Aw, man. Did you go and insult the Dendy?

Samurai.

Ninjas.

I had one on my wrist just to spite them throughout much of my school career.

I don’t consider anything like this a “surge protector,” just a power strip.

Any equipment I actually give a rat’s ass about in that respect is connected to a UPS anyhow.

This is almost real.

https://www.amazon.com/SUPERDANNY-Protector-Outlets-Charging-Extension/dp/B08Z2ZKVXX

Now that I know this, uh, I might be about to buy one.

I would say dry the shit out of those old filaments, and then send it.

You’ve already invested in them. The only thing you have left to waste now is your time.

That should tell you exactly why worrying about UV is a mug’s game. This is going to be an issue with all polymers, even tough old polycarbonate.

You could probably improve matters by clearcoating your objects after printing. The stuff used on car headlights after polishing is specifically for this purpose, and I believe Krylon makes an “arts and crafts” oriented clear coat that’s also billed specifically as UV protective and is probably cheaper.

PETG is probably the way to go.

Honestly PLA would probably work just fine for this application as well. It’s not like the things are going to be enduring any mechanical load or high temperatures.

Cops: “We have a firehose!”

No, this is a fire hose.

Is that apostrophe there to boost engagement via griping about it in the comments?

This is pretty accurate, to be honest.

Why does the “party of small government” think marriage and divorce are any part of the government’s business in the first place?

Oh. Right.

That looks like a ludicrously bad shop job. Also, Whirlpool appliance boxes are not printed in color like that.

And for anyone wondering, practically all of Whirlpool (and all the other “American” brands) refrigerators are made in Mexico. Just saying.

The two outlets could be on different circuits, if for example one of them is connected to a switch on a lighting circuit.

While this is technically possible by cutting the bus bars linking the upper and lower sockets, this is a duplex outlet and by default both sockets are internally connected. It’s fantastically unlikely anyone would go out of their way to create the setup you described, which would also require by code for both circuits to be connected to a linked breaker so that if one is overloaded both circuits are tripped. Making one of the outlets switched would also create an extremely confusing situation for the user or building owner, which would inevitably result in a never-ending bitch session at whoever installed it in the first place, e.g. every time the cleaning crew plugs in their vacuum cleaner and this outlet “randomly doesn’t work sometimes.”

But then, if someone is running around with a ready-made double male mains cable in your building, all bets are probably already off.

This would be perfectly safe provided nobody unplugged it.

Wired correctly this would just join the two hots together, the two grounds together, and the two neutrals together which is how they are already connected inside the outlet anyway, electrically speaking. But that’d only last right up until someone unplugged one end of it and touched the live prongs.

My local hardware store has one of these signs. I managed a different hardware store about a decade and a half ago, and I also made a very similar one. (Mine was nicer, and routered out of a scrap piece of plywood.)

You would be amazed at the number of times we’d get asked that question. Typically it involved a story along the lines of, “Well, my wife started putting up her end of the Christmas lights at one side of the house, and I started putting up my end at the other side of the house, and we met in the middle, and…”

…This is just normal basic business economics.

Your retail price is not predicated on what you paid to produce or obtain the product, it’s based on what you expect to have to pay to produce or procure the next one.

And watch the inevitable national scale strikes and protests bring the supply chain to a halt.

This is the part that is unlikely to happen. If past experience is any judge, the GOP’s propaganda machine will successfully shift the blame yet again, and morons will wholeheartedly believe that the solution to our problems is that the fuckheads aren’t being authoritarian enough, and we need to crack down harder on [insert bogeyman here].

2.) Consumer apathy. By which I mean consumers not giving a shit and consistently buying the cheapest garbage possible without regard for the long term cost.

This has some validity, but it is not as simple as just saying, “American consumers are stupid” and having done with it.

Quite a few shoppers, possibly even the majority, are living paycheck-to-paycheck and cannot afford anything other than whatever the cheapest thing on the shelf is. They are barred from making sound long-term purchasing decisions because they don’t bring in enough income to afford the superior product, even if they wanted to. It’s a case of, buy what they can afford regardless of low quality, or nothing. This is the real life version of the Vimes’ Boots Economic Theory.

I will also point out that a huge portion of spending by individual Americans is on perishable commodity goods with largely inelastic demand, the purchasing of which cannot be put off. In plain English, that’s food and fuel. I will also point out that these are two categories that are to many decimal places absolutely not tied to Chinese importation in any way whatsoever (in fact, the vast majority of food sold in America is grown and packed in America, and when you take prepared foods into account that number rises to near as makes no difference to 100%) so we automatically know that any supposed “tariff” increases on these products are in reality just a bullshit profit grab by retailers and/or Kraft-Heinz or Nabisco or whoever the fuck.

Yeah, well, this dickbird is already in and our chances of ever being able to legitimately get rid of him are, alas, extremely remote.

So this is only a problem in his own petty little smooth brain. And yet.