If you’d told someone in the ’50s that the toilet of the future would be weaker-flushing and just plain flimsier than the ones they already had, would they have believed you?I especially liked the part about disposable electronics...
(H/T to The Fourth Checkraise.)
9 comments:
Disposable electronics and fast-food packaging aside, I can see one "improvement" dictated by the toy company loss-prevention nazis. I've seen aircraft engines attached more casually than these toys are attached to the box.
It pays to do a little pre-snippage if you're opening this with an Asperger's or autistic child.
Thanks, guys.
You laugh, but there is one advantage the new low-flush toilets have over the old ones. If the bowl plugs up when it is flushed, it doesn't overflow, because the bowl can hold more water than the tank can deliver. The old toilets simply overflowed onto the floor.
My first after-college job was at a big famous engineering company. After a year, I would have been upped to $3,000 a year, about what a college prof made in those days.
My side job was at a radio shop, where I repaired ten or so late 1920's to early 1950's radios an evening for five bucks each. At the time, the average life of a radio was 22 years.
A few years later, the average life of a B/W TV was twelve years.
Now, the life expectancy of a piece of household electronics is two to five years. The cost of labor for the first repair usually exceeds the cost of a replacement unit.
Stranger
That's true, Anon@10:19am, but the trade-off is that they clog a lot more often.
Some do, Ken. Mine will not accept certain brands/types of toilet paper, but they never clog on certain others. Once I found what works and what doesn't, they work fine.
A toilet that only accepts certain brands of toilet paper is not acceptable. It sounds like a gun geek defending a pistol because there is some brand of ammunition it will feed without a malfunction on every magazine.
Not acceptable, or not desireable?
If I couldn't take a shit without expecting to have to plunge the toilet clear, that would be "not acceptable". I have three, they work just fine, and it would cost me upwards of $750 to replace them with others that likely would behave no differently. I don't think of that as "not acceptable", I think of it as "stupid".
What is not acceptable is government bureaucrats mandating such lunacy. The toilets are symptoms; the problem is government.
My current experience with low-flow toilets appears to be a bit of an anomaly , then.
I just bought a house and it is fitted with 2 toiles that appear to have been converted to low-flow designs by the expedient of putting plastic "buckets" in the tank (apparently a "factory" conversion by the appearance of the hardware.) Other than having to clean the bowls more often as the water height in the bowl is significantly lower, I almost never have to flush multiple times (and if I do it's under circumstances where I would have had to flush multiple times in a standard toilet) and I've yet to have to declog.
Electronics have a short design life due to short time before obsolecense. That having been said, I gave away a Monkey Ward 13" tube (vintage '86) a couple years back to a friend who is still using it, and other than stuff rendered unusable by dead customer battery or failure of a mechanical part, most solid state electronics I've disposed of for taking up space uselessly, not because it stopped working. I have a bunch of FRS radios purchased in the mid-90's, for example, that are still going strong; and all the laptops I've killed have died of pyshical damage (generally the power supply connection comes desoldered - which I suppose I could fix if I cared).
Fast food styrofoam was killed by the Watermelons - Styrofoam is TEH EV!L, MAN!!11121!.
As for parking spaces, I don't know what's up with that. It may complicate lot design to force people to drive one way in a parking lot? (Though that lets you use smaller lanes and therefore have more parking per lot space)
The Astounding World of Tomorrow is not what we were promised.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJjUVIIYptE
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