Being willing (even ready) to walk away from marriage completely defeats the point of about half of the intangible benefits of marriage.

“European countries this can even reduce the usually robust protections you have as an employee.”

This (GP) is different than phrasing of parent.

Also don’t forget you can delay paying for COBRA for up to 59 days after loss of employment and still be able to retroactively pay and be covered. It’s a gamble that you get to go back on if you cards break the wrong way

Wait a second $23/kWh? I pay ~ $0.15/kWh for power at my residence the majority of the year. Is this a proof of concept number? What am I not understanding such that the power this produces is 4 orders of magnitude more expensive than what’s in place currently?

"An average lithium battery costs around $139 per kWh in 2024" - random result from first page of googling in ddg

https://www.renogy.com/blogs/buyers-guide/how-much-does-a-li...

I think they mean kWh of storage capacity – your talking about your energy costs which in a battery is the round-trip cost.

Battery capacity and energy consumption are measured in the same unit.

It's like saying gas at the pump costs you $3/gallon but building a storage facility costs $100/gallon. Yes, they're both $/gallon, but these aren't the same measurements--one is for a gallon of dispensed gasoline and one is for constructing storage with the physical capacity of a gallon. One is the price of gas and the other is the price of storage. You can store and then dispense many, many gallons over the lifetime of that one-gallon storage.

kWh of capacity, as compared to a kWh of capacity on a battery, over the lifetime of the product.

On each of these kWh you'll have (hopefully) multiple orders of magnitude of charge cycles

The majority of the West has implicitly or explicitly ceded their national defense and warfighting capabilities to the USA. The comparison between USA and “other countries” isn’t really valid, as the situations are vastly different

What does that mean? That USA is somehow killing people all around the world as a puppet or Iceland or something?

The West isn't the world, though. China could start taking out random boats next week.

US exceptionalism doesn’t make killing ok.

If you plan on mounting to your roof beware of expired fire ratings. I ran into this problem recently

I don’t understand why people go this direction when propane-powered appliances are so much more appropriate. Much cheaper, readily available fuel, a few minutes to “reload” vs multiple hours to recharge the battery.

Similarly, I think there’s a niche market for a propane-powered espresso machine.

I can charge any battery powered appliances like that at home. Propane is only sold per bottle, not every petrol station has them(in fact - majority don't), you have to rent the bottle each time, the thing is stupidly heavy and has various restrictions on storage(can't park a car with it in an underground garage for instance, my insurance does not allow me to keep it inside my garage etc). Battery powered is just so much easier unless you're using it commercially and go through a lot of gas I guess.

Sunlight is free, nichrome nearly so. For these low temperatures any metal would work if you make it thin enough.

We can’t pretend the endless GMO soybean and corn fields are much better in some rural settings

This seems like a really really bad path to head down. I believe anyone can achieve their dreams through hard work and perseverance. However, reality shows us that kids with highly-educated / affluent parents are more likely to end up highly-educated and affluent. It seems in most “western” countries, the people that are having lots of kids are not the highly-educated and affluent. Seems like another form of brain drain happening on a generational time scale

Yes, and it is society’s responsibility to, not individuals’ responsibility, to address it.

Only if the the state worker has a subpoena signed by a judge. But it sounds like these are code enforcement people, which are generally just city employees rather than full law enforcement.