There is a massive YouTube and Instagram industry of outright faking craft and cooking tips. They're not just bad or a stretch, they're intentionally fabricated, made at scale by TheSoul Publishing with 550 employees. That's because making cool things looking surprisingly easy goes viral way better than actual reality-grounded instructions, and for the adtech giants nothing matters except the number of clicks.
Before people realize that they can't really make a 3-layer cake in a toaster, the fakers already cash in on the views. Usually the risk of these faked craft hacks is just cut fingers and kitchen fires, but the "just grab 2000V, it's so easy!" videos take it to another level of lethality.
> Before people realize that they can't really make a 3-layer cake in a toaster
Our 12-year-old recently tried to make himself "cheese on toast" by putting both cheese and uncooked bread into the (almost brand new, upright) toaster. Aaargh!
Cue the house full of smoke, a stern reprimand, then a couple of hours of my time wasted on removing every last piece of burnt greasy cheese from inside the toaster, followed by several empty runs with it outside to let it get properly hot and burn off the last of the fatty residues.
He was, at least, quite sheepish about his learning experience.
At the risk of sounding like a salesperson, I'd like to mention a feature of basic/classic Dualit toasters - namely, the optional and elegantly simple sandwich cage. [1] The cage is designed to take two slices of bread with a filling (in my usage, always heavy on the cheese). You put this into the toaster slot, which is vertical, and safely make cheese/whatever toasties. So, your 12-year-old had the right idea, but not the right toaster.
FWIW, and now going full salesperson, Dualit toasters are low-tech and minimalist. The timer is clockwork. There is no automatic pop-up function; you can depress a lever to raise the toast during cooking to check its colour, if you like. All parts are serviceable/replaceable. I've had my bog-standard Dualit (plus two cages) for 20+ years, and so far I've not had to replace even a heating element; and this with usage at least five days a week.
Using a real oven for this is kind of a massive waste of energy. I got a smallish countertop convection oven and it's basically replaced nearly all uses I previously had for a small toaster oven and our proper mounted oven that takes 8 million years to preheat, along with a good chunk of microwave uses. The big one only gets used for really big stuff now, maybe once every few months at most.
Dunno man, mine takes less then 5 minutes to get to about 150°c. I never measured it but just activating it before I take a pizza from the freezer is enough time to get it fully preheated. It really depends on the quality of the oven i think. There isn't that much more Air to heat so the wasted energy is less then you'd intuitively expect. And regular sandwich irons take at least as much energy, because it's not an enclosed space, consequently bleeding a lot of energy into the room
Your oven is miraculous compared to every fixed oven I've ever had access to.
At any rate we're talking about toast here and an oven broiler only has one setting (usually): all the way on, so you're using as much energy as it takes to brown a steak just to crisp up a bit of bread.
It's not really about heating up the air, anyways, toasters and broilers mostly directly heat things. A toaster (or toaster oven or countertop convection) just has the elements closer so can direct more energy into the bread and less to.. everything else.
Toaster ovens and toasters are at most 1800W appliances. Typical electric oven elements are in the 3000-3500W range. If you're broiling, toaster ovens are much more efficient.
Ovens I've used take roughly 15minutes to warm to 400F (200C), regardless of if they are electric or gas.
If you apply the same anti-consumption calculation to everything in life I applaud you wholeheartedly.
That said, you can buy a toaster oven for $30 from Walmart, and that cost covers the energy, material, transportation, and labour, plus markups at each stage. If you assume a $0.10/kWh energy cost, you might have at absolute most 100kWh of energy used in manufacture. That puts the oven/toasteroven breakeven point from an energy perspective at no more than about 60 hours of heating element usage.
When I was reading the GP comment, I immediately thought of the Dualit toaster. I'm not at all affiliated with them, but I own the classic as well as this sandwich cage and I cannot recommend it enough. They are expensive, but user-serviceable parts means that everything broken can be easily replaced from the logic board to the heating elements.
I think we should support companies that not only support right to repair, but look towards quality and longevity of their products. Dualit makes the case. Bonus points that their classic series are hand built in-house!
It's a fun idea, but I must say I have discovered quite by chance that an inexpensive toaster oven is the tool for this job - as well as countless other jobs.
Not just toasting bruschetta - it's secretly a $60 patio oven, opening the door to things like baking fish mid-July without heating or smelling up the house.
This is my take. Mid 40s and I’ve never owned a toaster in my adult life, but the toaster oven gets frequent use. However I don’t make plain toast ever. I suppose if I did, especially in the AM, I’d see the appeal.
I still don't see the appeal, what's the advantage of the non-oven toaster? Maybe it is quicker or something? But the toaster oven is a timed device anyway, just run it while the water is boiling for coffee...
Upright toaster is very quick and low risk of burning even when left unattended. I my experience, that timed example falls apart unless you're right there to take it out of the oven. I don't drink coffee so have no reason to hang out in the kitchen. I'd start it then go to my room and get dressed and return to my toast on my own time. However, my toaster oven behaves like a real oven and holds heat even when the elements turn off, I'd have to do a lot of experimentation to figure out the right time/temp setting. Figuring out the desired setting on a upright is incredibly easy. Once set, it's set and forget. You just push the button, walk away, return when you want to eat your toast.
Toaster's smaller and easier to clean. Quicker to start, if only slightly. Probably faster. Wouldn't be surprised if they're more power efficient per slice of finished toast. Toaster oven, being large and having so much functionality overlap with a normal stove (and microwave, to some extent), is far less common (at least in the US) than the smaller and more focused toaster. Most two-slice toasters you can easily stuff in a drawer or cabinet. Toaster ovens demand permanent counter space.
Non-oven toaster is better at making toast. They do a more even job on both sides. Toaster ovens never quite get it right and bread placement is finicky, too close to the door and it often doesn't brown well especially in cheap models. I still use a toaster oven because it's more versatile but it IS worse at making toast.
I think it’s likely those people just don’t want toast bad enough that they’d be willing to cook it that way. Juice isn’t worth the squeeze type thing.
Meanwhile if you’re in the cohort that enjoys homemade toast, enough very infrequently, you almost immediately find value in owning even a $10 toaster.
Yeah I'm pretty confused as to why people are suggesting all toasters with super-dupe sandwich cage thingies. Why care about the orientation of your food while it is toasting?
It's easier to evenly heat a vertical slice of bread, for one. Most times I've used a toaster oven I've ended up with one side cooked much more than the other. Plus a horizontal toaster oven takes up a lot more counter/cabinet space, which is at a premium in a lot of kitchens. (I don't have a fancy toaster or fancy sandwich accessories, but I do really like the idea of multiple-use appliances.)
Generally I'm salty at people going full sales mode. But this time? I'm not even mad
Sandwich cages are the kind technological solution people in general just have something of a blind spot against. Made myself a note if I decide to buy a toaster when I move next year
Removable stainless steel tray at the bottom of the toaster. The metal panels that the toaster rests on are easily accessible too. It doesn't have a spring-loaded "pop", but rather there's a lever on the side of the toaster to lift or lower the toast.
it is closer to a panini maker that you'd think... lets call it a poor mans panini even if it isn't very cheap.
The cage is very stiff and squeezes the slices very tightly together. So get the bread thickness and filling right, and it doesn't drip much/at all, and the slices will stick together. Crusts help. So it's not unlike a dedicated panini/sandwich toaster.
It's not perfect, a dedicated device is worth it if you're going to use it a lot and/or you have the counter space.
I've been looking for a toaster that works as well as the ones made 60 years ago. And for once, a marketing page has me convinced to pry open my wallet.
But there is no link or button anywhere on the page that tells me how to buy one. :(
In the UK, you can find Dualit stuff in stores that have a kitchen appliance section (John Lewis, say). I've seen them in shops in Germany and the Czech Republic, too. Not sure where you're based, though. Mind you, there is a little shopping trolley icon at the top right corner of the page ...
They're engineered for restaurants so they're absolute overkill for any home use. Your home toaster isn't going to successfully pump out 400 slices of toast per hour.
They're engineered for home use, that's why they are sold at home depot, on amazon, and in retail outlets.
Restaurants buy proper commercial gear, from hospitality supply depots. You don't buy restaurant ovens, and gear, from amazon or home depot. A strong tell is, restaurants aren't looking for candy red, enamel coated stuff. They want stainless, and their gear is hidden away in the kitchen, and they don't want to pay a penny more for trend.
Honestly, why would you say that? There is nothing about this that is commercial.
A 30 yr parts warranty is what tells people it's actually well engineered.
Searching for "Dualit toaster" on Amazon brings up their classic line as the first result. While available in a range of colours both the four and six slice versions are advertised as "Built for commercial use." https://www.dualit.com/products/original-toasters
My aunt had the six slice version rated for 240 slices an hour when she ran a bed and breakfast. I've also seen the four slice one in smaller cafes. All in the polished stainless steel finish of course.
I want to give a shoutout to a similar but much nerdier design, which is no longer sold. Kenmore (rebadged as De'Longhi) used to make a single long-slot toaster with an adjustable width all the way out to about 2 inches. I have one. The heat element isn't amazing, and it, like the Dualit, is manual lift with a timer. But critically, you can move the toaster elements manually together or away from one another with a lever on the top of the toaster. In other toasters, the elements are fixed in position regardless of the bread width. As a result, this toaster is amazing for big thick hand-cut slices of bread. And no need for a sandwich cage at all: you can put entire hoagies in there.
The cage holds the bread slices together, creating more friction for the cheese to counter the gravitational force. So somewhat surprisingly, little if any cheese drips out.
This morning I was making toast in my cheapo toaster and was reminded of the Dualit a customer brought in last year for me to repair. The date code was 1997 and it sounded like it was the first heating element replacement it had needed in that time. I thought the one side/two side heating element switch was particularly clever.
Honestly I was just impressed that the parts were available. Most consumer-grade toasters use nearly-identical mechanisms, with zero available replacement parts (maybe a crumb tray if you're lucky).
Considering their two-slice toaster I just looked up is $300, it better have repair parts available for the next, IDK, 50 years at least, not to be a complete rip-off. I expect I'll go through a half-dozen toasters in my life, and probably won't spend that much total (inflation adjusted).
That was the same conclusion I came to. I replaced my $20 toaster from 2015 with nearly-identical $30 toaster in 2020. I had looked into a lot of options to avoid the unified toaster box mechanism, including building my own, and eventually decided that the value proposition just wasn't there (especially considering how infrequently I make toast).
Right, I'm sure it's worth it for someone who's really into toast, and I get the whole buy-it-for-life thing, but I try to be a little selective about what I go that hardcore with, and a toaster doesn't pass that test for me. Shit, that's almost a quarter of what I recently paid for an entire stove, or about half the price of the cheapest stove that store had.
Conventional toasters are so cheap it makes no sense to try to repair them. Plus they aren't built to be repaired at all. When my last one died I tried taking it apart to see what went wrong (element burned through as it turned out) and see if I could fix it, but the whole mechanism was basically as single piece put together with spot welds and rivets, and with part markup being at least 2x or 3x initial cost there would be no way repairing it would make sense. I could gripe about it being cheap junk designed to fail, but it lasted over 20 years and browned thousands of slices of bread.
If some well built toaster that won't fail costs more than 4 times what the cheap toaster does, then it probably doesn't make sense to buy it. Especially if you can't guarantee that the well built toaster will actually last a lifetime.
If it cost only 4 times as much I'd probably consider it, but 10+ is just a really hard sell unfortunately. I had to scrap a perfectly good toaster because I couldn't find a replacement for a cracked plastic part that is supposed to make or break contact in a switch and engage the electromagnet. It would still toast fine if you held down the lever, and it pained me to toss it, but I couldn't source or fabricate a safe replacement part.
I'm sure the manufacturer(s) don't want to worry about self-service causing house fires though, and it costs a lot to create, maintain, and distribute a stock of replacement parts for what ultimately is a disposable appliance. I just wish I could find a solid basic consumer/prosumer toaster in the sub-$100 range.
Replacing tiny broken plastic parts is the main reason I now own a 3D printer. Granted, a toaster is one of those places where the relatively low melting point of PLA or PETG might be an issue, but it is still very useful to be able to fabricate replacement parts that are otherwise impossible to find.
Even better is how I can redesign the replacement part so it doesn't fail in the same way next time.
In theory you want anything with a finite lifespan to not need any repairs or maintenance during its lifespan and only fail once its lifespan has been exceeded.
Repairing isn't supposed to make sense, you get the next, better iteration of the product.
In practice, products fail way too early and for easily avoidable reasons justifying the need for repairs.
A story from an academic summer camp where I used to work:
In the dining hall one morning, a teacher sees three kids putting ice cubes into the toaster. The teacher walks up to them. Two of the kids dash away, leaving the third to fend for herself.
Teacher: "What are you doing?"
Student: "Putting ice cubes into the toaster."
Teacher: "Why would you do that?"
Student: "To see what would happen."
Teacher: "Okay. Let's think about this. What happens to ice when it gets hot?"
Student: "It melts?"
Teacher: "Yes, it melts into water. And what happens when you put water into an electronic device like a toaster?"
Student: "...it goes boom?"
Teacher: "So should you put ice into the toaster?"
Student: "No."
Teacher: "Thank you."
This is a camp explicitly for gifted & talented students, by the way. They are exceptionally talented in many ways, but they're still 11 years old.
> This was a camp explicitly for gifted & talented students, I might add
Believe me, they're the worst ;)
My son recently got on the wrong train to get home from school, it was one that was "fast" that is it doesn't stop in the place where we live, his train sailed straight through our station and the next several stations, before it finally stopped somewhere and he got off.
At this point he (rightly) whipped out his phone and called me for help/advice. I checked the train timetables, figured out that although I could have gone and picked him up in the car, it would actually be quicker - and perhaps a learning experience - for him to get the train back.
So, I told him "go to platform X and get the train at HH:MM and it will bring you home".
He went to platform X, but unwisely got on the first train which arrived, which unfortunately was a delayed - fast(!) - service. So, he ended up going in the other direction on a fast train - and (again) not stopping - straight through our station, until his train eventually reached somewhere it did stop at.
At this point he phoned me in tears. I got in the car and drove there to pick him up.
We filed that under "learning experience". We seem to be having plenty of them...
When I was 10 or 11 on a camping trip I watched an adult make sopaipillas, on a propane camp stove no less. So the morning after I get home I get up at 6AM and try to recreate the recipe from memory. My mom is a bit a of health nut, so for flour I used the whole-wheat we had available and instead of a frying oil I used olive oil. I turned on the gas stove and smoked the entire 2000sqft two story house out with a grease and burning dough fire.
Even if a video I could watch online was available in the 1990s, the recipe would still fail no matter how safe the instructions were because I misunderstood the base concepts. My mom taught me safety in the kitchen afterwards.
I was that 12-year-old. My brain still works this way when tackling novel problems.
If I may suggest, instead of reprimands (I'd imagine your kid knows they'd messed up and won't try this experiment again), use these situations to teach your child about forming hypotheses, questioning assumptions and doing reality checks before starting an experiment.
Horizontal sandwich toasters are the popular kind of toasters around my parts. It can make from plain toasts to fully stuffed sandwiches and are not that hard to clean either. I guess Americans will consider them more as a grill though.
Panini presses are less common here only* because they take up more kitchen real estate than a smaller upright appliance and can be reasonably replaced by a skillet. "George Foreman grills" were in vogue for a few years in the 2000s, but I rarely ever see them now.
Same as a panini press. We've never owned a toaster, which seem weird to some. We use our panini press instead. It's a flat model without any grill marks. Easy to clean and makes perfectly even toast.
The bread dries out in our press also. You can see steam being released before it gets hot enough to smoke.
One bonus way I like to make it for myself is keep the lid open and only cook one side. This leaves one side moist and other crispy. Downside to toasting one side is it's slower due to no pressure.
Cooking both sides with lid down is quicker, but you have to be careful with the height setting you use. We know how to make it perfectly now, but when we first got it we were making squished cracker-like toast.
It's still different though, enough for me to have a preference. Maybe I didn't or can't articulate that difference or you find it a close enough substitute (or outright preference). Moisture content aside, toasting by warm air and radiant heat and toasting by direct contact with hot metal plates creates enough of a difference for me to have a preference. Minor differences in cooking methodologies can make significant changes to mouth feel and other aspects that factor into taste/flavor.
> Our 12-year-old recently tried to make himself "cheese on toast" by putting both cheese and uncooked bread into the (almost brand new, upright) toaster. Aaargh!
I know it's tempting to blame modern technological monstrosities for this nonsense, but kids were lighting toasters on fire before the internet.
Source: lit a toaster on fire, prior to the January 1983 IPv4 migration on the ARPANET (and long before I knew what any of that meant).
The "cheese on toast" anecdote was told in response to someone blaming modern technology for "outright faking craft and cooking tips". Contextually I gathered that modern technology might be part of the conversation.
That's one way to read it, but it might just be a related anecdote that the poster wanted to share. Without any explicit mention of blaming modern technology I don't think it's fair to make the assumption that the text is doing that.
Just because you respond to something doesn't mean you are either refuting it or agreeing with it.
Are people using the word toaster to refer to two different appliances in this thread? In American English a toaster is a device that holds bread vertically between heating elements. There's a similarly named device called a toaster oven which is essentially a standard electric oven that's been shrunk down to countertop size.
> a couple of hours of my time wasted on removing every last piece of burnt greasy cheese from inside the toaster
I'm not (currently) a parent, so this may be off base, but I am currently in the crunch part of the process so looking to learn:
Is there not a better opportunity for this to be a learning experience by making it a couple of hours of your kid's time to do that cleaning? I know my adult life has benefited from my parents' insistence that I clean up my own messes, and 12-year-olds are certainly capable of generating elbow grease.
Yes and no. Punishing your kid for some dumb but innocent action has the potential to make them too cautious. Additionally, they might damage the toaster because they have no experience on how to properly open and clean it and that would make things much worse. That's especially true if your kid might be neuro-divergent - e.g. kids with ADHD tend to be clumsy but cannot help it, they might be 30% behind in motor coordination. So your 12yo might have the eye-hand coordination of a 7-8yo, and I would not let a kid that age clean a toaster on their own.
IMO, the best course of action would be to not ridicule or reprimand them but explain how this wasn't the best course of action and then clean the toaster together with the kid - that way they learn how to do it and don't feel like an idiot. And you don't have to fume over what your kid did wrong but spend some time together.
Obviously, if your kid actually IS dumb and reckless, things would be different.
I certainly agree that modulating the level of supervision of the cleaning to the kid's abilities is warranted, but I still think they should be involved to the end.
I don't see it as a punishment to make the kid stick around and help with the cleanup to the extent they can; rather, it's an attempt to practice conscientious habits (if you make a mess, you stick around to see it cleaned up even if you need help to do so), in addition to the specific learning experience that some things are really hard to clean, so we should be careful in our experiments with those things.
As cleaning a toaster most likely involves sticking things into it (like a brush, maybe even a knife to scrape off the burnt stuff) and you also don't want your kids to stick stuff (especially metal) into a toaster, I'd say it's safer to skip the "elbow grease" lesson in this special case.
About ten years ago, I bought one of those small countertop toaster ovens that is roughly big enough for four pieces of bread to lie flat in it. It became the best $100 I've ever spent. We cook everything small enough to fit in it, including toast with cheese :) . We've since only used our regular full-size oven maybe half as often, because this small countertop one is so much faster and more convenient
No need for an actual toaster, although this one takes a minute or two longer. As an added bonus, my mother-in-law hates waiting that extra minute or two, so that's a big win in my book.
So drop it off at a salvage location. OP was complaining about salvaging it, like it was necessary. If you want to do is as a fun personal project, go for it, but it is wasteful of human time to salvage something that cheap rather than add it to a scrap pile for a professional salvage company to process in bulk.
As a bonus, the kid learns that if you arent careful with your items they may break and be gone. you dont waste hours of your time on something that should cost about 1 hour of your time at work max.
Edit: Agree to disagree, but my post is still a valid position to hold and im open to conversation. but sure use downvote as a dislike button - we are all familiar with where that gets us.
okay guess im an asshole. go use a salvaged toaster in your kitchen. for $20, id rather not risk burning my house down or teaching my kids to put their hands inside the toaster but to each their own
Replacing it teaches the kid that if you break something, it magically comes back like a respawn in a video game.
I'd be very tempted to work with him to help clean it; let him do much of the grunt work whilst I helped and supervised (though to be honest I wouldn't be that hard on my kid for doing this unless he had been told don't do it beforehand. I've done enough boneheaded things in my day!).
>The salvaging actually helped the learning experience immensely - shows the kid that carelessness can have lasting consequences.
If the kid was present for it. Otherwise, its very much just another "oopsie" they did that mom and dad clean up behind the scenes and they have no idea what the difference is between ruining a toaster and spilling a glass of milk.
So what would the learning experience consist of then?
> If the kid was present for it.
OP mentioned several hours of work + dry runs in the garden. Pretty hard to miss that, unless they're perpetually glued to their screens (which would be the bigger concern). PS: Also, unless you take your kid to a physical store, the new toaster will pop up even more magically than the cleaned one.
the learning experience is that the toaster they were familiar with is gone because of what they did. very simple. I guess I am the only one here that doesnt want to fuck with toaster repair. they arent worth it. they can cause fires and give electrical shocks.
honestly, the last thing i want my kid to think in that situation is that it is okay for them to put their hands in the toaster. Which they might do if they see me do it while cleaning
which is why you unplug it before working on it and make a BIG point to the kid of both hazards, and how essential it is to remove power before working on something, AND to do test runs in a safer area like outside, etc.
>>the last thing i want my kid to think in that situation is that it is okay for them to put their hands in the toaster
I'd say that you don't want them putting their hands in WHILE IT IS POWERED or HOT. Important distinction, and best started early and often. They'll see it sometime, better to have them have a context so they can tell the difference between doing the same thing when it is smart (powered down and repairing), vs Darwin Award candidate level stupid (when powered); then they can evaluate other's actions and draw the right conclusions.
If you are confident enough in your ability to convey the entire full safety message to your kid and take full responsibility for anything they do as a result of that information, then go for it. I'm just saying for $20 it isnt really worth it. I dont want my kid fucking with electronics outside the designated use-cases it was built for, period. Cheese in the toaster? item needs to be cleared by a professional again. I dont care if I feel personally competent enough to clear it myself. I have very easy and safe alternatives.
Odds are the toaster company doesnt want you mess with it either. This isnt the old days where you can just use some elbow grease and fix everything on your property. Liabilities need to be managed. Electrical items need certifications. Doing it yourself takes hours. It's just a lot of things that are unnecessary to deal with over a toaster.
If I am going to teach my kid anything about fixing electrical items it's that if it isnt working then he (or she) should unplug them and then he shouldnt touch them until certified to do so. It'll encourage them to look at the bigger picture of the problem.
Sure, as an adult we can see through red tape and feel cool about it and want to teach the same to our kid.. but it's really not worth it. Kids that are smart enough to learn the will likely experiment with new things they learn. Just because they safely unplug the item before working on it doesnt mean it's safe to plug back in afterwards.
It's totally reasonable for an individual to say "it's not worth my time and effort to fix this, I'll just replace it." Taking a moral stand against repair-and-reuse in general is weird. Some people are on a budget where replacing even a $25 toaster is not a painless expense. Some people don't like producing unnecessary waste.
And throwing it away without replacing it punishes everyone in the house for the kid's mistake.
>Taking a moral stand against repair-and-reuse in general is weird
Nowhere did I do this, and the claim is confusing because I am a supporter of repair-and-reuse in general. People are extrapolating from me saying specifically that a toaster is not worth it. Toasters cause house fires. I would always sooner replace it for $25 than salvage one.
>And throwing it away without replacing it punishes everyone in the house for the kid's mistake.
A lack of a toaster for a day or two hardly punishes anyone, and the child sees that other people can be impacted by their recklessness.
> Some people are on a budget where replacing even a $25 toaster is not a painless expense
Yeah, I am one of those people actually. I have an emergency fund that I would happily use for this 1-off incident.
What better way to teach that than have them understand if they dont respect the way something is supposed to be used, they might break it?
Could be fun to sit with them and take apart the toaster and assess it together and see if its worth cleaning or replacing and explaining why. But I wouldnt spend 2+ hours cleaning it by myself and then complaining about it
there's a lot of relevant things i could get into on it. in short though, disposable items are cheaper and despite what a lot people think - most of us are broke.
after you adjust to dealing with disposable items a lot.. you kind of grow out of the feeling that every item is special and needs to be repaired to max extent and kept for as long as it can. It feels anthropomorphic / overly sentimental to do that. the moral argument gets the curtain pulled back and there's very little substantiating it. imo, at least. Curious if you can shed better light on your moral stance here tbh. im not die-hard on this subject and would happily update my views if convinced otherwise
I respect that you have a productive hobby interest in repairing items, and for the most part I share that. But I dont see anything wrong with throwing something away that could be salvageable. Once it stops working, it is just parts and material and I now become part of the demand for toasters. What's wrong with letting toaster specialists handle toaster demand? In the time it takes me to repair a toaster, the specialists can produce 100 of them. and thanks to people like me buying from them rather than doing it myself, they remain productive members of society and get to feed themselves. And I get a couple hours back to do something else to potentially improve society or my personal life.
All that said, I do think there is a lot more we can do with waste management to better deal with disposed parts and materials, though. A lot of how we handle disposed goods is definitely wrong. we mix materials with food waste and it makes everything gross and expensive to work with. food waste really should be a hard split from everything else but maybe one day
except it isnt functional. it is covered in burnt cheese that will take hours to fix. it's a huge waste of time to clean off burnt cheese from such a tiny piece of material.
collect a bunch of similar materials from the dump and bulk clean them all into workable materials again with a pressure washer in the same amount of time.
Work an extra 2 hours, use the money to buy a new toaster, and spend the rest on food for the homeless.
the moral argument is bullshit. it's a waste of your time, and the only reason you dont think so is because you get personal enjoyment out of fixing things (i do too)
Or the other trick is to microwave the uncooked sandwich slightly (10-20 seconds) so that the cheese starts to melt and then toast it so bread and cheese both get toasty without burning.
1) toast two pieces of bread until they are dry and quite brown, this is important (to remove the water ) so that the bread does not heat up in the microwave
2) while it is toasting, cut up cheese for each slice, I use quarter inch thick 1“ x 2“ pieces, usually four per slice
3) after the bread is toasted, put them on a glass plate and butter them, then cover each with the slices of cheese
4) microwave 30s until the onset of melting
5) optional to add cold deli meat the sandwich after microwaving and combining
6) cut into fours and serve with optional dipping sauce
The dry toast and the melted cheese have a very good texture and taste and it takes about 3 minutes to make.
I make this for children often and add a bunch more cheese and meat so that four pieces of toast can be the main part of a simple lunch for 8 kids (each cut into quadrants).
Just the other day youtube suggested me this cutsie "what to do with old microwaves" video that just had the corporate jingle music over a video of a guy building various things out of microwave transformers without any kind of narration or warning of the danger.
Considering people are actually dying trying these microwave tricks, this is no longer a theoretical concern.
"For entertainment only" is such a cop-out, do whatever dangerous thing and show step by step instructions but then slap on a "for entertainment only" on it so you're safe from legal repecussions.
Excellent point. As a matter of legal principle in the United States you can't unilaterally disclaim liability for future injuries. Signs that say "not responsible for accidents on these premises" don't hold up when you run a retail store where people are expected to freely to come and go as they please.
More concretely: a perfectly reasonable judge could decide a dangerous step-by-step how-to guide negates the prior "for entertainment purposes only" warning. There's a reason Jackass frequently had skull-and-crossbone warnings and didn't show much of their set up, just the results
these are with a low voltage high current winding, instead of the standard 2000v winding, though, which is much safer. The danger of the unmodified microwave transformer isn't really so much that it has exposed mains voltage (although obviously you should be careful around that, too), but that it has 2000v+ and it's galvanically isolated, meaning no GFCI/RCD will save you (and obviously the 2000v will also do a much quicker job at passing lethal current through your heart/other organs)
Comparatively, a spot welder is "just" as dangerous as any other mains-based experiment. Not safe, but you have a pretty good shot at surviving, even if you get zapped.
It's a really common project for them. Certainly a better option than a jacobs ladder or fractal wood burning, since you have to just take the usual mains voltage precautions, and not worry about arcs and other high voltage schenanigans
> Remember, if you've got lathes and welders and assorted tools and materials, don't throw out an old microwave because you can use part of it to make a wire hot.
exactly! Plus, they do throw out 98% of the microwave... just to save a clump of iron which is one of the more easily recycled materials. Admittedly, it's in layers with resin between, but I'm sure that resin will cook right off in the massive slag crucibles.
Contact with live microwave oven transform secondaries has about a 70% fatality rate, if we believe bigclivedotcom. Eating salad has about an 0.001% fatality rate.
Actually I think I have overestimated the salad fatality rate here by orders of magnitude. If one out of every hundred thousand salads killed the eater then many, if not most, people who eat salad regularly would die of food poisoning or choking on salads rather than (as they in fact do) of heart disease, cancer, and infections.
Care to elaborate? I've been eating salad my whole life and I'm just fine. But then again, I also cook eggs with runny yolk, so I guess I'm just a renegade in the eyes of the food safety folks.
I can't tell if you are being sarcastic, or if you actually live in a country with poor safety standards on produce and it is a risk for food-borne diseases to eat uncooked food.
I'm clowning on safety culture. It is not very dangerous to disassemble a microwave. Many people have died from eating salad, because fresh greens arrive liberally coated in goat shit. Also, you do not need to cook pork to 160°, that is an abomination.
A glaring example of how the advertising business model incentives lead to the worst outcomes for everyone. People working at TheSoul Publishing literally waste their lives producing straight up harmful content and the consumers either get brainrot from watching it or risk serious injury and death from replicating it.
Banning advertising (or using strong regulation to make it non-profitable) so that people can directly pay for the content they want to consume. Content that provides value will survive, clickbait and this kind of crap will die off since nobody would pay for fake crafts (and those who did will ask for a refund when they try replicating it and it doesn't work).
If YouTube leaves up the dangerous videos, but removes the videos warning of that danger, then they should definitely be held liable. This is literally the worst thing they can do. Doing nothing would be better.
Automated moderation is no excuse; they designed that moderation, and they did a really poor job of it if it leaves the dangerous videos alone but removed those warning of the danger.
It reminds me a bit of YouTube removing original content videos because of fraudulent copyright claims by Big Content, except this time people can actually die. YouTube needs to clean up its act and be held liable for this stuff.
Scary. I recently did some research into what's behind the 'Jungle Builders' channels (two guys pretending to build flashy, but completely dysfunctional, pools somewhere in a forest with little more than their hands as tools). Seems to be a similar scheme, it doesn't invite viewers to recreate, but they leave a lot of litter and moscito-infested concrete pits behind. Most of them are actually in the same tiny forest somewhere in Malaysia that looks like a v2 of the Banksy theme park now.
There is a whole genre of people building "by hand" underground pools and other crazy structures in the jungles. Aside from being terribly unsafe, if you look closely you can often see marks in the dirt from machine tools that they forgot to smooth away in the soft clay.
Here's one, although I don't like it because I feel like it's overdramatizing a bit. With construction quality this low, my hinge is that the jungle will claim back those spots fairly quickly, but the (drainless!) water pits will remain moscito breeders for a considerable amount of time (and wildlife trap hazards for some time).
Yeah I wondered if this was some kind of “traditional” construction with modern style. But water-based masonry seems like a suspect choice in a rainy climate.
On the other hand I was wrong once back in the 90s.
I was looking for the aftermath specifically. Not just the channels where the structures are built. So I searched “jungle builders aftermath” and “jungle builders today”.
For documentation purposes, I googled “jungle builders are a scam,” clicked the second result which is a Reddit thread and found this in the comments 4-5 parent comments down
What I don't understand is the posting of these videos on Facebook by seemingly fake accounts. I'm in a bunch of yard sale groups and random unrelated accounts are constantly posting these hack and engineering type videos that are like 20 seconds of 50 different useless things with no explanations or other information. There's no ads displayed, there's nothing being sold or promoted and no links or way to find out more about the video.
Does anyone else experience this? How are they making money or why is this being done?
I guess my theory is somehow facebook rewards total views and then they are monetizing some other content.
> Does anyone else experience this? How are they making money or why is this being done?
Could they be building an audience to exploit later? IIRC, that's the tactic the Russian Internet Research Agency used -- build an audience with memes and cat pictures, then pivot to political propaganda.
> Does anyone else experience this? How are they making money or why is this being done?
I suspect these are trying to build reputation for the account posting them. The bizarre, inexplicable videos will get watched by a lot of users wondering WTF they are, which may cause further content posted by those accounts to be ranked higher in feeds.
The account can later be resold, used to post ads or even sell courses to become a "successful" social media influencer using the account's own metrics as selling points.
> the "just grab 2000V, it's so easy!" videos take it to another level of lethality.
The problem is, they're thinking too small. The 2kV supplies in microwaves aren't big enough.
If you used the PSU from an old single-digit-megawatts klystron TV transmitter, then you'd have about 50kV at 50A or so. Now this sounds dangerous, but believe it or not, this would be far safer to work with than a microwave transformer.
What, you don't believe me?
Of course it is! If you got a shock off it, your arm would vapourise long before your heart stopped!
Not just fabricated for the views, but reactions too. For each debunking video, some will follow the actual videos to see how bad they are. But the viewer intention doesn't matter - clicks are clicks.
The one reason I still have Youtube, after getting rid of everything else Google, is the effort I out over time into getting rid of a whole bunch crappy content proposals on my attached account. Every once in a while I have to block some channels, overall it is acceptable. Once in a while I end up on Youtube without being logged in, man is it a mess. As bad as the proposals on Internet Explorers starting page I see at work.
My wife thinks it is weird that I watch so much YouTube, because when she goes to YouTube (not signed in), she is inundated with so many spammy/scammy videos. I told her it has taken me almost 15 years to curate the feed I have. And some days I have no new videos I want to watch, so I rewatch old ones.
Really? I kinda like the '[discipline X professional] reacts to [relevant movie clips]'-type videos (like 'Navy pilot reacts to new Top Gun movie'). You find them so terrible?
> I kinda like the '[discipline X professional] reacts to [relevant movie clips]'-type videos (like 'Navy pilot reacts to new Top Gun movie').
Those are exactly the ones I'm talking about
> You find them so terrible?
Yes. All noise, no signal!
If you want to watch videos about Navy pilots doing their jobs, go right ahead. Why watch Navy pilots "reacting" to a Hollywood movie?
The average Navy pilot must know as about as much about filmmaking and acting as Tom Cruise knows about actually flying a fast jet (as opposed to being filmed sitting in the back seat and not being allowed to touch anything[0]) ?
Tom Cruise is a really bad example, because he actually does have a pilot license since 1994 and is allowed to fly some jets. [0]
I'm not looking for advice on how to make a good movie (or how to fly a plane, for that matter), but on some perspective how (un)-realistic those movies are. I think overall that sort of scrutiny does some good in terms of making movies less unrealistic (compare 80's action movies like Rambo to modern productions), producers consulting not only ex-soldiers but also physicists, doctors,...
> Tom Cruise is a really bad example, because he actually does have a pilot license since 1994 and is allowed to fly some jets
Some jet ... but not the jets in the movie!
So what's the point in getting a Navy pilot to watch him "flying" them? Apart from - of course - being able to make clickbaity videos showing their "reactions".
> perspective how (un)-realistic those movies are
Erm, why? Movies are movies.
There's loads of excellent stuff to read/watch about actual fast jet flying. Far more interesting and, well, real.
> So what's the point in getting a Navy pilot to watch him "flying" them?
They don't comment on his flying but on other aspects, like the training scenes, mission tactics, and also on the flying (by professionals) that is depicted.
> Erm, why? Movies are movies.
You might feel that way, but even then you'll have to admit that a lot of people don't make that distinction to that extent (especially kids) - so they'll end up imagining they have an idea what it would be like to be in certain situations.
> Far more interesting and, well, real.
How would I know what's realistic and what's not (in areas so far outside of what I do) if I didn't rely on people with this knowledge?
> If it's realism you're after, how about listening to a professional talking about their profession?
I actually do that too, why the false dichotomy?
> Why bring Hollywood into it?
Because I've already watched the movie and now I want to know what to make of it. Claiming that it's all completely unrealistic 'because Hollywood' is a far more uninformed position than listening to an expert give a balanced account. Watching a documentary and then assuming that that gives me the required knowledge to make a realistic assessment sounds completely delusional.
And why do you care so much that the title is designed to induce clicks? Every outlet from solo influencers to NYT/WSJ-style media giants creates their online content with this mindest nowadays. It's only clickbait if the content doesn't live up to what's promised in the title.
> Because I've already watched the movie and now I want to know what to make of it. Claiming that it's all completely unrealistic 'because Hollywood' is a far more uninformed position than listening to an expert give a balanced account.
It's a action movie. It's designed to entertain you for a couple of hours. Did it entertain you? Did you enjoy it? What did you think of it? What did you like? What didn't you like?
Spoiler: You know the plot was completely made up, right?
I honestly can't understand why one would want to seek help on YouTube to know "what to make of" an entertainment experience which is an action movie with a made-up plot.
Maybe this is an age thing :( I guess I was watching action movies before the web was born.
I've seen a few videos recommended to me that are psychologist/therapist reacts. I'm pretty sure psychology and therapy without ever meeting and talking to the subject is generally considered unethical quackery.
Psychology/therapy may be a bit of an outlier in that sense, we wouldn't expect a nuclear engineer to have physically inspected a failed reactor before talking about accidents. And even they may have relevant things to say, psychology/therapy isn't only about individual diagnosis.
That's simply an appeal to authority, right in the title. I'm an programming professional and most react videos I could make about the art would be better served in another format. Not to mention it's tailored to clickbait.
Appeal to authority is a good point. In terms of clickbait, I feel that applies only when the content doesn't live up to what's promised, and I found the content quite decent in several cases.
Dunno, I have used both since I was like 13. Also, we used to weld and do all sorts of things (acetylene torching, lathe, casting, grinding, sawing, milling) mostly unsupervised with very little instruction in middle/high school metal shop. I don't remember any accidents.
Hello, Mr. or Ms. Survivor Bias! I used to cut firewood with my father using a 3 foot buzz saw made over 100 years ago*, and had but only the most token of safety guards (ignore the giant power take-off belt that's just waiting to consume some of your loose clothing, and you with it), yet I still have all limbs, fingers, and toes!
And yet I still think it asinine to shrug shoulders and say, "I dunno, nobody I know ever got hurt, yuk, yuk, yuk." If one cannot see the potential for harm in such scenarios, you are one of those accidents waiting to happen.
Speaking of a 3 foot buzz saw, my grandpa is rebuilding a sawmill with a 54-inch blade powered by a 1990's corvette engine. Fairly certain someone is going to get hurt on that one.
Not nearly as dangerous as the cars those kids were driving a year or two later.
It's deeply unfortunate that the parental attitude towards tools these days is never "learn to use it safely" but rather "Hide it away! Don't you dare let MY kid near filthy manual labor!"
The college that I went to had all the engineers learn how to run a metal-turning lathe. ME, EE, BME, I think even the Computer Engineers had to learn how to run a lathe. They put us through a safety class first, which mostly consisted of how not to run a lathe (no loose clothes, no long hair, no jewelry below the elbow, no necklaces, etc). The only injury that I know from that class was from when we learned how to run welders - one of the guys caught his shirt on fire with an oxy-acetalene torch.
Yeah, lathes are dangerous, but no more or less dangerous than a lot of other things in the world. Cars are dangerous. Turning on a light switch in the wrong context can be dangerous. If you approach this stuff with the proper respect and caution, you should be fine.
Lathes are only seen this way because they can go very big. The instant death accidents happen with the big ones, especially the ones designed to quickly remove lots of material from big metal pieces.
Otherwise lathes aren't more dangerous than any other piece of machinery with exposed moving pieces. In particular the ones designed to turn small pieces of wood can't do much harm.
Don't leave the chuck key in, wear eye protection, no loose hair, no loose clothes, don't be stupid and you will be fine.
… where the glue gun has orders of magnitude more power and speed and the “use electrical resistance to create heat” portion of the show necessarily happens OUTSIDE the housing. It’s a cute comparison but a MIG welder is a lot more dangerous than a glue gun.
I’m also gonna pick a nit here and say “like a hot glue gun” is what you say about a MIG weld that is done entirely improperly. If the filler material is just acting like glue, you might be sticking metal together but you’re not welding. So this tongue-in-cheek description also misleads newbs into creating bad welds.
It’s possible to weld so poorly that you are really brazing, not welding. And what a hot glue gun does is really analogous to brazing rather than welding.
I discovered when I first bought a MIG that there's a world of a difference between "I have a welder" and "I am a welder". I used to be bloody good at oxyacetylene, too...
"That's because making cool things looking surprisingly easy goes viral way better than actual reality-grounded instructions" <- I feel like this might be the soul of the whole "no code" movement and why it bugs me a bit.
There's also a lot of really really bad "electrical engineers" on YouTube, particularly from India I notice, who build stuff that runs directly off the mains with no isolation.
Oh and the anti 5G maniacs ripping people off for magic stickers
Yes. But also, since the giants do only the bare minimum of automated moderation with no oversight and no checks and balances, the systems are easy to game by bad actors.
See the example of someone on HN saying his wife lost Whatsapp account for reporting spam - the spammers probably retaliated from hundreds of fake accounts. Same with this youtube video. Same with people gettong reported az spam ehrn criticizing certain nations.
And the giants of course do not care, why would they.
> for the adtech giants nothing matters except the number of clicks
Yet another example why advertising is a cancer on society.
In a market not corrupted by advertising, this kind of garbage content wouldn't exist because nobody would pay for it since the content they show is false and misleading.
But with advertising, the payment is automatic, non-refundable and happens preemptively even if the person doesn't consume the majority of the content (sometimes a single click is enough), therefore it becomes more profitable to mass-produce fake content designed to solicit clicks rather than content that provides true value such as information or entertainment.
Ann Reardon's (subject of this article) channel calls out these other channels and she even tries to recreate these fake crafts to prove they are fake.
Yes! The fact that one of Ann Reardon's main interests is in debunking stupid/dangerous craft and cooking videos, and yet her video is the one getting taken down, is an important irony that seems lost on the author of the boingboing post, and many other commenters here.
My kids and I love watching her videos, especially for iron-stomach Dave eating whatever she cooks, and learning the occasional Australian slang ("<adjective> as" == "very <adjective>")
I feel sorry for Dave. How many times do you think he's come home to an absolute mess, weird kitchen smells and Ann has just mumbled something about YouTube?
She's definitely one of my favourites, and I have a copy of her cookbook that I use a lot.
Now I want to try to make a three layer cake in a toaster. I'm sure it can be done with the right technique and tools. Even if it's wildly impractical and will yield a tiny result.
Ann Reardon, the subject of this article, is a good scientist who's been debunking these 'food hack' videos for years. She eventually branched out into debunking other things like this.
I've always been impressed with her tenacity in challenging this sort of thing while also managing to educate and entertain. It must be soul destroying trying to fight this endless tide of misinformation, which is constantly boosted by the youtube algorithm.
Glad to see this comment. I'm a huge Ann Reardon fan, and her original video that got her into this "debunking" theme is still great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6abePkXncCM
Still, it's a little depressing that someone who made great, inspiring, detailed and actually feasible cooking/baking content found that they couldn't really pay the bills with that content, but instead it turned out that debunking all the BS on YouTube was a better way to actually get paid.
I'm a huge fan as well. She does an amazing job, and seems to be one of the only people on YT who is actually pointing out all the BS a lot of these "crafts" and "baking" channels are.
And she communicates a lot with YT trying to get them to remove some of the more dangerous "hacks" and I believe has also been successful with certain attempts in the past.
I see these constantly on instagram, and usually comment something skeptical, but it is drowned out beneath 500 comments of just heart and fire emoji’s. Maybe these recipes existing as just theoretical things you could do are enough for most people.
I thought it was just annoying that they're often on the top results of searches and thought of them as just digital clutter.
But for people to post outright dangerous and deadly instructions is negligent at best and I would say more accurately in the realm of manslaughter at least.
Who are the people watching this stuff? I assume it's largely women and parents, as a lot of the "hacks" are beauty or parenting related. I watched a few minutes and all the ideas were just... terrible? Ranging from silly to impractical to dangerous.
Stay At Home Mom is a massive market segment with a lot of purchasing decision power. Long-form advertising targeted at SAHMs is nearly as old as the advertising industry itself. This is just the next iteration.
Video does particularly well with this segment (as opposed to text) because of the nature of parenting and housekeeping -- lots of time spent on your feet with busy hands and occasionally available eyes. The same reason radio/long-form podcasting is popular with truckers. Or text with office workers (relatively speaking). It's entertainment you can engage with during work hours between or during tasks.
Plenty of people hate this shit and still watch it because they got tricked. I watched (skimmed) like 12 videos yesterday trying to find a hack to locate my empty AirPods case. There’s apparently no way to do it but each video had a more infuriatingly false title than the last.
It would never even occur to me to watch a video on finding my AirPods case. Either there is an article or forum post for it, or I need to post a question on a forum, but no way am I sifting through the garbage that is YouTube.
Plenty of my searches will lead me to a solid stackoverflow / reddit / quora / forum answer but another large percentage only seem to lead to the blog equivalent of the offending YouTube videos, hyper tuned to show a description that leads me to believe it's what I want but delivering nothing.
Same. It's probably a generational thing, with the split at maybe 20 or something where video became both searchable and trivial in terms of bandwidth.
But, to be fair, the Google-as-front-door internet has become totally useless for these types of tasks as well. Those wiki-style pages with huge walls of text offering nonsense advice are a plague.
If you don't mind explaining: how? I constantly find myself on those (very heavy) pages and haven't found a good way to avoid them except to restrict my search to certain domains (SO, Reddit, etc.)
I guess it is mostly heuristics learned over a couple decades. I use an ad blocker (Wipr), so if there are problems loading the page, that is a flag. If it looks like an SEO churned out page with lots of links and poor sentence structure, another flag.
A lot of times, you do end up on Reddit and SO, but there are some good forums available if you dig deep, especially for car/HVAC/home maintenance related stuff. Sometimes you have to join a forum and post a question.
I am hoping I can teach mine to be sufficiently literate and good at reading to prefer scanning through text rather than watch video. I assume many others have thought the same, who knows if I will be successful.
to be fair I can't google for shit anymore either. Try to find an actual review or more information about an item and the first 90 results are SEO spam and places selling said item.
I'm not sure cases have Bluetooth - I think they use either of the inserted AirPods as a proxy to communicate its status to the phone (the power pins must have a minimal communication protocol to allow the case to talk to the pods).
I sometimes find myself watching similar content for a bit like a kind of engineering "reality" show. no real goal in mind and absolutely no intention of doing any of the things though. Knowing now that they put out videos suggesting people mess with live transformers... i think im over it.
Certainly there must be some kind of liability here. One could never air these kinds of instructional videos on TV.
As the defacto online video experience, YouTube has both become the FCC and NBC - both the governing body and the distributor, yet they take none of the risk and assume no liability of either.
Before people realize that they can't really make a 3-layer cake in a toaster, the fakers already cash in on the views. Usually the risk of these faked craft hacks is just cut fingers and kitchen fires, but the "just grab 2000V, it's so easy!" videos take it to another level of lethality.