Japan has detailed zoning restrictions, including the shadow a building can cast on a neighbor's lot. Maybe there are fewer lawsuits because the law is clear so it is easy to know if you are following it. https://ranjatai.wordpress.com/2022/02/11/sunlight-on-japane...
1) clarity of law without local community process that overrides what the law says you can build,
2) extra capacity to actual build. Almost 100% of land is "built out" according to zoning, meaning that almost no land allows building anything more than already exists. In fact this downzoning was so intense that many many buildings would never be allowed to rebuilt, including iconic buildings.
We have literally outlawed cities in the US, due to the wishes of people that want suburban automotive lifestyle to replace city life.
Yeah I think that is the big difference. In the US it doesn't matter what the actual rules are, the lawsuits will come regardless and drive up costs massively, and many places allow local councils to reject buildings without reasoning.
When I was doing this, I went in a bit later and dropped the kids off and my spouse went in a bit earlier and picked them up. They were neither the first ones in nor the last ones out. My commute was worst case 20 minutes, that also helped. It worked fine (except when spouse was traveling), but WFH Is much easier.
Yep, I got the year qualifier for that part wrong.
To give some more context, Texas has already started to curtail around 10% of solar production because of overproduction. That brings an other aspects to the question if we are getting net zero if a company match solar energy production to their fossil fuel consumption. Do we get fossil fuel displacement by producing energy that no one is willing to buy at even zero cost? To be fair it is likely a non-zero number, but it seems logical that as overproduction increases that numbers get closer to zero.
I will add this study (https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate1451) as a additional data point with this quote: "Here, I show that the average pattern across most nations of the world over the past fifty years is one where each unit of total national energy use from non-fossil-fuel sources displaced less than one-quarter of a unit of fossil-fuel energy use and, focusing specifically on electricity, each unit of electricity generated by non-fossil-fuel sources displaced less than one-tenth of a unit of fossil-fuel-generated electricity"
DC Fast charging prices are usually quite high (45-50 c/kwh and may well be near the cost of gas, but not all PHEV's support that. Level 2 charging is usually much cheaper (20-30 c/kwh) though slower. So if you can charge at one of those (such as at work) it also works out to be cheaper than gas.
I have a PHEV and charge overnight from a wall outlet. I wake up in the morning fully charged. Probably 99% of my trips are electric, but only 80% of my miles. The occasional long road trip really adds up. It is also hard (in the US) to charge on a trip. My car can't charge from a DC fast charger (it doesn't have the right connector), only from the level 2 AC chargers. From a L2 charger it only charges at 3.3 KW (most chargers support between 6.6-10 KW) which results in ~10 miles of range per hour. So if I take a half hour lunch break while driving, that's only 5 miles added.
If you can charge at home or work it's a great deal, but if you can't I can see how it would be hard to charge it enough to make it worthwhile.
In 100 years most paper will be gone, thrown out, without any attempt to archive it. In 100 years most digital will be gone for the same reason. The exceptions in both cases is where something is “fortuitously forgotten”, a box left in an attic after a move, or a web page that remains in a fossilized state.
Preserving both paper and digital records requires the active effort of convincing people (some of whom haven't been born yet) that the records should be saved. That's the hard part.
Disaster recovery for millions of paper records is hard. So hard that even the US Government, which has been archiving paper records since its inception, sometimes fails. The majority of the 1890 census records were lost to a fire as well as a chunk of military service records (to a different fire). Disaster recovery for millions of digital records is much easier, make a copy on a different disk and give it to someone to hold. Repeat once a decade.
> Disaster recovery for millions of digital records is much easier, make a copy on a different disk and give it to someone to hold. Repeat once a decade.
Who is this "someone", though?
There's no long term, passive, digital storage solution available for the average person. Records that used to survive on a regular basis no longer do so in digital form.
The bagel button makes only one side of the slot get hot (or at least makes one side hotter than the other). Your toaster probably has a bagel icon on the top showing you which way to put the bagel in (cut side towards the center in every toaster I have seen).
Source: I'm not married to toaster moguls but I do peer into operating toasters to see which wires turn red. Feel free to replicate my research and post your observations.
Mine doesn’t have a bagel icon, but I do put them cut-side towards the center.
Looking closely during operation, the elements facing out from the center didn’t appear to change color with the bagel button depressed. It toasts the bagel just fine (as well as bread), though.
I should get a wattmeter and see if power draw changes.
My theory is that the bagel button does one thing only - it illuminates the bagel button when you press it. I've seen toasters with functional bagel mode but my latest cheap crap toaster does precisely nothing different when the bagel button is activated.
I don't think I've ever before been party to any conversation where the words "toaster mogul" ever appeared in the exchange, and yet, here they are, in all their golden brown and delicious glory!
Ok, so that I didn't know. Here's from the Oster website: "When this feature is selected, the toaster will automatically defrost your food and then toast it in one easy step." So the temperature is lower for a little bit to thaw the food then higher to toast it.
