The clueless people are out there among us
The clueless people are out there among us
136 comments
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Coming soon:
What do you mean my US dollars aren't accepted at any big intl. tourist locations anymore... I have to actually exchange them?
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At the risk of being that idiot …..
I’m still annoyed at crossing a border over an international bridge and having to exchange currency to pay the toll. There’s a good argument that situation should support both currencies at that border.
And of course the currency exchange at that toll did not allow exchanging the amount of the toll. Scammy ripoff of people trying to cross forcing them to exchange larger amounts than they need
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People like this think Trump is a genius
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I know it’s difficult to tell online, but I read that as a joke post. Not serious. But it’s better for others to make fun of others for being clueless I guess.
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Yeah. It always strikes me as bizarre how many people online see something that would only be satire in a sane world and completely assume it's serious. They have no doubts. Never occurred to them it might be a joke...
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Damn Poe’s Law
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This is all about standard issues.
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I live in a country with two plug types and actually have to use a fuckload of converters
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US used to be like that too. When polarized plugs first became a thing, they wouldn’t fit into older non-polarized outlets. It took decades for all those to be replaced and I’m sure they’re still out there. Somewhere
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that sounds like hell lmao where
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And these people vote...
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I think British style plugs are the best despite their bulkiness. For one they are easily fixed and are designed to be so.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about watch this: https://youtu.be/COWlYUvzgZI
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If you want a bulky replaceable plug, you can get those at any hardware store. Meanwhile I’ll take the smaller more reliable, more durable and waterproof molded plastic plug
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I'll for repairability but the plug isn't usually what breaks.
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idk i think our aussie plugs are a good middle ground: they’re about mid way between UK and US in size, are not reversible, don’t have a fuse (but laws govern the type of current things can handle: extension cords MUST be 10A which covers a standard 10A home circuit - i believe there’s some extra built into the rating too), power boards the same, and have a 10A safety switch built into them which prevents daisy chaining over the current just like the fuse
repairability probably not so good, buuuuut i’ve never had a cable break so maybe we do something different with the construction that solves that need?
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No-one going to mention that they said countries and named two continents?
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Because it reads like this:
“In other countries, like [those in] Europe or South America”.
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I didn't realize because I am too used to it.
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exhales
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Thailand has really cool plugs. they're shaped so they can fit European or American outlets, quite often. I rarely needed an adapter when I was there
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I mean makes sense, there is a big Chunk of population in the USA who don't have the means and opportunity to travel abroad and get used to the other electrical outlets in other countries.
Hell I think 30% of the adults in there haven't ever been abroad once on their lifetime.
Understandably, it's going to baffle more than one person who gets shared those travel experiences from traveling acquaintances
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Not do we need a "special adapter" but a converter as well, as Households in the US use 110V opposed to the usual 230V.
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Oh this gets stranger.
It's usually 120v, but I'm not going to split hairs over 10v.
So, 120v is not a voltage that is delivered from the grid... Technically speaking. Each home is given one circuit of 240v, which is usually part of one leg of a three phase, coming off of the Transformers... 120v is there because they center-tap the transformer. This halves the voltage by consequence. Inside the house the circuits are generally laid out to try to balance the load between each half of the 240v phase.
The idea is that two 120v loads, put in series, will total 240v. So power will ideally go from L1 to a 120v load, to "neutral", then over to another 120v load, then finally back on L2.
More or Less.
120v is basically just half of what you should be loading the system with.
The center tap neutral from the transformer is to collect any load imbalance between L1 and L2 to allow for the two "sides" of the phase to be out of balance and still work.
The US "plug" ( aka receptacle ) is a NEMA 5-15R, or NEMA 5-20R (for 20A); these are designed for 120v operation using the half phase described above. Of course, you can mis-wire it and make all kinds of dangerous abominations if you so choose. There is, however, a less known NEMA 6-15R and NEMA 6-20R that is basically the same, but for 240v operation, replacing the neutral wire with L2 instead (and 15/20A respectively).
So it is entirely possible to have 240v outlets in a North American home, while still being compliant with code.
It's actually really fascinating information when your dig into it.
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For most things people bring on vacation it wouldn’t be a problem since chargers and power supplies can run on multiple voltages. It’s for things like hairdryers where you need converter. Since they are calibrated for a specific voltage to create heat. Though you could probably run them at half settings on the double voltage.
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It's less of a problem nowadays where most things have switching power supplies that can handle either just fine
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Oh don't worry about that, just plug in your 110V appliances and watch them run twice as fast
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When I was 17 my father brought back a stereo from Japan. I was too eager to use it and plugged that directly to 220. It worked for a glorious 2 minutes. We got it working again after we replaced the transformer. Still have it and it still works fine to this day. Learned a lesson too!
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Houses in the US generally have 220v too but not at ordinary wall outlets
There's a technology connections video on it if you're interested in the specifics
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Yes and in Europe houses generally have 400V too but not at ordinary wall outlets
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A few years ago there was the possibility of me moving to the US from Germany and if I would have bought a house there, I would probably have installed additional Schuko-outlets all over the place.
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There's a technology connections video on it if you're interested in the specifics
Exactly :)
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Why?
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"I don't have an accent...YOU have an accent!!"
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I dated someone who in earnest believed she has no accent. She didn't understand what could be wrong about that.
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I moved to California last year from Oklahoma. Occasionally I will say something about moving from Oklahoma and people are like, "oh that makes sense, you have a Midwestern accent sometimes". We all sound normal to ourselves but everyone has an accent. Like the way California people say their O's.
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So, I'm from Seattle, basically, and for the longest time I thought no, I do not have an accent.
Then I learned that the reason I thought that was because well, the accent I have is basically the least distinct from the 'General American English' or 'Region Indistinct American' accent, out of all other regional accents....
With that 'General American' accent being what nationwide newscasters, voice actors and movie stars either developed on their own, or were trained into, for being easily intelligible to any other American accent/dialect speaker, or as just sort of a rounded approximation of 'American', with no specified regionality to the character.
Thats not to say the PNW or Cali or just general US West accents are all exactly the same as 'General American'... they are not... its just that they are the least difficult to understand from a general audience perspective out of other regional US accents/dialects... or at least that is the explanation I've heard.
As I am aware, the main difference between PNW/Cali English and other US regions is that we have completed the cot-caught merger. Absolutely no difference in pronunciation, the verb sounds are the same... whereas in much of the rest of the US, these are different, distinct vowel sounds. We just use the 'cot' pronounciation for both.
Bot cot thot slot thought caught fraught not spot dot.
All the same. No rolling or bending of the first vowel into the u to make a more complex vowel sound, all just 'bot' or 'dot'.
That and pop vs soda vs coke.
For whatever reason, I usually say soda, but that did make me an oddball of most people around me near Seattle saying 'pop'... but a lot of other places in the US use soda, but also a lot of other places use 'coke' to refer to any ... soft drink... which confuses and aggrevates my Autistic brain lol.
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There are a few things that I remember being distinct to Californian accents/dialects as compared to Seattle:
One is the rising tone at the end of the sentence... thing.
I always called this a valley girl accent, and this is because no one I knew as a kid spoke that way... unless their family had recently moved north, from Cali.
Now though, it is more common generally in the PNW, at least in my own experience.... but also that could literally be because a lot of Californians have migrated north.
Another silly, but super easy tell someone isn't from Seattle: Their accent may be essentially indistinguishable from a PNW accent... but they always, always refer to I-5, as 'the 5'... instead of 'eye-five'.
No one born and raised near Seattle does this.
I-5 is the main highway that goes all the way down from Vancouver BC, through Seattle, Portland, San Fran, LA, and runs through all of those cities, so its a major reference point of conversation in all those places.
And yeah, the regional vocab difference for how people refer to it is an example of a difference.
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Midwesterners are the only people I've ever met who don't think they have an accent. And I'm like "you have a midwest accent." They're stunned because to them it's just a "normal" accent, and they know it must be so because it's what the TV man talks like. Obviously I know midwesterners who know they have an accent and the TV man is trained to speak that way. But everyone else I meet and know knows their own accent and can recognize variations of it. They're not so conscious of how they make their accent happen, obviously, since it is their own. But they know they sound different from other people
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Like the way California people say their O’s
As a Canadian, it's all I can hear when they speak.
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I have a hard time understanding the people in a friends village and he lives 50km away
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Relevant exchange from Suicide Squad (the good one with Idris Elba and Flula, not the bad one with Will Smith and Jared Leto)
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Would be great if an equally clueless European followed up with
"So I visited your country and remembered seeing this post but when I got there, none of my stuff would fit in your outlets. What the fuck?"
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One of worlds longest running experiments is when an european tourist visited america and tried to boil water using a kettle and a travel adapter.
The paper published on the experiment noted that water finally reached temperatures of 63c in 2017.
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Take the adapter off, moron.
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Someone from Germany or France or one of the other States should do that to take the piss.
/s
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I mean, they're right. It does sound really stupid
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We simply use travel adapters.
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Regardless of where you are, can we all agree that no one's really perfected the electrical outlet yet?
NA plugs make contact without being fully seated, and can leave their live and neutral pins exposed. Worn outlets just let plugs fall out of them (I have 3 or so outlets in my apartment that are borderline unusable because of this).
British plugs are bulky and turn into caltrops when dropped on the floor.
European plugs have the same problem. And you only get like, one outlet per receptacle? Guess you're shit out of luck if you wanna plug anything else in the same spot.
Most of the rest of the world just copied Europe or the UK.
I like Denmark's plug though. Cute lil smiley face.
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England perfected it
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Euro plugs are perfect. They connect well, have no live metal exposed, power strips are safe, it can handle 230V Without a problem. They are being copied everywhere because they are well designed.
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I do prefer English plugs. Euro can wear out or just not hold in as well if they're cheaply made. Never ever had that issue with English ones.
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I think the Swiss have the best Europlug-based system. Their three-conductor plugs have the same footprint as basic Europlugs, which makes for very dense plug arrangements. Unlike e.g. the German Schuko plug they only fit in one orientation so you get no polarity issues.
It's pretty neat.
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Couldn't they've made it in a smaller form factor?
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European plugs have the same problem. And you only get like, one outlet per receptacle? Guess you're shit out of luck if you wanna plug anything else in the same spot.
The standard amount of outlets per receptacle here (Sweden) is two. Maybe in very old houses it would be only one, but that's rare. If you run into that, there are splitters that make one into two, you don't need to have an extender to split it.
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I don't think it's fair to judge plugs by how they behave when dropped on the floor (unless they're exposing live wires). Do you often have a lot of loose plugs lying around? If you find yourself unplugging things a lot to turn them off, you may be interested to hear the switch was invented not long after the light bulb for exactly this reason.
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If you find yourself unplugging things a lot to turn them off, you may be interested to hear the switch was invented not long after the light bulb for exactly this reason.
- As if that's the only reason you'd ever unplug something.
- Vampire loads. Turns out, most things don't completely turn off anymore. Yes, it adds up.
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I like Denmark's plug though. Cute lil smiley face.
Don't let that fool you, it hides a dark secret
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i like the compactness of this triple-plug design used for Type-J, used in switzerland and lichtenstein, although it missed some other points (no insulated pins, no on-off switch, etc)
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Most connectors I have use partially insulated live/neutral. Ground is optional and completely uninsulated where it's present for safety.
Also, recessed receptacles hide the most dangerous parts. -
Cables going in 3 directions? Who can live at that speed?
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The on/off switch always struck me as odd. Like, in a recessed plug such as this where the male prongs have a bit of insulation to them, are they really that worried about a tiny arc that might occur when someone forgets to turn off the device? Like it would make more sense to have a limit switch built into the socket that activates on insertion and deactivates on removal. And even then, with our caveman sockets in the US, a small arc isn't the end of the world, you just know not to have your fingers near the shiny bits.
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UK plug for sure is amazing, the caltrops is just to get you ready for standing on Lego.
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Does NA not have insulated pins? Where a half inch of so of the pin nearest the plug head is insulated so when plugging in the exposed part of the pin is inside the hole before the pin makes contact with live power?
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Lol, no.
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It's a right of passage for a kid to learn what a 120 volt shock feels like if they're careless in unplugging something. One pin is just an unforgettable sensation, while both will knock you down. The real mystery is why code requires the outlets installed upside down. Technology Connections did at least one video on the differences of outlets in the world, and his point was that if the ground pin was above the other two, something falling on a partially exposed plug would rest on the harmless ground and not what it can do, short out the two live pins. But then we wouldn't get the cute faces, so...
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that's cute. nah tho. the pins are just… out there. ready to kill you
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It does not. Some devices may have that on their plugs, but it's certainly not standard.
One night when I was 14, I tried to plug in my phone charger beside my bed in the dark and was accidentally touching one of the pins when it made contact.
Fortunately, I wasn't completing the circuit and I was electrically isolated laying on my bed, so I didn't actually get shocked. But I did feel a buzz in my finger like you get from those prank toys that shock the victim. That's a sensation I will never forget.
Not defending our plugs at all.
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AU outlets sound pretty good by comparison. I'm sure there are improvements to be made, but I never have any of those issues.
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UK plugs seem to have a few good design details.
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My only problem is it’s difficult to plug them in blind because not all power boards and outlets have the ground pin depression to feel for
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The Brazilian plug has none of those problems...
Also, what European plug are you talking about? There are quite a few models there.
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re: european outlets number: we usually just get an extender with multiple ports, i have 5 of those in my small flat
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So do we. But we don't need as many of them, usually just for areas with a lot of electronics like entertainment centers or computer desks.
US electric code requires an outlet like every 6-8 feet (2m) along a wall so you shouldn't _need_ to string extension cords everywhere. For the most part, it works pretty well. I have 5 outlets alone in my 12x12ft (3.6x3.6m) bedroom.
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Brazil's "new" plug (two decades maybe) is pretty good. Doesn't have any of the problems you mentioned. It's similar to one used by a few other countries around Europe.
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The Type I plug was developed by the US government but blocked in Congress during the FDR administration by the Republicans and southern Democrats on the basis that it was a change from the multiple different outlets being used at the time. The 3 core plug didn't become standard until 1965.
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Average American voter?
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They were right.
It does sound really stupid.
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There are even converters that will switch single phase 120 to 3 phase 240
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That's a "converter" in the same way an ejection seat is "a chair".
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No need for me to think about it. I own such a converter. Had to get it to power a chinese-made 02 generator that did not have a switch to go to single 110
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136 comments