I have a few family members with heat pumps (I’m in Canada) and they work well. They do need to be supplemented for the coldest days, but they have an electric heater integrated into the system for that. Last month was particularly cold (every day was below freezing) and resulted in some very high power bills, but still worked out to be less costly than oil or even wood.

In terms of EVs not working well in the cold… yeah and neither do Diesel engines. Need to plug in a block heater if you want your diesel engine to start on a cold morning. Seems a really easy fix to have something similar for an EV, and since you’re plugging it in anyway, it shouldn’t be a big problem.

EVs are kinda a no-brainer in terms of energy usage. Way cheaper than gas or diesel, only problem is there’s a significant upfront cost at the moment. Once some lithium mines come online and we get some economies of scale going on making the batteries that upfront cost drops too. Other than the battery, an EV is way simpler than an ICE vehicle, and all studies have shown they will last significantly longer than an ICE vehicle. Electric motors aren’t all that complicated, the batteries are getting to be mature tech now, so there’s less that can go wrong with them than with complicated ICE powered vehicle.

A charging station operating on 100% diesel to power an EV is much less efficient than a modern ICE vehicle of a similar mass sans batteries.

Citation needed. Do ICE engines not get hot and therefore also have great losses because of waste heat?

Presumably a generator making electricity for a charging station would only run when electricity is needed, while an ICE engine would be losing energy to heat the entire time the vehicle is idling in traffic.

Why would a diesel generator not be made to efficient and why are ICE engines always made to be efficient? How do you know which kind of generator they were using? Why would they use the generator for 100% of the energy needed?

Theoretically, yes… but the reality is that most people just let algorithms decide which junk they’re going to watch.

Yeah no shit they’re controlled by different groups of people.

Real currency is managed by a central bank which has as it’s goal to keep it stable with slight inflation over time. Because that’s what makes it good for doing loans with.

Cryptocurrency is controlled by speculators looking to make money from rug pulls.

Tickets at an arcade could be considered a currency because they only have value

You’re still thinking currency is supposed to have value beyond being something that makes it convenient to conduct transactions in. Money is a simply an incomplete transaction. You’re trading something of value for something else of value. You do labour you’re owed something. You buy a product, you’ve completed the transaction, trading labour for a product. Money exists when that transaction is incomplete. It’s a temporary thing that only exists because it’s inconvenient to haul around chicken, bushels of grain, or anything else someone might want whenever you’re making a trade.

Crypto currency operates on the premise that money is supposed to have value in and of itself and that value should be increasing. It’s valued because people believe it will increase in value with some underlying belief that it will someday become a currency. But once everyone that could ever get suckered into buying into it has already put all of their money into it, it can no longer increase in value and those that invested into it to make a profit will sell, causing the value to crash.

There is no benefit to crypto other than for illegal activities like money laundering and for scamming people. It would be stupid to take out a loan denominated in crypto as it could increase in value. So businesses will never be financed in crypto which means it’s inconvenient for business to pay employees in crypto, which means it’s inconvenient for those employees to buy legit products in crypto. The whole point of currency is to make transactions more convenient and crypto fails at that because borrowing crypto would be stupid.

So it’s not real currency and never will be because the libertarian concept of money that has increasing value doesn’t work for financing and therefore won’t work in a capitalist society.

Real currency represents debt. You’re paid money that represents what is owed to you for work you’ve done. Or you’re owed something because you handed over a product so you’re handed money that represents what you’re owed.

Real money is created when money is borrowed. Because real money represents something owed. Interest rates are set to control how how much money is borrowed which impacts the money supply, which impacts it’s value.

Crypto “currency” would be terrible to use for loans, as that would be effectively shorting it which as something that’s value is determined purely by speculation could result in you owing way more in real value than you originally borrowed. Buying crypto is a gambling the money you put into it. Taking out a loan denominated in crypto currency is gambling an infinite level of liability.

Since it absolutely fails at the primary function of currency (representing debt) crypto “currency” is definitively not a currency. It’s only believed to be currency by people who don’t understand what currency is.

It’s not about blocking, it’s about sending a message.

Don’t worry, you’ll be 40+ by the time the updates are finished compiling.

Yeah lettuce seems the biggest challenge to me. All the heads of iceberg lettuce come from the US. What pisses me off is that under the romaine lettuce it says “Product of USA or Mexico”. Which is it? I have no problem buying it if it’s from Mexico (they’re in the same situation as we are) but not getting it if it’s from the US.

I have noticed on some products the grocery story is putting a maple leaf beside the price when it’s made in Canada, but it’s not universal yet.

Add a bell button and a whistle button.

I think instead of promoting a page where people have to choose a server, just send people to lemmy.world directly. We should probably just get people to sign up there at first and have the ability to migrate their accounts to other servers if they want to do that later.

Having to choose from multiple servers is asking people to choose between a bunch of options they know nothing about. Get people straight to looking at content and posting stuff as soon as possible, once they’re more invested, and understand more about the different instances they can change servers if that’s what they want to do.

But yeah writhing the code needed to make account migration seamless might be a lot of work so not sure if that will happen.

Sorry… I got nailed by a blue shell just before I walked into the bank.

chmod 755 sonic

Whoah… wish I knew about this when I was setting up my raspberry pi. Got a brand new computer on the way (well half of it is here already) so this might come in handy… thanks!

Yeah it’s really lame… seems like the ban is permanent, so I went ahead and blocked lemmy.ml. No point in seeing content from communities that some self-righteous admin decided I shouldn’t be allowed to interact with.

It is what it is. I already left reddit because of their bullshit owners. There’s still way better communities on reddit than on lemmy.ml, and as bullshit as the owners of reddit are, they’re still not as bad as the owners of lemmy.ml. So if it were really an issue to me I’d just go back to reddit. But it’s fun to discuss things in smaller communities so I’ll stick with lemmy, just not lemmy.ml.

lemmy.ml tends to have an immature userbase with immature mods. It’s a weird bubble of insane extremists that are all about ideological purity tests. They aren’t really interested in discussion and will ban anyone that doesn’t conform to their extremism. And their extremists are constantly edging towards stochastic terrorism.

So needless to say, I’m banned from lemmy.ml, and I feel like that’s a badge of honour. But that does mean I won’t be engaging with any community that’s hosted on lemmy.ml.

So if you want to have discussion that’s not about how super awesome the violent overthrow of the government of your country would be, I’d recommend not hosting your community on lemmy.ml.

Have you ever bitten into a road apple?

People come up with funny names for things sometimes.

You’re not offering any alternatives.

But your personal experience probably doesn’t give you a representative cross section of Americans.

Neither does yours. The fact is that there are Democrats pushing legislation pushing to move towards Ranked Choice Voting. It’s only your personal experience that leads you to believe that it’s all for show.

There’s also, like, some pretty big rifts in the right, between the old school establishment and the MAGA crowd.

Yeah but they didn’t form a new party did they? And I don’t think the Dems want to be dependent on the GOP running another unpopular candidate in 2028. They have campaign workers that actually talk to a lot of voters so they’d know better than either of us about the cross section of Americans.

Most people don’t know about legislation that has passed, forget about proposed legislation being a thing that will influence voters. So why would they bother proposing legislation they don’t really want in an effort to bamboozle people who don’t even know about it?

Yeah I’ve seen all of these videos before. Problem is, these aren’t isolated concepts. There are very specific power dynamics within a proportional representation system that aren’t the same as the power dynamics in a community representation system. He doesn’t go into those details in the rules for rulers videos, only the broad concept of democracy is mentioned. He only goes into a some math on the FPTP video but doesn’t discuss the differences power dynamics for those different systems.

Basically in a community representation system (called FPTP by people trying to make it sound arbritrary an unfair) the power flows up from the communities. In a proportional representation system the power flows down from the party leadership.

Considering the “rules for rulers” video it seems CGP Grey thinks all government has to be top down, so he doesn’t seem to have even considered the possibility of power flowing upwards from a community. This is what happens in the system he thinks is bad, so I’d say he hasn’t adequately considered everything about the subject.

We don’t actually elect rulers we elect people to represent our communities. Sure they’re usually part of a party but because we elect representatives, not parties, that representative has the option of leaving the party if it serves the interests of the community they represent. Since parties can lose seats between elections they have to listen to the the elected representatives (community leaders) to avoid losing seats. People in a community put pressure on their representative, the reps but pressure on the party leadership, power flows upwards from the people.

Proportional representation only seems better if you think as CGP does and believe we can only be ruled over and we need to find a better way to select rulers. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of representative democracy.

Well the cops might be taking pics of a dead body the next day. So then they could say “yeah we probably should’ve responded to that one last night, but we just couldn’t risk that it might’ve been one of the 0.01% of these calls where it turns out it’s an internet swatting thing.”

It’s been a long time since Ross Perot.

I’m basing it on trends. We saw with RFK being offered whatever he wanted as soon as it looked like he was going to take more votes from Trump than Harris. He dropped out and backed Trump. While not all of his supporters might not automatically go vote for Trump (just as not all Libertarians won’t pick R for their second choice) it probably helped.

The Libertarians got what? 1/3 of the votes in 2020 than they did in 2016? Seems like they’re on the decline to me.

We’re seeing more of a push by various internet influencers (who knows who’s paying them, LOL) to push people on the left towards voting third party. And maybe I’ve spent too much time on lemmy, but it seems to be working. People want to vote for Cornel West or Jill Stein.

It’s probably exhausting for campaign workers to have to constantly explain they shouldn’t vote third party as it might result in Trump getting in. It would be far easier to say “sure I kinda like [Third Party Candidate] too, but I like [Democratic Candidate] more because blah blah blah, but the most important thing is you go out and vote!” and be fairly confident that vote will cascade down to their candidate. The whole “don’t vote third party” schtick that’s going on now may just result in that person not voting at all.

A lot of emphasis now is in getting turnout. If a third party candidate can energize some turnout whose votes will cascade down to the Dem candidate, that means the third parties are helping them instead of hurting them. And what people think now about how voting third party will push the Dems more towards that position would actually be true. Right now it’s not true but the internet is teaching them otherwise.