• Riskable
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    11 hours ago

    Ah, the good old days when your “dumb” refrigerator would kill children playing hide and seek because the latch wouldn’t open from the inside. When it was lined with asbestos because that’s literally the best insulation that exists excepting aerogel. When the mercury thermostat would fail—leaking mercury on to your food (and aerosolizing some which would be breathed in as soon as you opened it)—and it would freeze everything inside, complete with an interior wall of snow that could take days to defrost. It used old school freon, destroying the ozone layer. Or before then, fun highly toxic gasses like methyl chloride!

    Those were the days! When a breeze through the house on a day with wonderful weather could blow out the pilot light in your oven, slowly leaking gas into your house, exploding and destroying the entire home late at night while everyone is asleep.

    Then the wonders of electricity came along to produce ovens that were hooked up to 220V lines without a grounding wire, and wiring that would slowly fail over time, eventually making contact with the metal frame, electrocuting anyone who touched the device—or anyone that touched the person touching it.

    Ovens were built different “back in the day”! They didn’t have anti-tip brackets, resulting in loads of children sitting on the oven door, spilling boiling liquids down upon them.

    The best were those old washing machines, though! You could lift up the lid and look inside to see your laundry spinning at high speeds! Just don’t reach your hand in, or you could find out what the term “degloving” means.

    Ah yes, the good old days of appliances.

    • Dyskolos@lemmy.zip
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      19 minutes ago

      Well, you obviously speak for the USA. And despite things like thermal cutoffs or automatic shutoffs, things were pretty safe here (Germany) in the 60-90s.

      Also, there is a difference between general advancements in safety regulations and putting tons of unnecessary features in a device that will break soon. No Tesla of today will probably still be going in 50yrs or after 500.000km.

      The higher the complexity, the higher the chance of failure.

      And on top of it, there was no “planned obsolescence” or even suicides switches built in. Bad for capitalism, good for people.