In the short term the math is usually bad. Can be a 20, 30, 40 year payback on insulation. For the builder? It’s almost for sure a loss unless he can play the green card. For any individual owner? They are likely to leave before they recoup a project like this. Appraisals on houses are price per square foot with a bedroom and bathroom modifier. Until people start pricing in energy efficiency in homes, say a price multiple of 0.8 to 1.2 based on the efficiency of the home? It’s going to be hard to math out.
Which yes is sad.
I live in a moderately cold area and pay less than $2000 a year to heat a ~2000 square foot home. So something that improves the efficiency of the building would have to have a pretty low cost to even pay back at all.
There's probably a few lower cost things that I am overlooking, to the tune of netting out a few hundred dollars of savings after however many years they took to pay back.
> Can be a 20, 30, 40 year payback on insulation. For the builder?
In the UK, houses have energy ratings, which are largely not that useful, but they do allow estimated annual running charge.
The house that I live in we moved in and were spending ~1.7k on gas a year.
We needed to re-render the place, because it has a few missing pieces. we spent the extra £4 to put in 90mm of external wall insulation. We also had to replace the glazing. It was cheaper to get triple glazing (for some reason), however the results of that was that it was 6degrees warmer in winter, and 10 degrees (celcius) cooler in summer. Even with gas prices doubling, we spend about £70 on hotwater and heating.
There's also the simple reality that houses with better energy ratings are worth more when they are sold. If you own a house, it's a good way to lower your bills and increase the value of your house. The only thing you know for sure when you pay hundreds per month for gas is that it goes out of the chimney. Over ten years, that adds up. Most houses you can probably do some sensible things that definitely earn themselves back in that kind of period while also increasing the value of your property. The inconvenience and financing tend to be the big obstacle. Add incentives to the mix and it becomes an easy choice in a lot of places.
In northern Europe houses are insulated and have a rating. Cost to heat and electricity use are even standard part of a property listing and people do make it part of their total household cost calculation.
> For any individual owner? They are likely to leave before they recoup a project like this
How do you draw this conclusion? Like any other expensive, long-lasting part of the house, this should be seen as an asset which is “priced-in“ to the value of the building.
Ignoring the easy second line, the answer to the first line is: we have two political parties in the US. What if neither are doing what the voters want?
Then people should stop being dumbfucks and engage in local (which are frequently non-partisan) and state elections and primaries, and stop pretending that "the president didn't fix everything and make this a socialist utopia, so both parties suck" is a useful or vaguely intelligent criticism.
It sounds more like they probably have some kind of generic prompt that runs on top of either platform to "be" "Sparky" to provide Walmart sales and advertising on top.
I wonder if this is so Walmart can sell the advertising for products inside Sparky from their own platform (Walmart Connect) and then run the Connect ads onwards 'inside' Sparky.
If you ask the agent a product question you can trigger it into web search mode where it provides web links and autocomplete suggestions. You can follow the a/c suggestions down some pretty elaborate chains of questions but eventually it hits a rate limit and reverts to the default dumb bot.
Python is pretty big as glue in the AI ecosystem as far as I can tell. It also seems to be most agent's 'preferred' language to write code in, when you don't specify anything.
(The latter is probably more to do with the preferences they give it in the re-inforcement learning phase than anything technical, though.)
Just tried this yesterday... great experience indeed. Go has archaisms and can be verbose but it's still very much readable and codex catches errors easily.
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