> It feels like for all its faults, the global West has values worth preserving for the future, and that involves, well, going through with it and making babies.
As someone childfree by choice, I care about the preservation of the global west for, at most, the next 40 years.
Continuing on the thread of my argument, you could argue that in 30-40 years time your reliance on the society and any shared values will be very high - possibly at its highest in your life (though of course I'm just guessing, I know nothing about you). And elderly care seems to be among the most commonly outsourced. So even having a fixed horizon of caring doesn't invalidate the argument.
Air-Air should be more popular in the UK - modern units have very attractive COP (gain) - nearly 5.0 - without complexities of right-sizing pipework and emitters.
I think it's a tragedy that they aren't more popular. One of the reasons is that they don't qualify for installation grants. This in turn means the installers (ahem, grant-harvesters) are bad-mouthing them vs air-water to potential customers.
From what I gather those high COPs are not actually met in real life since they occur when the temperature difference between intake and outlet are too low to be useful. In practice the SPF (Seasonal Performance Factor, the average COP for a heat pump used for heating and hot water through all seasons) for air-source heat pumps in Germany lies around 3 (value given is 2.99), water-source heat pumps end up around 3.7 (value given is 3.72) [1] which makes them preferable over resistance heating but not necessarily economically effective given the discrepancy between electricity and gas prices and higher installation costs. These results are from 2009, it is likely that more recent heat pumps can achieve better conversion factors.
I'm talking about the emitter rather than the source. (ductless) Air/Air is relatively unused in the UK (except for aircon) for the (stupid) reasons described, work perfectly well even in very cold climates) and offer extremely good COP values (4.68@ 8C, 2.46@ -8C) which is likely better than retro-fit of Air/Water, given the difficulty of right-sizing such a scheme in an existing, older building. If the government really wants uptake of heat pumps, they should be pushing for these to be installed in flats (like they do in most of the rest of the world).
As you say (and the original article points out) - whether it's economically a good idea depends a lot on the electric:gas price ratio, which currently is around 3.2, so the COP needs to exceed 2.95 or so for the OPEX to be lower (let alone the CAPEX of having the thing installed in the first place). And historically the gap has been even larger - nearly 5:1, meaning the gain would have to be 4.56 even to break even - "somewhat ambitious"!
I follow Rosenow on twitter. he tried to tell me that Heat Pumps /were/ economic, because the gas/electric ratio would change /in the future/ ! "I'll wait until then, then".
I've been saying the things in this report for years. Nobody I know is particularly attached to gas as a method of heating their home, they simply want to do it at the lowest cost possible. Make heat pumps have an ROI of less than 10 years and it'll change overnight.
The UK government keeps banging the drum of heat pumps, then navel-gazing when the public won't install them. This is not because - outside of a few anti-green nutbars - they don't think they work, it's because they can see no economic case for them to do so. Making comparisons to countries with different unit prices doesn't help. Instead of the wildly complex subsidy scheme (Which merely funds a grant-harvesting installation industry, at the expense of viable systems like air-air), simply moving green tariffs to sit exclusively on gas would make a big difference.
One comparison this report misses is against variable electric tariffs (eg Octopus Agile which has 1/2 hr pricing). I suspect the gap would narrow, but I don't know by how much, and doing that you're taking a bet about the average electric unit cost in the future vs gas. My guess here - and it's the same reason I currently don't think a battery system is investable - is that the difference between 'cheap' periods and 'expensive' periods is going to narrow as time-of-use tariffs encourage the significant extra demand from EVs away from peak-load times.
a) involves an incredible amount of DRY in the specs (to the extend we tinkered with a DSL to generate the openapi which feels wrong)
b) doesn't have very good ways of splitting large files up and
c) is YAML which is horrible. (Yes, JSON too, but that's even worse for authoring).
I can see if you're trying to describe an existing API with OpenAPI there are enhancements here which you will welcome.
If you're using OpenAPI to develop new APIs, I've come to the conclusion of "don't. Use GraphQL". After initially worrying about over-fetching and N+1 stuff, and thinking "yeah GraphQL for the front end, but the serious stuff should be OpenAPI" I've ditched that. GQL Federation was the final nail; it /does/ force some conversations up the chain (how exactly ought two, supposedly completely independent APIs, federate) but in practice this is a useful attribute.
It's _all_ experience. "Don't sell the sausage, sell the sizzle".
This is why car adverts are either belting round implausibly empty urban streets, or of Wankpanzers off-roading in a way almost no owner will actually do. "Buy this and this is the experience you're connecting with".
I'm rather confused by the article's point. It really reinforces that it's all experience, and really, material goods are just a means to an end.
Look - if I want to go experience Bali, it's not like I have to buy an aeroplane to do so. We _vastly_ overestimate the marginal utility of a more expensive car or some slightly different shoes in the sense of what additional experiences it's going to give us.
And, frankly, if you're claiming your shoe purchases increase your wellbeing because they don't hurt then I might suggest you pay more attention to purchasing the correct size for your feet (Stop buying from the Dolmansaxlil shoe corporation).
ISTR that materialistic humans being on a hedonic treadmill has quite a lot of evidence.
A loathesome place filled with tax evaders hiding their wealth from the countries and citizens that made them rich.
When I watch those programs which celebrate the 'glamour' and 'lifestyle' of these people, all I wish for is a small suitcase nuke that could improve the world overnight.
> A loathesome place filled with tax evaders hiding their wealth
Lets not forget gold diggers, influencers, and poor people commuting in from France/Italy every day to all the boring work. Sounds like a pretty cool place!
