…I hope this doesn’t awaken anything in me…

A lot of the electricity probably came from burning natural gas at the power plant, and then some of that (~5%) gets lost in transmission. If we assume the natural gas plant is 60% efficient at turning gas into electricity, then an electric heating element in a hot water tank at your house would be about 55% efficient.

A typical gas furnace is about 80% efficient at turning gas into hot fluid, and a good one can reach 95% efficiency.

Depending on the fuel mix of your local grid, there’s a good chance that burning natural gas at home will result in less pollution than using electric resistance heaters, either for heating water or the air inside your home during winter. Places like Washington state that generate most of their electricity from hydroelectric power plants will be exceptions.

However, heat pumps can be higher than 100% efficiency. They don’t use electricity to generate heat, they just move heat from one place to another. You’ll produce fewer emissions overall by using an HVAC heat pump to heat your house, and a heat pump water tank for hot water. Even if you live in a place like Canada, you can reduce emissions by installing a dual-fuel system that will use electricity to run the heat pump weather permitting, and fall back to using gas when the outdoor temperature goes too far negative.

Using heat pumps to move heat from outside, to inside your house, to inside your hot water tank is more efficient than using gas to heat your home and water, even when the electricity to run the heat pump is generated by burning natural gas.

OP could have a well.

https://www.npr.org/2023/10/05/1200788439/wind-power-cargo-ships-carbon-emissions

Back in the day it was the best at what it did, but there’s less demand these days for that kind of old fashioned search.

Its still better than the competition at finding the URL of a corporate or government entity. Its still helpful for searching other websites for particular content - for example, the wikis for some games have an obtuse layout and unhelpful search function, and google can be the best way to find a particular page in that wiki.

Before ChatGPT existed, and before the enshitifaction of Reddit reached the critical level its at today, google searching site:reddit.com was pretty good at finding organic human conversations that provide actual answers to your questions.

Today however, ChatGPT is better at providing useful answers to whatever questions you may have. And Bing is better at image search.

over charging customers and under paying employees

That’s the crux of the issue.

Who’s going to buy it for a high price, if there is no demand for office space, because workers are all remote?

deleted by creator

That’s what she said.

A lot of today’s problems, like the rise of the KKK, stochastic terrorism, and infiltration of law enforcement by neo-nazis, can be traced back to an insufficient number of Confederates being hanged after the war.

MBFC is full of shit when describing bias - they call firmly right liberal capitalists “the left”. I don’t think they even have a word to describe actual socialists.

They’re decent about judging the reliability of factual reporting though.

“STINKY” is the default SSID for Starlink routers. These stupid motherfuckers couldn’t even figure out how to change the default settings. I wonder if they were using a default username and password too?

OpSec my ass.

Not D4 specifically, but yeah. I got temp banned from Reddit for reporting a ToS violation, and decided to never go back.

The market didn’t need regulations to maintain its freeness back then because the vast majority of transactions were made with small businesses. The limited technological capabilities in transport and communication also decreased the need for government regulation by decreasing the ability of the largest concentrations of capital to succeed at implementing global anti-competitive strategies.

To achieve the same degree of market freedom today, in the era of omni-national mega-corporations wielding monopoly influence, requires utilizing levers of power outside of the market those mega-corps dominate. The intervention of democratic governments to enforce anti-monopoly laws and prohibit other kinds of anti-competitive behavior is a necessary component of any plan to transform today’s marketplace into one that looks more similar to the market of Adam Smith’s day.

It is though - this is what capitalism invariably becomes. Musky Twitter is a symptom of late stage capitalism. This is why so many people say capitalism is bad and doesn’t work as advertised.

The golden age of classical liberalism, when capitalism actually worked, the 1700-1800’s, more closely resembles what we would today call market socialism.

Once the agglomerations of capital became large enough to impose irresistible anti-competitive force, the days of capitalism’s beneficial functionality ended. They say “the freer the market the freer the people”, but an unregulated market isn’t free - it invariably trends toward monopoly and irrationally assigned concentrations of wealth and power, eg Musk, Bezos, DuPont, Sackler, etc…

Capitalism supports, rather than resists, the anti-competitive influence of capital. A truly free market requires the intervention of powers other than capital - eg, democratic governance imposing something akin to Market Socialism against the wishes of those anti-competitive agglomerations of capital.

fund it exclusively out of his own pocket

That’s how newspapers got started - they were propaganda organs of the rich and existed exclusively to manipulate public opinion. Things really haven’t changed that much, but somewhere along the way people were tricked into paying for them.

I think its more likely that YouTube will shut down and be replaced by nothing. Its existence has never made sense as anything but an act of charity from an organization with tech resources to burn.

Its framed as being done to “strengthen their financial resilience”, but I suspect the motive is to slow down the rate at which banks are creating new money, driving up inflation. If these bank regulations pass, we can lower taxes without blowing up the inflation rate. Or, the Federal Government can spend more without increasing taxes, keeping the inflation rate the same.

The banks hate it because they would issue fewer loans, and therefore make less money. Its takes money out of the pockets of bankers and puts it into the hands of the Federal Government.

I’m generally in favor of markets deciding what gets produced, i.e. letting the banks judge which businesses asking for loans have the best chance of paying them back. However, the market has some blind spots where we’re all better off if the government steps in - for example, defense spending, infrastructure, and R&D (investing in NASA has historically provided incredible RoI).

That the Fed is even considering this new approach suggests to me that there is a perceived need for a rush of government spending in the near future, and the current geopolitical landscape suggests it will be spent on weapons.

The polling places in some rural municipalities are literally Masonic lodges where they make you announce out loud to all in attendance which primary you want to vote in.

Yeah, creating a venue for sex work is the only plausible use case.