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Umm, I encourage you to do that math a little closer. A contractor would have to;

Come to your house to quote, and only land 1/4 quotes maybe.

Schedule the workers

Order the equipment.

Get an electrical permit.

Pay for the truck and all the tools.

Insurance for the company and trucks.

Advertising costs

Warranty and callbacks

I can assure you that this is not the get rich quick scheme you may think it is.

EngCanManon Harnessing America's heat pump moment

The reality is that this is all solving a problem that people don’t have.

Forced air is a terrible way to heat a building yet thats how most homes are heated, and it is good enough for most people.

If you perfectly size a furnace for the coldest days of the year, it is now oversized for the other 90% of days.

The cheapest way is to install a multi stage heating/cooling system that works on first stage most of the time, and second when it needs to, like having 2 small furnaces. This passes the ‘good enough’ test for the vast majority of homeowners.

EngCanManon Carpenter's AirTags help uncover 'massive' case of stolen tools in Maryland

The most surprising part of that story, when I read it, was that it was from 29 years ago.

EngCanManon General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy

Another look from Not Just Bikes:

https://youtu.be/n94-_yE4IeU?si=ncDWw5WDwjdpl9DD

EngCanManon Realtors reach settlement that will change how Americans buy and sell homes

The conflict of interest on a buyers real estate agent is crazy:

the person you are entrusting to get you the best value is compensated on the opposite.

EngCanManon Facebook almost acquired Waze, but we ended up with Google

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. They could have easily invested their cash in whatever they chose, whereas a stock deal can be limiting.

EngCanManon Addressing the community about changes to our API

No, I don't think you did...it would be 4000 API calls per month.

EngCanManon Van Life in Japan

"An empty water bottle/adult diaper can become a luxury in the middle of the night to avoid putting on your clothes/shoes and exiting the van in the coldness"

You lost me when adult diapers became a luxury.

EngCanManon The abundance, biomass, and distribution of ants on Earth

If I just killed 3, how would I update their census?

EngCanManon Rogers network outage across Canada hits banks, businesses and consumers

Still no internet at all? I have a suspicion that you found some…

EngCanManon Ask HN: Is there a simple way to continuously backup your Google account?

I have a synology NAS specifically to backup my google workspace.

EngCanManon Ask HN: Are Gantt Charts Used in Industry

All construction projects use them, nobody has found a better way to show dependancies of the many many trades.

EngCanManon Ask HN: How to deal with death of a loved one

Sorry for your loss.

Your father would not want you to stop your life. You cannot change the past, only the future. Take the lessons he taught you in his life and his passing to make the future better for you and your loved ones. Slow down, spend time, pay it forward as he did for you.

https://youtu.be/PuPYIfcSz_Y

All the best.

EngCanManon Trudeau announces intention to freeze bank accounts of protestors

Right, but you said “the majority of the money is foreign”, now you just reiterated that “51% of the money is local”.

EngCanManon Trudeau announces intention to freeze bank accounts of protestors

https://beta.ctvnews.ca/national/canada/2022/2/14/1_5780989....

Says here that 51% came from Canadians. I think 51% constitutes a majority.

EngCanManon Data misreporting during the Covid-19 crisis: The role of political institutions

Do you have sources for this? Especially the part about fudging the numbers? Anecdotally I believe this is true, but have not seen the admission.

EngCanManon Ask HN: What was your Covid experience like?

My wife (pfizer) and kids (unvaccinated) had it, I never got it, and I kissed them all goodnight every night. All cases confirmed through pcr tests, I did multiple as well. Wife had a stuffy nose, kids had no symptoms.

EngCanManon Fake vaccine cards are everywhere. It’s a public health nightmare

Sorry for taking long to respond.

I do not believe the thread is full of liars or propaganda, although there is probably some, but I do believe many many people are ill informed and regurgitating headlines they read.

https://www.publichealthontario.ca/-/media/documents/ncov/ep...

Page 16 shows deaths by vaccination status in the last 60 days.

EngCanManon Fake vaccine cards are everywhere. It’s a public health nightmare

Reddit is your source? Cmon…

Ontario Canada breaks down deaths by vaccination status, which is currently close to 50/50 on a daily basis.

Please stop believing anything on Reddit.

EngCanManon Covid-19 may have killed nearly 3M in India, far more than official counts show

Thanks for the comment. Are you able to elaborate on the big pharma profits most on baby powder, insulin and pain killers? In the world I live in, they pushed those markets to the brink in the form of baby powder lawsuits, an epidemic of obesity and the opioid crisis. Also, have you looked into Pfizer's profits for 2021?

https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/02/business/pfizer-earnings/inde...

Edit: Baby Powder Lawsuit - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/health/baby-powder-cancer...

Obesity Worldwide - https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesity-and...

Opioid deaths began with increased prescription - https://www.cdc.gov/opioids/basics/epidemic.html

EngCanManon Facing sky-high connection fees, rural Ontarians go off the grid

Bears aren't usually a problem in the winter, with hibernation and all...

EngCanManon Mosquitto: An open-source MQTT broker

This may be a use case issue. I have a zigbee door contact that communicates to HA through Z2MQTT which turns on the light when the door opens. It turns on so fast that my wife didn't believe the light wasn't already on until I made her open the door from the inside. It is instant for all intents and purposes. So this delay may be relevant to the setup, more than MQTT itself.

EngCanManon Mosquitto: An open-source MQTT broker

Many people use https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/ now too, it seems people are moving in this direction

EngCanManon Work-life balance: A perspective from Jack Nicklaus

Your views are ones that are unfortunately too common in society, the common theme being ‘the successful guy has it easy, if he had my problems…’. The successful probably worked harder than you, made smarter/luckier choices than you, and had to overcome many of the same problems as you. Society needs to stop excusing their own problems as if the successful don’t have them too.

EngCanManon Ask HN: What are some of the great books that you have read?

The boys in the boat

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16158542-the-boys-in-the...

EngCanManon Ask HN: How to sync my files to my home server?

This, or resilio sync has been solid for me. There are others like freesync and goodsync but I have never tried them.

EngCanManon Universities forced to face addiction to foreign students’ money

Unfortunately, or maybe even fortunately for the rest of us, this 'wisdom' isn't necessarily true unless you believe it to be. I worked extremely hard during university both in my school work and at multiple jobs, it was far from 'the best years'. Now, most of the people who had all the fun in university agree with you. For me, it just keeps getting better. "The harder you work, the luckier you get" might have been better advice.

EngCanManon A Tiling Desktop Environment

I recently found WinDock (https://www.ivanyu.ca/windock) for windows and just love it. It is scriptable so you can define how windows get tiled in any part of the monitor, and you can make each of your monitors different if you want. You can also set different profiles, which could be used say during work ours, and after work hours.

EngCanManon Ask HN: How did you escape your safe 9-5 job?

How did you escape your meaningless 9-5 job to work full time on what you wanted to work on[1]? I assessed the 'worst case scenario' vs current scenario vs best case scenario and threw a reasonable probability at each. Next I looked at my potential happiness with each. It was quickly apparent that staying where I was at was the dumbest thing I could do. (also consider how 'safe' your job really is, every company and gov't changes direction from time to time)

Did you have a strategy or was it a leap of faith? Of course you have to have a plan or an idea, but then it is just a leap of faith, not much in life is a guarantee.

Did you regret it later on? Nope.

Are you happy with the decision you made? Yup.

Where do you think you would be today if you had decided to stay in that job? In that same job, doing the same thing, reasonably happy, but slowly dying.

Background: I am from Canada where the social systems and job prospects are good, therefore my 'worst case scenario' is not that bad, so YMMV. I also have an engineering degree to fall on. However; I do have a wife, 3 kids and mortgage. Honestly, the kids are the only thing that concerned me. Wives can work too if need be, and mortgages are easy to get rid of.

Worst Case Scenario: Don't let fear of failure (ie Pride) get in the way. Where is your pride when your dying and full of regrets?