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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • Well nuts I was considering Ireland as a nice place to flee Canada for. Shame to hear that they’re doing the same to you. I know there’s a demographic issue but I don’t see why they couldn’t have made the countries livable enough that the people living there could afford to have children, instead of importing people en masse from regions with little education.

    We are just creating another demographic problem anyways as at least here all of our migrants are suspiciously young working age men. We don’t see many families “fleeing regions in conflict” which seems very odd, doesn’t it.


  • I should probably clarify what I mean by that. Unlike most countries, most of Canada is probably best described as “a barely habitable hellscape”

    Even the pioneers relied heavily on existing supply chains, and in most regions aside from southern BC and Ontario the natives lived an unenviable hand to mouth existence.

    So while working harder for the same cheque is a bad idea, if everyone stops working at all (which feels like it’s on the brink of happening, some days) the collapse of our society actually means losing our ability to survive in a country that actively wants to kill you on most days.

    I live way out in the country in a mostly self reliant community, but the amount of material and energy we need to bring in just to survive always worries me.



  • Looks at what happened in Canada too, we had big structural problems with our economy so our government dumped a huge volume of immigrants into the country, almost entirely from a group known to not integrate well and who share little values and culture with the existing citizens.

    Now everyone blames the immigrants for everything. Success! And wages have also been depressed, and housing and rent prices elevated. The rich get richer and the poor get a scapegoat. Everyone… wins?

    And there’s literally nothing we can do about it, except effectively the whole country has taken on the “lay flat” movement as a protest after Covid pulled the mask off the villain. Very few working class people put any effort into their work anymore, figuring to collect their check but not generate any wealth for the robber barons.

    The trouble is we will burn our country down while we do it, because ultimately some work does need to be done to sustain our society.




  • I designed my heating system around a fairly efficient non-condensing NG boiler that takes 40W for the fan. I can run it and the circulators off my battery bank no problem, and handle a sustained power failure. But only because of the natural gas.

    I’ve been integrating a water-water GSHP into it to provide summer cooling and a supplemental heat source from my solar panels. It works well, but in my climate (Rural Canada) I would be insane to completely remove my gas boiler IMO. Heating demand is just way too high on the sort of days where the power goes out. I’ve been working on plans for a wood boiler but insurance has put their foot right down on anything that burns wood in the last couple years.

    Here in Canada we can’t get lithium at a reasonable price so I have 10kWh of lead-acid (which as you know is actually 5). Doesn’t go very far on a cold winter day with 4 hours of sun and snow on the panels!

    On the upside I haven’t had to hook my generator to my house in years, I’m really happy with my “grid-independent” system.


  • Double would be a COP of over 10. That’s a stretch for an overbuilt GSHP and not even slightly feasible for air-air.

    High COPs are usually easy on a compressor as they represent low compression ratios and low differential temps. For example I can hit around COP 7 in cooling on my scrap heap GSHP, with an evap temp around 10C and condenser temp around 20C. That’s a high side pressure around 100 psi and only 30 psi of differential, “barely working” as far as the compressor is concerned.

    The only way I know to get high COPs is to have an oversized condenser and a way to get your refrigerant below ambient, like evaporative, ground source or overnight radiant so you can get the compression ratio down, unless you know a secret in which case I’m not afraid to burn out a compressor or two trying it out!


  • Great to hear this story of success. That plus

    $266.99 per probe for the original proprietary one

    Reminds me of Schneider’s stupid proprietary dongle for programming their PLCs. It’s just a CH341 in a funny shaped case that fits into the funny shaped slot on the PLC, where it plugs onto an ordinary 0.1" pin header to talk logic level serial.

    Plus it has a custom USB ID of course. Probably costs $2 to manufacture, sells for almost $300 as well.



  • The interesting thing to me regarding both power and blasphemy is that by the fact that it was on display in a major cathedral, those in charge have already given it their blessing. Anyone calling “blasphemy” only looks like a fool.

    So you have these “traditionalists” wanting to drag the Church backwards. But due to the hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church that’s just not how it works. Church leadership has made significant progressive strides over the last decade, leaving people like this Tschugguel with only impotent rage and vandalism as their options. And as you state this only adds new context to the art, giving it more power and ensuring that their regressive goals are not taken seriously.

    Meanwhile the Evangelicals have gone absolute nutters, I never thought I would see the day where the Catholics were the “progressive” church. But they play the long game, and have always changed along with society over the millenia.



  • I don’t see how people like you miss the entire concept of “base load”.

    I live in a region with vast amounts of renewable energy resources. It’s always windy and the sun shines almost every day. I have solar panels on my house that cover most of my DHW and a large fraction of my summer cooling load, and keep most of my appliances running.

    But right now, the sun is down and the wind is flat. And I still need power. My battery storage would be depleted by morning, damaging it through overdischarge if I don’t buy power from the grid instead.

    And it’s a lovely summer evening with no heating or cooling demand! What about midwinter, -35C and dark and snowy? Where is my power coming from on that day, after a month of days just like it?

    Nuclear.



  • Is agriculture land based transport? Short of an actual nuclear tractor, nothing but diesel has the energy density sufficient to run modern scale farms.

    Chatting around the fire we’ve tried to imagine a solution like dragging a cable but with tractors pushing close to 1000HP now that’s about a megawatt. That’s a long, fat cable or an extremely dangerous voltage to drag around a field, probably both. And an insane grid infrastructure to get power to the field borders.

    You wouldn’t believe how much fuel goes into agriculture, to the point where I believe it makes up nearly a third of emissions (possibly including land clearing, can’t remember the details). Synthetic fuels are the only net-zero option.

    Well I’m kind of a fan of the nuclear tractor honestly but I kind of doubt it :)


  • Used to do this to my shooting glasses, just put Scotch tape on my non-dominant eye so I could leave it open while shooting open sights.

    I’m “wrong eyed” so my brain always tried to look down my gun with my left eye. The tape solved it. With practice I can now shoot well with regular glasses, though it’s still more comfortable to use taped glasses.

    Don’t listen to the wrong prescription talk as it will hurt your eyes. Tape is cheap and safe.


  • Thanks for the American context as I’m a Canadian and our systems are different here. I didn’t realize the risks involved and the motivation behind it. I think this might be my least popular comment on Lemmy ever😅

    The USA as a battleground between religion and atheism changes the context as I would shrug most of this off here in Canada as harmless. Like the 10 commandments? Most of them are good advice, basically just “don’t be a piece of shit” and i wouldn’t have a problem teaching them to kids… Unless the goal is to teach them actively as the word of God and marginalize non-believers as sinful, in which case this is absolutely criminal. That is church, not school.

    We have a more robust separation of church and state to the point where when I read “teaching the Bible in school” I hear “robustly secular, historical and cultural study” which as I stated I believe would be a valuable learning experience. In Quebec there are even rules that public servants can’t display any religious symbols at all, even as small as a cross on a bracelet. The leader of our Conservative party recently made a statement that both abortion and gay rights were “a closed issue” and he would not stand for any attacks on them.

    So personally my wife and I made the hard decision this year to send our daughter to a Catholic school next year due to the rapidly declining quality of public education. However the Catholic school district here is publicly funded and staffed, with strict regulations that any religious content is optional and that respect must be given equally to those who choose it or do not choose it.

    Many of her friends have already made the switch (regular school is quickly emptying out of smart kids and turning into a zoo as parents pull their kids) and stated this is exactly how it works, most of them being non-religious as well but impressed with the discipline and learning outcomes. My wife teaches college and said the difference is night and day with some kids even making it out of public highschool unable to read. Meanwhile my daughter’s new school has won awards for the achievements of its graduates and their placement in top schools and in industry.

    So you see I’m comfortable enough with our dedication to secularism here in Canada that I am willing to send my daughter to an actual Catholic school with no fear that she will be brainwashed… Obviously a bit of bible study doesn’t scare me but in the context of the USA culture war it’s clearly a much bigger deal.


  • Forcing it as a belief system is definitely wrong, but we were forced to study plenty of literature when I was in school, much of it far less relevant. I don’t see the difference with the Bible, especially if presented as a historical document and prototypical collection of stories?

    I’m not religious and wasn’t raised in a religious family, but when I decided to pick up a Bible and read it as a teenager I couldn’t believe how much context it gave me on our culture and its origins.

    Having to read and study the whole thing would also help rein in overzealous religion IMO. The #1 reason I’ve heard from evangelicals who left their church was “I decided to read the Bible for myself”