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this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
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Lefty Memes
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An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the "ML" influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
Serious posts, news, and discussion go in c/Socialism.
If you are new to socialism, you can ask questions and find resources over on c/Socialism101.
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0. Only post socialist memes
That refers to funny image macros and means that generally videos and screenshots are not allowed. Exceptions include explicitly humorous and short videos, as well as (social media) screenshots depicting a funny situation, joke, or joke picture relating to socialist movements, theory, societal issues, or political opponents. Examples would be the classic case of humorous Tumblr or Twitter posts/threads. (and no, agitprop text does not count as a meme)
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Notable achievements in all spheres of society were made by various socialist/people's/democratic republics around the world. Mistakes, however, were made as well: bureaucratic castes of parasitic elites - as well as reactionary cults of personality - were established, many things were mismanaged and prejudice and bigotry sometimes replaced internationalism and progressiveness.
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I actually like the idea of landlords covering electricity or at least a portion of it. It incentives them to install things like heat pumps which have a high up front cost but long term savings. If they aren't sweating the long term loss then why would they upgrade?
Most places here pay for heating, not cooling. Heating is usually natural gas or similar, cooling by AC is up to the tenant, and there's usually a premium in the summer paid to run AC when electricity is included.
Heat pumps are for heating too, not just cooling.
Oh. I know. I'm just saying that since it heats and cools, it's not a priority.
Where I am there's no legal requirement to provide AC to tenants, so whatever heating system is cheap, that's what landlords will install. Natural gas is usually cheaper per unit of heat output than anything based on electricity, mainly in up front costs. A forced air furnace with no AC which is heated by natural gas is so common and therefore ridiculously cheap by comparison. For larger apartment systems, it's usually a central boiler that heats dozens of units. It's difficult and certainly not cheaper to cool the same amount of space.
Electricity being included is usually for smaller rentals, like rental homes or multi-rental properties, which haven't been outfitted with the required energy meters to individually separate electricity per rental, so, because doing that would require rewiring the property and adding several new service panels/electrical meters, which would easily be thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars (maybe more), most smaller landlords just don't bother. Since they can't differentiate power usage between tenants, they just charge a bit more and include it in the rent.
That was my situation.
I moved to a larger apartment building, that was built from the ground up to be exactly that, and each unit had its own power meter and service panel. I paid my own electricity there. Heat was brought in from a boiler, but air conditioning was up to the renter. No HVAC system was built into the unit. Newer apartment builds and especially condos here can have air handlers installed per unit (though, not always), which may or may not have AC.
It's very hit and miss, but the vast majority of portable AC sales is to renters, since they don't have another option if they want to stay cool.
Presently, I live in a house (we're not renting it), and this house has central AC. I'm planning to move to a heat pump eventually, and hopefully also install solar to offset electricity costs around the same time; probably in a few years when the roofing needs to be redone. Once the roofing is done, install solar, and then, hopefully in the same project, upgrade the forced air furnace to a heat pump system. Right now it's natural gas. I'm not keen on that.