This is a very silly take. If you consume any animal foods raised in the US, you are consuming canola / rapeseed meal, soybeans (90% of soy grown in the us is used to create animal feed), and sunflower seed / meal already. You are consuming it in a condensed secondary form (one tropic level up). It seems exceptionally backwards to be worried about eating any of these foods when the animals you eat are essentially just condensed versions of these ingredients where any downside effects would have accumulated heavily.
Also canola oil is now considered on par or healthier than olive oil. Soybeans are one of the worlds few complete plant protein sources with a high quality protein and widely consumed all over the world to both animals and humans to much beneficial effect. Sunflower oil is the least healthy thing here, but still considered quite healthy without excessive heating.
> You are consuming it in a condensed secondary form (one tropic level up).
I always find this is looked over and a double standard. You can raise an animal on a diet of anything along with medication, drugs, and supplements, and advocates will label the beef/chicken/pork product as "meat" and "natural" as if it was a single pure ingredient. But then if a non-meat alternative like a burger is mentioned, every individual ingredient used gets scrutinized, even if that ingredient is often fed to farm animals like soy or grain.
This, in my opinion, is the most important point in the thread and the clearest expression of it. For purposes of this argument, meat is conceived of essentially as a single ingredient, and the raising of the animal in artificial conditions, on hormones, fed on processed food with its associated environmental footprints are kind of sidestepped, while alternatives have to answer for every step in the chain of production.
That mapping seems correct to me, as a lot of the objections here are free-floating one-offs that presume these background assumptions more so than they are apples to apples comparisons intent on clearly comparing them in totality.
This is a bad take. Of course methods meant for a local region don’t scale everywhere. Different regions require different methods of cultivation, and should be applied in the correct places.
Ideas like syntropic / successional agroforestry are needed to scale a place from having bad soil, to slowly accumulating nutrient density, and accumulate soil health. This then supports a successional planting of trees with an end goal of a mature forest with multiple healthy stories and a healthy loam underneath.
This doesn’t mean you need large herds of free animals (though obviously if you build these forests, you will accumulate more animal biodiversity since they can thrive there), but free roaming animals certainly can help in some circumstances. Though large herds of bipedal monkeys will definitely be needed.
It is technically the correct climate; but unfortunately the incorrect place for them, given the electricity costs and propensity for large power outages during storms (read: times when you actually need heating).
If you are in one of the cities with public utilities where electricity is cheap, then go for it, great choice. But on PG&E, the monetary proposition is awful compared to a gas heater, modern wood stove, or masonry / rocket mass heater.
Given the extreme excess of wood in the region (that otherwise ends up in huge forest fires), it makes a lot of sense to be running an efficient wood stove / masonry / mass heater.
The big loss is of course automation, so it pays to have some automated backup source of heat for when you are out of town, but that could just be whatever heating method you are using already.
If you are already heating using electric baseboards though, yes, definitely move over to a heat pump. It will save you a lot of money. Not as much as natural gas or the others, but savings are savings.
Also, there are plenty of ducted air source heat pumps that work as drop in replacements for gas furnaces. Use one of them if you already have a ducted system that works well and do a heat pump replacement.
Agreed. I live in the CA, and am a homeowner. I love the efficiency of heat pumps. I have a high personal incentive to install cool efficient tech. I have the 20k lying around to install a heat pump (or 5-7k for a mini split). Yet I will never install a heat pump, because PG&E is running a racket on electricity prices. In fact, I’m considering instead installing a new wood stove / masonry heater.
CA needs to get its incentives aligned to meet any of these goals. You want people to electrify? Just make it cheaper to run in the long term, and everybody will just do it by default.
Solar net metering is a weird subsidy. The solar panel owners are not paid for the full value of the electricity they provide. The utility is not paid for the full value of the electricity distribution they provide (you can pull 240V x 200A on demand).
Net metering can only form a small part of the retail market before the fixed costs of distribution get concentrated on remaining customers in a death spiral. A population that is generally less able to take advantage of tax credits (because their tax liability is not high enough), and has less access to capital in the form of homeownership or financing for the solar system.
This is analogous to the "problem" of fuel efficient car owners paying less fuel tax. Some states have added higher registration fees on hybrids and EVs to offset the "lost" revenue. Another similar situation is water utilities that encouraged efficiency through higher rates. Customers saved water and then the utility had to increase per unit rates to maintain enough baseline revenue to cover fixed expenses of maintaining the distribution network to every home.
I don't think that is correct. With net metering residential solar owners are overpaid for the value of their power. More than commercial solar plants selling at the same time.
Homeowners may get paid less than their panels cost, but rooftop solar is tremendously expensive and there is no way that it would recoup the cost at actual market prices
It's somewhere in-between: residential solar, when feeding back into the grid, is only using a small fraction of the transmission compared to a commercial solar plant (in terms of length of wiring and number of transformers used to transmit a given amount of power). In fact, it will generally be (unless in a neighbourhood where nearly every house has solar installed) reducing the overall load on the grid. So it's not reasonable to expect that the value of that electricity is the same as that of the same amount coming from a large utility, but it's still probably not worth retail prices, either (though maybe it is, in certain circumstances. In cases with a very overloaded grid it may conceivably be worth more!)
the grid is a fixed cost, which is needed unless we are willing go without power every night and winter. Once it is in place, it costs the same if it is sitting idle or being used.
There are absolutely no savings from an unreliable local power source.
Yes, this is what the CPUC said but was a ridiculous argument in favor of raising profits moreso than helping lower income people.
The climate should take precendence over everything else. Incentives for rooftop solar should increase, incentives to help lower income people should increase, electricity record profits should not be a thing.
This is entirely due to regulatory capture, not some "good will towards poor people" that the electricity industry is pushing.
> The climate should take precendence over everything else.
That's an argument for moving from rooftop solar subsidies into storage subsidies, because its already at the point where renewable output sometimes exceeds 100% of demand. (And the strong solar mandates will contnue to add supply without subsidy, especially—and this adds to the pile of reasons that this needs to happen—if housing construction stops being held back by zoning constraints.)
It doesnt make any sense to force utilities to pay retail prices for electricity when wholesale prices are 10x lower. There are much more efficient ways to encourage renewables.
> electricity record profits should not be a thing
Unless the electricity consumption is falling faster than inflation, I'd expect the regulated-profit electric utility to be having record profits essentially all the time.
IMO the state should have forced PG&E into liquidation, bought all the assets, and converted the whole mess to a public utility. It would surely take some time to learn how to operate PG&E’s disaster of a system, but it’s not as though PG&E can competently operate its own system right now.
I hated this idea at the time, but have come around to it. Im fairly libertarian, but understand that competition is difficult for the power distribution network.
As much as I think the state is inefficient, a cost plus regulated monopoly is even worse. Municipal power companies in CA run $0.10-0.20 per kwh, while PG&E is $0.40-0.50 cents, and going up.
It would be amusing to require PG&E to match the average rates of the municipal utilities plus 10%. And then liquidate them when their stock goes to zero as a result :)
How is a mini-split $5-7K in the US? A 6kW Mitsubishi Electric mini-split is $1800 (US$1200) here in Australia and you’ll pay another $650 (US$420) to get it installed… My 5 kW air to water heat pump was about $6K (US$4K) before a $900 (US$600) rebate but they are less common here so I think still cost a bit more than in Europe or the UK.
Yeah so basically the guideline here is 25 btus per sqft, which is 270 btus per m2, house is 110ish m2, so it’s roughly 30k btus. So then get a 30k btu condenser, about $3400, plus three 12k air handlers ($600 each or so), plus labor and the rest of the random parts. Could be overkill, I’m just following guidelines for the estimate.
You don't. At least not for an install these days. Their data point must have been from a few years earlier.
My experience having installed one a couple of months ago is that the installer charged around 1.5k AUD just for the installation(by my calculation using retail prices) for a back to back "simple" install for the same brand and size mentioned. This is in Melbourne, Australia.
I did get multiple quotes that were the same and this was before peak summer season. The ones that were lower were either not licensed or wanted to do it for cash - meaning they wouldn't declare and pay taxes on it so the customer gets it for cheaper. It also means they won't give you an invoice and good luck claiming damages without evidence.
They blame the high cost of living but knowing some insiders, the margins are huge.
It's a pretty big market here I guess - this is for a simple installation, of course, with the mini split on a wall back to back with the external wall, running the piping down and hooking up and gassing. But that's about the standard price everyone was charging for that when I put my last one in two years ago. If you were putting in a ducted system obviously it would cost more.
Charged around 1.5k AUD for a recent back to back install in Melbourne. Tradies have bumped up their rates by quite a high margin citing cost of living and with it their profit margins.
Would you say HVAC companies are more or less "entitled" to that labor/profit, compared to, say, a company that prints business cards for those kinds of small businesses?
Any business is entitled to the profit they’re able to compete for and satisfy their customers, HVAC, lending, printing, whatever, even selling pictures of your butthole on the internet.
When regulation serves to limit via licensing and multi-year apprenticeships is where you get into market distortions that sometimes serve consumers and sometimes harm them. This happens to some degree in licensed trades (price out a drywall crew, painting or carpet [not licensed or at least licensed without apprenticeship in most places] vs a plumber, electrician, or HVAC).
Yep, same story with solar rebates, most of it goes to the installer.
Home construction work is really interesting, because the transaction costs are so high around locating and comparing the service providers.
It is easy to say there isnt enough competition, but im not sure that is actually true. I think more likely is that most consumers dont collect 10+ quotes and compare, so the price signal is weak.
Part of the problem is that buying refrigerant requires a certification/license.
Also in Seattle, only an HVAC company can pull a permit for refrigeration, even though plenty of heat pumps/mini splits are pre-charged and you'll never need to touch refrigerant.
The EPA 608 universal takes about 90-120 minutes online and is free at SkillCat (no affiliation, but I tossed them $50 as a thanks). The 609 (for autos) takes way less time but costs $25 online.
I’ve bought refrigerants online several times over the years without showing any license (even though I hold an EPA 608 and 609). It’s legal to buy for resale, which is probably how suppliers get around checking.
Have you actually watched Jodorowskys movies? Because if you go and watch one, you know that his Dune would be have been an absolutely incomprehensible nightmare. The costuming would have been really cool, but the story would have been totally changed to be incoherent, and it would have become an infamous scandal at changing a movie away from the book storyline.
I was so intrigued by this documentary, and how amazing it might be, until I went and actually watched ‘El Topo’. It was probably the worst movie I’ve ever watched… To this day everyone I asked to watch it with me will bring up how bad and weird,incoherent, and gross it was.
>Have you actually watched Jodorowskys movies? Because if you go and watch one, you know that his Dune would be have been an absolutely incomprehensible nightmare.
Yeah, it would've been great. El Topo is awesome. Holy Mountain is probably even better.
A part of me did laugh out at the thought of you naively sitting down with a group of friends to watch a Jodorowsky movie. Having watched The Holy Mountain, El Topo and Santa Sangre I could only imagine how awkward this was.
Regarding the creative process of creating Dune, Jodorowsky has this to say in the documentary:
> "if you respect the woman, you will never have child. You need to open the costume and to... to rape the bride."
Which is a horrifying choice of words considering Jodorwsky "claimed in a 1970 interview to have raped his co-star Mara Lorenzio on camera" [0].
He said he wanted to shock people and that he didn’t really do that, but there are multiple ways to prove that, one of them was to bring people from the production or even Mara Lorenzio to speak.
I tried to search for Mara Lorenzio on the net to see if there is anything on her and it is impossible to find. I’m not sure if her name was that….
On the other hand, how likely is it that someone could get raped on a set where there are at least 20 other people all standing around and staring into the scene? Would none of those people try to stop it if they saw it? Would they not share the story afterwards?
> Have you actually watched Jodorowskys movies? Because if you go and watch one, you know that his Dune would be have been an absolutely incomprehensible nightmare.
I have seen one of his movies, and it's the only movie I've ever walked out of. Now, granted, it was a midnight showing where the theater would show older movies, but man alive was whatever movie it was an incomprehensible trainwreck.
Doesn't sound terribly different than how I perceived the actual movie. I often describe Dune as a 3 hour trailer. I didn't hate it due to the visuals and the immersive sound at the theater but I would have probably been pretty upset with my wasted time if I saw it at home.
Only thing I’ve had that worked against argentine ants was termidor sc. Non repellent, and slow kill time. Spray it on an active walkway, and it will slowly spread through the colony and kill them all off. Again, supercolonies, so it isn’t a perfect solution. But it’s the only thing that works for me for 6+ months at a time. Then, I have to spray again as soon as I see another Argentine.
Plenty of people in California are doing this. Basically they buy a large amount of acreage up where nobody cares (mostly Mendocino county or Humboldt county, but sporadically throughout Sonoma County / Marin County/ rest of the Bay) then spend about a decade putting the land into a trust, and marking each separate trees to make sure people don’t poach them. The largest one is the ‘Save the Redwoods’ league, but I’ve spent many days hiking through redwood preserves just from some random person who died and made a land trust as their legacy.
People 2000 years from now will also be enamored with Redwoods (provided they still exist), they’ve been highly regarded for thousands of years already, and they will for thousands more.
Also canola oil is now considered on par or healthier than olive oil. Soybeans are one of the worlds few complete plant protein sources with a high quality protein and widely consumed all over the world to both animals and humans to much beneficial effect. Sunflower oil is the least healthy thing here, but still considered quite healthy without excessive heating.