That may explain it. I have a Qrevo S, which is from 2024, while yours is from 2022. The only thing that it ever gets stuck at is one spot where, from under the couch, it can see out the ground-level window, and get stuck between the couch and window ledge (not actually stuck, just confused), because the LiDAR sees out the window. And I fixed that just by setting a small exclusion zone there. It never "gets lost" - maybe your house has some vast open spaces that it can't handle? But the LiDAR seems to see pretty far. The only other issues I've had are things like where I'll have a loose cord on the floor or some large piece of debris or whatnot, and even then, it's usually good at not getting stock on them. I'm also impressed with how well it deals with doors vs. a Roomba - my Roomba used to always get itself locked in rooms by accidentally closing doors after it entered, while the Roborock really tries to avoid ever touching them.

The Qrevo S has actually rotating mops, and they do a superb job with the floor. Spotless. My robot has the hardest mopping job in the world, too - it has to clean under my parrot's cage, and he poops off the edge onto a plastic mat under it ;)

I've never had to contact support - hopefully I don't need to :)

although map editing sucks and it often gets lost and can't properly reset its position. It needs to be rescued pretty often which is a major fail.

That's very distinctly not my experience. What version do you have?

A real vacuum cleaner just about maxes out a standard residential 120v 15a circuit, as anyone who remembers the incandescent bulb era can attest to. A circuit with a few lamps shared with a vacuum cleaner could easily end with you flipping a breaker or replacing a blown fuse.

When you look at the absolutely tiny lithium ion pack these robo-vacs come with, ...

Sitting on my kitchen table right now is a drone pack. It's 57,5Wh, smaller the batteries of most modern Roombas. It's 50C - thus it can output up to 2,9kW. And there's even higher packs available than that. Lithium ion cells can handle some truly high power outputs. It's *energy*, not *power*, that is their limitation. Run a pack at 50C and it'll be empty in a bit over a minute. That said, on hard floor surfaces there is absolutely no reason why you should be drawing more than 300-400W or so, and you can get by with well less than that. High powers are for like shag carpeting and the like. Also, the head matters more than the power (though of course contribute) - for a hard floor, for example, a fluffy roller head is ideal.

Pet hair has never been an issue for me with robots. My long hair always is. It's way longer than any pet's.

Yeah, my Roborock has rotating mops, and I can say with 100% certainty, I haven't lived in a cleaner house since I moved out of my OCD mother's place as a teen. You could eat off that floor.

Facts. I used to have a Roomba for years, but as I live in Europe, it was getting increasingly hard to deal with modern features (like the self-emptying base which needs 120V power). I reluctantly switched to a Roborock when my power converter died, and just, wow, they're light years ahead of iRobot. I think iRobot has been coasting on its name for a while now.

You say you're independent, but you refer to far-right propaganda as fact, which suggests you're not as independent as you believe yourself to be.

Furthermore, the aspect of you referring to Biden's center-right policies as being "radical left" and "extremist" suggests you're more accurately positioned somewhere between the hard-right and the far-right. Sure, the center-right, seen from the perspective of the hard-right, is to their left. But being to the left of the hard-right is very different from being on the left.

It's quite telling how immensely to the right the whole Overton window of American politics is when a lame party such as the DEM, with its grand total of zero left-wing policies, is considered as not only "the" left, but even as the "extreme" left. Go figure...

Well, I'll have to admit, I didn't have "learning that someone on Slashdot believes that the Cold War was a myth" on my bingo card for today.

Ah! A GB News regular, I see!

Are they still following the old trick of taking one single isolated event, and talking about that one single isolated event non-stop for ten years straight to give the gullible the impression that one single isolated event happened twenty thousand times?

Nope, see Alexandr Dugin's Foundations of Geopolitics.

They don't want to, but they want to cause the impression they want to. The more afraid individual NATO countries are they're going to be invaded, the more the invest in their own military strength, and refuse to share their stockpile of weapons and ammunitions with Ukraine, after all, what if they need those stockpiles? Better to hard them in fear a future hypothetical war, than to spend it on the current real war that, if won, would stop the future potential aggressor cold.

Hence, threatening NATO countries is an extremely effective psy-op for Russia. And European leaders are quite the idiots for not perceiving that's what's going on.

Ah! Another American whose history lessons were limited to learning that, I dunno, George Washington once cut a tree and that the US saved the world all alone twice! Nice!

Me, I'm quite amused when I see the US doing such things for roughly the same reason I'm amused when I see its pseudo-conservatives destroying its welfare system. The result will be, respectively, what happened to the British Empire and to China after WW2. As the old saying goes, never interrupt your adversary when he's doing something stupid! ;-)

You seem to be confusing "wanting to get rid of communists" with "wanting their countries to be poor and dangerous".

It's not hard to understand. Three things have been happening all at the same time in Europe, and each one of these are, all by itself, of the kind that prompts governments to go into authoritarian mode. All three put together make this exponentially more the case:

a) Risk of Russian invasion.

Russia has already been attacking NATO countries via invasion of their airspace via drone fleets and military aircraft, plus several cases of cutting oceanic data cables, and other forms of harassment, including explicit verbal threats against several members.

Preparing for war requires managing citizens morale. Completely free flow of information is detrimental to this effect, since either true of false (propaganda) content telling citizens the war is going bad can become a self-fulling prophecy. Hence, governments see the need to start implementing all the technology needed for effective control of information flow right before and during a war if it happens.

b) Rise of internal threats.

First and foremost, the far-right parties on those countries have been growing in popularity and power, being financed as a 5th column by Russia. If victorious, they will fracture the EU, weakening them all against aggressors. Additionally, European leaders fear losing power and, in the extreme, losing their lives and freedom to far-right extremists.

As such the see the curbing of those propaganda efforts as absolutely necessary for the survival of their, well, everything.

b) Betrayal by a former major ally.

The US has sided with the enemy of Europe, Russia, on a number of fronts, having been undermining the European effort in the buffer zone between Europe and Russia (aka Ukraine), helping to fund the above internal threats, relentlessly pressuring European countries on all economic fronts, and actively threatening to invade and conquer European territories, meaning what was a risk of a war on a single front has grown into a serious risk of a two-fronts war. Additionally, the US controls most of the information exchange technology Europe uses, meaning it can advance the propaganda mentioned above way more effectively than Russia alone could, and get intelligence on Europe at levels Russia alone absolutely wouldn't be able to.

As such, transferring control of information channels from US national security associates to European ones became urgent, with an immediate need to reduce as much as possible the power the US has to advance those contrary goals, which again requires controlling information flows.

Hence the recent push.

Notice I don't agree with any of the above. I'm of the "the best counter to bad speech is more speech" school of thought myself. But that's what I see as the core motivations behind this movement.

As for the US, it's trying to implement a Fascist political regime. As any such movement, it uses the tools of freedom to raise, then once in power destroys those tools. As such, what we're observing over there is much simpler than what's going on Europe, even if the end result, if it arrives at its goal, is pretty much the same.

And other countries are following so many variations of the same issues.

USAID was horrifically corrupt

The cuts to USAID are projected to cause 14 million extra deaths - a large minority of those children - by 2030. And USAID engendered massive goodwill among its recipients

But no, by all means kill a couple million people per year and worsen living conditions (creating more migration) in order to save $23 per person, that's clearly Very Smart(TM).

And I don't know how to inform you of this, but the year is now 2025 and the Cold War and the politics therein ended nearly four decades ago. And USAID was not created "to smuggle CIA officers" (though CIA offers used every means available to them to do their work, certainly), it was created as a counterbalance to the USSR's use of similar soft power to turn the Third World to *its* side.

They can go back at any point if they don't think the conditions and salaries offered are worth the job. What matters is that they remain free to leave, with no "catches" keeping them there (inability to get return transport, inability to communicate with the outside world, misinformation, etc etc). Again, there's a debate to have over what conditions should be mandated by regulation, but the key point is that the salary offered - like happens illegally today en masse - is lower than US standards but higher than what they can get at home.