"Dishwashers don't start fires when you forget they are on. Close the door on a hidden toaster and walk away in the middle of a toasting cycle and it may be the last time. The cost of solving that "problem" (hiding toasters) would be far greater than the cost of just making them look like cool things people want to display.That reality has nothing at all to do with the rightness or wrongness of the professor's statement. The public's alleged preference for just having toast and not having to see the appliance that makes it doesn't mean necessarily mean 1- that they are willing to go without toast to achieve that aim or 2- that that desire is strong enough in a large enough population for appliance makers to produce the costly means of having both desires met."

"I feel like I'm missing what's so special about this scraper or how anyone might think it would even be possible to patent. There is nothing new about curving the edge of a scraper. Pretty much every woodworking catalog I've ever seen sells curved scrapers. I have a small box of different shapes that I have made myself from old saw blades or cut up Bahco and Sandvik rectangular scrapers. What really makes me scratch my head is why anyone who makes things by hand with tools would need a pattern to draw a circle of a known radius or choose an expensive milled edge over a water jet edge. If 30 seconds with a file is too much work then maybe rethink taking up a hobby that requires frequent sharpening tasks.A link to one of the many articles online about making "stradavarius" or violin scrapers would be much more of a "teach a man to fish" gesture.This is really the story of the power of developing an online following and marketing niche items to that fanbase. I am not knocking that, it's a living as much as anything else is. It just that for a blog that as least has the premise of speaking to people who design, make, and sell things it would be a more honest and fitting approach to talking about what this item and its success are rooted in."