People get this wrong all the time. North America is 120V for the usual outlets, but what comes into your house is 240V split phase. You get 240V in places you want 240V, like electric stoves or clothes dryers.

Exception is apartments, especially those with elevators, which use three phase. Then you combine two legs to get 208V and your electric stove is kinda shitty.

IIRC, the UK actually teaches kids how to wire plugs properly in school for that very reason. Or at least they used to.

To add, we upgraded our house from 100A to 200A service a little while ago, and one of the companies quoted an AFCI box. Was something like $15k, compared to like $3k for a much simpler setup (which left our existing 100A box as a subpanel instead of moving everything).

Also, I run 3D printers, and apparently those tend to trip AFCI.

That’s just USB-C with a USB PD controller. Can go up to 48V.

What I’d like to see is apples-to-apples comparison of home and office safety between the different plug types. The data is sorta out there, but it’s not normalized in a way that’s convenient for comparison between countries.

On paper, yes, the North American plug is pretty bad, but will that show up in actual practice? There may be a case for changing it, but that needs a comprehensive study before going to all the effort to transition to a better design. Even if we had that study right in front of us, I can already hear conservatives complaining about Marxists electrical plugs.

Remember, all this stuff started over a century ago. The main application was electric incandescent lights, which are fine to run with only two wires.

Lots of old houses in the US still have a bunch of the Type A outlet. My first apartment did for most outlets.

Now, what’s really fun is Knob and Tube wiring, where the hot and neutral lines are separate wires. Which means they tended to be run in separate directions if it was convenient for the asshole from a century ago to run it that way.

I’ve done the rgb mod for an old NES. The PPU is on a big ground plane and just impossible to get off using a wick. Or you can, but now you’ve put so much heat into the chip that you fried it. Need a heat gun or hot plate.

Playstation SD card mod is easier than hand desoldering the NES PPU, and it involves scraping away very thin traces and soldering to them.

Stop expecting politians to be the source of change. The results will be lackluster, at best.

Yes. Since that clearly doesn’t work, what’s next?

My doctor has added a few extra checks to visits so it can be billed to the insurance company as a general checkup, and not the specific thing I came in for that would bill at a much higher rate. I appreciate him doing that, but he shouldn’t have to.

By the time the system has consolidated enough that there is little effective competition, those companies have also become so large that they can lobby for regulatory capture. It’s not zero regulation, but rather a form of regulation that solidifies their position while still providing the same shitty service they always have.

Regulation won’t work. The system is too far gone.