It’s time to stop thinking a phone should be premium

too many people treat phones like a status symbol

Honestly just be glad you’re not among those misguided and move on.

or when all other forms have been neglected

Oddly enough that also makes individual transportation by car crap again lol. Cities that have ditched all other forms of transportation are some of the most congested.

Literally my only gripe with Firefox is that the mobile version on Android frequently plays html5 Videos very choppy and you have to reload the page to get normal fps. Apart from that it’s the obvious, good choice.

Damn. The other day I received a notification from my local post app about something very important that has landed in my PO box when I had just arrived at home from work. I was curious and checked my emails for the exact time stamp of the delivery, turns out it was not “just now” like my Android notification implied but 12 minutes ago. Incidentally, 12 minutes ago was pretty much exactly when I cycled past my PO box being really disappointed that my package hasn’t been delivered yet, or so I thought at the time. Had to go back when I could’ve just picked it up on the original trip.

Stupid me thought it was the “optimised” per-app battery setting vs “unrestricted” that would control this.

Thanks for pointing this out OP!

Millennials are using tiktok?!

That’s the best part, when you meet people of the language you are learning you can say the odd quirky shit from Duolingo and they’ll absolutely love it. What, you are an apple?? A dog is wearing three pullovers?? More relevant for beginners who can say a handful of stuff but can’t yet hold a proper conversation.

It’s not like Duolingo is just randomly generated sentences that make no sense either. They are carefully sprinkled in to break up the routine and make it a bit of fun.

Bless your grandma and puppy

Loads of people love to pretend an NPP is just a hut with a magic gem inside delivering an endless amount of power for free. In reality they are huge, highly complex, high-security facilities that take decades and billions to build and need to be operated and maintained by loads of highly trained staff in 24/7 shift operations. This isn’t to downplay their merit of providing CO2 emission free power, but for the love of god please appreciate the enormous effort and expense this is achieved with, especially when comparing it to renewables.

That’s obviously what they are trying to get across but they affiliate it with something that isn’t bad at all and people should be doing either way, financially stable or not. It’s kind of a weird argument to say that Gen Z are poor, because it might also mean that they are just consuming more consciously by cooking themselves. There’s clearly ways of telling they are poor without this ambiguity.

This can go either way. I’ve literally been the person declining to watch something as I immediately saw it was some conspiracy nut job piece. Why yes Kevin, I’m sure your pixelated Whatsapp video titled “ever wonder why almost all people in power are Jews?” is a completely normal and factual essay that will totally change my mind.

Coming straight from “unless 100% of people abstain 100% I’m not calling it change”-folks. There’s significant shifts in both of these issues. Meat more so, or leading ahead compared to cars, but the fact that some people aren’t going to drop one or either doesn’t change anything about that.

So maybe efforts to reduce the impact of those kinds of things aren’t necessarily wasted.

Not only are they not wasted, they are absolutely necessary. What’s important to understand is, however, that large parts of the negative impact of cars aren’t affected by EVs at all. It’s not just internal combustion engine exhaust pollution, it’s the waste of space, gigatons of asphalt for roads and parking, microplastics from rubber tires driven endless miles by a billion people, traffic congestions and the never-ending demand for another lane to fix them, ““cities”” sprawling out so far that everything is too far to get to by any means other than driving, pedestrian (if such a thing even still exists in your neck of the woods) safety, noise, socioeconomic factors such as the high upkeep costs vs low-income population who are reliant on a car in a car dependant world, …

We have to transition to EVs either way, but it’s not going to fix anything meaningful. And that’s just the neutral outlook, a real danger we’re facing is that through car manufacturers’ greenwashing that is already in full swing, we coax ourselves to a good eco conscience over our no-emissions cars and continue growing the dependency, which would eventually increase the impact. The only real way of reducing the impact is by reducing cars and car dependency where it’s possible. And people are, very slowly, waking up to the fact that this is more often the case than they were led to believe by lobby driven media and politics of the last 60 years.

Anti-EV? The fuck are you talking about this is anti car dependance.

We heff eckssidentally repläced wan bulb with a kaltweiß kind, Wolfgang get ze shotgun

6 months? In Germany itself 2 weeks of returns is granted by law and most shops do one month, more than that is pretty special here.

I’ve seen this this morning and found it immensely funny. By sheer coincidence I scrolled past it again just now and again it made me laugh out loud. No idea what makes this so damn funny.

Added “overview” as a new default section for profiles

This is great and long awaited, however it also means months of muscle memory down the drain again 😂

gas furnance that was somehow under-dimensioned – the idea is that in the real cold days you’d still have the good ole fireplace

Oddly enough I’ve never encountered that in Germany, I only ever see catastrophically oversized furnaces that start cycling in March… Seems to me plumbers never really worry too much about correct dimensioning, they just put the same 20 kW furnace that they know and love to install in every apartment and single family home. For some it will be somewhat adequate, for some it’ll be oversized, who cares, customers never complain when the furnace cycles, but when it’s too cold, you’ve got a problem. Same as they’re never too worried about finding suitable supply water temps. Just set it to 80 and you’re good, it’s the customer who pays horrendous gas bills, not you lmao. That’s also why everyone thinks their Altbau has to have 80°+ supply water when they have never really tried anything lower to see if it maybe suffices. My parents had their oil-furnace on 80C supply for the past 40 years and last winter when everybody was trying to save as much energy as possible they figured out you can set it to 55 as well.

but assuming they’re saying that it’s saying that $0.63 worth of natural gas gives you the equivalent thermal output of 1kWh

Correct (although $0.063), and interesting to see you seem unfamiliar with this, this is the standard way of listing energy prices in Europe, it’s not just that site. That site was just my first hit when I looked up Canadian energy prices. It’s the low heat value and it’s determined by the energy in a fuel if not allowed to condense (which is the relevant value for a traditional furnace, if you have a more modern condensing furnace you take the high heat value) and it makes it relatively easy to compare different sources of energy.

Canada is huge, and some of that landmass is in the Arctic circle.

What people never realise is that being far up in arctic climates doesn’t only impair an SCOP. Yeah the lowest temps are very cold, but that means temporarily bad COPs. An SCOP is made up of the whole heating period though, which in colder climates is longer, so in turn you have several months more of the time where heat pumps are extremely viable with temporary COPs above 5 or 6 saving loads of energy. The real problem is if your lowest temps are so low that a heat pump will stop working entirely, in which case you get a hybrid system or just leave your old furnace in as backup, which is even better for your SCOP because you omit the month(s) with the worst COP and only use the heat pump when it’s most viable. Let’s say you live in Tuktoyaktuk and heating period is basically all year, then you have your furnace on for 3-4 months but you’re saving massive amounts of energy with your heat pump in the other 8-9 months of the year.

touching on the nuances of the word “efficiency”

I actually tend to avoid using that term for heat pumps anyway, as it’s not really correct in terms of physics. What makes heat pumps so viable is a coefficient of performance, their actual electrical efficiency isn’t all that good at 50-60%, but it’s also kinda irrelevant. It’s sometimes easier to just call it efficiency, but like you say, once you go into the nitty gritty it falls apart.

if your energy cost for that source of power is high, it’s going to lose the financial argument every time.

How high, is the question. How much more is electricity where you live that heat pumps “lose the financial argument every time”? Where I’m from a kWh of electricity is roughly 2.8-3x that of natural gas, so most modern heat pumps will beat that, some by quite a margin.

If globalpetrolprices.com is to be trusted and Canadian natural gas is 0.063 CAD and electricity is 0.165 CAD you’re very much in the same boat with a 2.6 ratio. Most heat pumps should be able to beat a 2.6 SCOP even in Canada.

So, sure, the study only looks at COPs and not at overall cost, but I think it’s not unreasonable to expect home owners to be able to divide electricity price by gas price and compare it to the SCOP of heat pumps on offer.

You’d usually run two or more units in a cascade/multiplex when requiring large amounts of power rather than having one giant unit. Means you can turn off one or more units entirely for low heating demand.