quickthrowman

Japan has no domestic source of oil or natural gas. The US has so much natural gas that it’s flared off to the atmosphere in some places. Natural gas is insanely cheap to heat with as a result and condensing boilers are extremely efficient. This created a scenario where heat pumps may be more efficient, but they might still cost more to operate. The raw cost of gas excluding pipeline and connection costs in my state is $0.57 for what is equivalent to 29.3kW of electricity. It’s very hard to beat that if you have a 98% efficient boiler, even with a COP of 4 if you’re paying $0.15/kWh, that means the equivalent amount of heat moved would cost 0.15*7=$1.05 or just under twice as expensive.

> but it's ridiculous that people have this sense that shopping should somehow fund your vacation.

Some people are dumb and think tax refunds are free money when in reality they’re an interest-free loan to the IRS.

Money is fungible and instantly redeeming rewards for a statement credit is almost always the optimal way to use credit card rewards.

A person who wants to fund a vacation with rewards can simply redeem the rewards for a statement credit while simultaneously transferring that amount of cash to a HYSA or similar.

> I cannot understand why silicone rubber is not more commonly available for cable insulation. It is so much better than much of the badly plasticized PVC and other plastics that are now used.

PVC, XLPE, and rubber insulation is more durable than silicone. THHN uses PVC, XHHW uses XLPE, SOOW cord uses EPDM rubber.

I would encourage you to refrain from saying things like ‘lol. Talk about cope.’ here, let your argument stand on its own without baiting the other person into responding emotionally.

I’m not offering this advice because I’m perfect either, I find it difficult sometimes to be respectful of someone I disagree with. You can take it or leave it, I’ll just say editing those sorts of things out of my own posts has been helpful.

I assure you that Nathan Fielder is not rehabilitating her image. If you’ve see his work, you’d understand.

He gets people with personality disorders or a lack of embarrassment to act insane in front of cameras, more or less. I don’t see why that would change, given the subject. She tried to get out of prison by having a baby.

> (The second-largest problem -- the smell -- is a different issue entirely. It usually ramped up pretty well by the time the first problem was approaching being solved.)

Makeup air unit and exhaust fan, just like a commercial kitchen, sans the hood and fire surpression.

The exhaust fan should have a slightly higher cfm that the makeup air unit to maintain negative pressure so the body odor does not escape the gaming cave :)

Hot water heaters don’t heat water enough to kill bacteria and also they’re absolutely disgusting inside unless you’re one of the rare 0.1% of people who drain it annually and replace the sacrificial anode when it needs replacing.

Don’t drink from the hot water tap.

Unlike Hock Tan, you forgot to raise the prices 5-10x. Then your 0.1% of customers generating 20% of your revenue turn into 0.1% of your customers generating the same amount of revenue as 100% of customers were before with lower operating costs and thus higher margins.

I fail to understand why anyone is scared to place their bare thighs on a public toilet seat. Do you have open wounds on your legs?

The entire current US Administration has adopted the grievance rhetoric of its chief executive because the alternative is expulsion.

Who do you think benefits from the use of oil? Everyone. We’re all guilty, it’s not just oil companies. Goods are transported on ships, railroads, planes, and trucks. Virtually none of these are electrified because of energy density constraints. They all use oil. Anyone that consumes is an oil consumer.

I understand now, my apologies for the pedantry.

What’s next, force the troops to drink as much whiskey as the SecDef does on a daily basis? Most of them would die on the first day, after their BAC hits .3% at 3 PM, a double whiskey on the hour every hour hits the liver hard.

I fail to see how the author of this piece is the one who called those things “perversity”, here is a direct quote from the piece that refutes your claim:

> he wrote about what he called perverseness: the “unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself”—the mysterious desire he felt, and believed we all feel, to get in our own way.

> Perverseness, Poe thought, was as fundamental a drive as hunger or libido, with its own dedicated region of the brain. When we are perverse, we turn not only against our better judgment but also against what are apparently our desires. “The Imp of the Perverse” begins with an essay defining the concept and giving examples that range from the harmless to the unsettling; Poe classes as perverse both procrastination and the impulse to kill oneself by jumping from a great height.

Where does the author define the things that are perverse? All are attributed to Poe.

The first three apply to any construction project with a paved surface and there are ways to mitigate that, you can collect the runoff in a cistern/tank that filters back into the groundwater or collect it in a retention pond which does the same thing.

Items 4 and 5 apply to any facility with cooling towers, not limited to but including hospitals, apartment buildings, schools, prisons, cold storage warehouses, combined cycle power plants, large commercial buildings, paper plants, retirement homes, commercial bakeries, industrial facilities with heat rejection needs, etc.

The sixth one applies to virtually every power plant in existence.

I think unethical behavior is necessary to have a certain amount of wealth, I’m not sure where the line is, but I do think it’s there.

Also, it seems that higher status/income people benefit a lot more from acting unethically than lower income people would, the more money at the table, the more beneficial it is to act unethically. I’m not saying it to excuse anyone’s behavior, just speculating out loud.

I have no doubt it’s already being used if it was the first thought that popped into my head.

It’s less obvious than looking at Strava maps, but still low hanging fruit.

Could probably get a lot of actionable military information about troop locations by running targeted ads for subprime auto loans and divorce lawyers and collecting location information, discarding any US locations.

> I wouldn't be surprised if most of the savings was the new lights are LED while the old only incandescent was available

It’s definitely not the lighting, you only need a few thousand lumens to have bright elevator lighting. If you need 4000 lumens, that is (5) 60W incandescent lamps, switching to LEDs that do 100 lumens per watt (8W lamp) saves you 260 watts/hr.

The new elevator uses a VFD (they call it a VVVF) to control the motor which is where virtually all of the gains come from. Lowering the speed of the motor lowers the power usage, it’s a non-linear relationship but a motor spinning at 75% speed uses 1/4 to 1/3rd of the power that it would use at full speed.

> They likely only have whole building power consumption

You can easily measure the power of a single circuit or single panelboard using a submeter: https://www.shopemondirect.com/catalog/shop/Shop-E-Mon-Direc...

Heavy trucks do more damage to roads so the fuel tax is higher.

Agricultural or ‘off road’ diesel is untaxed as the fuel tax is meant to pay for road maintenance, tractors and combine harvesters spend almost all of their time in a field and very little time on a road.

You’re correct, there needs to be refrigerated trailers, train cars, and ships along with refrigerated warehouses from source to destination. Transportation and storage.

Before vapor-compression refrigeration, there was the ice trade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_trade

The office building I’m sitting in has a 2 MVA transformer feeding a 2500A 480V three-phase service, 2 MW is peanuts.

Yes? Nation-states like the US (and China) are more powerful than any international organization and power dictates what happens in international relations.

I’m not saying it’s right, I’m just saying it is what it is.

I use simple algebra and occasionally a bit of geometry estimating and managing construction projects, but I’ve never found it necessary to find an exact solution for an area under a curve or the rate of change of a function at a specific point.

I don’t know how to solve an integral, but I understand that an electricity meter or flowmeter (gas and air) is performing continuous integration to keep track of total power usage or fluid flow. That’s good enough for me, and if I had to I could approximate a solution with a piece of paper, a pair of scissors, and a reasonably accurate scale; or trapezoids and graph paper.

Re: your edit, calculus would definitely come in handy if you had an interest in RF. The good thing is, you could still learn it :)

How big is the transformer and how many residences are sharing it? It’s probably stencil painted on the enclosure.

I’ve seen half a dozen houses on a single 7.2kV -> 240V 25kva transformer which can lead to problems given the available current on the secondary side is only 104A. As the transformer overheats you get voltage drop, as you’ve noticed ;)

Your supply voltage should be +/- 5% of nominal, 115-125V line to neutral and 230-250V line to line, appliances are generally OK with +/- 10% from nominal voltage.

> Due to having extremely wide feet, in shoes that don't specifically have a wide option, my shoes can be anywhere from an 8.5 to a 10, depending on the manufacturer and style.

As someone with wide feet, I don’t buy shoes unless they specifically have width options. It’s not particularly easy to do unless you really like traditional men’s leather shoes and boots, but there are some athletic shoe makers that offer wide width shoes (NB and Hoka for sure).

Even given all of the above, I still own shoes in 3-4 different sizes because shoe sizes are not standardized between makers, like you said.

> Income from capital has a low tax rate in the US (and many other countries) because you can deduct neither losses due to inflation nor losses due to risk, both of which are substantial for capital income but non-existent for wage income.

You are incorrect on both of those, the risks are obvious.

If you wage/salary does not keep up with inflation, you lost buying power due to inflation.

If your employer goes out of business or your industry suffers a downturn, you may be laid off and lose your income. This risk is highly concentrated due to most people only having the one job.

Wage earners are exposed to all kinds of risk.

Also, equities go up when there’s inflation and if you hold bonds to maturity, all you miss out on is potential interest income in an inflation event. Rents go up with inflation. Cash and cash wages have the highest inflation risk.

I have no issues with Spotify either, but my usage pattern is pretty simple.

I search for the album I want to listen to and then listen to it. Sometimes I search for an artist and then locate the album in their discography and listen to it.

The ‘Jam’ function is fun when you have a group of people listening to music together.

You can stick with local control and no internet access, all of the major BAS integrators offer completely offline systems. A BAS system is pretty simple, there are microcontrollers with binary and analog inputs and outputs that get networked together (RS-485, Ethernet, ARCnet), sensors and relays get wired to the microcontrollers. The microcontroller network is usually connected to a control panel that orchestrates the controllers, this is what you can connect to via the internet or a local pc not attached to the internet.

But pretty much any grocery store with multiple refrigerated/freezer cases is going to have an automation system that runs it.

Ed Zitron’s job is to convince people to pay him money to read what he writes, of course he’s going to preach to the choir, they’re paying him to do that and he knows it.

This is why I always consider the agenda of an author, Ed Zitron’s agenda is to make money from subscribers who read his writing.