Sounds like the problem is people leaving plugs lying on the ground? Otherwise known as user error.

Yo, what’s wrong with your goats?

Oh look that's something ninjas spread on the road when they run.

You just brought back memories of my siblings and I walking around outside barefoot to the point these things penetrated our shoes more easily than our feet.

In rural southern Utah these things are literally everywhere. If you go out with cheap foam flip-flops, the entire bottom of the shoe will embedded with dozens of these seconds after you start walking around lol

Kind of oddly satisfying to pull them out of the soles of shoes tbf

I've always heard them called sand spurs, and they're the devil. Nothing in nature needs to be that sharp, ffs.

At least chestnuts have the decency to be really localized and large, despite being spikey balls of evil. These little fuckers are miniature, everywhere, and can hide in carpet for a solid six months before you notice them the one time you decide to go barefoot.

I'm so glad we don't have these where I live.

There's also no real reason to unplug something, even if the plug isn't switched. Modern electrical appliances have idle power draws of less than a watt.

Rule of thumb: If a small electronic appliance (e.g. phone charger, power brick etc...) isn't warm to the touch, it's using less than 1 Watt of power, which at UK electric prices, is less than half a penny per 24 hours.

If you value your own time at UK minimum wage, and it takes you 5 seconds to unplug, and 5 seconds to replug, you won't break even unless you keep it unplugged for at least 7 days. So maybe worth it if you're going on holiday. As an everyday thing, unplugging idle electronics to save power is a complete waste of time.

As for electrical safety, generally speaking if something is unsafe whilst plugged in but switched off, it's typically not legal to sell in countries with properly enforced standards anyway. And with whole house RCD protection being relatively universal in western europe, even if something were to go wrong, chances are the RCD, or AFCI if the breaker panel is real fancy, will stop the bad thing happening real quick.

Oh and quick PSA: Regardless of it's whole house protection, or individual socket protection, you should test the function of your RCDs every now and again. Officially at least once a month. Every RCD breaker has a little button somewhere labeled "test", that connects L to GND across a resistor, to check if the breaker actually does it's job. If you've never done this (and haven't recently had the RCD trip for an actual fault) GO DO IT NOW. THOSE THINGS ARE LITERALLY LIFE SAVERS AND IT'S IMPORTANT TO MAKE SURE THEY'RE ACTUALLY WORKING.

Boy I bet youre fun at parties

I think the switches are nice but in the modern world you really don't need to unplug a vast majority of things. Even my $30 120V USA space heater shuts itself off if it tips over or gets too hot. My cell phone charger pulls functionally 0W while idling.

Having switched outlets wouldn't make US plugs any safer, at least not in any meaningful way.

The individual switches on UK outlets don't really add significantly to safety, they're mostly just a convenience feature, because for an electrical plug/outlet to even be considered safe in the first place, it has to be always safe, whether it's powered or not. You can't rely on people switching off unused outlets instead of doing actual safety design.

The main factors that make US plugs less safe than UK ones is the potential for exposed metal contacts with a closed connection to the outlet, the lack of internal fuse and the lack of polarisation, and, particularly in combination with the first point, the comparatively weak grip strength and protruding design that make it easy for a plug to become (partially) unplugged by accident.

Yeah, I think brits and other europeans can generally agree on american plugs

I have, but it was a foot-safe surface mount package

No, the cable comes out perpendicular to the pins (ie parallel to the wall).
Which pretty much guarantees foot-pain orientation

That's from a power brick that came with attachments for different regions.

I've handled normal plugs as well and they tend to orient themselves prongs up too.

a 110/220 auto sensing plug

There's no real need for a plug to be able to sense what voltage it's plugged into. That would be handled device side, not plug side. And for devices for which handling both 110 and 220 makes sense, well those pretty much universally already have a switch mode power supply that does so automatically, or at least a dip switch with which a user can manually select their grid voltage (check your phone or laptop charger, I can virtually guarantee it already supports both).

And the issue with devices that don't already do this, is generally that they are basic resistive or inductive loads (anything along the lines of heaters or motors), with little to nothing in the way of digital control electronics, which need to be designed for a specific input voltage in order to achieve a specific power output. Making these devices both 110V and 220V compatible would require either giving every single one of them a voltage transformer, or to include a 110V motor/heating coil, and a 220V one, that can be switched between. Both of which would massively increase the price of these devices.

https://xkcd.com/927/

My understanding is that higher voltages mean that amperage can be lower. There are also gains in transformer efficiency.

Two words: Extension cords

Us extension cords (or power strips or whatever you want to call them) practically catch fire if you look at them wrong. Over here, there's much more leeway for plugging multiple loads into a single socket.

AS/NZS 3112

I can charge my electric car from a standard outlet. Can add 20kWh overnight, which is plenty for 3 days round town driving.

230V at 15A on a standard outlet, plug only slightly larger than the American one.