I would but Google charge me $5 a click and nobody will engage with my Reddit ads (not even an ASCII dong in the open comments anymore) and zero conversions.
What has strongdm actually built? Are their users finding value from their supposed productivity gains?
If their focus is to only show their productivity/ai system but not having built anything meaningful with it, it feels like one of those scammy life coaches/productivity gurus that talk about how they got rich by selling their courses.
The "scientific foundation" PDF does disclose several financial relationships with the National Cattlemen's Beef Association and other cow-related lobbyists.
High protein, nutrient dense. Definitely want to get grass-fed or pasture raised though. Shouldn't eat it all the time because it has a high calorie content, but steak isn't bad. They're probably showing a steak to indicate that eating meat is good, not just steak in general. Keto and carnivore diets have been shown to be pretty good for people with inflammatory conditions.
> Keto and carnivore diets have been shown to be pretty good for people with inflammatory conditions
No. The scientific evidence of a carnivore diet reducing inflammation is pretty weak. The scientific evidence of a vegan diet reducing inflammation is way stronger.
Worth noting that ruminants have less variance between "good diets" and "bad diets" for the animals than other animal protein sources. IE: you're better off with a grain fed steak than an unnaturally fed non-ruminant animal.
As to the calories, yes calories count, but the fact that it is calorie dense doesn't necessarily mean you should avoid it so much as be aware if you are mixing sources and having excessive meals. I know a lot of people on carnivore diets for inflammatory and diabetic control and the total calorie intake is less of an issue in those cases. Even with a pound of steak and a dozen eggs a day, weight loss is still happening for overweight diabetics on carnivore diets.
Just meat is very sating and impossible for most people to overeat in practice... at least from my own experience and exposure. The relative mono diet also helps with this.
Yeah, I agree, I'm not really a calorie counter. (I tend to get irritated by the "a calorie is a calorie" folk because nutrient quality is the most important thing). It's occasionally worth paying attention to calories with some foods though, like bacon or whatnot because it's very easy to eat a small volume but a lot of calories.
My advice in the various keto-carnivore and diabetic groups I'm in is to concentrate on getting used to the diet first and only start counting calories after a prolonged (months long) stall or gaining weight for multiple weeks.
It's too easy to obsess, and I've experienced times where I'll stall when not eating enough more than eating too much when I'm eating clean. I have digestive issues from Trulicity/Ozempic and have a hard time eating enough, and my metabolism is highly dysfunctional... If I eat 1500 calories a day, about my natural hunger level at this point, I won't lose anything, but if I eat closer to 3000-3400/day, I will lose weight. It seems counter-intuitive but it's true.
> Definitely want to get grass-fed or pasture raised though.
Yeah I mean if you're going to maximize your impact just go all out right. Eating beef, particularly in the US, is one of the worst actions you can take environmentally speaking.
More people need to understand how incredibly destructive cattle ranching has been around the world. In the US in particular pretty much all BLM and Forest Service land that isn't protected as wilderness or permitted for extraction (oil/forestry/etc) is used for ranching. That is an enormous area that has literally been turned to cow shit. Even where the cattle don't eat all vegetation in sight they trample habitat and entirely change the ecology of the area.
Source: I spent three years traveling around the western US from 2019-2022 and camped almost exclusively on public lands during that time. The number of beautiful places I've seen completely covered in cow shit is utterly appalling. Why should we let agribusiness use OUR land this way? It is truly such a waste.
If Lysenko Jr wants us all to eat steaks, he should get to work on either eliminating ticks, or creating a cure for alphagal (alpha galactose) allergy transmitted by many ticks. I've had to stop eating beef (my wife gives me a little bite of her steak once in awhile), along with lamb and pork (pork seems to be less of a problem than beef, but I still have to eat it in moderation).
In case you're not familiar with this allergy, it doesn't behave like other food allergies: instead of getting instant symptoms, it hits you hours later, making it hard to figure out why you suddenly have hives---unless you already know about alpha gal.
That's rough... I have issues when I eat legumes and wheat... I still like pasta and pretty much had peanut butter every day of my life up to a few years ago. When I manage to stick to a meat centered diet I do better... but it's easy to get off track in social circles.
>he should get to work on either eliminating ticks, or creating a cure for alphagal
Or he should just lobby to make high quality, lean, grass-fed steaks cheaper so everyone who wants to consume them can consume them. It's not currently cheap.
"In over 24,000 participants from the NHANES study, high saturated fatty acid intake was associated with an 8% increase in all cause mortality risk. A meta-analysis with over 1,100,000 total participants showed that high intake of saturated fats was also correlated to a 10% increase in coronary heart disease mortality risk"
(https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCRESAHA.118.31403...)
(there is an argument for why this shouldn't apply to grass-fed meat but that is an extremely small minority of meat sold)
that is an impossible standard to apply to diet-based research which is incredibly expensive to otherwise study (e.g, you need a metabolic ward and at that point you'd complain about small N).
We know saturated fat increases LDL, we know LDL contributes to CVD. This is still an area of active research and there are small populations of people that don't accept the consensus but it is still very much best-practice keep your LDL low.
I visited a heart doctor at Duke research medical center a few years back. His comments then were that dairy products were the most inflammatory foods for humans and a major contributor to heart disease by gunking up our bloodstreams.
Saturated fats are good because they're more stable than poly-unsaturated fats for instance.
If you do consume a seed oil (which you really shouldn't -- there's no benefit), you should get a cold-pressed one. But that would be more expensive, so if you're paying more you might as well just get something good like avacado oil or coconut oil.
Saturated fat is OK in moderate amounts, but if you eat too much, it drives up your cholesterol because your body converts saturated fat into cholesterol[1][2].
The issue I have with this new food pyramid is the guidance ignores the danger of saturated fat. It lists "meats" and "full-fat dairy" among sources of "healthy fats", and that's just not true. In the picture that shows sources of protein/fat, 11 out of 13 of the items are animal-based fats. With a giant ribeye steak, cheese, butter, and whole milk specifically (not just milk), they're simply not giving an accurate picture of healthy fat sources.
I personally don't think seed oils are bad, but even if they were, it does not follow that saturated fat is good. The evidence shows otherwise, for one thing, plus it's not like seed oils and saturated fat are the only two kinds of fat. There are plenty of unsaturated fats which aren't seed oils.
The point the Cleveland Clinic page makes is that seed oils tend to be what's used in ultra-processed foods, and those are bad for you. So if you avoid seed oils, you wind up avoiding the bad things as a second order effect.
Aside from that it's just hand-wavey "they use chemicals to make it! It doesn't have nutrients beyond the fat!". There's nothing to indicate that using sunflower or peanut oil is any worse for you than using walnut oil.
The connection between omega-6 fats and inflammation is a whole lot more tenuous than the link between ultra-processed foods and inflammation.
Just Google "seed oils health" and look at the reputable results (Cleveland Clinic, various universities, Mayo Clinic, etc), and you'll see opinions across the board. Some say "Bad". Some say "Not bad". Some say "Unsure".
Jury is still out on this one.
And I think lumping all seed oils into one category isn't helping. Maybe canola oil is OK and sesame oil is not. Or vice versa.
I think it's generally fair to lump them together, because the types of fats you get in them are similar.
The history of cotton seed oil is interesting. After reading that, I would challenge people to think if that's really something they'd want in their body. Other than cost, I see no downside to avoiding seed oils and a lot of upside: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottonseed_oil#Economic_histor...
Looking at the article, I'm not sure I see the problem.
> Other than cost, I see no downside to avoiding seed oils and a lot of upside
The taste of food in certain recipes (that don't involve cooking the oil) varies widely with the oil used. In some recipes, canola oil tastes better than olive oil (by a significant margin - no one would eat it with olive oil).
Cost was never a factor for me (even as a student). Oil is amongst the least expensive things in the food I cook.
I mean, what you want to put in your body is up to you, but an industrial byproduct that involves a lot of chemistry seems like something I'm not a fan of. Also if you go past the history a bit: "The FDA released its final determination that Partially Hydrogenated Oils (PHOs), which include partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil, are not Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) in 2015."
Olive oil definitely has a flavor, but other oils are pretty neutral (I cook with avacado oil because of the high smoke point and I don't notice it really effecting anything). Also you have to keep in mind that those seed oils have a neutral flavor because they've been through a deodorizing chemical process, otherwise they'd taste/smell rancid.
Exactly this. Rapeseed oil is obviously a seed oil. You can have a chemically extracted version or a cold-pressed version. "Seed oil is bad for you" is a typical simplistic Twitter/Reddit conspiracy theory.
This is a great example of how harming your own credibility can damage an otherwise correct and uncontroversial message. RFK Jr. has surrounded himself in controversy, and that controversy is really dominating a lot of this conversation and drowning out the message. Given how he's acted, I don't blame anyone for being skeptical of him, even if this particular food pyramid seems to be a good move that would itself be uncontroversial if provided by a different messenger.
True, but, I think this is also an important lesson in considering the arguments not just a source. Nobody is ever 100% right or 100% wrong, and just leaning on arguments of authority is lazy thinking.
Inflammation is a real thing you can measure in the body, you know. (C Reactive Protein for instance). It's behind a lot of diseases.
The reason WHY it's "always" inflammation is because the standard american diet CREATES a lot of inflammation. You'll probably have to worry about hearing that buzzword a lot less if people ate better..
Depends if it's eye of round or rib eye. I think the usual steak emoji is a porter house. All 3 of them have very different protein/fat ratios (and thus calories)
Steak’s not great for you, but in moderation is probably a better source of calories than refined grains, which should be treated more or less the same as candy.
Ah yes, shades of Siddhartha. I almost forgot about the part where he worked for a megacorp that was ripping society’s social fabric apart and wanted to do something else for a while.
He was. he didn't just parachute in Meta to start working on PyTorch. he worked in many areas of the product and a member of the senior technical staff, was knowledgable about many aspects of the company.
Right on. I have a heat pump water heater and a heat pump heating system in my HVAC. Getting those installed felt like swimming upstream. Most contractors would try to dissuade me from them.
Luckily, I found a contractor who was skilled and knowledgeable about heat pumps and rebates (back when govt thought climate change was real). Very happy with my heat pump tech.
I’m in California, I have two heat pumps installed. I can sum up the problems as follows:
1. They are EXPENSIVE. The equipment itself isn’t that expensive tbh but installation is pretty expensive. The government subsidies have made sure that the contractors jack up their own prices by as much.
2. I end up paying more in utilities because electricity is very expensive and heat pumps aren’t nearly as good at heating in the winters as old fashioned gas furnaces when it comes to the cost.
I made the massive investment because I could and I eventually want my house to run completely on rooftop solar as a way to reduce my carbon footprint. But the cost is nowhere near mass market adoption price range.
I was shocked when I saw the price of heat pump installation in the US, even with an existing ducted system. There’s no reason a reversible heat pump system should be significantly more expensive than a cooling only one.
It’s bonkers. I bought a pre-charged ductless mini split to DIY. Took my dad and I about four hours to do the install. So call it 8 hours of semi-skilled labor.
The unit was $1350, I added a line set cover, pad and feet for another $200, and needed about $200 in electrical equipment - it was a long wire run and code requires installing a disconnect box. The only special tool was a hole saw bit for running the coolant lines.
So maybe $1850 all-in, plus 8 hours labor. I’m sure a pro could do it in half the time. But the low end for a pro install is $5k.
I get that they have insurance and warranty or whatever, but that’s a damn juicy margin.
I did the same thing and spent slightly less than you did because I did not need the extra linesets, etc. I was also able to install this in a location that few professionals would have tolerated (interior wall). My thinking was that even if the unit died, I would have saved so much on installation that it wouldn’t even matter. It’s a great unit too. Installation costs are kind of a racket.
It's not that different for other contractors either. That's part of the reason housing prices are so high. As unbelievable as it is, someone must be willing to pay the high prices. Economic inequality is the basic reason for the housing shortage.
If prices are high, that typically means demand exceeds supply. What is preventing supply from expanding to meet demand? Elsewhere in this thread someone mentioned regulation.
Suppose we wave a magic wand and everyone in society becomes equally wealthy. That doesn't solve the fundamental problem of a contractor shortage. It just means we no longer have prices as a method for matching contractors with jobs to the same degree as previously. Without prices being bid up as high, there is less incentive to go into contracting, meaning that the shortage is liable to persist for longer.
In New Zealand a pretty basic 3.5kW (the internet told me that’s about a “ton”) mini split will cost about NZ$2000 including basic installation - that’s with the units on the same wall, ground floor, including the line set cover and running a new circuit if you need one. A 9.7kW model is only $3500. Again New Zealand dollars so halve that for US. Also that includes a 10 year warranty.
I know our labour costs are going to be lower, but not that much lower. Glassdoor indicates that salary for a US HVAC installer is about US$60k, and in NZ a local equivalent says NZ$60k, so I’d expect the numbers to be the same.
Oh and that price includes all taxes and excludes rebates (which most of us don’t qualify for anyway)
Lol it's protected by the licensing mafia. You'll have to change $5 capacitors for $1000 a pop for 4 years first while being paid peanuts to do it.
Hardly anyone wants to do that so we're stuck with the status quo. You're basically stuck either paying through the nose or finding a family/friend with the equipment and expertise or doing it yourself.
I don't know why you're being downvoted (it shows as slightly greyed out). This is true. I had a roommate who is a HVAC salesman. Very smooth talked. The 'HVAC' company offers free HVAC maintenance. They techs go in, do some stuff and they point out some problems. Sales guy goes in, smooth talks his way to 5K - 70K bill to most people. Of course, when something goes out and people don't have a choice (like in peak summer or winter), they make out like bandits.
Most of the local firms (Dick's local $town hvac/plumbing/electrical) are owned by massive PE firms (Saudi + other billionaires) which pretty much own the entire businesses all over US. They keep the local name to make people believe they are giving business to a local guy.
Another roommate of mine was a plumber.
The guys who do the actual work get paid close to nothing ($20 - $22/hour) and live on day to day basis.
Plumbing company quoted me $3000 to replace a broken water heater in the middle of peak winter. I paid my guy $300 for labor (heaters are $500 - $1000 from lowes depending on how long of warranty you want) and he was super happy for making a lot of money.
The good local contractors have all the work they can handle on commercial accounts. Residential is an annoyance. That leaves the very small fish (if you can find them) and the PE-owned scam companies.
The equipment is actually a lot cheaper if you’re a pro - the DIY pre-charged line-set adds about $500 over an equivalent unit. Pulling a vacuum and adding coolant is not hard, just requires specialized tools that still aren’t that expensive.
I mentioned warranty and insurance.
You don’t need to “schedule workers” if you are owner operating. Maybe you want a (non-skilled) helper to speed up the install, but you absolutely could install solo. That said, you will need a licensed electrician to run the circuit.
In my metro, hvac contractors can get ten-packs of permits for mini-split installs, and at most one out of ten is inspected. It’s a rubber stamp if you’re a pro, and the individual permit is maybe $50.
And that $5k I mentioned is the low bid, which you’ll only see if you know how to find contractors who aren’t private equity fronts. These guys are not advertising, but they stay busy by having the best price. There are shops that will happily charge you double for the same work.
I never said it’s a get rich quick scheme. It is just highly compensated for owners without requiring the level of expertise of something like a plumber or electrician. I’m curious what is happening in the market to support these margins.
Devils advocate here, it cost me ~$1500 in equipment to buy the vacuum pump, vacuum gauge, nitrogen air tank to flush the lines and pressure test, pressure manifold set and gauge, air lines, good flaring tool, copper bending tool, schrader valve pulling tools, various air tools, and a book on mini split installations.
Then it took me 2 days between pouring concrete pad for the heat pump, installing the heat pump and bolting it in, running the copper lines, drilling the exit hole, running the drain piping, learning how to use all the tools, running the electric and control cables and installing a new breaker and 220 subpanel, pressure testing, vacuum testing, flaring, releasing vacuum and all the stuff you have to do. I also had to spend several nights watching youtube and get a EPA 608 certification for handling refrigant which took another day.
Wouldn't have been worth it for a single unit, but was worth it for installing 3, and now I can do additional units for basically $0 overhead and of course no one would even have to know if I installed it and now I can order unlimited amount of refrigerants to my doorstep.
Having plumbed my entire house, and done my entire house electrical system, I would say the level of expertise to install a mini split is higher than either alone. You have to do electrical, plumbing, refrigerant handling, pressurized equipment handling, be liable for massive federal/EPA fines if you do something wrong, and on top of that I had to do masonry work.
There is a 0.00000% chance of getting into EPA trouble installing one minisplit. You got crews dumping 5 a day into a bucket of water all over and no one will answer a report
It's going to vary by installer, of course, but when I looked into getting a heat pump it was about $1500 more than just replacing the A/C condenser and evaporator with a like-for-like unit. Keeping the existing natural gas furnace as backup. This was in the PNW, about three years ago. $4500 for A/C, $6000 to replace it with a heat pump instead.
Tuning a heat pump vs resistive heat is a much tougher game than it should be. In a moderate climate, I use my ecobee to ensure aux heat doesn't come on until it's below freezing, and it should only come on if something has gone wrong at that point too. Unfortunately, many thermostats by default will use resistive heat in relatively normal scenarios, of worse, when you've programmed home and away times intended for efficiency but disparate enough to activate resistive heat.
That said, I've found that in most cases (assuming you're on the right electric rate plan, that's a whole other conversation, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42763695), most homeowners in california actually see operating cost parity or a slight decrease, even with super expensive electricity. Silicon Valley Clean Energy recently did a study substantiating this: https://svcleanenergy.org/wp-content/uploads/Bill-Impacts-of...
> most homeowners in california actually see operating cost parity or a slight decrease, even with super expensive electricity
But you’re missing my first point though, installing a heat pump system comes with a price tag of tens of thousands of dollars. I’m not doing that if my operating cost is at parity or a slight decrease. It’s the same reason people are no longer incentivized to install solar. And to add to that, installing heat pumps also come with additional costs that can range anywhere from a few thousand dollars to replace the main electrical panel to tens of thousands of dollars for a full electrical upgrade if your house is on knob and tube wiring to reduce fire risks.
If you DIY everything and go with server rack batteries you can keep the costs low enough for a reasonable break even point. Any middleman is going to gouge.
I just got 10 new 585w panels and inverter for under $5k. A battery is gonna cost me $1500 but at $350 month for electricity, not sure how you can claim it not worth it.
Home solar makes perfect sense in Australia - a market with similar Labour costs to California - because they do it for 1/3rd of the cost.
It makes no sense in California when the subsidies alone are higher than the total costs for utility scale solar.
> installing a heat pump system comes with a price tag of tens of thousands of dollars.
Mine cost US$250 for the machine, refrigerant included, and another US$80 for the installation. We've had to have it fixed twice due to factory defects. Its heat output is 3400W, nominally consuming 941 watts of electrical power. It's not a great machine, but you're smoking crack.
Skilled labor in the US is expensive! Most of the install costs come from labor, not equipment. Tens of thousands of dollars is pretty typical for a heat pump installation.
(For what it's worth, the person you're quoting is referencing a whole home system, either ducted or multi-zone ductless. I think you're referencing a single-zone ductless. Those are cheaper, but still are typically $5-10k installed from a licensed contractor in the states)
Yes, it's just a mini split. Two guys (skilled, but AFAIK not licensed) installed it in about 6 hours. I'm in Argentina, but I don't think US$1000 an hour is a common labor rate even in the US? Maybe for a famous lawyer or surgeon?
Ha. It's not straight labor. So much other overhead to consider - workman's comp insurance, back office staff, technician utilization, vehicle repair and maintenance, etc... There are lots of other costs that get baked in when you're looking at a licensed company compared to a guy in a truck
Okay but US$5k for half a day of work? It would have been faster if the guy had had his own ladder instead of us moving my desk so he could stand on it to work. (He's bought one since then.)
A half day of work, a half day of office rent, a half day of truck use, a half day to pay for loan servicing, a half day to pay overhead costs, a half day to add to reserves for the half day you don't work, and so forth.
My house has six rooms, but the 3400-watt heat pump is only enough to heat two of them. If it costs tens of thousands of dollars in the US, say US$25000, you would expect the resulting installation to be able to heat or cool about 200 rooms rather than 2, producing 340 kilowatts of heat output (1.2 million BTU per hour) and consuming 94 kilowatts of electrical power (430 amps at 220 volts). Indeed, because houses gain and lose heat only through their surfaces, you'd expect the 100× bigger US$25000 heat pump installation to be able to heat or cool a 2000-room building rather than merely 200.
Most houses in the US have less than 20 rooms, let alone 200 or 2000, so it's not mostly because houses are bigger.
In Southern California it costs $120 just for a guy to come out and look at your HVAC. Not fix anything--not install anything--just to look at it and give you an estimate for how much the repair is going to take. I went to the website for a local installer and they give a ballpark of $13,000-$25,000 for a heat pump installation.
I don't know why it's so expensive here. It shouldn't be, it makes no sense. But it is.
The first point is very valid too. There was an energy commission study a few years ago, and up front cost is pretty consistently one of the biggest barriers to heat pump adoption.
I think there's some nuance to that, though. Even replacing a furnace + AC in California amounts to tens of thousands of dollars! It's not that heat pumps are expensive, it's that construction work in general is expensive.
When you frame it in terms of percentage of home cost, it actually feels a lot more reasonable. Robert Bean is a pretty respected voice in HVAC, and shared this article a few years ago (https://web.archive.org/web/20150210053806/http://www.health...). The gist is (and this is focused a bit on new construction, so not entirely apples to apples) that you should budget 3-5% of the home's cost for a bare minimum code compliant HVAC installation. When you look at it in that lens, $20k to replace the most complicated mechanical system in a $3M home is less than 1%.
"Productivity growth in the goods sector raises the wage in that sector, but also raises the output of that sector. So the ratio of wage to output - a measure of the cost of a unit of output - stays constant over time. Higher wages in the goods sector put pressure on wages in the service sector, so wages rise over time there. But (taking the exteme position) productivity is not growing in services, and so output is not growing. The ratio of wages to output in services - a measure of costs - is thus rising over time. This is the “cost disease of services”."
While I don't think that's all of it, it is a helpful framing of the economics around these dynamics.
There are some companies out there that are truly price gouging. But many are just pricing around the true cost of labor and to run a construction business. I've done a little writing around this topic too: https://www.heatpumped.org/p/pricing-transparency-peeking-be...
Ultimately, I would love to see upfront prices & operating costs for heat pumps both fall. But there are a lot of tough realities baked into the cost of these systems. They are still a very logical choice for most homeowners at the time of failure. Especially with rebate & incentive stacks in many places, a heat pump actually works out cheaper than a new furnace + traditional AC for many homeowners.
That is precisely why im not planning to install a heatpump until i have rooftop solar.
Here in Bay Area my gas furnace is generally off late March through late october and while gas costs have gone up over the years, electricity easily goes up 10% year over year. We are currently in $0.43 per kwh territory OFF-PEAK. This is nearly 3 times the average rate in the United States.
I wont be investing $$$ in heatpumps until i spend $$$$ on solar panels and that wont happen till i replace my roof in a few years.
PS. this is why buying a hybrid a few years ago instead of buying an electric was a good call. Our gas prices stayed pretty much the same, while our electricity is up 30% since that time.
The same problems apply to evs and yet people seem to buy those too. Maybe most folks end up getting them second hand which is not an option for heat pump.
Solar + heat pump will take me 10+ years to come out financially ahead (if not longer) but if you're invested for the long term it does come out ahead (even factoring in opportunity cost). The comfort level is also dramatically better in my house due to more even temperature, so I would argue in many situations it can be worth a premium. I thought for sure I was going to need ductless per room to get this level of comfort but it turned out to not be true. If you didn't have ac before, it's also nice to have the option to use it on hot days.
I got a heat pump with a backup gas furnace this year. A heat pump just felt like a no-brainer of I was going to get an AC anyway. But gas in PA tends to be cheaper, so the system will use gas at a certain point. The problem is I couldn't have picked a whose installer if I was throwing darts at the wall, but that's another story.
I ended up self-installing my HP-WH. Professionals either tried to talk me out of it like you described, or charged a premium for the upgrade. My county has a rebate that allows for self-installs. It was rather straight forward and ended up being ~$700 in the end. The old unit I tore out took an extra $350/year in electricity, so I've already broken even.
I guess I lucked out; our house had a (very old) whole-home (that is, ducted) heat pump system for heating and cooling when we moved in. When it was time to replace, our local contractor knew exactly what we needed. They even do mini-splits, had we wanted one.
No, no ductless magic without mini splits. I feel like a lot of people refer to heat pump systems interchangeably with ductless mini splits, so I wanted to clarify that. Maybe that's just an issue with the people I speak with, though.
You are right. Most do heat pumps with mini splits for each zone. However, ducted houses can certainly use heat pumps with an air handler. Typically this translates to heat pump replaced outdoor condenser (ac unit)and the air handler replaces the indoor furnace.
Yes, the actual refrigeration and heating cycles are always based on compressing and decompressing a gas. But the gasses used differ based on temperature range, and further you can have air to air, air to water, or water to water for the heat transfer. The overall costs are the system can be very different based on whether you have a split unit that requires a single wall penetration, a central unit in the basement with ducting, or a geothermal system that requires digging deep trenches or wells. It makes for difficult conversation when some people are talking only about air to air minisplits when others are including all of these and more.
I had a similar problem too. Was unable to find anyone who was willing to quote me on a heatpump when I was installing my air conditioner. I assume it will be better in 5-10 years when I have to replace them.
Unlikely. Private equity is swooping in, especially in places like New York that have taken bizarre regulatory stances against gas.
In my area, about 75% of the HVAC companies have been swept up. Prices are up 75-150%. I got my gas furnace replaced to to beat the ban, and had a fireman who works a side gig do the job for $15k. The bids from the companies ranged from $25-85k
Was curious, so I tried it in several different AI detectors to see what they returned.
Most seemed to believe it was approximately 2/3 AI generated text. Primarily the first several paragraphs. Last, and second to last scored the best as "human". ZeroGPT said it was only 5% likely AI written. Couple sentences.
Not sure if that means its actually AI written, cause there's lots of argument about false positives. Also, it's software. In many ways it seems like a lot of that field / genre produces articles and writers that then have a very "structured" writing style. Read a lot of HN. Write articles that place on HN. Tailor your writing style so it gets upvotes on HN.
It's very similar to the Youtube issues, and people making their intro, thumbnail, and splash screen before even considering article content much. Mr. Beast had a leaked article on the subject. Lots of SEO, Click-Thru-Rate, Average-View-Duration, ect... [1]
It was. You can compare to the author's first blog post, which doesn't have any of the classic LLM giveaways.
I suppose "coauthored" is a more charitable word though. This article wasn't as bad as most slop. I imagine the author passed it through Grammarly or something.
Once you have some experience, phrases like this are a dead giveaway: "and honestly? It’s incredible to watch". Also 30 em dashes in almost as few sentences.
>The real tragedy? Once you see it, you start writing that way too. You start thinking, "Well, maybe I should make this generic in case someone wants to use quaternions instead of matrices..." and suddenly, congratulations – you're building for someone who doesn't exist.
is awful similar to LLM writting. I can't put my finger on exactly where, but that the impression i got.
Because whilst universities claim they do that, there is no evidence to suggest it is true. People genuinely trained in critical thinking would be highly skeptical of this claim. For example,
- What exactly is the definition of critical thinking they are using?
- Which part of a {computer science, art history, etc} course teaches this?
- How is it assessed?
- If it's a teachable skill, why are there no qualifications in it or researchers studying it specifically?
- If it's something universities teach, why are there so many bad papers full of logical fallacies and obvious fraud?
I know some like to argue philosophy is such a course but very few people do philosophy degrees, so even if that were true it could hardly be generalized to all of university teaching.
I've taken 2 required critical thinking courses from 2 different state schools. They were in the philosophy department. Why do you think they don't teach it? In stanford, for instance, they require taking 2 courses on formal reasoning as a prerequisite for a degree, which invariably includes critical thinking.
I've never heard of anyone being required to take a philosophy course but some universities surely do it. I was curious about the Stanford claim. This is the Ways system, right? Their website says you need to take at least one course in formal reasoning:
They list a few examples like market design or programming. I thought, OK, formal reasoning maybe, but is that really the same as critical thinking? Then I clicked the "See Formal Reasoning Courses in Explore Courses" link:
143 courses are considered to teach formal reasoning. First on the list is "The Questions of Cloth: Weaving, Pattern Complexity and Structures of Fabric (ARTSINST 100B)" which teaches hand weaving on a loom. A bit further down there is "Introduction to Bioengineering" which teaches "capacities of natural life on Earth" and "how atoms can be organized to make molecules". It goes on like that.
I dunno, this doesn't sound like anyone has to study critical thinking specifically to pass the formal reasoning requirements. It sounds like almost anything connected to science or engineering in any way counts. And that's Stanford!
There was a critical thinking requirement that multiple courses fulfilled. One was a critical thinking english class that involved a lot of writing. I didn't want to write, so I chose the philosophy course (which still involved writing).
Here is a state school that has a foundation requirement in critical thinking with several courses:
Yes, but, thinking critically about this, why would learning how to hand-weave on a loom teach critical thinking? I get that you weren't doing these courses at Stanford but it's this kind of thing that makes people skeptical when universities make grandiloquent claims. Stanford is supposed to be the gold standard, so when it makes it appear that they teach critical thinking but actually don't (or it's at least very easy to make choices that won't do so) of course the claim is devalued.
If universities really cared about this aspect of their reputation they'd defend it by firing professors who were found to not be thinking critically e.g. by praising or putting their names on papers that are clearly fraudulent. It doesn't happen.
Your original claim was "there is no evidence to suggest this is true (teaching critical thinking)". I presented my own anecdotal evidence, and then a counterexample. I'm sure there are many, many more. Moving the goalposts is not a discussion I'm interested in having and you seem to have a very set viewpoint on this topic.
But I disagree with your counterexample - Stanford may say they do this but I don't think they do given the evidence I saw. Or at least, you'd have to explicitly seek it out as a student to get such exposure.
So we're left with your anecdotes. Lots of people have such anecdotes. People saying "I learned critical thinking at university" are a dime a dozen, but their beliefs aren't evidence they really did.
I don't think this is moving the goalposts. Obviously when I meant "no evidence" I meant no evidence that could persuade someone who didn't agree with the proposition. Just saying "yes they do" isn't evidence.
That's an interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing. If you had free rein of an engineering school in a university system, how would you re-design curriculum to address your concerns and establish proof of teaching critical thinking?
I don't know, I never thought about it much. I think engineering schools already do better than most others at this because requirements validation and weighing tradeoffs is such a big part of engineering as a discipline. Validating requirements often boils down to critical thinking, e.g. "but do you really mean that" and "is there a better way?".
The issues with critical thinking really show up in the other areas of academia, the humanities and natural sciences. But it's hard to get people to do it because often there are strong incentives not to think critically, or to be outright misleading deliberately.
I guess a curriculum focused around finding subtle flaws in arguments would be a reasonable place to start. It could be a lot of work to compile teaching materials that are tough enough. You could take papers that you know contain logic errors and ask students to find them. For instance, a lot of COVID papers work like this:
1. A COVID case is defined as anyone who gets a positive PCR test.
2. A positive PCR test is defined as detecting a COVID case.
When you see it spelled out so simply the problem is obvious but the whole field of public health managed to not see it (there were a few papers that timidly pointed out the circular logic, but it never reached public awareness). Of course maybe it was deliberate. But you could assign students a few relevant papers and ask them to analyze them critically.
I don’t understand, can you elaborate? I’m trying to understand your perspective. New college grads I generally meet and work with are bright, hard working, curious and have a deep desire to learn.
I don’t think we’re having the same experiences so I want to know more about yours.
Most fresh college graduates I have worked with are anxiety ridden wrecks incapable of developing skills on their own and lack fundamental knowledge of industry practices.
Makes sense. I think they're lucky to be around you. Since you're hanging out on HN, I'd imagine you care about tech, doing things well and have a natural curiosity.
Back when I started out, I was deep in debt, insecure about my skills and being around highly skilled people who had many more years of experience only deepened those insecurities. Luckily, people were kind and patient with me and gave me the apprenticeship I needed. They deeply cared about technical expertise and doing things well, probably like you if I am guessing right. I have my dream job today, and I am in a position to mentor new grads. I continue to pay it forward as the senior engineers did when I started out. Not all my colleagues do this, but I see so much potential around me and I try to grow it. It's one of the most satisfying when I get a note from a new grad/junior engineer on how they've grown after our work together.
Thank you for caring!
On a side note, I can't imagine the anxiety they must go through now between the economy being what it is and AI exacerbating the gaps in technical skills. Seems like a scarier time than when I graduated. It's harder to mentor in this environment, but it's a fun challenge to learn how to mentor in this environment.
My car keeps telling me to bring it in for Inspection B. No matter how many times I cancel, next time it comes back. I guess eventually people do it just so the message goes away.
Remember when cars started beeping until you put on your seat belt?
If you did your scheduled maintenance on your own by the book, you would have done the right button combo to actually clear the maintenance notification. Or if you took it to a competent shop they would have done it for you.
I'd highly recommend doing the scheduled maintenance on your car. Whether at a dealer, at your trusted shop, or on your own. For your own safety and those around you.
You're acting like this is related to necessary maintenance / safety, why give corporate the benefit of the doubt without knowing about the vehicle involved?
Even things like washing machines and coffee makers will soft-brick themselves these days asking you to "start self clean-cycle with Foo(tm) substance" and then won't perform their function without some kind of forced reset. That part of the airplane ride where the PA is blasting some kind of "join our miles club" literally at a captive audience with no choice but to listen? It's not safety related either. My headphones that I would like to use to drown out the PA advertisement literally stop working if they detect speech, and the only way to disable this "feature" is to download their app.
This is just growth-hacking "zero-cost advertisements to a targeted audience" stuff that's extremely disrespectful at best, and kinda looks like it's edging closer to threats and extortion.
> You're acting like this is related to necessary maintenance / safety,
It's the maintenance reminder notification on a couple ton metal machine with lots of critical moving parts meant to operate next to pedestrians, cyclists, and other vehicles in public spaces. The maintenance schedule usually is related to safety and good operating of the car over time. Things wear out and should be inspected, serviced, and replaced over time. Should I just be OK with people ignoring the maintenance schedule? Should I be OK with the airline ignoring routine maintenance as well? The transit operator ignoring the maintenance on their trains?
I don't think it's unreasonable to require people to keep to maintenance schedules if they want to operate such machines in public spaces. It's a mistake for these states to relax inspection requirements. I don't mind a notification bugging an owner refusing to do the maintenance on their car. It probably pushed a lot of people to do it who would have otherwise forgotten.
What? I'm not arguing that people have the right to ignore important safety-related notices, especially if it's related to public safety.
I'm arguing that we should have the right to reliably separated channels for safety/operational notifications vs commercial content / outright scams. We don't have that though, which effectively erodes the safety you are saying you want to protect. If you're serious about safety, you should agree that using airplane PAs for emergencies instead of ads is a good idea. You should also be onboard with the idea that "service required" should actually mean "service required", not just that it's time to pay what amounts to a subscription fee to the vendor. Once a signal has degraded into pure noise, people get used to ignoring it.
The situation is mostly the same with software updates.. no way for end-users to reliably separate updates that help them vs ones that are only going to hurt them. Serious about security? Don't get too comfortable blasting your users with immaterial "news and updates" trash, or of course they want to ignore you
Once again, the person I was replying to was talking about the maintenance notification on their car. Not some ad for satellite radio or some other thing, a maintenance notification. It's scheduled to go off at the scheduled maintenance interval. It's not an ad. Any knowledgeable individual can clear it if they did their maintenance by the book. It's a reminder to go look at the book and do the scheduled maintenance or pay someone else to do it for you, whether that be the dealer or any other knowledgeable shop. Having it continue to go off indicates one didn't bother doing the scheduled maintenance on it. They're continuing to operate their car probably in public spaces while ignoring the maintenance.
> Remember when cars started beeping until you put on your seat belt?
Yes, that was ... this morning? I guess now that I think about it, maybe it does stop after a moment. Though if I start moving, it definitely starts beeping again.
No maintenance for 200K miles though, so I'm hoping to avoid any messages about bringing it in. I'll find the magic keys to turn that off if I must.
> Two folders, not one
Why post AI slop here?