Your phone charger can electrocute a toddler who pokes a fork into the socket. The British plug cannot. That difference comes from a 1947 engineering project that refused every shortcut and turned a household plug into one of the most deliberately safe objects ever mass-produced.
Britain published BS 1363 in 1947, built for the post-war housing boom. The country was wiring millions of new homes at once and needed one standard that would work safely for everyone. They picked the most paranoid option available.
The earth pin (the large top prong) is longer than the other two. When you push a British plug in, the earth pin goes in first. Inside the socket, it presses a lever that opens two metal shutters covering the live and neutral slots. A fork pushed into an empty British socket hits only shutters. The shutters block it.
The two conducting pins are also coated in plastic for their lower half. A plug halfway out of the wall is still safe to touch. You would have to pull it completely clear before any live metal is exposed.
Inside every plug is its own fuse. UK homes wire their sockets in a loop called a ring circuit, which runs at 32 amps, enough to melt a lamp's cord if the cord fails. So each plug carries a fuse matched to the appliance: 3 amps for a lamp, 13 for a kettle. When something goes wrong in your appliance's wiring, only that plug's fuse blows.
The standard US plug (flat two-pin or three-pin) has none of the pin coating and no individual fuse. American building codes began requiring shuttered outlets in new construction in 2008, decades after Britain made shutters standard. Even those newer shuttered versions lack pin coating and plug-level fuses.
Britain's plug is bulky because a fuse, a shutter mechanism, insulated pins, and three contact prongs all need room. The plug looks the way it does because safety engineers refused to sacrifice any of those features to make it smaller, and that decision is now 79 years old.
ZELENSKYY: We attack military targets in Russia, or their energy, which they sell to fund war. Russians deliberately target civilian objects: museums, schools, apartments. They destroyed this Chornobyl museum that we built for 40th anniversary just one month ago. Crazy assholes.
In other words, the war is over, we're stumbling toward some version of the JCPOA, America is out billions of dollars and lots of weapons that we didn't need to waste, and the United States is now weaker and Iran in a strategically stronger position.
And for what?
NESTERAK: President Trump has granted clemency to numerous individuals who have stolen hundreds of millions in Medicaid funds. Can we expect any of these folks to be shown the same mercy?
McDONALD: I'll take a different question
A French national not on the cruise ship has hantavirus. He flew on flight w/Index patient (now deceased) from St. Helena to S. Africa.
Was he sitting next to her? Yes suggests droplet transmission. Elsewhere on plane suggests airborne. Airborne can mean pandemic potential. Droplet transmission means virus could burn itself out. What about the 85 other pax and crew on that aircraft? And how did French pax transit from S. Africa?
🇺🇸BREAKING: Someone placed a $920 million crude oil short at 3:40 AM.
70 minutes later Axios reported the US and Iran were close to a deal.
Oil dropped 12%.
The trade made $125 million in profit.
Minutes after that Iran launched the “Persian Gulf Strait Authority” and oil surged 8%.
$760 million placed before Trump’s last announcement.
$920 million placed before this one.
Every major announcement in this war has been front-run by someone who knew it was coming.
What kind of war is this?
This is more like a trading desk with an army.
Never stop connecting the dots.
The atmosphere in the Pentagon is reportedly in "disarray," with senior officials fearing that the internal cohesion required for a functioning military has been severely damaged by Hegseth’s leadership. https://t.co/QOs1vNVAUD
The verdict of a prominent conservative website and magazine:
"A 79-year-old man who has long dealt in chaos is now being consumed by that chaos. His episodes are becoming more frequent, his good days further apart. What he has lost is not a sense of decency or decorum—he never had those—but any remaining sense of self-control.
"Everyone around him can see it. Yet, whether from ambition, cowardice, or weary acceptance, they keep looking for ways to rationalize his behavior. The tragedy is no longer Trump’s. It is now America’s."
During a national-security crisis, top advisers decided the commander in chief’s presence was a liability. This incident is only the latest example of how Trump’s aides have been trying to keep him in the dark and build a protective bubble around him.
https://t.co/5NVFfpZZJQ