We had an accident this morning with the coffee pot. Nobody was hurt but the carafe was broken, so I'm on the hunt for a new one.

There really should be, like, one or two glass carafe shapes per capacity, that the coffeemaking machines standardize around, like with lightbulbs. The fragile glass carafe getting broken is the #1 reason working coffeemakers end up in landfill.

As it is, it's like buying vacuum cleaner filters, a confusing and offputting mess of part numbers and revisions and carafes that cost half of what the whole machine cost in the first place, leading many to just shrug and say "Time for a whole new machine I guess."

There needs to be, for a 12-cup (and let's not get started on a "cup" measure being maybe 60% of an actual reasonable sized coffee mug, let's just use mls) carafe, two glass shapes (tall and skinny / short and wide), detachable plastic and/or aluminium trim in any colour you like, and maybe three or four lid designs which we could narrow down as a victor emerged.

But manufacturers aren't gonna do that unless the people we vote for force them to. Hell, remember when every single phone came with its own proprietary charger that you couldn't use with any other phone? It was madness! Only government intervention forced manufacturers to agree on using a couple flavours of USB.

I get that people on here (often quite rightly) tend to be skeptical of government, but setting and enforcing standards can't be left up to manufacturers or we end up with a mess.

If your coffeemaker's carafe had to be a standard shape, then the companies making them would have to compete based on the strength of the glass and the ease of washing and the attractiveness of the trim. As it is, every machine has its own carafe and for any given model there's barely incentive for one company to bother making it in the first place, and they don't have to do a particularly good job because it's buy theirs or buy a whole new machine.

Force companies to compete.

Now that all chargers are USB we can buy multi-device chargers with like 5 USB ports on them and charge all our stuff off one wall hole, and there's all these companies making multichargers trying to outdo each other on features and ports and current capacities. If the EU hadn't forced companies to end the one-phone-one-charger madness, that wouldn't have happened.

Imagine if they'd had a look at printers! Maybe inkjets wouldn't have devolved completely into a scam!

(in the interests of fairness and just to both-sides a minute, the EU also mandated the use of unleaded solder joints, which I reckon has to be the most catastrophic governmental decision in my lifetime, and no amount of standards-setting will offset the staggering injury done to our environment or to human dignity caused by that one disastrously ignorant ruling. So y'know, swings and roundabouts)