Important to note that it appears that the drone struck the north side of the New Safe Confinement structure. Russian claims that this was a false flag attack can be safely ignored, but there was always the possibility that a Ukrainian drone went off course, or simply hit a tall structure on its flight path. That’s not likely with a drone headed south only a few kilometers from the Belarusian border. Sure seems like a deliberate strike on the NSC by Russian forces, on that basis.

I’d been planning for a new HVAC system for a while when that video came out, and it gave me the idea to cross-check the thermostat data with the Manual J calc I’d already done. They were in general agreement, though the Manual J block load was more conservative than empirical data for a design day.

In your case, since you don’t have data from a healthy system on a representative heating design day, I’d suggest using a web tool like CoolCalc to simply calculate an approximate Manual J total heating and cooling load, and use that to guide your choices.

A little headroom ain’t bad, but it had three times the required heating capacity for my area’s “design day” low, which meant that for most of the winter it was kicking on for maybe 5-10 minutes per hour and then leaving massive cold spots in the house, because the thermostat was smack in the middle and all the walls were bleeding heat.

My new heat pump is just about 2x the design day heat requirement, but that also means it’s got capacity to handle extreme lows without resorting to resistance heat, and in any case it’s fully modulating so the house has stayed quite comfortable so far.

My old furnace was hilariously oversized for the house.

One of the nifty things about smart thermostats like Ecobees is that you can pull usage data from their web portal. I grabbed a CSV file covering a cold snap last year that reached a 100-year record low, and using Excel I summed up the total heat output while we were at that low.

The furnace was only running 50% of the time, even when it was with a couple degrees of as cold as it’s ever been where I live.

Needless to say, when I got a new system installed I made sure it was more properly sized, and given that I had a convenient empirical measurement of exactly how many btus I actually needed in the worst case as scenario, that was easily done.

There are sophisticated and nuanced critiques to be made of Western power projection, soft and hard. “Nuanced” and “sophisticated” are not words appropriate to the average hexbear or lemmygrad denizen’s take on geopolitics, and for those of us who live in the real world rather than living to argue over how many Maos can dance on the tip of the icepick that killed Trotsky, the loud and unrelenting naysaying of anything less extreme than “armed proletarian revolution now!” got to be incredibly tiresome, not to mention the constant cheerleading of brutally-repressive regimes that don’t have any values in common with actual socialists or communists just because they oppose the US and its allies.

From the industry journal I linked in another comment – it’s literally just an off-the-shelf Mireo Plus B. That’s it. The only thing Tesla about it is that it’s serving a spur line connecting Tesla’s factory to the existing Berlin light rail network, and was presumably financed by them for the PR benefit of not having the workers at an electric car factory arrive by diesel train.

I did a little digging and it seems like there’s a tiny kernel of fact at the core of this giant turd of a hype-piece, and that is the fact that they electrified this little spur line from Berlin to the new German Tesla factory by using a battery-electric trainset. Which is not a terrible solution for electrifying a very short branch line that presumably doesn’t need frequent all-day service, even if it’s a bit of a janky approach compared to overhead lines. But hand that off to the overworked, underpaid twenty-two-year old gig worker they’ve got doing “editing” at Yahoo for two bucks an article, and I guess it turns into “world-first electric wonder train amazes!”

For a second, though, I read the headline and wondered if Musk and co. had finally looped all the way around to reinventing commuter rail from first principles after all these years of trying to “disrupt” it with bullshit ideas like Hyperloop and Tunnels, But Dumber.

That’s at least more cultured than my brain shouting “MULATTO BUTTS! (Mulatto butts!)” at me

Courtesy of Roger Ailes and the invention of political talk radio, The United States was the breeding ground for media manipulation tactics that later arrived in Europe, and those have been most heavily utilized by right-wing actors – think Sky News/The Daily Mail/The Sun in the UK, or instance. When you poll most people about what they want out of government here in the US, they tend to be in alignment with “liberal” values in the US or center-left parties in Europe, but when you ask them if they support implementations of those values by name (i.e., “Social Security” or “Medicaid” or “food stamps” instead of just asking “should the government help needy people stay fed and healthy?” people who consume right-wing media suddenly flip to be against those policies, because they are brainwashed by their media diet to oppose them even though in principle they express support for them.

Bottom line, after almost forty years of Rush Limbaugh and his ilk and thirty years of Fox News deliberately manipulating the American right to become hateful and reactionary in spite of their own natural impulses, the gap between left and right has become incredibly difficult to bridge in any meaningful way. IMO, the only hope for reconciliation is to push those extreme voices out of the mainstream in order to limit their ability to influence the gullible, and there’s just not many viable mechanisms to do that.

I highly recommend the Kill James Bond episodes on Charlie’s Angels which break down just how much of each movie is basically just (executive producer) Drew Barrymore perving on her co-stars.

Not OP, but if I had to hazard a guess, it started as a rudimentary issue tracker and grew into a formalized system over time, maybe? I’ve worked with many a project manager who “knew Excel” and liked to use it for things it should never be used for, and sometimes PMs get promoted and take their dumb little systems up the org chart with them.

I think they see Trump, and say well, he’s an asshole, but he’s not one of those weird plastic people who’ve been stealing from my pension fund and making sure my health insurance doesn’t work, and he seems to hate them too and not afraid to get violent with them. Hey, that sounds pretty fuckin’ good from where I’m standing. He’s got my vote.

Rural Americans by and large don’t have pensions anymore if in fact they ever did, and they’ve been thoroughly brainwashed to believe that their insurance worked better back when you could be kicked off your plan for costing too much and be blacklisted from getting any in the first place if you had a pre-existing condition. No, the thing that they liked about Trump was that he said he hated all the people they hated too, and he gave them license to speak their hate aloud after decades of being told that they were bad people if they hated somebody because of some indelible feature of their origin or identity.

To your last point, compare and contrast with Obama, whose speech patterns were chock-full of long pauses where you could just tell he was doing higher-order political math on the next phrase. To an extent that’s because that’s what Obama had to do or else the Hannities and Carlsons of the world would find some minute quibble they could build out into an elaborate conspiracy with which to fan the right-wing outrage machines for another week… but for all the other problems I have with the man I do appreciate the no-fucks-given mindset Biden’s brought to the job. The right wing media hate machine has become fully decoupled from reality at this point; there’s no reason to soft-shoe around things that might set them off anymore.

The Shrieking White-Hot Sphere of Rage ended up being flabby and orange, but otherwise they were spot-on.

I remember some of these discussions around the time of the Twitter and Reddit exodii and the mindset of many of these folks was essentially that they’d used this social media protocol to create a nice, quiet safe space for like-minded tech-savvy queer leftists, and felt that the explosion in interest threatened to expose their posts to people outside of the community that they had come to know and trust – which is a point of view I can understand, but as a counterargument, you’re on a public social media platform, and specifically one that is designed to spread content broadly and indiscriminately to servers outside of your control. If you wanted to keep things out of the view of the larger Internet there were other, better solutions for a community platform that you probably should have picked instead.

This is called the “Johnson Treatment,” ironically.

Ukraine claims north of 400k, which is undoubtedly optimistic, but allied intelligence agencies have previously floated numbers around 1/2 to 2/3rds of Ukraine’s public claims, which is still an utterly appalling number of dead Russian men. Russia’s tactical approach from the start has been more or less to treat their mobilized conscripts as expendable. For politically-important objectives their commanders have been perfectly happy to dump fresh meat into the metaphorical meat grinder until the gears jam, and then claim victory.

I think it might increase supply, but only in a paradoxical sense. I’ve had to deal with tremendous damage done to my home by one of our pets, and I’ve only put up with it because the animal responsible was incredibly dear to my wife. If I was renting the house out and had to deal with similar damage done by some stranger’s pet every time the house turned over, I think I’d throw in the towel and put it up for sale. It’s just not worth it.

There was a reasonably strong slate in 2020, and Dem primary voters passed them over for the old white guy as a hedge against the voting preferences of casually-racist and sexist boomer voters in the general electorate. The shit of it is that their reasoning wasn’t without merit either. But that’s left us where we are now, with a milquetoast octogenarian as the last bulwark against putting the fascist septuagenarian dementia patient back in charge, and nobody likes those options even if one is obviously less bad than the other.