If you have the time, I recommend Adam Conover’s podcast interview of Corey Robin about What Liberals Get Wrong about the Right. It answered a lot of questions like this for me.

Flipboard. That’s a news reader for phone/tablet right? I think I used to use it a number of years ago.

Then I started wanting finer control over my newsfeeds and got into RSS clients. But this is an interesting development in that it provides a lower-level way to access Flipboard content that might suit me better?

I wish Apple News would do something like this. I subscribe to it to get around certain paywalls, but it seems pretty unscriptable.

wtaf

“And then not only are EVs more expensive, but their own salespeople are untrained. They don’t even know how to answer most of the questions they get. A lot of them have 100–200 percent turnover of their sales staff in a given year,” Reigersman told me.

This seems not good. I might have been slightly more sympathetic to the dealers before reading this?

That’s a lot of good info. Thanks!

I hadn’t considered the noise issue. I often wear noise-cancelling ear cans while I’m working. I wonder if they might help?

That’s great! Good to know. I remember staying at a hotel in rural Mexico where they had a cistern on the roof. Basically just a big metal tank, and even that thing heated enough that it was comfortable to shower when I’d come back from the beach in the afternoon. So it doesn’t surprise me that a purpose-built water heater could do quite well.

I’ve been considering replacing the central a/c in my house with a heat pump to handle home heating as well, but never thought about heating water that way also. That’s interesting. Can you get a single heat pump system that does both?

Where water heating is concerned, I do know a guy who set up a solar water heater, and he made some compelling arguments for it. Like he considered rooftop solar panels initially to generate electricity, but opted for water heating instead. He pointed out that while electric panels are maybe 20% efficient, water heating is nearly 100% efficient, and his system works so well that it even needs to shut off every now and then to prevent overheating. Anyway, I’m not vouching for this personally since I have no experience with it, but I’m just throwing it out there another possible approach?

I often go chmod -R go+rX . if I want to give read-only access to whatever I’m working on to everyone else. The capital X only sets the executable bit on directories.

We got one of these heated mats from the pet store and our cat seems to prefer it over the space heater. It activates and warms up like an electric blanket when it senses the weight of the cat on it.

George W Bush certainly caused more deaths

That’s debatable. Trump’s handling of the pandemic was atrocious. >1 million Americans dead under his watch. Worse than any other 1st world nation.

Speaking as a Canadian, the Bush presidency was certainly wince-inducing. I was genuinely surprised he got re-elected after that clusterfuck of a first term. By the end of the 2nd, I was fairly convinced the best days of America were behind it.

But the difference between him and Trump is the wounds were more self-inflicted on the country with Bush. Still not great for Canada, whose fortunes rise and fall on what happens on the other side of the border.

But Trump had a genuine animosity for freedom-loving, democracy-respecting American allies and a love for oppressive dictatorships. He tore up trade agreements, levelled tariffs, etc. against Canada and Europe while advancing diplomacy in person in the likes of North Korea.

And on a more social level, he poisoned public discourse and stoked right-wing authoritarianism all over the world. I have family members I can’t talk to anymore. And the lunatic fringe came out of the woodwork under his term. We even had a mosque shooter here in Canada who was quite candid about Trump being his inspiration.

Within the US, Americans hate Americans with a passion. What a mess. Another civil war is not out of the question. As such, I am coming down on Trump being far, far worse.

I’m glad the article mentioned a number of potential stumbling blocks. Working in the mining sector, I do worry about the ability of metals production to keep pace with demand for all that a solar/wind/EV revolution entails. Metals are certainly the oil of this century though. Our end of the trade show floor has grown so much since I first started in the industry and the oil exploration people are just staring at their feet right now.

I think some people underestimate how much work will need to be done on grids before solar/wind can dominate? The article does mention this also, though without any specifics. Where I live, there is a lot of solar/wind development happening, but it’s more due to the fact that the grid still has some spare capacity left in it than the area being especially well-suited to renewables. In many jurisdictions, they can’t hook up any additional capacity without major work on the grid. You might think that they could still replace existing fossil fuel energy production at least, but it is not as straightforward as you may think to move from a centralized power generation model to something more distributed. This is where nuclear may still hold some advantage, since it is centralized by nature and can fit into the existing infrastructure with less drama.

One thing the article did not mention is the NIMBY backlash problem. In my area, some wind projects were outright cancelled and solar scaled back due to community activism. This drives me nuts, frankly. Where were all these people when coal plants were blackening the skies? But it is what it is. The next phase will be to add grid storage, but even there, there are signs of community blowback.

Oh right. Now that I think of it, it’s often somewhere near the back of the store, so you have to go past everything again to get to the checkout. Clever.

It’s weird but I can’t think of the last time I bought a raw chicken? My wife did the math at one point and concluded it was cheaper to buy bbq from like Costco, cut it up, and toss it into whatever. And that’s not even factoring energy costs to heat up an oven or anything. It is literally cheaper, at least where I live, to buy a pre-cooked chicken than raw. It makes no sense I know?

One thing to bear in mind is that while federal funding is involved, every province manages its own healthcare system. As such, you can expect some variation depending on where you live.

I live in Ontario, as do most of my family members. My experience is that hospital care here has been top notch. I have never had a situation in which I felt myself or a family member was not getting everything they needed during a medical crisis.

It is more in everyday care situations where the system has some issues. The pandemic had a knack for revealing healthcare problems with laser focus wherever you were in the world. Here, it was in nursing homes where we saw super-spreading events. My mom’s building alone saw 9 deaths in a single month. It’s not really surprising. Our current conservative premier took it upon himself to find “efficiencies” in long-term care at the beginning of his term.

Where I live, there has also been a chronic family physician shortage. I know people who have been on the waiting list for over 5 years at this point. They can always go into walk-in clinic or the hospital out-patient centre, but still… I think there is a problem with medium-sized cities in Ontario that they are a bit too large to qualify as under-serviced communities and get more help from the province? They figure that since the city has a couple of major hospitals, it can’t be under-serviced.

Good point. I am not opposed to pumped hydro or other such schemes for storing energy. Nuclear itself tends to be employed for base load power generation and is not especially good at following demand variability. Having supply side variability (from solar, wind, etc.) makes matters worse, of course, and necessitates even more storage. But one way or another, it will be needed, and pumped hydro tends to scale better than say battery farms.

I wonder about option B. As it stands where I live at least, there is not much wiggle room in terms of getting people to use less power in the event of a shortage. For example, the local utility has offered free programmable thermostats in exchange for giving them the ability to control power usage in the event of a shortage, but I understand uptake of the program has been low thus far. I suspect in that scenario, they would have to bring fossil fuel power generation online.

Where I live is not in a drought-prone area at least, but it is also not suitable for pumped hydro given the geography. There was talk in the local news recently about a compressed air storage system that may get built nearby our natural gas plant. This juxtaposition makes some sense when you think about it, since it is a site that already features well-established grid hookups, so they can piggyback on that. The province as a whole is generating something like 60% nuclear, 32% renewables (mostly hydro), and 8% fuels. Recently, there was a major refurbishment of some of the nuclear reactors and it came in on budget and ahead of schedule, so the argument that anything nuclear must automatically involve cost overruns is perhaps no longer true, though good lord we have seen some epic ones in the past, particularly after the utility was privatized.

So first off, the source of this article being pv-magazine makes me immediately skeptical about unbiased reporting. This part really gets me though:

The availability of this electrical source is also questioned in view of the increasingly frequent droughts expected in the coming years, causing, in particular, low river flows and therefore associated problems of cooling power plants.

And availability is not a problem with renewables then? If not the central problem? Hydroelectric is probably the most reliable of the renewables, but then we have the aforementioned problem of low river flows. Droughts could even affect pumped hydro: a much-touted solution to availability problems with wind and solar. For crying out loud, present both sides of the argument fairly! /end rant

At any rate, I can get on board the idea that in terms of adding new generating capacity, renewables may be the most competitive option at the moment? They have come a long way in a short time, though they still face major challenges on the energy storage front.

But in terms of getting away from existing fossil fuel-based power generation, is nuclear not an attractive option? The infrastructure is already there, and would essentially have to be largely abandoned as sunken assets by power utilities switching to something like wind or solar right?

Consider your average coal plant. It is a centralized heat source powering steam turbines connected to large generators and a giant transformer station feeding power out over a network of high voltage transmission lines.

What is a nuclear plant then? It is a centralized heat source powering steam turbines connected to large generators and a giant transformer station feeding power out over a network of high voltage transmission lines. I’m thinking at least some of the existing hardware could be repurposed for nuclear to leverage what already exists? Am I wrong?

When I got married, my wife moved up to live with me in Canada in the dead of winter. Our only car was a manual rust bucket my brother gifted us with. For some reason, it was always freezing cold in that car. I eventually squeezed an old pizza box in front of the rad and it helped retain a modicum of heat. But man what a junker…

At any rate, we’d get off work and it would of course already be dark and I’d take her to a parking lot to teach her stick. She’d be trying to do donuts in the snow while the car was lurching around or spinning the tires. She just kept getting angrier and it didn’t help when I’d yell “you’re gonna stall! give it more gas!” Our marriage was seriously tested at that point but by some miracle we’re still together?

it was a giant failure

Well not entirely. 2L coke bottles emerged around that time and they’re still around!

As a Canadian with a living memory of when we made the switch here, I feel your pain. Though to be fair, I was a child at the time and so probably had an easier time of it? But in some ways, I’m still transitioning to this day!

Take temperature, for example. When Canada went metric, all the weather reports switched to Celsius but our indoor thermometers and thermostat were still in Fahrenheit. So I wound up in a situation in which outdoor extreme temperatures became more relatable in C, while typical indoor temperature ranges sounded better in F. I particularly liked winter temperatures in C. It was so intuitive that < 0 means snow and > 0 means rain.

Today, I am more comfortable with C for indoors as well, but not for cooking. I guess that’s because a lot of recipes still say set the oven to 350 or check the meat on the grill is at least 160?