This actually happened to me: I arrived at my destination and discovered my load was loose, ready to fall. There have also been times that I dropped something. And times that my backpack was mistakenly unzipped and I could have lost something worth keeping.

So if I operate with your assumption (that honking drivers are always assholes), then I lose the opportunity to pick up something I dropped or correct insecure cargo. Why should I give that up?

(edit) Since a horn is an ambiguous signal, in this circumstance of a car following a cyclist it should come to be universally understood to mean a cyclist dropped their phone or wallet, as this is the legit scenario.

I doubt vaping has the health consequences that cigs do. Baking the plant at a precise temperature needed to just release the desired chemicals instead of burning it and releasing all toxins presumably would result in less cancer. Cigs also have filters that attempt (and fail) to trap the unwanted chemicals and iirc there’s also some recent research that the filters themselves have some negative health consequences (for both the smoker and for the environment when the discarded filter chemicals leech into the ground water).

Note I’ve not studied this in depth but that’s my off-the-cuff understanding.

Probably depends on the country

Exactly. No one is mentioning their country but it makes all the difference in the world.

In Switzerland, people must subscribe if they want a junk-free mailbox which costs them the equivalent of $/€ 30/year. I don’t suppose anyone is enthusiastic about paying that heafty fee, but the upside is that it works. If someone puts junk in your Swiss mailbox, it’s strictly enforced. The perp gets a fine, which I don’t recall if any of that goes toward compensating the victim.

In Belgium, it’s free to put a sticker on your mailbox. And it’s illegal for people to junk up your mailbox if you have the sticker. But it’s unenforced. So the level of junk mail drops a little with the sticker, but it never stops the flow of junk completely because everyone knows it’s unenforced.

Yeah it would be nice if it were organised to some extent, like crossposting everything between the two for redundancy since each node would have different lifetimes, but get people to comment in just one. Though the rules are different. The German one bans all advertising.

The induction woks are separate from the cooktop, so if cutting the power were too slow, you can instantly lift the wok off just as you would with gas. Though I don’t imagine that cutting the power would be any slower than cutting the gas.

I heard that Belgium has mandated that all new house builds must be passive homes going forward. (very cool) Can anyone confirm or deny that? Have any other regions made that forward-thinking policy?

I spoke to a real estate agent in the US who didn’t even know what a passive house was, and after I explained it he was sure that no such house existed in his whole state. I was blown away by the gross oversight.

In another US region, someone who needed a new roof said they did an exhaustive search for a roofer who could install a vegetated roof. Not a single roofer in their city or neighboring city could do that. WTF.. how are people so not on the ball at this stage?

Modern ACs are totally environmentally friendly, they’ve moved off the effective-but-polluting coolants they used to rely on

Indeed that’s what I thought.. that freon was banned in much of the developed world in favor of harmless alternatives. But yet the article says this:

Special refrigerant gases used in air-conditioners and refrigerators, when leaked into the atmosphere, are also potent greenhouse gases.

Very few homeowners are going to want to pay even more for tracking. You’d also need more space to accommodate the swing of the array, and it also brings about more consideration for wind loads.

In principle I think it would be ideal to have an easily accessible rooftop with a rooftop terrace so the rooftop space is functionally usable. But then indeed the frames that hold the panels up high enough so you could sit under the panels as they move would have to be rock-solid and thus costly. But quite useful if they could flip 180° when there’s hail (and unconditionally at nighttime). I’m brainstorming.. is that crazy talk? Is this something that’s so cost prohibitive that the costs could never be recovered? It obviously wouldn’t be a budget option but some people might be willing to pay more just to have the luxury of extra terrace space.

I’ve heard the down-to-earth lean budget approach is to have the panels on the ground because of the need to periodically quickly cover them up in hail storms and do various other maintenance tasks and adjustments. I don’t have ground space though.

Grid inefficiencies are still present with rooftop systems as well, as excess power is sent back to the grid.

IIUC, feeding the grid is more energy efficient than feeding batteries, which I assume is why you have an assumption of grid-feedback, correct? Alternatively, what about installing an extra big hot water tank so there is never unconsumed power?

The only socks that come with a lifetime warranty are “Darn Tough” and (AFAIK) just one other competing brand. IIRC, both are made of Merino wool.

EDIT: Darn Tough socks are a blend of Merino wool, nylon, and lycra spandex.

In any case, Marino wool must be durable if socks makers are offering a lifetime warranty on it. The only material that I would expect to do better would be aramid (Kevlar™), though that’d be quite pricey since that fabric must be laser cut.

I have no doubt the bottom line is king to them, which surely must imply that the cost of plugging the leaks exceeds the value of the fuel they would recover.

What I don’t get is why they are not being forced to plug the leaks at their own cost. Seems to showcase that regulation is an embarrassment.

I’m using the stock web client of slrpnk.net (whatever version that is), and when I type @Emperor@feddit.uk … oh, wow, that worked. Strange. In the cases that failed me, I copy-pasted the user’s address. So apparently it must be typed out manually to trigger auto-complete. I see that the client just makes it a markdown hyperlink to your profile. That’s useful, but what’s more important is that the user get a notification. When i copy-paste the address (e.g. @Emperor@feddit.uk) there’s nothing to signal to me that the user was recognized and that they will actually be populated in the “mentions” field of the JSON record.

I just found the contrary. In a lemmy search field querying this thread (https://slrpnk.net/post/2450620) comes up empty every time (#Lemmy → Lemmy). Just to get here to respond, I had to search for the support community then browse for this thread. All in Lemmy.

Kbin cannot cross-post to anywhere.. not to another kbin or to lemmy. But I was able to search for a specific #Kbin thread in the lemmy search form, then search for another kbin magazine in lemmy, then use Lemmy to cross-post a kbin thread to another kbin instance.