And also droughts are defined by lower than normal precipitation. So if it didn't rain in a desert, and it's still not raining in a desert, that wouldn't even be a drought anyway.
Why does it matter if it personally occurred to him or someone related to him? It happens to plenty of people. You can have empathy for people not bound by blood.
There is a great deal of injustice in the world. Psychologically healthy adults have learned to add a reflection step between anger and action.
By all evidence, Luigi is a smart guy. So one can only speculate on his psychological health, or whether he believed that there was an effective response to the problem which included murdering an abstract impersonal enemy.
I'm stumped, honestly. The simplest explanations are mental illness, or a hero complex (but I repeat myself). Maybe we'll learn someday.
He could die quietly making no impact on the issue. Or he could sacrifice the rest of his free life to put a spotlight on the issue. That is what he chose to do. Not an easy decision I'm sure.
The article speculates that this coyote might attempt to establish a pack on Alcatraz, by calling until a mate makes the same 1.5 mile swim in treacherous cold water.
I wish everyone the best of luck here, but I can't shake the image of the lonely guy unwittingly calling young females in proestrus to their likely deaths. An appropriately gender-swapped Coyote Siren of Alcatraz.
Maybe female coyotes are smart enough to understand SF Bay tides and currents, or just to ignore the crazy loud guy. I sure hope so.
It seems too good to be true, honestly. The idea that this is how nature works, that it is indeed so metal, and it is actually just we, puny humans, who find the swim so treacherous in the pursuit of lust and eventually love. I’d swim to Alcatraz for pussy, if it was the only pussy for hundreds of kilometers around. I suppose.
Alcatraz being the last place on Earth I would expect to see such savage beauty is of no consequence to the fact that it is we, humans, who make Alcatraz so treacherous. Mother Nature sees it as an opportunity to breed hella puppies.
Most of the island is off-limits to tourists. It's administered by the National Park Service.
Coyotes are territorial and usually have fairly large ranges. Alcatraz is small, but probably big enough to keep a breeding coyote pair well-fed and mostly out of the way of humans.
But the younguns will need their own territory after a year or so, and needing to cross the Bay to Marin or SF City would be have very low rates of success!
FWIW, every non-US American I've ever known or worked with (from Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, Belize, Guatemala, Mexico, Canada) has been more amused than bothered when I've asked how they feel about US Americans calling themselves "American", and excluding non-US Americans.
Non-US Americans don't seem to care, and they think it's silly that I'd wonder whether they did.
It still feels dismissive and rude, so I try to avoid it -- but evidently it's not a significant or widespread concern among those with standing to be offended.
I haven't been there in (way) too long, but there used to be a great pierogi vendor -- so even on cold rainy mornings (too common) you'd at least get some warm delicious breakfast.
OK; you got me. I was insufficiently prepared for pedantry. Let's add another couple of critical points:
- Must be a GUI application.
- Must integrate at least somewhat reasonably with the platform's keyboard shortcuts and similar, not have its own entire way of doing things that needs 6 years to learn.
Not pedantry; just responding to your "genuine" desire for suggestions. My mistake, I guess.
BBEdit is great, but if you need to learn something new anyway, or if being tied to macOS is ever going to be a concern, emacs or vim are equally-capable and cross-platform options.
You can learn 90% of everything you will ever need in a week or two. You will never need to switch editors again. It's a great trade, all things considered.
I've used both emacs and vim before. Long enough to actually know how.
I don't like using them. (I know, this may come as a shock to a diehard advocate.)
I like GUI text editors much better.
But also: How do vim and emacs do with these points from my requirements?
> - that keeps its list of open files in a sidebar, vertically, rather than in tabs, across the top
> - that can transparently open & save files over SFTP
To the best of my recollection, they don't do either of those. Which, if true, means that even your initial "genuine" response not actually in good faith, because I did say I wanted one that did all of those.
...So maybe keep your snide remarks and scare-quotes to yourself?
It's not like the wisdom is lost, it's just ignored in modern builds.
All architects think about siting and solar exposure. But the builders are in charge, and they optimize for what the market responds to -- which does not always include factors like these which contribute to long-term comfort and livability.
So I would say that consumers could learn a thing or two. That said, most buyers are not buying newly-built homes, so their ability to influence the inclusion of some of these features are limited.
The industry is downstream of market demands. If customers aren't aware enough to demand smart things, builders will skip them to save money, or to optimize for more visible features. Same old story.
> So I would say that consumers could learn a thing or two. That said, most buyers are not buying newly-built homes, so their ability to influence the inclusion of some of these features are limited.
Even then I think Americans are not at all well-versed in what makes a house a good house in terms of design or aesthetic and there isn’t a marketplace that exists to help customers shop and compare.
Today, if you’re buying a new build your only option is McMansion style or just a smaller and equally distasteful version of the McMansion. And yes they are all distasteful - it’s a matter of fact, not opinion.
So most people buying new builds end up with the same cargo culled designs. And then “architects” design more and more different versions of these horrendous designs and plop in things like Sedona Avenue near the golf course and that’s how you get suburbia. There’s never a market signal, despite the fact that we can build homes much more nicely and with techniques to be a little more naturally energy efficient and kinder on the eyes.
There is also much less competition with neighborhood design though surprisingly there have been some inroads there that have fostered some competition, but it’s mostly for now for the wealthy. I live in a neighborhood designed before cars, a neighborhood that today is largely illegal to build. But the home prices are highest here because the market is demanding this type of neighborhood - single family detached homes mixed with apartments and coffee shops and small offices and restaurants. “Mixed-use development”. It’s incredibly scarce and in most American cities it has the most expensive average real estate and tends to be the most economically vibrant. Little pockets of Europe.
Neither home builders or zoning officials have taste and because as you in my view correctly acknowledge the builders are downstream of market demands, because the market doesn’t even understand what is actually good and possible, the entire industry and government regulation apparatus is downstream of the sewer.
Or it is set out in building codes that they must design in a certain way.
In the UK that means adding lots of insulation. UK houses predominantly had a lot of thermal mass from the inner skin of the cavity wall being brick or later concrete blocks. The little wall insulation, if it even existed, was in the cavity. In a push for more insulation they switched to lightweight thermal blocks, and sometimes more insulation inside, or timber frames. All of which designed for insulation while reducing the thermal mass. No matter how much sun you put in during the day you only heat the air, which goes cold quickly. This is not the architects choice.
Architects can only design for orientation on a single house plot. In the UK they are trying to cram houses on at 50 to the acre or more due to the price of building land. They focus on best use of space, rather than orientation because of that
> > It's not like the wisdom is lost, it's just ignored in modern builds.
> Or it is set out in building codes that they must design in a certain way.
An anecdote: Two decades ago in college in the US, I knew several people doing Architecture. One day in one of their dorm rooms, one of them went on this long rant about how modern codes ignore environmental factors and just require certain things no matter the climate.
I don't know how universal her experience was, but I can see these two lines I quoted as both happening, just in reverse - the building codes are causing loss of knowledge/wisdom.
Even when the buyer is buying a newly built house, it's often already built or being built off of already existing plans that do not take these things into account.
Only true for lighting circuits though, and most household circuits are mixed.
The quantity and (edit: aggregate) power draw of modern appliances is far greater now than 60 years ago, so the overall load on the old wires is much higher.
I'd bet that modern TVs are more efficient that CRT televisions. Do most people even have desktop computers anymore, or have they mostly been replaced by laptops, tables, and phones? I'd be interested to see the efficiency numbers for electric clothes dryers over time. I wouldn't be surprised if they are also slightly more efficient than older models, even if they are still using resistance heating. Due to smarter electronics that automatically turn the unit off after the clothes are dry (air humidity sensor). I think electric ranges, dish washers, toasters and coffee machines have been ubiquitous since the 1960s (but are probably about the same energy-consumption wise). Air conditioning units are one thing that I'd believe are much more common today than in the 1970s and 1980s. Household sizes are also smaller, so less electricity used for electric water heaters, and the oven, etc.. Electric vehicles are an up and coming user of electricity. What other appliances are likely to be using more now than before?
These are good points, but having worked on a few older houses, I usually see overextended and overloaded circuits, not the opposite.
Standard small-house service used to be 60A, sometimes as few as 4 circuits! It's now 100A minimum by code, with 200A common.
Ovens/ranges have gone from 30A to 50A (dedicated) circuits by code. Microwaves also require dedicated circuits now. Gaming computers with big GPUs are common. Air fryers and electric pressure cookers are newly-common countertop appliances. People definitely use resistive electric space heaters more now (very cheap, much safer than the older options). And there's a trend away from gas and to electric ranges and water heaters. Heat pumps are also increasingly common. You mentioned air conditioners and EV chargers. Kitchens and bathrooms are now required to have dedicated (and GFCI) circuits. Household sizes are smaller, but houses are larger.
So I guess I'd say that, properly expanded, individual circuits should carry less current than they used to. But very often, appliances (AC, microwave, gaming rig, air fryers), are just "plugged in" to an unexpanded system, with varying results.
If you're lucky, they pop a breaker and you call an electrician. If you're not lucky, they push the power draw into uncomfortable zones, esp for Al wire.
This is absolutely not true in areas where heating the air and water and cooking are done with natural gas. Every single appliance in a house is more efficient today than in 1970 due to advances in motor speed control, without exception. The only thing that didn’t get more efficient is electric resistive heat and it’s impossible to improve on that anyways.
I can’t think of a single appliance from 1970 that consumes less energy than its modern equivalent. Anything with a pump or fan is more efficient and so is lighting. LCD TVs use less energy than CRTs.
I also can’t think of an appliance that has become common in households that draws more than 100 watts of continuous load since the 1970 aside from just ‘computers’. An ancient 500W 80% efficiency PSU at max load only has 5.2A of current at 120V single-phase.
If you convert your natural gas furnace to a heat pump, you will use more electricity but excluding that and NG to electric HPWHs leaves only more efficient equipment.
Sure, but there are more appliances plugged in today than there were. The simplest evidence for this is that there are never enough outlets in an old (unrenovated) home.
In a renovated house, you won't have aluminum wire at all, so these concerns are null.
My original statement should be qualified. Since we were talking about aluminum wire it's relevant -- an updated house will have new (copper) circuits that can handle all this stuff. An NON updated house might have Al wire and be overloaded in a more severe way than it was in the 60s.
But FWIW, new >100W appliances:
- microwaves (1200+W)
- air fryers (1500W)
- electric pressure cookers
- rice cookers (mine claims 610W on the plate)
- stand mixers (old: 80W, new: 475W)
- desktop computers (esp gaming rigs)
- resistive space heaters (1500W)
- *bigger* TVs (compare 72" LCD to 19" CRT?)
- air purifiers (mine clocks 175W on high)
- towel warmers? :)
- and the ubiquity of 10-20W small stuff has of course exploded, and it all adds up
> Sure, but there are more appliances plugged in today than there were. The simplest evidence for this is that there are never enough outlets in an old (unrenovated) home.
Perhaps, but none of them are continuous load, which absolutely matters.
Rice cookers, microwave, stand mixers, air fryers, pressure cookers, etc are all short duration usage, not continuous load. If homeowners decide not to add dedicated kitchen circuits and instead use a 120V 12A load on a 120V 15A shared circuit and trip the overcurrent protection, that’s their own fault.
These loads don’t really matter in the way a heat pump, air conditioner, furnace fan, or water heater does, it’s a bunch of random kitchen appliances that you won’t be using simultaneously. Your utility does not even take the full non-continuous load into account when calculating the kVA demand of your electrical service. IIRC a random convenience duplex receptacle for non-continuous loads only adds like 180 VA (this is 1.5A at 120V with a power factor of 1) to the demand calculation.
You are correct in a technical sense that people have more devices they plug into a wall, but most of the power consumed by a home is to devices that are hardwired in, aka continuous loads, not cord and plug connected appliances.
The continuous load of a home should be lower than ever without electrifying heat. Every continuous load (which are almost exclusively motors and lighting) in a home is more efficient now than in the past due to variable frequency drives and electrically commutated motors.
It does rain in deserts, of course. But most of California is not a desert anyway.
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