Category: Consumerism

In testing the new iPhone 14’s satellite SOS feature before a trip to Death Valley, where getting lost sometimes leads to death, I reached the following demo screen:

Why would dispatchers ask for your location? Can it be that the iPhone, which knows your 3D position precisely, doesn’t bother to share this with the folks who try to respond to emergencies? In other words, Apple copied all of the features of the EPIRB/PLB except the one that matters: automatically transmitting the location of the person in distress?

If so, it is great for lost hikers who happen to know exactly where they are!

For lost hikers who happen to have 5G mobile data available, Apple offers a help page on the Web that explains a complex procedure for sending one’s coordinates to people who might be able to help. An additional help page seems to contradict the demo screen:

After you’re connected, your iPhone starts a text conversation by sharing critical information like your Medical ID and emergency contact information (if you set them up), your answers to the emergency questionnaire, your location (including elevation), and your iPhone’s battery level.

So maybe the people who wrote this help page and the people who wrote the demo don’t talk to each other?

Once in Death Valley, how did the system work? Fortunately, we didn’t suffer any emergency conditions there. However, after about 2 hours away from mobile data coverage, the phone prompted me to share its location via satellite. Presumably this updated the Find My maps for those with whom I have shared location. It took about 2 minutes of holding/pointing the phone out the windshield of our rental car (the notification hit while my friend was driving).

Another recent interesting Apple user interface issue… a friend in the neighborhood put an AirTag on his dog’s collar. Every time that we walk the dogs together Apple warns me that an AirTag is following me around and do I want to disable it.

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Looking for a last-minute Christmas gift for a friend who shaves his/her/zir/their beard? Let’s examine Jeremy’s vs. Dorco, which prevailed over all competitors in my 2019 testing (see Friends weigh in on Dorco versus Gillette and Dorco Shaving Test: 7 blades good; 4 blades bad).

During the ordering process, the company deplorably references “Columbus Day” rather than Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

Fighting wokeness isn’t cheap:

At the time this order was placed, Amazon was selling a Dorco handle with 10 Pace 7 cartridges for $29.99 (free shipping for those of us in the elite inner circle of Prime membership).

What do you get? A beautiful box:

The cartridge contains six blades arranged in pairs so it initially looks like a three-blade device. The handle is about twice as heavy as Dorco’s standard handles. I have seen speculation on the Interweb that Dorco is behind Jeremy’s, but the connection system is slightly different and Dorco’s 6-blade cartridges do not arrange the blades into pairs.

Here’s the Dorco 6-blade cartridge for reference:

I set up a test where I would shave two days of growth in the shower using a new Dorco Pace 7, my favorite product from that company (see Dorco Shaving Test: 7 blades good; 4 blades bad (referenced above) and Gillette versus Dorco Shaving Test 4), on the right side and a Jeremy’s razor on the left side. Dorco has a handle with some additional freedom of movement, but for comparability I used a Dorco handle that allows the cartridge to rotate in just one axis, like the Jeremey’s handle.

Whereas the top-of-the-line Gillette (Fusion 5) v. Dorco Pace 7 test revealed subtle differences, Jeremy’s v. Dorco was not a close contest. The Jeremy’s razor was much less comfortable and it felt like it was snagging on every bristle, though ultimately it produced a similarly close shave.

Winner: the quietly competent Korean engineers at Dorco whose opinions on #MeToo, 2SLGBTQQIA+, and white patriarchy are unknown.

Jeremy’s includes some collateral material that mocks the Gillette celebration-of-transgenderism ad:

Plus some instructions:

Who wants this kit? I will be happy to mail it out, minus the one cartridge that I have used, to any reader who wishes to continue this research project.

Oh yes, speaking of beards… a Hero of Faucism in the Bellagio casino, Las Vegas, with a full beard plus simple mask:

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A story to keep in mind as we enter the season of outrageous consumerism (i.e., Christmas)…

I visited a friend who lives in a 10,000-square-foot beach house here in Florida. The core of the two-story house is open, which makes the ceiling in the living room about 25′ high. He said that he was planning to remodel the kitchen. “Why?” I asked. “This house was built only about three years ago, right?” He responded, “They put in a tiny dishwasher. They wanted something that would match the cabinet size and didn’t think about the function.” I imagined an 18″ Manhattan-style dishwasher in the kitchen, which was itself the size of a Manhattan one-bedroom apartment. After getting a good workout by opening and closing the doors on the 72″-wide wall of Sub-Zero refrigerator/freezer (each door 36″ wide), I located and opened the dishwasher. It was a non-standard Asko-brand unit in the completely standard 24″ width of an American dishwasher. His house and kitchen were so vast that the standard-size machine seemed like Derek Zoolander’s dishwasher.

It looks as though a 30-inch dishwasher was actually made for home use at one time. From Dacor:

From the reviews…

We love being able to fit lots of dishes into our pretty dishwasher; however, everything must be rinsed very well before loading and the wash time is 2 hours. We’ve had less expensive dishwashers that were more effective with less time.

Loud, Poor cleaning, Unit replaced, Still bad, Racks begin rusting in 18 months, 3 yrs the rusted racks are falling apart. 800 for bottom rack 300 for top rack. Now I have an oversized space in my cabinets. If you want to spend 3K on a dishwasher and really want greater capacity, buy 2 24″ washers, I wish I did.

And that last idea is what’s going into my friend’s new kitchen: two dishwashers.

Separately, I’m not sure why he needs so much dishwashing action. He doesn’t have more kids or more meals than moderately rich people. He doesn’t even eat breakfast. When he has a big party there are caterers. I guess one justification is that dishwashers now take more than 2 hours to run so the obvious solution of doing two loads in sequence isn’t as sensible as it was back in the 1970s.

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Everyone I know who tried the first robot vacuum cleaners eventually gave up. They held so little debris that it was just as much work to empty them as it would have been to vacuum the room with an $80 Hoover. Walls got banged up from the robot’s clumsy attempts to map rooms and avoid furniture. Delicacy prevents me from going into details, but a family dog with a stomach bug and a robot vacuum cleaner turned out to be a toxic combination in many households. (Do a web search and you will find many stories!)

Friends in Maskachusetts have been been on a renewed buying spree lately driven by, I think, the following beliefs:

• the original electric home vacuum cleaners were not marvelous labor-saving devices and their descendants (up to 114 Bidies for a decent Hoover?) are, in fact, extremely tedious to push around in a McMansion
• a battery-powered machine is always more effective at cleaning than a 114-Bidie plug-in Hoover with a 1440-watt motor
• the latest and greatest robots have better sensors and software
• their children have weak immune systems from 1.5 years of school closure and activity lockdowns and shutdowns and therefore the house must be cleaner than ever before

Although the market segment was pioneered by iRobot, an MIT spinoff, these guys have come to the consensus (“a Scientific consensus”) that the Chinese-engineered Roborock S7 MaxV Ultra is the best machine and has the best software.

They’ve sent me pictures of this dock and robot in their $2-3 million COVID-safe suburban bunkers. They take up a lot of floor space and look completely out of place. Here’s what the naked machine looks like:

(Across the top you have dirty water (post-mopping), clean water (pre-mopping), and a wastebasket for the self-emptying dust bin within the robot. The company claims this allows 3-4 days of usage before the robot’s human servant must be summoned to change out the water or empty the bin. They base this on a small footprint of 1,070 square feet.)

You wouldn’t leave a regular vacuum cleaner out where family members, guests, etc. could see it, right? The vacuum cleaner is ugly and used intermittently so it lives in a closet. These robots aren’t smart enough to open doors, so my friends are putting them where they are often visible to people trying to enjoy the house. It’s New England and the robots can’t climb stairs so a house with three living levels will have three of these cluttering the space.

I’m wondering if houses and apartments should now be designed so that a robot vacuum with dock will stay mostly out of sight. Maybe it lives in an alcove under the stairs. Perhaps there is a curtain that it can drive under (it is mostly the dock that needs to be hidden). The companies that make these devices should get together and agree on a standard for the shape and size of the alcove. Obviously the alcove needs electricity. Maybe for rich people there should also be a fresh water supply plumbed in and a drain and perhaps robots could be made that tapped into these so that the only thing that the human servant of the robot ever had to do was empty the dust bin.

I know there’s a fine line between brilliant and stupid. Which side of the line is this idea on?

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We finally moved into a house with enough counter space to experiment with a pressure cooker (Ninja brand that is a ripoff of the popular Instant Pot). Most of the recipes that I have tried called for a “quick release” of the pressure. If you don’t do this, it takes perhaps 30 minutes for the pressure to bleed off naturally and the food will be overcooked (also, it won’t save any time compared to using the stovetop or legacy oven).

If you do open the quick release valve, however, the kitchen gets filled with an aerosol spray of whatever was inside the pressure cooker. If the goal is mac and cheese on a plate, the result is aerosol milk and water filling the kitchen and settling on the surfaces.

The CDC says that anything aerosol can be defeated by wearing the simplest of cloth masks, but my experience is that Formula 409 and paper towels are required. At that point, how was any time or effort saved compared to stovetop cooking?

It seems possible that slow-cooker recipes, e.g., for stews, could be accelerated via pressure cooking even if we account for a natural dissipation of the pressure at the end.

Related:

• Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the successful asylum-seeker who waged jihad with pressure cooker bombs in Boston in 2013 (we can’t blame Putin because the Russians told us that his brother was going to wage jihad and our FBI decided that their judgment was superior)

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The local power company wants to sell us an $11/month surge protector that is sure to protect our home from a 100-million-volt lightning strike and then, because it works so well, charge an additional $6/month to clean up the damage when the surge protector fails to provide any protection:

Florida has epic thunderstorms, for which climate change can be blamed, but the lines feeding our house are underground so I don’t see why we would be vulnerable. I’m wondering if we can infer from the pricing that the surge protector is only 50 percent effective. It costs $12/month to buy electronics surge protection as pure insurance, with no hardware installed in the house. It costs $6/month additional to get this surge protection if one is already paying $11/month for the protection hardware plus insurance on the appliances that will be zapped when the protection hardware does not protect.

Having gone my whole life without suffering anything damaged by a power surge or knowing anyone personally who has lost anything electronic to a power surge, I would ordinarily map this into the “total waste of money” category, especially given our underground lines. I would also be concerned that the surge protector would fail in a way that shuts down power to the house despite no surge having occurred. A neighbor who has been here since the inception of Abacoa (2003 for this corner) has never had or heard of a surge problem.

But given that everything is out of stock forever, I’m wondering if the idea isn’t as dumb as it seems. If our KitchenAid 42″-wide built-in refrigerator failed, it would be four weeks before we could get the required two service visits plus part replacement to restore it to functioning. If we wanted to replace it, that would take months. If we wanted a new GPU card for the PC, we’d have to rob a crypto miner. Working from home makes a power surge that takes out cable modem, network switch, WiFi access points, or PCs far more destructive than if one were using a house only for sleeping and watching TV.

Readers: Has anyone ever had anything damaged by a power surge?

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In addition to six wall-mounted TVs, the previous owners of our house left with us a $2,000 Wine Enthusiast wine cooler (there is a compressor inside, not a Peltier cooler). Since this isn’t made by LG or Samsung, of course it quickly failed (it looks brand new, but is presumably at least a year old). An email to the company’s customer service department yielded no response. So I called the company and the robot said that due to COVID-19, people were working from home and therefore wouldn’t be able to answer the phone quickly. I recognize that we’re still in Year 3 of our state of emergency, but how much longer will consumers fail to consider that it is just as easy for someone at home to answer the phone as it is for someone in an office?

Separately, I think this shows what a great business it is to sell stuff to people who drink a lot of wine. The sticker on the back says it is 6 cubic feet in volume and “Made in China”. Home Depot will sell you a 7.3 cu. ft. fridge, not designed for winos, for $275. Maybe the answer is to buy Wine Enthusiast products from Costco and get support from Costco? From the Costco site:

How did the Costco customers enjoy their Wine Enthusiast fridge combined with Costco support?

• Nice looking but temperature controls and lights don’t work…out of the box!! Tried calling their warranty number but on hold for over an hour and cutoff twice.
• we ordered one and we couldn’t get it to hold the temps and the blue back lights we not working / we figured well maybe it’s defective we will order a 2nd one. The 2nd one was more trouble than the first!
• A beautiful, quiet wine refrigerator; however, the controls do not work and the lights do not work. Very disappointed.
• Beyond junk. Can’t control temperature
• Very disappointed to get this all set up in the location but then it didn’t cool and neither side got below 66 degrees. Called the manufacturer and after 2-3 minutes on the phone, they said that it was broken beyond repair.
• Stopped working after 2 weeks.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, I need to give a shout-out to Baldwin Hardware. Our front door came with a 19-year-old Baldwin Prestige Pistoria handleset. The latch wasn’t working perfectly anymore so I called them up to see if I could buy a new latch mechanism. Baldwin answered the phone quickly, did not mention their inability to get off their sofas and put down their Xbox controllers due to COVID-19, and decided that the issue would be covered under their lifetime warranty. They sent out a brand new replacement that arrived within a few days of the call.

On the third hand, maybe I should be inspired by companies like Wine Enthusiast. I can say that COVID-19 is responsible for the low quality of my blog ideas!

[What ultimately happened once I got through to Wine Enthusiast (by phone; they never did answer the email)? They said that they couldn’t look up any information regarding the refrigerator based on the serial number. There was no way for them to determine whether the fridge was within warranty, for example, so they would refuse to honor their 1-year warranty. They gave me the name of a local appliance repair service. That company came out, said that the problem was “probably with the sealed system” and that it would cost $500 to do a test of the system, which would take about two hours, and after that another $1,000+ to perform a repair. The ultimate cost to fix the $2,000 fridge would therefore be about $1,700 and they recommended against it. I called Wine Enthusiast and they suggested buying a new one from them at full retail price, plus shipping… $2,200 (no cheaper than switching to a name brand such as LG or Samsung; who sticks with Wine Enthusiast after experiencing a failure like this one?) The good news is that we will be able to free up some space in the living room because we were not passionate about wine to begin with. Because of our Massachusetts heritage, we consider (“essential” during lockdown) cannabis to be far more important. And that raises the question of when we will be able to buy a $2,000+ stainless steel refrigerator to keep cannabis at the ideal temperature for consumption.]

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Department of How I Became the World’s Most Boring Person by Buying a House…

Our middle-class mansion in Abacoa came with a 3-year-old Bosch dishwasher. The bottom rack was constantly falling off the rails built into the interior. The KitchenAid repair guy said “I can’t help you with Bosch, but call them because they may have a fix.” Sure enough, I called Bosch and they eventually answered the phone after the obligatory excuses for how COVID-19 made it impossible for anyone sitting at home to pick up the phone.

How do they describe their engineering failure to product a rack that is the correct width for the stainless steel interior, resulting in plaintive queries all over the Internet for how to fix the problem? “In some rare cases, the lower rack may disengage from the tub rails when the rack is heavily loaded.”

To their credit, they will send out an “extended lower rack wheel kit”, part number 10016657, at no charge. You snap in these wider wheels and the problem goes away.

I’m leaving this here so that people can find the solution with search engines.

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Department of How I Became the World’s Most Boring Person by Buying a House…

A couple of the doors in our 20-year-old Spanish Colonial tract house were not framed precisely vertical. Therefore, they tend to fall closed, which is more annoying than you’d expect. Our team of Czech carpenters said that fixing this would be as simple as ripping out the door frame, putting it back in, re-hanging the door, repainting, etc. Perhaps $2,000 per door.

The Internet is packed with products designed for “self-closing” of doors, but there is almost nothing available to fix a door that you want to hold open. After calling a few hinge companies, I found a Band-Aid that works well: a spring that goes through the existing hinge pin. The seller hasn’t updated his pricing for the Age of Biden so these are $6 each. A single spring was sufficient to render one door more or less neutral and two springs cleaned up a tougher case.

Hidden advantages of homeownership: While renters were learning Mandarin, writing the Great American Novel, and perfecting their golf and tennis games, I embarked on a self-education program on gravity, friction, hinges, and springs.

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