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Cake day: June 29th, 2024

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  • The thing that bothers me most about office AC, is that the air is stale due to poor maintenance. Yes there are regulations against this, but those are not being enforced because that would cost money and hurr-durr stockholders and hurr-durr employers. Home ACs are just wasteful. I live in a neighbourhood that has many many gardens that are fully paved over. In order to counter the heat, each house has several AC units. Dumb fucks.

    I installed solar panels 5 years ago. Back then, a home battery was ~€9000 , so not worth it. Currently, a home battery starts at ~€1500 but with pitifully low capacity. There’s currently no real incentive to install these. You may save a bit of money, but at its current rate you would look at a 15 year ROI.

    Switching to an EV would be a nice idea for surplus energy, but our anti-environment government has made it very unattractive to buy one, but now I am going off-topic so I’ll save that for another rant.


  • As US-centric as the article is, here’s a perspective from the EU.

    I have a strong opinion on air conditioning. I hate it as I have worked in too many poortly ventilated offices with the AC as its only source of slightly less stale air. There should be laws against poorly maintained office ACs. However, I am going to need it at home, even if I do not like it. I live in a temperate climate that is getting hotter in summers. Fast. The house I live in was never intended for extremely hot weather: flat roof, lots of glass, poor insulation. I did upgrade the insulation, but the huge glass facades of my house make it a greenhouse in the summer unless I take some measures like sun blinds and whatnot. Even then, our top floor gets uncomfortably hot.

    I have installed solar panels that allow me to generate more electricity than I need. However, over the years our neoliberal and current far right government has made it very unattarctive to invest in this as they allowed the commercial energy businesses to impose tariffs on the surplus of generated electricity.

    So now I am seriously considering installing AC to use on hot summer days. Not only do I get my house cooler, I also won’t be charged for generating too much electricity. What I am not going to do, is keep the AC running all day though.

    Fuck this government and its predecessors.








  • kubok@fedia.iotoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.worldDo we need religion again?
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    2 months ago

    You alraedy say it yourself in as many words, but we need more community. Where I am from, our country was ‘columnized’ up until the 1970s. You had a catholic ‘column’, a protestant ‘column’ and a socialist ‘column’, each with their own clubs. So you had a catholic football club, a protestant football club and a more public football club simultaneously. The same went for schools, pubs, etc.

    For all the good and bad that gave us, people were shoehorned into their own communities (note my explicit use of ‘shoehorned’).

    About 50 years ago, our society got ‘decolumnized’ and people got more individualistic. Add to it the rampant neoliberalism of the latest decades and well here we are: people do not know how to find each other anymore. I notice that many yourger people have similar questions like yours.

    Do we need religion as in something to believe in or to have faith in? Possibly? However, I do not know what to believe in to be honest. Progress? Not going to live to see that anymore. It will get very ugly very soon. Maybe my kids will see things get better / more enligtened/ etc, but only after getting screwed over for a few decades I fear.

    I do think that religion is not the answer. Men running around in dresses trying to force the ideas of mistranslated books written by goat herders several thousands of years ago are not to be taken seriously.