The replacement of the old rubber-and-thread insulation on UK domestic wiring with PVC probably also helped.
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Latest Bundle of Holding includes a Western RPG called “We Deal In Lead”, and my first thought was “that wasn’t me up the church roof constable…”
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Part of the UK is already way ahead of you
It amuses me how the answer to “why do British people do this weird thing?” is so often because of old infrastructure or compatibility with old infrastructure or because we’re used to things being old and are still compensating for it.
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That applies to so many things, whether its banking systems running COBOL or government systems using Windows XP. One of my (many!) personal bugaboos is MTU sizes of 1500 bytes.
Once a technology or methodology gets entrenched, the cost of replacement is always much greater than the cost of maintenance and mitigation.
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When we bought our house, I had an electrician come over to talk about a couple things I wanted to do. He warned me he was very busy, and it would several months before he’d be able to do anything, but he was working nearby so he could swing by to take a look. He pulled the deadfront off the panel and started cursing in Polish. he poked a couple wires with a tick tester, and insulation fell off them. He looked at a couple other things, and then called someone. They had an animated conversation (in Polish, so I couldn’t follow it, but I do know what cursing sounds like…). After, he said “It all must go. We start Tuesday!”. And he showed me what some of the issues were, mostly that the previous owner had replaced circuit breakers with ones much larger than they should be for the size of the conductors.
So, they replaced all the wiring in the house. Fortunately, this is Chicago, so everything is in conduit, so they didn’t have to open any walls, and two guys did the work in a day and a half. Most of the wire that came out was cloth covered rubber insulation, which had been run so hot for so long you could break the wires by flexing it a couple times. I am reasonably sure the house would have burnt down had the wires been touching something combustable, instead of being in steel pipe.
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We have a Ninja kettle with multiple temperature settings. Love it
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To me, a chip pan is a pan under a machine that collects chips that the machine makes (like on a lathe or something). Is the UKian usage something like “frying kettle”?
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Yes:
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Nothing! Nothing at all!
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This is our kettle… I am afraid it is not as fancy as most of yours, but it gets very loud if forgotten
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At the opposite end of things from super-kettles, do you remember the Kiwi who decided that the best way to cool his Guinness was with a jet engine?
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In our last house, we had all the wiring replaced right away. It was a big house with lots of plaster and replacing it took two people most of a month.
The insulation is all flaking off the (often aluminum) wire in our current house, but we’re now living in a place where it’s not only incredibly expensive to hire people like electricians, it’s almost impossible to find them. I cross my fingers. Board games and books are notoriously flammable. 
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A chip pan was a deep saucepan filled with oil or lard with a wire basket that you used to put the sliced potatoes into and then lower into the incredibly hot fat. (approx 180°C, 360°F?).
Ours was used so much in the 70s that the lard stayed in the saucepan for a long time and the basket was left in it between uses, freeing itself as the lard melted.
When it comes to thermonuclear war, it’s going to be cockroaches and GenXers left afterwards.
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Huh, I’ve just discovered someone saying that this may have been one of the first wide-shared urls to go viral on the whole internet, being 1995.
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My brain and eyes are not processing that. There are two things that should be ‘down’ and they are at right angles.
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I believe it is a kettle wearing a multi-pack of Costco seaweed as a hat, at a jaunty angle.
In the reflection, I believe we can also see an electric pressure cooker. And a hand holding a phone. The hand holding a phone is probably temporary.
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It was only the reflection that gave me the context to make that call.
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Sort of a Bigby’s Phone-Holding Hand deal, which disappears when the duration of the spell runs out?
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