The graph shows the price for 3100 kWh. I'm not sure if that is a very low annual amount or a very very high monthly amount.
The average US household uses 10,000 kWh annually ~833 kWh per month. So I'm guessing most Americans reading the article and looking at the interactive graph are thinking either: this is very cheap or very expensive, depending on whether they are assuming it's monthly or annual.
In the US the average price for 3100 kWh in California would be $1062 which is among the highest in the continental US. So right in line with GB.
In New York it would be $710. Florida it would be $454.
So it's high, but not as eye-watering as it seemed to me initially.
We mostly don't have AC, we have tiny houses, our heating is gas powered. Lots of showers aren't electric either. We don't use huge amounts compared to the US
Unfortunately not. Most houses in the UK are heated using a 'central heating' loop. A closed loop of water that circulated through pipes run through the house and through large radiators in each room. A central boiler, usually a gas boiler, burns gas to heat and circulate this loop to provide whole-house heating, while also typically using a heat exchanger to heat the intake cold drinking water supply into a whole house hot drinking water. (Thus, most houses have cold, hot, and central heating piping).
If you switch out the gas boiler for a heat pump, it can still heat the hot water and heat the central heating loop. But it can't provide cooling that way. There is no infrastructure in most houses to run AC ducting or refrigerant pipes.
You might think that you could simply cool the water in the central heating loop, and therefore make all of the radiators very cold, and use that to move heat out of rooms. In theory that might work, but in most houses these central heating pipes are not insulated and run under floorboards. If you make them cold then they'll cause condensation, leading to water in all kinds of small spaces, and likely leading to warping, damage, or mould.
In the UK, retrofitting AC into an existing house is a huge undertaking in most cases.
Good point. Not to mention the circulation will be all wrong had the radiator been cool instead of warm. (The primary means of heating by radiator actually comes from convection rather than radiation.)
That's the annual figure. But just for electricity. Most UK homes are heated with gas, and many have gas stoves, so the average kWh annual gas figure is much higher (~12,000kWh).
3100 kWh is the figure set by the regulator as the representative annual usage used to calculate prices for e.g. tariff comparison between suppliers. It makes sense to use it here.
Median income and take home pay should be brought into account though. California has one of the highest even by US standards so a $1000 bill for the median Californian family feels much less expensive than for the median Manchester family.
I agree, the mode is probably better. Anyway from the median you can also get a good guess of how much income the band sitting between 25%-75% has since it's a normal distribution. Either comparison should be ok for a guesstimate of the impact of electricity bills for a family in California vs different parts of the UK.
There is clearly a difference between states that invested in projects that went over budget. Power generation is cheaper in a lot of states due to the price of natural gas is dramatically lower than it was 20 years ago. Florida uses gas for 75% of electricity.
We're at ~3.6 MWh in a ground floor apartment with 2 adults, with water heating (e.g. showering) electric but building heating on gas (though we use a space heater a lot as well, probably to the tune of 0.2 MWh/year)
I wonder if I should feel bad since I'm currently at 2830 kWh in 2024 for a single household with all heating costs not coming out of my electric bill.
Hard to say since usage doesn't simply divide by 2: the fridge needs to run regardless of how much food there is (it matters, but not linearly), or if you watch a TV every evening with 2 persons or 1 doesn't show up on the bill either. Probably best to ask friends and see how they get their costs down or if, conversely, you can give them tips
If this article seems super weird to you it's possible that's because you are naturally adept at socializing. For many neuro-atypical folks, remedial socialization requires tons of cognitive focus. It's why some people find social activities exhausting.
> that's because you are naturally adept at socializing
People can be bad at socializing for a number of reasons. if you're depressed it can feel like just thinking that everyone hates you and never reaching out
At least for me it gets easier when you don't think, but this guy is giving the opposite advice
I'm sure this advice might be useful to some people but it's probably the opposite of useful for many others
It's disingenuous to say that Google is targeting uBlock Origin. The Manifest V2 extension architecture is fundamentally different from V3. V2 uses always running scripts while V3 requires event driven temporary workers. Additionally V3 eliminates the obviously risky V2 features like remote code execution and direct modification of network requests.
Not surprisingly, uBlock Origin relies heavily on features in V2 to perform it's functionality. It could probably be rewritten to use V3 but it's not a simple "Hey ChatGPT, make all this code into V3 compliant code." It will require a pretty fundamental rewrite.
Google made common sense improvements to the way extension work for safety and performance. Were they sad that uBlock Origin stopped working? Probably not. But I highly doubt it factored into the need for the V3 changes.
> It could probably be rewritten to use V3 but it's not a simple "Hey ChatGPT, make all this code into V3 compliant code."
There are explicit limitations of V3 that make it not able to be as effective even if rewritten to be compliant. uBlock Origin Lite exists; it can't do everything uBlock Origin can.
It’s perfectly valid to say they don’t care that this is happening. Software businesses carve out exceptions annd extensions all the time and have done so since the dawn of desktop computing.
Actually, the most believable course of action is that Google wanted to
remove the adblockers first, and by doing that they've removed some
of the remote execution vulnerabilities.
If only there was some middleground between "no remote code execution" and "breaking the entire paradigm of adblockers".
The statement that they could be "rewritten" to anywhere near the same effectiveness is straight up disinformation. There are years and years of coverage of this issue that contradict you. The debate has nothing to do with the level of effort for rewrites. This is a hostile decision by a company with a directly adversarial relationship to adblockers.
I feel there were very good reasons that airships were abandoned. I don't know what those reasons were, but unless they enumerate the reasons and explain why they have now solved them, I will assume they are also going to fail.
According to AI, there have been 5 historical attempts to make airships work before the modern resurgence:
The early experimental phase (1780s–1850s),
The pioneering era (1850s–1900s),
The golden age (1900s–1930s),
A post-Hindenburg decline (1930s),
Cold War military uses (1940s–1970s), and
A modern resurgence (1990s–present).
From the article:
"Price gouging is generally defined as a situation where companies set the price above the customary level in order to prevent shortages from occurring."
That sounds like normal supply and demand, not "price gouging". If you only have N of something, you set the price level such that the demand at that price will only be N of that thing.
But people feel it as price gouging. If the price has been X for a long time, and now the price is suddenly several times X because the supply got short, that feels like price gouging rather than "supply and demand".
Well, but see, supply and demand works on both ends.
That is, I'm selling the thing that's in short supply. But why is it in short supply? Because if I'm the manufacturer, I can't make any more of them than I'm making. And if I'm the distributor, I can't sell any more than I can buy from the manufacturer.
And why can't the manufacturer make any more? Typically, because there's some resource that they can't get. So they get some more, but they get it by paying more for it.
So the point is, when the company selling you the widget raises their price, that isn't pure profit. Their costs went up too, because the price of what they need went up.
ODD has some really questionable aspects. Especially considering half of children diagnosed with it are also ADHD. I highly suspect the issue is more with the authority figures not knowing how to handle neurodivergence than the children themselves.
Many people tend to do the opposite of what they are told to do. In an individualist culture, this is normal.
A step back - I’d consider the possibility too that it’s a learned behavior where they have received enough pain in the past doing what they were told, so literally have been conditioned to do the opposite of what they were told.
And/or, never got attention or positive feedback when doing what they were told - but got lots of attention when they did what they were told not to do. Not necessarily positive, but something is better than nothing.
Which isn’t necessarily at odds with what you’re saying.
As someone who has some of the traits this is absolutely it.
When you spend your childhood being told by people to do things that will lead to, well, almost certainly being poor and having a shit life, you learn to just ignore advice and do the opposite.
It is really hard to unlearn this in adulthood. I tend to get by by judging the person giving the advice e.g. if they seem successful then they are more likely to be correct than if they are not.
I developed something like this, but it manifests more as "question everything until it makes sense to me."
I feel like I'm constitutionally incapable of taking anybody's word for anything, but it's vastly worse for anyone who reacts with hostility to my questions about points that don't make sense to me.
It was very much trained into me by my father that following the advice of those people leads to suffering and pain. He acted like he knew everything. He reacted with rage when questioned. And looking back on it, he was (and remains) wrong about every single point of substance I ever remember his having made.
> manifests more as "question everything until it makes sense to me."
This is called "critical thinking" -- at least when combined with a decent amount of existing topical knowledge to be able to ask good questions -- and is rather useful for all sorts of things.
It's surprising and disappointing how rarely it goes over well. It's led me to believe most people deserve to feel "impostor syndrome."
One of my favorite feelings is the one I get when I have an opportunity to change my mind because someone has better information about a topic than I do and is willing to share it with me so I can come to the same conclusion they have, rather than the one I had because I was ignorant of certain information.
I always hope professionals, whom I expect to be experts in their subjects, enjoy their subject enough that they are better informed than I am about it, so I tend to ask a lot of questions. It is extremely rare that I find one who takes this well.
My mechanic is a glowing exception on this front. He actually specializes in my kind of car (old Priuses, not something fancy), and when he tells me X, Y, and/or Z are wrong with it and what he needs to do to fix it, if I ask questions, he can easily identify what knowledge I'm missing, and happily just explains it to me. As an intelligent, curious person, I love interacting with experts like this and will happily pay more to do so. And he seems to enjoy talking about his subject, even with someone who knows a lot less about it than he does.
But my doctors? Especially "specialists"? Absolutely opposite experience on every front. They loathe my questions, and treat me with contempt for daring to question their authority, even when I'm trying to ask about recent research papers and have previously read all their citations. I'm not a doctor, but I do know how to read papers, and especially for a chronic condition I have, I've read a lot. I'm not some random person coming in with a file of advice from "Doctor Google." If anything, I know quite a bit more about my condition than I do about my car, even though my history with each is about the same length.
I don't know if it has to do with the respective systems the two kinds of experts operate in or what (my mechanic's education was not as long or as arduous, and since he operates independently, it's up to him to decide how much time he wants to spend with me and what to charge me), but it's a disappointing world for an inquisitive critical thinker.
All heart pumps damage the blood. So far we've not found a way to pump blood without causing damage due to various factors, sheer, pressure, heat, etc.
Impellers are particularly bad. Alternatives that use flexible membranes are better but still not perfect. Abiomed and Ventriflo both had pumps that use a flexible membrane. Abiomed had the first TAH (total artificial heart) to be implanted.
There are also other problems with blood pumps, such as stasis areas where blood can stagnate causing issues like thrombosis. These can be caused by valves or other issues in the flow path.
People on blood pumps need blood thinners and anticoagulants which can cause their own problems long term.
The average US household uses 10,000 kWh annually ~833 kWh per month. So I'm guessing most Americans reading the article and looking at the interactive graph are thinking either: this is very cheap or very expensive, depending on whether they are assuming it's monthly or annual.
In the US the average price for 3100 kWh in California would be $1062 which is among the highest in the continental US. So right in line with GB.
In New York it would be $710. Florida it would be $454.
So it's high, but not as eye-watering as it seemed to me initially.