Category: Consumerism

Why aren’t there front load washing machines with the same depth as top load washing machines?

by philg

A lot of houses have closets and hallways architected to fit a standard top loading washing machine, which seems to have been roughly 27x27x44″ high. Here’s a 3.9 cu. ft. Whirlpool:

By cheating just a little, e.g., stretching the depth to 27 and 7/8″, Whirlpool can deliver a machine with a 5.2 cu. ft. drum.

It would seem obvious to build a front load washing machine with the same 27×27″ footprint, but nobody seems to do that. One of Whirlpool’s smaller front loaders is advertised as “closet-depth” and, in fact, is about 31.5″ deep. Their bigger front loaders are over 33 inches deep with the door closed. If you scale down to a “compact” front loader, as seen in Europe, the footprint is 24×24″ and capacity drops to just 1.9 cu. ft.

What’s the engineering challenge to making a front loading washer that exactly fits the footprint of a legacy washing machine and, thus, fits into an older American house as it was originally designed?

(Our house is an example of one in which 27-inch depth is the limit. The laundry room connects the family room/kitchen to the garage. A machine deeper than 27 inches will stick out beyond the door frame (top of the figure below) and obstruct access into the garage:

In fact, the only way to have 27-inch deep machines not poke into the hallway is to dig into the 4-inch drywall behind the machines, e.g., to make water and gas connections. Everything must be perfectly positioned for the machines to sit flush on the baseboard.

In other fun appliance news, an architect who redesigned our Harvard Square apartment’s kitchen notched out cabinets to precisely fit a particular LG fridge that we bought back in 2013. The fridge has French doors, which introduces another point of failure beyond a conventional side-by-side fridge or bottom-freezer fridge. The “mullion door” or “flapper door” in the middle of the French doors had a failed spring. I thought about buying a replacement, but was concerned that the notches wouldn’t work for the new fridge and also I couldn’t find any current fridges that had stainless steel sides as the old one did. Thus, it was time to think about repairing the minor problem with the 11-year-old fridge.

I was renting it out on AirBnB, couldn’t get up to Cambridge to fix it myself, and didn’t want to hassle my friend from MIT who is a mechanical genius but has his own 130-year-old 3-story wooden house to maintain. I called LG service and they offered a fixed $399 flat-rate repair fee. I gave them the model and serial number in advance and told them exactly what the problem was and what part was needed. The technician came out to the apartment, diagnosed the problem as the flapper door, and then said that no replacement part was available (the LG Parts web site showed a compatible replacement and eBay had the exact part number available from an appliance store that apparently had a lot of old stock). While monkeying with the fridge, he managed to short out the control board so the fridge went from “tough to close” to “completely dead.” The flapper door actually has an electrical connection to the control system in order to run a heater that prevents condensation from forming on the door. I then asked a series of people who answered LG’s 800 number with thick Indian accents whether I could perhaps get a refund of the $399 repair fee since they themselves acknowledged that they hadn’t repaired anything. They never simply refused to refund the money, but always said that it would be considered by some other group and that someone would get back to me. Of course, nobody ever did get back to me and LG never did issue any refund.

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Six months with the Apple Vision Pro augmented reality headset

by philg

A friend was one of the first to order and receive an Apple Vision Pro headset. He’s had it for about six months. He’s a great programmer and a sophisticated user of technology. I asked him what he’s done with the $3500 device. “I use it to watch streaming movies,” he responded. Does it have a full two hours of battery life? “I don’t know,” he said, “because I always use it plugged in.”

AR is the technology of the future and always will be? Apple claims to be the company that makes everything useful. (They’re bringing us AI next, which is upsetting when you reflect on the fact that the iPhone isn’t smart enough to correctly oriented a picture of an English-language museum sign nor can it fill out an online shopping form with the owner’s name and address, despite having seen hundreds of similar forms that all get filled in with the same info.)

Readers: Have you figured out what to do with one of these?

One possibility: ForeFlight Voyager, a free “playground for aviation enthusiasts” from the flight planning nerds who were acquired by Boeing. It includes real-time traffic. This was purportedly being demoed in the Boeing pavilion at Oshkosh, but I didn’t see anyone with the headset on. The ForeFlight folks were happy to talk about it, but didn’t offer to demonstrate it. I wonder if it is too cumbersome to get a new user into and out of a Vision Pro. Or maybe people throw up as soon as they are in the VR world?

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I got $100 for my Tesla Solar Roof and the lawyers got $1.5 million

by philg

During coronapanic I decided to save our beloved planet by paying $71,533 for a Tesla Solar Roof to sit on top of our house in Maskachusetts and provide backup power for the week or so per year that we would typically lose power. About six months later, Tesla told me that the price would be changed to $84,137 (see Tesla Solar Roof (the price is not the price)) and about six months after that they offered to install the roof for $71,533 as originally contemplated (by which point we had sold the house and escaped to the Florida Free State).

In retrospect, considering the raging changes in price that were happening in 2021 (not to be confused with “inflation”, which is a figment of conservatives’ imaginations), I’m surprised that the price bump was so small.

Apparently, there was a class action lawsuit around this debacle. Without having taken any action or signing up for anything, just this month I received a check for $100 for my role in the small drama. What did the lawyers get? $1.5 million.

I actually wish that Tesla would make a Spanish barrel tile version of its roof and then we could re-roof in Florida with their product. I’m not sure that it would be worth paying for their batteries, though, given that we lose power only for a few minutes per year. Maybe the batteries would be great during a once-every-20-years major hurricane, but $20,000 for batteries could buy a lot of hotel nights in Orlando.

(Solar gear on top of a Florida roof is an idea that frightens roofing professionals.)

Spend the $100 on a trip to Titusville, Florida to watch a SpaceX rocket launch? Or how about one of these EMF-blocking hats so that I can stop lining my own hats with aluminum foil (not a “tin foil” hat liner because those are for the paranoid)? Facebook’s AI correctly discerned that I would be a likely customer for this product, named after pioneering Scientist Michelle Faraday (maybe a “no brain fog” hat should actually be named “the Dr. Jill Biden, Ed. D. hat”?):

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Portuguese cheese and wine research

by philg

If I’m going to hold an EU passport I should probably learn something about cheese and wine. While in Portugal on this recent trip, I decided to try to put the cheeses in “10 Portuguese cheeses you must try” in front of an expert panel (includes two tasters aged 10 and under).

For Serra da Estrela, we got what the lady at the Continente hypermarket across from Gare do Oriente, the main train and bus station next to the public aquarium said was equivalent: Casa Matias SEIA‘s Quejinho de Ovelha (the same company also makes the cheese identified as “Serra da Estrela”; I think the nomenclature has to do with the precise fields in which the sheep graze). Kids rated this cheese “excellent”. Azeitão cheese is a more challenging flavor, but nonetheless rated “amazing” by the 10-year-old panelist.

El Corte Inglés is where a banker told me to shop for cheese. When I asked for Rabaçal, the ladies gave me the following:

I’m not sure that this is Rabaçal (might not even be the right milks), but it was a huge hit with the kids. It’s smooth and unchallenging. The opposite might be said of São Jorge, which was available aged 3 months, 4 months, 7 months, and 12 months. The cheese section lady recommended 4 months and that was rather sharp/sour/bitter.

The Queijo de Nisa, from a town to the east of Lisbon, is sharper and not as creamy as Quejinho de Ovelha. Nobody on our tasting panel liked it as much as the Serra da Estrela. Evora cheese: rejected by all (too sharp). Terrincho was rejected by the young tasters.

Here’s a cheese that isn’t on the “10 must try” list, but we loved it: Ovelha Amanteigado (“buttery soft sheep’s milk”?) from Serra Gerês. It was kept more or less at room temperature in a mini-market in the mountains near Portugal’s only national park. The consistency was more like a dip than a cheese. Everyone on our panel loved it. The web site referenced in the label below didn’t have any further information. It seems unlikely that this will show up at Publix or Whole Foods.

Here’s another cheese from the same area that we enjoyed at a restaurant, this time from cow milk:

And, to complete the circle, Serra Gerês goat cheese (excellent):

An expensive cheese at Pingo Doce that I didn’t love was Quinta do Olival. It’s a “cured” goat’s milk cheese that has won a lot of awards, but it tastes too smoky/sour (I don’t think it is actually smoked). The family was more positive regarding this one.

If you’re desperate and need some cheese that can be found in even the humblest of markets, Terra Nostra (from the Azores) proved mild and acceptable to the kids:

How about some wine to go with the cheese? Daily drinking in Portugal need not be costly. The typical bottle of wine for sale in a supermarket seemed to be 3-5 euros. We found 5 liters (6.7 bottles’ worth) in a name-brand box for 8 euros at a small town fruit market. If you’ll go through more than 5 liters between supermarket trips, here’s 10 liters for $11 (supermarket in Terras de Bouro, a mountain town named after the Buri people). That’s 13 bottles of wine for less than $1/bottle.

Garrafeira Estado d’Alma, the wine shop around the corner from our Lisbon hotel, recommended a 19-euro Syrah-based wine from south of Lisbon (i.e., not from the famous Douro region; apparently this entire Alentejano region produces excellent Tuscan-style wines):

I served it to a discriminating law firm partner and he pronounced it excellent. The wine merchant also said that Madeira wine lasts longer, once the bottle is open, than Port. If immigration hasn’t made the average European rich, it certainly seems to have helped the elite. I asked if it wasn’t damaging to leave a 6,800 euro bottle of Champagne in an upright position. Portugal is the world’s leading producer of cork and shouldn’t he realize that the cork could dry out and start letting air into the bottle? “You’re right,” he said, “but we’ll sell the bottle within about two weeks so it doesn’t matter.”

He was kind enough to take us (including the 8-year-old member of the panel) to the basement to see the 10,000 euro bottles:

After trying about 10 more wines during the three-week trip, I concluded that I prefer Alentejo wine to Douro wine. So does IKEA, apparently because that’s what they serve at their Michelin-starred cafe in Braga:

A mid-priced Alentejo wine that I found in Continente and enjoyed is Pêra Doce. Their “premium” wine costs about $5 in Portugal and was rated 91 points in Wine Enthusiast (I found this out after tasting their $15 “special edition” wine, which was marked down to $6, so the rating did not affect my opinion).

Even allowing for the government-limited market for imported cheese here in the Land of the Free Market (TM), I can’t figure out why Portuguese cheeses and wines aren’t widely available in the U.S. I’m guessing that there is too much fragmentation. Serra Gerês cheese is good enough to compete in the American market, but probably there isn’t enough made to supply even one U.S. state. Therefore, it would be tough to get a return on investment from educating American consumers about these superb cheeses. Murray’s in NYC carries just two Portuguese cheeses, neither of which I noticed for sale in Portugal:

(the prices have to be at least 4X what these cheeses cost in the domestic market)

I guess we also do have to factor in the import barriers imposed by our government at the behest of the dairy industry (we would call them “cronies” if we were talking about a Third World country). Given these barriers maybe it makes sense to import only those cheese with which American consumers are already familiar and willing to pay a big premium.

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Which mapping app can avoid narrow roads in Europe? And which can provide walking directions that avoid dangerous neighborhoods in the U.S.?

by philg

We used Google Maps in Portugal. It made quite a few absurdly bad routing decisions. To save a theoretical minute or two it would send our Mercedes E class sedan down roads narrower than a North Carolina dentist’s driveway. We were constantly terrified that a car would appear coming the opposite direction and that we’d be forced to stop suddenly and then back up to a rare section wide enough for two cars to pass. When shown these routes, the locals said that they would never drive along those roads for transportation despite most of them having narrower cars and better driving skills than a Floridian lulled into complacency by textbook highway engineering. Below is a segment from a suggested Google Maps route for our rental car (#2 after the first E class melted down). I don’t think that our Sixt rental agreement says anything about driving up or down stairs, but the road was definitely narrower than the car:

Where was this road, you might ask? In one of my favorite towns in Portugal: Covide!

Is there a mapping app that is smarter about getting around Europe without scraping?

Related question for the U.S.: is there an app that will calculate walking directions to avoid dangerous neighborhoods? Or calculate directions and score the walk with a danger level? This tweet from a former Googler suggests that Google will never do it:

(His/her/zir/their reasoning is that sending pedestrians via a scenic route will lead to “spatial inequality” because the nicer areas tend to be richer.)

WalkSafe seems to have the crime rate information, but I’m not sure that it will provide turn-by-turn directions to a pedestrian.

Here’s a street in front of an AirBnB that we rented in Amarante, Portugal (very pleasant town!):

(The host said to navigate to a nearby parking lot and walk the rest of the way.)

I don’t have a good illustration of a crime-ridden street in Portugal because the country is one of the safest in the world and every tourist attraction seems to be in a safe area.

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Are Miele vacuum cleaners in the U.S. a huge ripoff?

by philg

I’ve always liked Miele vacuum cleaners, but after a trip to Portugal I’m wondering if they’re massively ripping off American consumers. Here’s a Complete C3 at El Corte Inglés, a full price (to say the least!) department store in Lisbon:

It’s 359 euros, but that includes 23 percent value-added tax. So really this is perhaps a $300 vacuum cleaner. I’m not sure exactly which accessories are included, but it says “parquet” so I think that means the powered carpet device is not part of the deal.

The cheapest vaguely comparable Miele Complete C3 that I could find in the U.S. was at build.com for $839 (before tax, consistent with generally fraudulent U.S. retail tactics):

Is it time to get a distinguished Canadian economist to investigate? Here’s some of her work:

Separately, here’s another tweet from everyone’s favorite Canadian:

What would happen to a noble Gazan if he admitted that Color Me Barbra was his favorite album?

Circling back to Miele and corporate greedflation, here’s a Compact C1 Ecoline that is under $200 before tax:

It is $470 at build.com, i.e., more than 2X the price.

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Don’t expect a car to last more than 10 years or 150,000 miles

by philg

I was chatting with a senior engineer at a Detroit automaker. “We design the car to last 10 years or 150,000 miles,” he said. He explained that component manufacturers try to torture-test the components so as to meet the same standard and then the entire car is given an accelerated aging beating on a test track, e.g., with a road so bumpy that the car needs to be driven by a robot to avoid employees developing back problems. What about other car companies? “As far as I know, all of us use the same standard.”

So… don’t pay real money for an old or high mileage used car! Here’s an example of a car that is about ready for the boneyard and that will cost over $15,000 including taxes and fees:

The price for this 2012 Toyota with 204,000+ miles seems insane, but it aligns with KBB estimates in our inflation-free completely-affordable-for-the-working-class economy:

“Low Mileage”?!?

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Where’s the AI customer service dividend?

by philg

ChatGPT (launched November 2022) and similar LLMs were supposed to make customer service agents more efficient. Has this happened? From what I can tell, the opposite has occurred. If I call a company that is supposed to be providing service the inevitable greeting is “we are experiencing higher than normal call volume” (i.e., demand for service exceeds agent capacity, despite the agents now being augmented with AI). When an agent does pick up, he/she/ze/they immediately asks, “What is your phone number?” In other words, the smartest computer systems ever devised cannot use caller ID.

(If Trump gets elected this fall and then, as predicted by the New York Times and CNN, ends American democracy, I hope that he will issue a decree that companies aren’t allowed to announce “we are experiencing higher than normal call volume” more than 5 percent of the time.)

My favorite company for customer service is Hertz. They recently hit my credit card for $262.41 for a 24-hour 29-mile rental of a compact Ford Edge in El Paso. I never signed anything agreeing to pay $262 and their app was quoting $76 including all fees (I picked up the car at an FBO so there wasn’t the fully array of Hertz computer systems on site). When I called Hertz to try to figure out why they charged so much I learned that they’ve eliminated the option of talking to a human regarding any bill. A human will be happy to make a reservation, but not to answer questions about what could be a substantial credit card charge. Hertz funnels all questions about past rentals to a web form, which they say they will respond to within a few days. Of course, my first inquiry about the bill yielded no response. My second inquiry, a week later, yielded a “everything was done correctly” response. I finally pinged them on Twitter private message. They admitted that they had no signed paperwork with an agreement to pay $262 and issued a refund of about half the money.

Circling back to AI… if LLMs make customer service agents more efficient, why has Hertz needed to shut down phone customer service? And if LLMs are brilliant at handling text why isn’t Hertz able to respond to contact form inquiries quickly?

Here’s an example pitch from the AI hucksters:

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How is Intel able to sell CPUs if they’ve already told people that the current socket is obsolete?

by philg

Here’s a question at the intersection of marketing and electronics: who is buying Intel CPUs right now after Intel has told the world that they will render the current socket, and therefore all current motherboards, obsolete before the end of 2024?

“Intel’s next-gen desktop CPUs have reportedly leaked” (Tom’s Hardware):

Arrow Lake will reside on new Intel motherboards with LGA1851 sockets and 800-series chipsets. Although the upcoming socket has 9% more pins than the existing LGA1700 socket, the dimensions didn’t change, so you might be able to recycle your existing CPU cooler.

Intel hasn’t provided details on when Arrow Lake will hit the market. But we suspect it’ll be sometime in the fourth quarter of the year since AMD’s upcoming Zen 5 Ryzen processors are on track for launch before the year is over.

Especially given that AMD is not rendering its socket obsolete for another few years, I am having trouble figuring out why demand for Intel desktop CPUs, at least at the high end, doesn’t fall off a cliff.

The news about the socket is actually almost a year old at this point. A July 2023 article:

I guess it is tough to keep a secret when there are so many independent motherboard manufacturers, but shouldn’t we expect a demand collapse, massive price cuts for both CPUs and motherboards, etc. as the Arrow Lake release gets closer?

Is the explanation that anyone who cares about CPU/computer performance buys AMD? I think that Intel claims that their new chips have an onboard AI-optimized GPU.

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WaterGuru: pool monitor for a country where average IQ is falling

by philg

Average American IQ is falling (The Hill; note that this cannot be due to a massive increase in low-skill immigration from countries with a low average IQ because #Science proves that IQ is not heritable). Those who get jobs doing pool maintenance, a process that involves some chemistry, tend not to be the best and brightest within a labor pool whose overall trend is away from high intelligence.

We recently switched pool maintenance companies because our old one wasn’t answering texts and emails regarding how to recover from a coconut assault on the pool heater (cracked case; heater still works). To make sure that the new company was doing a good job, I invested in a WaterGuru Sense S2 that sits quietly in the skimmer:

Instead of buying two months of test strips from Amazon for $12 and suffering the indignity of interrupting your TV watching and Xbox-playing to put a strip in the water you pay these folks a higher price/test every day for the rest of your pool’s life. In return, you get notifications and recommendations from the app.

The new pool maintenance company sent out a young man who had only just gotten out of training. He was seemingly unable to keep the pH anywhere near where the WaterGuru thought it should be. After a few weeks, I asked him what his target was. He said that he was trying to keep the pH “above 8”. I said “Your test kit maxes out at 8. How can you target a value that is above the maximum range for your test?” This question hadn’t occurred to him, but he agreed to add some acid because the app said to do so. I asked “why does the acid bottle say the pH should be between 7.2 and 7.6?” He responded “I was trained to keep it above 8.” (I later talked to his managers who said, ‘He must have misunderstood the question because he is aware that 7.4-7.6 is the ideal range.”) If you’re trying to maintain the pool chemistry yourself, the app gives helpful recommendations and pitches for supplies to order:

The next dramatic event was that the pool monitor reported a normal level of chlorine (4.2 ppm of “free chlorine”) and the kid, based on his own test kit and I’m not sure what target chlorine level, decided to dump a bottle of chlorine into the pool (which has a continuous chlorine generator so it shouldn’t ever need a bottle). The monitor went nuts the next day, reporting chlorine at 10 ppm and only because that’s the top of its test range (an indoor pool with more than 5 ppm is illegal in Florida; the app says a good target is 3 ppm). A detail page showed the actual measurement at 13.5 ppm (24 hours after the chlorine addition). I bought some test strips at the local pool supply place and the chlorine level was somewhere between 10 and 20 ppm. I turned off the chlorine generator and the numbers came down gradually.

If you’ve created a society where humans aren’t smart it is nice to have robots like this one! (Once the chemistry is under control it is possible to reduce the frequency of the tests in order to save on the 28-day cartridges.)

Related:

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