It’s not a “feel good statement”, it’s reality. Gas is terrible. It’s responsible for a significant portion of climate change and gas stoves cause myriad health issues. This is basic stuff. Of course the transition isn’t all sunshine and rainbows but electrification is far from some insurmountable ideal, and it can be quite cost effective.

The vast majority of HVAC equipment will be replaced on burnout, and when you do the economics of a new gas furnace (and almost certainly AC these days) vs an ASHP, it’s simply not $30-50k extra. There are state and local incentives, the federal tax credits, utility incentives etc., but I agree the IRA programs are on thin ice (even though Biden awarded funds before leaving). I bought a high end cold climate heat pump for just a few grand more than my neighbor who bought a furnace/AC with similar operating costs. You can get a cheaper ASHP and furnace for something in between cost wise. My state has tripled cold climate heat pump incentives and they are now very competitive with gas systems. I work in the industry and live this every day, it’s not some boondoggle, the grid updates necessary aren’t as dramatic as headlines imply and are already well underway to support vehicle electrification and load growth/resiliency. The PNW is quite mild and people are willing to pay for AC anyway due to heat waves (and wildfire smoke), so going straight to heat pumps is a very cost effective solution. Folks are cancelling gas service left and right and the remaining users will be left with rising fixed costs. Plus as I led with, gas is terrible for your family and the climate (and locally where the wells are).

It’s always the right time to switch to heat pumps and induction stoves. Gas is terrible.

Exactly. What I don’t understand is how everyone knows this, but somehow the stock is still high. Somehow Elon is singlehandedly keeping the stock up while doing literally nothing to help the company, make it make sense.

Well lucky for us they have the R2/R3(X) in the pipeline. Can’t come soon enough though, 2026 for the R2 seems like a lifetime away.

Pedantry warning - we use the plural for decimal quantities less than 1 too. E.g. the tank only made it 0.8 meters before collapsing into a pile of low grade steel.

Their intention is to protest how we are ignoring climate change, you know, the civilization ending catastrophe. There are road delays all the time, for construction, crashes, event traffic, weather, floods, electricity outages, etc. Do you get this upset for every one of those events?

I’d argue “share the road” includes uses such as protests, marches, bike races, whatever. It’s a public good, you don’t have the final say on “approved” uses. Traffic in my town is insane on game day, do I get to jail the sports teams organizers for the disruption for 5 years? Someone probably shat their pants due to the delay, where is their justice?! Boggles the mind that a trivial delay causes this much outrage. Car brain is a hell of a thing.

Why is the road so sacred? Aren’t there multiple roads all going to the same places?

The problem is a simple paved lot can be redeveloped into something useful easily. Once there are EV chargers and and solar roofs in place, it’s that much harder to break the cycle of car dependency. Places like Walmart/Costco/strip malls are probably better off just placing panels on the roof instead of building a new structure for them. I’d actually extend that to just about any building. This isn’t really happening at any scale on its own, which tells us it’s less economical than other installations. Forcing higher cost installations while also entrenching parking lots that often shouldn’t exist seems like poor policy, although I’m sure there are some places where it makes enough sense. But if we care about preserving farmland and wild spaces, stopping sprawl is the only real policy that matters, and that means stopping car dependency and parking lots.

Snow will accumulate on solar panels (source - have rooftop solar on Colorado). Panels are glass so snow will slide off depending on angle, and since panels are dark they tend to melt snow quicker once they get started melting, typically causing the snow to slide off dramatically.

Hi, I have solar on my roof in Colorado. Solar panels are glass, so depending on angle snow will accumulate and slide off dramatically if not for snow bars either on the bottom of the panels, or more commonly the roof below the solar panels. The structure needs to be able handle the snow load and be designed so snow doesn’t slide off and kill people.

You’re still making the mistake of treating dems like some single monolith. It’s a coalition of just about everything that isn’t MAGA at this point, covering all sorts of ideals, yours being just one small part. The answer is still “get a majority of reps that aren’t asswipes” and then we’ll get legislation we want.

As to DC statehood, it would have gone through if not for Manchin because the Senate “majority” at the time hinged on his support. We need to win these seats with bigger majorities, period, and then they’ll pass better bills. The overwhelming majorty of Dems support DC statehood, saying “they won’t do it” is not a great take when they literally didn’t have the votes.

Sure, assuming you don’t think the American rescue plan, bipartisan infrastructure act, CHIPS, IRA, and the first massive tranche of funding for Ukraine are useful. I don’t think you realize how short 2 years is for the legislature and how narrow the dem margin was. They achieved significantly more useful legislation than I thought possible. Unfortunately they didn’t codify Roe, overhaul SCOTUS, or harden our institutions against fascism, so maybe you’re right. Who knows what they could do with a larger majority and control of the House/Senate for 2 more years though - it would be fun to find out, if we could avoid getting all worked up blaming different people we mostly agree with and vote big against fascism.

You seem to supporting the concept though. More people didn’t keep voting left, they voted center/left which sounds like has been moving right, so things stayed the same/went right. Who you vote for matters too - we have multiple opportunities to vote between “dems”. To me OPs comment is a simple truism - we can’t move left by not electing leftist individuals (and parties by extension). Any other strategy is some pie in the sky game theory.

I recently picked up a Lenovo 7i 2-in-1 (I got the Intel Evo version due to a nice sale, but wanted AMD) and am currently dual booting with it. No issues with Ubuntu at all that I’ve encountered.