In China at least, toilet paper wasn’t soluable for a long time and sewer plumbing wasn’t up to standard, so you used the waste basket for your TP. You would also bring your own TP to public bathrooms and they had no idea if your TP was soluable or not (lots of cheaper kinds aren’t). These days, toilet paper is universally soluable and plumbing is much better, you can totally flush it (and I always do when I’m there) but so many people grew up being told not to that they still have and use waste baskets.
For the spray nozzle sure. It would only work in particularly hot climates though, so maybe Arizona and Florida in the summer. There is a reason northern Asia goes without or with heated Japanese toilets instead (they also warm the water so you don’t hate yourself).
Bidet (no hand sprayer, just a toilet seat based jet) works fine in this US household. I don’t notice the cold in the winter. Maybe I have an exceptionally robust asshole, but our water gets very cold in the winter.
Do you have decent central heating? Japanese households didn’t (and still don’t, it’s not required by law even in Tokyo), so heated toilet seats and heated water is considered essential. There is a reason kotatsus never caught in the states I guess. You won’t encounter nozzles in southern China either because the winters are too cold and they have even less heating than northern China (which is why everyone is wearing winter jackets indoors).
Even in the US, I can’t imagine installing a nozzle here in Seattle, but we also don’t have central heat (just a heat pump with remote units in a couple of rooms).
> we also don’t have central heat (just a heat pump
I'm so terminologically confused at this point by comments like this. In Texas, many people's central heat is a heat pump. My current house's heater is the first I've lived at in over forty years that wasn't a heat pump (this one is gas). High end homes, cheap rentals, everything in between, heat pump central heating.
Ductless heat pump (aka mini split) you need indoor units to serve each room that the heat pump handles. We have one in our master bedroom and in our open living room kitchen, but not on the bottom floor (kid bedroom/office, and our master bath really isn’t heated well by our master bedroom indoor unit, so it has a separate wall heater that doesn’t have a thermostat so we never use it. So our bathroom is a bit cold in the winter, although it’s Seattle so never really that cold, although my wife avoids the toilet for the one in the living room since it bothers her more.
So…is a ductless mini split heat pump supplemented by a bunch of resistive walk heaters, one gas fireplace, and no central thermostat really considered central heating?
In China, this becomes even more pronounced, northern cities provide central heating from heating plants…so central means “central” in a much stronger sense. Apartments are poorly insulated from each other so it makes little sense to heat each unit separately. In southern China (and lots of older Japanese housing), you don’t even have good insulation so all your heating is localized (eg via a kotatsu and heated toilet seat, or heated train seats which are really nice). That is a lot less centralized than a minisplit (which are catching on in southern China these days as well).
I use a non-heated bidet in Truckee, California (near lake Tahoe). In the winter the water that comes out is cold, but it's only for a few seconds, so I just grin and bear it.
I don’t think Americans are using wet wipes on their toilet business, at least in any meaningful numbers, maybe parent was talking about some other region of the world? There are plenty of regions of the world where TP is the norm, eg in China you aren’t going to find sprayers or Japanese style toilet seats, and many toilets are still squats.
I wonder about really cold locales where ICE cars either need to be plugged into block warmers when not running (e.g. in Alaska/Northern Canada) or are kept on constantly and/or put into car blankets (Russia Far East). Heck, I guess in Yakutsk, the trouble of keeping your oil/petrol/engine from freezing (hence the car blankets and a system that turns them on when they get too cold), an EV might pay off big in terms of being able to plug in when parked (and...you just need to top off the charge your battery is losing), although I guess a heat pump wouldn't be very effective in -50C?
There are many parts of Norway where it’s hard or impossible to start diesel cars without block heaters. EVs are indeed much easier to start and more reliable.
The postal service changes all jts vehicles on Svalbard to electric. Svalbard is an island close to the North Pole.
I think many EVs have resistive heating elements as backup to the heat pump? But it’s brutal on range of course.
Executive orders are shot down by courts all the time. And it always starts in lower courts, with appeals going up to higher courts (both sides can appeal!). This is true for any president, Democrat or Republican, the judicial system is a check on executive power, with the understanding that the executive gets to nominate judges and congress gets to approve them.
It is really weird how many people don't get this, and think Trump is getting special treatment! And an executive order with lofty legal reasoning will always be challenged. And judges on either side...they actually have some idealistic notion that law matters, not who nominated, so the 3 judges who unanimously decided against trump: one was a Trump appointee, one was an Obama appointee, and one was a Bush appointee. In an idea system, judges try to be impartial to law (they don't have to, and their only check is that they can be impeached by congress).
The discourse coming from the political right is clearly meant to attack the Judicial branch. They are going after what they call "Partisan judges" or "Activist judges" or "Radical leftist judges" or "Clinton and Obama appointees". They want to remove all judges who do not let them support whatever the administration wants to do.
> 8 of the top 10 universities by global research output are Chinese.
Having been in academia before, I don't see this as meaningful (quantity vs quality). But it is just as much as not meaningful for American universities.
The biggest problem with Chinese universities is that they mostly teach classes in Chinese, so you have to become fluent in Chinese first, which takes around one or two years of intensive Chinese study.
And branch campuses...you need to avoid those. Harbin Institute of Technology in Shenzhen is probably not going to be the same thing as studying at HIT in Harbin (and aren't all of the institute of tech universities run by the PLA?). Focus on top schools only: Guangdong, Zhongshan (sun yat-sen) University is pretty good, Shanghai Jiaotong and Fudan in Shanghai, PKU/Tsinghua in Beijing, the science and tech one in Hefei, etc...if you are a foreign student and work your way up from their language program your chances should be OK (but my experience is 20+ years out of date so who knows).
This is very disturbing, and could do irrevocable damage to US academia and high-end R&D. China is also becoming more appealing for Chinese students to just stay home, I feel like this will drive the final nail in the US being a destination of mutually beneficial opportunity.
Notes: a lot of top students are invited to join the CPC, or even pressured into it (you are head of the class, you need to do this!). And sensitive fields...that probably includes computer science.
They have a narrow so small that passing tariffs would still be politically difficult even though they control both chambers, and that is not even considering a filibuster.
I hope this judgement stands, however, trade actually works out really well for the US economy and its job market. Yes, we don't often manufacture the thing, but we have huge roles in designing those things and packing them with software. Even China is trying to get in on that while they offload manufacturing to robots and countries that are earlier on in their development.
Three of the post senior citizen Democratic representatives died in office so far so the margin is actually getting bigger as time goes on, the GOP had room to make multiple mistakes on the budget bill where one GOP rep fell asleep and didn't vote and one rep was present but just missed the deadline to vote. The Democratic senators have not shown the spine to put a hold on any appointments or pull a Tuberman and not let appointments through, let alone a filibuster, and Fetterman has gone off his meds and it shows, he's turned into a GOP senator after his strokes. Chuck Schumer on the other hand appeared earlier to be more interested in going on a book tour to sell his book. The whole thing appears to be on the precipice.
The one in Texas stood out for me when it happened, because the governor is GOP, he put off the special election until November so that a Democratic stronghold will not have a representative for ten months.
It would be difficult, but arguably everything has been difficult for the congressional GOP as even when they ran the house during the last cycle they could barely operate.
They struggled to pick leaders among their own party members numerous times.
It has been hard for the judicial system as well, with Trump ignoring injunctions and orders as if they were just advisory. I wonder if he will try that here as well? "Oh, the court said no tariffs, but I'm not even going to bother with an appeal to the Supreme Court and just use an executive order to invalidate...", here is hoping he doesn't do that.
> some US marshals put Trump in jail for ignoring the court
In chess you never capture the king. Similarly, the way to fight this is have arrested the lower rung players e.g. the tax collectors. (And ICE agents conducting illegal arrests.)
Given how often American "kings" leave the metaphorical playing board, this isn't chess: it is non-euclidian, real-time, penultima, on a continuous board, with hundreds of players and billions of pieces (and any given piece is under the control of potentially multiple players), and where the secret rules for every piece include self-playing behaviours and weird emergent dynamics.
And in penultima, sometimes the king isn't the real target, and attempting to capturing it destroys random other pieces instead.
Sounds like there isn’t support for this agenda, and they’re breaking the law to force it on the country. They could moderate their position to something that would pass congress if they cared about the Republic.
