It’s true, and there’s nothing IoT that is absolutely essential. But, if they were secure and safe, there are a lot of IoT things I’d like to have.

Thou must use the cloud so that thine company hast a recurring revenue stream.

I can completely understand it, if you ignore all the privacy issues and potential hacks.

For example, a smart fridge. Imagine a fridge that tracks the expiry date of everything inside and warns you before something goes bad – or detects when something goes bad based on the off-gassing that it produces. Imagine it gets to know your purchase patterns and suggests items for your grocery list when you’re running low. Or, if you fully trust it, it could even order those things for you.

Or, smart lights. Imagine lights that are nice and bright in the winter when you don’t get enough sunlight. Then imagine those lights are smart enough to start dimming and getting “warmer” at a certain point in the evening on your personal schedule, making your body more prepared for sleep. Add motion / presence sensors so that the lights turn on when you go into a room, and turn off when everybody leaves the room. Most of the time a light switch isn’t a burden, but if you’re carrying things it can be a bit annoying, and we all know kids are pretty bad about turning things off when they leave a room.

In a world where you didn’t have to worry about the privacy issues, the bugs had all been worked out, and so-on, smart appliances could be great. But, we’re on v0.1 and so I’m extremely cautious in every “smart” device I use.

“Smart” toilets are a privacy nightmare.

Having said that, in the distant future, if we don’t drown the world, or kill ourselves in some other way, smart toilets are actually a smart idea.

Look how often a medical check-up requires either a stool sample or a urine sample. It makes sense. It’s the waste products our body produces, so there’s going to be a lot of data there. Now, imagine if you could get a basic medical check-up every time you used the toilet. You could catch so many problems early. It would be an entirely non-invasive medical check-up and if done right you wouldn’t even need to change your routine. You’d just use the toilet as normal and if the toilet detected anything that required a more detailed check, it could give you a packet of data you could give to your doctor.

At the very least, imagine if instead of trying to pee into a cup at the doctor’s office – or worse, trying to collect a stool sample, you could just use the “Medical Toilet” the way you use any other toilet and it would collect the sample for you.

But, of course, the wealth of medical information it could provide is exactly why it would be a privacy nightmare in the current world. I don’t know why Kohler is jumping into this now. Even if they see it as some way to generate revenue, they have to know it’s going to generate lawsuits too, and when inevitably there’s a privacy breach it’s going to put their good name in the toilet.

The nurse knew that the power management system required an Internet connection? That’s one geeky nurse.

Still, I have hope with things like solar panels. I think these are likely to be teething pains there. Being off-grid on a solar panel is probably a pretty common situation, so they’re probably going to eventually work out the kinks. As long as there isn’t a monopoly on power management systems, or regulatory capture by the companies that make them, probably the ability to work disconnected from both the power and Internet grids will eventually happen. But, with Internet-of-Things stuff, there’s often a commercial incentive to mine people’s data and lock them into a subscription service model. So, that’s really going to require regulation to fix.

Smart products are part of the issue, and smart products that fail in dumb ways are a really big part of the issue.

Any smart product, pretty much by definition, has to have a computer in it. Anything with a computer in it can be hacked. There’s really no good reason that your bed should have an attack surface.

If you are going to have smarts in something, it really needs to fail well. Like, for a bed, it should have something that bypasses the smarts and lets it go back to “dumb bed” mode no matter what. No matter what position it’s in, it should be possible to make it go flat even if you have no Internet connection. In fact, even if the smart parts are not working at all, there should be a way to make it go flat, even if that’s a purely mechanical system that allows you to bypass the motors.

The only way to learn what something sounds like as a non-native speaker is to look it up or listen to someone pronounce it. There are no rules – or at least no useful rules, because any rule will have many exceptions. Even different English dialects differ in how to pronounce words. There’s simply no making sense of it.

For example, in many British English dialects, the “a” in “can” and the one in “can’t” are pronounced completely differently, despite “can’t” being a contraction of “can not”. It’s literally the same word, just with a different word afterwords, and yet the two get different pronunciations. There’s no way to guess at that being the case, or come up with a logical reason why. You just have to accept it.

How do you pronounce gnocci, gnat, etc? They may start with a ‘g’ but the proper pronunciation is just /n/.

And then there are the cases where two consonants combine to form another sound entirely: ph, ch, sh, th.

I’m seeing reality, you’re seeing what you want to see.

That’s what’s in the tiny text at the bottom, but the actual argument as presented is “it’s the way things were done in the past, so it’s bad”.

I don’t care about lawns, I care about the bad argument claiming that if things were done a certain way 300 years ago, they’re necessarily bad.

Then say that, instead of saying “do you dress like this?”

I don’t care about lawns, what I care about is the bad argument claiming that just because things were done a certain way 300 years ago means that they’re necessarily bad.

The basic design of lawns doesn’t need to change

I’m not really interested in lawns, just the bad argument that was used to claim that something being in use 300 years ago means that it’s necessarily out of date and needs to be replaced.

Also beds back then were made of straw and rope

Mattresses, maybe. Beds were beds. The basic design of beds hasn’t changed.

The point is that some things haven’t changed in centuries because they do the job just fine. So, the argument that “this is the way it was 300 years ago, therefore it’s bad” is a shitty argument.

Are you still dressed like this?

Then why does your bed still look like this?

Look, I get the idea. Lawns are bad. But, the argument is a stupid one. Just because things haven’t changed in a few centuries doesn’t mean they necessarily should change. Beds are essentially the same design as hundreds of years ago because that design works. Why are lawns necessarily different than beds?

Ooooh, la dee dah. A morning dressing gown and an evening dressing gown? Does your butler hang it up for you?

I also use hooks. It’s better than using a chair. But, I recently saw an upgrade to the simple set of hooks in Ikea: a pegboard. A pegboard lets you customize it so you can have hooks for small things (like a hat) and other hooks for longer things (pants, etc.) I haven’t tried it yet, so I might be missing something, but it seems like an upgrade to hooks to me. In the past, I also just went with a coatrack. It’s pretty compact and lets you keep the back of your door for a towel or something like that.

Do you mean “almost completely”?