Until I got to the specific shit I thought this was going to end with a punchline about Canada geese.

10+ years experience in product design here. There is nothing about a “simple” product that is cheap or easy. Say you hire a design engineering firm to design it, who is going to make the parts? Have you ever worked with manufacturing in Asia? Who is going to assemble it? Who deals with the inevitable issues?

Then you have to think about selling it. What certifications do you have to get?

That is just hardware, now repeat many of these same questions for firmware and app development.

Now you have a product, what are the customers and who do you need to hire to market and sell to them? Assuming someone is interested in purchasing it how much money do you have to pay for all the product up front and warehouse it?

There is a damn good reason why so many Kickstarter projects never actually ship. Hardware is hard even if you know what you are doing.

Obsessive apologizing makes a person appear not confident in themselves. If it is a person I care about I want them to be confident in themselves.

Additionally the more you repeat something the less meaning it has. So if someone apologizes too much for things that really don’t necessitate an apology when they have something they genuinely need to show remorse for and apologize for the apology holds less meaning.

I’d probably just say something non-pressuring but supportive like “I know with everything that is going on recently that things may be challenging for you right now. If you need anything please don’t hesitate to reach out to me and I’ll support you in any way I can.”

Yeah this is pretty much what I’m doing. My subscriptions are pretty much spaces about my interests that post positive content, and even then I filter out keywords for the bullshit that leaks in. Trying to spend more time reading books and unplugging from the internet. It still feels so hard to avoid the depressing bullshit though.

Christy Clark is the worst possible replacement for Trudeau, she totally fucked over BC and isn’t even a Liberal. The BC Liberals were a conservative party.

I don’t know what it is but I’ll read my posts before posting and then come back later and it will have an obvious autocorrect error I missed.

It pisses me right off how bad predictions have gotten on every keyboard. SwiftKey and Swype were damn near perfect at one point and now I swear it purposely chooses the wrong word.

You almost can’t use too little detergent, recommended amounts are actually too much and tend to leave residue. You only need 1-2TBSP to properly clean your clothes.

Because that is what people are willing to pay for them.

A lot of those types of goods are priced extremely high compared to the actual cost to manufacture. Lighting is another example of this. You are paying for the design and brand in many cases even though they aren’t built better or with better materials compared to a more moderately priced faucet. High end faucets do have some more expensive components in them than cheaper ones. For example, orings are replaced by ceramic cartridges that feel better. Those changes maybe account for a couple dollars of manufacturing cost though.

It can be frustrating knowing how much stuff costs to manufacture, so often I look at items like this and get frustrated because I know the manufacturer is selling for >10x what it cost to make.