Ask Paul: August 9 (Premium)

Happy Friday! We're heading to Washington D.C.--my favorite city in the United States--for the weekend. I'm ready for a bit of downtime. But first ... this!
Casting about for a reason
helix2301 asks:

Why do you think Google is abandoning the Chromecast brand in exchange for the Google Cast brand?

The Chromecast brand didn't make sense from the get-go, as it was never based on the Chrome web browser. I wonder whether there wasn't a brief attempt to use Chrome as a brand like Nexus, Pixel, Google Home, or Nest, and if the confusion around this name was what put a stop to that. But this shift has been underway for a long time, like many Google transitions, and it parallels a similar branding mistake and rethink with Android TV/Google TV. And we think Microsoft is horrible at this. Google has taken confusion to an art form.

In any event, Google Cast makes sense to me as the brand here. And Google TV makes sense as the name for the set-top box, as it positions it clearly against Apple TV (which has its own streaming tech, AirPlay, that's similar in many ways to Google Cast). But this is Google, so making sense could be temporary.

If you didn't see it, I wrote up a Chromecast history of sorts, along with some notes about my own experiences with this platform, yesterday.
Montezuma's real revenge
train_wreck asks:

Do you guys still have water heater problems in Mexico? Not sure about there, but in my experience a good portion of people in Central/South America just shower using regular temperature water straight from the pipe. My girl's apartment in the barrios doesn't have hot water, and yeesh it is intense to shower there. The owner installed this crazy showerhead of doom device where the water passes over electrical coils to heat it up, but we've never had the guts to use it.

We discussed this as part of a summer update video back in July, but we've sort of come full circle on the water heater in the sense that it will never really be fixed, and it's at the point where it's at least usable. The issues there are many, and the cause(s) are still a source of debate, but it almost doesn't matter. We have a water heater that can heat the water, and it usually works fine if one person is taking a shower. You can't do multiple things at once--two showers, a shower plus hot water in a sink--but that's fine. It's Mexico, we get it. We just want hot water.

Two trips ago, we got into a system where we could reliably take showers with consistent hot water and pressure, and we were mostly successful doing this again on the most recent trip. I don't recall having a single issue, but Stephanie said it got cold on her twice. But it will reset itself, and you can force that by turning the temperature to full cold and then back again, and it's not horrible. We basically just got used to it, I guess.

I feel like we could spend several hundred dollars installing a water tank in the laundry room where the water heater is and that may or...