I’m so confused. Whose dishwashers are you talking about? I’m in the US, you’re describing every dishwasher I’ve ever had, except that we always hook it up to the hot water line. Our unit takes very little water, it takes hours to run a load due to efficiency features. It has a heating element inside to take whatever water it gets and keep it hot for the cycle.

I don’t really see why it’s any less efficient to use the hot water we are already heating with our water heater (which heats much more efficiently than a small electric heater would). The water originally arrives to my house cold, it has to be heated one way or another. My dishwasher is less than 10 feet away from my water heater, water is not losing appreciable heat on the way to the dishwasher.

Up to* $2k. Just for the sake of clarity.

The tax credit is 30% of the total project price, up to $2k. If the HPWH is over double the cost of NG, you’re still paying quite a bit more even with the tax credit.

No. Tipping culture 100% existed before COVID. This isn’t an opinion. It’s well documented. You are either willfully ignorant or a troll. This discourse has run its course.

The article is saying “before” as in “before the changes that happened because of COVID”. I don’t know when the inflection point was where we shifted to shit wages for traditionally tipped jobs, but it was many many years ago. When COVID hit we were not giving living wages to servers.

I appreciate your well mathed response, but this is a classic example of using a numbers argument where the eye test should prevail. It’s like people who play fantasy sports and argue that advanced stats prove a player who sucks, is actually good.

I don’t at all think in the terms you are thinking of when I cook. I’m not looking at the flames. I’m not looking for “exactly half” when I drop the temp. I’m cooking, and watching the food I make react. Sometimes I need to raise or drop the temp just a tiny bit, and I can do that with excellent speed and resolution of change with gas. Electric pulses do not offer this. Every electric stove I have ever used is absolutely terrible at making small quick adjustments of heat. I am not thinking about the exact percentage by which I want to raise or lower it, and getting concerned about whether it’s exactly right. I’m not concerned about the linearity of change (although honestly if I’m thinking of it, my gas stove’s heat range feels fairly linear to me). I am doing this by intuition or feel, and by watching what I’m cooking to see that it is doing what I want.

Also I have no idea what you mean about gas being too hot at its lowest setting. I have never encountered this in many years of cooking. Mine goes low enough that I can keep a sauce warm without stirring without it sticking. I have however, many times encountered food that scorched because the electric coils stayed hot for 15 minutes after being turned off.

Ultimately, I probably incorrectly used the word precision. Someone who is a superior wordsmith may be able to direct me to the correct verbage.

I’ve just started dipping my toes back into the waters again too, also after many years of downloading absolutely nothing. It’s a combo of things prompting me.

First, costs have gotten out of control and prices just keep creeping up. This is happening at the same time as content libraries per service dwindle. I make more money than I used to, yet it feels like it goes not nearly as far these days with prices of everything skyrocketing.

Second, it’s becoming a bigger and bigger pain in the ass to find things. Part of the issue for me is interfaces (though I can get around that, generally). Part is content shuffling from one service to the next. But a big issue is all the trash content companies like Netflix are shitting out to pad their libraries. You have to wade through oceans of garbage to find a single thing worth your time. This experience is exactly why I dropped traditional cable years ago! I hate endless filler trash. I don’t want the illusion of a large library to make it seem like I’m getting value. I just want actual good content.

I totally get wanting to play the game when it’s fresh. You miss out on being part of the buzz of a new game if you wait to play it. Every gaming site is full of memes about a new game for the first few months after release and it’s definitely part of the experience to be on the “in” side of that.

With that said, I just pick and choose which games matter to me for that nowadays, and I commit myself to actually beating the games I buy (assuming I don’t hate them). Committing to beating them before buying a new game has really cut back on my buying of new games only to have it languish in my backlog and see price drops before I ever play it.

This way I do get to be part of that community for the games that really matter to me, but I also am not just buying everything out there at full price.

Well no, they couldn’t. The article literally says that prior to this only that one bar in New Jersey could use it because they had a statewide trademark on it. Because they dropped it, anyone can now use it including other small bars in Jersey.

What this is doing is ensuring it remains open for use by anyone. Taco Bell, Taco Johns, Taco Suzy, whatever. Before, anyone could register for the trademark if no one else had, and start screwing over other small players.

I’ve heard that from people and I’m eager to eventually have a chance to try one. Our gas stove is under 10 years old and works fine, so a new induction range isn’t really on the horizon for us financially.

But I’m definitely interested to try one.

Sorry if it sounded like a freak out. That wasn’t intended.

How did I change the point? You said all electric ranges are fine. I contend they are not and tried to support that argument. Happy to hear your interpretation of what I said beyond dismissing it.

And again what I said wasn’t intended as a personal attack on you. But if the argument is that electric and gas are equivalently effective at cooking, that’s a difficult discussion to have because it’s coming from a place of factual inaccuracy.

Completely fair question.

Tons of things require this. Eggs are much easier this way. Anything that needs to be brought to a boil then dropped to a simmer. Anything that needs to not be overcooked but still needs to hit temp. Fish and chicken come to mind. It also just enables fine adjustments while cooking. If I am searing something but realize I crowded the plate and things have started steaming instead, it’s easy and fast to turn the heat up one notch.

Granted some of this comes down to what kind of pan you have too. I cook a lot with a carbon steel pan and it’s very quickly responsive to heat changes. I have a set of all-clad pans and they also respond relatively quickly. But like, my cast irons obviously don’t so it’s a bit moot for them.

I’m sorry, it is unbelievable to me that anyone who has done a good amount of cooking on both gas and old-style electric stoves would say they are equivalent. It simply tells me you do not have adequate experience, or are not observant enough to notice.

I don’t mean this as a personal attack. It’s just…this isn’t an opinion. Gas is dramatically more responsive and precise for heat control. This is objective. If the way you cook does not leverage fine heat control or require quick changes to heat levels, then no you will not notice.

But the difference is stark and noticeable for someone who wants and uses this level of precision.

Speed to boil water is not at all the selling point of gas.

It’s speed and precision of temperature control.

Coils stay hot. When you turn the gas off, the heat is off RIGHT NOW. When you turn it on it’s on RIGHT NOW.

Many coils pulse full heat to simulate different heat levels. Gas gives you very precise control over exact heat levels and it is instantly responsive to change.

I’m not here to argue about the possible health concerns, I don’t know anything about that and would need to read more. But people who argue electric ranges are just as effective as gas simply haven’t cooked as much. I’m certain of this because I used to think that too until I switched to gas. Gas is plainly better.

I’ve heard great things about induction and maybe that’s the way I’ll go next. Not sure yet. I’m certainly curious.

Fully agree with you on artists not getting their fair share, and I would argue that the issue is sadly endemic across the entire music industry and was that way long before streaming services even existed. Spotify is merely the most visible representation of a long festering issue that spans generations.

I can only speak for myself but I do actually still buy CDs for bands I really like. I will also occasionally buy merch or go to shows. Some of these bands I very certainly would never have discovered without Spotify (or a service like it).

Ultimately I agree that I’d like people to understand their options. I think the biggest likely barrier is convenience. I have a NAS server, and a virtual host set up that runs a Linux server with Plex on it, and I have that open so I can use Plexamp to play live albums or any other stuff I own that isn’t on Spotify. But like… That’s a massive barrier to entry to simply create something close to the experience Spotify offers out of the box. And it’s definitely not as polished. I do it because I’m a hobbyist, but most people aren’t like that. So then if you want to buy music individually, you’re stuck listening to actual physical CDs, or ripping them and loading them on your phone or mp3 player. Old school cool for sure, but new school convenience is sure hard to beat once you’ve had a taste.

This is your rationale and that is ok for you. Ownership is important to you. That is ok. But people who make the point you are making never understand the point those of us who like Spotify are making.

We do not care that we don’t own anything after paying. I am not paying to own it. Never felt like I was, never felt like I needed to. In fact, it’s almost a perk that I don’t because then I am not sitting amidst towers of CDs (something that was definitely possible if I had continued my pre-spotify trajectory). Anyway, I pay for access. No more, no less. I pay for access to Spotify’s library, which is many orders of magnitude larger than anything I could ever hope to amass myself, even if I was pirating shit.

I want to listen to whatever I want, whenever I want, instantly. I don’t want to go pirate it, I don’t want to go find it at a store, if someone suggests me a song or album or artist I want to go listen to it right now. Spotify enables that. I have discovered so much music I would absolutely never have tried without Spotify.

And again, I am 100% comfortable paying for access to something not owned by me. I’m a member at our local zoo. I don’t expect to own the animals, I pay to just to get in. I’m a member at our museum. I don’t feel like I should own the artifacts, I pay for the privilege of seeing them. I am a member at a community pool. I don’t own the water, I pay to get in, and have someone else handle all the hassle of maintaining that pool.

Spotify is the exact same for me.

Which of course is stupid, because USPS is actually great and provides a much better and more reliable service than any private competitor even in its current underfunded state.

Is it wrong to buy my kids “read banned books” shirts?

Joking, but only sort of. I’m so irritated that this is the world they are growing up in. That I’m going to have to have conversations with them about why people are trying to restrict what they can learn based on bigotry and why that is wrong. There are so many other things they could be worrying about, I hate that we have this as an additional and completely unnecessary distraction.

Completely understand Scholastic’s move here. It’s unfortunate in a vacuum but on the other hand I’m very glad they aren’t simply dropping these titles entirely.

If we are trying to dig into the root cause? Then yes, honestly. It is Google. And don’t call them the “search engine guys”, that’s not what they are about. They are the “mass aggregation and correlation of user data guys”. Search has been a means to an end for Google for a very long time.

All those other things didn’t exist when google was developing their model. Google paved the way for the internet no longer being free, but being “free” with payment rendered in the form of user data. That in turn directly led to all those other evils you referred to. It is not an exaggeration to imply that Google is ultimately at fault for the way the internet functions today.

There’s already been a new flavor of coke developed and allegedly chosen by AI. If that’s not some kind of singularity moment, I don’t know what is.

“The postal service is losing money!”

No, the postal service costs money. It’s a service. It doesn’t aim to make a profit. It costs money, and we are in turn rendered a service that is useful.

I swear people are delusional.