By easy you mean of course conceptually easy. I love land value taxes conceptually but politically they will not be easy to implement. In fact none of the solutions to housing affordability will be easy to implement because homeowners don’t want the value of their property to decrease under any circumstances. That is their nest egg and they guard it with extreme jealousy.
Nothing Russia has done including (or since) the invasion in 2022 was smart. It was all stupid.
Russia’s wasted a million soldiers on grabbing a rather small amount of Ukrainian land. They’ve destroyed their own economy, their trade relationships with most of the world, and their demographic future. Take a million men off the streets of most countries and it’s going to crash your population within a generation or two.
The Chinese international students don’t want those jobs, that’s why they left!
My point here is that none of these cases feature Microsoft inventing a brand new product and trying to market it for the first time. Their whole strategy from the very beginning was to look for existing products with existing markets and try to conquer them. They even had a name for a variant of this strategy (targeted at open standards) which the US DoJ famously discovered during the antitrust trial:
This is how Microsoft has operated since day 1:
That’s why they’re doing this. The sleeping dragon is waking up. They’re gonna pour all of their marketing effort into killing the Steam Deck because of the threat it represents for consumer Windows.
I tried the intermediate step and even the minimum possible temperature increase of half a degree still triggers the bad behaviour. I can’t find any auxiliary heat lock setting. Maybe it’s in the service menu set by the HVAC installers? They set a password on that and won’t tell me what it is.
I’ll check them out. I once applied for a job at ecobee without knowing what they did!
That’s a good point. I should look into that. It does have the ability to connect to the thermostat with an app but I never tried that.
My issue is home insurance and HVAC regulation in Canada. I don’t know what is legal and what isn’t as far as HVAC system modifications go, given that I’m not a licensed HVAC technician. Doing my own home automation mods badly could damage or destroy either my heat pump or furnace, resulting in thousands of dollars in repair bills. Or it could jeopardize my home insurance in case of a fire and result in even greater financial losses, even if my modifications were only tangentially related to the cause of the fire.
I have a heat pump and furnace combo. The heat pump works extremely well down to around -10C. Below that it takes a very long time to move the needle by half a degree. The furnace doesn’t kick in until the thermostat sees the house temperature trending in the opposite direction it’s attempting to achieve.
Unfortunately, its method of determining the time gradient of temperature is rather moronic and doesn’t take the temperature schedule into account. This means every morning when the schedule calls for higher daytime temperatures (even by just half a degree) the thermostat freaks out thinking that the house is cooling rapidly and kicks on the furnace to bring up the temperature.
This causes the system to needlessly run the furnace every single morning. It annoys the hell out of me but I don’t know what to do about it. Aftermarket thermostats aren’t very common around here (Canada).
Note that the 240V outlets in Canada are actually just two separate 120V circuits plus a neutral. This is different from a UK outlet which has 240V AC on a single conductor and then a neutral and a protective earth.
I am a Canadian man but not young. I’m baffled by the trend towards social conservatism by young men. They idolize Andrew Tate and abuse their female teachers. It’s pretty awful. It’s like the whole incel movement took over young boys’ minds.
The Maillard reaction cannot be achieved through simmering alone. The temperature is too low. Simmering meat over a long period of time is useful for breaking down collagen and making a rich broth but you will not have the same deep, browned flavour as a broth made from roasted meat.
“For some reason”
You seem like a curious person. You should do some more research into cooking and why the Maillard and caramelization reactions produce such delicious food. It isn’t the carcinogenic byproducts that taste good (those tend to be quite bitter), it’s all the other complicated compounds produced from those reactions of proteins and sugars. By the way, these reactions can be achieved without burning the food at all, just not with most traditional cooking techniques.
Even still, you can get cancer from cooking without burning food at all. Heat up a bunch of oil to its smoke point and throw some water in there. In addition to creating a huge oily mess, you’ll fill the air with countless tiny droplets of oil and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) which are a known carcinogen. However, you can reduce the risks by not reheating used cooking oil, instead using only fresh oil every time.
You can also greatly reduce the risks by not heating the oil to its smoke point. It’s actually not necessary to heat oils to their smoke point in order to achieve the desirable browning flavour reactions.
As for life time of only eating bland boiled food: I would trade away a couple extra years of lifespan for avoiding that. Keep in mind that many of the most delicious soups and stews feature lots of seared, roasted, or fried ingredients anyway. Plus as I said, you can still get cancer even if you never eat or drink anything unhealthy. The air, the soil, and the water are all polluted with carcinogens. Even switching to electric cars will not help: the road, brake, and tire damage creates loads of PM2.5 particles which will destroy your lungs. This damage increases with the 4th power of vehicle mass, which means electric vehicles (that are far heavier) are actually far worse at producing this pollution!
You’re throwing out entire continents worth of cuisine. You’re essentially saying “do not sauté or stir fry anything.”
But here’s the sad reality: you could live your whole life eating nothing but bland, boiled food and still get lung cancer from VOCs and PM2.5 particles in the air due to the pollution of city life.
Not true. No matter what stove you cook with, cooking can produce large amounts of oil fumes (vaporized oil particles), smoke, and other VOCs from your food. All of this stuff is bad for your lungs.
Unless all you cook is boiled pasta, rice, veggies, gently simmered sauces, and sous vide (but not seared) proteins, you’re going to need a good quality range hood that (ideally) vents cooking emissions outside.
If they don’t spend enough money to differentiate themselves then they risk being drowned in a sea of indie games.
Every year the number and quality of indie games increases. The ferocity of competition makes it extremely hard to get anyone to play your game, let alone survive as a developer. This raises the bar on quality to a ridiculous degree.
Take any AAA game from the 1990s. Today that’s a single person project which can’t even compete with the most basic of indie games out there. To actually make money and support yourself as an indie developer is ridiculously hard!
Hey I’m not blaming students for any of this. I’ve been in the trenches with them this whole time. I’ve witnessed first hand the power of Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and mobile games. It robs them of their ability to focus. Then when they’ve procrastinated long enough they get exasperated from stress and fire up ChatGPT for a way out.
I’ve tried to help a teacher who can’t even get her own son to study. No avail.
I can’t really blame our political leaders for this. They don’t know what they’re doing either. They had no more ability to anticipate the effects of all this stuff than the rest of us.
The only ones who truly anticipated these issues are the folks working in social media. They saw what was happening first hand, through their metrics. They began unplugging their families from technology before anyone else.
I also don’t blame our teachers nor the folks in charge of setting curriculum (also teachers for the most part). I have friends who have worked in education research. They simply do not have the resources to compete with social media psychology researchers (working for big tech) who run A/B tests around the clock on millions of people in order to learn to maximize engagement. What hope does a teacher have when facing a class of 30+ bored, tired, social-addicted, and disillusioned teenagers? Very little.
I think we’re not too far from a huge social media and technology backlash. But before that we’re going to see a lost generation of squandered human capital.
Yes, although Carney has a free hand to admit that management is incompetent because it’s a management he inherited from Trudeau’s government, not one he hired himself. Carney worked at Goldman Sachs which has an infamous ultra competitive work culture. I could see him being annoyed with any manager as laid back as Trudeau was as PM.