We used to be. The rules changed about 10 years ago.

I’d rather have 120v wiring I can do myself than 240v wiring that I have to pay someone $hundreds just to replace a light switch.

A lot of big appliances require higher power. Dishwashers, clothes dryers, fridges.

Here in US dishwashers and fridges run on <1500w. A fridge should only use a few hundred watts tops unless it’s horribly inefficient. A dishwasher needs power for the heating element but ours do okay on 1500w, although yours probably heat up faster. We use a different plug for clothes dryers, usually a NEMA 10-30 or NEMA 14-30 (30A at 240v), sometimes NEMA 14-50 (50A at 240v) for really big stuff like EV chargers.
Our power is split phase (two 120v legs, 180° out of phase, so either phase against neutral/ground is 120v, phase A against phase B is 240v). So with those plugs you either get both legs and ground or both legs plus neutral plus ground.

Some powers tools, drill press, plainer

Almost all US power tools run on 120v 15A.
There’s a few really big ones, mostly designed for professional shops, that need some flavor of 240v, usually with a NEMA 6-15 outlet (like normal US outlet but pins are horizontal rather than vertical). These outlets are uncommon outside of wood shops.

I never worry about load splitting,.

The only time I’ve ever even considered this is a. charging my Tesla on 120v, or b. running a space heater and a hair dryer at the same time in the bathroom. :)

Bottom line- yeah NZ system has higher power density but I don’t think the benefits outweigh the loss of ability to work on it yourself.

Okay but that’s more talking about the benefit of a 240v system. The question here was the benefit of the giant UK plug. Personally I would argue that 240v to every receptacle is not a major benefit, because very few devices require 3kw+. And in exchange you get a somewhat more hazardous system.
I am curious if homeowners in NZ are allowed to work on their own wiring? Here in the US you are…

Your understanding is correct. It’s actually a very simple calculation: volts x amps = watts. Watts is the amount of total work done. So to use a water pipe analogy, imagine you have a pressure washer. Volts is the pressure in PSI. Amps in the flow rate in gallons per minute. Watts is how quickly it cleans your sidewalk. Thus, the 500 PSI pressure washer that can put out 2 gallons per minute does about the same amount of cleaning as the 1,000 PSI pressure washer that puts out one gallon per minute. However, as long as the hose can withstand the pressure, pushing out 2 gallons per minute requires a larger diameter hose.

It’s the same way with wiring. The capacity of a wire is measured in amps. So if a device needs say 1200 watts, feeding it was 240v instead of 120v means you can use thinner wires everywhere. Including in the transformer that powers it.

However, this type of gain only really makes a big difference when you get into very high power consumption devices. An electric kettle that takes 1500 w, in the US you are almost maxing out a single 15 amp outlet. In the UK the same kettle is using less than half of the outlets capacity. (Of course they just make a kettle that has twice as much output, because the Brits don’t want to wait for their tea). Amusingly, that 3 kilowatt tea kettle is one of the only places where you get a real perceptible advantage from a 240v system.

… How is that the case? You’re multiple loads end up with a cubic foot of plugs and receptacles. Like imagine I want to plug in a computer, two monitors, a printer, a desk lamp, a cell phone charger, and a laptop plug. None of these devices use more than 100 watts. In UK you need seven of those ridiculous giant plugs for all this. Even with a power strip it would be physically huge.

In the US the power strip that would run all that stuff is barely a foot long.

I have used power strips all my life and never once has one caught fire.

American here. I may be in the minority, but I think this plug design is absolutely stupid. I get that it has safety features, that you can put a fuse in the plug, that the outlets have switches, etc etc etc. But it is absolutely fucking huge. Ridiculously huge. And anywhere that you have multiple devices you want to plug in, it is totally impractical because it is so fucking huge.

The fact is, very very few devices need 240v 13A. Yes I get that it is useful to have this ridiculous amount of power so you can boil your tea kettle in 35 seconds, but other than that very few household appliances need anywhere near that amount of power.

So the result is a cell phone charger, which at the very outside is pulling 20 or 30 watts, is plugged into this giant ridiculous monstrosity capable of supplying 3000+ watts. And in reality the only appliances that use anywhere near that much are cooking appliances and space heaters.

Meanwhile the US NEMA 5-15 is good for 1800 watts, plenty to run almost every household appliance, with the longer ground pin and an appropriate outlet it supports tamper resistance shutters, the thin flat pins resist the insertion of foreign objects into the outlet, and you can fit many outlets in a small space.
And it doesn’t destroy your foot when you step on it, as a nice bonus.

There’s a flip side to that. drone costs whatever, missile costs 40 times that, but if the missile hits its target you lose 400 times that or more

So, the AI chief dude is saying he doesn’t understand why people don’t want AI… do they even read their own docs?

Here’s what I see happening, probably very soon when this AI thing is released: Some malware developer writes an ‘AI installer’ that activates this thing, sets itself up as an AI on your PC, passes through whatever query you have to free ChatGPT, and then uses AI access to steal all your stuff or track you. Because if the AI model has access to your data, so does any support code related to that model.

Exactly. If this is stealing from shareholders to pay customers, it’s because the original fees were stealing from customers to pay shareholders.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/corneliawalther/2025/06/09/intelligence-illusion-what-apples-ai-study-reveals-about-reasoning/

https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-thinking

Exactly. And longer battery life. A drone can only lift a certain amount, and the more you lift the more power you need to keep it in the air. Double the weight and you double the power consumption or more of every minute the drone is airborne.
This is just basically an RC truck. No power is used to keep it in the air, only power is used to move it along the ground. Double the weight and you only add 10 to 25% more power consumption, and still it only uses power when moving.
The result is with something like this you can carry a much heavier explosive or fragmentation shell. It won’t move as fast as a drone, But it will make a bigger boom when it arrives.

There was actually a paper recently that tested this exactly.

They made up a new type of problem that had never before been published. They wrote a paper explaining the problem and how to solve it.

They fed this to an AI, not as training material but as part of the query, and then fed it the same problem but with different inputs and asked it to solve it.
It could not.

AGI would be able to learn from the queries given to it, not just its training base data.

And if he’s flying at Mach 2, there’s probably a fuckton of wind noise against the helmet. Which means he’s probably listening way too loud. Same problem.

It’s a bunch of crap. In fact, modern headphones can if anything help protect your hearing.

The thing that damages your hearing is sound level. Doesn’t matter if it’s from a speaker to inches away or 20 ft away, what matters is the sound pressure level that arrives at your eardrum.

The problem with headphones is many people turn them up to drown out outside noise. To get it loud enough that you actually can’t hear the surrounding noise, it’s pretty loud. That is what causes hearing damage, not the fact that it is headphones. It would be no different if you put speakers and turned it up loud enough to drown out the noise.

I say modern headphones can help because a lot of modern headphones have noise canceling. Thus, reducing the ambient noise level means you don’t feel a need to turn up the volume as high.

Yeah but think that through. If you want to get rid of Dad’s gun, you have to get rid of pretty much every Dad’s gun. And that has significant effects beyond just school shootings. It means every parent who used a gun to defend their family from harm now is defenseless.
Every year there are about 10,000 to 15,000 firearm homicides. 100 or less are due to terrorism or spree shooting. In contrast, per Wikipedia, there are somewhere between 67,000 and a few million defensive gun uses each year. Most are where a criminal sees a gun and runs away. Take away Dad’s gun and you get rid of almost all those defensive uses. And maybe you stop some or most of the 100 spree shooting deaths. Seems to me like doing more harm than good.

Why would you think that? That a psychopath who often spends weeks or months planning to kill people is going to be dissuaded by that, when there are black market ways to purchase or construct a firearm of their own?

Evil men will always find the tools they need to dispense their evil.

Actually school shootings is a good reason for more guns not less. There have been a number of would-be mass shootings that have been stopped by armed Good Samaritans, either off duty police or civilians with carry permits. Much like overall crime, this is a distributed problem and you don’t usually fix distributed problems with centralized solutions.

The reason you shouldn’t been weapons is very simple - you can’t.

Look at alcohol prohibition in the early 1900s. Virtually all alcohol production, storage, transport, sales, and consumption were banned. And what happened? Did people stop drinking? Did crime go down as predicted? No, quite the opposite. Crime went up because criminals now had a market for illegal goods. Prohibition was where organized crime got its real foothold in the USA.

Same thing is true with weapons. If you ban weapons, all of the law-abiding people will turn theirs in, and the criminals will not. This does not improve public safety. In fact it reduces public safety because now the criminals have weapons and the means to acquire more weapons, whereas the law abiding citizens are unarmed.

Your sophomoric hostility doesn’t actually refute any of my points.

I am guessing you are from the US. Probably have never traveled abroad. Different countries sometimes have different cultures.

If you had money and could afford toilet paper, you wouldn’t go down to the public bathroom and empty the stalls to save $2. In other cultures some people would go and steal every roll from every stall, not because they don’t have $2, but because they can and it doesn’t bother them that people who use the bathroom won’t have toilet paper.

Go to a country like Norway or Japan and look at the infrastructure. Things are immaculate because the overall population puts effort into keeping things nice. There is very little litter for example. When it comes to litter, US isn’t nearly as good. We have signs on the highway reminding people not to litter. And it’s well understood that in most public places if there aren’t garbage cans everywhere that litter will be the result, people won’t hang on to their garbage to avoid littering. Make it inconvenient not to litter and the trash goes on the ground. Go to New York City and read the paper, every other week there is a fire on the subway tracks caused by garbage people throw off the platform hitting the electric rail and causing sparks.

Point is simple, don’t assume that every other country is exactly like the experience you have had in your country.

I can understand that. Doesn’t make it okay to steal from the public stall though. That’s not stealing from some big faceless business, that’s stealing from your fellow human who will then come to the stall and have no toilet paper.

Easy words for somebody who has never experienced a stall without any toilet paper