaches to this. This chair is obviously designed as a luxury experience, as the process takes a full 15 minutes.
My idea is designed for efficiency, to reduce the amount of time it takes to bathe in the morning without reducing cleanliness.

Interesting idea. Seriously over-engineered though.

If you want a 'human washer' you don't need a $350k fancy chair with heart rate monitors. Just take a page out of the automatic car wash.

Human stands in a stall. Shower allows human washing of hair and face. Then just hold arms out making a diamond in front of you (think TSA body scanner position, but with arms forward instead of upward) and a 360° robotic sprayer starts at the neck and goes down spraying soapy water, then back up again with a slight up angle to get the groin and armpits. Shower comes back on to de-shampoo hair, then the same 360 robot does two passes with clean water to rinse everything off.

If you get fancy with machine vision and body position sensors, the 360 wand could flip 90° to do the hair and would be angled backward a bit so it doesn't get water or soap in your face.

You could build this for a lot less than $350k. And instead of $1500 worth of body sensors you have a $50 waterproof emergency stop button.

We used to be. The rules changed about 10 years ago.

I'd rather have 120v wiring I can do myself than 240v wiring that I have to pay someone $hundreds just to replace a light switch.

A lot of big appliances require higher power. Dishwashers, clothes dryers, fridges.

Here in US dishwashers and fridges run on <1500w. A fridge should only use a few hundred watts tops unless it's horribly inefficient. A dishwasher needs power for the heating element but ours do okay on 1500w, although yours probably heat up faster. We use a different plug for clothes dryers, usually a NEMA 10-30 or NEMA 14-30 (30A at 240v), sometimes NEMA 14-50 (50A at 240v) for really big stuff like EV chargers.
Our power is split phase (two 120v legs, 180° out of phase, so either phase against neutral/ground is 120v, phase A against phase B is 240v). So with those plugs you either get both legs and ground or both legs plus neutral plus ground.

Some powers tools, drill press, plainer

Almost all US power tools run on 120v 15A.
There's a few really big ones, mostly designed for professional shops, that need some flavor of 240v, usually with a NEMA 6-15 outlet (like normal US outlet but pins are horizontal rather than vertical). These outlets are uncommon outside of wood shops.

I never worry about load splitting,.

The only time I've ever even considered this is a. charging my Tesla on 120v, or b. running a space heater and a hair dryer at the same time in the bathroom. :)

Bottom line- yeah NZ system has higher power density but I don't think the benefits outweigh the loss of ability to work on it yourself.

Okay but that's more talking about the benefit of a 240v system. The question here was the benefit of the giant UK plug. Personally I would argue that 240v to every receptacle is not a major benefit, because very few devices require 3kw+. And in exchange you get a somewhat more hazardous system.
I am curious if homeowners in NZ are allowed to work on their own wiring? Here in the US you are...

It boils down to this: If you support the direct will of the people in choosing a candidate, you probably like RCV. If you want the party to have significant influence in choosing a candidate, you probably don't like RCV.

It is possible the Democrats are realizing that their establishment selected candidates are not competitive against modern Republicans.
It's also possible they are considering somebody more radical but want plausible deniability about how that person came to be elected.
Or it's possible they are just out of ideas. Or maybe all three...

Amazon is a total mess.

If you want a quality item but don't know what brand you want, it's near unusable. All the results are random Chinese vendors with what look like random names, half of them are rebadging the same noname Temu-quality crap.

It's gotten to the point where I Google for product recommendations or look at YouTube (keeping in mind that 90% of them are sponsored 'unbiased reviews' of the product in question) rather than searching Amazon.

Of course then you get the brand name stuff sold by random grey market resellers for $5 below Amazon's price so they claim the buy box and you get a product where the mfr won't honor the warranty.

Your understanding is correct. It's actually a very simple calculation: volts x amps = watts. Watts is the amount of total work done. So to use a water pipe analogy, imagine you have a pressure washer. Volts is the pressure in PSI. Amps in the flow rate in gallons per minute. Watts is how quickly it cleans your sidewalk. Thus, the 500 PSI pressure washer that can put out 2 gallons per minute does about the same amount of cleaning as the 1,000 PSI pressure washer that puts out one gallon per minute. However, as long as the hose can withstand the pressure, pushing out 2 gallons per minute requires a larger diameter hose.

It's the same way with wiring. The capacity of a wire is measured in amps. So if a device needs say 1200 watts, feeding it was 240v instead of 120v means you can use thinner wires everywhere. Including in the transformer that powers it.

However, this type of gain only really makes a big difference when you get into very high power consumption devices. An electric kettle that takes 1500 w, in the US you are almost maxing out a single 15 amp outlet. In the UK the same kettle is using less than half of the outlets capacity. (Of course they just make a kettle that has twice as much output, because the Brits don't want to wait for their tea). Amusingly, that 3 kilowatt tea kettle is one of the only places where you get a real perceptible advantage from a 240v system.

This is exactly it. Back before Black Friday was a household name that appeared in advertisements, there were some real good deals to be had, especially if you were willing to go before noon. That's where you got rushes of people banging down doors at 6:00 a.m. for the very best deals, but there were plenty throughout the day.

Then Cyber Monday became a thing. Then it became Black Friday week.
And in the process it lost all meaning. It's no longer anything special, it's the same deals you get on many other major holidays.

So I just don't bother anymore. Like I'll grab something if there's a good deal but I don't put much special attention into it anymore because there's no point.

... How is that the case? You're multiple loads end up with a cubic foot of plugs and receptacles. Like imagine I want to plug in a computer, two monitors, a printer, a desk lamp, a cell phone charger, and a laptop plug. None of these devices use more than 100 watts. In UK you need seven of those ridiculous giant plugs for all this. Even with a power strip it would be physically huge.

In the US the power strip that would run all that stuff is barely a foot long.

I have used power strips all my life and never once has one caught fire.

American here. I may be in the minority, but I think this plug design is absolutely stupid. I get that it has safety features, that you can put a fuse in the plug, that the outlets have switches, etc etc etc. But it is absolutely fucking huge. Ridiculously huge. And anywhere that you have multiple devices you want to plug in, it is totally impractical because it is so fucking huge.

The fact is, very very few devices need 240v 13A. Yes I get that it is useful to have this ridiculous amount of power so you can boil your tea kettle in 35 seconds, but other than that very few household appliances need anywhere near that amount of power.

So the result is a cell phone charger, which at the very outside is pulling 20 or 30 watts, is plugged into this giant ridiculous monstrosity capable of supplying 3000+ watts. And in reality the only appliances that use anywhere near that much are cooking appliances and space heaters.

Meanwhile the US NEMA 5-15 is good for 1800 watts, plenty to run almost every household appliance, with the longer ground pin and an appropriate outlet it supports tamper resistance shutters, the thin flat pins resist the insertion of foreign objects into the outlet, and you can fit many outlets in a small space.
And it doesn't destroy your foot when you step on it, as a nice bonus.

Hey I really appreciate that, seems like these days most people double down on the cynicism rather than walking it back. Sending tons of good vibes your way.

I agree it would be difficult to complete a democratic process in an authoritarian state. I think the process would have to be those areas revert to Ukrainian control, and the election will happen in 4 to 6 months or something.

It might also be totally impractical, for the simple reason that those areas have been contested for so long they are probably largely war zone rubble and much of the civilian population has fled. So you would have to restrict voting to anyone who lived in the area before the fighting started, because if you allowed anybody who lived in the area at vote time to vote you no Russia would just pay a whole bunch of people to move there and vote to switch to Russian rule.

Basically my thought is Russia should not get to expand its territory by force, but at the same time if people in those areas genuinely prefer to be part of Russia that should be taken into account too.

Never said they were my friend. They might have been once, in the 'Don't be evil' era, but that era is long past.

They are however somewhat more interested in open standards than Apple. Android for example uses OGG a bunch under the hood.