The EU is built on rules that uphold liberal democratic principles, agreed to by national governments in a flush of post-WW2 clarity, and which tie successors to the same principles. There are exit mechanisms, but they impose large costs (i.e. Brexit).
You're saying nothing concrete in particular.
What rules? How do they inhibit change?
The only thing I can think of which is actually difficult to change is the echr and i see more than a dozen mostly liberal governments queueing up to change it (to little effect so far) over migration issues.
As a non american looking in I feel like that applies to the other side as well and is how you ended up here.
Having paid a bit of attention during the election seeing bernie and trump at least in terms of rethoric more in line with eachother on the same trade agreements, migration, etc whilst also both outperforming Hillary in the same swing states, etc is not some coincidence.
And given that you live in a 2 party state it's always going to swing at some point eventually. No matter how depraved someone like trump is.
If the next one is just as bad and they sit it out long enough they will get their turn.
1. No, absolutely not. Why would you settle for COP=1 when you can have COP>1?
2. The electrical to heat conversion efficiency is indeed 100% regardless of the temperature of the resistor. And if you're putting out 1000W, then all input losses are also identical. If you put a 1000W light bulb in the middle of your room, or 2 of them but run both at 500W, you'll get EXACTLY the same heat output in your room, but the single bulb is much hotter.
1. Are there not scenarios where it drops below 1?
The stats for them always seem optimistic scenarios given what i hear from people during winter cold spell in houses that aren't absolutely perfectly insulated.
If your water term needs to remain above 70C and it's starts freezing hard outside during winter when that COP starts to matter the most for example.
Older heat pumps had max temperature limits and did often have resistance heaters to get that last push above 60C. Modern household heat pumps will reach 75C while staying above 100% efficient and can skip the resistance heater.
This is partly due to a change in the refrigerant used.
> Modern household heat pumps will reach 75C while staying above 100% efficient and can skip the resistance heater.
Is this adequately maintained even as temperatures drop?
I was recently considering getting a heatpump in addition to my gas installation but I assume I need to go for more than a bit better than resistance heating during winter for that investment to make sense.
It mostly leaks and such.
Limescale buildup is also a small issue for their efficiency and more so if they run hot.
If we reduced it to a simple input output calculation that would never be an issue except for some speed of transfer.
It achieves cleaner air, which I personally like, and which is especially great for anyone with lung problems like asthmatics.
I suspect part of the rule tightening is to slowly squeeze to get rid of fires altogether (the outcome with the cleanest air).
> what do you do if you build your own woodburner/fireplace?
You couldn't afford to do it legally (I expect emissions testing is expensive). I don't know what the penalties are for illegal woodburners/fireplaces. My personal experience is that it isn't enforced. I'd guess penalties can be avoided unless you're a repeat offender with a complaining neighbour.
Note that outdoor braziers are legal AFAIK. Although Outdoor fires have some restrictions - especially if very dry and high fire risk.
Firewood is not cheap for heating. Even if you have free trees then it costs a lot of time (in my experience) and often equipment or transport is expensive too.
>You couldn't afford to do it legally (I expect emissions testing is expensive).
An honest answer at least and something i hope we don't see here.
But I think similar legislation is going to become common trough the EU (something is already on the books i believe) and is already a thing in Germany.
It's silly too in a time when most still heat with fossil fuels, pumping up more and more that could be avoided and i can build a fireplace with outside air intake or get a damn near ancient finish masonry heater that's far more efficient than anything one can get at the store.
>Firewood is not cheap for heating. Even if you have free trees then it costs a lot of time (in my experience) and often equipment or transport is expensive too.
I live in Western Europe but it's been cheap.
If I counted up the time invested and compared it to equivalent time worked for money to spend on other heating with fossil fuels then it comes out far far cheaper.
Even if i add some egregious estimates for the cost of a chainsaw, trailer and wheelbarrow it's still only a fraction of the cost.
Christchurch doesn't use much fossil fuels. Coal, Coal gas[1], Coke, and LPG were used in the past for home heating. Electricity generation can come from coal when hydro lakes get dry. Utility Solar will replace that usage.
I use firewood for heating when I'm using the living area but I'm not sure I'd replace the current woodburner. I currently use gas for hot water for showers but LPG is getting more expensive so when the gas califont fails it will be replaced with electric heating.
I have access to free trees, but I've been slowly finding that my "free" firewood is expensive (because I value my time highly). I'm not sure how to account for the risks of hurting myself, or the benefits of exercise!
We had a massive problem with smog, and although the regulations definitely have some bad side effects, the regulations have worked.
No one is forcing you to get/build one that doesn't far exceed the current regulations to the point where it is expected to exceed them until the end of its useful lifespan.
And the certification will cost almost nothing and take into account everything i presume?
Or will it center around the ones you can buy in a shop of the shelf like most regulation and be ridiculously prohibitive for everyone that goes off the beaten path?
I don't show it but honestly I also find it hard not to attribute the negative consequences (partially in Brussels funnily enough) of your preferred policies to people like you.
Sometimes it gets hard to hide that.
>The NATO forces defeated the Taliban in a timeframe that could be measured in hours. The remaining years were an exercise in nation building, there was never “defeat.”
There was never a "defeat" indeed but the taliban grew in numbers manifold over the course of the occupation so saying you defeated them in hours is also a funny take.
This is my point: the war was over almost immediately, and since there was never any intention of permanently colonizing Afghanistan the occupation always had an expiration date.
On the other hand, the United States already lives in the United States, there's no 'waiting it out.'
I'm not too big in this field but didn't many of those same IOT companies and the like struggle with the packages becoming dependent on Poeterings work since they often needed much smaller/minimal distros?
I don't think this is generally true. If you are running Linux in your stack, your device probably is investing in 1GiB+ RAM and 2GiB+ of flash storage. systemd et al are not a problem at that point. Running a UI will end up being considerably more costly.
Sure, but devices that do that are not running a Linux distro off the shelf. They are creating something custom with the minimal amount of dependencies possible.
I work on embedded devices, fairly powerful ones to be fair, and I think systemd is really great, useful software. There's a ton of stuff I can do quite easily with systemd that would take a ton of effort to do reliably with sysvinit.
It's definitely pretty opinionated, and I frequently have to explain to people why "After=" doesn't mean "Wants=", but the result is way more robust than any alternative I'm familiar with.
If you're on a system so constrained that running systemd is a burden, you are probably already using something like buildroot/yocto and have a high degree of control about what init system you use.
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