US water softeners are usually only on the hot pipe. They tend to add sodium to the water, and it’s not recommended to make it your primary drinking water source.

Southern US is the best place for developing new methods to kill yourself in delightful ways.

You get 3-phase in the US if you live in a large apartment complex. Especially if it has an elevator. Since this combines to get 208V, the math works out to making your 240V stove only 75% of what it should be.

For residential use, split phase is fine. We just run the two legs to get 240V on the specific things that need it. That’s generally electric stoves, water heaters, AC unit, electric dryer, and more recently, EV chargers. 3-phase is great when you’re driving something that spins with a high draw, and of those, only the AC unit does that (electric dryers spend most of their electricity heating, not spinning).

As a combo tea/coffee drink, it tastes horrible. Nobody wants tea flavored coffee or coffee flavored tea. Although you usually don’t get tea flavored coffee in those hotel drip makers, but only because the grounds they use are shit tier quality and taste too burnt to even get tea flavors.

Have to drop the US number by 20% for continuous loads like a kettle would be.

That said, US homes built in the last 40 years or so tend to have a lot of separate circuits in the kitchen. My house has one for the fridge, one for the disposal, one for the dishwasher, one for the lights that’s shared with lights in adjacent areas, stove has its own 240V outlet, and then one for all the other plugs. If I ran the microwave and a kettle and a mixer all at once, I’d probably still trip it, but that’s a lot of multitasking going on.

Zojirushi. They last. Since it’s BIFL, I don’t see the extra cost as a big problem. That’s what you deal with when you BIFL.

Microwave magnetron efficiency is around 65%. Since a kettle turns electricity directly into heat, it’s basically 100% efficient.

A caveat is that microwaves will heat water directly and won’t lose as much to its surroundings. This is similar to why induction stoves are more efficient; they’re less efficient on paper than direct electric heating or burning gas, but they heat the thing you want in a more direct way.

Even so, a microwave isn’t great for this task. If you’re short on space and don’t want even a small travel kettle, I can see why you’d take this option. Otherwise, no.

Most residential outlets in the US are going to be a 15A limit. You also have to reduce that by 20% for a continuous draw.

UK might be able to get away with the full usage because their plugs are designed to have a fuse built in. Not entirely sure on that, though.

That said, kettles are still a better option most of the time. Technology Connections has real world tests of this.

We have a Zojirushi. 120V does limit it somewhat, but it’s fine.

The water in our area of country is also hard as shit. We have undersink RO now, but before then, mineral buildup in the kettle was bad. Crusted like concrete if we didn’t stay on top of it.

And the thread is wrong about one of those. I rarely touch them for tech news.

Somehow, they actually are a good source for political news. The tech press (them and Wired) have been some of the best at covering the second Trump Admin. Possibly because it’s crawling in tech bros, and the tech press already knows how to deal with them.

A racist old drunk white shithead in a bar in Ohio once yelled at my wife to go back to the res. My wife barely has any native ancestry, has never lived on a reservation, and the ancestor in question was put through the boarding school program where the whole point was to erase their native identity. Their family can only guess what tribe they’re even from.

No, I don’t like Ohio very much. Too many people like that.

So most photosynthetic organisms are not limited by CO2, which is why having more CO2 in the atmosphere won’t cause plants to explode in growth. There are a few exceptions, though, and one of them is the algae that causes red tide.

Meaning, no, Florida will still be red.

Usually a dish these days rather than waveguide, but yes.

If your bank credentials can be intercepted that way, then the bank had poor security. They’re not responsible for that anymore than any other ISP.

WiFi is a specific protocol, IEEE 802.11 (with a lower case letter at the end for the version). There have long been hobbyist and commercial methods for using it with point-to-point links. There are some other wireless methods for this, like LoRa/Meshtastc, but they tend to be slower and less developed. Everyone prefers using WiFi.

So, yes, they are using WiFi in a point-to-point way. The antenna is directional to give it (potentially) several miles of range.

Now is some cringy fucker actually going to give Gates McFadden a “#1 Ghost Fucker” t-shirt at a con?

It’s also important to note that Teflon (PTFE) is used in a multitude of stuff, and there’s no easy replacement. Got a 3D printer? The tube connecting the extruder motor to the hotend is probably PTFE.

The PTFE industry isn’t going to collapse just because we all switch to different cooking pans.

Most of the followups have treated the supernatural as real. It’s never that way in the original.

Acme-brand Beyonce?