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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • As for what France does, as I mentioned, the US has not developed or built that tech because there is ultimately no profit in it and the US is unwilling to spend tax money on it.

    First Ford, then Carter stopped commercial re-processing in the United States. Reagan brought it back. G. H. W. Bush then put the brakes on it but stopped short of an outright ban. Clinton stepped on the brakes even harder but again stopped shy of a full ban and when Bush Jr came into office he started a slow process of bringing it back. That’s as far as this CRS Report goes although there may be an updated one somewhere out there.

    Still, the US has spent money on it and was doing so at least as recently as 2008. It appears the biggest worry we have is proliferation of nuclear material, not profit or cost.



  • It wasn’t until somewhere in the last 15 years that air type type heat pumps, as opposed to ground loop, could cope with the cold temperatures in the northern states without having to fall back to resistive heating for weeks at a time.

    When you have to run resistive heaters the electrical usage skyrockets and makes a heat pump system vastly more expensive to operate.

    If you live in a cold State, Zone 6 or higher, then you need to be careful when purchasing an ASHP to make sure that it has an HSPF of 10 or greater. If it doesn’t then you’ll be paying big electrical bills trying to keep your home warm. Those units are also more expensive to purchase than a regular Heat Pump like you would run down under.

    Frankly nowhere in Australia experiences cold anything like what I do on a yearly basis. The coldest temperature ever recorded anywhere in your country was a mere -9f. Here in the United States there’s quite a few places where that is a common daytime high temperature in the winter, even in the lower 48. There’s quite a few places even in Zone 5, see previous map, that will get to -9 and stay there for days at a time.

    It’s not uncommon for overnight lows in Zone 6+ to hit -20f and temperatures even lower are definitely possible. At my house in Wyoming last winter we touched -40f / -40c for a some hours one night.

    Air type heat pumps simply could not handle those kinds of temperatures until relatively recently. That’s why so much of the US doesn’t have them already. They just didn’t work during the winter in northern half of the country.




  • …which in the north only happens for a few hours a year…

    I know the guy in the TC video used Chicago as an example but the “few hours a year” thing simply isn’t true for many of us.

    Where I live we had many days below -15f including a week where itpretty much stayed between -20 and -30 for nearly a week straight.

    A Heat Pump will still work, even here, but you need to be careful about which one you purchase and how it handles cold weather.









  • Why would they face any legal consequences any more than any other social media?

    Instance location. Content comes at you from all over the Fediverse but once its in your instance it’s actually located on your server. It’s obvious how even regular NSFW stuff can be a problem if your instance is sitting in a ME country but perhaps less obvious (and more troublesome) is text based content.

    For instance if a user is enrolled on an instance located in Germany and then subscribes to Neo-Nazi content from an instance located in the United States. That NN material is now on your instance but much of it is probably illegal in Germany. What happens when the German Authorities find out and come knocking?

    Even “Child Porn” isn’t nearly as cut and dried as most people think. Things like /c/tinytitties or /c/flatchested from lemmynsfw are arguably illegal in a place like Australia since the person can be perceived as under-age due to their physical characteristics. It gets worse when you toss in the AI Generated stuff.

    Big Tech does a lot of juggling trying to stay clear of these problems and they have large legal teams to help them when they run into trouble. I rather doubt that most instance admins have the resources for it.


  • I recommend you stay away from anything that requires any kind of portal to setup. If you have to download an app and create an account in order to pair the device or get it setup then don’t use that equipment. There’s a near endless array of sensors and things you can get now that work using Z-Wave, ZigBee, and even HomeKit that work DIRECTLY with HA, meaning that they don’t require commands to be sent up to the cloud via the Internet and then come back down to your device.