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Joined 27 days ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2025

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  • I suspect this is actually what’s changed - labor is so expensive compared to the cost of the machine that people replace their appliance with a new one because it’s only a little more than fixing their old one.

    The guy on an assembly line who places a particular assembly in place and connects the tubes/bolts can perform that task on hundreds of machines in a day. The guy who has to drive to each person’s house to replace the exact same part can do maybe 2 a day, assuming he has the right part on hand, and assuming that it’s easy to diagnose which part has failed.




  • The Icarus myth is still a useful analogy, even if you don’t believe it actually happened.

    And what’s their takeaway? Is it about learning from their mistake and trying again? No, it’s “God is punishing your hubris!”

    Just substitute any force or phenomenon bigger than human ability for “God” in that sentence and it’ll still apply to a lot of situations.







  • Two things.

    First, dating and commitment is about matching and compatibility, not about some kind of objective ranking system of quality or merit. It’s about how a partner or potential partner rates on your own personal scale, not some sort of societal scale built by social consensus. So while it is ok for you to find a particular trait to be a negative, or even a deal breaker, your point is completely irrelevant to the advice being given, which is not to hide important traits of one’s identity.

    Second, your own preference here is stated in unnecessarily condescending terms, as if your preferences are right and the opposite preference is wrong or the sign of some kind of disorder. Whatever your definition of “toys and dolls” are, it probably isn’t a very tightly defined term, and I’d venture to guess that you are OK with some kinds of “toys” but not others. People collect stuff. People develop emotional attachment to physical things all the time. And for you to gatekeep and say which things are acceptable or unacceptable is kinda an asshole move.




  • Right now in California natural gas is about $14-15 per thousand cubic feet (yeah it’s a stupid unit), which is about 1 million BTUs (another stupid unit of energy). That translates to about 290 kWh.

    The average residential price of electricity in California is about 30 cents per kWh. So the same amount of energy in electricity would be about $87, about 5.8 times as expensive as gas per unit energy.

    If a heat pump is 4 times as efficient at heating than a gas furnace, then we’re still looking at higher heating costs for heating a home.

    And things like stoves and hot water heaters tend not to be as efficient as heat pumps, so you’re still looking at a 4-6x cost difference from electrification on those.