I've had a cooling/heating heatpump fitted. Adding a couple of wall units bumped the price by about £1500, although the whole thing was softened by the grant for getting rid of an oil fired boiler.

While our house is relatibvely small and we kept the units (which also do heating as well) confined to the main living space, it wasn't especially burdensome. The bulk of the work was installing the behemoth of a hot water tank!

Did you consider going with instant hot water at the sink/basin/shower/bath? My house is also relatively small and has little room for a huge hot water tank.

Belatedly, no, but I think our installer may have (possibly as a result of the free money!) wildly overspecified the tank which I suspect we will never empty even if we actually tried.

Daikin (and presumably others, but they're the ones we went with) do have integrated tanks/heatpump internal units. It might be worth having a think about your actual needs and it may be that there is a solution.

My experience with electric hot water taps is that they've been universally awful and only a last resort, but equally the state of the art may have moved on since I last looked!

That can’t practically be done electronically. Needs to be gas. The power demand is too high for electric water heating

Original comment mentioned £ so they are in the UK. It's possible and not super uncommon to have electric showers in the UK because the 230V provides enough power for water heating unlike the US.

I'm currently investigating options for kitchen sinks and such. It feels quite silly to have a long length of pipe leading from a central source for a small amount of warm water to wash my hands.

I would make the hypothesis that racism outbursts are driven by Farage, Tommy Ten-Names, Putin and the right wing engagement mill that is Twitter.

If you give the public access to ANPR they're going to spend 30 seconds googling the cops and then they're going to go to town on wives, husbands, exes, stalking victims etc. etc.

A touchstone for people who forget that engines have been fuel injected for decades.

My great-grandfather - a carpenter in the 1930s - apparently had a saying: "If a man can make it, a man can fix it."

While /technically/ still true, I lament that it is increasingly inapplicable to the world around us today.

Have you seen the price of solar?

Yup, it's dropping dropping dropping. But it's still out of range for most.

Housing is out of range for most, but hopefully regulations will change to allow for balcony solar, which means that renters would be able to buy a tiny bit to offset their costs, and move it to their next place.

This is an area where Mastodon ought to shine. Departments/organisations can create their own instances, with named users. Interested constituents follow those users with their client of choice. Direct following means you avoid the federation dramas.

No algorithim means that people get the updates they want when they're posted. Users get a familiar-looking client to bang out the quick updates.

Obviously the issue is someone will need to run it, but if you're not open to public signups then the moderation burden doesn't exist and it's just a case of keeping things updated.

On the last point, it's a lot harder to manage than you're making it sound. A public org isn't going to gate signups.

You wouldn't let Joe Public create an email account on your mail server, why would you let them do so on a mastodon instance?

Sorry, I misread your first comment. So only the org can post and people can only view. Doesn't seem like people would follow it then.

But that's not how Mastodon works.

Like email, I sign up for a Mastodon account on a server that suits my tastes. I then follow other accounts, on other servers, using a client - I use Ivory on the mac & iPhone (because it's made by the same company who made Tweetbot) - and those accounts show up in my feed in chronological order, like Twitter in the old days.

Are you actually 'both sidesing' slavery?

I'm pushing back on Chermska1's effort to say that "well actually, the confederacy wasn't really about slavery".

They didn't say the Confederacy wasn't really about slavery, they said it was much more than that. And it's those more abstract ideologies which have persisted through American politics, as traced in the history podcast episode I posted in a sibling.

The biggest issue is that at the time of the vote, nobody had any idea of what Brexit actually meant. The leave campaign could literally promise anything and a) they wouldn’t have to deliver it and b) everyone who voted for Brexit can reasonably suggest that they voted for something other than what was actually delivered.

The best you can say about the Brexit vote is that 51% wanted something other than the status quo.

>It's like it has no conception

This is the point.

It's an empty point and a boring one and leads nowhere. It means nothing, but sounds deep. It's so shallow, any taxi driver and sociologist can come up with it and has, already in December 2022.

>It's an empty point and a boring one and leads nowhere.

But, is it true?

>It means nothing...shallow...

Ironically, the entirety of your comment just repeats that the GP comment means nothing. There is no further explanation or "depth".

Yours added no depth either.

It’s very much not a console.