• 0 Posts
  • 37 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle





  • I briefly experimented with it ages ago. And I mean ages ago, like 20+ years ago. Maybe it’s changed somewhat since then, but my understanding is that Gentoo doesn’t provide binary packages. Everything gets compiled from source using exactly the options you want and compiled exactly for your hardware. That’s great and all but it has two big downsides:

    • Most users don’t need or even want to specify every compile option. The number of compile options to wade through for some packages (e.g. the kernel) is incredibly long, and many won’t be applicable to your particular setup.
    • The benefits of compiling specifically for your system are likely questionable, and the amount of time it takes to compile can be long depending on your hardware. Bear in mind I was compiling on a Pentium 2 at the time, so this may be a lot less relevant to modern systems. I think it took me something like 12 hours to do the first-time compile when I installed Gentoo, and then some mistake I made in the configuration made me want to reinstall and I just wasn’t willing to sit through that again.




  • You could install LineageOS on your existing phone instead of upgrading. The OnePlus 7 Pro is supported. The install process can be daunting depending on your technical skills, but it’s a one-time process since the phone gets updates over-the-air after the OS is installed.

    I did this with my OnePlus 6 a few months ago and the experience has been good. Switching to LineageOS bumped Android to version 13, whereas it was stuck on Android 11 on stock OnePlus firmware. I’m getting regular updates again, including open-source Android security patches. Not everything gets patched though, some of the core firmware is proprietary to OnePlus and that cannot be patched by anyone but them. It’s letting me extend the life of a phone still works well and has a 3.5mm headphone jack.




  • Remember there are actual people who are making these decisions.

    Sure, but what I want to know is why they feel comfortable making immoral decisions. Are they all psychopaths? Psychopathy is known to be more common in the C-suite, by some estimates 3.5% of executives are psychopaths. Businesses reward those who deliver good business outcomes, and psychopaths might tend do better at that with no pesky moral compass to get in the way. But the rest are just average people, probably no different than the general populace when it comes to measures of morality. So if 95%+ of oil company executives are not inherently less moral than the rest of us, why the hell would they be willing to make decisions that literally destroy the fucking planet?? I mean, the oil companies knew climate change was a big fucking problem decades ago, and they still did what they did. How the fuck does that even happen??

    My thesis here is that the corporate structure itself is sufficient to compel otherwise moral people to make choices that are absolutely heinous when viewed objectively. When you’re faced with an option that makes your corporate targets and nets you a bonus but irreparably harms some distant other, the average person will tend to make the immoral choice. They’ll rationalize it, they’ll minimize it, but ultimately they will happily fuck over someone in another country, another generation, or hell, just in another office, so they can make a buck.


  • Corporations are always happy to pander to morality when it’s to their benefit, but I believe corporations are inherently amoral. They might make decisions that are moral, but that’s just a happy coincidence that occurs when the decision that’s in their interest also happens to be the moral choice. Corporations are equally happy to make choices that most would consider immoral, if it meets their goals.

    I have no source for this, but my theory is that when the workforce of a corporation grow past Dunbar’s number it will inherently bend toward amorality. Making moral choices requires knowing the people affected by your choices, and having empathy for them. Once it becomes impossible for one worker at a company to have a personal relationship with every other member of the staff, it’s all too easy for groups to form within the company that will make choices that drive the company’s goals (growth, revenue, profit) at the expense of anything and everything else (the environment, the community, their customers, even their own workers).




  • The total install was $12k. I also did another 1k in retrofits under the Greener Homes program, but I did the Greener Homes loan as well. I had to outlay the $13k up front, but then I got all of that back in a 10-year, 0% interest loan, plus $5600 in rebates on top ($5k for the heat pump, $600 for the furnace). The loan processing company debits my account $110 a month, which is low enough that it doesn’t really sting.

    I debated doing solar as well, since the Greener Homes loan goes up to $40k. Solar would gave easily soaked up the remaining $25k available in the loan. My roof isn’t ideal for solar though, and I didn’t want to triple the loan’s monthly payments for a solar install that wouldn’t have paid for itself over time.


  • Was there any specifig brand/seer rating restriction with the GHGrant?

    It’s more complicated than that. The major components of the system all have to be qualified for the rebate, down to the component model numbers. There’s a lookup tool to see which model numbers qualify. For a hybrid setup like mine, there are three parts:

    • Outside model number: this is the actual heat pump component that gets installed outside
    • Inside model number: this is the condenser coil that gets installed on top of the furnace
    • Furnace model number: this is the model number of the furnace itself

    A ductless system would only have two part numbers involved, the outside heat pump unit and the inside wall unit (though a ductless install can have multiple inside units in multiple rooms). No furnace for a ductless system of course. Edit to add: and all of the major components you get have to be certified with each other by the GH program. They don’t want you mixing and matching.

    Every HVAC company I talked to was pretty knowledgeable about the GH program, so if you tell them you’re an applicant then they should put together a quote that qualifies. Multiple HVAC reps advised me to make sure that all rebate-covered part numbers were listed clearly on the invoice. Apparently if that info is missing it can derail the rebate until the invoice is updated with full info.


  • a journalist saying that a COP above 1 means the heat pump “creates energy”

    In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!

    But what’s great is that this COP of 2, while bad, is not catastrophic. That’s still in territory where gas boilers are more cost efficient that a heat pump, but unless you are living in a place that is consistently under -10C for several months, then a heat pump has overall lower running costs than a gas boiler. And you are starting to hit pretty northern territories with this.

    I actually have a hybrid furnace/heat pump system, and I live in southern Ontario, Canada. The furnace is the auxiliary heat source and it only kicks in when the outdoor temp is below -6C. I’ve only had this system through one winter so far, but I think I could count the number of days the furnace ran without running out of fingers. My electricity bill went up some of course, but my winter gas bill went down a lot.

    Edit to add: I wasn’t shopping for a hybrid system in particular, but I got this upgrade through the Canada Greener Homes Grant and there were limitations on which units qualified for rebates. For my install (forced-air with existing duct-work), the hybrid systems were the ones that qualified.


  • Atlassian doesn’t even have consistency within single products! I’m using Jira Cloud at work, and while most fields support markdown (e.g. three backticks to start a code block) there are a few that only support Jira’s own notation (e.g. {code} to start a code block). It’s always infuriating when I type some markdown in one of the fields that doesn’t support it for some inexplicable reason.