I was curious about this a while ago and did some napkin math.
Natural gas is roughly $15 for 1 million BTU. There are 3412 BTU in a kwhr, so if you heated resistively, you'd need 293 kwhr to get 1 million BTU.
In my area, which I feel has pretty high electricity cost, we pay $.24 per kwhr, so that'd be $70.
Therefore, you need a 70/15 (4.666) COP for your heat pump to match natural gas by price. My understanding is that that would be an unusually high number for cold weather conditions.
The State of NH Office of Strategic Initiatives has a nice Fuel Price comparison page that they keep up to date (and are adjusted according to cost per MMBTU):
You can see that as of June 2, measured at $ per MMBTU (million BTU):
Natural Gas $8.31
Oil $17.62
Propane $32.93
Wood pellets $21.92
Resistive electric $48.84
Air src heat pump $18.74
The fossil fuels are all measured assuming 80% heating efficiency, whereas for propane or natural gas you might well have a high efficiency unit up to 97% which gains you a bit more savings.
These prices may vary depending on location and also I think natural gas isn't that common in NH as it's a mostly rural state.
I'm really glad I recently replaced my old 80% efficient oil boiler with a 97% efficient natural gas boiler. My winter bills are less than half what they were and it barely uses any gas during the summer for hot water.
With 80% efficiency, you have to burn 1/0.8=1.25 units of fuel to get one fuel unit worth of useful heat. With 97% efficiency it's 1/.97≈1.03 units.
So if fuel prices and the amount of useful heat usage stayed the same, then your bill should be 1.03/1.25≈82% of what it was before. If your bill is "less than half" then something else must have changed.
Yes, I switched from an oil burner (#2 heating oil) to a high efficiency natural gas boiler. The other key ingredient is that the oil boiler was 20 years old and did not have "cold start" (so it always keeps itself at temp even in the summer).
Any modern boiler (gas or oil) will almost certainly be cold start, so it only fires when there's a call for heat. This alone probably saves a gallon of oil a day at least.
There's a reason the Energy Saving Trust over here in the UK discourages people from replacing their gas boilers with heat pumps thinking it'll save them money, even though our climate is more suited to it than the colder parts of North America. Unfortunately, that doesn't stop our press pushing the idea we should go for heat pumps because Germany has. (They don't have such widespread natural gas connections to homes as the UK and so are reliant on oil-fired home heating, which as you can see has very different economics.)
We also don't know what the long-term fallout is going to be. Natural gas has been unusually cheap recently because it's a byproduct of fracking for oil. But low demand for oil means less demand for fracking which mean less natural gas production.
It's really hard to predict where prices are going to be in a year, because you really have to predict how well the oil industry can predict future demand in this environment. If they shut down too much production and then demand comes back there could be a price spike. If they expect a quick recovery and are wrong, prices could remain on the floor for a good while.
This is close enough to what we do -- and it works -- but since we support multiple releases at a time, it often ends up feeling like merging is pointless. Merging a dev branch into trunk feels good, but honestly most git interactions involve cherry-picking sets of commits to old releases, or to create hotfixes (So much, in fact, that we built some tooling around it to make it easier to not screw up). So then, you start to wonder, why am I special casing this one situation and using merge to trunk, and using cherry pick everywhere else.
This is so awesome! Back in 2008 I built a projector from an old unsued laptop and a high powered metal halide overhead projector that I bought off ebay for 50 bucks. It was surprisingly good looking; I was very happy for the total investment. It was unwieldy and pretty power hungry, but none of that really mattered living in my college dorm at the time.
When the laptop screen eventually gave up (I think just the connector) I never ended up rebuilding it. Nowadays you can get a really awesome looking projector setup for so little, it's not really worth trying the same approach.
But from what I skimmed through, this is a build of way higher complexity, cost, and quality. I'm looking forward to watching this video tonight.
In 2006 or so I did the same, building a projector out of a laptop LCD (without the laptop, just a plain LCD module and a controller), some lenses, a fresnel lens (cut in half, one part before and one after the LCD) and a 400 watts mercury vapor lamp usually intended to be used to light up factory halls. I constructed a housing for it from wood, a cooling system using lots of PC fans to vent that 400 watts of heat, and even a microcontroller-based control system for the entire thing, with a small LCD display, which managed stuff like tracking bulb used time, monitoring internal temperature via a temp sensor IC and letting the cooling system run for some time after turning off the lamp to get the heat out.
That thing was heavy and loud as hell, and it wasn't very bright considering it used 400 watts of light power, but it was about half the price of an equivalent projector back then, which effectively allowed my poor student self back then to enter the home cinema scene, which I couldn't have afforded otherwise.
There even was an entire little scene back then of DIY projector enthusiasts (at least in Germany) with bulletin boards and even some niche online shops specialized in selling suitable lenses and LCDs and matching controller boards. It was great fun and a great learning experience, especially since you could get help from like-minded people and ideas from other people's projector projects.
A few years later it all quickly went down the drain when the first Full-HD projectors with acceptable quality dropped into price ranges that were affordable for the general public. It simply wasn't possible to compete with that anymore, neither in terms of quality nor in terms of price. I myself replaced my hunk of a self-made projector after about 4 years of use or so, with one of these entry-level full HD home cinema projectors (which I'm even still using today, so that was a really good investment in my book). But that self-made device was worth every cent and every hour of work, and I still have fond memories of building it and tweaking it for maximum quality and then watching movies with it, all the while thinking "man, I built that thing basically from scratch".
I'm on the hunt for my next laptop and I'd really like to have a rock solid portable that runs Linux, but my past experience with Dell indicates inferior hardware and construction to Mac.
I looked at the 2020 Macbook Air (the $~1300 model), and it seems to offer the same or better specs (depending how much you value the display) for the price. Are we at the point where we must pay a premium NOT to run OSX, or am I missing something? I don't love the direction OSX has headed, but I'm still content enough running it and using Linux remotely where needed.
are the system76s better? I heard the hw was kinda iffy (crap) in the past. One of the reason I decided against it about 2 years abgo when I bought my Lenovo X1 carbon (for Linux).
The Lemur looks interesting (nice you can get it with more than 16GB RAM in 14")... wonder how the quality is on it though
If anyone can solve this mystery, it would be great to compare to other laptops like the Surface Pro, whose i7 is "Quad-core 10th Gen Intel® Core™ i7-1065G7 Processor"(1.3 / 3.9)
I saw a chat show once where there was a debate as to whether a tomato was a fruit or vegetable. The person arguing for them as a fruit challenged the other party to eat them with custard. The producers then got someone to make up some custard and brought it in bowls with some tomatoes for them to eat.
They ended up quite enjoying them, but I have never been tempted to try it lol
Well, right. But, I think that a lot of people are frustrated because living in dense urban areas is NOT an allowed pattern of development in most cities, especially the Bay Area.
I'd love to see a city that had like, a super dense core, then a ring road with endless car parks around it or something like that. You drive in, from your country home, get the subway for 10 mins from the ring road to the CBD or your urban dwelling friends' place, sorted.
Zone the ring road to kill sprawl.
Ban cars inside the ring road other than trucks for deliveries, workmen etc.
Best of both worlds.
It's not gonna happen in a pre-existing city though, the winners will block it (and rightly so).
It's amazing/depressing what patterns of living these megarich metropolises end up creating. There are people who live in Ireland and commute by boat and train to London for half the week in order to work.
The seat of state government is Albany and the seat of commerce/finance is in Manhattan. A couple where one worked in each place would naturally have something like that arise (and I'd think it wouldn't even be particularly rare).
I suspect for the majority of those couples, living in/near Albany would be vastly preferable to NYC, even before you consider the after-hours of political work is probably benefited more by locality.
My commute from Poughkeepsie NY to my office in midtown Manhattan was 2:15 door to door. That included the ~10 minute walk to and from the train stations at each end.
There are a LOT of people that do that commute and many of them drive from much further away and work much further away from Grand Central Terminal.
It was better than the 15-1:30 commute I used to have from Seattle to Bellevue in a car though, just because there was almost no variability and I wasn't driving.
So 4.5h for commuting, 9h of work, 8h of sleep, that leaves just 2.5h for everything else in your day, including enjoying your rural lifestyle. That would drive me absolutely crazy.
Remember, 4 of those hours of commuting are sitting on a train. You can watch movies, read books, take a nap, play games, get work done, etc.
I usually was at work from 10-5 and usually sleep closer to 6 hours a night. That gave me about 6.5 hours of free time. I also worked from home twice a week.
I personally hated it and only lasted at the job for a little over a year, but I could understand how some people could make it work.
I don't know how you'd get 90 miles with Metro North or NJ Transit. The furthest you can go on Metro North is NYC<->New Haven, which is 70 miles and takes 2 hours 7 minutes, one way.
That is interesting I regularly used to do a 65 mile commute to London which can take just over an hour on the slower train and 35 min on the intercity. (Bedford to St Pancras)
I'd love to see a city that had like, a super dense core, then a ring road with endless car parks around it or something like that. You drive in, from your country home, get the subway for 10 mins from the ring road to the CBD or your urban dwelling friends' place, sorted.
The UK often does something similar with "park and ride" bus schemes. To reduce congestion in inner cities, there are large car parks on key roads coming to the city, and usually you can park very cheaply or free and get a relatively cheap bus ticket into the centre. Often the buses also have privileged access so they can bypass queues where people chose to drive their cars all the way in instead.
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it certainly does reduce congestion and all its negative consequences locally and in the short term, which is obviously a good thing. On the other hand, it sustains a culture where we drive longer distances in vehicles much larger and less efficient than we actually need in order to get to work, which is a significant cause of negative consequences over a wider area and a longer term.
I heard a suggestion long ago that the best thing to do about congestion in our cities might be nothing at all. The argument was loosely related to the points in the article here: the underlying problems are the need to make so many journeys in the first place and the inefficient modes of transport we use to make them. By allowing journeys into crowded cities to become ever more expensive, financially and otherwise, we would force better solutions in terms of how we plan our residential, business and recreational spaces. We could encourage areas with relatively dense populations where good public transport both within and between them is practical and efficient, where currently many of our cities here haven't really got critical mass to run a good 24/7 public transport system but are too big and often badly designed for historical reasons to support the volume of traffic that now wants to move at peak times. We could encourage the use of smaller, more efficient personal vehicles where public transport isn't sufficient. We could encourage the use of remote working for those whose jobs allow it. And in general, newer and more efficiently designed places to live would become relatively attractive compared to those with historical baggage that don't work as well practically.
I haven't seen anything like enough evidence and analysis to know whether that's really a good general solution, but it has always struck me as a reasonable enough proposition to be worth exploring.
> By allowing journeys into crowded cities to become ever more expensive, financially and otherwise, we would force better solutions in terms of how we plan our residential, business and recreational spaces.
Perhaps. I mean, it certainly seems to be working so far - anecdotally people are stuffing themselves into smaller and smaller apartments, flat shares, etc, naturally.
I'm biased so it's difficult for me to really conceptualise it. In that scenario, I would (and in fact have) just nope out entirely and move to the country because I can afford it.
It seems unfair to tell everyone who can't to just suck it up and live in a shoebox.
I'm sure you're right about the smaller and smaller accommodations, but I think the argument I heard before was intended to be a little longer-term than that.
Our starting position is that a lot of employment is very centralised in big cities or industrial areas, sometimes for historical reasons that aren't necessarily as relevant today.
With better planning of future cities, with an emphasis on keeping everyday services like schools, shops, basic medical care and sports facilities more local to where people live, both the provider and the consumer have less need to make routine long journeys that overlap lots of other people's routine long journeys.
There will always be a need to centralise certain key facilities more, say hospitals that need to respond to a diverse range of serious conditions very quickly but also serve a wide area because fortunately there aren't many people with each condition at any given time. However, there is no need for your dentist or optician to be based 10 miles away in the nearest city centre when there are more than enough patients who need that sort of care within a one mile radius anyway.
In my country (the UK) we do this much better in some respects than others.
Schooling is usually relatively local in the early years, for example. Most kids don't have to travel silly distances to reach secondary school (ages around 11-18) either.
Some places have much better routine medical facilities available locally than others. This is definitely an area where we could improve.
Shopping in bricks and mortar stores is so bad now that we're increasingly seeing our traditional high streets turning into deserted wastelands, far too expensive and time-consuming to reach for a quick visit when you just want to buy a new shirt for the weekend or toy for your child. Online stores and huge, car-friendly out-of-town shopping centres with almost exactly the same 100 brands as all the others are driving all the traditional, local, interesting shops out of business, sadly.
More generally, far too many of our vanilla office jobs are based in city centres entirely unnecessarily. Their staff don't live nearby any more because they can't afford to, so what was once an advantage is now a disadvantage that causes big problems for and because of commuters.
So I don't really think living in shoe boxes is the answer. Moving everything else so it's more readily accessible from good quality homes is the answer, according to this argument at least.
Just to be clear, this isn't necessarily an argument for moving everything out to the suburbs or smaller, more rural towns. The same principles can also be applied in much larger cities, by better balancing residential, business and leisure facilities in each neighbourhood. The trouble is usually that historically this wasn't so well understood, so existing planning/zoning rules often aren't very effective but you can't just transplant everything overnight to where you'd ideally like it to be. Hence the desire to promote newer and better designed areas as a general trend, and in (lots of) time allow the older and less practical areas to be rearranged.
Your argument is basically sound, but IMO based on a wrong starting point.
> Our starting position is that a lot of employment is very centralised in big cities or industrial areas, sometimes for historical reasons that aren't necessarily as relevant today.
So first of all, I don't want to get stuck in a home office. I want to share an office with my coworkers and engage in normal human social behavior during the workday. A coworking space does not appeal to me either: I'm not comfortable spending my workday around strangers who appear and disappear every few weeks.
But besides that, I think that work is only one part of the equation. There are other reasons why people live in big cities. I grew up in a German city with 100k inhabitants, and there was basically nothing I could do after 8PM once shops had closed. I now live in a larger city where there is a lot of stuff going on everyday in some place (tech meetups, concerts, etc.). You just don't have that in a village or small city.
Another, smaller thing: I have some chronic ailments, so it's convenient to be living in a large city with a good coverage of specialist doctors and hospitals. A small city (say, 10k inhabitants) will have a couple GPs and probably an ophthalmologist, but will likely lack more niche specialists.
There are more reasons. That's not to say that everyone wants to live, or should want to live, in a big city. But it's not a good idea to force everyone to live in small communities either.
So first of all, I don't want to get stuck in a home office. I want to share an office with my coworkers and engage in normal human social behavior during the workday. A coworking space does not appeal to me either: I'm not comfortable spending my workday around strangers who appear and disappear every few weeks.
That's all fair enough. Everyone is going to have their own preferences for something like this. But why should the office be located in a hard-to-reach central area at all, if most or all of its staff live somewhere else?
But besides that, I think that work is only one part of the equation. There are other reasons why people live in big cities. I grew up in a German city with 100k inhabitants, and there was basically nothing I could do after 8PM once shops had closed.
Again, that's a fair point. I did acknowledge that there would always be a need for some facilities to be located more centrally and serve a wider area. Anyone wanting to use those facilities will also benefit if there are fewer unnecessary journeys competing for space with their private vehicles or overcrowding public transport, though.
That's not to say that everyone wants to live, or should want to live, in a big city. But it's not a good idea to force everyone to live in small communities either.
I agree, and this is the point I was trying to make in my final paragraph before. Sorry if it wasn't clear.
The problem, IMHO, isn't having large cities. Many people prefer to have less personal living space but be nearer to a wider range of facilities, much as you described yourself. The problem, IMHO, is the design of many large cities today where there is a central area with most of the places people want to go, surrounded by suburbs with most of the places where people live.
The geometry of such a design prevents it scaling well. As the city grows, the residential area spreads outwards. This means more people live further from the area with the services. Typically, the area available for the services also can't grow proportionately, creating a problem of where to put enough new services to meet the needs of the growing population.
A less centralised design based on clusters that each combine residential accommodation, basic services for the local population, and possibly some sort of business district, has much more ability to grow without separating large numbers of people from their everyday needs, even if you then position large numbers of such clusters close together, introduce additional areas among the clusters for more specialised facilities, and form a big city.
But why should the office be located in a hard-to-reach central area at all, if most or all of its staff live somewhere else?
Because most or all of its staff live in different somewhere elses and mass transit is horrible at random route commutes. If you take a city and express it in polar coordinates defined by each spine of mass transit as being at a constant theta, putting the things that lots of people need to come to near the center makes the most sense.
Locating an office 3 miles out of the center at a random theta means that a lot of people need to commute into the center, change to the line serving the office [waiting], and continue their commute out, reversing the same on the way home.
If I'm competing for the best employees, I'm far better served to pay more to put my office near the transit hub and lower the inconvenience for my employees.
All the above assumes a significant commuting base on fixed route rail that tends to cluster around hubs. It might be possible construct (more expensive) transit that was not hub and spoke. If you do that, I predict you end up in the less centralized design you describe in the last paragraph (which still seems like it doesn't serve the needs of people who need to work together but are served by different of the numerous hubs).
Because most or all of its staff live in different somewhere elses and mass transit is horrible at random route commutes.
Right, but the problem with this isn't the different somewhere elses, it's designing mass transit systems that are only useful on arterial routes into or out of the centre of a radially organised city.
This is often how things work today, but there's no reason it has to be, as long as you have a reasonable alternative layout and sufficient volume of journeys to make comprehensive mass transit viable at all.
For example, consider a big city like London. There are enough travellers to run both the Underground (metro) and bus services almost 24/7 now. A wide variety of routes, many of them not just arterial paths to or from some central hub, cover most of the Greater London area.
In that sort of situation, even if you aren't living within convenient walking/cycling distance of your normal place of work, it makes little difference whether you're travelling into the centre of a city or further around it.
If I'm competing for the best employees, I'm far better served to pay more to put my office near the transit hub and lower the inconvenience for my employees.
The assumption of a single, central transit hub rather than a more distributed, uniform arrangement is the problem here. It has much the same inherent scalability problems as any of the other services that some of us were discussing further up the thread.
All the above assumes a significant commuting base on fixed route rail that tends to cluster around hubs. It might be possible construct (more expensive) transit that was not hub and spoke.
Exactly. The challenge is to match the scale of the city with the scale of the transit system so the "(more expensive)" becomes negligible. But since in this case the costs of inefficient transportation systems and unnecessary journeys are more than just financial, that doesn't seem like a crazy idea.
> I'm far better served to pay more to put my office near the transit hub
Coincidentally, my office is right next to the busiest tram stop in the city center, which is great because I don't have to change lines during my commute.
Hours in front of screen are perhaps the easiest metric to check up on workers. Unfortunately, it's also not well correlated to productivity! Lazy managing, for sure.
Personally, I'm pessimistic that any metric about productivity can be useful in the long term, but I recognize that in this reality, there WILL be metrics used to judge you. So, what's the best way to handle this? Is there anything an individual contributor can do to guide towards better metrics, or even just the perception of such?
In deduplication, we check to see whether a block has been seen before. If it has, we don't write it. If it hasn't, we write it down and record that information for next time. Checking if a block has been seen requires looking in an index, which is large and expensive to check, but recording the store can be amortized.
So, a bloom filter can tell you whether it's worth spending the expensive check to verify that the block is a duplicate, or whether you should skip that behavior and move on directly.
Same is true for malicious site detection. Google offers this feature in Chrome, but we don't want to make an expensive network request for every URL we visit. And we can't really have a database of all malicious URLs downloaded and updated to everyone's computer. Instead, they can distribute a bloom filter of malicious sites. if the bloom filter says it's malicious, we can afford to check the network for the final answer. If the bloom filter says it's not, we know we don't have to check (and that's the most common case, too!)
In my opinion, the intuition to extract is this. If you need to check membership, the set is expensive to check, and getting a definitive NO is valuable, then you can consider a bloom filter (or another probabilistic structure like a cuckoo filter).
In dedup, we need to check membership, the index is big enough to not fit in RAM so it's expensive, and getting a definitive NO means we can skip the index check.
In malicious site detection, we need to check membership, the answer requires a network round trip so it's expensive, and getting a definitive NO means we can just move on to loading the site.
Natural gas is roughly $15 for 1 million BTU. There are 3412 BTU in a kwhr, so if you heated resistively, you'd need 293 kwhr to get 1 million BTU.
In my area, which I feel has pretty high electricity cost, we pay $.24 per kwhr, so that'd be $70.
Therefore, you need a 70/15 (4.666) COP for your heat pump to match natural gas by price. My understanding is that that would be an unusually high number for cold weather conditions.