191–200 of 200 posts
What is the plan for revamping all the residential units that have non-electrical heating in the parts of the country which have winter?
Heat pumps! They work great on cold weather now, as long as you can find a competent HVAC contractor. HVAC folks tend to not like new tech, though, so it's hard to find one.
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We switched to a heat pump a couple years ago. It soaks up all but the coldest (5-15°) days in winter (when the resistive heater kicks in as well) and uses only a little more energy than our old gas system’s fans did. It’s way more efficient in the summer than our old AC was so our annual usage actually went down and we have less maintenance. Over the course of the year, our entire HVAC load is roughly what our modes…
How much did that cost you?
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>> But your average house in the US is for sure more comfortable than your average house in France. "For sure more comfortable"? Like you said though, by what measure? I'm visiting my sister in London right now. She lives in a 750 sqft two bedroom apartment. Sure, it's smaller than my 1700 ft house back in the US, but she seems fairly comfortable.
Google says <5% of homes in France have air conditioning.
Quickly finding an annual weather calendar for Paris, the seasonal high is 78 F (26 C), one month of the year.
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> If by NIMBYs you mean paid actors attending council meetings Exactly, most anti-renewable objections are outright fraud by the oil companies, it is groups like 'Citizens for responsible solar' that are recieve fossil fuel donations through shell companies. Theu go and complain that a solar farm will spoint the veiw on somw derelic wasteland and robbing locals of job opportunities ities. There isnt a single local pe…
And what about situations like the following, "‘It’s got nasty’: the battle to build the US’s biggest solar power farm", https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/30/its-got-... Unfortunately, I don't think people like Connie Ehrlich are rare, especially considering that you typically don't need much money to be as obstructive as she has. Yes, there are corporate-funded "grassroots" lobbying organizations, but…
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Google says <5% of homes in France have air conditioning.
It does not typically get that warm in France. Quickly finding an annual weather calendar for Paris, the seasonal high is 78 F (26 C), one month of the year.
If it was properly unimportant then the majority of stores and offices wouldn't have it.
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If a developer tells you they can deliver by x, and they also don't know how to do it, what is the level of confidence you have that will occur?
As a developer, the ugly truth about Agile is that something (TM) is delivered and fallout is labeled Technical Debt.
One challenge I’ve seen though, in the situations where that’s what happened, is that I didn’t see at the time (and still, looking back, don’t see) any alternative that was likely to work either.
But no one likes that answer, especially not the folks paying for it.
Most of the difficulty was just figuring out what needed to be done, not sitting down and actually doing it.
And software is so incredibly picky, it was always in doubt for many projects if it was actually going to work well enough until the hard parts were all almost done anyway.
CRUD apps? Sure, not as hard - but even there it’s common to run across issues like ‘that doesn’t actually make sense to do’ once you go to actually do it. The new checkbox makes everything really confusing, or it tips the whole CRUd page into ‘too many things’ without a rethink, or if the bit of data that logically is associated with everything else is actually stored in a different backend, and the semantics of clicking ‘Save’ get too scary if you combine them all.
Waterfall, while pushing forward some of the planning, can help compared to what Agile has devolved to sometimes - like people literally not trying to figure out what they even want to do this week.
Waterfall was always an issue because the plans just get more unrealistic because the time to discovery of issues gets bigger, and everyone spends tons of time churning in their GANTT charts instead of just trying it, or realizing you can’t plan something accurately if you don’t know if it will work and being honest about it.
And then tighten the screws when the people doing the work are late.
It’s a story about overwhelm, in my experience. Most business problems are always in need of more decision making ability, and process tends to be used as a crutch instead of solving that problem.
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> local objections That's a big component of all this. NIMBYism in this country is becoming a big problem in a lot of ways. Want to build a dense, mixed use development that is less carbon-intensive than single family suburbia? NIMBYs oppose it. Build a transmission line from your green energy source? NIMBYs, again! Build a solar farm? NIMBYs will try and block it.
Want to start a backyard steel-smelting campaign? NIMBYs will block it. Want to eradicate sparrows who seem to be eating crops? Environmental review will block it. Want to set up a space launch facility near a village and jettison booster stages over agricultural fields? NIMBYs will block it. Want to operate a pig farm in a residential neighborhood? NIMBYs will block it.
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> coal mine or a logging operation or a PFS factory or a highway it would still go through Actually, all of those things are just as difficult to do in jurisdictions where the public sentiment is given so much deference. That's why they're usually built in the middle of nowhere, or in jurisdictions which don't effectively grant the public procedural veto powers. (That said, mining and chemical factories in particular…