Heat pumps are a lot closer to theoretical efficiency limits than cars. Most of the gain for cars has to do with aerodynamics and energy storage / regenerative braking. The engine itself, only modest gains. Even the most efficient ICE engines are like 45% or something, or looked another way, 55% effective at producing heat.

Variable speed and 2 stage systems do provide gain. However those are still expensive and complicated. I’m skeptical that someone using A/C for max 2 months per year will break even versus a conventional system. Could be true for common residential buildings, not so much for detached homes.

Regardless of theoretical efficiency, the problem is more “supply side”, how much heat is getting into your building. The most effective way to save energy is to reduce the heat you have to reject in the first place. Reflective roof tiles, low emissivity windows, a dang tree. Each of those could be measured in terms of heat reduction but don’t have an efficiency rating directly comparable to a heat pump because they operate passively. The social-political question is whether to move in a one-way direction toward A/C dependence or if these other options can be used instead in more temperate countries.

In Europe, most buildings are relatively well insulated and use materials with a high thermal mass. So the building itself can soak up a lot of heat during the day and radiate it out during the night. In North America you see a lot cheaper construction out of lumber and drywall instead of brick and cement, and with modest insulation.

In North America, a brief heat wave is immediately noticed and requires a lot of work by the A/C system. In Europe, you can tolerate a heat wave lasting up to a couple days. But weeks on end? Your buildings will heat-soak and at that point it starts to work against you. Your air conditioning will run all day and all night because now the insulation and thermal mass is acting like an oven, keeping the interior warmer than the outside.

Thermodynamics has not changed in recent years. There has not been any change to the fundamentals about A/C generally taking a lot of energy to run. It is just slightly complicated because of the need to factor in the building and neighborhood in which the A/C is operating.

What are you comparing it to?

A passively cooled home, architected to prevent heat buildup in the first place (especially considering neighborhood-scale solutions like tree canopy) can take zero watts of electric power to cool. I guess if you take the architecture as given, and look only at options that consume electricity, then yes there isn’t much juice to squeeze on A/C technology. There are still some options like whole-home fans which gently suck the hot air upward.

But if A/C is avoided, then you aren’t inputting extra heat into the system to run the A/C, avoiding the local heat increase. Remember if everyone is pumping heat out of their homes, that heat ends up immediately outside the homes and into the street.

Supergirl GO! to the polls

I’ll go out on a limb and say it has to do with the demise of the USSR and the type of futurism that is only possible with a major socialist project in the world. We are only barely now starting to see a revival since the 2010s with the rise of China.

Capitalist futurism, at its root, is about domination over nature. “We” go to the Moon or to Mars, not for any humanistic objective but to claim it, as if to say to the universe, “nothing for me is off-limits.” For the bulk of humanity, for animals, for the environment — there is no future under capitalism.

The futurism of socialist countries has the capacity for humanism, and I think that is reflected in the imagination of society.

This is true in the general sense that the Catholic Church was reluctant to update their interpretations of the universe. But what’s lesser known is that Galileo didn’t provide very good or scientific evidence at first. It was basically vibes that turned out to be right.

Dr Fatima has a great video essay on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7a65AvELdU

It is not yet clear whether this toll will be obligatory, Bloomberg noted

The toll is only a suggestion dw about it

Sorry babe, I can’t eat my beans without setting my bean bowl on my bean mat

Looks great!

The enhaired Lenin has also been airbrushed and hair dyed. His eyes are slightly less bagged and his eyebrows filled in. Bottom lip somewhat tighter, mouth smaller. Even the tie knot is tighter. Not only a hair transplant has been done.

Too much push!!

Sure, I don’t mind. Thanks!

but the fact they are finding and funding them doesn’t make the theory wrong in itself, just more likely to be useless.

This is precisely what Rockhill says in the video I posted yesterday: https://hexbear.net/post/8857126. His elevator pitch starts at 7:07.

My approach is always to situate the production of ideas within production more generally, and that implies at least two fundamental principles.

One is that intellectual production is never done in isolation. It is done in a material system of production. Therefore, if we want to understand the intellectual production of any individual (Deleuze, Derrida, Lacan, etc.) it is imperative on us to situate that individual production within the overall system that produced both the thinker in question and the work that they produced.

Second is that any intellectual production is the result of a theoretical practice, and we need to analyze that theoretical practice, see how it operates and what it is its fundamental goals are. In the case of French theory, what you have, if we look at it from a larger historical perspective, is that these thinkers became prominent within the imperial core because it was largely driven by the theory industry that developed within the United States in the wake of World War II.

So the fact that people today read Lacan, you know, people like Baudrillard, Derrida, Deleuze, etc. isn’t because these people are, organically, on their own, individually finding these authors and becoming bewildered at how brilliant they are. It’s because there is an entire system of intellectual production, distribution, and consumption, that has promoted these thinkers as the most important in the world. Given that this system of intellectual production itself is situated within the larger social relations of production, it is necessary, then, to recognize that this is part of an outgrowth of the broader capitalist system.

Rockhill makes a careful and dialectical analysis. It’s kind of like saying pop music is not inherently bad, but it’s not as good as its popularity implies either. You have to account for the record labels, advertising, celebrity cliques, etc.

Vijay Prashad can be corny a lot, and holds a lot of optimism which can come across as naïve to some more cynical types. But I would not ever consider him an opportunist. Dude is a genuine communist, has been for his whole life and is properly well informed on communist theory and history. In one of his recent videos he made a passing comment that financially life has been a struggle. He doesn’t have health insurance. If he’s an opportunist then he’s bad at it. He could make a lot more money selling out his principles to talk on cable news.

‘I’m just a Marxist, not any specific sect’ shtick.

I believe this is based in principle, not aesthetic. He is a big proponent of left unity. This is not to say he compromises on principle. I have seen him frankly disagree with people to their faces on several occasions. But he highly values that people sit and talk to each other, that that’s a necessary prerequisite to solving our problems. Especially in an era of capitalist antisocial fragmentation. Getting people into association together has to happen so that they can come to discuss politics and build class consciousness, just as the concentration of workers into factories and neighborhoods developed the proletariat as a class during the early capitalist era.

Trump’s base is largely made of evangelicals; they didn’t go anywhere. If anything they have strengthened with the official state recognition afforded by having their guy elected twice as president.

Evangelicals have been inseparable from conservative politics since the Republican Party pushed the southern strategy in the wake of the civil rights era. The country was not divided neatly along partisan lines on the question of racial civil rights, so the Republican strategists sought electoral advantage by appealing to the grievances of white “moderates.” In the decades since, particularly starting with Obama’s election, this strategy intensified à la the Price Is Right dial.

The US has always been a haven for fanatical Christian sects, but this most proximately explains the current era imo.

deleted by creator

Many people aren’t aware that their notifications are also, by default, delivered through cloud servers. The notification message contents might be exposed through that. Though privacy focused apps like Signal do employ some attempt at countermeasure by sending blank pings which then trigger an on-device retrieve of the message.

Dialectics is vacillation between this take and the conviction that Bernie’s new morality is proof of historical materialism