MudMan

The reason I’m still tempted to go back is my kitchen has three heating elements, not four. I have other tools to complement it, but getting the pressure pot out of there is a signficant gain. Still, lots of money for that, and I’m also short on counter space, so I’m holding off for now.

Yeah, I am using one of those, mostly because I already had it in the place I moved to and I don’t see the need to buy an electric one. It really causes me no anxiety at all to use it in terms of security. It’s safe and reliable.

But also, if you’re not used to them and you don’t know what to buy and how to use them, I see the appeal of a programmable electric thing where you push a button, it stays to a set temp and pressure and it’ll automatically vent and tell you to take things out. I had one of those precisely because it was small and fit my kitchen setup, and I used it constantly with no issues.

“Dedicated” is doing a lot of work there. Regardless, they are both a vessel with a small hole where you’re heating up a gas. The difference is the pressure cooker has a valve that lets the pressure climb higher before it vents while the rice cooker is only up to whatever pressure builds up due to the vent cap foam filter being narrower than the lid. The old “exploding pressure cooker” thing is about that valve getting blocked, broken or clogged and pressure building indefinitely.

Only that shouldn’t happen on modern versions of either because the electric versions of both are using timers and sensors to control the cook. My old-school stovetop cooker still relies on pressure building until the valve hits the pressure I’ve set and vents the steam, but the electric one I was using before didn’t have to vent (at least when used manually, some programs had venting built in), it just went to temp and pressure and stayed there for some time, then released the steam at the end.

But even if my stovetop’s valve failed, there is still a safety valve. And even if that failed again, there is a scored area on the lid that is designed to fail first and vent the pressure (although you wouldn’t want to be in front of it if that happens).

I’d still default to an instant cooker if I was worried about safety. Not only does it not build up pressure indefinitely in the first place, but it also won’t let you open it until it’s vented, so you won’t open it and get a faceful of pressurized steam. Which, honestly, is the real danger with old manual pressure cookers. Everybody freaks out at anecdotal reports of explosions, but from what I can tell “opened too soon or vented incorrectly, got a burn” seems to be the real scenario you should be concerned about.

Ironically, that can still happen with rice cookers. I’ve (lightly) burnt myself by popping the lid open while my rice cooker was still hot before.

I’m curious about how expensive. My last electric pressure cooker was a more expensive model (and I sold it after years in working order), but the stovetop pressure cooker I have at home now was more expensive than the entry-level Instant Pot branded electric cookers.

So are water heaters and we use those pretty confidently.

Pressure cookers get a bad reputation for safety from the times when they were basically a metal box with a tiny hole in it, but modern cookers have a lot of additional redundancies. Particularly modern ones with timers. It’d take a lot of work to get one of those to go catastrophically. It’s more likely to get killed by lighting than by pressure cooker, at least in the US, and as far as I can tell from available stats, and most of the pressure cooker injuries the stats list are from people who got a contact or steam burn, not by explosions.

It’s also interesting that people are often afraid of exploding pressure cookers when they think of them as pressure cookers, but you don’t get as much anxiety from rice cookers (AKA pressure cooker - but small).

The thing is, these are just a pressure vessel with a timer and a heating element. They are all good unless they are very poorly made.

I mean… the normal speed for seeing behind your car is the speed of light, so that may come a bit short of expectations.

In any case, I agree that by itself it’s not a big deal. After the broken windshield wiper, the pieces that fall off and the sticky accelerator one may… you know, infer a pattern. Which, really, is the news here.

I once was travelling abroad as a student, staying at a family’s place as an exchange student.

Their cat was… well, this comic. I once sat on it. It was a very weird, creepy feeling, I could feel his little bones on my ass while my brain tried to figure out what the ball of fuzz, claws and rage was under there.

The cat ran out the back door and nobody saw it for like three days. It was, needless to say, a very awkward stay after that.

Alright, let me take a step back to the OP.

The claim here is that unless something is flagged as being “world” something, it’s assumed to be specific to the US. The obvious example is politics forums with no qualifier in social media (including here and on Reddit) being about US politics where everywhere else is qualified with either “world” or a specific country/region.

That’s the claim.

The counterclaim is that makes sense for US-based social media where most users are American. I dispute that because… well, most users are not American in many of those sites, or a large enough proportion aren’t that the assumption is not justified.

The logical way to organize that would be for the US politics channel, forum, magazine or whatever to be flagged “US politics” while everything else keeps its own qualifier. There is no default nation for politics. If anything, “politics” without a qualifier should be fair game for all world politics. That makes logical sense, but it’s often not what happens in social media unless the specific social media site is heavily restricted to a specific non-English language or territory.

That’s the observation here.

Wait, what?

We’re talking about assuming that a site’s default user is from the US. I’m saying if 49% are not, then that assumption seems ethnocentric. That doesn’t require every other user to be part of a monolith of non-Americans, they all share the trait of being… you know, not American.

That’s a big chunk of your users that don’t conform to your default use case. If this was about anything else you would not a default at all in that scenario, but that’s not what happens. Also, it’s not blamed on the “average American”, it’s being blamed on Americans as a whole, culturally, on the aggregate, which is fundamentally different.

This is true. I wonder how often people assume and don’t think anything of it because it doesn’t even register that they may not be correct.

That said, I once did have a long conversation here with someone who just straight-up refused to believe I’m not American and would not take my word for it. I never quite got why he believed I’d be lying about that, but that person would not be persuaded, and it was one of the most baffling interactions I’ve had in my life.

Well, yeah, but it’s not anecdotal. There is data to tell you how big Facebook is and was outside the US, in what territories and by how much relative to their US popularity at what point. My personal experience just happens to match those numbers (India, by the way, is Facebook’s current biggest market).

I would also point out that by your own data, which is accurate as far as I can tell, 49% of Reddit is not American, so even with its more US-focused audience the assumption that users are American unless proven otherwise is wildly ethnocentric.

Now, I agree with you that assuming things about anonymous accounts, and especially anonymous accounts writing in English, is foolish. Lots of people are fluent in English who are not native speakers and definitely who are not from the US. Most, in fact, depending on how you define your parameters.

I disagree that this is “human nature”, though. I don’t assume the same thing from people who speak my native language online. I also don’t assume the same thing about English speakers. The reason the OP is asking is that US ethnocentrism stands out. That’s not to say it’s not natural. We non-native dwellers in anglocentric social media will often comment on US cultural and political minutia, because US cultural and political minutia is present and relevant to us in a way ours isn’t to Americans (thanks for that, cultural imperialism). We pass for Americans in more situations than some American lurking in a German-language forum would, and we’re likely many times more numerous than… well, Americans lurking in German-language or Chinese-language socials.

But it being natural doesn’t mean it isn’t notable or an issue or a symptom of a dysfunction. Which it is, and it does annoy me for that reason.

Fortnite is all the Epic games. As in, there is a kart racing game, a survival Lego-licensed game and a Harmonix rhythm game in there, besides the bunch of shooters.

It’s a weird store-ception thing, but at this point if Epic is going to make a new game they won’t put it as a stand-alone thing in the Epic store, they’ll put it inside Fortnite. And it’s working, which is… kinda scary.

He did. Fortnite actually grew this year and hit 110 million monthly active users, according to him.

Fortnite isn’t dying, it’s killing everything else by absorbing the rest of gaming into itself like an alien blob. I don’t like it, but it’s happening and that’s what he’s talking about.

I agree. Unfortunately, despite both the company and the storefront making more money, the share of Epic Store revenue from third party game sales they’re reporting actually went down, both in relative and absolute terms.

That sucks. It means that sure, Fortnite will keep that alternative afloat for as long as it keeps growing and stays popular, but it’s not really growing as a Steam alternative.

Yeah, people need to start reading past the headline.

He’s not complaining, he’s bragging.

His point is that people aren’t buying Sony’s big, expensive games, they’re playing Fortnite.

… I am a non-anglophone who, at the time of Facebook’s raise to social media dominance lived in multiple non-anglophone countries. I was there.

In one of the places I lived there was briefly a popular local Facebook alternative. It lasted maybe a couple of years before entirely capitulating and getting absorbed. That place does still have a local Reddit-like alternative, and Reddit is certainly more US-centric. You are right that Facebook stayed popular much longer outside the US. It has started falling off in some of those places, but I did keep a Facebook account for work purposes for a lot longer than you’d expect because work relations in those territories would share Facebook credentials as a way to establish professional contact. Twitter may as well have been a lost ancient civilization, though.

There’s also a lot to unpack in the assumption that on a thread about “why do Americans default to assuming everyone is from the US” you’re reflexively lumping the entire anglosphere as part of the US, but honestly, I’ll let the recently annexed English-speaking countries deal with that one on their own.

So like Facebook and Reddit? Social media isn’t in English specifically. People who speak other languages often post in their native language for some things and in the lingua franca for more international conversations. The Internet is the Internet regardless.

I am fairly sure that the rest of the world already existed. And those formats keep being in use in newer places, too. This is not just a Reddit thing. Even you mentioned Facebook, which was instantly popular globally.

I’ve heard this more times, and it’s kind of baffling. The US isn’t even the biggest individual country on Facebook. What do people who assume everyone is from the US think a non-US “forum” looks like? Where do Americans think everybody else hangs out online?