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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • My front loading clothes washer. It frequently doesn’t drain right. If you create a fault tree on what causes that, you can have:

    • Faulty water level sensor
    • Clogged water level sensor hose
    • Clogged filter
    • Clog around the heating element
    • Broken check valve
    • Faulty pump
    • Clog between drum and liner
    • Faulty control board

    The pump can clearly be heard running when the water levels are too high, so I know the sensor, sensor hose, controls, check valve, and pump are all functioning. Sometimes, the pump runs for way longer than you’d think necessary, with only a small trickle of water coming out little bit by bit. This indicates to me that there is a clog upstream from the pump. Multiple times, I have squeezed myself back behind the washer to take the back off and access the filter (which should be accessible from the front). I’ve found no clog there. Ive taken out the heating element to check for clogs around it, and found nothing there. Ive shown a bright light from inside the drum to highlight any potential clogs between it and the drum, and seen nothing there. Despite all of that, the problem remains, and when I manually spin the drum with nothing inside, I can hear what sounds like stuff moving around inside.

    I assume it must be ghosts or something at this point.








  • To summarize for anyone not reading the article:

    German balcony solar panels are connected directly to their home power through a smart inverter that will kill power if the grid power goes down, so lines don’t stay live when you’d think they are dead. Those devices are designed for the voltage and frequency of the German grid, and can’t be used in America. Companies won’t makes devices if they aren’t legal to use, but one state has legalized it, so hopefully we get there soon.

    The other issue is that a circuit breaker essentially monitors the amount of current going into your home’s circuit from the grid as a way of preventing your wires from being overloaded. Since the micro inverter is on the other side of the circuit breaker, you could overload the circuit without tripping the breaker, and that is why they are limited to 800 W.


  • I found this good review article based on a study commissioned by the Canadian government.

    https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10408444.2023.2295338

    It seems like potential IQ effects are still difficult to distinguish as a dose response, so they weren’t able to come up with a point of departure. It doesn’t help that in a lot of studies comparing “high” and “low” fluoridation effects on IQ, the “low” is still higher than the WHO recommended level of 1.5 mg/L, and the US recommended level of 0.75.

    I think the optimal level is likely going to vary by municipality based on the quality of dental care and the use of fluoridated toothpaste (that everyone overuses), and consumption of high fluoride beverages like tea. I guess my main takeaway is that people need to read their local water quality report, and do what they will with that information




  • One thing to keep in mind with a lot of responses is often when someone says “we didn’t learn about x in high school”, what they should be saying is “I didn’t learn about x in high school”. I’ve certainly heard former classmates claiming not to have learned something even though they were sitting next to me when I learned it.

    When i was a preteen, we learned about WW2, mainly from a US perspective, and had a fairly large focus on the holocaust, including a visit to a holocaust museum.

    As a teen, I had a class on specifically European history. In there, we learned about lot more about the rise of the nazis (though not much on Italian fascists).

    Here’s the tl;dr on what I remember learning about then:

    WWI ended with the treaty of Versailles which was not a realistic, sustainable peace. We learned about the economic trouble like hyperinflation. We learned about the beer hall putsch, and that it was effectively unpunished. We learned that Hitler then sought power through legal means by allying with a broad range of groups unhappy with the current government. As he rose to power, various elements were purged from the government. Concurrently, political violence from the stormtroopers suppressed minorities and other enemies from organizing against them. This culminated in Hitler being elected chancellor, and then the enabling act gave him ultimate power. In the night of the long knives, all the allied elements in the party were purged. After that was kristallnacht, the remilitarization of the rhineland, annexation of Austria and the sudetenland, and then finally the invasion of Poland.





  • It basically says you can’t add anything to water except for “water quality additives” and has a fuzzy definitely of water quality additive.

    403.859 Prohibited acts.—The following acts and the causing thereof are prohibited and are violations of this act: (8) The use of any additive in a public water system whichdoes not meet the definition of a water quality additive as defined in s. 403.852(19)

    And then 403.852(19) has

    “Water quality additive” means any chemical, additive, or substance that is used in a public water system for the purpose of: (a) Meeting or surpassing primary or secondary drinking water standards; (b) Preventing, reducing, or removing contaminants; or © Improving water quality.

    Bold are the additions. The “primary and secondary drinking water standards” are legally defined terms where the EPA sets limits on maximum allowable amounts of stuff in water.

    https://www.epa.gov/sdwa/how-epa-regulates-drinking-water-contaminants-documents

    Personally, I would argue that fluoride is added to water for the purpose of “improving water quality” because water that protects people’s teeth is higher quality than water that doesn’t. If I were someone from a municipality whose job was ensuring water quality, I would read this as still allowing the addition of fluoride. If anyone doesn’t like that, let them try to prove in a court that fluoridated water is lower quality.


  • based on binging Ave back before he for political

    Yeah, that’s been a disappointment to me. There are other channels that test tools like Project Farm, but he primarily tests out of the box performance, which is important, but I’d rather have a tool with 5% less performance but 2x the service life. Big Clive does teardowns of electronics, and I’m sure there are others, too.

    I think what one could do, at the very least, is some kind of federated materials/parts database. If a tool uses an ABS casing and unbranded battery cells, you know it’s not as good as something made of fiberglass reinforced nylon that has Samsung cells, and it doesn’t leave room for gaming the system beyond selectively improving parts that have been called out as low quality, which is effectively as good a response as we could hope for. It doesn’t even necessarily require expertise from people who would contribute. I’m imagining something that works like Street Complete for collecting inputs to OpenStreetMap.


  • I think about this a lot. When a company updates a design, they often don’t have “release notes” on what actually changed. Sometimes they swap out components for cheaper stuff, which they won’t tell you. Sometimes they fix some stuff that was bad from the original design, which they often won’t tell you. The only time they tell you about updates is if they are just making something presumably better, but that also doesn’t let you know for sure if parts will be compatible.

    Some brands keep the same product name, but make lots of changes, and some brands make essentially the same product, but change the name (e.g., vitamix 5200). Sometimes model numbers help, but they don’t always show you the model numbers, and oftentimes retailers have their own model number that you’d have no clue is the same. I often end up having to rely on stuff like the wattage where if it changes, you know something changed.

    I have a tool (milwaukee circular saw) that started getting an intermittent failure. When doing some reading to try to fix it, I found the schematic and parts list for replacement parts (Milwaukee is good about this). I then found the same list for the newest Milwaukee circular saw (i don’t remember if it was the same model number or just n+1). The only replacement part that was different between them was the switch that sits behind the trigger. Enough people must have had the same exact issue that I did that they changed parts, but you would never see that information somewhere. The issue ended up being that the switch design created arcing that fouled up the contact surfaces, so you could technically just take it apart periodically to clean them, but that was a pain, so I just sent it in to have it fixed with the new part since it was under warrantee.



  • Wow, someone actually explaining the problem correctly. I’ll also mention that part of the fix should be on the demand side. Using your home as a thermal battery can load shift HVAC needs by hours, and with a water heater, it works even better. That’s not even talking about all the other things that could be scheduled like washer/dryers, dish washers, EV charging, etc.-

    the real economies of scale come when you have a large open field.

    And before anyone bothers you about the impact of turning fields into solar farms, I’ll add that we (the US) already have more farmland dedicated to energy production (ethanol corn) than would be necessary to provide our whole electricity demand.