in CA my natural gas is far cheaper than the heat pump sadly

In western europe today, I spend €10+ per day to heat my home (17 degrees mind you) with a gas powered boiler for radiators. I can run my mini-split on 18 degrees all day for a couple of euros. I moved here from the US in 2022 right after the full scale invasion of Ukraine so natural gas prices skyrocketed overnight.

I don't really understand what the aversion is to forced air climate control here other than "it's not as comfortable" which from what I've gleaned from other people is taken to mean noise/moving air/humidity. Coming from the southern US, I find all of those points to be a non-issue for me. I've slept with a fan on my entire life, so if I can shave off 50% of my heating costs for a few decibels of fan noise, sign me up!

I don't buy your numbers. I'm in Western Europe myself, and have run those numbers multiple times. Kilowatt for kilowatt (COP adjusted) gas is always cheaper than a heat pump.

have you met the california high speed rail or not yet?

Well, that's not 'mostly done'

im not sure you're allowed to state all this! kidding but yeah.

curious where in CA. in the past 15y ive def. seen more rain lol.

I think this has to be seen as "over some span of time", because a drought is an "over some span of time" thing.

He did that before he was elected?

it really doesnt have to be golf though lol. its all just excuses. i worked minimum wage (actual minimum mind you, no tips, nothing) for about 7 years and i didn't get obese, must be magic.

my hobbies included waking and running around, making stuff on an old laptop (I kept that one!), reading, making planes out of whatever material i could get my hands on that sort of stuff. i ate pasta, eggs, rice, water, tomatos. i never cared about eating the same thing everyday (i still don't but ive learned to eat a little better).

theres plenty more hobbies, obviously none of these being forbidden in the USA lol. and most make more money than I did, not to mention have food stamps and the like.

natural selection. you can only cheat it so far.

put simply and fairly bluntly: because they do not know how things work.

but actually it's worse. this is HN - supposedly, most commenters are curious by nature and well versed into most basic computer stuff. in practice, it's slowly less and less the case.

worse: what is learned and expected is different from what you'd think.

for example, separating service users sure is better than nothing, but the OS attack surface as a local user is still huge, hence why we use sandboxes, which really are just OS level firewalls to reduce the attack surface.

the open port attack surface isnt terrible though: you get a bit more of the very well tested tcp/ip stack and up to 65k ports all doing the exact same thing, not terrible at all.

Now, add to it "AI" which can automatically regurgitate and implement whatever reddit and stack overflow says.. it makes for a fun future problem - such forums will end up with mostly non-new AI content (new problem being solved will be a needle in the haystack) - and - users will have learned that AI is always right no matter what it decides (because they don't know any better and they're being trained to blindly trust it).

Heck, i predict there will be a chat, where a bunch of humans will argue very strongly that an AI is right while its blatantly wrong, and some will likely put their life on the line to defend it.

Fun times ahead. As for my take: humans _need_ learning to live, but are lazy. Nature fixes itself.

google has changed when they started firing everyone to replace them by "offshore", around 2022.

you're getting human replies from people who do not give a crap.

culture isnt equal.

I would be surprised if any human at Google had anything to do with handling this case. This entire conversation was with an AI bot.