> Twitter seems to be working fine. What is the problem?
You’re correct in that the predictions of doom following his laying off staff were misplaced. To the extent any layoffs seem regretful with the benefit of hindsight, it’s in the trust & safety team, not among the engineers. (A lesson Silicon Valley noticed.)
What isn’t working fine are Twitter’s financials. It remains cash-flow negative and looks increasingly likely to go into restructuring.
Heat pumps are nice and efficient, but expensive to build and reliant on grid. Makes you more dependent and at the exact moment things get bad - during a weather emergency. Nobody, especially in NY state, should be without a fuel- burning heater.
> Heat pumps are nice and efficient, but expensive to build and reliant on grid
Expensive but falling as scale increases and government subsidies help drive scale.
Reliant on the grid - natural gas relies on the grid to move the air too. Not sure if this is the case all the time but mine won’t run at all without power, so unless you are referring to wood fired stove, natural gas furnaces are also reliant on the grid from what I can tell.
Inherently more expensive to install due to greater size and complexity.
Gas/oil furnace can be powered by a small generator, solar panels or even a backup battery system, which is not the case for a heat pump. Oil / propane with local power generation can be fully off the grid.
Edit: the lower capital cost means you can also _afford_ a backup power supply.
Heat pumps are hardly much more complicated than plenty of other household appliances, like washing machines, microwaves or fridges (which are heat pumps!). There’s plenty of scope for them to become a lot cheaper than they are today as they are manufactured in larger volumes.
Also, the largest heat pump in my house (I have a 6 kW and a 3 kW split system and a 5 kW air to water) also only uses about as much power as an electric kettle (~2 kW) most of the time here, I’m sure that could be powered off a small generator…
Yea.. mine does. I have water heat during power outages iirc, but no gas furnace heat. I've always assumed it's due to the thermostat though - if i knew how to manually run the furnace i always assumed i could have it start pushing air during a power outage.
My strategy is a deep cycle car battery and harbor freight inverter to run the blower motor. You get a long enough extension cord and you can use your car as an emergency generator.
I have done exactly that - car as generator, during a long power outage in NH.
We had 2 oil furnaces, and ~350 gallons of oil left in the tanks, but no power to run the blower motors to move the air. A Harbor Freight inverter and our Ford Explorer kept things running for 30 hours, until Amazon could deliver me an 8,000 watt portable generator.
The blower motors are pretty power hungry, on the order of about 330 watts, give or take. For a 12V system that is about 30 amps, or about 2 hours of output from a typical deep cycle batter before you risk depleting it to the point of damage. An ~$300 12V Lifepo4 battery might get you 4 hours of runtime, but not much more than that. In most cases, an outage of less than 8 hours won't get things so cold in a decently insulated house that you need to worry about it, and IME, an outage that lasts more than 8 hours has high probability of lasting much much longer.
TL;DR - Your deep cycle battery approach may not prove to actually be worthwhile, consider working out the car-as-generator hookup plan in advance.
> The blower motors are pretty power hungry, on the order of about 330 watts, give or take. For a 12V system that is about 30 amps, or about 2 hours of output from a typical deep cycle batter before you risk depleting it to the point of damage. An ~$300 12V Lifepo4 battery might get you 4 hours of runtime, but not much more than that.
This is 2-4 hours of run time though. My experience is that the blower turns on for a period and then off for a period. It would depend on your heat loss rate which is situation specific, but you can probably get significantly more than this in time coverage with the blower only running periodically.
I have a 7500W dual-fuel generator but haven't gotten around to installing a transfer switch yet. I have a well pump and a gas boiler that I really miss when the power is out :)
Radiant in-floor heat is pretty efficient (and it's nice not to have an ice-cold floor first thing in the morning), just need power for the circulation pumps and the boiler. My back up heat is a wood-burning stove - and we have lost power for several hours when the temps are -20F or so...
If the boiler is in the basement would you not be able to treat the circulation tubes as a thermosiphon, with the hot water rising from the boiler, creating pressure to push water through the loop?
> TL;DR - Your deep cycle battery approach may not prove to actually be worthwhile, consider working out the car-as-generator hookup plan in advance.
Ha yep, learned that the first time and was ready to go with an extension cord the second time I needed this setup. First time, I had a stash of 3 batteries but I didn't realize how much power the blower motor would draw, so I was charging on the car and swapping out batteries as needed. Did that the first day then rigged up cords for day 2. Halfway through day 3 we got power back.
> natural gas relies on the grid to move the air too
Natural gas heating relies on nothing more than convection to move hot water or (in older setups) steam from the boiler to the radiators. The only part of the setup where electricity is required is for electronic thermostats, and those can have a battery backup.
My forced air heater was noisy and getting old. I installed a "Direct Vent" heater near the stairs in the basement and it keeps the whole house warm via natural convection. No electricity needed. You get to watch the cheery flame in the window, it is great.
I was worried the bedrooms would get too cold when the doors were closed but it turned out not to be an issue. The bedrooms do get colder but this actually is better for sleeping.
with a very small generator or battery - but you can't run a heat pump on a generator without going with a much bigger one, (and much more expensive one).
My furnace's air handler fan pulls hundreds of watts. That's generator territory. And I'd have to re-wire it somehow to give it a male plug or better yet add a transfer switch.
A heat pump is basically just an air conditioner with a handful of extra parts to allow it to work in reverse. In the US they currently are significantly more expensive to install than AC, but I don't think it will stay that way for ever.
I think part of cost issue is that heat pumps tend to put an extreme focus on energy efficiency, leading to higher up-front costs, whereas AC units tend to balance a little more towards lower initial costs.
Any home that has both gas heating and air conditioning could replace the AC with a heat pump and get more efficient heating for most of the time, while still keeping their existing heating for situations that call for it.
I'm hopeful that AC manufacturers start shifting towards bi-directional units for their lower-cost "regular" segments instead of reserving that for only the fancy super-high-efficiency (expensive) units.
if the economics and/or contractual arrangement of crucial home equipment benefit a corporate profile, you can bet that some number of people will get those units -- usually people who do not have a choice, or do not understand the whole deal. This kind of degradation of the consumer and their rights is going on at a wide scale.
Another way to say this is "the consumer does not matter at this point" .. meaning that the game plan and expansion of the central corporate (or govt) operation is "more important" than the consumer benefit or choice.
Sadly, more than one thing can be true at once. If dramatic energy savings are "required" due to real structural problems, and also the well-capitalized and aggressive central entity can negotiate and implement the changes.. then it is a collective social situation.. End result - many advantages that small home owners have enjoyed in the USA for so long, are going away in real time right now, on a large scale.
Wood stoves pair very well with heat pumps. The fuel won't leak, won't expire, and can be stored away from the dwelling. During extreme cold or loss of electric, one can spend the time tending the fire. And in the shoulder seasons where keeping a fire going would be overkill, the heat pump is most efficient.
The gas grid is much less likely to go down than the electric grid - and btw, many run on propane - not natural gas - and that is stored locally (i.e. in a tank at the house) - I use propane gas, stored in my own tank - natural gas is not available anywhere near my area.
In the sense that a senile rapist wearing diapers while trying to set himself up as Americas Hitler with brown people playing the role of dangerous menace instead of Jewish people can be said to be cool. Nothing says Übermensch like a full pair of depends and the heady smell of shit mixing with the smell of clown like greasepaint.
I'd say he should have done this when he was young in the 80s but the role of TV star cosplaying as President was taken back then and we really both the apprentice to bring Trump into the popular consciousness and a drastic overreaction to a black man becoming president to make his ranting resonate.
Houses arent retail businesses. They are your home. The citizens of a community have an absolute right to control the direction of their community - and aspirational transplants have no right at all.
Depends on level, no? Certainly it seems higher up (PhD or other research-oriented role), rote busy work may be necessary from time to time, but it also requires more creative work trying to synthesize new ideas.
ADHD has too much creativity and barely any capacity for bulk, so trading a bit of that creativity to do the bulk work is worth it.
Imagine if your brain refuses to do worthless uncreative work, that is ADHD, it is great for coming up with ideas but sucks for doing the work you often have to do.
I agree with you there. But the thrust of the article was using drugs as “cognitive enhancers” not to treat a medical condition of ADHD. Bringing someone up to baseline is one thing, but this is not that.
A software toggle is not reassuring. There needs to be no physical component at all that can allow access by anyone that isn’t me, physically present, with my ass in the seat.
People are opposed to being forced into injections of experimental mRNA.
Very few people were ever opposed to the standard-type vaccines we have been using for 100 years.
That is why the vast majority of people are happy to vaccinate themselves against polio and tetanus, but only 2% of people were interested in the latest Pfizer booooster experiment.
I would suggest against making up imaginary enemies.
The problem with your assessment is that you aren't being injected with experimental mRNA, it is well tested and proven on billions of people. It's fine to not want to be a part of that, but saying it is experimental is misinformation.
Seems inaccurate where vaccines were correlated to autism in a 2016 GOP debate. (And the doctor on stage said nothing to rebut, and turned out to be anti mRNA as well)
Don't make it partisan. Remember, for decades prior to covid, antivax had been more predominate on the left. Both parties have plenty of ignorant members.
It wasn’t so much a question of skew but visibility: people saw celebrities opposing vaccination a lot more than, say, the Christian homeschoolers who were doing the same things but not holding press conferences back then.
This is a readily citable nationally televised recent singular event with many elected officials on stage, ~3 years before mRNA was rolled out for a major event
Decades and smaller advocacy groups are less distinct.
